Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
wallacepolsom
occasionally subtle
Not today Justin
Janaina Medeiros
Misplaced Lens Cap
if i look back, i am lost
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
noise dept.
No title available
sheepfilms
JBB: An Artblog!
art blog(derogatory)
Kiana Khansmith
Cosimo Galluzzi
Three Goblin Art
izzy's playlists!
Jules of Nature
No title available
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
seen from Dominican Republic
seen from South Africa
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from Mauritius
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
@technoelfie
Here is my casing of Tales From the House of the Moon by Resmiranda @ahollowyear and typeset done by the lovely Megannana of the Amateur Fanfic Binding group on Facebook. This is my holy grail and I loved casing this so much. This story means so much to me it got me through some hard times in High School and this was a lifeline to me. I hope I did it justice. And no we aren’t gonna talk about the typo. 🥹
Gorgeous. 😍
simon 'ghost' riley who says you guys can't be in a relationship because he's emotionally unavailable.
simon 'ghost' riley who doesn't stay the night because he's afraid you'll get too attached.
simon 'ghost' riley who tells you he's just using you for your body. that's it.
simon 'ghost' riley who says you're nothing too him but a toy.
simon 'ghost' riley who says he's too cold hearted for you.
simon 'ghost' riley who says he's too old for you.
simon 'ghost' riley who claims he's just a shell of a man.
simon 'ghost' riley who says he'll ruin you.
simon 'ghost' riley who says you're too sweet for him.
simon 'ghost' riley who says he'll hurt you.
simon 'ghost' riley who says he's too dark and demented for you.
simon 'ghost' riley who says he's too broken to be in a relationship with you.
...
simon 'ghost' riley the fucking liar
...
simon 'ghost' riley who was pussywhipped the first night with you.
simon 'ghost' riley constantly messaging you when he's deployed. 'good mornings' and 'good nights' every day without fail.
simon 'ghost' riley who was gentle the first night together.
simon 'ghost' riley who spends most of the night cuddling and soothing you.
simon 'ghost' riley who barely even has sex with you most nights, preferring to just being in your presence, existing.
simon 'ghost' riley who goes straight to your home after deployment and falls asleep on your couch.
simon 'ghost' riley who treats your body like a temple - always putting your pleasure before his.
simon 'ghost' riley who indulges in whatever your interests are. even if he's deployed. that singer you like? got tickets for you and a friend. favourite food? there's an uber order on the way. you said you like those shoes? it's at your front door. that book you're currently obsessed with? bought the rest of the serious and the limited edition hardcovers. tattoo you want? money sent.
simon 'ghost' riley who makes sure you're eating and drinking right.
simon 'ghost' riley who remembers the tiniest details you've told him. so he makes sure you're taking necessary medication at the right time. reminds you of appointments.
simon 'ghost' riley who couldn't sleep after your first argument.
simon 'ghost' riley who was destroyed when he saw you cry.
simon 'ghost' riley who admitted that he was in the wrong.
simon 'ghost' riley who apologized first.
simon 'ghost' riley who's nothing but sweet to you.
simon 'ghost' riley who never left your side when you got sick and tended to every little thing you needed.
simon 'ghost' riley who drives you wherever.
simon 'ghost' riley who does the laundry because you hate it.
simon 'ghost' riley that can't stop holding your hand.
simon 'ghost' riley who prefers being with you than anyone else.
simon 'ghost' riley who realizes he couldn't live without you.
simon 'ghost' riley who said i love you first.
a/n: ew this was so sappy. i just wanted to call him out for being a liar lol.
JUJUTSU KAISEN'S ANATOMY
A/N: God I LOVE when you guys let me break the 4th wall. Most of you guys already know my specialty but in my junior years of residency I had to rotate on different services as part of training. Everyone loves a well rounded doctor.
Anon, you’re insane for this ask. I could never write a full medical fan fic because it’s TOO close to home and I already spend 100 hours/week at the hospital I need to escape it somehow.
Nevertheless, I’m SO happy to indulge you, baby. Let’s get into it. I’ll break this up into two parts. The Attendings, then The Residents.
