#I hate it but she’s FINALLY here

[missunderstoodxoxo]

Plot Bunnies: Julia Parker

Julia Parker has a lot on her plate.

Juggling being the personal assistant to the founder of a media conglomerate, helping her aunt raise her brother Peter, while also being emotional support to said-aunt, who just lost her husband recently- it’s enough to do anyone’s head in.

Why mess with routine, however precarious it might be?

Into her life on a rare night out, walks one Eddie Brock, a notorious investigative journalist recently returned from San Francisco.

Well- what’s one more thing to juggle, right?

“This is, well, Venom.”

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The Quest Continues...

(part 1- part 2)

[hobermallowed]

Can’t stop thinking about claudeleine in their last moments. The last soft glance. The unknown whispered final words. How they kneel together hand in hand until Madeleine can’t bear the brunt of the sun anymore and wraps her arms around Claudia. How Claudia holds her close until there’s nothing left of her. The only person in the world to put her first and Claudia’s final moments are spent clutching their ashes in her hands.

[heartorbit]

just how can i protect your smile?

[sasoxichomoshi]

Potnia Theron

This is about brilliant Artemis her golden arrow, her hunting of deer, her pride in arrows, the sacred virgin, the sister of Apollo in his gold sword, Artemis

[frownyalfred]

all of the anons who told me, entirely unprompted, that I was a horrible fucking racist and I should kill myself because I’d never written a fic with Duke Thomas as the main character have been MIGHTY quiet since eye in the sky got published. just saying.

(this is your reminder that what people like to read/write doesn’t make them bad people irl. and just because someone hasn’t written a certain character does NOT mean they hate that character’s background or identity. I can’t believe I have to say that on here again, but here we are)

[karizipan]

orv dump 5(?)

[armandssawtrap]

I’m going to slam my head into the fucking table Claudia is so so much like Lestat and they HATE it she HATES it and he wishes it were different but unfortunately… like mother like daughter

[wraithsoutlaws]

"I thought you were gonna clean your face for church. You're so handsome beneath all that paint, you know. Just like your father." "Don't remind me."

[xxplastic-cubexx]

talking to my brother about quicksilver and i was like 'ik him and wanda are twins but he exudes little brother energy so much' and my bro Without Hesitation just went 'well thats what happens when you're the least favorite in the family' and he says this to me, the youngest in our family like 🧍‍♂️

[secretsimpleness]

Fan service.

Shepard (custom), Liara / Mass Effect (c) Bioware

[0039pf-third-blog-hooray]

guys look what i made for my best friend 🤭🎀

i also bought a couple of sticker packs and gems for a friend to decorate the album, and ethan got the best and the most. he deserves it. 💔

edit: part 2

[blackjackkent]

Astarion doesn't hesitate once the fight is complete. Still covered in the blood of the werewolf he just finished killing, bare-chested and battered, he hurls himself at the stone coffin into which Cazador retreated.

"No, no!" he roars. "No healing sleep for you! WAKE UP!"

Grabbing Cazador by the collar, he hurls him out onto the stone floor.

Cazador scrabbles backwards across the bloodstained platform, struggling to retain his disdainful expression around the fear suddenly in his eyes. "Get your hands off me, worm!" he spits.

Astarion towers over him, the master he has hated for so long finally brought low. "I'm not the one in the dirt," he snarls, like a kicked dog finally showing its teeth.

He reaches down, picks up a dagger that has fallen to the floor as Cazador was thrown across it. It's a strange blade, not like one Rakha has ever seen.

At its center, held within curving strips of polished metal, is a stake of wood. Wyll has told her of how vampires die; she can see the purpose of such a blade. That is not a weapon made for mortal men.

Astarion looks at it, then lifts it to point the tip at Cazador. It trembles almost imperceptibly in his grip. "One last thrust," he hisses - and his voice is trembling too. "And I'll be free of you. I'll never have to fear you again."

He swallows, then flicks his eyes to the staff on the ground at Cazador's side. "But if I finish the ritual you started... I'll never have to fear anyone. Ever." His eyes glow with manic, desperate hunger - and fear.

Cazador laughs hollowly. "You think me a fool?" he cries. "That I would allow anyone to usurp me, speak the words, and ascend in my place?!" He leans forward a little, headless of the sharp tip of the dagger pointing at him. "The runes I carved into your flesh bind you and all seven thousand souls to the ritual! Complete it, and those bearing the scars will be sacrificed - you included."

