#I live in a town that doesn’t exist and I lost my memories

[yeetus-deletus666000]

Uhh hello? I did not ask for… what was it again? Idk but hey welcome to this home of chaos anyways.

All I do is exist anyways with no purpose, no rhyme, nor with no reason. The things I do is color, draw, and other things but recently I have no idea on who or what I am anymore other than that I sell things a lot for a purpose.

But I may not have the memories I used to have but just call me Yeetus Deletus until I can remember as much I possibly can. Until then I am stuck not remembering of even what I was before I ended up at my new house. Yes I somehow have a new house and I don’t remember even moving.

I don’t even remember how I got here or why I am here other than that all my job entails is just selling stuff for some unknown company that I don’t think exists. This isn’t even remotely close to my house but other than what I think I know. But all I know is that I sleep in my non existent basement which I didn’t have although I can’t remember much other than what my old house was. It’s that I can’t remember much of my own life other than my old house. Even memories are hard to even recall because even if I try to remember or recall something nothing works it is just blank but I need to find something at least.

Even the town I live in is not real as I swore I seen problems. Yes I have seen people with no faces or people that just appear out of nowhere even on the map the town is non existent. But even I am not happy with my current predicament but I feel forced to smile, sell stuff, and exist. I don’t understand my situation nor am I even liking it as I want to leave but there’s no exit nor is there anywhere to go as the roads are closed constantly when people tried to leave. I even tried to leave but currently I’m stuck in a town that doesn’t exist on any map but my memory feels foggy and non existent. However I have been trying to regain all of my memories and little by little I have found some bits and pieces of my memory but I just need more pieces of each memory. But I’ll update as much as possible if I managed to remember at least something but it will take a lot of time as I have no idea to even how I’ll ever gain back every single one of my memories. Even if I forget to update it probably means I been drawing a lot and I forgotten to update that day. So I’ll keep everyone posted.

[storiesbyrhi]

Witch!Reader x Bat/Vampire!Eddie Munson Series Masterlist The Grimoire The Timeline

Warnings: canon typical violence, horror genre typical violence, swearing, animal death, no beta, warnings updated each chapter.

Synopsis: No witch has stepped foot in Hawkins since 1845, but when Vecna opens the ground and poisons the town, a voice begins to call to you. Have you been brought back to this cursed place to heal the townspeople’s wounds, to save a hexed bat that always finds its way to you, or to redefine your history with a reunion 150 years in the making?

Chapter Summary: Violence comes twofold. 2909 words.

Notes: Since canon Eddie doesn’t exist in the 1986 timeline, Chrissy’s death went down differently. This chapter explains what happened to Hawkins’ sweetest cheerleader. Stranger Things terminology you’ll need to know: The Void.

Credits to @jo-harrington, @toomanyacorns, and @somnambulic-thing for helping with this chapter, and a huge thank you to @munson-blurbs, who helped map out the action sequences of this chapter and the next.

1843

Penelope’s powdered spell was like anthrax to the vampires, and it was the turning point in the battle for the flatlands.  The coven lost not another member from that year forward, but the colony of vampires grew more feral and savage when faced with their new mortality. They burned and pillaged just as fast as you could give and take their breath.

Some of the coven focused their time on helping the humans rebuild structures and acquire new seeds to plant. Some of them worked tirelessly, tinkering away at the collective memory of the flatlands, ensuring vampires and witches remained folklore and scary stories to tell in the dark. Some, like you, felt emboldened by a bloodlust that could only be satiated by killing evil.

“Did we fail her?” your mother asked your aunt as they watched you arm yourself with pockets of Penelope’s powder and blessed blades.

Sally and Gillian had borne the weight of their decision differently. For sister, they were not much alike. Sally, your mother, was burdened with regret whereas Gillian grew harder with each difficult choice she made.

“This is holy work,” Gillian stated.

“Is it?” Sally was grief-stricken. You used to be gentle, feeding wildflowers to deer and making mischief by moonlight. Now you slept, ate, and killed.

“The Witches Who Came Before foretell of us leaving this place. The humans will remain on consecrated ground and we will retire to where no sisters have been dissected by beasts. We will not live on their graves. When we leave, she will heal,”

“Will she ever know?”

“No,” Gillian answered. It has been seven years of not knowing. “Not ever.”

…

1986

Between the burning yarrow spell that had not stuck and the magic bath that brought Eddie back, you felt practiced in the healing arts. There wouldn’t be time for any rituals though. You would have mere seconds to take the twisted, pulsating flesh Henry Creel grew into in the Upside Down and restore it. The spell would take the inner magic you possessed and would force you to deliver it by touch.

A potion, though, could help the cause. All the plants you’d used before became paste in your mortar and pestle. Echinacea and elecampane. Rue, sweetgrass, and yarrow. As you worked, you spoke freely, writing a spell into the air.

“Seven years of cheated death,

Felt deep pain but kept his breath.

These plants I crush and bend to will,

Impart my magic,

Let me heal to kill.”

You scooped the paste into a pouch and then stood at the kitchen bar on unsteady feet. There was more to be done. An easy spell to hide the night from anyone who went looking, witches or monsters alike. A candle and an old spell uttered, you could finally crawl into your bed and close your eyes.

…

Like your body was set to a nighttime alarm, your eyes snapped open as soon as the sun had set. You moved quickly through the trailer, expecting Eddie to be there. No vampire. No bat. Just a groggy head after only a few hours of sleep and a pouch on the kitchen bench reminding you of what the night would bring.

After pacing and trying to telepathically call Eddie home (home…?) you settled your nerves with tea and tried to stomach some food.

Hand. Spoon. Bowl. Mouth. Hand. Spoon. Bowl. It was mechanical until the taste turned bitter. You pulled the spoon from your mouth to find a pen. Before you, the bowl was pushed off the bench and instead, your notebook sat open.

“A witch cannot fight alone,” was scrawled out.

The Witches Who Came Before had never initiated contact before. They’d never taken your hand for automatic writing without you calling first. You watched helplessly as your arm moved on its own accord, the pen gliding along the paper.

“He knows,” came the next caution.

“I know,” you said. “I know you’ve warned the coven. I know what’s at stake,”

“It is coming into focus. The voice that called you to consecrated ground.”

You paused, reading the words a couple of times over. “You said I should have never come here,” you reminded them.

“It is coming into focus,” was repeated. “A witch cannot fight alone. So, a witch will not fight alone.”

Did they mean the humans? El and Will and their own coven of sorts?

“You were wrong?” you asked them. Could they be wrong? Was that possible? “What… What do you see now? What’s coming into focus?”

The words were ripping from the pen too quickly, letters stacked on top of one another. Your hand hurt, the grip too tight.

HISTORY WILL NOT REPEAT A witch will not fight alone A WITCH WILL NOT repeat history will not repeat history LORE WILL BE REWRITTEN A witch will not fight alone a witch will not fight alone HISTORY REWRITTEN lore lore lore rewritten a witch will not fight alone a witch will not fight alone he knows he knows he knows A witch will not fight alone We Are Superstition a witch a witch A WITCH will not fight alone He came calling He came for help Not alone. Not alone. Not alone. History will not repeat.

The pen flew from your hand and across the room, embedding itself into the cheap plaster wall of the trailer. You were breathing heavily.

“Fuck,” you muttered under your breath. They were gone, leaving no comfort nor clear warning, just a hollow sort of fear and sense that maybe now the calling to Hawkins had indeed been sanctified.

You cleaned the mess off the kitchen floor, then considered leaving Eddie a note. Something in you said that if he wanted, he could find you. With one last look at the trailer you’d barely had a fortnight in, you locked the door and got in your car.

…

Vecna had ripped Hawkins apart using each of the four gates as a starting point. The gateways to the Upside Down represented a place of death, but not all of them were accessible. Max’s death (and subsequent resurrection at the hands of El) took place inside the Creel House, which was reduced to rubble, burying gate four too deep to get to. Patrick McKinney died over Lovers’ Lake, making gate three underwater. Both Nancy and Robin were violently against that option. Fred Benson’s road top ending left gate two hidden under thick layers of asphalt and concrete, the street having caved in entirely. That left the first gate, the one that had festered open under the corpse of Chrissy Cunningham.

Haunted and hunted, Chrissy had been chased into the woods near Hawkins High by visions of her monstrous mother. There, her body broke and the end of her life had ushered in Vecna’s dark hold over the town. The gateway left in the wake of the murder was the one you, Nancy, and Robin climbed through.

The Upside Down was eerie. It felt like a place that had absolutely no right existing. Doomed from inception. It smelt of ash and sulfur. The bodies of what looked like malformed bats were rotting everywhere. And it rained a kind of soot you’d seen slowly appearing in Hawkins.

Vines covered a lot of the landscape. They moved, like pulsating appendages. The motion of them, sliding and crawling over one another, reminded you of the squirming desperateness of garter snakes as they ball themselves together for days on end.

If your coven believed Hawkins was no place for a witch, what would they think of the hellscape you were marching through with only teenage girls for backup?

“What if he’s not in there?” Robin asked, her eyes glued to the ground as she carefully stepped over hivemind vines and other ghoulish obstacles.

Nancy stopped so abruptly that you bumped into the back of her. She turned around quickly, eyes wide. “What if he’s not in there?!” she repeated. “How… How did we not think-”

“He is,” you interrupted. “I can feel him.”

Their looks of relief lasted only a second before the fear returned and you all continued.

Treading a similar path in the real Hawkins, the rest of the humans were already coaxing Vecna out. Will’s skin prickled with goosebumps, the hairs on his arms standing on end. El could hear that voice in her head. “I can see…” he began. “I can see all. All your plans. All your hopes… Soon to be failures… I told you… It was just the beginning.”

The staircase in the Upside Down Creel House was covered in writhing tentacle vines. “These attacked… last time we were here,” Nancy whispered. She shared the same raw bruise as Robin. Steve would have shared it, had he survived.

Steve. He was all the girls could think about. How he’d led them up those stairs. How he’d stood and watched in awe as Nancy fired her sawed-off shotgun and Robin threw Molotov cocktails. How it was meant to be the three of them.

You stood in his place and sooner than they would have liked, you’d arrived in front of Vecna’s sleeping body.

“Shhhesh,” Robin hissed quietly. “Didn’t think he could get any uglier.”

The bullets and flames slowed him down but they hadn’t killed him. The scars became part of him, as all of his scars had. They shaped him. Built him. Powered him.

“Stay at the door,” you whispered to them. “If it looks bad, fire once then run.”

Nancy and Robin nodded in unison.

The room was quiet. Ironically, it felt cleaner than anywhere else in the Upside Down. It smelt of dust and human life. Had Henry carved out a small piece of normal there? Was there a soul beneath the horror?

You moved towards him. Each step was measured and you watched him for any twitch of movement. He felt sedate, but Vecna had mastered trickery long ago.

He was held high by the attached vines. “Per magica, oriri me,” you cast, levitating from the ground steadily until you were close enough that you could see the veins and tubing pulsate, you stopped. At the room’s threshold, Nancy and Robin held hands.

“Seven years of cheated death,” you whispered. “Felt deep pain but kept his breath.”

You covered your fingers in the potion and reached out swiping it across Vecna’s chest.

“These plants I crush and bend to will,

Impart my magic,

Let me heal to kill.”

The room held its breath, waiting for something.

