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[dasnagon]

my first favorite hobby is yapping. second is being extremely quiet and not talking ever at all ever.

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you can be peeling a boiled egg and think to yourself wow. that was so simple. and then you peel another one and it’s like being in the throes of war. shell everywhere. egg mangled. tears in your eyes. that’s how god keeps you humble

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A Gentle Sound (the Rolling in the Graves) pt 4

Surprise! I've actually had this chapter written for like more than a month because I got excited and started writing Rembrandt pov when I wasn't done with Cowgirl's yet. Let's talk worldbuilding! There's no actual advancement of the plot in this one lol it's just Rembrandt backstory.

- - -

Humans have many theories on the ecology of sirens. Rembrandt, in her limited and singular experience, cannot consider herself a truly objective source on sirendom. Nevertheless, she feels fairly comfortable in saying that most human theories about sirens are wrong. This is because, among the myriad of things humans are amusingly wrong about, they are most wrong about desire. 

What is desire, to a siren? Impossible question. Rembrandt can no more define desire than she can define sound. The real question, then, is what is desire to a human?

Humans are reaching, needy creatures. Always grasping for each other in their blindness, unable to comprehend the great cacophony of their being. Humans ascribe a malicious otherness to the magnetism they feel in siren song. A siren’s song, so the story goes, engenders desire in the human mind, irresistibly drawing them towards something they would never usually want. 

This is, in Rembrandt’s opinion, a cute way to think about it. 

Here is what Rembrandt knows about singing: it’s actually more like echolocation. Rembrandt can feel desire thrumming beneath the skin of every living thing - hunger, fear, lust. Everything which is alive wants something. Human beings, especially. They want so elaborately, so desperately, like they would die to go without. And when humans hear her wanting - her longing, her curiosity - they, as social creatures, instinctively reach out for it. 

This is what Rembrandt has learned in her time bewitching humans: you have to climb the side of the boat before you open your mouth. 

Either that, or you have to not want the humans to be closer to you, and sirens are legendarily unequipped for not wanting. 

Rembrandt has attempted to broach the subject of echolocation with other sirens, when they cross paths. They are mostly uninterested. Human language is a tool. Who cares what terms they have come up with to classify an underwater world they will never truly understand? Who has ever wanted something like echolocation?

These are the words they know, in every language spoken by any human who lives by the water: turn back, look away, forget. In the shadows of fishing nets, in the long memories of sirens who remember what the sea used to be: come closer, jump, breathe in. 

It’s an art, or a sport, to look long and deep enough at a human mind to draw out the basal want which undergirds every other aspect of them. There are, after all, a potentially infinite supply of humans on potentially infinite beaches, with infinite desire pumping away in their chests. They want to be remembered, to be loved, to be looked at and admired and coveted. Rembrandt isn’t sure what the goal of this game is. She doesn’t like the words associated with it. I love you. I have the answer. You’ll never be scared again. This one especially, a phrase of English that she finds so morbid as to ruin her appetite for a week: You’ll never want for anything ever again. 

So Rembrandt is strange and off-putting twice over, never quite satisfied with the idle amusements of her kinfolk. But Rembrandt has her own games, and has learned to be quite good at them.

Here is what Rembrandt knows: there is a type of boat which can be found in virtually any ocean which contains a type of human who all have the same bright hummingbird flutter of excitement in them, and the only words they want to hear from Rembrandt are, Tell me everything you know.

So Rembrandt knows about echolocation. And radar. And fluid dynamics. She knows about benthic worms and seastar wasting disease and dolphins - she knows more than humans do about dolphins, but that seems rude to point out. And knowing all these things is good because it means she can ask the next human more specific questions, even if she’s starting to encounter more and more skepticism that, yes, she does understand the evolutionary relationship between osteichthyes and sarcopterygii, and no, they don’t need to explain that to her. 

The humans sob into her arms sometimes, like she could hold their apologies. Rembrandt wants to say she's not an angel, she doesn't speak for the waves, but some of them have been out on the water for a long time trying to help, and the sea has never spoken back before. So she holds them, and she brings them gifts of cracked purple sea urchin because a fisherman in the South Pacific taught her that they’re bad for kelp forests but you can eat the soft yellow insides, and she extends her memory of the sweet white flesh of the lionfish she was offered by a diver in the Bahamas into the minds of sharks. 

And this is how she lives. Most of the time. 

- - - 

Ajax doesn’t remember how they met. This was unintentional on Rembrandt’s part. Humans who have never encountered a siren before tend to have difficulty reconciling the memory with the rest of their life. The few humans she’s run into more than once usually believe that she was a particularly detailed dream they once had. The amnesia varies in intensity based on how strongly the humans are affected by her presence. And Ajax, well. Ajax had taken it pretty hard. 

