emmmm i dreamed of baran today!!! somehow she was a replacement teacher and she was so kind and patient and she liked my silly cat sweater i was wearing, and i woke up with a smile 🥰🥰
omg that's the dream (i'm famously a genius at wordplay) AND it's in character. wow!
mel king x frank langdon | 3.1k | mature | lotr-themed fluff
tags: established relationship; slight soft-domming; referenced sexual content
(written for the always-wonderful @mateo-diaz for her birthday! love you maur, hope you're having a great day!!!)
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Across from him, Mel stopped eating.
It took Frank a few seconds to notice; he was too focused on the big plate of lasagna in front of him. It took two days to make, and he thought it was something he could use to impress Mel. She was a picky eater, but spaghetti was one of her favorite meals, and plus: Frank liked a challenge.
She told him it was delicious after the first couple of bites, so when he stopped hearing her fork scrape against the plate, his eyes shot up. He found her staring at him, mouth slightly open, eyes narrowed.
“Hey, you okay?” Frank asked. “Is there something wrong? Weird spice? Too much ricotta?”
“What do you mean you’ve never seen Lord of the Rings?”
“What?” he asked back flatly.
“Just now,” Mel explained. “You said that you’ve never seen Lord of the Rings. Is that true?”
“Uh, yeah,” Frank stammered out, placing his own fork down beside his plate. “Is that… is that a problem?”
Their relationship was new, something that both terrified Frank and made him feel like he was a teenager again. It officially started three months ago, shortly after he accepted an offer to become a new attending physician in the ED. By that point, the King sisters had engrained themselves in his life so fully he had a hard time remembering what it was like before then, before that terrible Fourth of July when Becca had her UTI, and Mel had her deposition, and the two of them were fighting worse than they ever had before.
On the day of the job offer, he was supposed to meet Mel at the thrift store. She had just purchased a new set of barstools for her apartment after Frank pointed out that her old ones could barely hold her weight, let alone his. It was a warm day in March, and he drove over in his Subaru since they wouldn’t fit in Mel’s car.
All he remembered was how excited he was to tell her. She’d become the person he wanted to tell everything to. His first text in the morning, the reason why he spent all winter taking photos of dogs wearing sweaters on his morning runs, his emergency contact after he finally updated his home address once the divorce got finalized.
Frank asked her to dinner a week later. A date, he’d clarified, just to make sure she understood. A real one. He’d kissed her on the sidewalk after he walked her home, and once Mel was safely inside her apartment, Frank knew that he wanted it to be the last first kiss of his entire life.
However, as he stared at the incredulous face of his girlfriend, Frank questioned if he was about to be kicked to the curb.
“How?” Mel demanded.
“I don’t know,” he responded lamely. “I didn’t really go to the movies a lot as a kid. My mom thought it was too expensive.”
“But you’re not a kid anymore,” Mel argued. “What about when you were in college?”
Frank laughed. “Mel, I played football; we were not watching movies with elves and dwarves on the weekends.”
“What about the books?”
“They have books?”
Mel made a little noise of distress and put her head into her hands. An alarm bell went off in Frank’s head, and in an instant, went to crouch by her side.
“Hey, hey hey hey,” he said gently, his hand ghosting over her arm in case she didn’t want him touching her. “What’s going on? Is this about the movie?”
“Movies,” Mel corrected with a groan. “You didn’t even know that.”
“Movies, sorry,” he replied quickly, “but is it really just that? How I haven’t seen them?”
Mel moved her hands away, looking down to meet his eyes. “Well, no,” she admitted, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “But kind of. They were my favorite movies growing up. My dad used to watch them with me, and he gave me his old set of the books when I read them for the first time. The problem’s always been that Becca doesn’t like them.”
“I see,” Frank nodded, understanding completely.
“I thought when Becca moved into Middle Hill I would have more chances to watch them, but if you don’t like them, then I can’t do that since I don’t want to make you watch something you don’t like.” Mel stated the whole thing like it was a fact, but Frank’s eyebrows pulled together.
“But Mel, baby,” he asked, now reaching up to take her hand in his, “how do you know I don’t like them if I’ve never seen them?”
