#I recognize that tags are for nonsense but I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing with them

[r2d2stay]

lmao so I just started using garage band and I didn't realize the metronome + piano echo would record

oh well. Guess it's not fully acapella, but it is other than those two things, so it's like 99% there. I mostly had to get this one out of my brain before moving onto things I liked more, so I'm calling it a day.

note that I'm not as sad as this rendition makes it out to be; I did want the "rice farmer antifacist rebellion" vibe and not the "money heist" vibe, and also to reference the Hopsin rap, and also a personal note, and I guess that's what came out?

art is from a "space orchid collective", they do music, unrelated, I just needed a "galaxy orchid" that was purple

[runningfrom2am]

cold nights // part thirty-two

summary: the end.

pairing: coriolanus snow x fem!reader

wc: 2.9k

masterlists / nav / requests

tags/warnings: tribute!reader and mentor!coriolanus, r is very sweet (too kind for this world. literally.), sunshine x grumpy trope kinda, he falls first, violence typical for the source material, depictions of mental illness, also she's is very smart (as she should), district twelve!reader.

a/n:

the end!! omg!!guys thank you so much for being here through this whole story and this was LONG!! over 110k words of a lot of nonsense but to anyone who's made it this far,, ilysm. i'm gonna miss them!! stop they were everything to me :(

ANYWAY same with LTPF if you've read that, there will be an epilogue coming soon and also definitely more oneshots and maybe bonus content that i wish i included in the original series but just didn't make the cut. so stay tuned for that!!

if you liked this series, i'm obligated as well to plug my NEXT series that's coming soon, 'requiem'!! i am so excited about it so please follow me for updates on when that will be posted!! def soon!!

just one more time i wanted to say ily, and thank you :')

see you soon!

my asks are also open to talk about this series! (i do have emoji anons open now too!)

send me any and all of your thoughts! here!

series masterlist // playlist // pinterest board

You keep your books tucked firmly to your chest as you walk into your first class, wearing the spare clothes you brought to Sejanus's house on Friday just in case you had to change. In case you spilled something on your white dress, or just felt the need to change- ironically enough.

Your normal seat in the front centre of the room is obviously free, considering also that you were quite early this morning. You had some readings you needed to catch up on anyway, in order to be prepared for midterms which were apparently coming up quickly.

It isn't long after you open your book before others begin to shuffle in, and much to your surprise, you feel the chair next to you pull back and see someone sit down. "Hi, Victor." The boy's voice says, forcing you to look up from your book.

Dark hair and dark eyes, you think you remember his name was Cancor. "Oh, my name is Y/N." You correct him kindly, adjusting nervously in your seat.

"I know that." He says, eyes merely slits as he seems to look past your own eyes and into your soul.

"You're... You're Cancor, correct? I don't believe we've properly met." You add, sitting up straighter.

"Crane." He states. "My last name is Crane."

"That's... yes that's a lovely name." You smile nervously, unsure what to say but still wanting to fill the silence he seemed so comfortable with. "Alliteration is such a fun thing to consider when naming a child..."

"It means spider." He states. "Did you ever meet my sister?" He asks, ignoring your nervous ramblings.

"No, no I don't believe I have. What is her name?" You ask.

"Arachne." The boy says, raising an eyebrow at you expectantly while you take a moment to wrack your mind to place it. He's acting as if you should know her, and suddenly you feel like you do.

You tilt your head slightly, allowing the memory to hit you like a freight train.

The funeral.

All you really remembered until now was being chained to a truck and paraded down the street you now recognize as the Corso, the body of his sister's tribute swinging above you while people screamed and cursed at you. Then, Coryo sang the national anthem.

"Oh, yes. Of course." You nod slightly, a frown settling over your features. "I am so sorry for your loss. Truly."

"No, you're not." He spits. "You don't care, and the fact that you're pretending to is just vile. She meant less than nothing to you and those animals- otherwise, she would still be here!"

You stammer, pushing yourself back in your seat as you grip the bottom of the chair. "No, no- I am sorry, I am. That should not have happened. It- It was horrible."

"Cancor." You silently thank the universe for your professor's quick intervention. "If you wouldn't mind returning to your usual seat and leaving Miss Y/L/N alone."

"We were just talking." Cancor replies, suddenly sweet as honey- cool and collected as if he wasn't just berating you over your faults in his sister's death.

"Go." Dr. Nero tells him again, nodding up toward the back of the lecture hall. "Before I am forced to ask you to leave."

The boy sighs in quiet frustration, slightly aggressive about his movements as he grabs his bag and stomps up the stairs.

You look up to your professor who greets the look with a curt nod and the smallest of sympathetic smiles.

It does nothing to quell the lightness you feel that usually signifies the trembling of your hands, which would soon spread. You close your eyes trying to take deep breaths that wouldn't come, but all you can see is the bodies of Arachne Crane and her tribute by the bars that had separated them. You have to open your eyes to remind yourself you aren't standing in the street, wrists still shackled to a truck. You can feel the chains weighing your wrists down to the desk as you think about it. You had almost entirely forgotten about the whole event- and the guilt of that was suddenly clawing its way up your throat. Cancor had never had the privilege of forgetting the way you had.

Quickly, you shove your books into your bag and stand, heading for the door. "Y/N." Dr. Nero's voice forces you to stop and you just turn to look at him, knowing full well you're unable to speak. "It's 8:58."

You nod slightly, looking down at the marble flooring that lay between you. "Start without me." You mumble, not giving him the chance to respond before you're leaving, accidentally bumping shoulders with some of the final students to enter.

You hadn't missed a single class yet, attendance was important, but right now you couldn't care less. Why should you even have the privilege of attending classes at the university in place of some of the academy's brightest minds who never got the chance? Like Arachne, and the three other mentors who were killed because of the games. You knew it wasn't necessarily your fault, but you understood Cancor's anger being directed at you. In a twisted way, you felt like you deserved it. They were meant to survive, you never were. Yet, here you were- a walking reminder to those students' friends and families that for some reason, they had to lose someone they shouldn't have.

You quickly pace down the nearly empty hall, trying to hold back your tears as long as you could. Feeling like you can't breathe is making it exponentially harder, and you wonder how you even walked out of the arena as it was. Adrenaline is a crazy beast- and you wished you had some leftover now. Sometimes, in moments like this, you wonder if you had used up your life's supply of the chemical the last time you were here in the Capitol.

Coryo was already running late after spending probably far too long conversing with your brother in the car, but he couldn't resist taking a detour into the arts building. He would just pass through, past your room just to glance inside and see if you were really there. Just to get a look at you.

He doesn't need to, though, turning a corner and just catching a glimpse of your hair as you disappear with a left turn at the end of the corridor. He was sure it was you.

Walking past your classroom he looks anyway, just to double-check, and as he suspected, you were gone.

He quickens his pace, taking advantage of his height difference over you to try and catch up with more rushed steps. "Y/N?" He calls out as he turns the same corner, but you're already hidden from view and the door at the far end of the hall is slamming shut.