He pushes himself up on his knees, even now striking out against Astarion with word after word. "You are simply a means to an end! I made you to be consumed!"

Astarion's fingers tighten on the dagger's hilt. A muscle works violently in his jaw as he stares down at his unrepentant tormentor.

"I am so much more," he whispers, "than what you made me."

There's a long, strained pause. Then he looks up abruptly, fixing his eyes on Rakha. "Get over here," he snaps brusquely. "We can do this."

Rakha doesn't move, doesn't say anything for a long time.

She knows what Astarion wants her to do. She even, on some level, knows why he wants it. This ritual, whatever it fully entails, is the ultimate throwing off of the shackles that have held him for centuries. He wants to be free. He wants not to be afraid anymore.

He wants peace, just as Rakha wants it. But he wants to obtain it by accepting the darkest version of the monster that he has become.

The idea makes her skin crawl. She has stood on the same precipice as him, offered a gift that came with the selling of her soul. She wants to grab him by the shoulders, pull him away, out of reach, before it can swallow him.

"Didn't you hear him?" she asks hoarsely. "If you complete the ritual, you'll be consumed..."

Astarion barks a sharp laugh. "Trust me. I know what I'm doing."

Perhaps he does. So many times before, her friends have faced choices of this magnitude, and she has trusted to their judgment rather than her own. Shadowheart with her spear, and Lae'zel's stand against Vlaakith, and Wyll's choice of his future, and Gale with the Crown of Karsus. She has never believed that she might know better than them, and this hardly seems the time to start.

This is Astarion's choice, not hers.

Isn't it?

"All right," she mutters haltingly, one hand rapidly flexing into a fist at her side. "What... do you need?"

"I need your eyes," he says. His voice sounds hollow and exhausted - but brittle with determination. "In a manner of speaking."

"What do you think you are doing?" Cazador hisses.

"Unmaking what you made me," Astarion growls, his eyes not leaving Rakha. "Use the parasite," he tells her. "Link your mind to mine. Through your eyes, I can see the scars on my back and copy them onto his."

Cazador's eyes widen, showing the whites at their edges. "You... would not dare."

"I would," Astarion murmurs. "And I will. You will be consumed. And all the power you've lusted after will be mine!"

"And what then, Astarion?" Jaheira asks flatly at Rakha's side. "You would use this power born of so much death for *good*, I suppose?"

Astarion ignores her. His eyes have not left Rakha's, not even to blink. "Help me do this. Please."

Rakha hesitates. She can feel Jaheira's sardonic disapproval, and Wyll's gaze digging into the back of her neck. She senses Minsc vibrating with barely-restrained anger. Even Lae'zel seems somewhat disquieted, her fingers tapping restlessly against the hilt of her sword.

But it is... Astarion's choice. Not hers. Not anyone's....

Mechanically she takes a step forward, and then another.

Enter Astarion's mind so he can proceed with the ritual.

Narrator: Your minds join and your two selves become one. You can feel the knife in your hand, see the scars on his back, and taste his hunger for power.

The bitter, brutal emotion pours through her like a waterfall, like a burning flame. Rakha grunts with sudden pain, clutching at her temple, but Astarion's eyes go wide with exhilaration.

"Yes. Yes - I see it!" he hisses.

In a quick, smooth, harsh set of motions, he steps behind Cazador and rips the robe off of him, baring his back and shoving him to the floor.

And Cazador screams as Astarion, over and over and over, sinks the knife into his flesh and begins to carve.

(A/N: This is a truly unpleasant little sequence and goes on for quite some time before eventually fading to black to indicate that it goes on even longer.)

All sense of time fades out. For a while Rakha is conscious only of the screaming, and the blood, and the overwhelming sense of delighted rage flowing into her from Astarion's mind. She doesn't know how long she's been standing there when the connection finally breaks.

She comes back to herself standing at Astarion's side. He and Cazador are both soaked in blood. The others look on with expressions ranging from appalled to enraged.

"There," Astarion hisses. "Perfect."

"Ungrateful child," Cazador chokes out. Tears are streaming down his face, cutting lines through the red painting his cheeks. "Wretched child!"

Astarion just smiles. "Time to take your place!"

He lifts the staff from the ground, and it glows with blood-red power in his hands. With a jerk, he lifts Cazador from the ground and hurls him into the socket where Astarion himself was held only minutes earlier.