ATTENDINGS ON CALL
Love this so much! 🥰
Merry Christmas!🧼🎁💀
That’s cheating
“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html
I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:
https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/
I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:
WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.
Years and years ago I worked for a small software company that made niche products for a tiny, vertical market. My boss started doing the enshittification tango (though I didn't know that's what it was at the time) and I was so angry and confused. Why would he be intentionally making our products worse?
Now I know. And it's incredibly validating to have smart people saying that I wasn't wrong, actually, to be uncomfortable with the way the company was going.
"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."
Interesting point.
How would you respond, if every bookshop and CD / DVD store you ever bought stuff from reserved the right to send their agents to your house, where they would break in and take all that stuff away, or set locks on the devices that play them and demand payment to unlock?
In THIS house, there would be...
Displeasure.
*****
@dduane has never put DRMs on anything sold from Ebooks Direct, and never will.
Her attitude, and mine, is that when you buy a book, you own that book; if your device goes phut or changes working formats - MOBI files for instance - you still own that book, so you can just quote your order, ask for, and get a replacement in the new format.
An old-fashioned business model? Yes.
Given what Amazon and iTunes can do to your libraries without asking, old-fashioned ain't so bad.
An artist shows how he gets his amazing pictures
What do you think of the squishy wizard trope? Shouldn’t people that travel around and go “adventuring” have some baseline of athleticism?
So, we're back to a game design discussion, again.
The short version is, if it doesn't make sense to you, don't use it.
Squishy wizards are almost more of a gameplay consideration. If you have a game, and you're balancing ranged damage against melee damage, if your ranged damage units do enough damage, you can create a situation where melee damage straight up doesn't work. It's not viable. The 40k meme about the Tau comes to mind: “Sure, they suck in melee; too bad you'll never get there.”
If you tone down ranged unit's damage, that can easily create a situation where they become the ones who are irrelevant. Such was the experience of every level 1 Wizard in AD&D. Once in awhile, you can get into the perfect situation to end an encounter, but most of the time you're just biding your time until you get to level 5 and can learn to accidentally fireball your party's front line, but that is a long time from now.
If ranged units can do a lot of damage, they need to be fragile enough that you can remove them from the board. And the Tau comparison comes back to mind once again.
All of this combines to create a board environment, where melee fighters need to be tanky enough to get into combat and stay there. Ranged units need to be fragile enough that they can remove each other, deal enough damage to harass the melee units, without doing so much damage as to render them completely irrelevant to the board.
And, while you can build a story around that structure, you don't need to.
Gandalf isn't a fragile wizard. He's not some “book nerd,” who spent high school getting shoved into lockers. When the time comes, he goes toe to toe with a Balrog (or, the Balrog, whichever), and doesn't immediately die. He clearly manages to hold his own, in melee combat, with a massive monster. (In fairness, he's also not human. I mean, none of Tolkien's, “the race of men,” are conventionally human, but Middle Earth's Wizards are an entirely different race of beings.)
In a lot of games, solution is to give the frontline fighters a ridiculous amount of health. Now, I'm going to trash on D&D for a second, but consider that a 10th level Fighter should have somewhere around 94 - 114hp. Remember that critical hits represent some kind of significant injury. These are not just blows that connect with your armor and will leave a bruise, this is someone ran you through. Someone could crit on your fighter, with a long sword, and stab them in vital places at least 4, and probably 5 times, before it actually kills them. That's a comical amount of damage someone to suffer. (Now, granted, a 10th level character in D&D is basically a superhero. If you're thinking of Boromir's death in Jackson's Fellowship of the Rings, that is what it takes to put down a relatively high level fighter in D&D. Which is to say, hilarious amounts of abuse.)
If you signed up for that, cool. I'm not going to stop you. I'm not even going to tell you it's wrong. If you want to tear down a super-humanly powerful character through prolonged combat sequences, or due to attrition of multiple fights in quick succession, that works. I mean, hell, that's how DC killed Batman in the 90s.
If your wizard power fantasy is that a wispy intellectual gains cosmic power through hard academic study, cool. Again, that's entirely valid, and as I mentioned, it even fits into a power fantasy. If you were bullied as a teenager for your atypical interests, and habit of reading, here's a character that studies strange and esoteric subjects, and has real power as a result.