As he continues down the corridor, a furrow knits its way into his brow. You must be headed to where you normally eat lunch, that is all that would make sense.

Without thinking, he follows. The courtyard is almost empty, aside from your frame curled up on the grass, knees tucked to your chest and bag discarded halfheartedly beside you on the damp grass. The sun casts a shadowed glow where it isn't blocked by trees or buildings in its path of rising, the grass is wet under his shoes as he quickly approaches you.

"Hey- hey, Y/N/N, it's me." He calls out as he walks up behind you. You turn your head, and then stand quickly.

"It- It's okay. I'm fine." You stammer, wiping your cheeks frantically. "You should g-go, you're already late."

"I'm not leaving you like this." He shakes his head, holding a hand out toward you as you avoid his eyes. "Tell me what happened, love. Talk to me."

You shake your head, shoulders backed to an invisible wall as you hold your palms over your face. You can't look at him right now- especially right now, when all you want is for him to hold you.

"You're okay. I'm not gonna hurt you." He whispers, taking a hesitant step closer. By now, you know full well he wouldn't hurt you. Not in the way he's saying, at least.

"You should go." You choke over the words that feel heavy in your mouth.

"Y/N, love, I told you, I'm not going anywhere." He repeats calmly.

"I want to go home." You sob. "I shouldn't have won, I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't even be alive!" You say, voice picking up in frustration. "It's not fair. Nothing is fair, nothing."

He frowns as you lower your hands, clenching your fists at your sides. "Of course, you should be here."

"You don't get it!" You snap, and you hardly even sound like yourself.

This was it. This was your breaking point.

Coryo is taken back by your outburst, almost flinching at the abruptness of your shift. He had never seen you angry- he didn't even know it was possible. Of course it was. He'd spent all this time, all this energy trying to convince people that you were human. Anger comes with that, hand in hand like your cat and the fur that's clinging to his clothes at this very moment. You couldn't have one without the other. "Then explain it to me." He urges you, trying to sound anything other than defensive.

Your eyes soften, as if you're suddenly realizing that your anger was not entirely placed on him. You shake your head. "It's not... I cannot explain it and that is the worst part." You sigh, but the rage flashes in your eyes again as you look down. "Why was it me and not any of them? Why did so many of your classmates have to die? Why did Marcus escape only to face a worse fate than the rest of us, when he tried to help me too? Why am I enrolled at this stuffy university when my spot belongs to Arachne Crane in rights?"

"Arachne Crane?" Coryo mutters, eyes widening with confusion while he wonders where on earth that came from. He shakes his head quickly to dismiss the thought. "Marcus tried to save you, yes, that could have been you who escaped, that's true- but you were too busy trying to save me. And you did." He knows better than to accuse you of regretting that. He knows you don't.

When you don't reply, just staring at him head on now, frustrated and confused, he continues. "If we're going by this unexplainable logic of the universe, I think that it was you because instead of saving yourself, you saved me. And you did it again in the arena, when you went back for Jessup when I was looking at the screen and begging you silently to just ditch him. Same exact thing when you tried to get little Wovey up into the rafters with you, and hell! When you stared down the barrel of my gun, shaking head to toe from fear just to save the life of the Mayor's daughter, who was nothing but awful to everyone!" He says, gesticulating wildly to get his point across. "I've been trying to tell you for months, Y/N. It was you because you are the only person in this whole damn country who cares about someone other than themselves."

You just shake your head, and it's frustrating to him that you're unwilling to accept what he knows to be true. "It didn't work." You sniff. "You're the only one who survived me."

"Listen to me," Coryo says, reaching out and holding your face in his hands- throwing caution to the wind regarding how he knows to handle your panic attacks. "I survived because I had to learn how to love you."

You look into his eyes, flitting your own back and forth between them in an attempt to place any signs of deception. Blue, baby blue. You find none.

"And I did. And I'll love you every day for the rest of our lives. I don't want you to think for a minute that I'm embarrassed by that fact." Your eyes are squeezed shut by the time he finishes speaking, his thumbs swiping over the tear stains left down your cheeks by anger.

"It's not your fault." You mumble, shaking your head under his hold. "I do not fault you for being embarrassed."

"I'm not." He says again. "Look at me, please, love."

You pry your eyes open to face him.

"I've... I've had all this pressure my whole life to be perfect, and now it's worse than ever and I should have never let that get pushed onto you. I want you to be happy, that's all. I want you to be free to do whatever you want, and right now, the cost of that comes with who we are in public. Do you understand?"

"Yes." You say softly, but he can see that's not fully true.

"Here, in the Capitol, everything is a social ladder. We cannot marry who we wish, we marry who we should. Rarely ever do kids here date for fun."

"Like Lucy Gray and the silly mistakes she made over and over again with Billy Taupe." You comment, trying to lighten the tension you feel radiating off his body.

"Yes." He chuckles, smiling hopefully at you, relieved that you understood. "But I want nothing more on this earth than for you to be the one I spend my life with. I want to make you happy, but first, in order to do that, you have to be someone that they will accept. And I am so, so sorry I didn't explain this to you sooner, but I want you to know I've never wanted you to change."

"We don't need them to like me to be happy. That will be an endless uphill battle, Coryo." You shake your head slightly, placing your hands over his as they slide down onto your neck.

"It will be uphill but we can do it." He assures you quickly. "You're already well-liked, we're-"

"Were you not happy in Twelve?" You ask, a sad look in your eyes.

He stops, tilting his head slightly at you. He was happy in Twelve, now that he considers it. He hadn't thought about it, he was so focused on hating everything but you that he just assumed it was awful, but really, it wasn't. Not in hindsight."Is that what you want?"

You smile in response. No one had asked in months what you wanted. What you really wanted.

"What do you want, love? I'll pack up and move us back to Twelve tomorrow if that's what you really want." He says again, nothing short of desperation in his tone.

Faced with the option, you're really not sure. Yes, of course, you'd like to go home. It was very tempting. But Coryo was right, this education was important. You imagine for a moment the life you could have back home if you stuck it out a few more years. And maybe by then, you'll be better accepted here. Maybe by then, the Capitol will be a different place, and you'll be truly happy here. With him, and he will have the power to make the games go away.

"No, no." You shake your head. "I want to do something splendid...something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday." You say, and he can tell from your change in notation that the words are not your own. It was something new, unlike what he had heard from you before. He smiles. "I want to be with you, first and foremost."

"You'll always be with me. Where you go, I follow." He assures you. "I was happy in Twelve, if only because I had you."

"That should not be enough, though." You insist.

"It has been for you, hasn't it?" He asks, and you nod, biting your tongue.

He grins. "Then I promise, love, that would be more than enough for me."

"O-okay." You agree, suddenly flushed by his stare. Coryo smiles, looking briefly at your lips as you speak. To him, they seemed more tempting now than ever.

He starts to lean in and you move your head back quickly, a worried look crossing your face and you look around. "Coryo, we-"

"I don't care." He says quickly, gently pulling you back to him and pressing his lips to yours. Consequences are the last thing on his mind right now.