Back on Earth, El and Will were laying side by side in the dirt near the rubble of Creel House. Jonathan knelt beside his brother, Joyce next to El. Their eyes were closed but they weren’t asleep. El had pulled them into The Void. It was quiet.

There, El and Will – siblings for all intents and purposes – stood facing Vecna. “A vessel,” Vecna almost crooned, reaching his clawed hand to Will’s soft face.

El stood between them. “Do not touch him,”

“This is done, Eleven. Look around. Hawkins is in ruins. Your friends have fled... those that still live,”

“It is not done until you are dead,” she spat back at him.

Vecna almost laughed. Almost.

You repeated the spell again and again, covering Vecna in the thick potion of flower and magic. His skin was changing, clearing.

“Ho-ly-shiiiiit,” Robin said.

Nancy’s eyes glazed over with tears.

It was working. It was fucking working.

Vecna reached out for Will a second time, but froze in place as he felt a burning sensation. The children in front of him both stumbled backward, staring at his body. He looked down and watched scar tissue heal in real time.

He roared; El and Will covered their ears, screaming at the sound.

“What! Is! This?!” The force of his anger knocked them off their feet and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.

“Where’d he go?! El?!”

“He’s- He’s-” But she was too panicked to say it. Vecna had returned to his physical body in the Upside Down.

Will and El bolted upright, panting. Their families embraced them. It’s all they could do. It was all up to the bravest teenage girls they knew and a witch they hoped was stronger than Vecna.

His eyes snapped open and his hateful stare bore into your soul.

You don’t know how you did it and neither did they, but your voice was loud in Nancy and Robin’s heads. Run. It was too late. Vecna’s arm shot out and held them frozen in place. The slithery tentacles peeled off the wall and wrapped around the girls’ wrists and ankles. They struggled to no avail.

“Your fight’s with me now. Let the humans go,”

“What are you?” Vecna asked. The healing magic was spreading slowly, a thin line of porcelain skin and a brilliantly blue eye twinkled with curiosity.

“You want to talk? Let them go.”

Vecna looked over at Nancy and Robin. With a flick of the hand, one of the tentacles tightened, breaking Robin’s wrist. A sharp intake of air let him know it hurt you too. “All you… heroes… You and Eleven… So much power wasted on loving the humans…”

It wasn’t going to work. You knew it then. The healing was happening too slowly. He’d kill the girls before he was Henry enough for you to use witchfire to any effect. He’d never let them go.

The only bargaining chip you had was the one thing you could never offer – insight into the craft. Even if you could save Nancy and Robin now, handing that over would doom them and the entire world later.

You had answered the call to come to Hawkins.

You had done what you thought was just and kind.

You had loved the humans for all of your years.

You would die with them, fighting with them, for them.

The coven would intercept him. They could do together what you could never do alone. Not alone echoed in your mind. The Witches Who Came Before. Not alone.

As Vecna held his claw out, hellbent on snapping Nancy’s left ankle, a loud and revolting squelching sound ripped through the room, followed by a howl spilling from Vecna’s mouth. He thrashed, hitting you hard, sending you toppling to the floor. He crashed down next to you, quickly standing to face his new enemy.

You followed his gaze to where something – moving so fast it was like watching static – was shredding through the tentacles holding the girls up. Suddenly, they were free. Both their faces were red and covered in tears. Before taking in any new information, you yelled, “Go!”

Robin pulled Nancy up and they were gone. In their place stood a figure with blood and Vecna-goo dripping from their face and hands.

Eddie.

…

1836

It was unmistakably vampire carnage.

They had come in the night and stolen a child. They’d left her father, the village’s best apple farmer, weeping and wounded. He was bleeding out, the only way to save him would be to let him turn. That was a fate worse than death though.

“It begins now,” Gillian spoke to the coven. “Witchfire at will. Penelope, all your focus must be on finding a true death for them. We will create closer borders. Accompany the humans whenever they leave. We will hunt them… Make no mistake, sisters… This is war.”

Eddie met you by the stream that night. The grief was written all over your face and it shattered him to see. He held on tightly, arms squeezed around you, and kissed the top of your head.

“I can’t leave now,” you whimpered, crying softly into his coolness.

“I know, little witch, I know.”

“No. No! You do not understand. There’s no way both you and I survive this! There’s no… No… No us… anymore.” You hit at his chest and pushed him away, only to let him pull you back into his embrace.

Eddie was stoic, but if he was honest with himself – a little pissed off that he was able to feel heartbreak when his heart didn’t beat at all. He hurt more then than he ever had before. Dying hurt less.

“And I, for my part, cannot stop them. The chasm between them and I has grown. They are… becoming suspicious of me. If I-”

“I know. I know. I don’t… I don’t want you to…” But you did. You did want him to be able to stop the colony from reigning hell on the flatlands. You knew he couldn’t, not if you wanted him to live. “You have to leave. You must go somewhere far away from here.”

There was no more discussion for there were no more options. Eddie could not fight against the colony; it would be suicide. He couldn’t and wouldn’t join them either. Not if it brought harm to you, or your coven and human charges. So, he would run.

“I would die again and again, my love, if I meant I met you again and again,” Eddie whispered. “I have loved you more than I have loved life, than blood and the night.”

Eddie took your face in his hands, pushing his forehead against yours. In your last kiss, he split his lip and bit down on yours.

“Blood of my blood,” he said. “My little witch.”

Tears poured down your face. Between shaky breaths, you replied, “Blood of my blood. My lonely vampire.”

End Note: The Grimoire and timeline have been updated. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts and feelings! xo Rhi

Fic Taglist: @kaitebugg03 @paranoidmunson  @idkidknemore @paprikaquinn @stardustworlds @loz-brooke @wyverntatty @vintagehellfire @dark-academia-slut @scarletwitchwhore @becks1002 @mrsdollardog @heyndrix @luceneraium @rosaline-black @devilinthepalemoonlite��@goldencherriess @iamwhisperingstars @wiltedwonderland @blueywrites @breezybeesposts @jadehowlettthewolf @spikesvamp79 @foreveranexpatsposts @tortoiseshellspells @wingedpeachjudgegiant @stardustmunson @live-love-be-unique @fangirling-4-ever @reanimated-alice @b-irock @gh0stlybunnie @myown-worstenemy-2003 @woozzz @cyberxlust @hiscrimsonangel @buckysbarne @m00nlight101 @word-wytch @spicysix @briasnow-blog

All Eddie Taglist: @solomons-finest-rum @ruinedbythehobbit @sweetpeapod @thorfemmes  @corrodedhawkins @grungegrrrl @lilzabob  @averagemisfit03 @ches-86 @ilovecupcakesandtea @onehotgreasymechanic @hazydespair @mel-the-fangirl @eddies-hid3out @siren-lungs @aheadfullofsteverogers @hiscrimsonangel

[trollprincess]

Since my birthday is tomorrow, I figured I would make a short list of what I want just in case anybody is in a giving mood:

Money.

Any of the many, many, many minidollhouses on my Amazon wishlist.

For the Leverage team, and in particular Hardison, to hack into the system and wipe out our collective student debt. (And also all the medical debt while he’s at it.)

A free ticket to go back in time and watch Queen perform at Live Aid from the front row.

The ability to teleport.

A lifetime supply of red licorice laces and salted roasted pumpkin seeds.

For Pringles to start making those cinnamon sugar tortilla chips again.

To dump a truckload of elephant diarrhea on Ronald Reagan’s grave.

I said money, right?

To lose forty pounds in one night, preferably without delivering a child I didn’t even know I was pregnant with or losing at least one limb.

Five more seasons of “Sense8.”

That really fancy train ride from Paris to Istanbul that costs like 80k Euros.

The ghosts of the people in town who died of COVID to haunt the newspaper editor who added “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” to his enormous Trump sign out front of his office.

One free month at the Library Hotel in NYC where I’m not allowed to do anything but read and write.

A literary agent.

A pitch-black Victorian house decorated with 90s movie witch vibes.

A Bluetooth connection between my brain and my phone so I can just download my goddamn story ideas instead of wasting time typing them out.

For all of my WIPs to edit and polish themselves.

A free maid service that doesn’t judge about the depression mess and makes me a tea before they go.

A wallet that always has the exact amount of money I need inside it whenever I open it up and can never be stolen or lost from me.

The ability to choose to watch a show I’ve been meaning to watch instead of watching the same old show for the eleventy millionth time.

For someone to come repair the patch of cross-stitching I fucked up so I don’t have to.

My own capybara.

Yup, definitely said money. I take PayPal, Venmo, CashApp, Zelle, carrier pigeon, singing telegram, personal delivery by Janelle Monae, and the quiet but satisfying feeling of all my creditors suddenly forgetting I exist.

Chocolate chip cookie dough without the chips in a jar that never empties.

To live long enough to finish all the books in my TBR pile.

For Professor to live just as long as I do, if not forever beyond that.

For Elon Musk to eat several thousand fried dicks.

For Donald Trump to end up broke and alone with every single one of his followers having finally realized the emperor has no clothes.

World peace, free education for all, universal healthcare, high-speed rail, the end of poverty and bigotry, kindness throughout the land, and for whatever embarrassing memory pops into your head at the worst of times to vanish from existence as though it never, ever happened.

[simpingforstardew]

Hi!! I love your writing!! Especially on SDV and Emily!! If you are open to requests, cloud you do one were the reader divorced Haley bc she realized she ended up in love and connection more with Emily? How would she react? Happy ending pliz 🫰🏻

nature abhors a vacuum

pairing: sdv emily x reader (sdv haley & reader)

synopsis: after a failed marriage, you realise your heart always belonged to emily ♡ i did change the req ever-so-slightly but i hope you still enjoy this drabble, anon !!

warnings: slight angst, mention of divorce / heartbreak. happy ending !!

word count: 0.7k

“I’ll be fine on my own,” Haley’s voice is honeyed and sombre, yet still wrapped in the effervescent charm of her Valley girl accent, “Thanks for the memories, just go… live your own life.”

Her smile is bittersweet as she tucks a strand of displaced golden hair behind her ear; quietly, she leaves.

Time always seems to stand still during moments like this, during endings; during heartbreak. The rain that pours from the dark clouds above seems pathetically appropriate. It feels as though barbed wire is tugging at your throat as you push the tears back— it was silly really, this was a mutual divorce.

For weeks now, you and Haley had been at odds: at first, silly arguments about movies and music. Then, inevitably, disagreements about taste became fights about chores; fights became nights alone on the living room sofa. Turns out there is a difference between loving someone and liking them; living with you, being by your side 24/7, made Haley realise that— although she cares about you immensely— she doesn’t particularly like you.

But then there was Emily.

Vibrant, passionate, she breaths life into the shadows of your existence. With Emily, conversations are more than just words; they're connections. Her laughter is a melody that fills the air with warmth. Her presence lifts the weight of the world, replacing it with a sense of peace you haven't known in years.

You didn’t realise how much you needed somebody like that until you met her. The dejected look she would wear when watching you flirt with her sister was lost on you completely; the gifts Emily painstakingly made for you were received platonically.

You pick up one of Emily’s handmade gifts that lay neglected on your sofa: a cardigan knitted from the softest wool, dyed in your favourite colour. Running your fingers over the soft fabric, you discovered a small detail: a custom label on the hem of the cardigan, embroidered with a heart.

A blush warms your cheeks before the realization hits.

You’re in love with Emily.

Slipping into the cardigan, you sprint out of your farmhouse. You feel the unrelenting rain soak your skin as your dog barks out in the distance; your boots splash in the puddles along the dirt path to town.

