#captainallthingspurpleme

He hears them before he sees them, the clatter and scrape of silverware against bowls, water rushing in the sink, Marcus’ elated giggle. As he edges closer, Elizabeth says, “Lift your elbows, don’t want to get frosting on your shirt, huh?”

“No way,” Marcus says solemnly. “I don’t think Daddy would like that.”

“Probably not.” A pause and then, “Let me get you a stool, okay? That way you’ve got a better view of all your hard work!”

“But you helped!”

She laughs, loud and tickled. “I did. But the dinosaurs were your idea.”

Rio leans to look around the corner from the hallway to the kitchen, smilin’ when he sees Elizabeth help Marcus up onto the child’s step stool, curling her arms around his shoulders and her fingers around his little hands, keepin’ him from squeezing the frosting bag too hard in his excitement.

“Okay, let’s do the outlines on the--”

“T-rexes!” he shouts, twisting to grin up at her, flashing his teeth.

Elizabeth grins back and boops his nose with her finger. “You got it.”

She helps him trace the borders of each cookie, patient and warm, at one point propping her chin on the crown of his head and lettin’ him do one himself. Rio slides his hands into his pockets and rests his hip against the wall. Somethin’ bright starts coiling in his chest, snaking up his shoulders and dropping to his belly, like a supernova unfurling light and fire through him until his fingers are tingling with it. He wants so badly to stride over and touch her, pass this spark to her, watch it ignite in her eyes and her throat and on her skin. But he doesn’t. He hovers and watches, enjoyin’ the show.

“Miss Elizabeth?”

She swaps the green frosting bag in his hands for the blue. “Mhm?”

“Are me and my daddy gonna live with you soon?”

She freezes, startled by the question. Marcus doesn’t notice, just keeps squeezing frosting onto a cookie. Rio watches her eyebrows furrow, unsure how to answer. “I don’t know, honey, do you want to live here?”

They’d discussed movin’ in together very briefly, more of shared quick thought, somethin’ to consider. They definitely hadn’t decided anything.

And he sure as fuck ain’t gonna move into this white picket fence, Suburban Mom fantasy house.

Marcus takes a long moment to think about it, rocking his mouth from side to side in consideration. “I dunno. Daddy says that your house is like ‘a goddamn circus’ where all the animals got loose. And he said you have a big clown!”

The look of absolute disbelief and offense on Elizabeth’s face, combined with the innocent way his son presents the observation hits Rio right in the gut so hard that he throws his head back and guffaws.

“Daddy!”

Marcus ducks under her arm and sprints, flinging himself bodily into Rio and wrapping his arms around his waist. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is completely still, disapproval etched into her sharp frown.

“Hey, Pop,” he says as he rubs Marcus’ head, smilin’ mischievously at Elizabeth through his lashes. “Hey, Mama.”

She sniffs and looks down her nose at him.

“Whatchu up to, little man?” Rio unlocks Marcus’ arms from around him and leads him back to the kitchen island. “Yo, you make me some cookies?”

“Yeah! We made some T-Rexes, and some Stegosauruses, and --”

As Marcus lists all of the shapes they made and the colors they used and breaks down every step of their afternoon, Rio presses himself against Elizabeth’s side, buryin’ his nose in her hair, pointedly ignoring her frosty glare. His exuberant affection catches her off guard, though, melts her ice. She turns into him and raises her hand to scrape her nails through his beard until he hums and kisses her, cupping her jaw and holding her in place so that he can deepen it, his other arm curving around her back.

“Ewwww, Daddy!”

They break apart, Elizabeth already flushin’ in embarrassment, both of them looking down to see Marcus watching them through his fingers.

Before she can pull away, Rio drags his finger against her forehead, tucking her hair behind her ear and pinching gently at her chin. They don’t really talk about their feelings, it’s not who they are, but he hopes she can feel that supernova swirlin’ in his chest, hopes it seeps into her, too.

And by the way her eyes sparkle, he thinks that spark caught and flared.

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ah, you have chosen one of the ones where I have reused the exact same premise (3) different ways! so along with my established relationship kink fic, this is another story whose premise is “rio walks in and catches beth masturbating.” this is—for real! for once!—an actual porn without plot!

in this one, beth and rio are not together and rio walks in on beth getting down with her bad self, only she’s stuck in the bed when he finds her because she’s naked and can’t shepherd him out. rio teases her for a moment, beth is mortified, and then rio wants to know what she was fantasizing about. he ends up talking her off, just watching her in her own bed. beth has no idea what to think of the whole thing once he leaves, and he goes back to acting like it never happened (a taste of her own medicine!) which is confusing—until he calls her late one night and wants her to return the favor and talk him off. she does.

This is such an old ask, and I’m so, so sorry it’s taken me so long to get to it! I was pretty overwhelmed with asks during s3, and then the pandemic flattened me a bit. 

Y’know, it’s funny. I didn’t like the pregnancy storyline while I watched it either, but it’s actually one that’s grown on me quite a lot within the context of the season overall, and on re-watching too, and I guess that really does boil down to the fact that no, I don’t think there was anything else she could’ve done in that moment to stop him from killing her. 

I think on both a character logic level for somebody like Beth, and on a story and symbolical level, the pregnancy lie actually did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of playing with the very little that Beth knows about Rio that’s true, and also serving as a means of reiterating Rio’s relationship with fatherhood, redrawing our attention back to their historic intimacy (something that was reiterated time and time again throughout the season), and to be the sort of record scratch interruption that that part of the story needed. 

“You’ll be okay,” Rio saysquickly, shoving the door to the motel room open with his shoulder as hehalf-carries Beth inside. “Just a flesh wound, yeah?”

Beth lets out a shortbreath, pain circulating quickly along her ribcage, spine, shoulders, anythingdirectly up from the bullet graze. It’s radiating heat, bloodseeping into her mom jeans, her breath coming in short and heavy as he sets herdown onto the bed. It hurts too much for her to speak—she knows it could have beenworse, if she would have been an inch to the left, she’d have a bullet in hergut.

J: Favorite woman writer?

I’d probably go with Deanna Raybourn at the moment. She writes the Lady Julia Grey series and the Veronica Speedwell series - both of which I adore.

She’s one of the few authors that I preorder religiously and when the book does show up, it’s an absolute binge without stopping. I always want to savor the book, but I have -1,000 self control and must consume with the force of a million hurricanes.

I love her characters and their relationships with one another, especially the women. Both series have a woman main character and both women are amazing (I lean more towards Lady Julia Grey who starts off incredibly sheltered and mousey and turns into this driven I-take-no-prisoners warrior just going for what she wants and I want to be her someday haha). They run around solving crimes in Victorian England (sometimes they travel which is always fun and interesting!) with their male counterparts which they inevitably end up romantically involved with. It’s one of my absolute favorite tropes and I will die on this hill.

Not to mention the frankly obscene amounts of sexual tension that kill me even just thinking about them UGH.

The fact that they stopped publishing full novels in print (as opposed to Kindle)  of the Lady Julia Grey series is a travesty that I still have not recovered from and probably never will. It has been years, and I am still wildly displeased about it.

You’re so sweet for checking in ❤️

We aren’t in any immediate danger for fires (closest one is about 40 miles away) but the smoke keeps getting worse. This is outside our front door this morning:

It kind of just looks like a foggy overcast day but that’s just all smoke. You can taste it as soon as you step outside.

oh my gosh, that’s one of the earlier chapters where i’m always like “no, i’d do it so much differently now!” hearing that it’s actually one someone else’s list as a high moment is actually pretty special since i’ve had so much doubt about it myself. thank you ❤️