Mel’s eyes narrowed, her lips parting. “I don’t,” she said tentatively, and Frank swore he could see the gears in her head turning.
“If you want to do it, I would love to watch the Lord of the Rings with you,” he told her enthusiastically. “It’s something that means a lot, and I want to share that with you.”
With that, all the sadness left her face.
“You mean it?” she asked, breaking into a smile.
“Of course! Let’s finish eating because having dinner is very important.” They were still working on making sure Mel ate real food three times a day. “After though, we can start up the first one if you want?”
“Oh no!” Mel shook her head, looking quite offended. “No, it’s already almost nine, and the extended edition of Fellowship is almost four hours.”
“Four hours?!” Frank thought he could hear his jaw hit the ground, but Mel continued on.
“We have to make time for it, and oh!” Her hands flew up to her mouth in excitement. “Sunday! We both have Sunday off!”
“Okay,” he laughed, rubbing her knee affectionately. He loved when she got like his, when her cheeks were round and pink and he could feel the buzz coming off her skin. “We can definitely find four hours to watch on Sunday.”
“Actually, there’s a way I’ve always wanted to watch them,” she said. “You do it all in one day, and you make a bunch of food that fits into the Hobbit schedule: breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, all those.”
“Sure,” Frank replied, not knowing anything she was talking about. “If that’s what you want to do, we can make it happen.”
“No, I want to do this for you,” Mel insisted. “I’ll go to the store and buy all the things and prep them; you just need to sit on the couch and let the magic happen to you for all eleven hours. Sound good?”
Frank attempted to process the concept of watching movies for eleven hours straight, but then Mel leaned down and kissed him, and he stopped thinking about anything at all.
*
*
*
After their shift on Saturday, Frank drove them both to the grocery store for Mel’s big shopping trip. She had a list a mile long, more food for one day than Mel usually had around for a whole week. He thought it was a bit overambitious considering he’d seen her try to cook for the two of them — four when Becca and Adam came over — but she was so excited that Frank couldn’t bring himself to say anything and simply pushed the rapidly filling cart behind her.
Mel’s plan lived inside a very elaborate Excel sheet that she had been working on all week. The two of them were to wake up bright and early Sunday morning and immediately start Fellowship of the Ring while Mel set up granola and yogurt to go with their tea and coffee. While that was going on, the oven would be prepped for an elaborate French toast bake. Their third meal would consist of cheese, meats, and crackers followed by potato soup for lunch when they started The Two Towers. Following afternoon tea and cookies, Mel wanted to take the time to make a whole pot pie for the two of them with a chocolate cake for “supper.”
“I feel like I’m cheating,” she told Frank in the check-out line, “but I don’t think we need to have two big meals like that back to back.”
“Considering we’re about to consume five-thousand calories each, I don’t think any part of this is cheating,” Frank responded with a laugh, but Mel still frowned.
“I want to do this the right way,” she said sternly. “You deserve the best experience for this.”
Frank wrapped an arm around her waist as the cashier loaded a third bag into their cart. “The best experience is just going to be watching with you,” he reminded her. “Anything else is just a bonus.”
That still didn’t make the worry-lines in her forehead go away, and when they got home, Mel went straight into the kitchen. Frank stayed nearby offering help that she refused in turn. She was determined to do it all herself, cube every piece of bread for the French toast, dice every potato that would be soup. The only time she took Frank up on his help was to break down the rotisserie chicken that would go in the pot pie, but only because the process grossed her out so much. It was well after midnight and Frank was dozing on the couch when Mel came back into the living room covered in flour and declared prep to be done. Groggily, Frank sat up and followed Mel into her bedroom.
The first time Mel slept with Frank – really slept, no funny business – she was out for seven hours straight, something she claimed she hadn’t done since high school. She said it was due to how exhausted she was, coming off days of back-to-back shifts. The issue with that theory was that it kept happening. When Frank stayed at his own apartment, Mel would fall back into her old ways and clock three or four hours of uneasy rest, but the second Mel rested her head against his chest, she would be fast asleep.
The night before their Lord of The Rings marathon was no different.