As you enter the town square, you see Emily rush towards the Stardrop Saloon with her coat pulled over her head, protecting herself from the rain you’re soaking in.

“Em’! There’s something I need to tell you,” you shout, voice barely louder than the rain as you approach the saloon, “Something I should have told you a long time ago.”

Emily’s eyes widen as she looks towards you, “Oh Yoba, you’re soaked! W-What is it?”

“I… I love you, Emily. I think I’ve loved you for a very long time, but I was too scared to admit it. You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met, and I just… I can’t imagine my life without you.” You exhale softly as you tuck a strand of azure hair behind her ear, “Everything you used to tell me about soulmates and fate… I just wanted to tell you that whatever happens now, my soul belongs to you. It always has.”

Emily’s breath caught in her throat, her cheeks flushed with surprise and disbelief. “You… you love me?”

With a surge of emotion, you closed the distance— your soft lips meeting hers in a passionate kiss that spoke volumes more than your words ever could. Your hand nestles in her soft hair, and you feel her pull you closer with a tug of your cardigan.

As you finally pull away, breathless and dizzy, Emily looks up at you with a beaming smile, “I love you too, of course... Cute cardigan by the way.”

[khazadspoon]

Dollars fandom event day 1 entry - sunrise

I went conceptual because the idea of tmwnn as an eternal entity makes my brain happy

———

Every morning is the same, in essence. After night has had its way, the sun begins to rise. Light breaks slowly at first. It crawls over the horizon, the fingers of the dawn reaching out over the landscape inch by inch, feeling each rock and tree, chasing shadows back to their dens. Beasts that scurry and chase hide away once more.

The sun, in all its glory, takes back the domain it has dominated since before time began.

A campfire flickers back to life as its creator pokes it, nurses it to health once again, adding fuel to wake it from slumber. Miles to the south and the east there are people who remember a name that doesn’t exist. To the north and the west it still hasn’t been uttered. It will be in the months and years to come, but not yet.

He doesn’t choose the names for himself. They are bestowed on him by the sunrise between desert and civilisation. They are gifted to him like leaves dropping to the surface of a pond. One syllable, two, a ripple that meanders out to touch and fade away, only remembered by those who have felt its effects.

He has lost track of the names given to him so far. Only the last three linger on in living memory. There is a certain fondness he has for those three and the experiences they brought.

Blondie and his cold hearted greed tinged with the desire for humanity, bonds tied and untied with equal certainty.

Joe, young and reckless, throwing himself in to fix what he did not break, hurting but unwilling to hurt.

Manco, the impulsive opportunist who felt the sting of being abandoned more keenly than the others, having learned what it means to connect too late.

Another name waits down the road. Another dawn, another sunrise, another man with no name to write on a tombstone.

He pokes the fire, whistles some old tune forgotten to all but himself. A relic from a bygone age. It floats away on the morning breeze, drifts with the tendrils of light as they spread.

A few miles away he knows there are towns that will ask him to help. He knows that behind him is a man searching for him across the desert and the plains. He leaves marks so he can be found, eventually. When a new name is given, it won’t be used by that man.

Every morning is the same, in essence. The sun is rising once more and the man who has no static name to call his own readies himself for the new day.

[randoimago]

Day 11. Heartbroken Banshee x Reader

Note(s): Ngl the idea of a banshee that is just lonely and wants affection is a great idea and I'm stealing it for my next D&D game

requested by anon

His existence is a curse. To die of heartbreak but not allowing his soul to move on with his beloved. Instead, he’s forced to be in this state between life and death with his heart forever filled with grief.

It doesn’t help that the only emotions he seems to feel are either anguish or rage. It doesn’t help that when he screams and cries, the sound causes despair in anyone else that hears. It doesn’t help that he’s so damned lonely.

Some have tried adventuring to the long forgotten hut that he used to live at. Some have tried to explore the forest that he resided with his beloved. And all those that do end up dying because he won’t allow them to ruin his home. To damage the memory of his love.

And the someone else comes by and he’s filled with anger again, but he’s also just tired of being angry. He keeps watch, not showing himself just yet. His anger is growing as you get closer to his home, but it simmers as you move behind his hut, seeing the makeshift grave.

He doesn’t think anyone else has noticed it before. Usually people just trample over the mud and dirt and try to enter his home for whatever valuables they think they’d find. But now you, you actually seem to be looking around first, taking note of the state of things.

At least, he thought that until he sees you going through your bag. He’s tense at what you might pull out, what you might do to the grave of his past love. But instead you bring out incense, some candles. Instead of the sadness and rage he always feels, this time there’s something else that pulls at his heart. An emotion he’s long forgotten.

He stays out of view, continuing to watch as you light the candles and incense. He doesn’t know rather it’s prayer or to ward off evil spirits or maybe it’s an offering to the dead. He doesn’t know, but seeing someone acknowledge the grave, to do something nice, he can’t help moving closer.

“Thank you.” His voice is raspy, hoarse and scratchy from all his crying and screams that his existence has become. You’re startled, of course, but you don’t seem too frightened.

“You’re a banshee?” You ask and he recognizes the term. He’s heard legends of them when he was living.

“Yes.” Because what else would he be.

“There’s been rumors around town about something killing people in this forest. Rumors of it protecting a treasure.” Your words make him angry, not at you, but the fact that that’s the reason so many have tried coming to his home.

“Those rumors are false. There’s no treasure here, just mourning.”

He expected you to leave or pesture him for information regarding whatever treasure. Instead, you look at him with curiosity. As if lost in thought or like he’s fascinating. He supposes there’s not many stories of “kind” banshees.

“Who are you mourning?” You ask, your voice soft and his heart clenches. Or, the ghost of his heart does.

“My partner. This was our home. Sickness took them away from me and heartbreak caused my own death,” he explains, feeling a freeing sort of feeling with talking to someone. “But the gods are cruel and I didn’t get to be with them.”

“And now people have ruined your home in hopes of finding treasure.”

He nods to your words, feeling anger again, but he pushes it aside. He hasn’t talked to anyone in so long, he doesn’t want to harm you because of his emotions overwhelming you both.

“Well, I’ll go back to my home and let them know there’s no treasure here. I’ll figure out some excuse. Maybe say there’s a vampire or something in the area.”

He feels amusement from your words. “A vampire?”

“I doubt anyone would believe I managed to escape from a banshee. With a vampire, I can lie and say I splashed it with holy water or something.” He’s more amused at the thought, it’s nice to have a lighter feeling fill him than the sorrow and rage.

“Maybe a different creature. I’m sure some believing to be vampire hunters will come here. and I’d hate to kill those thinking they’re trying to do good.”

He feels regret now from his words. Perhaps even fear? That is also an emotion he hasn’t felt in so long. But he worries of scaring you from what he said.

“I’ll think of something then.” His eyes widen as he watches you stand and gather your things. There’s a lurch in his chest, more fear as he reaches his arm out. Regret fills his eyes as he watches you shiver from cold.

“My apologies, I don’t know what-“ Except he does know why he did that. He didn’t initially, but now he realizes. “You’ll visit again?” He asks, his voice quiet.

“Do you want me to?” You barely get the sentence out before he nods, not understanding why he’s so needy. Perhaps he’s just been lonely for too long. That must be why. Having someone around to talk to after decades of being alone is making him react strangely.

“Alright, then I’ll make sure to visit.” He feels light again. So light. It’s a far cry from the anger and sadness. In fact, it’s the opposite. He’s happy. Hopeful.

“Thank you.” He hopes you recognize the relief in his tone of not being alone. He doesn’t know if you do, but the smile you give him is enough to melt the coldness he’s perpetually felt.

He watches you walk away, already wishing you’d stay and talk to him, but he can’t be selfish. Instead, a smile crosses his face as he sits on the ground. Or sits as much as a ghost can.

“My love, someone new came by…” He murmurs as he speaks to the grave of his past lover. His heart light as he isn’t so lonely anymore.

[septnanis]

catch up

a bit about Riku and being a loner.

The surf comes in, soaks the back half of his pants. He knows when he stands up he’ll look ridiculous. Sora will point and laugh and tell him how ridiculous he looks.

Riku doesn’t mind. He likes to make Sora laugh. He always has.

The water is warm, warmed by the evening sun and the heat of a summer that never really ends on these islands. He never really noticed that, how his home was cradled in a static existence where the sun almost always shined and even when it stormed it just meant the sun would shine brighter the next day.

“You’ve always been too good at this,” Sora says from behind.

Riku looks up and over his shoulder at him.

“Good at what?” Riku asks.

Sora sits down next to him and smiles. Riku’s always been absolutely weak for Sora smiling but now that they’re growing from exuberant borderlining on goofy to bright and sweet, he’s pretty sure Sora could ask him to do terrible things and he’d do it without hesitation.

“Being alone,” Sora says and immediately frowns when it makes Riku laugh. “What?”

Riku shakes his head. “I’m not,” he says. “Good at being alone. The last few years being alone has lead to some questionable if not outright terrible decisions on my part.”

Sora stays quiet but stares intently.

“I isolated myself back home and ended up tossing it into darkness,” Riku continues. “Also ended up getting possessed which is weird because sometimes when it’s really quiet I can still hear him whispering in my mind. Maybe just a memory? I don’t know.”

The waves roll in just a fraction closer, but it makes both of them curl their toes into the wet sand.

“Castle Oblivion was me at my very best,” the sarcasm in his voice makes Sora frown a bit deeper. Riku is direct and dry in his communication but rarely sarcastic. “Kept that up but then blindfolded. Don’t get me started on Roxas and then transforming myself into the man who possessed me.”

“You did the best you could, Riku,” Sora says. Maybe it’s part of his dna, but he can’t help but feel sorry for his friend. “It must’ve been lonely.”

Riku grins. “When you said you wanted to go with me so we could do the Mark. Together…” He’s past caring about how this looks, so he sighs. “I was so happy. Even when we got split up..”

“Which was my fault,” Sora says with a sad look.

“Nah,” Riku says. “You did your best. Which is a thousand times better than most people’s best.” He leans down to lay his crossed arms on his raised knees. “It was the first time I felt like we were together. Even though we were apart, I still felt like you were with me.”

Riku doesn’t continue, like what happened after the Mark is something better left unsaid. The Dark Margin, the Graveyard, how Sora can’t remember Riku staring death down in a way none of their friends had been able to. He knows it happened, like Castle Oblivion happened, like he fell so deep into dreams Riku had to yank him out, memories because someone else told him.

“That year you were gone,” Riku says. “Don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone. Everyone was involved with finding you but, it was like they lived life alongside that. I just couldn’t. Felt like I was…”

Dancing on the kid’s grave, Cid had said to Riku. Chin up, he wouldn’t want you to be like this, maybe it’s time to move on, all those baseless platitudes that made Riku only more determined.

“Felt weird,” Riku says. “And wrong.”

“You found me, though,” Sora says with a grin.

Riku laughs again. “Yeah and you forgot all about me,” he says, leaning in close to Sora’s face, giving him a nudge with his shoulder.

“I didn’t mean to!” Sora says with mock indignation. “You know… you’re always finding me.”

Riku frowns at him.

“You found me in Traverse Town,” Sora says. “And in Castle Oblivion. You found me all over the place once I woke up. You found me when I got lost during the Mark and when I fell to Darkness in the Graveyard…”

Riku startles and whips his head towards him. “You… you remember that?”

