#I hope people like it 🥺

[ninetyminutes]

Sure! I’d love to read a bit of the fic!

Okokok I’m lowkey nervous to share this because I don’t have much experience writing getting together fics but I actually kinda like this bit. This chunk takes place before they get together (obviously), but Lorne is already aware of his growing crush. Chevy is still a little oblivious to his crush on Lorne, so the flirting is mostly just Chevy being Chevy.

* * *

Lorne was jolted awake by the relentless pounding on his apartment door. Groaning, he rolled over to squint at the glowing red numbers on his alarm clock. 4:00 PM. He ran a hand through his hair, still groggy from an interrupted sleep that had been far too short.

He shuffled out of bed, pulling on a pair of wrinkled sweatpants that had been draped over a nearby chair. The floor felt cold beneath his bare feet as he made his way to the door, rubbing his eyes and mumbling something incoherent under his breath.

Unlocking the door, he barely had time to register who it was before Chevy breezed past him into the apartment.

“Morning, sunshine,” Chevy said, holding two steaming coffee cups in one hand.

“It’s four in the afternoon,” Lorne mumbled, still half-asleep.

Chevy smirked and set the cups down on Lorne’s cluttered kitchen counter before taking a seat at one of the mismatched chairs. Lorne blinked a few times before joining him, his curiosity piqued by the comforting aroma wafting from one of the cups.

He took a tentative sip of the coffee Chevy handed him, expecting the usual bitterness, but paused in surprise when he realized it was made exactly how he liked it: not too sweet, with just the right amount of cream.

“How’d you know this is how I take my coffee?” Lorne asked, raising an eyebrow.

Chevy scoffed, leaning back casually in the chair. “I pay attention.”

“Really?” Lorne tilted his head, the words catching in his throat and surprise flickering across his face as his groggy mind tried to process the unexpected thoughtfulness. His stomach gave a traitorous flutter at the idea that Chevy had cared.

“Not at all,” Chevy admitted unapologetically. “You’re a caffeine addict, and I asked the barista downstairs for whatever the short guy in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt usually orders.”

Lorne nearly choked on his coffee, startled by Chevy’s bluntness. He coughed, trying to suppress the laugh bubbling up in his chest. He ran a hand through his disheveled hair, still shaking his head at Chevy’s audacity.

“It’s too early for your bullshit,” Lorne groaned, his voice rough with sleep as he shook his head. He drained the last of his coffee and set the cup down on the counter. He started a fresh pot on his coffee machine before heading toward the bathroom. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Don’t have too much fun in there!” Chevy commented dryly, not even looking up from the newspaper he had picked up at the café.

Lorne paused mid-step, glancing over his shoulder just in time to catch the sly smirk playing on Chevy’s lips. That familiar, maddening smirk. Lorne shot him a deadpan look, the kind of empty glare that unsettled most.

Chevy glanced up, grin widening at Lorne’s reaction, entirely deterred. “If you do, I want an invite!” he teased just before Lorne closed the bathroom door.

Lorne froze for half a second, his face heating to a shade that rivaled a ripe tomato. He gritted his teeth, willing himself not to engage, and twisted the shower knobs with more force than necessary.

The spray of water hit him almost immediately, freezing cold and shocking enough to pull a yelp from his throat. Still, he stayed put under the icy blast, as if the cold water might drown out both his irritation and the strange flutter of something he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—name.

He leaned his forehead against the cool tiles, letting the water cascade over him. It was starting to warm now, but he barely noticed, his thoughts still churning. Chevy’s voice, his teasing words, and that damn smirk played on a loop in his mind.

“Unbelievable,” Lorne muttered under his breath, reaching for the soap. He scrubbed his face harder than necessary, as though washing away the memory of Chevy’s stupid, flirtatious comment would help.

But it didn’t. And as much as he hated to admit it, a small, traitorous part of him didn’t entirely want it to.

[rubsjuice]

What if a guy who was evil definitely didn't deserve all that

[gloomtownfags]

I don't want to work I want to go home and finish my fic

[vaguely-concerned]

the more I play the more I think lucanis basically knows it's illario who betrayed him right from the beginning (he's had a year in the ossuary to think. not that many people knew where he was going. when you ask him 'did Illario know you'd be on that ship' his only answer is the hardest flattest 'yes' you ever heard). so it's not so much about figuring out who the traitor is (because that's ludicrous. we all know. immediately. they didn't really bother to hide it lmao) as about methodically closing off every single avenue of denial lucanis has clung to that whole time with as much or little gentleness as you might prefer until he has no choice but to admit it. because the moment he has to admit it, he'll have to do something -- feel something -- about it. and that's such a catastrophic event in lucanis' inner landscape (he has had TWO people in this whole entire world up until now and will do anything to hold on to them with a heartbreaking child-like desperation, even at and especially through the detriment of his own self) that he'd rather just. not. what if we quite simply. didn't. what if we just stayed here in the emptiness where we can both pretend you didn't hurt me in a way I should never forgive. I have so much practice in that with caterina already it's always worked out great for everyone so far. (press x to fucking doubt but that's trauma logic for you lol)

