#spectatorials

[paceyjen]

for writing asks: cassiopeia, apus, and orion! 😊

thank you sm for sending these!

cassiopeia: from my current wip I think my favorite scene would have to be this one:

apus: I think the hardest part of writing for me is probably describing actions😭 not knowing how to put a gesture or a body movement into words is the most frustrating thing ever

orion: I do sometimes! it really depends on my mood

[shanyushahollander]

gold (arrogance) 👀

here you go 🥺 NOT very edited right now unfortunately :(

“Ugh. Are you sure?”

Kathy puts the sponge back inside and snaps her compact shut. “I think you oughta give him a shot,” she says reasonably, then picks up a tube of mascara and starts slicking it onto her already-long lashes. “You got other boys I don’t know about beatin’ down your door?”

Evie’s fist shoots out to punch Kathy in the arm, making her drop the tube onto her thickly-carpeted floor; Kathy just smirks. “Besides, you get Stevie on the string, means you might be able to make a move on that dreamboat Soda Curtis. Just think of him as a stepping stone.”

Yeah, Evie’s well-aware that he’s Soda Curtis’s— and she feels bad thinking this, even though it’s true— less attractive friend, the one always scowling next to him, arms crossed, while girls flirt with him at the DX and in the lot of the Dingo and when he’s heading out of auto mechanics class. She also had world history with him as a freshman, and had to listen to him argue with the teacher, a glorified wrestling coach, all fucking year about how the textbook was outdated, secure and smug in the knowledge of his own rightness. He used that same approach asking her out, the other night, when she and Kathy were about to make tracks back home from Jay’s. You wanna drive down with me to the Ribbon Friday night? he asked, and she thought he meant Kathy at first. I’ll pick you up at eight.

Worst of all is that it worked. She was nodding her agreement before she could even think better of it.

“Fine,” Evie sighs— it’d be rude as all hell to stand him up now, anyway. “Ain’t like I have to marry him or nothin’, I suppose.”

[hintons-a]

🎵 + kelly

kelly + this song. being cool, above it all but into the politics of dancing

[corleona]

poetry asks: 12 :)

u know exactly what u did here… also this is completely original fiction so <3 content warning for very light implied / referenced sa (first referenced in “if only”) in the first paragraph!

SNAKE BRIDE

you turn thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and things start to change. you notice boys first, and then lisa leaves, and then boys notice you right back. some of them do things you won’t be able to think about for a long time; none of them love you the way you want them to.

in letters to your sister, you tell her stories. they never seem to end, and you fill page after page as if writing a diary, desperate for her to recognize what you’re not telling her. if she ever figures it out, she doesn’t say, and instead, the year you turn eighteen, lisa comes home and says she’s leaving again all in the same breath. she asks you to come with her but only after the announcement, and it feels like an afterthought, so you run off once she’s distracted by her man again.

instead you find yourself in matamoros, where your aunts linger after your own father left. when he lived at the border it was as a petty criminal, smuggling illicit goods northward. when lisa was born, he named his boss her godfather; that you run into this godfather’s employee soon after you arrive in this same city is the worst kind of fate.

his name is nico, he says. in a few years you’ll want to laugh at how easily you fell for it: the flirtatious attitude, the slicked back hair like the white boys used to wear, thinking they were the ones who made it up. his eyes aren’t green but they’re close, a hazel that the sun transforms into whatever color you miss. sometimes you think he’s a shape-shifter, sneaky, blending in perfectly no matter where he takes you on dates, whether they’re in nice restaurants in the city you were named after or to a party on someone’s ranch.

when he smiles you feel like the only thing he’s thinking about, and the worst part is it’s true, but that’s only in the moment.

“tell me a story,” he says every time he comes by to see you, and you do until he loses interest in your words and reinvests it in your mouth instead. dozens of stories half-started, unfinished, and it feels almost like you’re living life on repeat.

september leads to october leads to nearly three seasons together. the week after you turn nineteen he takes you shopping and tells you to pick out the biggest ring you want.

“you wanna get married, chula?” he asks you, and you don’t know where to look: his eyes flashing in the afternoon light or the massive rings you never thought to even fantasize about. you try not to think about how he seems to want to eat you alive.

you think there’s a story about that somewhere—a bride telling stories to her snake husband for a thousand nights. you wonder if you should have taken notes, but instead of thinking too hard about it, you tell yourself you deserve this (even if you don’t quite know what this is).

[shanyushahollander]

two for you: 🎵 + angela and 🎵 + YOUR ponyboy :)

angela: i have a HUGE playlist for her omg, but girls your age— transviolet (jailbait baby, hunting men in their twenties / cupid’s shooting arrows, but i’m cold, so i outgun him) really captures what i think her mindset was as a teenager 😧

MY ponyboy: i’m coming out— diana ross okay no 😭 all my songs for him are like.. randyboy songs fml…… i like did the day go just like you wanted?— belle & sebastian (he’s a long-haired puddle of doubt / but he’s yours)

[hintons-a]

silver (moonlight); gray (compromise)

silver (moonlight)

dog is the one who greets him at the door, panting and whining. dallas reaches down to scratch at his ears, murmuring out, "c'mon, keep it quiet." dog does that funny, two stepped prance he does when pleased, and as soon as dallas turns on the living room light, he turns tail and goes back to the steps, tail wagging the whole time. dallas takes the time to get to the kitchen, to wash his hands as thorough as he can at the sink. he's still getting used to the house — it's so new, it feels like he's still got a new paint smell to it even a month in. the dishes are stacked on the side, and the view outside of the window shows the streets hardly illuminated.