Sora doesn’t look at him but he grins. “I did eventually… in Quadratum,” he says. “It was you, how could it not be? It’s always you.”

“But Kairi…” Riku feels his face heat at his stammer, feeling caught out.

“Kairi kept my body from fading away,” Sora says with a fond look. “She’s so strong. Don’t think I’ve ever given her credit for that. I thought it was you at first! It felt like you… but then I thought it was Kairi. I mean… there she was, waiting for me in the Darkness.”

Riku turns his head back to the sea. The sunset is turning the water to that vibrant amber orange that Sora likes so much.

“But it was you,” Sora says. “Should’ve known it was you. And then you found me in Quadratum, even though I didn’t recognize you. If it hadn’t been for you, Kairi and I would’ve just wandered in the dark.”

Riku looks back at Sora when he feels a hand on his arm, curling around it with a firm grip.

“You were always so much brighter than all of us,” Sora says, his voice uncharacteristically solemn. “You were just too good at hiding it. And here I am, thinking you’re good at being alone. I fell for it again.”

Riku isn’t sure why it touches a nerve, but it does. His back straightens, his eyes feel a little warm, he tries to clear this throat as subtly as he can.

Sora looks right at him, uses his grip on Riku’s arm as leverage and presses a quick as can be kiss to Riku’s cheek. Riku whips his head around to stare at Sora with eyes so huge they feel like they might pop out. Sora, of course, is grinning.

“Haaa, wanted to do that for ages," Sora says. "Was that okay?”

Riku is stuck between disbelief and joy. He nods though, because this tiny act of affection from his dearest friend has been a thing he had given up wanting.

It’s his own fault - he’s never given up on Sora before, and for good reason.

So Riku returns the favor, moves in slow so Sora knows what’s coming. Sora tilts his head up invitingly and lets his eyes slip shut, which Riku takes as acceptance. The kiss he gives Sora lands on the corner of his mouth, momentary and fleeting.

Sora opens one eye when Riku draws back. “That was it?”

Riku’s cheeks are burning. “You’re such a dork,” he says. “Why am I even friends with you?”

Sora looks at him with a sort of knowing smile that says he knows exactly why but he’s not going to deprive himself of the pleasure at watching Riku squirm to get it out.

“You’re…” Riku starts. He shakes his head because he’s overwhelmed and Sora won’t stop gazing at him like he’s making the sun shine brighter. “Such a dork.”

Sora laughs, presses his cheek to Riku’s shoulder and lands a well aimed punch to his arm. “I really came down here to take you back to the ship,” he says. “Donald’s going to blow a gasket if we stay any longer.”

“Let him,” Riku says. He’s dutiful at his core though, so he stands, Sora still hanging from his arm.

Of course Sora bursts out laughing. “I get that sitting on the beach is nice, Riku,” he says, pointing at the wet seat of Riku’s pants. “But you could at least try and find a bush or tree.”

Riku nods his head with a sardonic grin and leans over to smack the equally wet seat of Sora’s pants. “Look who’s talking!”

It just makes Sora laugh even louder, setting off at a run up the beach back to the Gummi ship.

Riku follows, because he doesn’t like being alone. He doesn’t have to anymore.

He catches up quick.

[fluffyzoey]

10 Letters to Mom - Mischa angst

Mischa is instructed to write letters to his mother as if she were still alive to cope with losing her. He doesn’t write often, but the letters convey a lot.

Letters from Mischa Bachinski to his late mom, translated from his slightly broken English by Ezra Lamb, St. Cassian’s student, in memory of the boy, lost to the September 14th accident.

Letter 1: Dated September 9th, 2008

Dear mom, 

The counselor says I should write to someone I love to practice my English. And so, I am writing to you. Perhaps I will burn these letters by firelight, in hopes the smoke will travel up to you. 

Canada is not as nice as I thought it would be. Classes are terrible. In maths I have to sit between a snotty ginger and a strange poet boy. It makes no sense, how all of these people exist together in this tiny town. Home is no better. I do not think Chris and Carly like me that much. No, I will not call them mom and dad. 

I still miss you. Part of me still yearns to be a helpless boy again, still in your arms. 

I miss you. 

Love, your son, 

Mischa

Letter 2: Dated October 24th, 2008

Mom, 

I was suspended. I’m so sorry. I promised you I would be your good son, your small boy always. But I got angry. I was spiteful, and I wanted a drink, a drink always makes things better. And I only knew one way to get one. 

I know you said that churches are sacred and not to be crossed, but I heard the ginger from maths say she knew the pastor, knew where the communion wine was kept. I milked every last bit of information from her, promising to join her stupid choir. It doesn’t matter, I need the alcohol. 

3 whole boxes I stole before she ratted me out to Father Markus. 

I drank it all in one night. And the next morning, Saturday, as I lay there, hungover in the basement, I wondered how I was ever going to make my life worth it for you. I still do not know.

I’m sorry, mom. 

Love, Mischa

Letter 3: Dated November 17th, 2008

Mother, 

I have a new hobby. I think you’d be proud—I am learning to sing. Not opera, or the god-awful jazz that poet boy listens to during study hall, no, this is the good stuff. Real, bonerfied rap music. (note: I know it’s supposed to say bonified, but Mischa would think boner-fied is hilarious, may he rest in peace —Ezra)

I even created a channel on this thing called the YouTube—it is called “Bad Egg” because it is an egg, that is bad. Bad is a good thing, it means cool, or that is what the football boys think. Maybe this new thing will turn out well. I am raging, mother, for you and for Ukraine. And when I rage, I rap about money in autotune. 

I will inspire the world. My life will have meaning once again. 

Love, Mischa

Letter 4: Dated December 30th, 2008

Mom! 

I have got the biggest, greatest news. I have found LOVE! Me, your silly boy, your little child that you raised all by yourself, is engaged!

Ever since my YouTube channel was born, a certain beautiful woman has been leaving kind comments on my YouTube comments wall. Her name is Natalia, and last night she had the courage to message me. She announced her love for me over the internet, and it is a truly beautiful thing. She even sent me picures, and she is the most gorgeous woman I have ever met. 

I wish that you could have lived long enough to meet my perfect Talia, for when I look into her almond eyes, I do not see the boy I am, but the man I must become to possess her. I am growing up, mama, but I promise I will always be here, and that you will always be in my heart.

Love, Mischa

Letter 5: Dated January 31st, 2009

Dear mom, 

I want to tell you about choir. 

Most of the school is scared of me, they think I am some bad boy who lives in the woods. But the choir seems to just have it out for me. Annoying ginger is the leader: she is stuck-up, and a real pain in my you know what. Her real name is Ocean, which I suppose fits, because she is salty and rough and probably drowns people. Poet boy is there too, his name is Noel, and he is the least insufferable of the group. He is gay, which is fine, but funny because if he were a girl, he would so be my type. He is nice, but odd. Then there is a boy named Ricky. This month, Ocean decided she needed to prove that choir was accessable for all, so she got boy who cannot speak to join. I never know what he is thinking. He is scary. Last, there is Constance. Sometimes she cries in the corner when she thinks the others do not see. I see. I wonder if she is okay. I hope she knows I am not okay. I hope she knows she is not lonely. 

I thought choir was going to be the bane of my existance. But…I think it has grown on me. 

I miss you. I love you. 

Love, Mischa

Letter 6: Dated March 6th, 2009

Hello mom, 

Yesterday was Noel’s birthday, so Constance brought in cupcakes for everyone. They were red velvet, and very tasty, much better than Carly’s cooking. Carly is no replacement mother, and her basement has cockroaches. I sleep with the roaches. Perhaps I will name them.

I continue to make videos, and to make love with Talia when I can. I hope I get to meet her some day. In fact, I know I will. Mom, I want to come back to Ukraine. I will meet Talia, and we will love each other in person. 

Tomorrow, we are singing at a local soccer game. We are singing some song that Father Markus wrote for us. I do not want to be on stage. I guess I will have to get comfortable with it. 

It‘s getting late, almost time to meet Talia. I love you mom.

Your son, Mischa.

Letter 7: Dated May 15th, 2009

Mom, I have a dilemma. 

Please, tell me you wouldn’t be upset if I told you that I think maybe I like boys?

Last night, Ocean hosted a choir get-together at her place. It was small and cramped. She and Constance ended up sharing the sofa, Ricky took the armchair, leaving myself and Noel on a blow-up air mattresss. I tried so, so hard to give him space, but I’m not a small guy, and somehow we ended up nestled together under the blankets, somehow I ended up lost in his eyes and staring at his lips-

It felt like betrayal. Like if Talia knew, she would have my head. She wants me to be loyal.

But how can I be loyal when Noel watches me with those stupid baby cow eyes? How can I stay at her side when Noel is right there?

It’s so confusing, mom.

-Mischa

Letter 8: Dated June 19th, 2009

School is finally out, mom. I spend every day scrambling for ways to make a quick buck so I can buy cheap vodka. It’s a bad habit, but hard to kick. I wish I could kick it, I do…

But instead, I beat a kid for a 20 dollar bill from his enemy, sold the foster folks’ antique china, and now am in even more heat with them. They cry at my presence and shoo me away like fly.

I do not mind. At least I do not have to go to school and see Noel and his stupid sparkly eyes and his stupid beautiful face. I will spend this summer with Talia, like I’m supposed to.

Letter 9: Dated August 18th, 2009

It is my birthday. I woke up to a box of cupcakes sitting on the floor above the basement stairs. Carly says they were left for me by the Blackwoods. I opened the box, and they were chocolate with vanilla icing, but found strawberry jam in the center when I bit in, a pleasant surprise. There was also a note. It said “happy birthday Mischa! Love Constance, Ricky, Ocean and Noel”

I smiled when I saw it. I hated being in the choir, but it might just be one of the better parts of my life now.

I am 18 now, and that means I can do lots of things. Hopefully one of those is coming back to Ukraine. I miss home, I miss home, I miss home.

I do want to see Talia, but part of me wants to bring Noel home with me. You’d love him, mama.

Your son (now an adult), 

Mischa

Letter 10: Dated September 14th, 2009

Mom, 

This letter will not be too long, because I am singing with the choir at the Fall Fair this afternoon. It is 6:00 am and I am scrawling some quick words across this paper. Tonight I will tell Noel how I feel. I will tell him I love him and that I have eyes for him. I will tell him soon.

Tomorrow, I will write again and tell you how it goes. 

I can’t wait to have him in my arms, mom.

Your son, 

Mischa

[meatcrimes]

Nineteen years. That’s almost two thirds of my life you’ve been gone. I’ll never forget the hot pavement on that sunny, unusually humid July day. I forgave you for this years ago, but if you had known your death would have been a catalyst for so much trauma and pain for your entire extended family, would you have been more careful?

Look at us, those of us who are left. Look at your brother, your daughter, your surviving son. Look at what they’ve overcome in the past nineteen years. Look at me, your niece, and my brother, your nephew who you never got to meet. Look what we’re still trying to overcome. I no longer blame you for the actions of other people done in the wake of your death, but the timeline shifted that day, and whatever track we were on before veered into the wrong lane at 100mph and ever since we’ve been picking up the pieces. I can’t say we would have been better or worse off if we hadn’t lost you, but I can say we all wish you were able to walk your daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Walk your foster son down the aisle at his wedding, because it became legal in 2015 for him and his husband to marry. You had no idea he was gay, did you? Neither did he for many, many years. And the trauma he experienced from your death influenced his own death in his early thirties. Now, you both left widows behind. You have more in common now than you ever did in life.