Frank woke to a loud yelp from the other side of the bed. He opened his eyes to find Mel sitting upright, her hand covering her mouth.
“I overslept!” she cried out. “I forgot to set an alarm, and it’s after nine!”
Frank rolled to his side, and the big red numbers on Mel’s clock showed that she was right. It was 9:08, two hours after Mel was supposed to wake them up for breakfast and the first movie.
“No no no no.” Mel repeated as she pushed off the blankets and darted for the door. Frank rubbed his eyes a few times before throwing on a shirt and following her out into the living room. He found Mel in the kitchen, his apron over her pajamas, frantically preheating the oven.
“Okay, you go get the movie started,” she called over her shoulder, sprinting back over to the fridge. “I can have first breakfast out right now.”
“Mel,” Frank stated, trying to get her attention with no use.
“It’ll take a little while to get second breakfast up, but what I can do is combine it with elevenses,” she pressed on.
“Mel,” Frank cut in again. He moved around the counter to where she was filling her arms with bowls and spoons from her cabinet.
“We can do soup with tea, but just have a late dinner when we start Return of the King, and then I think– ”
“Mel.” Frank stepped right in front of her path. She almost dropped the bowls, spoons, yogurt and honey in her arms as her eyebrows shot up. “Let’s take a breath here, alright?”
He held his hands out, and dutifully, Mel transferred some of the items over to him.
“What’s going on with all of this?” he asked gently, placing the bowls on the counter before turning back to her, crossing his arms.
“We overslept!” she repeated, flinging out one of her arms wide. “We’re behind schedule for today by almost half of one of the movies! We need to start right now if we have any chance of finishing today!”
“Okay.” Frank gave a nod. “Why is it important that we do all of them today?”
“So we can do all the meals!” Mel answered. “This is supposed to be the ultimate way to watch the movies, and it’s your first time.”
“That’s true,” Frank said, and that’s when it started clicking. He liked solving problems with Mel like this, asking her questions until he could sort through the details for the thing that was really bothering her. “But why does that matter? You didn’t watch them like this for the first time, and you’re a huge fan.”
“Right, but I care about you, and I wanted you to have the perfect experience.”
Ding ding ding. Jackpot.
Frank took the rest of the things from her arm, setting down the big container of vanilla yogurt and jar of strawberry jam before taking her by the hand and leading her over to the stools on the other side, the same ones he picked up for her months ago. He let her sit down first, holding her hand the whole time.
“Mel,” he started, meeting her eyes, “do you remember when we had sex for the first time?”
“What?” Mel’s spine went straight, her cheeks starting to redden.
“When we had sex for the first time,” Frank repeated. “Do you remember what happened?”
The blush on Mel’s face spread to her ears, and her eyes darted over to her couch by the window.
“Let me refresh your memory,” Frank grinned. “It was our third date. We planned it during our second date after which we made out in my car for twenty minutes. We went to the movies, and we had a large popcorn and two cherry ICEEs and your tongue was bright red all night.
“You invited me inside because I think you said you wanted to give me a book or something?” Frank questioned as Mel smiled, remembering the easy lie she told to get him in her apartment. “I ended up turning on some rerun on TV, and you brought out two cans of ginger ale that neither one of us touched because the second you sat down, I couldn’t keep my hands off you.”
Frank knew it wasn’t one of his finer moments, but seeing Mel with her hair down, her lips still artificially red, and wearing a sweatshirt she got at the Smithsonian last year was too much for him. He remembered pulling her into his lap, letting his mind go blank as he wound his fingers into her hair, pressing his tongue against the seam of her lips.
“I’ll spare you the details,” he said, but he could tell Mel was thinking about them too. Fumbling for the buttons on the other’s jeans, their shirts thrown on the ground. Mel telling him about her virginity, her IUD, and Frank’s response that he was okay with both. He remembered the groan he couldn’t silence when he pushed inside of her, how tight she was, the way her thighs quivered as they settled into a comfortable rhythm. Mel tipped her head back over the arm of the couch when she came, and Frank leaned over to kiss her when he did the same.
“What does that have to do with us watching the Lord of the Rings?” Mel asked after a beat. She nervously tucked her hair behind her ears, shoulders creeping up.