At the same time, it's entirely reasonable to have an averagely healthy mage, whether they study magic academically, or have some ingrained talent that they've honed, plop them down next to a veteran swordmaster who's fought in wars on nine continents with the scars to prove it, and while they may look a bit anemic in comparison to their buddy, is still in better shape than the average villager they interact with on a daily basis.
That's where I tend to land in all of this.
When you're creating characters for your writing, it can be helpful to assign them attributes. Now, I don't mean this in the literal RPG stat blocks. (I've tried that a few times, it doesn't really work for me.) But, just a few text descriptors (which, does sound like Fudge, come to think of it.) You might describe your mage as Smart, or Intellectual, Wise (or Absent Minded), Willful. You know, “wizard stuff.” If you describe your warrior as, Strong, Tough, Tenacious, and Cunning, you're not making the wizard squishy, you're making another character less squishy. A lot of the time, we set the base line by what other people are doing. It's reasonable to say your mage is less durable than your soldier. (Unless your mage has a reason to be that tough. Maybe they're from some frozen wasteland, and are just absolutely jacked from surviving in a hostile environment.) But, that comparison doesn't mean that your mage is deficient.
Now, on the other hand, frail characters can be interesting. You're taking out their ability to fight conventionally, so when they do start decisively ending situations, whether that's through their own creativity and guile, or sheer magical power, it can be very gratifying. And, to be clear, I am very fond of flawed characters, especially when they have to work within the framework of their flaws to find solutions, rather than just overcoming them through the power of love, friendship and mescaline.
When handled well, flaws are about creating limitations for how your characters can solve problems. These can also make your story more interesting. If you say, my character can't fight, (and you don't back down from that and just let them cheat so they can fight, because they're so goddamn special), they're going to need to find other solutions. That can result in a better, more interesting, and less predictable story.
-Starke
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Keying/graffiti-ing someones car is old news now if someone cheats we go at their wardrobe with a seam ripper
yknow what? Fuck you *unstitches all your shirts and jeans*
My mother did this to my father once. They got into an argument, my very pregnant and hormonal mother stormed off…except they lived in a tiny apartment so the only place to go was to shut herself into the closet for a good long sulk. And while she was sitting in there, fuming, she looked up and saw her sewing kit on the shelf, and all my father’s uniforms hanging right there.
So she picked one shirt and one pair of trousers, carefully, methodically ripped every third stitch out of every seam, and then hung them back up together so that he would be likely to pick them at the same time. This took her a couple hours, so by the time she was done, the anger had worn down. She came out, she and my father had a talk that ended in apologies, after which they were tired and went to bed. My mother swears up and down that she meant to warn my father about the sabotaged clothes in the morning, but he wore a different uniform set and they were both still feeling a little raw, so she didn’t want to bring up the fight again. She decided to tell him that night instead.
And then she forgot.
Anyway, about four days later, my father apparently came home roughly an hour after he left for work, his clothes slowly, gently shredding off his body, the most bewildered expression on his face. “Paula,” he said, his voice mildly shell-shocked. “Paula, my clothes are broken.”
My mother promptly burst out laughing so hard that she went into labor. And that’s the story of my birth, heralded by petty vengeance and utter confusion.
GUYS IT’S THE POST
THIS POST THIS POST OMG
Christopher Soukup
I want to move to a place where I can find autumn in every corner 🍂🧡
Hello October! It’s nice to see you again 🎃 spooky season is officially upon us 👻
I have realized that the perfect form of media must have a delicate balance between absolutely heart wrenching pure emotional devastation and the most ridiculous nonsense you have ever seen in your whole life
I love picking at plot holes like scabs so i want my fight scenes to be as realistic as possible. However. There’s a creature in my head that says a buster sword is SICK AS HELL. What modifications would it need to be even remotely wieldable while still keeping its central appeal (huge sword big blade cool and sexy) intact?
You’ve made a mistake. You mistook suspension of disbelief for realism. This is a common problem that gets in the way of a lot of fantasy and sci-fi authors. So, don’t worry. It isn’t just you. However, realism vs believability is where your hangup is. Stories don’t need to be realistic to be believable.