You take hold of the front of his delicately pressed shirt, pulling him closer with his hands on your neck. Here, in the middle of the university courtyard with the sun shining down on your back, everything is okay and at least for now, the cold night has given way to a warm, sunny morning.

taglist: @soulessjourney , @that-veela-girl ,  @dreamyysouls , @rockstarbfs , @maysileeewrites , @baybieruth , @kitscutie ,  @fratboyharrysgf0201 , @totallynotkaibiased , @stelleduarte , @secretsicanthideanymore , @bejeweledreverie , @drewsandsebastianswife , @niicole-87 , @queenofshinigamis , @innercreationflower , @nallasstuff , @iovemoonyy , @thatmarvelchick19 , @wearemadeofstardust0 , @regulusblackcore , @puredreamagination , @fantasticchaosthing , @becauseseaotters , @secretsicanthideanymore , @cascadingbliss

okay suddenly tumblr isn't letting me tag more people than this so i just made some cuts unfortunately :') i just left the max amount of people i could whose users i recognized and see in my notifs all the time :) if you're not on here and you should be i'm so sorry!

also this taglist is closed now!! if you’d like to get a notification when i update, turn on my post notifications!! i promise i won’t spam y'all :,)

[andthisisdia]

🫧Hi🫧

Name: call me Dia💎

Age: I was born in 2002 and I'm too lazy to update my age every year💅

Nationality: Italian (English is not my first language so I might make some grammatical errors)

🏳️‍🌈: I'm a bisexual and demisexual/demiromantic girl (I use she/her pronouns)

MBTI: ENTJ (Don't stereotype me. I'm just really into doing things right and I like to have a plan for everything. I always try to find a solution to people's problems)

Something about me: I'm autistic and borderline 🪐 and I'm very extroverted, I like to socialize and meet new people. So if we have any interests in common, feel free to write to me🌌 (Read the continuation to find out more about me and what I post, it's important. Thank you)

(I made this edit using picsart stickers that represent my interests and something about me)

🎮Favorite video games:

•League of Legends (I play on the European server)

•Wildrift

•Valorant (I don't play it that much because I'm not very good)

•Overwatch

•Team Fortress 2 (my hyper fixation, I need to talk to other tf2 fans. I'm going crazy, I don't know who to talk to about it, I'm afraid of appearing boring to my friends who aren't fans😭😭😭)

•Life is strange (this game made me realize I'm not straight)

•Detroit Become Human

•Danganronpa (I discovered this thanks to tik tok during the pandemic. It was very trendy at the time)

•The last of us

•The Sims 3/4 (I never had the chance to play the previous ones)

🍿My favorite TV series are:

•Shameless

•Love, Death & Robots

•Bojack Horseman

•Arcane

•She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

•Ever After High

🎼Singers I like:

•Madison Beer

•Mitski

•Ariana Grande

•Ashnikko

•Kali Uchis

•Girl in Red

•Marina and the diamonds

•KDA ("Akali that girl, 'kali go grr 'Kali don't stop, 'kali don't skrt 'Kali got a job, 'kali go to work 뜨거워 언제나 don't get burnt" 🗣🗣🗣)

•Gorillaz

•Queen

•Molchat Doma

•Arctic Monkeys

•Mother Mother

•Jack Stauber

•Cavetown

•TV girl

•Bo Burnham

I actually listen to a lot of artists but I don't remember them all c:

🫧Things I like:

•Lost media

•Liminal space

•Dreamcore

•Nostalgiacore

•History of cinema (especially animated films)

•Psychology (and all other branches of this science. I also love anthropology and sociology)

•Travel and discover new places

•Everything that has to do with creativity (Drawing, writing stories and fanfiction, creating things like accessories for your clothes and such very cute things. I really admire people who can repaint dolls)

•Having fun (going out with my friends, watching films - if they're trashy films it's even better -, sending each other memes and tik tok videos and things like that)

🪷Hobby:

•Cosplay (Especially cosplaying my comfort characters)

•Drawing (I haven't drawn seriously since 2020. I'm waiting for inspiration)

•Collecting dolls (I love Monster High, Ever After High, Rainbow High and L.O.L O.M.G. I also collect Funko pops and figures from other brands. I also have many books and comics -which I have to finish reading because there are too many-)🧸

•Roleplay (Doing roleplay with me means that I have already organized the whole plot. But I also listen to the other person's ideas)

•Find out about the topics that interest me (Most of the time they have to do with culture. I'm a very curious person and I love to inform myself)

��What I post on Tumblr:

•Things about my fandom

•Positivity (Especially mental health or pride posts about being a member of the LGBT community. Be yourself🌈Be unique)

•Aesthetics

•Vent

•My posts are tagged "Dia's post"

🦦Other random things:

•My favorite musicals are Heathers and Ride The Cyclone (the name of my blog is a mix between two of these songs)

•I'm terrible with numbers and sometimes I read the wrong words (I have a learning disability -be patient-)

•In my blog there are posts about Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss BUT IT'S NOT A SPECIAL INTEREST OF MINE. I recognize that they are two series with a lot of plot holes and nonsense. But it still reminds me of time spent with my friends. I actually like hearing people analyze and criticize it. I'm fond of the character of Vaggie and I like the ship between Sir Pentious and Cherri Bomb but as I wrote before: it's no longer a special interest of mine. I am neutral towards them

•I'm an atheist

•I am very interested in the meaning (and world) of dreams

‼️ Sometimes I also reposted something related to when I feel down. Unfortunately I have a lot of trauma but I'm trying to move forward and get better‼️

🔞I'm a girl from 2002 so I have young adult maturity‼️I want to talk to people my own age. You can follow me if you like my "aesthetic fandom stuff" but i would like to talk to people my age🔞

🧜‍♀️Comfort characters:

•Jinx (League of legends/Arcane. She is my main and for certain things I see myself in her)

•Seraphine (League of Legends. didn't like her at first but I love her gameplay. And I think she has the best skins -along with Jinx, of course-)

•Evelynn (League of Legends. She's a Goddess)

•Chloe Price (Life is strange. She made me understand that I like women too. I love this punk)

•Sunset Shimmer (Equestria Girls. She is one of the few ENTJs to be a positive character. I really like how her character has evolved)

•Reagan Ridley (Inside Job. We are very similar in certain things)

•Entrapta (She ra. I love this chaotic neutral autistic scientist princess. Again, I see myself in her)

•Kotori Minami (Love Live! When I was in middle school this was my favorite anime)

•Dia Kurosawa (Love Live! Sunshine. Love Live is an anime that accompanied me as I grew up. I'm very fond of it)

❕️I'm looking for young adult people like me (young adult means being over 18 and under 30). I have no problem with NSFW (I prefer artistic nudity) and I have no problem with swearing. I have a certain maturity so I want to interact with people like that.❕️

‼️ This is my safe space🗣 SO DO NOT INTERACT WITH ME IF YOU ARE: racist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic and against the LGBT community, do not interact if you are a pedophile and if you harm animals.Don't fetishize queer people. We are people, not nsfw categories. And don't romanticize the Mafia. Be kind and open-minded. Don't interact if you are against feminism (which I remind you, means gender equality), don't interact if you are people with ideas of hatred and discrimination. No ignorant people about mental health or what is happening in the world, because we are in 2024 and we need to have a minimum of culture. If you think abortion is murder, I would say you can also go elsewhere because I support women's rights and human rights in general. In general, don't interact if you are a person with bad ideas (that kind of bad ideas. Go away)‼️

🌟Talk to me if you are a normal person (and if you're nice and send funny memes. Or if you want to talk about some fandom in common or something. We can also play some video games together or talk about philosophical things like "what's the point of life?" or things like "do aliens exist?")🌟

[roboticonography]

it's getting really upsetting to see certain corners of the fandom demonize peggy. do you have any thoughts on the matter?