“Because – believe it or not – half-dressed on the couch was not the way I wanted to have sex with you the first time,” he told her. “And I’m sure that’s not how you ever saw yourself losing your virginity, right?”
“Well, no,” Mel shook her head, “but it didn’t matter. It was perfect.”
“Exactly.” Frank gave a big smile and cupped her face with his hand. “Sweetheart, I wanted to take you out to a nice dinner, bring you back to my place, light some candles, and really do the whole thing right, but that’s not what happened.
“Instead, what happened was even better that I could have imagined all because it was you,” he said finally, holding her gaze firm with his. “We could have had sex in the car, in a king-sized bed in a five-star hotel, right here on the counter, it all would have been perfect, and these movies are the same way. Any way we watch them is going to be perfect because I get to watch them with you.”
In an instant, Mel’s eyes started to well up. A tear started running down her cheek, and Frank brushed it away with his thumb. Her hands went to his neck, and she pulled him in for a damp, sloppy kiss.
“I love you so much,” she said when she pulled back, her voice thick and weepy. “I’m sorry for all this… mess.”
“It’s not mess,” Frank told her sincerely. “You did such a great job prepping everything. We’ll make it through what we can today, and freeze the rest for later. Right now, all I want to do is start the first movie and have a great breakfast with you, okay?”
Mel nodded and kissed him again, and then the two of them got to work. The French toast went into the oven while they had their tea and coffee on the couch wrapped up under a blanket. They paused the movie to leisurely fill their plates and mugs and then return, eating off the coffee table while Mel ran through every fun fact she knew with each scene.
“Do you want to do The Two Towers today or wait until we have another day off?” Mel asked him once the movie was over. They were going around stacking their dirty cups and plates together from rounds of breakfast and snacks.
“Let’s save it for another day,” Frank answered. “We can set aside the time for it, make more snacks, turn it into another little date for us.”
That made Mel smile and she gave him a quick kiss. “You liked it, right? They’re such good movies.”
“Of course,” he said back. “I’m already looking forward to the second one.”
Another kiss before Mel skipped into the kitchen with their dirty dishes, her hair swinging behind her.
Truth be told, Frank thought the movie was fine. A fun fantasy, but he wasn’t at Mel’s level of enthusiasm, nor did he want to be.
However, Frank thoroughly enjoyed their morning of cuddling, of listening to Mel talk about this thing she loved, of her face lighting up with excitement. That was his favorite part, and something he could easily watch for eleven hours a hundred times in a row. Frank would always look forward to seeing her like that, spending more time with her, getting to know her as they settled into their forever one perfect step at a time.
what was your favorite baran scene in season 2? and for victoria? 💖
hey maur!! oh my god, an excuse to talk about my two faves, i NEVER get to do this don't look at my blog--DON'T LOOK AT IT!
anyway!
for baran, i think i'm obligated to say "just because you know it's broken doesn't mean you stop trying" because that's just... her character thesis statement and i love her i love her i love her
but honestly also the scene with her and brenda outside! she's a superheroooooooo
also the slash trach
for victoria it has to be her patient's crash and then roxie's death.............. i love acting and i think shabana azeez is good at it
and yes, that is all One scene to me i don't accept feedback
HOW I TRY TO AVOID WHITEWASHING MY GIFS (FOR THE PITT)
hey! so, the show i've undoubtedly been giffing the most lately is the pitt, which features a whole lot of characters of color! it also happens to be a show with mostly white & cool toned backgrounds and bright lighting. unfortunately, those are circumstances in which it can become really easy for gifs to slide into whitewashing territory - whitewashing in this case meaning that characters of color are colored to be a lot lighter than they were in the unedited version of the scene.
DISCLAIMER: these are some examples of whitewashing that i encounter in my gifmaking process and actively try to avoid. this is by no means comprehensive, nor am i any kind of authority on what does or does not constitute whitewashing. furthermore, i myself have an issue where gifs look surprisingly different on tumblr on my pc vs my tablet, so truly, i think it can even depend on what device you're viewing gifs on. there are some cases that are pretty straightforward to me, but sometimes my tablet makes gifs - that looked perfectly fine on my computer - suddenly look kind of too pale.