Look at your daughter, you probably won’t even recognize her, and not just from the weight loss. She’s now a devout Catholic, in a loving marriage with a man who values and respects her, with five beautiful step daughters that call her “mom”. It wasn’t easy for her to get there. She went through far too long of believing herself unworthy and unloveable, and far too many boyfriends who saw her the same way.

Look at your biological son. He’s in the national guard now, making something of his life and what has been left behind. He simultaneously never grew up and grew up all too fast, a lot like me. He doesn’t remember what your voice sounds like, and I wish I could transfer my memory of your voice into his mind. It isn’t fair that I remember your voice and he doesn’t. Really, none of this is fair, never has been, never to anyone. Your generation may have said “Life isn’t fair” with the connotations of “so there!”. Often a justification of their mistreatment of others. But us, we hear it in a different pitch. We hear “life isn’t fair” with “but with compassion and community we can bridge the gaps, even if we can’t close them”.

I don’t remember where I was going with this. I’m sitting in my old room at my dad’s house that he owns, that he bought with money he earned in a career that didn’t exist nineteen years ago. We live in a small town thousands of miles from our ancestral land, in a climate my body will frankly never get used to. I was built for the desert, biologically designed for the Great Basin region. Last time I went back, my anxiety was nearly gone, my acne cleared, my hair didn’t need any styling or products beyond a brush and shampoo. My thyroid condition was getting better at a faster rate than it was before. I thrived in Nevada. I am a Western Shoshone woman. You were a Western Shoshone man, no matter how much you or anyone else ignored it, or explained our genes with ancestry we didn’t share. Las Vegas is haunted ground now. My father plans on never going back, because it reminds him so much of you. And me? No matter how badly I want to return home, it’s not home anymore. It hasn’t been since we lost you. And I don’t think I can rebuild what was destroyed.

[trigunwritings]

Hello hell-o!!, so i wanna request can i get Gn! Reader with base on a song hire the song

Gn! Reader who is an angel who fall from the heaven , disguise her self as a human, Bit by bit they try and try to help people , but somewhat felling bit sad and you know.. Kinda hate himself , eventually they meet humanoid typhoon it self, and so bit by bit spent time with him, The reader wanted to show her true self ( like wings and Halo things ect) and yet they did but reader said " I'm look bad aren't i? " But Ofc you know Vash Like shut the reader up and tell that they are Not bad ect ect

SO YE IT'S MIGHT BE SAD A LIL BUT IN THE END READER HAPPY WOOO!!!

One step placed in front of the one before it, the motion even and repeating. It’s almost a mantra of physical movement, over and over again with no seeming end in sight—both metaphorical as much as physical. Onward. That’s all you can think. Onward and onward.

How long? The hot days and cold nights have begun to blur together.

How far? You’ve lost count of the steps since last meeting the eyes of another living thing.

The feeling of sand beneath your feet has gone numb, faded into the background of pure existence just like everything else; the sharp wind, the cold darkness, the air burning beneath a merciless sun. Things like hunger, sleep, thirst—they are nothing, but you are not without a physical sense that feels lacking and empty.

But it’s for the best, you tell yourself.

A lie, you tell yourself.

-

It’s never a good idea to stay in one place too long. If you do, people begin to get curious; from there, curiosity turns into suspicion, then to realization, and then accusation. It’s the same cycle every. single. time. Once one person knows the origin of their town’s newfound ‘miracles’ then its only a matter of hours to get out before they inevitably try to corner you with desperate pleas and agonizing voices of hope.

Please heal my son, he’s been sick for so long-

-bless our crops so that they will finally grow, or else we’ll starve-

-you can’t leave without helping us!

Help us.

You have to.

Each voice is a stone you drag along behind you, tied inexplicably to your memories no matter how hard you want to forget them. Sometimes they are just desperate and think they must convince you to part with some of your strength in order to heal their sick, their tired, their hungry. Other times—most other times—they think you are selfish and evil. To be capable of helping people and not doing so, they say, is that not a form of evil itself?

And that is why you roam. Why you can’t afford to stay without bringing even more harm and fear to the very people you want to help. Why you are afraid to let anyone see you. Know you.

Beg you.

Curse you.

It’s for the best, you tell yourself.

-

Your existence spans so many years that its hard to pull specific moments apart from the relative gray that haunts you. Moments of fleeting joy interspersed with empty desert, sand beneath your feet and wind howling in your ears.

But is shattered by the companionship of one singular man, and his name is Vash.

At first you’re wary of him, hoping to leave his presence and escape to your self-enforced isolation every moment that you can. And yet somehow he sticks to you without fail, as if he has the same levels of unending stamina and inhuman lack of basic needs—but he is so… bright? Joyful? Having grown so used to the cold, dark auras of people in need, Vash’s soul is like staring directly into the sun.

You think that he will wander off on his own path eventually, but he doesn’t—nor does he ask any questions when most would.

The random feathers strewn about camp in the morning after bedding down for the night (it felt nice to sleep again).

Your constant supply of food somehow procured from deep within the old bag on your shoulders (when did it taste so good?).

He did not even question when, in the quiet moments beneath the dark night sky, you held up your cupped hands so that he could sip from the water that miraculously came into existence from nothing at all. And as you sipped in kind, it tasted so cool and refreshing against your dry throat.

When had it been so quenching?

-

“Vash.”

The sound of his name stopped the man mid-step. He turns, eyes glancing back towards you curiously but saying nothing in reply.

He has to know. Why won’t he say something about it? Why isn’t he calling you selfish?

“I’m not human,” you say, the words like needles against your tongue.

He’s quiet for a moment before a soft smile pulls at his lips.

“I know.”

“This is not what I really look like.”

“I know.”

You stare at him for an unknown amount of time before your gaze moves down towards the sand shifting around your feet. How many grains of sand was there on this planet? How many people had succumbed to its deadly embrace? Starvation when you could have created food, illness when you could have healed them. How many people have died in which you could have saved?

A hand suddenly comes down upon your shoulder, jolting you from your thoughts so viscerally that when you look back up to see Vash standing in front of you, there must be tears in your eyes from how much they burn.

“Having the power to help one person doesn’t obligate you to help everyone.”

Hypocrite, but an honest one.

He brings his hands up to cup either side of your face. Is that empathy in his eyes? An understanding? Whatever emotion lies within them, it is interlaced with a pain you are all too familiar with. The pain of regret and guilt.

But his touch is soft and warm. New and unfamiliar. In that very moment, you suddenly realize that there’s not a singular moment within the gray sea of existence that you remember someone touching you like this. It’s nice.

And that’s when your wings shimmer into material existence. Feathers swirl in the air around you both, as numerous and white as forgotten bones strewn across the desert. With but a simple motion they expand outward, so wide that they cast a dark shadow across Vash’s entire body from the suns behind you. Two, four… six? Maybe more, countable and uncountable in ways a human’s eyes can’t always perceive.

The golden ring of light above your head sits like a crown, though it feels many times heavier. Neither a physical or material shape, it hums and wavers in and out of existence as the sunlight scatters through the air. You can even feel the marks start taking shape on your skin—words of a language so old that it spoke the universe into existence.

And Vash doesn’t look away from you.

He watches, smile never fading, holding your face in his palms even when he must feel the weight of a thousand mountains on his shoulders in your presence. Even as the air is hard to breathe, even when your very whispers are like thunder, he looks at you with such fondness.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmurs. “So beautiful.”

And for the first time since the dawn of time itself, you truly believed him.

[kaija-rayne-author]

I wrote something hard today. It's long. Please mind the content warnings, this one is heavy.

We Must Remember

ON DECEMBER 30, 2023 BY KAELENRHY/Kaija Rayne

Content Warnings: AIDS epidemic, queer death, queer abuse, child abuse, child neglect, mention of attempted rape, sexual harassment in the form of catcalling and whistling.

My generation of queers, the ones who came of age in the middle of losing most of a generation of our queer siblings… we don’t talk about it.

It’s got to be pretty obvious why we don’t. I can’t think of a queer person who knew they were queer who didn’t lose someone. And we all lost when it comes to some people. Freddie Mercury, for one, the lead singer of Queen. He died a day after announcing his diagnosis in 1991. He was 45 years old.

And there were so many others.

I’ve been aware of the lack of people who lived through it talking about this for a while. But it really brought it home to me when I asked my eldest, who is openly queer, if they knew what the AIDS quilt was. They didn’t. And generally, they’re interested in queer history, so tend to be better informed than a lot of queer youth about our collective history. It helps that I was a history teacher at one time and have always lived and breathed teaching it to anyone willing to learn.

So, here’s a story from a time I hope never to see again, but one which, when I look at the world, I deeply fear is coming back.

The moral panic we see now is like déjà vu for people like me. It was this exact same moral panic that caused medicine, and most of humanity, to completely ignore it as loved ones died. To treat human beings without the care or respect any human being deserves simply by drawing breath.

I grew up in the mountains in a very Christian cult-like atmosphere. It was honestly so close to being an actual cult. There really is such a minuscule difference. But it wasn’t an official cult. Just… very poor people backbiting each other any way they could. Praying like good people on Wednesdays and Sundays, but doing anything they wanted every other day of the week. You’d think with all the mountains around, they’d have anything better to do than gossip. But gossip ran as life’s blood. The internet didn’t yet exist in private homes in that piss hole in a snowbank. There were 3 churches in the town, and 6 bars. For 300 people. The closest store was a good 20-minute drive away, the closest library an hour.

Christ, it’s hard to remember these things. It’s been 33 ish years since this story happened in real life, and I still don’t want to revisit it.

But it’s important.

The memory of this day is ingrained on the inside of my skin. I can almost feel the heavy summer sun.

Sad Summer Day

I’m around 14 years old. I’m barefoot, because my family doesn’t see the point of buying shoes for summer wear. Feet toughen up just fine.

I’m wearing a fourth or fifth-hand t-shirt that is far too see-through and cut-off jean shorts. The tickling of the strings falling against my thighs as I walk is a soothing sensation to me. I’m finished with my chores, the horses are cared for, the dog fed, the abusive younger sibling has stopped screaming and throwing things at me because I wasn’t a suitable big sister and had gone to hide in her room. I’m an embarrassment to my allistic sister. I’m an embarrassment to my mother too. If she ever crawls out of the bottle long enough to give a shit about anyone. My brother lives elsewhere.

I stink. I don’t know that or understand it, but I stink. Getting clean means swimming in a scummy mountain lake most evenings. My mother hasn’t taught me anything about personal hygiene. She smokes like a damned chimney and always smells of booze. There is no way I don’t smell bad. We had bath nights once a week in the winter. The only reason I knew my period was a thing was school health class.

I hang around in the barn a lot. Or in the ancient maple tree in the pasture. Ar Bazara is my beautiful Arabian mare. Her hide is the stunning red of particularly vociferous sunsets. She often patiently lets me lie on her back with a book open on her rump while she grazes. My new goat, Esmerelda, is still adjusting to not being the house goat she was used to being. She’s miserable, mourning her friend and old life. I do what I can, but it doesn’t help very much. Goats grieve as much as humans do, maybe more so.

It’s my job, and escape, to walk to town and get the mail for my father, who works more than not, and can’t get to the post before it closes at 5pm. I have no idea when or if my mother will come stumbling in blind drunk.