Oh, if only this were a new thing, anon!

I’ve been in the MCU fandom since before there was an MCU to speak of. Shitting on women characters and the actors who play them has been going on forever. People posted about how they hated Pepper Potts, saying she wasn’t a good partner to Tony because she didn’t constantly enable his erratic behaviour, or sacrifice her safety to accommodate his trauma. They posted about how Pepper should have died in Iron Man 2, for the good of Tony’s story, and when Iron Man 3 came out, they said the same thing. It was fucking exhausting.

People also posted about how they hated Natasha Romanoff, how they hated Jane Foster, how they hated Wanda Maximoff, how they hated Sharon Carter. 

And yes, there were Peggy-haters then too. They called her a “karate-kicking fucktoy” and a “vengeful feminazi” and those are the most polite terms I can recall. They complained that she was too powerful, they complained that she was too feminine, they complained that she was pointless without Steve, they complained that she talked about Steve too much. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum.

Now, to be clear, I am not talking about some of the very valid criticisms people had about the Agent Carter series - its writing, its casting, etc. I am also not talking about the very valid criticisms people have about the larger MCU related to representation, or lack thereof, across multiple fronts. I believe it’s possible to enjoy a piece of media and still have issues with some (or even many) aspects of it, and I enjoy reading posts that grapple with those issues. I’m not even talking about venting about a popular character you can’t stand: that has its place, though I’d argue that the place is probably not in the tag for that character. (I guarantee you, your “unpopular opinion” is never as unpopular as you think.)

I’m talking about misogyny. The same tired, rehashed, played out bullshit woman-hating that has existed in fandoms, so many fandoms, for at least the 25+ years that I’ve been active in them.

And that’s still what’s happening.

Many of the posts I’ve seen that fall under this category are expressing anger that one character or relationship or storyline or interpretation of canon is getting airtime, while another one, one they like better, is not. I’m not going to argue with anyone about that. You like what you like, and you're entitled to be annoyed if you don't get it. But if your argument is sound, you should be able to make your point effectively without calling the character the grossest euphemism for vagina you can find, or speculating on the exact sex acts an actor had to do to keep her character popular.

Other posts I’ve seen are just absolute buckwild conspiracy theory nonsense. The only thing I have to say about that is, yikes. Get well soon.

Tumblr, like other social media platforms, recognizes that they get more engagement if people are forced to play in the same sandbox, which is why it probably feels like you're seeing a disproportionate number of hate posts. And anyone who writes for money on the internet knows that hate clicks are often the juiciest clicks, and so they will write articles and listicles and polls with titles and subjects designed to get your blood up. It’s become increasingly difficult to avoid seeing other people’s ridiculous opinions. But that’s still the strategy that I find best helps me enjoy fandom. 

So if “certain corners” of the fandom are not to your taste, anon, then my advice is this: block, blacklist, and just don’t engage. Don’t feed the trolls. Instead, put that energy into positive interactions. Make art. Comment on things you liked. Find your friends, and have conversations that inspire you and amuse you, instead of ones that make you angry and tired.

Thanks for the ask! Take care.

[free-for-all-fics]

Enola Holmes and Enola Holmes 2 Prompts Part 2! Pls tag me if you’re inspired by any of these and I’d love to read it! 🕵🏻🖤🕵🏻‍♀️

13. You’re the illegitimate daughter of a rich and powerful man, your mother having been one of his mistresses. While in public, your father calls himself your godfather and you his goddaughter and neither of you can ever acknowledge your true relation in public, but he does show that he loves you. With your engagement to Sherlock Holmes, you’re very happy. He loves you, and you love him. You know that. He’s your best friend and your mother used to say that you must marry the man who is your dearest friend. But suddenly, he’s stopped you from going with him on cases. You’re not sure why, as you’ve accompanied him and sometimes even his younger sister, Enola, before. You go to your father for guidance in this situation.

“He was more interested in going on capers than with spending any time at all with me. He used to let me tag along with him, we used to be a team, working on solving cases together, but lately, something in him has changed. It’s only getting worse. He values my insight and my perspective on cases, but he won’t let me help beyond looking over clues in his flat. He suddenly says it’s too dangerous, that it’s better if he works alone. But his sister is still a minor and she’s gone on wild adventures while solving her own cases. Why won’t he let me join him anymore?”

“Y/N, please. Sit. Whatever my issues with Mr. Holmes, I know that he cares deeply for you. That he loves you. And remember, it is you who is to become Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. It could be coming from a fear of losing you. What he does and what his sister does is highly dangerous. I can understand his worry. After what happened the last time…”

He doesn’t even have to say it for you to know exactly what he’s referring to. While investigating a case, you were in a coach with Enola when your driver was shot. The horses whinnied in fright as they were spooked into galloping aimlessly at breakneck speed and the two of you were tossed about the rattling coach like dice in a cup, glass shattering and wood splintering around you as you were shot at, causing the carriage to disconnect from the horses and overturn off a cliff.

~

“Y/N, are you all right?”

“I don't believe it's hit bone.”

“You need to tie it off.”

While your ankle was wounded, Enola was luckily relatively unscathed and still able to walk, only suffering some non-fatal cuts and bruises. She helped to support you as you walked, panting and grunting the entire way.

“Why do you think we've been followed all the way up here?”

“Because we know too much. Enola, if I don't get away and you do, I need you to give your brother a message.”

“You'll have to deliver that message yourself, as I have no intention of either of us dying today.”

~

“Y/N, we must hurry. I think it's best if we stick to the woods. Is the pain better or worse?”

“Hard to tell. I think my brain has already habituated to it.”

“What did you want to tell me? Your message.”

“Oh, it's nothing.”

“Oh. I’m not a fool, Y/N. I saw the love between Sarah Chapman and William Lyon during one of my previous cases and I myself am in love with Viscount Tewkesbury. I can recognize that look.”

You grunted.

“‘Dull,’ I think Sherlock called it. But he doesn’t always mean what he says. Does he know how you feel?”

“Not the extent of it.”

“And is it reciprocated?”

“Yes.”

“Of course, I...I suspected it all along, but to actually hear you say it... He’s wonderful. He’ll make you very happy. Look after him, Y/N.”

“I shall do my best.”

“Well, I suppose I can brag that I introduced the two of you.”