TO NON-GIFMAKERS: absolutely feel free to look at these examples and if gifs strike you as way too pale for what you saw on screen just consider not interacting with that set. maybe you might even shoot the creator an ask/reply telling them that they may have veered into whitewashing.
okay, now that that's out of the way, let's just take a quick look at what i mean when i say whitewashing - let's look at this (extreme, cartoonish) example:
now you might say, "that's absurd, nobody would color it that way," but the thing is, something like this in different forms is easier to get to while coloring a gif than one might think.
and both skin tones (again... duh) and lighting can differ drastically from character to character and scene to scene. i've tried to assemble a few gifs of different characters of color to explain what i try to avoid and how i avoid it when i color.
BRIGHTNESS & CURVES
the most obvious and probably the most widespread (i think) thing is that when you originally screencap a show/import a video into photoshop, it's kinda dark. it just looks nicer to most gifmakers when we make it a little brighter. the issue with that can come when we do too much with our curve or brightness layers.
(the little circles show shades that i picked with the color picker tool at hopefully pretty much the same spot for all four gifs)
so you can see that i'm a bit of a hypocrite - i made her lighter with my standard psd! that's why i say that i personally think this is a matter of degrees. as far as i'm aware the difference between the unedited and second gif that shows how i usually color is within the margins. it's still fairly vibrant and brown whereas with the two lower gifs i'm firmly in pink/light beige territory (which is not sepideh moafi's skin color).
this one's pretty easy to avoid, in my opinion: just don't go too far with curves or brightness. i try to keep it in that margin that still approximates the color of the unedited version.
THE BLUES & GREENS
i feel like this is the most complex one. like i said, the pitt is a show with a lot of blue in the background and what can happen is that in trying to make those colors pop or reducing reds & yellows, we distort skin tones maybe a little too much.
layers this can become an issue in: selective color, color balance, levels, channel mixer, hue/saturation.
how i try to avoid this:
selective color: the red & yellow tabs of selective colors are crucial to me here. in those, i try not to increase the cyan or decrease the magenta or yellow too much -> of course it depends on the scene! if it's a very yellow scene, i can probably decrease the yellows of red or yellow without running the risk of actual whitewashing
levels: i usually keep my hands off the individual color levels for this - that's just a personal preference, though. if used, i'd apply the rules of color balance and channel mixer
color balance: i pretty much only use "shadows" and "lights" for color balance and here i try to take care with the cyan/red slider (and in some rare instances the yellow/blue slider) -> too much cyan and i create that pink-ish hue in the spots where the light hits the character, and that doesn't really belong there; with other characters too much cyan almost bleaches them out
channel mixer: no increasing reds in the green or the blue channel, basically
i made another example for this in combination with increased curves/brightness:
VIBRANCE
i don't see this one as often anymore because the pale gif trend was years and years ago (and personally, i'll never participate in it again bc i didn't like it), but for completion's sake i wanted to include it because pale gifs had a HUGE whitewashing problem.
as you can see, victoria looks sort of grey and ashy in the bottom two gifs. if you add more brightness/curves on top of that it becomes very, very pale which was sort of the trend for a while.
again, easy to avoid because i have to add a hue/saturation or vibrance layer and drag the dials into the negatives.
PALE COLOR GRADED/LIGHTING SCENES
sometimes the show does the deed itself, although i'm not super sure if that can still be qualified as whitewashing. in any case, sometimes i'll load screencaps into photoshop and go, "why does she look so pale??? i've giffed her before and she didn't remotely look like this."
at that point, i come to kind of a crossroad - do i try to color correct in addition to my usual coloring or do i just proceed as normal and go off of the skin tone presented to me in the scene?
i skew towards the latter... the top two look bad To Me but i don't know if there's an actual right answer to this conundrum, to be honest.
and that's it for now!! i hope this is maybe a little helpful? again, this is not meant to encompass everything or even go into much detail on individual colorings but moreso the general considerations i try to make when i gif. i hope it makes sense! tysm for reading!!