after everything illario did, so much of the storm of lucanis' emotions around it is 'what the FUCK did you get yourself tangled up in this time and how do I get you out of this mess safely'. what's worse: the fact that your brother murdered you, or that he put himself in horrible danger doing so and thus exposed you to the risk of losing him forever. lucanis' heart certainly has an opinion here and it's fucking unhinged (affectionate)

the themes of dissociation in lucanis' character in general makes me feel nuts. allllll these contradictory messy things he needs to cut off from each other because they can't coexist or be easily reconciled inside him. but all remain stubbornly true separately anyway and will have their due one day. love and resentment. tenderness and fear and rage. terror and longing. love and freedom don't coexist. the burned out golden child anthem is playing in the background. he was always caterina's favourite and he has to keep striving to deserve that dubious honour with every breath he takes and then, presumably, mercifully, some day he will die and be excused and can rest. and until now he's suppressed all the -- natural, healthy, protective! -- negative feelings that threaten the few attachment relationships he actually has, at the cost of ever actually having his needs for connection and safety met and leaving his core self imprisoned and compromised. and spite goes 'what. no. that's dumb fuck that' (*spite voice* I do not understand that and even if I did I would not respect it) and does not allow him to fall back into that, which I think is what saves his life, ultimately. it took being possessed by a demon for lucanis to even contemplate telling anyone he loves 'no' in any way, but hey. whatever gets you there right lol

lucanis is dealing with the freeze response allll the way down baby. and he was even before the ossuary, that just turbo powered it and brought it to a breaking point way before it could happen naturally. but something was going to break eventually no matter what, and I'm just glad that in the end, through the power of friendship and also pure spite, it doesn't have to be him

[leojfitz]

merry christmas @useryoumna 💜

[dootznbootz]

I currently have writer's block and fucked around and made Iliad and Odyssey memes :'D Some look like "repeats" but aren't. Just different scenarios/people. Enjoy!

There's... A LOT. I don't care if you pick out your favorites! I put this all in one post as I don't want to spam the tags! :D

[coulrobotomy]

i feel like a dumbass for making this plate of corn tweet ass post but did he pluck his own feather and use it as a quill?

[myokk]

bored

[varyathevillain]

no joke but what I really want for Buddy Daddies as a fandom is to make fanart and fanfic post present time ep12 where Rei wears an arm orthosis when working.

I think varied disability aids being represented would be fantastic, and personally would write Rei as someone being deeply proud of something he's done for his family, but also understanding with time that using an orthosis also helps him at work and in raising Miri. with a giant portion of mobility/motorics aids being represented by prosthetics, seeing more variety and exploring it in fiction would also help making a step in normalising disability treatments.

[trentcrimminallybeautiful]

[hamdaegils]

i will always wish those friends well and cheer them on in my heart for the rest of my life 🥺

[thanatika]

yeah i agree with your point about survival mechanics and i feel the same way about the lack of combat mechanics. "why would an educated city doctor need a weapon" because shit is hitting the fan in every way impossible and pretty much everyone is walking around armed... also why am i supposed to believe the the fact that he's a man of intellect will somehow provide him with food? i don't think anyone is going to be too eager to share food during an outbreak intellectual or not...

+ follow up for the previous ask but actually my favorite quest from the original pathologic is the day 11 bachelor quest that involves shooting down soldiers. i think it really drives the point home about how this random fuckass guy who is supposed to be battling a plague doesn't even have the time to do that anymore because the people in charge are asking completely irrelevant things of him now and he's at a position where he cannot refuse what is being asked of him. like i think it was good storytelling that even as the guy who lowkey wants to deal with the plague and solve its mystery you still have other, more pressing, less interesting and or pleasant tasks to complete

i agree! honestly, i feel this way about the combat mechanics even more than i do about the physical survival (food, health, illness, sleep) mechanics. because sure, i can see how it makes sense for daniil's position of authority to mean that his basic needs are somewhat provided for -- although i don't think it makes more sense than what we got in the original game. i've never seen anyone bring up "isn't it kind of unrealistic that the bachelor isn't given lots of food during a massive food shortage?" as a plothole that needed to be resolved. the townspeople generally don't like him much, and most of the people with power don't either, except for the kains. sure, maybe it's kind of weird that you can go see the kains while broke and on the verge of keeling over from hunger, and they won't do anything to help you, but... the kains are pretty self-centered, and they're so goddamn weird that maybe they forget that you need to eat food to live anyway. and it's half-implied that the powers that be are ultimately giving daniil this role as a convenient way to kill him, so it makes sense that they would put no pressure on the town authorities to keep him alive.