“I know it's hard to comprehend. I've questioned my own feelings many times. I told myself it's concern and duty on his part, dependence on mine. And naturally, I realize how inappropriate it is, but...there are certain things a woman cannot control.”

“I told you, love resides in the heart.”

“Nonsense. It's still physiology.”

“Oh.”

“His brain reacts to qualities in me that he lacks in himself... He can be dispassionate and cold, only ever animated and excited during a case. While I am sociable, and exude kindness, warmth…”

“Humility.”

“That, too. And my brain reacts to qualities in him that I lack in myself. Courage, for example.”

“You’ve shown more courage in the last few days than most people do in their entire lifetime. No one deserves love more than you. Come on.”

When you went to hospital, Sherlock was called and told of the incident. Despite you telling him yourself that it was unnecessary and that you and Enola were fine, just a sprained ankle and some cuts and bruises, he still came over to see you.

“You had expectations of me, Y/N. Fair ones. I got caught up in this case…a matter of confounding urgency that…overtook me, and then…I’m sorry, Y/N.”

Sherlock,

The nurse just told me you'd been in to see her. Should've let me know, I'd have made sure I was there. It's been a while. I'm sure she appreciates it. You know she'd tell you that herself if she could. You know she loves you and doesn’t blame you for what happened. And neither do I. Call me when you get this message.

Enola

“If there’s one thing Mr. Holmes and I can agree on, it’s that we don’t want to see you hurt or dead.” Your father says, pulling you back to the present.

“Yes, that very well could be it. He’s never been in love before, and neither have I. I’d understand if he was scared. I’m scared too. But I’m ready to be a wife. His wife. But is he really ready to be a husband? My husband? Have you seen how he gazes at his work during his investigations? How he leaps out of his chair when he’s suddenly had an epiphany? How he hangs onto every word of every person he’s ever interviewed? I love that about him. I know he leads a busy life. I’ve always known that, but his inability to balance his professional life with his love life is so…concerning. I worry for his health sometimes. There are days he barely eats, and nights he barely sleeps. When a case vexes him, he imbibes in alcohol, tobacco, or even other drugs like cocaine. Why does he endlessly push himself? I fear that I’ll be as my mother was to you. An accessory. Papa, I understand the ways of men of your standing, but Sherlock and I haven’t even begun a life together.”

“I promise you I will bring Mr. Holmes to heel. I will not let you suffer.”

“As your wife has? And my mother has? Sometimes, it’s as though the whole of England whispers as I pass by. ‘There goes that poor, unwanted, misbegotten thing.’”

“Oh, Y/N. My girl. You are so dear to me.”

You won’t rely on your father to fix your relationship with your fiancé. You’re a grown woman, you can handle this yourself. You know Sherlock has always worked alone, but you’ll show him that he doesn’t have to anymore. Your marriage, like all marriages should be, will be a partnership. You will be equals. You’ll be very happy. Even if you have to enlist Enola’s help in snapping Sherlock out of whatever funk he’s in, you’ll do what must be done so you can go back to how things used to be. You won’t let him treat you like a fragile, weak thing made of glass.

~

“I’m sorry, Y/N. It’s been a strange day. There is something I would like to speak with you about which is troubling me.”

“Well, that can’t stand, can it? I won’t let you be troubled when you’re with me. It’s not permitted. Please, look at me. You know I love you, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Then you know that is no easy feat for someone like me, for someone whose family she’s not allowed to acknowledge, who’s always aware of the whispers when she enters a room, who’s never had solace or a name to call her own. And this is why I cannot wait to be announced as Mrs. Sherlock Holmes on our big day. In belonging to you, I will finally belong.”

14. You were once Sherlock Holmes’ friend, but then something happened to you that set off a chain reaction of bad events which led to you doing many odd jobs, including selling your hair and working at a match factory, a tailoring shop, and even becoming a prostitute. You’re well aware of the Jack the Ripper killings that have been occurring, but Sherlock once told you to stay unemotional, and so you do. You have to, to bear going through with the kind of work you do, to let men lay on top of you and do what they wish to you for coin. But then you become pregnant and, after your child is born, they are taken from you against your wishes by the Madame. You wake up in the middle of the night and discover your baby gone. You escape from the hospital you were put in and desperately enlist the help of your old friend Sherlock to find your baby. You couldn’t care less about the man who got you pregnant. He’s dead to you. But your baby…you still want him/her. They came from your body, they’re yours. Sherlock feels terrible and guilty for leading such a busy life that he lost touch with you, and has been unaware of the series of unfortunate events that have befallen you.

“Now what may I observe about you? Shoes a state. Hair’s not much better. You need to wash your clothes every now and again. You are pale…undernourished, and you’ve lost your…”

“Stop!” You point your finger at him.

“And then there’s your fingernails. Why on earth were you working in a match factory?”

“What?”

“Last night, they were dirty with green traces. This morning, they are black. The phosphorus from the match-making has mixed with the oxygen in the atmosphere.”

“How did you…”

“And your neck is red. Someone has gripped it or held a knife against…” Sherlock stops as he looks at you. “Are you involved in something dangerous? Because you are still my friend. If you need my help, my offer remains on the table.”

“The Madame didn’t want a baby. She didn’t want me to keep it, so she…sent me to a hospital. They took the baby from me. I’m fortunate I bled too much and they left me intact instead of sterilizing me like they do other women. But I want my baby back. Please, Sherlock. I know I’ve fallen on hard times and it seems I’m incapable, but I…I want the chance to try, to be a mother.”

“Having your baby… That made you happy. To feel loved, didn’t it?”

“When my baby was born, they were covered in blood, and the nurses wiped them down, and they laid my baby on me, and from that moment, I loved them. Please, Sherlock. Help me find them.”

“I’ll do more than that. I’ll help you get back on your feet. I promise this will never happen to you again. You’ll never have to go back to that place.”

~

“Sherlock…I thought I’d lost you. What are we going to do?”

“We’ll find a way. Is that not what you want?”

“I just fear that you love this version of me, your friend, and all the qualities that you like in me as a friend, you would not want in a wife.”

“I love you for your kindness and your courage, your beauty, and your fierce intelligence. You challenge me. What are you scared of, Y/N?”

“Love that is not truthful is not love. It’s only passion. Is it not true that you want a wife, a family, a place to call home? That’s what you want?”

“Is that so wrong?”

“No. But at this moment, I’m not sure that I…”

“You need rest.”

“In the hospital, you asked me, did I want a family?”

“And you said that you did.”

“I have dreamt about it often, but I realize here in this room what it is I value most dearly in life. I was born a gentleman. I have grown accustomed to behaving in a certain, correct way, not quite saying what it is I want and don’t want.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you.”