I hope to see my friend, who lives at the top of the road to the post office. He hasn’t been feeling well. Wrapped up in a quilt in his mother’s rocking chair on the porch is how I’ve been finding him lately. It’s not very odd, it never gets truly warm in the mountains, so people in heavier clothes or a blanket around their shoulders isn’t uncommon. I think nothing of it.

He’s a relatively recent addition to my life. He moved into his mother’s house last year. Esmeralda had been his, but he’d asked me to take her last week and love her like he did. I really don’t see it coming, or maybe I don’t want to add up the clues.

He’s my only friend there. He looks much older to me, but in reality, is likely in his late twenties. He wears dark tortoise-shell rimmed glasses, always has interesting books to read and ideas to discuss. He’d made it out of the mountains, so has seen so much more of the world I long desperately to experience for myself. His butterscotch blond hair is always a curly mess, and he’s always running his hand through it. I hope I can sit on his porch steps, picking at splinters, while he tells me another story. I’m not supposed to talk to him. No one does in that town. We might catch it, if we do so much as look at him. But I like him, and he treats me like a combination of younger sister and wild animal. He always speaks in such a gentle, calm tone. A tone I never hear at home. Except for the day he gave me Esmerelda. He couldn’t talk through the tears he was trying to hide.

My aunt lives next to him and warns me away every time she sees me. I suppose she likely told my parents, but my parents either aren’t there or are drunk. He’s the only adult in that town other than my grandmother, who even sees me. Much less talks to me like I’m a person. My aunt is happy enough to take his money to make an extra portion of food for him when she cooks for her family every day. She drops it off on the porch and will only take the dishes back if they’re soaking in bleach water when she comes to get them.

I’m tanned dark brown. My mother kicks us out as soon as the snow melts and we’re expected to stay out until dusk. But I’ve got my summer colour, my hair is frizzy from the yearly perms, and sun-bleached. The stench of lemon juice in my hair is still strong, but I know better than to not use it every morning. Having my mother yank the black, spiral hairs out of my head hurts worse. But I hate the smell of lemon juice in my hair.

It’s a short walk to a mountain child. Though if you’d called me a child then it would’ve infuriated me.

I am still a child, a very naïve one. I only know the words gay and lesbian because I’ve read the OED cover to cover. But they’re nascent, formless concepts to me. I’m in the midst of my first crush. A girl in my class with the prettiest brown eyes and lush, curly hair. But, I’ve told no one.

There’s sand on the sides of the beaten-up tarmac of the road. I’m avoiding walking on the road itself because prickers from wild roses and blackberry bushes are vastly preferable to burnt feet.

In shade areas, the mounded sand is cool, a treat to dig my toes into, and there’s a place where rain makes interesting patterns in the sand. I stop there for a short time to look at the swirling patterns in that section. It’s different every time it rains.

The air is heavy, like a wet wool blanket, presaging another evening rainstorm. I cuss because it means I won’t get to swim that night. If I want to rinse off, it’ll be in the cold rain. Hopefully, there won’t be thunder. Loamy earth and the particular faintly metallic scent of slightly damp, lichen-covered stone coat my tongue with a musky taste. The lighter, higher sweet honey note of spreading dogbane makes the walk smell like a slice of heaven. They’re poisonous, of course, but they’re beautiful and one of my favourites. Bunchberry shows little red splashes of colour. Orange hawkweed is blossoming, and so is the milkweed. Soon there will be so many monarch butterfly caterpillars I’ll have to watch where I step. The unnatural stench of old, oft-tarred tarmacadam adds an unwelcome element of human activity to the interesting scents.

The forest sings, murmuring to each other with the slight breeze that’s the only coolness I’ll find unless it rains. And the creaks and groans of the poplar and birch trees provide a symphony. I walk by my grandmother’s house. She’s outside tending to her flowers and checking the bird feeders, so I wave instead of meandering over. My grandmother loves to talk. I’ll stop on the way back. I’m later than usual going to get the mail because of my sister’s abusive outburst.

My hands are stuffed in the far too small front pockets of my shorts. My hand is tightly wrapped around the mail key. I always hold it in my fist, my father says it’s a trust, and I don’t want to blow it. A hopped-up pickup truck with a custom paint job, jacked tires, and glass-packs roars by. The boys inside and riding on the bed cat call me, but I don’t understand it.

By this time in my life, my mother has dived into a bottle and never looked back. She taught me to drink on hanged man’s bridge when I was 11. Vodka. She’d already moved on to vodka from wine by that time. In a lot of ways, I didn’t have a mother anymore, if I’d ever really had one at all in anything other than the physical sense.

It’s 1990. Big hair is falling out of fashion, but I still have the perm that my (at the time) stick-straight hair needs to look like Bon Jovi.

It’s mid-summer, the sun is high in the sky and it won’t get dark until after 9 pm. I won’t have to go inside until 10. The voracious bugs are preferable to listening to another argument. And Gram will let me in and likely feed me. Maybe my brother will be there.

As long as I’m on my father’s or grandmother’s land by dusk, I don’t have to go inside. The crab apples aren’t quite ready, but I pick one to eat, anyway. The bitter, tart juice is still green-flavoured, but it fends off my hunger. I didn’t get to eat my food; I cleaned it up from where my sister had thrown it at the wall and took it out to the hens. I wonder if they like grape jam?

It’s not the first time I’ve been hungry. Hunger is basically my ground state. So much so that I don’t even feel it when I’m hungry.

I pause on hanged man’s bridge. Just for a moment, while I warily scan the church parking lots at the end of the road.

They’d kicked me out when I was 12, but if the minister sees me, I’ll get scolded for breathing. I’m lucky, the lots are deserted and I continue on my way.

There’s no tree cover here, but there is down by the water. The beavers are busily building a dam that the men will burn come fall. It makes me sad because I can see kits with their parents. Beaver has a lot of fat in the fall, so it’s good meat.

I turn left at the end of the road and walk past another not-so-distant relative’s house. I stop for a moment to pet the Percheron workhorses who obligingly hang their heads over the fence so I can pluck handfuls of fresh green grass for them. Their slobber on my hands is green, but it doesn’t register as anything other than something to wipe off on my butt. I love these gentle giants, but the sun is lower in the sky, so I hurry on. I pass two more relatives’ houses. I have a tendency to walk with my gaze on the ground, partially to make sure I don’t step in anything, but partially in hope of finding a new, interesting stone or a bone for my collections.

So, I just… don’t notice. I’m in my own head a lot, working on stories. I started writing 3 years before.

There’s a sharp, rattling sound I associate with caster wheels and I look up.

My friend isn’t on the porch and he can’t tell me any more stories.

The glaring canary yellow of haz-mat suits screams brightly from his faded house. They look like aliens to me. Fierce, terrifying aliens. We don’t have TV, or rather, we don’t have TV reception, so the only reason I know what the suits are is because of my long habit of reading encyclopedias.

One of them is roughly handling his body as the other wraps a second roll of cellophane around him, over and over. They’re great yellow spiders as they finish wrapping my friend in cellophane and put him on the emergency bed from the ambulance. There aren’t any lights on, it’s turned off, and the driver has his booted foot hung out the window while he looks at a playboy. He whistles at me and winks. I hear one of the aliens say the body bags are too expensive to waste on trash. One of them fetches a floral sheet from my friend’s home. They wrap him in that.

I stand there like a rock has landed on my head.

I’m mute. I can’t even make myself move to go yell at them for laughing over my friend’s body and trading slurs for him as if it’s a game. Even if I were brave enough to confront adults. Which, I am not.

They very carefully take the gurney to the ambulance, avoiding all possible touch with the cellophane cocoon. The straps are so tight around my friend’s body that if he could feel them, he would have cried.

The doors make a doubled, muffled thump and the engine of the ambulance starts. It jerks me into movement, but I’m too late. They drive off.

They haven’t closed his kitchen door. So I do it, thinking in that odd way that he’ll be sad when he comes back to find it left open. I never have seen inside his house and I don’t breach his privacy as I close the door.

I have no way to lock it, and he told me he hasn’t any family left.

I step quickly down the top of the searing hot grey metal culvert cover to my aunt’s large backyard. I’m grateful to not run into my cousins. One of whom has already tried to rape me. I can fight him off if I have to, again, but all I need is to escape. I hopscotch across the brook and into the old potato field. I leap like a yearling deer from one mound to the next before I can disappear myself into the forested lands on my dad’s property. I practically live in the forest, and my friend’s habit of treating me like a wild animal isn’t off. I am.

The next thing I clearly remember is hugging Esmerelda’s neck, finally understanding why he’d asked me to take her.

Finally understanding a lot of things a 14-year-old probably shouldn’t have to think about.

I never did get the mail that day. I had to scour the area I’d walked to find the mail key I’d always been so careful not to drop.

Years later, when I was 19, and I’d escaped those fucking mountains, I was in university and doing very well. The only semester I didn’t hit the president’s list was the semester I had mono, and I still made dean’s.

I and a couple of others had recently been thrilled to get the B added to the LG group (lesbian and gay). Bisexual erasure is still prevalent, and it was worse then.

It was meeting night for the club, and one of my friends, one of the first openly gay men I knew while understanding what that meant, had a square of heavy white cloth. He explained it was for a project to remember those we’d lost to AIDS.

I took it home to my dorm room that night and feverishly embroidered a little grey goat wearing a green collar and a shiny gold jingle bell. I’ll never know why he named her Esmerelda.

The last time I visited those mountains, just before our move to Canada… I walked over with my eldest on my hip to look at my friend’s house. The door gaped open like a missing tooth in a smile, but no human scavengers had touched anything. (In those mountains, scavenging is a way of life. It’s a testimonial to their prejudice and discrimination that his home wasn’t pillaged.) The roof had fallen in at some point, always a danger in those mountains, from the weight of snow. The porch step I’d sat on to listen to his stories had fallen off and lay almost rotted through. I stood there looking at his house for probably longer than I remember. They’d closed the post office. The workhorses had been sent to make dog food when the man of the house died and his widow couldn’t care for them. Pound for pound selling them to the butcher was more practical.

My mother sold Ar Bazara just before she left my father. My beautiful mare had died at her new owners from pneumonia not long after I’d graduated high school.

Fall asters bloomed, making shockingly bright splotches of colour around his house. No one would even go close enough to do the neighborly thing and mow the tiny area of land that went with the house. Perception was everything to those people. It wouldn’t do to be perceived as less than a ‘good Christian’. So it spoke volumes that no one had shoveled the roof or mown the lawn. The only way people survive up there is by banding together when needed. My cousins may shoot each other (true fact) but they’ll band together if someone threatens from outside.

My grandmother was gone. Still with us in the flesh, but Alzheimer’s took her from us long before she actually died. She didn’t even remember I had a kid.

My father had cut the ancient maple tree I’d loved so much for firewood years before, sometime when I was in uni.

There weren’t any horses anymore. Esmeralda had gone. She never recovered. The sweet, gentle goat I’d agreed to love turned vicious and mean. I didn’t know how to help her and no one I dared ask could help. My father made me get rid of her when she butted him in the knee.

I kissed my little one’s head when he reached up curiously to touch a tear on my cheek. I doubt he’d ever seen me cry before that. I don’t cry easy. My therapist has me working on relearning how to cry.

That isn’t a problem right now. I can barely see to type. No matter how many years pass, I can’t forget the tearing, sticky sound of the cellophane as they wrapped my friend up. I can’t forget the things they said about him while wearing those stupid haz-mat suits. Which they hadn’t even been wearing correctly. I can’t forget and it’s so bloody hard to remember these things, much less talk or write about them.