The quick and dirty (and possibly unhelpful) answer is to create a world that justifies your buster sword, not a buster sword that’s trying to justify itself in a world that doesn’t want it. You step back from the sword itself and away from a world where reality dictates that it’s too heavy, too clumsy, too slow, and ask yourself: “in what type of world does this thing make sense?” And there’s about a billion different ways to create that.
The hangup with the realistic argument is that all of fiction is a lie. Good or bad, that’s what stories are. They can be very compelling, addicting, manipulative, feel incredibly good, and still be fake. The goal of a creator isn’t just to create stories that are believable, but for your audience to want to believe in them. Storytelling is always a joint venture between you and your reader. You are the salesperson asking your audience to come along for the ride. To keep their attention, you’ve got to spin up a good yarn. Build trust. The world has to feel right, but it doesn’t have to be right. Reasonable, not right. The goal is to take a cool idea and work backwards to how your society got here so that when seen from an outside perspective, the choice ultimately looks like a reasonable conclusion given the surrounding context. One of the better ways to build your reasonable conclusions is by studying the history of technological invention from the beginning to the midpoint rather than starting with the end point—the results.
History is full of weird, wacky, wild attempts and failures at creation. You’re not the first person to look at a human sized sword and wonder if it could, in fact, hit good. Or, really, better than swords that currently exist. Or, fulfill a battlefield role the sword was currently not occupying. Or, as we like to say, have real battlefield applications. The Claymore, the Zwhihander, the Zhanmadao are all real weapons that saw real, if not necessarily extensive, use. Like all weapons, they were specialized tools meant for particular battlefield uses. In this case, mainly as anti-cavalry support.
Ask yourself, why? Not just, why would I want it? Ask, why would I use it?
What actual purpose does the big cool blade serve beyond looking big and cool? What function does it fill on the battlefield? Why use the big cool blade instead of other weapons? What does it do better? What are some offsets which might account for the massive size? Technology? Superhuman enhancements, mystical or otherwise? Gravitic fields? Magic? Why is the big cool blade better suited to ensuring a character’s survival? What advantages does it provide? What is its practical value to warriors within your setting?
The initial defensive reaction is that we don’t need a reason because we have the Rule of Cool. That could be the reason, but I challenge you to go deeper. Go deeper than, “this was the weapon my character was trained to use.” The followup question is: why were they trained to use it?
In the real world, we can answer these questions both from a personal and from a larger social perspective. We may not be able to answer whether we’d use a gun, but we understand why humanity developed guns, why we use guns, and the purpose they serve both for personal protection and in their military applications. The answers don’t necessarily need to be good or smart. What matters is that an answer exists to feed your audience. When your reader starts struggling to believe, they begin to ask questions, they pick at the fabric of the narrative trying to figure out why their mind has rejected the story they were previously enjoying. What we, the writer, want to create is a chain of logic underpinning the narrative and its world. This way, when questions are asked, a reasonable answer is ready and waiting. While we won’t win over everyone, trust that your audience wants to believe. Trust that they’re smart enough to figure it out without being spoon fed. That way, you won’t fall into the trap of infodumping.
Worldbuilding always involves a lot more happening under the surface than ever makes it onto the page. Your characters will be the ones to demonstrate and act on the internal logic that’s been created for them without needing a billion questions to lead us from Point A to Point B.
If we look at human history in a wide view, we find that weapons are a fairly steady march forward that matches a civilization’s technological growth. We keep what works and discards what doesn’t. The crossbow replaced the bow as the main form of artillery in martial combat, but we still kept the bow. The bow still had practical applications. Guns eventually replaced the crossbow just like they replaced the sword, but it actually took a very long time. We had functional firearms in the Middle Ages.
Ease of Use
Ease of Training
Lethality
From a military standpoint, these are the three most important aspects for widespread adoption of any weapon. Easy to use. Easy to train. Lethal. The longer it takes to train a soldier on a weapon the more time your army is losing out on using that soldier and the more effective the weapon needs to be in order to justify its expense. Why give your soldier a big cool sword if they’ll never get close enough to reach the forward line to make the assault? Why have them use the big cool sword if operating the laser cannon is more efficient, effective, and keeps them alive longer? In the coldness of battlefield calculus, it’s often better to have cheap, efficient units rather than more expensive ones that might be more lethal but take longer to produce. No matter how good they are, you’re eventually going to lose them. Therefore, easy replaceability becomes a factor.