15. You've always been average, rather Plain Jane compared to your sisters. Unlike your beautiful and multi-talented sisters, you’ve no serious marriage prospects, so your parents often forget you in favor of focusing on securing your sisters’ marriages to men of wealth and social status. You love your parents and your sisters, but you suffer from classic middle child syndrome. Your family keeps asking you to run errands for them which means you can't focus on any one thing for a longer time, and you can’t say no to them. You often run into Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective, among many other accomplishments, while running these errands. Impressed by his many talents, his charm, his devilishly handsome good looks and more, you befriend him. Not an easy feat, since he’s a man who prefers to keep to himself. “Stay unemotional,” and “You’re emotional. It’s understandable but unnecessary,” are two of his favorite phrases to live by. Though he’s hesitant to admit it, even to himself, he enjoys your company, and you always spare him a thought or two, inadvertently helping him with his cases without thinking much of it, failing to recognize your own genius and other attractive qualities. You never thought of yourself as anything much. Not a great beauty, musician, athlete, or artist like your sisters.

Your family even sends you out on errands at night, sometimes without access to a horse or carriage if your sisters need to use them. You’re left to walk, scared half to death by shady characters and wild dogs when you run into Sherlock and his younger sister, Enola, who stop their carriage once they see you. It’s not safe for a woman like you to be out alone at night, especially with money in your purse. There are scary people about. They offer to give you a ride, which you gladly accept. Though Sherlock is in quite an inebriated state. He doesn’t usually imbibe, but he’s on a case, you see. It’s proven rather tricky. Sherlock introduces you and Enola, slurring his words as he does so. Though it’s under less than ideal circumstances, you’re happy to meet her.

You help Enola carry Sherlock, slinging his other arm around your shoulders and supporting his other side as, it turns out, he is medievally heavy. It’s like carrying a dead horse on which sits another dead horse.

“That’s A, and I’m B.”

“I didn’t know you had steps.”

“One should always have steps to avoid people stepping on you. That’s a tip, you should probably write that down.”

You help Enola to get Sherlock up the steps, and though it’s not an easy task, the two of you manage to get him inside his flat and he throws himself onto the couch. While he’s sleeping, you and Enola look around. The place is a mess.

“It’s perfect. Don’t touch anything.”

“What are you investigating?”

“None of your business. I work alone. It’s private. Shh! Don’t go in there. No.”

You stay the night and while Sherlock all but kicks Enola out, (“Dundee cake. Door. You can help by leaving.”) He permits you to stay, using some excuse like you’re an adult and not his sister, so he can’t tell you what to do. You help him clean up his flat just the way he likes it while he’s hungover and indisposed with a headache. While you’re cleaning, you chat about many things.

Soon you’re making excuses to your family so you can go out and see him during both the day and the night. They’re none the wiser, assuming you’re eager to get to your chores. This turns into a secret romance between you and Sherlock. The secret places you meet at are far from glamorous, but you’ll take a flat, a building with a leaky roof, a spot in the woods, or a pub any day. Just to spend hours in his arms while investigating his current case with him. But first, you have to overcome the bane of your existence, the corset: A symbol of repression to those who are forced to wear it. But for you, who chooses to wear it, the bust enhancer and the hip regulators will hide the secret messages Sherlock has given you. And as they do so, they will make you look like that truly unlikely thing: A lady!

“This one is too small.”

“We shall just have to get you a tighter cinch,” your mother says as she comes in.

“I cannot breathe as it is.”

“If one cannot breathe, one cannot eat. Tighter. Tighter!”

“Is she to breathe, Mama?” One of your sisters tries to interject.

“I was able to squeeze my waist into the size of an orange and a half when I was your sister’s age. She shall do the same. How’s it coming?”

“It’s difficult to say.”

“I’m told it’s the latest fashion in London.”

“Well, women in London must’ve learned not to breathe! Ow! I can barely breathe!”

“You must suffer to be beautiful, so say the French.”

“The French are crazy.”

One of your other sisters comes into the room, holding a large box. “Sister, dear, Father has left a gift for you.”

You open it. It’s an evening dress and, unlike your mother’s choices, this dress is to your liking. “Oh, it’s beautiful!”

“Isn’t it?”

“May I inquire as to the occasion?”

“Does Father need an occasion to dote upon his daughter? Go on. Actually, he…he had hoped you might wear it for the ball tonight.”

“Ball?”

“The Match Maker’s Ball.”

“I knew it!” You turn towards your maid. “No, Tessie. I'll not wear this evening dress as I have no need to flatter myself.”

“It’s a charity gala. To combat Typhus.”

“Will there be gentlemen present? I should say, rather, there will be gentlemen present, yes, but not for me. Just for you and our sisters. It’s only a ball, and I’m only there for the food, as Mother likes to say.”

“All the more reason to make an impression,” your mother points out.

“Please, Sister, won’t you wear it?”

“Mr. Clark will be there. He’s a fine gentleman, don’t you think? He fancies you, you know.”

“I can't decide whether they abhor our shape or crave another,” you say to your maid once you’re alone in the room again.

“They believe us to be delicate creatures, miss.”

“Then to hell with them.”

Coincidentally, Sherlock’s case and Enola’s case and your family’s desire to see your sisters married leads the three of you to the same place: The Match Maker’s Ball hosted by the Lyons. You and Enola and Sherlock meet again while going undercover to investigate the case and underneath the fancy dress and sparkling jewelry, Sherlock recognizes you. Even when you were dressed as a kitchen mouse to disguise yourself, he always thought you were beautiful. He puts his name or alias in your dance card and you dance together. You thought those lessons with your sisters teaching you how to use a fan were boring and pointless.

~

“What are we learning today?”

“We are learning the art of the fan.”

“Fascinating.” You deadpanned.

“Yes. Get up. Get up. We only have about ten minutes in which to communicate this. Now, first of all, one handles a fan very deliberately. It's a tremendous tool of communication. That's it. You can say things like, ‘I'm feeling flirtatious. Come hither.’ You can say, ‘l never wish to speak to you again. Go away.’ You can say, ‘I'm feeling terribly shy today.’ And you...Are you sassing your sister?”

“I would never sass you, Sister.”

“This is also a way of showing you're annoyed.” Your sister hit you with her fan.

~

Now, you use the fan to your advantage to cover your mouth while discussing the case in hushed tones. You also use it to tell Sherlock, “I love you,” from afar. You’ve been in love for such a long time, but were too blind to see it.

“Picking up any gossip?”

“Mmhm.”

Your family starts to get suspicious, especially when they notice you’ve barely spent any time with your caller and have been seen dancing with Sherlock Holmes. Your caller interrupts you and Sherlock after the dance is over, asking for a moment of your time. You and Sherlock bow and curtsy to each other, then part ways. He takes you to the second floor and you look out at the dance floor below from over the banister.

“May I have a moment? You look lovely, Y/N.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I apologize if I seem forward, but I must speak my mind. This promotion throws into sharp relief that which I have not yet achieved. A marriage to a fine woman. You have become a fine woman, Y/N.”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Yes, I…I’m a bit nervous myself.”

You fall from the second story balcony, landing on a table. Horrified gasps and screams fill the room, causing a commotion as Sherlock pushes his way through the crowd and towards you. Focused on getting you to breathe again, he cuts open your dress and corset, ripping the damned death trap off of you. You greedily gasp for air, your lungs desperate for it. You look up at Sherlock with dazed eyes. After you recover, he gets you alone to ask you some questions that have been weighing on his mind.