(and honestly, artemy is taken under the olgimsky's auspices as much as the kains take daniil's under theirs! which is to say, selfishly, with ulterior motives that are more important to them than the well-being of their healer, but... the olgimskys are set up as the wealthiest of the 3 families financially, as well as the ones with the most access to food, given their control over the meat industry. so if anything it's "weirder" that artemy isn't more materially provided for, though to be clear i don't think there's an actual plothole there either way.)

but anyway, you could handwave it and say that daniil's position of privilege and authority gives him more perks than he got in the original game, but the amount of fighting you have to do to get through town is... kind of an unavoidable physical reality? like you're given so many sidequests that you often wind up walking around town after dark, and that's when the bandits come out. is the idea that the bandits would be too scared to attack him because he's so important? because that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and even pathologic 2 establishes that he's seen as a valuable target by the bandits:

and then there's the quests where combat plays a more direct role in the story itself, like getting involved in saving andrey from the firing squad, or killing guards to break artemy out of prison, or the quest where you have to kill var in attempt to stop the arsonists (which i include on the same tier as the other ones because i really like the quest journal entry he has if you complete it where he blames himself for willow's death. it's a good character moment.)

hell, even in pathologic 2 itself, one of the biggest Bachelor Moments is on day 11, when you have that big dramatic convo with him after he killed a soldier for the papers he was delivering. plus one of bad grief's idle dialogues in patho 2 is commentary on the bachelor being "quick on the draw" and that he "already shot someone". like he just straight up is not living a combat-free existence. and overall, combat isn't just a good tool from a mechanical perspective, heightening the stakes and placing pressure on the player (though it is), it's also pretty important for him on a thematic level imo, almost as important as artemy and his "rivers of blood". in patho classic, daniil has this early interaction with the inquisitor:

which, thinking about it from a doylist perspective, was probably the writers' attempt to make it sound more plausible that this random medical researcher from the big city was competent with multiple types of guns. and i appreciate them coming up with that hint of backstory to cover their bases a bit, but with those bases covered, i think the fact that daniil ultimately spends more time shooting people than he does prescribing medicines for them actually does a lot for him thematically? i mean, if his whole thing is that he's this "tempted destroyer", someone who frames his career as a combative battle with death rather than a quest to save people's lives, whose "default" solution is to raze the town with artillery because he's too limited by his rationalist worldview and military upbringing (and bitterness over being manipulated and sabotaged) to come up with a solution that saves the any remaining infected survivors on his own. plus the way that clara frames artemy and daniil as two sides of the same coin in being violent destroyers and killers, who without player intervention will immediately devolve to running around chasing each other down in what's either an insanely dedicated tom and jerry LARP or some really elaborate foreplay. imo, that whole dichotomy (which is pretty core to the game, as the idea of dichotomies are core to it in general) works so much better with the way they're both presented in classic, stalking around with gun/scalpel in hand. hell, not to mention the effect that spending 12 in-game days trying not to starve and getting killed by bandits or guards or worms or soldiers every day would have on the player, and the way it would make them feel about the town and their natural projection of those feelings onto dankovsky, who is a perfectly fitting vessel for them as the avatar actually undergoing those virtual experiences.

ultimately i think they are mainly going this direction out of a desire to do something more creative and original, which is fine... it just seems a bit silly to me that they keep saying "well obviously that doesn't really work for the bachelor's scenario", when, well... even as recently as patho 2 in 2019, they seemed to think it fit his narrative pretty well! i'm also guessing that a lack of combat won't be that bandits are just no longer roaming the streets at night. it sounds more like pathologic 3 is set to be more of a nonlinear experience, where you'll probably fast travel from place to place instead of having to walk across town so much? so you'll be avoiding bandits just in the sense that the gameplay will be avoiding them. i guess i'm hoping that at the very least, there's still the implication of the crunch of not getting enough sleep or food and the threat of being stabbed to death while trying to get through town occurring to dankovsky in the background, even if those mechanics are deemphasized in favor of more macro-level town resource management, time control, and sherlock holmes fruit ninja or whatever the hell they were on about back in 2022 lmao.

[kitkatsgalore]

you have my soul, you have my heart ♡

[subtle-as-an-earthquake]

Miles Kane talking to his mum on the phone after meeting his childhood hero Roberto Baggio ⚽️♥️

[joshuamj]

She just wanted a friend :(

[anxiouscaretaker]

as much as i love the working-through-illness trope, what i find much more relatable is a character who doesn't work through it - just stresses out/gets annoyed at how inconvenient it is.

there's a big deadline they need to meet or event they have to miss, but they don't try to push through. after all, that would just make them feel worse, and somebody else might catch their bug.

but the whole time they're supposed to be resting, our poor character can't settle down! they're worrying about the work they'll have to catch up on, the people who might be covering their shift, maybe they were supposed to bring something important to an event - and they feel so guilty for something they couldn't even control.

and of course, all that anxiety with no rest doesn't help. the sickness stays longer than it would otherwise. perhaps their symptoms worsen, or they get fun new ones.

hopefully this character has somebody to help them relax so they don't spend even more time sick and stressing...