If you can answer those questions (and the myriad of other similar ones) you won’t just have a weapon, you’ll have a world. You’ll have more than a justification, you’ll have battlefield strategy, tactics, and a greater understanding of how the average layman characters in your setting beyond your main character approach warfare and possibly a technological history. You might even have several functional armies.
Ultimately, this is a game of value versus cost. Most settings that use big cool swords sacrifice ease of use and ease of training to amp up lethality. The weapon having a specialized function or only being usable by a specialized unit helps if that unit’s battlefield effectiveness is justified. Or, you could just have a weird technological outlier where its effectiveness doesn’t quite justify its cost even if the individual warrior is effective. A good example of this is in shounen anime where one character has a specialty that no one else has, a really cool, effective weapon that never appears anywhere else, because the length of training, high skill floor, and finicky nature of its use make it difficult to justify widespread adoption.
The danger is assuming there’s a right answer. There isn’t one. The value in learning the rules of real world violence is so you can break them. This way you can tell the difference between the vital rules necessary for suspending disbelief and don’t accidentally break the ones you needed to keep your audience invested.
-Michi
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Guide: Naming a Town or City
There are many things to keep in mind when naming the town or city in your novel:
1) Genre/Theme/Tone
It’s very important to consider the genre and theme of your story when choosing a town name. Take these names for example, each of which indicates the genre or theme of the story: King’s Landing (sounds fantastical) Cloud City (sounds futuristic) Silent Hill (sounds scary) Sweet Valley (sounds happy and upbeat) Bikini Bottom (sounds funny) Radiator Springs (sounds car-related) Halloween Town (sounds Halloween-related) Storybrooke (sounds fairytale-related) 2) Time/Place It’s also important to consider the time and place where your story takes place. For example, you wouldn’t use “Vista Gulch” as a name for a town in Victorian England. You probably wouldn’t use it for a town in modern day North Carolina, either. Vista is a Spanish word and would normally be found in places where Spanish names are common, like Spain, Central and South America, the southwest United States (including southern California), Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Florida. 3) Size/Settlement Type An isolated town of 300 people probably won’t be Valley City, but a sprawling metropolis of 30 million could be called Windyville, because it could have started out as a small town and grew into a large city. 4) Geography Words like gulch, butte,and bayou tend to be regional terms. You probably wouldn’t find Berle’s Bayou in Idaho, or Windy Butte in Rhode Island. Words like mount, cape, and valley are dependent upon terrain. Most of the time, you won’t have a town named “mount” something unless there are hills or mountains nearby. You wouldn’t use “cape” unless the town was on a cape, which requires a large body of water. 5) History Is there a historical person or event that your town might be named after? The Simpsons’ hometown of Springfield is ironically named after its founder, Jebediah Springfield. Chattanooga, Tennessee is named after the Cherokee town that was there first. Nargothrond, in The Lord of the Rings, is an Elvish town with an Elvish name. 6) Combination of Words
person name + geographical term = Smithfield, Smith Creek
group name + geographical term = Pioneer Valley, Settlers’ Ridge
descriptive word + geographical term = Mystic Falls, Smoky Hill
person name + settlement type = Smithton, Claraville
landmark + settlement type = Bridgton, Beaconville
Word Lists: Types of Settlements
Geographical Features
Place Words
Common Suffixes
Other Descriptors
Try a combination of two words from any of these lists. :)
Some of those words - “mesa”, “butte”, “gulch”, “canyon”, “prairie” and even “ranch” - are so locked to a certain part of the world that they would read oddly if describing a fantasy landscape inhabited by elves.
Unless those elves wore chaps and Stetsons and carried six-guns, which may or may not be a story seed for someone. It certainly throws a new light on “going into the West”… ;->
*****
Here’s a very small selection of names of villages and hamlets in England:
Appleby Magna, Appleby Parva, Atherstone, Atterton, Desford, Earl Shilton, Fenny Drayton, Glenfield, Kirby Muxloe, Kirkby Mallory, Little Wigston, Maxstoke, Newbold Verdon, Sapcote, Stanton, Stapleton, Stoke Golding and Stone.