“When I teased you and said that perhaps you're in love with him, you said that you were. Did you mean it?”

“I imagine I was teasing you back.”

“I think I'm in love with you.”

“There you go again, Sherlock Holmes.”

“I know it's embarrassing to speak of such things, that we should keep them to ourselves and abide by the codes that keep us civilized, but how can we be civilized when we've experienced something like this? Turn me down, by all means...but don't pretend I have no feelings for you.”

Sometime in the future, Sherlock is your husband. He is the softest, most doting husband you could ever ask for. Whenever you can’t decide what you should wear for the day, he picks out a dress for you. He’s the one to help you put on your dresses and take them off. With so many things to lace and button, and so many buttons being tiny, close together, and often in hard-to-reach places in the case of undergarments, and the goddamn corset that is the bane of your existence. Sometimes you curse women’s fashion for being so complicated and coming with so many layers, but Sherlock is always ever so patient in helping you get ready. It’s probably one of his favorite parts of the day. It’s no wonder that many women relied on the help of a lady’s maid or an obliging sister for help getting dressed. But you have no maids, and your sisters live elsewhere with their own husbands, so you must rely on your husband to help you get ready for the day and prepare for bed at night. He buttons and unbuttons the back of your dress or ties and unties your dress laces for you while you brush out your hair. He doesn’t force you to wear a corset if you don’t want to, uncaring if it isn’t proper. He values your comfort above your appearance.

“Good heavens, that corset looks painful. Might I help you off with it, my love?”

He holds the hand mirror for you while you fix your hairdo or makeup, though he may not be able to resist kissing your neck and getting distracted. You, of course, return the favor by tying his cravats for him when his fingers seem to fumble and he just can’t get it right, helping him with his cuff links, or buttoning up his vests and coats. When your corset and/or dress has trouble closing, that’s when you and Sherlock suspect that you might be pregnant.

16. “I tried to stop her but she’s full of this fight.”

“You can’t control Enola Holmes. She’s a force of nature, a law unto herself.”

“Yes, she is. And I fear she will hang.”

Even long after the case of Sarah Chapman is solved and Enola is safe and sound, Sherlock occasionally experiences nightmares in which he couldn’t save Enola and she was hanged.

Grail pounces on Enola, and the two tumble into the shadowy backstage of the theatre. Onstage, Lord Tewkesbury duels a corrupt officer with a sword hidden in a cane, tossed to him by Sherlock. Backstage, Enola crawls behind a stack of flats as Grail limps around looking for her. Enola is beneath the workbench, when it flips over! Tools and paint brushes scatter across the floor. Grail stands there, with a fire extinguisher raised above his head. He brings it crashing down. Enola dives from its path. His veins bulge, his blood bubbles thinking of Enola like a slippery little rat or fly to be crushed, a pest to be rid of. He whips around to find Enola ascending a ladder to the catwalk above. Grail follows. Above the stage, Grail pulls himself onto the catwalk. He limps across the raised platform as Tewkesbury and Sherlock come close to incapacitating their opponents below. But where is the damn girl? Just as the thought enters Grail’s mind, Enola drops down from the lighting rig above. She lands on Grail’s back, wrapping a length of rope around his neck. Grail flings himself forward, flipping Enola over him and the catwalk’s handrails. Enola hangs, holding on for dear life. Grail smiles down at her and inches his foot toward Enola’s hand. Stomp. He jams his heel down, breaking three of her fingers. Enola pulls her hand from under Grail’s foot. Now she’s dangling by one arm. Far below is the stage floor and certain death. Grail places his shoe just above her hand.

“You insolent little girl, I want you to die knowing I’m going to be Commissioner. I’m going to rule this town with an iron fist, and after I’m through with you, I’m going straight for the rest of your family.”

“Yes, Superintendent Grail. Your career is on the rise.”

Just as Grail’s about to bring down his foot, Enola swings her free arm onto the catwalk, grabbing hold of a large sandbag. She yanks it with all of her might, pulling it over the edge. It hurtles toward the stage below, pulling the rope it’s tied to. The rope that’s wrapped around Grail’s neck. Thwip, when the bag’s only halfway down, the rope snaps taut. Thrown over a beam in the lighting rig, it pulls tight, lifting Grail into the air. He reaches up trying to free himself, but it’s no use. His neck is caught in the tangles. His eyes bulge, then roll back. He chokes, twitches, spasms twice more, and finally goes limp as Sherlock watches. Grail sways softly in the rafters of the theatre, dead as a door nail. Grail’s face shows signs of strangulation. His death was not a pleasant one. Enola pulls herself onto the catwalk.

Sherlock tosses and turns, kicking his blankets off and talking in his sleep while he sweats profusely. You’ve often woken him up from these night terrors, but it’s not always easy. Sometimes it’s as if his body and mind are trapped somewhere between wake and dream, and he has to fight against himself so that the paralysis that has taken over his mind and body will relinquish their hold on him. You rub his back and hush him as you hold him, combing your fingers through his damp hair. Sometimes the nightmare changes, and instead it’s Enola who gets murdered by Grail, her limp body left swinging from a rope in the rafters. Other times, it’s you on the noose instead. But in your case, it’s not just a nightmare, but a memory. Sherlock mentioned to Enola that he and Grail had a history. This was part of it. You were part of it.

In his younger days, he thought he would never fall in love. He led far too busy a life. He never got involved with people, unless they were clues. Until one day, he met you, a breathtaking woman. You were more than beautiful, you were intoxicating, mysterious, clever, everything he’d ever dreamed of. He felt his heart would burst if he couldn’t have you. And Sherlock, the poor idiot, he married you in secret. You honeymooned in secret. He took you to his flat and you were happy for a time, as happy as a man and a woman can be as they solve cases together and end up in wild, unpredictable, sometimes highly dangerous adventures in the pursuit of answers and the trail to the true culprits. Then one day, you were riding through the woods, and you were thrown from your horse, and knocked unconscious. When Sherlock rushed to your side and hurried to help you, your dress was torn and he noticed a mark on your body... Something he’d never seen before, something you’d managed to keep hidden all this time, even while making love. You’d been branded. Given a mark that is only reserved for those who are to be executed for murder. Sherlock was confused. How could you, the woman he loved, his bride, betray him like this? You’d lied to him, but there must’ve been more to the story. In his line of work, he knew not everything is as it seems. When you came to, you swore that you’d been falsely accused of these crimes, and he believed you. From then on, he took your case, convinced he could find the truth of what really happened in your past and who really committed the murder you’d been tried and convicted of. Both he and you used the utmost discretion. But then, despite how careful you and Sherlock were to keep what you were doing hush hush so that nobody else in London would know your business, the police came to take you away to be put back on Death’s Row and executed, and you…you were still professing your undying love. While Sherlock was working on the case from the outside, you were held in a cell, but still able to investigate from the inside. Unbeknownst to the guards, you’re an expert lock picker and snuck in and out of your cell to snoop in the Commissioner’s office or other forbidden areas to uncover files and private records, anything that would help your case. Sherlock came to visit you often, and when he did so, you told him in hushed whispers of what you’d found.