Rembrandt had just been bored that day, because it was winter and there was a storm off past the coast and there weren’t any boats out and the docks were empty. Or, well, she’d thought they were empty. She had been singing, yes, that’s her bad, but she was just trying to echolocate whether there were any humans slightly further inland that she could convince to come talk to her for a little while. She doesn’t know why Ajax was fucking about on the pier. Ajax doesn’t remember. 

Unless the siren is intentionally trying to communicate a specific desire to a human, humans only hear in siren song what they bring to it. They reflect back onto it with their own wanting. And god, Ajax wanted. There was an empty, ravenous ache in Ajax that Rembrandt’s song echoed in, and Rembrandt had felt how unprepared Ajax was to feel it. How apart from it she had tried to keep herself. How thoroughly Rembrandt had cracked through where she’d iced over that pain years ago. 

And Rembrandt will take a lot of accusations from humans but she objects to uncompassionate because she had pulled herself out of the water and come up onto the pier to make sure whoever she’d heard was okay. 

Ajax had a headache, and she was disoriented. Rembrandt sat with her on the ground until she’d gotten her wits about herself enough to decide she probably hadn’t drank enough water that day and kind of embarrassedly snap at Rembrandt to quit fuckin’ hoverin’ because she was fine and stomp off. And Rembrandt thought that was probably just a lesson in being more careful around humans because they had such delicate minds, yes, capable of incredible things but so easily bruised. 

Except that Ajax came back. She didn’t know why, but a few days later she sat down on an empty dock and stared out into the water, frowning. She hadn’t quite managed to put a lid on the depth of her wanting, and she couldn’t remember anything about what she wanted other than it was down by the docks. 

Humans think sirens have the monopoly on compulsion. They’re too self-centered to imagine the sword could cut both ways. Once Rembrandt had heard Ajax, she couldn't unhear her. And when Ajax wanted her, Rembrandt couldn't stay away. 

And Ajax really did want her, was the thing. Ajax liked hearing her talk. Ajax liked that she got overexcited talking about coral and she even sometimes agreed to eat small pieces of the fish Rembrandt was eating, even if she mostly didn't like them. Ajax had that hummingbird curiosity in her too, even if she didn't know it. Rembrandt could feel her fear and her uncertainty, her sense that she was unremarkable and Rembrandt was extraordinary, and eventually Rembrandt would realize that and leave her. Ajax didn't understand, couldn't understand, how completely she had Rembrandt at her beck and call. What did humans say? Hook, line, and sinker. 

Rembrandt thinks if humans knew how vulnerable sirens were to the simple joy of being wanted, they'd never be afraid of them again.

- - -

Thank you for coming to my fish autism ted talk. I'll see you in a week for Rembrandt's continuing adventures in trying to socialize with humans.

[dasnagon]

fear me

[dasnagon]

"here's how Cochise can have more of a character in the stage show" actually no! give her nothing! Cochise is my plaything, my tabula rasa, my deity of untold aspect. she's the true leader, and she's a despicable traitor, and she invented the instant pot 31 years early. when i nail my eyeliner i'm channeling Cochise. when i trip over the curb, i'm such a Cochise. my Cochise is my Cochoice. join me won't you. bow down. say it with me now: she's Cochise. and she's versatile.

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sometimes people on this website start scrolling down and never make it back to the top. Nobody ever sees them again

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this website’s easy watch. *dangles a bunch of greek gods like keys*

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highly recommend keeping a small portrait of a historical figure who met a grisly end on your work desk. for perspective.

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I can now see none of the warriors as neurotypical. Help me.

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There are people who played In Stars and Time and finished it feeling neutral and unchanged by it. Scary world out there. I struggle to even fathom

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Shoutout to the maned wolf, which is technically neither wolf nor fox but has its own genus called Chrysocyon! Why -

why are your legs so long?

I mean, intellectually, I understand that it’s because you live in grasslands and have evolved to be able to see over the grass, but emotionally… why? Are they?? Like that??? Surely there was a way to make your body more cohesive and proportional-looking?

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that’s enough emotions for a whole year. ciao

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It is unreasonably funny to me that all the boroughs have really cool tag lines in "survive the night" but Staten Island's tag line is just complaining about the ferry

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i hate when u post something with a target audience of 1 person and they don't interact ... like ok i thought what we had was real but thats fine 😔💔

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Mercy is the most character ever. I have a problem about her. The tone shift in orphan town when she goes from taunting the orphans to flirting w/ swan gives me whiplash every time like girl two seconds ago you were making this woman’s life infinitely harder and mocking a group of boys cause they were dropping everything for the pretty girl act. You literally called them brain damaged and now you are flirting with the girl, and acting likes she’s the weird one for being confused.

Did I fucking stutter, no you did not, you have however, done a complete 180 I fear and swan is not the only one who is confused. Queen behaviour.

[dasnagon]

I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors I love warriors