Those are all from Leicestershire, pronounced Lestuhshuh.
Something else to play with when creating place-names is that, for various reasons, they’re often not pronounced the same way as they’re spelt. Sometimes this can be because speakers of one language are bamboozled by the rules of another, or because the name has been worn down from years of (mis)use.
Check out these examples:
In Ireland Cobh is Cove, Dun Laoghaire is Dunleary and Youghal is Yawl; however Drogheda can be Drawada or Drawheda or Drockeda. Up north, Ahoghill is Uhhockle and Clogher is Clawer.
In Scotland Culross is Kooruss, Culzean is Kullane and Kircudbright is Kercoobray, while in England Alcester is Olster, Bamburgh is Bamberruh, Durham is Durrum, Mousehole is Mausel, Worcester is Woostur, and so on.
These give away that people are “not from these parts” (though as Drogheda demonstrates, it can apply even to fairly local strangers), and in fiction allows accidental reveals without handing otherwise-sensible characters the Idiot Ball.
*****
Finally, check out “The Atlas of True Names”, which translates placenames from their original language.
I was born and raised in the Fort of the Gamblers in Northern Westland, @dduane comes from the Bow-Wood Grove of New Fort in the Land By The Long Tidal River, and now we live in a part of Westland that’s the Country of the Spear Folk…
And yes, we do have spears, even if one’s a practice version.
Pink Mugs And Painful Expressions
John Price/Reader
Word Count: 2.3k
Warnings: You go to the gym regularly
No Use of Y/N
Summary: While on leave, Price gets fixated on a girl at his gym with a painful running face
A/N: Price seems so domestic, this premise is so silly but so soft
AO3 Link: Pink Mugs And Painful Expressions
The first thing Price noticed about you when he saw you the first time, sweat covered and finishing up his gym routine, was the immaculate look of pain on your pretty face. You were running on the treadmill at a steady but punishing pace, and the expression on your face reminded him, oddly enough, of a baroque painting of a martyr being tortured. Eyes cast up, eyebrows tight, your mouth slightly parted and aggressively downturned. He'd seen that same look of agony on men who had lost limbs. It jarred him enough that he openly stared for almost two minutes before coming back to himself and quickly leaving.
You went to the gym at the same time everyday, he realized, seeking out the striking expression on your face everytime he came to train. Leave made him restless, antsy, often resulting in multiple gym trips a day. He adjusted his schedule to match yours, because the tortured look on your face gave him something to focus on outside of the combat he was itching to go back to. He wondered why you ran so often if you loathed it so much. He wondered if you were just a particularly expressive person. He wondered if you were constantly miserable and not cognizant of the face you made at the gym. He wondered if this fixation was inappropriate.
It was one of your usual gym days, and John had just finished up his last set, head turned over his right shoulder to look back at the treadmills when he knocked into someone. His head snapped forward as he instinctively grabbed onto the person's wrist, steadying them before realizing who it was he bumped into.
"I apologize," he said, looking down at your slightly red face, "I wasn't watching where I was going."
"It's alright," you replied, your voice clear and slightly breathless, "I wasn't paying much attention either."
There was a beat. John realized he was still holding your wrist and snatched his hand back with another apology. You smiled at him shyly and he felt the world shift. Your eyes were lovely.
"I'm John Price," his hand shot out almost reflexively. You shook the offered palm gently and introduced yourself as he marveled at how small your hands were compared to his. "I apologize for knocking into you, love." You smiled again, laughing away his apology, ducking your head and gently detaching yourself, turning to leave. He was too caught up replaying the sound of you laughing to realize you were walking away before you were already gone.
The quiet was the worst part of being home. In the field, there was always noise. Gunshots. The murmur of his men conversing. Even when silence was required you could hear the shift of a uniform, the quiet footsteps. His flat had no noise. Price was a man accustomed to company, and his empty flat was silent as the grave. He forced himself into the shower, letting the water wash over him for over an hour. He'd go out tonight, he decided. Go get something to eat, maybe go to a pub. Hear the clinking of glasses and the sounds of conversation. He'd get his mind off your sweet voice and the feeling of your tiny wrist in his hand. He just needed to breathe. He got out of the shower and smoked a cigar.