Within my lifetime, we’ve seen amazing changes in queer rights. But I, and a lot of older queers, are watching the current political climate of the world and… we could so easily lose everything we’ve gained.

Trans people are always the canaries in the coal mine; always the ones sacrificed first. They will come for the rest of us.

If you’re queer, don’t ever fall into the trap of thinking it’s ancient history. I’m currently 47. This day happened 33 years ago. Don’t fall into the morass of thinking our rights can’t be stripped from us.

They can. And I fear, deeply, that they’ll strip our rights from us again. We could so easily fall down the slippery slope until all of us are disrespected as my friend was. He died alone. And I suppose I should be grateful my aunt noticed right away, that anyone noticed at all. He was a pariah. He’d come home to die after his partner did, only to face massive social exclusion by people he’d grown up with. My aunt only fed him for the cash. Even then, barter was still common. Hard cash wasn’t always easy to get.

I went to the cemetery to try to find his grave and plant some flowers on it. I found where it was supposed to be. Right on the very edge next to the pine forest. Just a slight depression marking what was likely a cheap pine coffin, if they even paid him that much respect. There wasn’t a crematorium anywhere close by. So they’d stuck him as far away from the other dead people as possible. As if the dead could catch it. We didn’t name it. It was the illness variety of the boogeyman. If you don’t name it, it can’t find you.

Starflower had grown to cover the area, so at least I know every spring he has a blanket of small, ethereal white flowers. We lost most of a generation of queers due to medical negligence and reprehensible cruelty from humans to other human beings.

But these stories shouldn’t die with us. Queer youth need to understand what we lived through so they don’t get too complacent. I’ve fought for queer rights since I was 14 years old.

My eldest can just be openly queer. Something I’ve never been able to be except for a few short years in university.

I don’t want to see us lose our rights again.

I don’t want another misunderstood, abused, hurting queer kid to have to watch as their only friend is wrapped in cellophane and denied the honour of a body bag. Denied the honour of a decent grave with a simple headstone.

We’re already losing queer rights. Please don’t be complacent.

Phew, so… I’m a sobbing mess. If my work of words touched you, please consider a tip or becoming a patron. We live in poverty. My husband is recovering from one of the likely three back surgeries he needs for his broken back. We have two autistic/ADHD kids and finding a job is impossible. I’ve been looking since January 15th, 2023. I have $50/$1220 I need for rent for January. We can’t get any government aid because I’m an immigrant.

Far too many queer creatives live in poverty. I’ll do a series of these memories as I can. They’re very emotionally difficult for me to write, but I feel they’re very important things.

http://ko-fi.com/A630KKM

https://www.paypal.me/KaelanRhy

[thatgirlonstage]

Hey have a fucked up TAZ thought for the day. Gently pushing aside Merle and Gundran somehow literally being blood related, the people that the seven birds like grew up with and knew before the IPRE obviously wouldn’t… exist on Faerun. Or even if we take Griffin’s hand-wavey explanation of Gundran and accept that there are some of the same people in this particular planar system, these versions of those people wouldn’t have the faintest goddamn clue who the birds are. From what we’ve seen of the voidfish, it will to an extent overwrite its own inconsistencies, but it doesn’t have the ability to implant totally false memories in disconnected people. Lucretia couldn’t have done that.

And I know we kind of generally agree that all of our birds are orphaned and generally solitary people, which is borne up by none of them (LUCKILY FOR GRIFFIN LMAO) ever randomly being like hey let me roll to see if my dear childhood friend Claire lives in Goldcliff now or something or otherwise referencing connections from their childhood, but like— they couldn’t possibly have known no one at all who was still alive and in touch with them when they blasted off to space.

So like. What if, after the destruction of Raven’s Roost, Magnus actually tried to do the healthy thing first. He’s devastated, he’s not thinking straight, but he’s not quite at fling himself off a cliff in despair levels, so he does what you’re supposed to do: he reaches out to a friend. No one from Raven’s Roost, obviously, but an older friend, someone he met on fantasy study abroad and had maintained a pen pal relationship with for years. He hasn’t written to them recently, of course, bc he’s been so busy with the rebellion, and Julia—he sent them an invitation to his wedding but they must not have been able to come. Or it got lost in the fantasy mail! Shit happens—but he feels sure they wouldn’t turn him away, certainly not in this state. They’d at least give him somewhere to crash for a week, let him sleep through some of the worst of the grief.

He turns up on their doorstep and they’re—not there. According to the gnome couple that live there, they’ve never been there. This has been the gnome couple’s house for 120 years. No one of the name Magnus is giving has lived here since before he was born.

He asks around town. Goes to the school he studied at and asks for records. Literally hires a divination wizard to try a scry because he’s fucking desperate at this point.

This person, this person Magnus got sloppy drunk with, who got into a bar fight back to back with him, who helped him struggle through Elvish grammar and cantrip lessons, who wrote to him about the gorgeous half-orc boy they wanted to marry, who sent him chocolate every Candlenights, this person doesn’t. Fucking. Exist. Has never existed, as far as Magnus or anyone else can tell.

Spooked, and grieving no less, and seriously afraid for his friend’s well being, Magnus thinks okay. Okay. He needs help. He needs perspective. He tries someone else, someone maybe a little more distant but still reliable. An old school coach, maybe. Someone who gave him his first sparring sessions when he was training to be a fighter.

That man did exist, but he’s been dead for eight years according to people in town. Which isn’t fucking possible, because Magnus saw him for lunch four years ago.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Someone else. Who else can he talk to.

He goes to a town where he once spent a summer interning for a dog trainer. He learned so much there. It would be good to be around dogs again.

The woman he trained with has no memory of him at all. She doesn’t recognize him, she doesn’t recognize his name, she doesn’t believe him when he says he knows her. She doesn’t recognize half the dogs he talks about. She chases him off her property, accusing him of trying to steal from her, although he hadn’t asked for anything.

The next one was dead too.

The next one didn’t know him either.

The next one didn’t exist.

Magnus’s family, friends, and acquaintances are a string of “dead” “don’t remember him” or “apparently, never fucking real” until he says fine, fucking fine. He’s not the type to spiral into despair. He’ll do some good before he goes out.

But he is going to go out.

Because if no one still alive even knows who he is, what is he living for?

[joviewinchester]

31 Nights of Halloween Prompt List 2023

You had finally found who you had been hunting for years, but they aren’t who you thought they’d be.

You’re lost in a corn maze with your enemy.

The scarecrow kept on your family’s farm had always freaked you out, but what happens when you decide to get rid of it for good?

You and your friends go to a haunted house, only to discover that everything is real, and you may not make it out alive.

“Do you like my costume?” “It’s not a costume if you actually are one!”

“You’re not one of those crazy girls who starts celebrating Halloween two months early are you?” “Yeah. I am. Hence the decor.”

“But you’re dead. I’m just going crazy.” “Do you not know how this whole All Hallows Eve thing works?”

“Can we not stay here? This place looks haunted. Personally, I don’t do ghosts. I am not a ghostbuster I am afraid of those ghosts.” “Y/N, we hunt monsters for a living.”

It’s the apocalypse and your closest friend has been bitten.

“Ha. Ha. Flickering lights. Very funny. I’ve caught on by now. You’ve been playing me all week!” “I’m not doing that.” “What do you mean you aren’t doing it?!”

“Hey I just dropped by to- Holy shit that’s a body!”

“So this doesn’t bother you?” “Hell no. I’m not an idiot of course vampires exist.”

“I mean come on. Opposites attract.” “That does not excuse sleeping with a demon! And you are far from an angel so that isn’t even valid!”

Going to a psychic and learning some shocking news.

“Woah. Hey now-“ “See? Even the ouija board ghost knows you’re delusional.”

The pain of finding out your significant other was the killer all along cannot be compared.

Dating the antichrist

Finding out you are a supernatural creature.

You woke up in the middle of the woods with no memory of the previous night.

Ghostface AU

“All right. Let’s split up.” “When has it ever been a good idea to split up? Have you even seen Scooby Doo?”

You’re a ghost, and by some crazy twist of fate, you found someone who can see you.

You live in a town that has had countless serial killers. What happens when they all return from their graves?

“Which one of you idiots stole the ancient relic off my desk?”

You find a doorway to another world. At first it seems like a dream, but now you’re not so sure. (Coraline AU)

Not letting your s/o see your costume until you arrive at their party and vice versa.

You didn’t mind being able to see and touch ghosts, until you discovered a really hot one.

You’re pregnant, but with the fast changing of your body, you realize your baby is not normal.

Being brought back from the brink of death.

Being caught in the cold rain on an autumn night with your enemy.

Taking your kid/niece/nephew/cousin etc. trick or treating.

It’s that time of year! Send in a number and what character from the following I should write about. I encourage wlw requests!

Avengers

Guardians of the Galaxy

The Vampire Diaries

Supernatural

Fear Street

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

My Babysitter’s a Vampire

Ghosts (U.S.)

American Horror Story any season

Scream

Stranger things

[can-you-hear-me-yet]

I wish I felt real.

I know I am. In fact, I am overwhelmed with the constant fact that I exist. In an uncontrollable and unrelenting world, where there are billions of perceptions of life, I understand that I exist and that my presence has the ability to change the course of several lives. Yet, I can’t get this idea out of my head that if I left right now and walked until I physically dropped, nothing would be different. I’d be farther away and a lot more tired, but after I walked back it would be like nothing happened at all.

That doesn’t add up. It should make a difference. Of course, I am actually sitting in bed writing this. If I started to walk nothing could happen but I could also be hit by a car, abducted by a stranger, make a wrong turn get lost and never find my way back. There are endless possibilities of what could happen and where. I could die in my sleep without every knowing what was coming.

So why is it so important to feel real if I know that I am? Why so I seek long term happiness if I can cloud myself in constant reoccurring bursts of dopamine? Is the pause in between too much to handle or am I afraid that if I were to truly experience happiness I’d realize I’ve never felt it before?

I told my girlfriend I wanted to go on a drive but that I would get upset because my brain would question whether or not we could afford to use that gas. She agreed and went to sleep thinking I was going with her. I am awake now, wishing she would have talked me into going on that drive. Yet I am unable to be upset or even disappointed because I provided both the suggestion and the rejection.

Typically I rant about these things on Snapchat but I have a fear of being heard at the moment because I know that I believe everything I say. Not to sound stuck up but I am usually right. Not about everyday little things but I get these gut feelings that I’ve learned to trust and they tell me I don’t have friends. That those who are listening are not hearing me and it hurts. Every ignored cry leaves a scar within me that itches every time I yearn to cry out.

I can’t make noise when I cry. I have been practicing alone in the bath but sound won’t leave my throat. It burns to stay quiet, cremating my screams and scattering the ashes over my childhood. I want to be heard. When I’m laughing and when I’m crying.

I want my best friend to talk to me again. I want my mom to acknowledge she hurt me. I want my grandpa to forgive himself and my grandma to give herself room to be whoever she wants to be. I want my aunt to treat herself like a human being and not a medical file. I want my sister to be safe. I want my girlfriend to be happy. I want to feel alive.

I want someone to tell me they know that I am not ok. I want someone to hit me with a reality check in some fleeting hope that my head will reattach to my shoulders and tel me what to do. I need to be me again.