he takes his time, flicking off the water, making sure that he doesn't smell like smoke or ash or gasoline. even if the job tonight had been minimal, that's always been the deal.

once satisfied, he sheds his coat, makes his way up the steps, up to the bedroom. when he gets to the bedroom on the right he peaks in: kelly's still half snoring, drooling on the pillow, red hair slightly illuminated by the lamp that he shuts off. there's a letter on the table beside her — probably from soda or sandy — and once he's satisfied she's fine, he shuts the door the way he found it.

then he's where he actually wants to be, crossing the threshold into the cooler air of the room he and ponyboy have. there's a bit of amusement: ponyboy's up by the window, plaid shirt half open, book in his lap, glasses halfway down his nose, snoozing softly. he can guess that he tried to stay up, to wait for him to get back and either the book was too boring (unlikely) or kelly had tired him out earlier.

doesn't matter which, as he leans over to rock ponyboy's shoulder. the moonlight makes the gray streaks in his hair turn silver, and he watches ponyboy sigh in his sleep instead of waking up. he grasps his hair as rough as he always does: and that does the trick, ponyboy jerking awake, glasses fully slipping down just as it has for years, eyes focusing on dallas. "quit it—" he squirms, and dallas snickers.

"c'mon," dallas tugs at his hair again, "gonna mess up your back lying here and you ain't gettin' any younger."

"big words," ponyboy huffs out. gray (compromise)

magic isn't perfect. ponyboy knows that now, that magic has rules, that magic demands you give something up in exchange for what you want, that there are limits to what you can and cannot do.

it says that he can raise the dead back to life, but he can't raise his own parents back up from the dead. it says that he can use the magic — but each time he uses it, he feels weaker, thinner every time for days on end.

this time, he'd gone to raies up johnny and dallas. johnny had refused, had pasesd on on. and now he's left with dallas, who's back but isn't the same, with skin still a strange gray, with his eyes blazing unnaturally bright in his face, who is somehow worse than he was a person and yet better — his temper is stripped of the little brakes it had, but now he's franker, point blank with the fact that whatever the magic had done, it meant he wasn't leaving ponyboy and he had no plans on violating that.

so it's not perfect. dallas is a little more of a monster than man now, but he is alive, and that's what ponyboy wanted.

[corleona]

✏️ and 🗝️ -- an anytime invitation

✏️-Would you go back and change anything if you could?

HM i think i would maybe lean into the pony/vicky vibes a bit more... i think it's pretty one-sided here, which makes sense, because this is from izzy's perspective , who is attuned to vic's side of things (aka, assumes it was a one-sided crush that went nowhere). it is Not a one-sided crush, though, it's that pony doesn't work up the nerve to acknowledge his own feelings until after vicky's left town and then all of a sudden she has this cool older boyfriend and lives in mexico 🤠 so i kind of wish i had snuck more of his feelings into this somehow, bc i think izzy's just observant enough that it would have added an interesting level of tension if she realized pony missed his shot (...or did he!)

🗝️-What were you thinking when you wrote it?

i was thinking, "how do i get susie's characters to mexico in a believable way" and tbh. this was a stretch LOL i wrote this at a moment that i was really struggling to write about mexico in the way that i wanted, and while i've moved past that (and am slowly getting the hang of how i do write said country), it was a really useful exercise for me!

it also sort of serves as a retcon for two fics: the long-deleted "this town i live in" and "dizzy." the former established the pseudo-criminal ties that the bernals have - aka, their godfather's a big name in mx, and there's repeated references to it here not only with lisa's ongoing affection for the guy, but also the fact that vicky marries someone who works for him (who is like!!!!! 25 or 26 to her 19, god i hate him but also this is my own fault). "dizzy" was my izzy mathews fic that was LEGIT just original fiction ft soda in two chapters, so :( brought her back for this one! i wanted to highlight that messiness of extended, immediate, and chosen family, hence the bernal catfight.

it was especially important to me that izzy and vicky just, like... love each other? theyre best friends and there's no conflict *within* that relationship, there are external forces that cause issue (and tbh that has less to do w vicky getting married than *who* she is marrying). this was also the fic where i decided pony/vic were endgame and that i wasn't going to kill off vicky :) i had a lot of fun with this, even if the last chapter still bothers me (it was just so hard to write)

ty!!!! <3

[hintons-a]

🎥 -- for any fic, of course (also damn the ask and follow buttons being so close)

tumblr has terrible design.

🎥 Were there any tv shows, books, or movies that influenced this verse, if any?

marshalfic feels easy -- it's justified, the mini genre of "dallas leaves and comes back to tulsa" fics, the need to have ponyboy actually take dallas to task for leaving, some xena episodes, endless talks with @aishitaeru and the general feeling that running away isn't the answer.

so let's do something more complicated -- the descent is influenced a lot.

i'm still working on that syllabus but a huge influence of that is kim petras' TURN OFF THE LIGHTS album, and also, twin peaks (series & movie). i think twin peaks really started to converge here around certain concepts: the possession rules in the fic (that i don't explain but have been delighted that readers have picked up on -- ponyboy realizing that he has to cement the possession with things dallas cared about or possessed himself is really fun for plot.); the sort of horror that goes with the loss of life and having to live with it without the true acknowledgement from others of how horrible it is to live with it, with the knowledge that you have to walk past dead friends all the time, you have to live in a place that killed someone you loved; the sort of daylight horror of it all; and just the underscoring of cosmic, supernatural horror visited upon ordinary people.

and, of course, grief.