Everything begins to happen at once. Astarion slams the staff into the sigil at the center of the platform, and around Rakha the Weave seems to explode with that same red, writhing light. All around them, the suspended spawn begin to scream, their voices echoing and rebounding on each other and mixing with other screams from below and behind, from the seven thousand other souls prepared to burn for this ascension.

Rakha staggers with the intensity of it, the overwhelming wall of sound and light and pain.

Behind her, barely audible through the chaos, she can hear her companions begin to shout, unable any longer to hold themselves back.

"No!" Wyll cries. "What are you doing?"

"Enough!" shouts Minsc. "We can still stop the nonsense words in his mouth!"

"This isn't the way!" shouts Lae'zel. The three of them break into a run towards Astarion - but the wall of power around him rises to meet them, slaps them back like a physical blow.(*)

At Rakha's side, Jaheira reaches out and seizes her forearm with a sudden fierce grip. "Are we truly to be party to this?" she asks, her voice low enough to cut underneath the screaming around them.

Rakha has gone completely still. The magic is pounding at her like a creature with fists and claws, and the screams echo in her mind, resonating with the memories of a thousand other deaths at her hands in a life she does not remember.

It is Astarion's choice. She is a broken thing, with no right to believe she knows better on this or anything else.

And yet...

I am so much more than what you made me, Astarion said.

An image flashes through her mind, painful as the edge of a knife, of the last moments before her death in the Temple of Bhaal, another moment soaked in red light and blood. Her father's rage as she rejected his 'gift'.

You refuse me? You are my spawn! Your veins course with my unholy blood. Your life is mine!

You were made to conquer! To devour! You reject my blood, and so I will reclaim it!

I will make another who is worthy...

She opens her eyes and stares at Astarion's body, writhing in the grip of the gift he has stolen from his own monstrous 'father,' on the precipice of the oblivion she rejected. And she knows, suddenly, that wrong or right, she cannot let this go on.

This ends here, I said. It ends... here...

We are more than what they made us.

Stop Astarion.

With more instinct than thought, she hurls herself across the platform, lifting the knife with the stake at its core from the place where Astarion discarded it.

Astarion's head swivels to face her, and for a single instant his eyes widen as he recognizes what she is trying to do.

"What are you doing?" he cries over the screams around them. "No - stop!"

She does not stop.

She hurls the knife like a javelin into Cazador's chest.

Silence, abrupt and complete. The swirling power fades. The screaming stops. Cazador, pouring blood from the wound in his heart, slithers to the floor and lays still.

Astarion staggers, then collapses to his knees, letting the staff clatter onto the stone beside him. "It's... it's gone... All that power..." he whispers.

Rakha releases a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. She is trembling all over, her eyes fixed not on Astarion but on Cazador's bloodsoaked body. In the moment of her attack, she was striking not just at him but at Bhaal as well - but Bhaal is not here, just the vampire who dies along with Astarion's hope for ascension.

"You don't need it," she mutters. "You're more than strong enough as you are."

We... are so much more than what they made us. Come with me. We will live, and be damned to them all.

But Astarion's head lifts and he stands and rounds on her, and there is no gratitude in his eyes, no hope. They are like burning coals set in the paleness of his face.

"Don't you tell me what I needed!" he snarls. He looks hollowed out, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. "I was so close - I could have had it all," he says with desperate, furious grief, stepping closer to her. "But you took everything from me!"

His voice lifts to a sudden scream of violent despair, and he grabs her by the collar of her robes, jerking her forward.(*)

The rage in his eyes shows no understanding of why she did what she did, or the similarity she sees between them, or the terrible things that have been done to them both. He needs an enemy, and he no longer has Cazador, and she is the only target that remains.

"Cazador won after all," he says - and his voice is suddenly soft again, hollow and mournful. "I'll never escape the hell he built."

And then his face goes hard for the last time, until it is nothing but steel and rage. "And if I can't escape... then no one can. Not them--"

He drops suddenly, lifts the staff, and without hesitation snaps it across his knee. The power still within it - the power that would have released the seven thousand trapped spawn - bursts in a sudden supernova around his hands... and then fades to nothing.

Through the fading, dying ripples of the Weave, he stares into Rakha's eyes, and if there was ever friendship between them, it's gone now, gone forever to the same place as all that power.

"And certainly not you," he growls. The pieces of the broken staff clatter to the ground, and his fingers close around Rakha's throat.

-----

(*) Artistic license in this whole bit. Only one companion actually speaks up here (in-game it was Minsc), and none of them actually do anything but watch. But I wanted to give everyone a little more activity, so I dug all four characters' lines out of the dialogue files.