I can’t even remember what I typed… I think I need to see a therapist. Work some of this out. Just in case I actually go through with that thought, my goal is to feel real. To feel alive. I don’t want to think about why I replied “No worries” to the cashier but “Of course” to the lady I opened the door for. It’s a useless thought that overtook a memory of whatever I was doing in the moment. I remember how hard I was breathing when I kissed my girlfriend for the first time, but I can’t remember kissing her. My childhood memories consist of the photos I’ve seen in passing. I used to walk through 5 towns everyday after school because it was better than being at home. I would stay up all night after school, sneak out at 3am walk around until 6am sneak back in then go to school. I would drain my body of any energy all in effort to feel alive and it worked. I really wish it didn’t because it’s all I can think about now and I am pleading to my future self that I show this to my therapist.

I know this is a mess.

This is my cry for help. This is as loud as I can be.

[whatever-lmaoo]

#“you’re still that summer rose that claimed the young heart of the crown prince of SAMCRO” that’s actually so cute🥹

#“The way the light in him had died when you left town.” I’m sorry jaxie pooh😕

#“Where you had first fallen in love lost in the rosy throes of youth.” Excuse me🙉 too good🤌🏾

#“Some part of you had tasted every tear he shed and felt the rhythm of his breathing. The deepest part of you had always known no matter how far you had flown from Charming. Living only for the memory of what you left behind when you had run away from here that haunted morning.” What’s your secret??? bc I just started and your writing already has my heart🙉🥹🌸

#“Climb the stairs and every rise feels like a mile. Coming home is fucking hard. Your home has always been his heart, even more so in all the years you spent apart. “ with the utmost affection, JAIL TIME🙉 I feel like it should be illegal to come up with so many amazing lines and comparisons 😭💗

#“Spun of sun-gold, from his hair down to his soul.” If you’ve been here long enough, you already know why this is here🥹✨

#“The break of heaven in those baby blues, each time he looked at you.” GIRL😮 I’m ashamed to have not come across your fics sooner🙇🏾‍♀️❤️‍🔥

#“Read the truth all across his face. Changed in a thousand ways... but this is just the same.” Born to be a poet I swear🙉

#“He doesn’t need to; in the hollow of his heart your name is carved into the walls. Into the dark the only thing he ever calls.” I swear more than half of this reblog is just gonna be me being astonished at how amazing your writing is🤩(that probably didn’t make sense but you get my point🥹)

#“Eleven years since love was made upon this roof, first whispered in the bloom of youth. The silence still carries the same unchanging truth.  I love you.” Omg stop😭 this is gonna be so redundant but I have no thoughts because it’s just so good😭🌸

#“Here today. Nothing to say. His ring-clad fingers on your cheek. The love he doesn’t need to speak. The love so strong it makes you weak. Sooner see all the fire burn out of the Redwood sun above you, than see this love run its course. He kisses you with fragile force.” OMG I KNEW IT!!! LITERAL POET!!!!

#“He tastes of everything he did before. He tastes of so much fucking more.” My heart actually can’t handle this🥹🤧

#“And broken everything I’ve touched since you’ve been gone.” Don’t make me cry😭

Wait because i can’t just copy and paste this whole fic😭(I totally would tho🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾) so let’s talk about🥂 I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this before🙉 the way you mix descriptive writing with poetry is something i didn’t know I needed🙉 if this were a book i promise almost every line would be highlighted!!! I love the passion and hurt that Jax put into their intimate moment and how so much was said through their bodies and overall connection that still exists between them even with the 11 years of no contact🥹🥺💖 literary genius I swear!!!!

Kutte to Black

A/N: So here’s an angsty fluffy smutty fic about you being the love of Jax Teller’s life (reimagined in the place of Tara) – you two were high school sweethearts and reunite years later. This fic is a sequel to Kutte and Gown but can also be read as a standalone! ✨

Pairing: Jax Teller x F!Reader Warnings: smut, swearing, angsty angst

Word Count: ~2.3k

The Sons of Anarchy just froze.

They look as though they’ve seen a ghost. You haven’t set foot in this room, or in this godforsaken town you once called home, since you ran off eleven years ago. Haven’t returned since that door closed. By now you thought they all forgot—but clearly not—you’re still that summer rose that claimed the young heart of the crown prince of SAMCRO. No love since yours ever came close. And everybody knows.

You don’t, though.

You don’t know shit. How much damage the lost hope of your love went off and did. The way the light in him had died when you left town.

“H-hey, is Jax around?”

You can just barely bring yourself to ask the club. They’re all shook up. Their badass biker hearts have stopped. So you of course assume the worst; reckon your presence here is unwelcome and cursed. One of them gestures toward the rooftop.

God. The roof. Where you had first fallen in love lost in the rosy throes of youth. Of course that’s where he is right now. Some part of you had known somehow.

Some part of you knows everything. Some part of you had tasted every tear he shed and felt the rhythm of his breathing. The deepest part of you had always known no matter how far you had flown from Charming. Living only for the memory of what you left behind when you had run away from here that haunted morning.

Thank the Sons with a stunted smile. Climb the stairs and every rise feels like a mile. Coming home is fucking hard. Your home has always been his heart, even more so in all the years you spent apart. Tried to deny it for a while. Truth cuts deeper in denial.

You remember him the way he was back then. Remember every inch of Jackson. Spun of sun-gold, from his hair down to his soul. The smell of worn leather and smoke, that made you feel at home and whole. The truth in every word he spoke. The inky black of his tattoos. The break of heaven in those baby blues, each time he looked at you.

You wonder how much he has changed in all this time. How deep he’s fallen in this life of sin and crime. Can’t help but feel that on some level you’re to blame.

Wonder until you reach the roof and meet his gaze. Read the truth all across his face. Changed in a thousand ways… but this is just the same.

Keep reading

[edge-oftheworld]

we started in this little town, or maybe it was my parents’ house. maybe it was a school. either way we knew we needed to leave, move away from the predictability and the controlled routine. we daydreamed about getting away. getting away together, or making it out but leaving our loved ones behind. we were conflicted even then.

the black and white town became our muse, this town that never existed but was a place to us, an experience of an area that was caught up in our perceptions, a shared headspace we didn’t understand back then when the outskirts of a messy megacity down under didn’t meet our needs and we had no words to explain why. just a restlessness for something more. for the high of meeting people out of our league and wearing name brands we’d never been able to afford before. it’s easy to promote body positivity when you’re doing it in American Apparel underwear and not hand me downs from Best and Less. we were loved and we were wanted and it felt like a fever dream but it felt like being alive for the first time ever. and who were we to complain? we’d achieved more than we ever dreamed of.

but the self doubt crept in, and the other side of the optimism of ‘she’s just a little bit older, but I want to get to know her’ was the memories of ‘she’s 17, I told her I’m 20, I can’t take her out cause Mum’s got no money’ and ‘I’m not being me’ but how can I when I never got to learn who that is? when I stepped into this role, the role of a lifetime, but being a star doesn’t negate the times my teacher told me I’m mentally disabled, so unstable, so I stayed in bed all day. but at least I’m not alone. just like we did back then, we told each other it’s going to be okay. we repeated it again and again and maybe we believed it sometimes, or maybe it lost its meaning and instead became another piece of confusion because we had everything, why wouldn’t it be okay? we did something about it. we called it the new broken scene. the album was finished in 8 weeks.

desperation came from many different angles. when we used to long for freedom and opportunity we now long for rest. it’s still longing for freedom. it’s still the same escapism but don’t you remember? we’re young. we’ve gotta stay optimistic. it’ll be okay. we told the rest of the world that. we look back on the encouragement we got then when it reached its audience and we got to share in the feeling with them and in giving them hope, we got to cultivate a little coming back. it was a lifeline, but people don’t like lifelines when they’re a reminder people need them. a reminder things get hard and messy and this is the era of bubblegum pop, we don’t acknowledge that around here. try to step away from that, away from the pressures to stay innocent and untainted and be your perfect fantasy and suddenly we’re the assholes. but maybe we are, maybe we have been all along.

we’re tired and looking for something bigger that’s going to give us the edge. restless for change like we always are. we’ve seen suffering now, we thought we knew it before, but we definitely do now and it’s terrifying. we hold onto each other a little tighter as a result. could we take this emotion and turn it into song? could we sanitise it, with a badboy party lens, that same desperation and angst and the tiredness that tips right into a self destructive overenergetic party vibe like a toddler kept up past its bedtime, if household toys were replaced with cigarettes and alcohol. the sugar coated pain. turning triple time into four. we turn heartbreak into a phenomenal live show. we make it. we’ve found our feet. we’re tired. too tired to know what calm means.

so that’s what we name our album, as we collaborate with the biggest and the best. self deprecation kicks in in different ways, and hopefully it doesn’t drive us apart. our homeland is burning down when we’re so far away. if we fly in a plane to sing at a show and raise money for its relief, are we part of the problem that caused it? tired of travel. just want to go home. which one? tired of trying, of doing everything they say will make us feel better without taking away our authenticity and creativity. maybe something needs to give. it’s tiring seeing your loved ones suffer. and so the angst makes its way out in industrial beats. prime targets for an orchestral or acoustic rearrangement. we do neither. a kaleidoscope of too many bright lights made us colourblind. it’s there, collectively, in our minds—which mirrored section is the fragment of a life that’s real?

we’ve all got stories to tell, and maybe some time apart will help us access them. time with loved ones. new friends. turns out we do want to hang out together without the distractions of the big names and bright lights. there are things no one shares yet until they’re ready, supported by a whole body of work. we know better than to ask questions. we know that the public will. we’ve done this dance before, figuring out how much we want to share. even when we do it alone, we still come back to each other.

we’ve gotten help now, and that has to be one of the best feelings when we see evidence of that in each other. pride and love and a calmness we finally found in the familiarity of it all mixed with the growth we all feel so honoured to witness. growth that reminds us of those times we told ourselves it would all be okay. this is one of the most uncertain times of history but maybe we’re watching our own prophecy come true. sorry for being self destructive, I’ll take better care of you now. care of me. we get nostalgic and we wonder if the world is going to change. if we made the right choice. as we grow older and move forward in our lives, sacrificing so many things, but we still have each other. and pop punk. maybe we can make a song about that

then we’re touring again and it hits different when you thought it might be something you’d never get back. there’s activism to be done until it becomes too much, when you’re a bit more self aware instead of pushing things away to later it becomes too much a little more often these days. or too little, either way, we can process that a little better now. step aside and make art, or do it in the meantime, switching between confidence and vulnerability like maybe they weren’t such opposite things to begin with. maybe motivation and grief can come together. maybe we’re getting older and we’re so scared of the world now but we always were, except when we didn’t know how to look after ourselves we were scared of staying put even more. maybe it’s okay to grab hold of that tension and make the most of it. maybe life is just a series of doing things while scared or sad and finding the good parts in it anyway. really living.

we’ve found our place a little more now, and yet we’re constantly fitting together in new ways. we each have our own boundaries in how to interact with people and we compliment each other on that now, our strengths falling into where each other might be lacking. and that’s okay, we can embrace it. but still be pretty self deprecating. maybe things will be different now. maybe we’re healing. or maybe we’re just surviving and trying not to get too repeatedly traumatised, that’s valid too. maybe our big dreams were just the longing for something deeper, for connection and validation and self expression and the freedom from the monotony and weight of their expectations made for some idealised person none of us were capable of being. and one day, eventually, we’ll probably write a song about that.