The pub turned out to be a brilliant idea. With good food to fill his stomach and good bourbon to dull his senses, he felt himself unwind slightly. The bell over the pub door jingled and he looked up reflexively before he caught his breath. Of all the gin joints in all the towns, he thought. You're haloed in the doorway, leading a group that must be your friends. John feels a distinct pleasure at the cheerfulness of your expression as your eyes survey the room, zeroing in on an empty table. He watches you order food and drinks, watches your cheeks flush and your smile widen with every sip and every comment. It delighted him, your overly expressive face being so brilliantly cheerful outside of the gym.
Eventually, you volunteer to grab the next round, slightly stumbling as you rise from the table. You beeline for the bar and land next to his elbow, anchoring yourself against the corner of the bar as you wait for the bartender to take notice of you. You smell incredible. John can feel it when you see him, really see him, because you startle like an animal. He waits a breath before hearing a small throat clear. His eyes meet with yours.
You smile, embarrassed, and blurt, "I don't want you to think I'm a stalker," eyes wide with sincerity. "I've just noticed you at the gym before and then I bumped into you today and now we're at the same pub…" you trail off. "I like your hat." You duck your head and a quiet laugh bubbles in John's throat.
"I'd never accuse you of stalking me outright," he said, his eyes twinkling.
You reward him with a giggle that would bring him to his knees if he wasn't already sitting.
"Buy you a drink?" John asks, but your eyes dart towards your friend and his heart sinks.
"Maybe not tonight," you say, regret coloring your tone, "maybe we could go another time? I'm free Friday," you say shyly, "I can give you my phone number?"
He pulls out his phone embarrassingly fast, swiping past his home screen (the entire team dogpiling Gaz, laughing harder than a man with several very heavy grown men on top of them should be able to.) and opens the new contact page before sliding it to you. You type your info in quickly before gracing him with another one of your shy head bobs and breaking off, completely forgetting the drinks you were supposed to retrieve.
John calls the bartender over and asks him to send your group another round on him. He can see the bewildered baby deer eyes you give him all the way from across from the room. He tips his hat, unable to completely drop the smirk on his face, and settles his tab before heading out, the bell tinkling merrily behind him, sending him into the night.
The gym was now the focal point of John’s day, eagerly waiting for Friday, drinking up every interaction he had with you. You’d stop to say hi to him now, and he could feel your eyes on him when he was lifting. On Thursday, he could’ve sworn he caught you staring at his ass, your guilty eyes rising up to meet his. He wanted to laugh, settled for a grin, just to watch the way you flushed, a slight crease in between your eyebrows.
He asks you for dinner instead of drinks, decides a meal is the proper way to do things, not entirely trusting himself to be a complete gentleman with liquor running through him. He picks a quiet restaurant, something he knows, a place with all the exits mapped out in his brain. He offers to pick you up, and is rewarded with a line of smiley faces that would irritate him from anyone else. He thinks of the time he made Soap do push ups for slipping an emoji into an official report, and the memory of the Scotsman’s indignance makes him laugh, carrying him lightly out the door and towards your flat.
You open the door with a flourish and it takes all of John’s self restraint to keep his jaw from dropping. You’re in a sundress, soft and flowing, shoulders bare and your hair down. You smell like peaches. Price freezes, staring at you silently until you bite your cheek nervously.
“Do I look alright?” You ask, and it’s John’s turn to flush.
"You look lovely,” he says, remembering his manners, “are you ready?”
You nod, and he offers you his arm, leading you out to his car, opening the door for you. You smile at him in delight as he shuts the door, and he uses the walk around to the driver's side to try and recover some composure. He needed to pull himself together, couldn’t spend the entire time just staring at you. In the car it’s worse, the radio playing quietly, the scent of peaches stronger. He had lost his advantage, a feeling he disliked on principle, but fumbling for conversation like this hadn’t happened to him since he was a teenager.