(*) Also artistic license obviously.

[livinglaughinglove]

I keep thinking about the fact that as soon as Rio appears to Agatha in the forest, we see the exact moment their century-long love affair comes to an end. Like as soon as Agatha says 'if you do this, I will hate you forever', that's it. Agatha knows it. Rio absolutely knew what would happen going into it. It's done.

So Rio does the only thing she can and delays, gives them all a little more time in limbo (and I have a lot of thoughts about how much Rio pushes that envelope throughout the series - Rio, at pretty much every turn, gives Agatha more time).

But then they're stuck. Forced into a macabre tragedy, and all they can do is wait. 'I will hate you forever' - but not quite now, not quite yet. 'IF you do this' - but what happens to those feelings when you're waiting for that 'if' to become 'when'?

Not a grace period, never that - neither of them are gentle enough for something so kind. But a slow and inevitable decay of a love that was precious, once.

And so the cycle turns once more from life to Death.

[markantonys]

my show-first friend has been reading the books for the first time in the wake of s2 and is now on TFOH, but unlike me when i first dove into my readthrough, she knows nothing about the general Fandom Opinions™, so every now and then i like to drop a relevant bad Fandom Opinion™ on her and be vindicated by her utter bewilderment

and even this was after i undersold it by being like "oh a lot of people think he's dumb / think he's the worse brother of the two" i couldn't bring myself to say "he is the #1 most hated character in the entire series" because that would sound completely insane to someone who is normal djkfjg and would create some very false expectations for her about gawyn's future actions (shoutout to my pre-reading prediction that he was going to murder morgase and fight elayne for the throne or something, just based on the sheer vitriol i saw towards him). i WILL be interested to see if her opinion of him changes as she goes along, but he made it through the coup unscathed in her esteem and she's also thus far been all in favor of him becoming egwene's love interest, and i'm sure his upcoming onesided homoerotic rivalry with rand will amuse and delight her rather than annoy her, so i have high hopes!

[brucie-baby]

Thinking of a sentient Gotham AU where she makes Bruce her champion and stuff, and it basically makes B immortal until his mission is complete. Until Gotham is rid of corruption and it's the utopia that B dreams of making it, he's not going to die.

Like, he stopped aging in his mid thirties and no damage done to him is permanent. Bane breaking his back? Gotham healed it up good as new, every time he SHOULD die? He doesn't.

This can go one of two ways with the Batfam:

1) His children are unaffected by his mission and he has to watch them grow old and die.

2) Gotham extends her claim onto his children as well and they are also unable to die.

I prefer option 1 but what do you think?

i loooove sentient gotham thank u for this

i like the idea that like. bruce is constantly grappling with the fact that he's been granted immortality but his loved ones have not. he kind of hates himself for it, honestly. he feels it whenever robin!dick gets injured but never more than that time dick got shot, when he fired him. in this little au, bruce fires him because (in his mind) dick has seen him defy death one too many times and now acts like he can do the same. but he can't. he can die. he will die. but the longer dick is around bruce, the more dick acts like he's invincible. this is not the case, of course - bruce is just projecting. but he thinks, in this desperate attempt to save dick, that if dick stops working with somebody who cannot die, he'll stop acting like he also can't.

but then comes jason. and bruce tells himself that this time will be different. he won't tell jason that he can't die. he won't act like he can't die. this time will be different and jason won't get hurt and everything will be fine and suddenly they're in ethiopia and there's a warehouse and a clown and a boy who knew he could die but who just wanted to save his mother and--

and bruce is constantly grappling with the fact that he's been granted immortality but his loved ones have not. he really hates himself for it, honestly. he hates gotham for it too. why would she give him this blessing and turn it into a curse? why wouldn't she help his children, the people he loves?

gotham may not grant his children immortality, but bruce will. bruce will dig down as deep as he can, tug on strings he didn't know existed, feel the black sludge of magic in his veins and cast it out into the world and it will find his children if bruce has to guide it there himself. gotham fights back, throws everything she has into stopping him, but bruce is too strong, too determined. gotham cannot stop him when he knows her streets better than the endless corridors of his own home.

then something gives. he feels the magic being shared. and he knows, with absolute certainty, that all of his children, past, present and future, will be safe. they will not die.

bruce can now, though. bruce can die. but his children can't, and so bruce is okay with this. because somewhere out there, eyes he thought would stay closed forever have just burst wide open.