"So what do you do?” You ask into the silence, pulling John out of his thoughts. He pauses, trying to decide what he could reveal.
"I work in the military,” he says vaguely. “What about you? Professional marathon runner?”
You let out a snort, and Price smiles at you, eyes creasing at the sides as you launch into an explanation of your job. He likes the way you talk, he decides, the way that you constantly move your hands, your face changing, becoming more expressive the more you speak. He’s only half paying attention to the road now, relying on muscle memory to get you two to your destination, trying to memorize the way your nose crinkles, the quirk of your lips when you say something you think is funny. When you get to the restaurant, you wait patiently for him to come open your door, taking his offered hand with a small smile as he pulls you out of the car. When he orders a Bourbon, he laughs out loud at the look of disgust on your face.
“Not a fan of the finer things, are you, love?” Price teases.
"Not a fan of the taste of jet fuel, more like it.” You respond with an eye roll. John wonders if he’s ever smiled this many times in a day before. He loses himself in you, doesn’t realize the night has grown long until the candles on the table have burnt low. The energy shifts on the way back to your flat, and Price finds himself covertly stealing glances, trying to decipher your thoughts. He can feel your stare branding his skin, turns to meet your eye to find you’ve conveniently turned away just in time.
"May I walk you up?" He asks, watching the streetlights shift and change your face.
"You're quite the gentleman," you respond, smiling softly.
Price didn't realize he was capable of loving a flat before yours. It was full of life, posters and photographs covering the walls, brightly colored mugs cluttering the sink, your clothing shed haphazardly around, the bed unmade and stuffed to the brim with pillows.
You make nervous apologies for the mess, clear him a place to sit down. He takes his hat off and thinks of his own flat, bare and cold with the bed made to army regulation every day, clean but dusty, an empty shell. He likes it here, in this cluttered, lively place, more than he thought he would. He would help you keep it clean, he thought to himself, make the bed in the morning, do the dishes. His chest got tight at the idea of waking up next to you, of being allowed in this sacred, private space. He dug his nails into his palms and cleared his throat. For God's sake you'd only been on one date.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" You ask, rustling around in the kitchen, and John wonders what mug you'll pick out for him.
The mug is pink and heart shaped, ridiculous in his large, rough hands, and you're laughing at him.
You're laughing at him and the tea is warm and strong and perfectly made, and your eyes shine in the low light as you sip from your own mug, a perfectly respectable blue, shaped like a normal mug. John sends you the disappointed look that normally sends people running, and you let out a delighted squeal, nearly spilling your perfectly made tea in your efforts to mock him.
"If I'd have known you were gonna be funny, I wouldn't have walked you up," he grumbles, but the twitch of a smile underneath his mustache gives him away, sends you into another round of laughter.
It's late when he finishes the last sip of tea, and he wonders if you can feel the switch. You're closer than before, heads leaning together unconsciously, nearly whispering. It's been a long time for Price, longer than he'd like to admit, but he still knows the game, leaning down towards you, his eyes on your lips. He places one of his large hands on your knee, feeling the soft material of your dress. It stings his ego more than he'd like to admit when you pull back, eyebrows pinching together.
"I have an early day tomorrow " you say softly. Your eyes drift towards the door, then back to Price, apologetic and regretful. He wonders if he's spooked you and pushes down the impulse to touch you again. He pulls back, shifting out of your space.
"Don't let me keep you up then, love. I'll just get out of your hair." Price says, standing up and grabbing his hat. He places it back on his head and turns towards the door, wondering if this is goodbye. You trail after him.
"I'd like to see you again John." You say quietly, your voice suddenly shy again.
He pauses, one hand on the doorknob before turning to step closer to you. You let him enter into your space, but John wonders if he placed a gentle hand on your throat if he'd feel your heart humming. Instead, he reaches out, gently tilting your chin up. Your eyes slip close instinctively.
"I had a really nice time, love." John's voice rumbles low from his chest.
Then he leans in and captures your soft lips with his own, and he doesn't need to feel your pulse to know it's fluttering like a bird. He pulls back and smiles softly, before turning to leave your flat.
This is gorgeous, so lovely and textured and cozy! The simmering slow burn is wonderful, can’t wait for the next part.