“Sir—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Sherlock held up a finger while passing the gate and going back to the cells, where you were. When you saw him, you got up from your spot on the bench and ran up to the bars, stretching your arm out through them to hold and kiss Sherlock’s hands.

“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Holmes.”

“Grail. I wish to speak with your prisoner. In private.”

“By all means, do so while you still can. The Commissioner likes you, and has ordered a stay of execution. Unless you can find new evidence that proves her innocent or Mrs. Holmes miraculously finds herself with child, she’s still set to die in thirty days.”

“What exactly is my wife in prison for?” he asked.

“This I did not know. But when I heard that you were coming, I asked my fellow officer here that myself.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said his brother was just looking for a good time. When your wife murdered him. Eyes front and keep your nose clean, Holmes - a noose and a short drop is how we deal with troublemakers. Murderers, pickpockets - doesn’t matter what you do. All you lot will end up swinging from here.”

Grail never once scared or intimidated you. He was a repulsive man, slimy and smug. But nothing he could say or do to you would get you into giving a false confession. Even as your time ran out and you were walked to the gallows, you weren’t afraid.

Wind howls. Sherlock’s grip on you starts to give.

“Don’t lose me, darling. Darling? Sherlock? Sherlock!”

Your hand slips from Sherlock’s fingers. You’re pushed to the ground by a gust of cold air. You tumble through briars and thickets of dry-brush, till you land with a thump on the floorboards of an old wooden courthouse. You look up to find a village worth of angry townsfolk leering over you. Two men grab your arms and yank you to your feet.

“No! Let her go!”

You’re dragged to the bench of a decrepit, old judge. He points to you with a spindly, spotted finger.

“Y/N Holmes! You vile creature! You have been found guilty of the crime of murder. This crime being sinister in nature. For this crime, you are sentenced to be hung by the neck until dead. May God have mercy on your soul.”

The villagers pounce on you. You’re suddenly in a clearing, the heart of what will one day become a forest. You’re staring at a rickety platform. A noose hangs down from a beam up above. The townsfolk take hold of you and push you toward the gallows.

“Kill the murderer!”

“Kill her!”

You’re thrown onto the scaffold. In the back of the crowd gathered to watch the execution, one man stands out. You can make out his hair and his tall stature. It’s Sherlock, calling to you. An executioner pulls a rope around your neck as the judge cries out.

“Never shall she plague this land again! This land which we paid for with blood! Her immortal soul shall rot here. And the roots of the wood we plant shall ensnare her forevermore. Any last requests?”

“Yes. Loosen the knot and let me go.”

“Of course we don't let her go!”

Sherlock desperately claws his way thorough the mob.

“Darling, you have to take control! You’re giving them the power! With it, they can kill you!”

But the illusion is too strong. The nightmare has Sherlock caught in the memory of your almost death. The executioner takes hold of the lever, ready to release the trapdoor beneath your feet.

“The innocent must suffer.”

“Sherlock!”

“The guilty must be punished.”

“Sherlock!”

“You must taste blood to be a man!”

At the judge’s signal, the executioner pulls. The floor beneath you falls away. Sherlock hurls himself at you, catching you midair.

“Her neck did not break. Oh, I'm so sorry. Now, we must watch her strangle to death.”

The two of you go crashing through the confines of his mind. Lights flash. Bulbs burst.

“Sherlock, wake up!”

Then quiet. You and Sherlock land on a dusty, dirty carpet in a large, dark room. Your flat at 221 Baker’s Street. You both sit, brushing yourselves off.

“Sherlock! Are you all right?”

“I got scared. You’re…you’re really here? I’m not still dreaming?”

“Yes, I’m here. You’re awake now, and everything is fine. Was it…that nightmare again?”

Sherlock doesn’t say anything, but his actions speak louder than his words as he wraps his arms around you and holds you tighter, sobbing as he lays his head on your chest so he can listen to your heartbeat. It and your voice whispering to him sweet nothings are the only sounds that can calm him down and keep him grounded in this situation.

In reality, Sherlock caused a distraction, which allowed him to make his way towards the scaffold where you were. The platform below you dropped as the lever was pulled but Sherlock threw a sword beneath your feet, saving you from dying. But it was still difficult to keep your balance as your feet kept slipping on the metal of the cutlass. A bullet was fired, cutting the rope and causing you to drop from the noose. You ripped off the torn rope. Sherlock interrupted the proceedings by coming in with all the evidence necessary to prove it wasn’t you who committed the murder, flawlessly going through step-by-step the series of events. Society demands swift justice, and he gave it to them. Sherlock informed Inspector Lestrade of who the real culprit was and to arrest them at once. With that, a mistrial was declared, the old trial was thrown out, and you were free to go and Sherlock took you home. Ever since suffering that public humiliation that cost him his reputation and most coveted promotion to Commissioner, Grail hated Sherlock and you even more than he already did, because your innocence being proven at the last minute and the failure of having you executed put a major black mark on his image and a wedge in his plans of climbing up in position through any means necessary, even corruption.

In present day, Grail is dead, killed by Enola while he tried to kill her in a conspiracy to cover up corruption. His head cracked like an egg. You’re alive and here, and so is Enola. You’re both safe. Grail can’t hurt any of you anymore. It’s over. All Sherlock said was that he and Grail had a history, and Enola still doesn’t know the full extent of it. You and Sherlock are still undecided if you’re going to tell her or not, as the past seems not to matter now that the man is dead. As you make the both of you a cup of tea (or maybe something stronger) to calm your and your husband’s nerves, Sherlock knows that these night terrors will pass. Eventually. For now, all he needs is reassurance that you’re still here and won’t be going anywhere without him.

17. Nanny McPhee-esque AU: You’re the scullery maid to Eudoria Holmes, the matriarch of an upper class family. She’s a widowed woman with two grown sons who left home shortly after her husband died, and Enola, a young girl of sixteen who you’ve looked after as she was growing up. While you’re very intelligent and intuitive and have a keen eye among other qualities, you’re an orphan who’s never had a proper education. When you were hired, you were uneducated and couldn’t read or write, so Eudoria helped you to learn alongside Enola when the day’s work was done.

“What’s this word?”

“Lovingly. ‘He took her lovingly by the hand’.”

Eudoria was not an ordinary mother. She didn't teach Enola to string seashells or practice her embroidery. They did different things. She also taught you everything she taught Enola: Reading, science, all sorts of exercise, both physical...and mental. She said you were free to do anything at Ferndell...and be anyone. She was Enola’s whole world. You’ve befriended the young girl over the years as she grew up. Enola’s like a sister to you, in a way. You are the same to Enola. When Eudoria leaves the night before Enola’s sixteenth birthday, she instructs you to look after her daughter and give her these presents. While Enola goes to meet her brothers at the train station, you prepare yourself by dressing like a powderpuff or “proper lady” with a hat and gloves. When they return home and ask if Enola has had a governess, (“Enola, you at least had a governess? Tell me, she at least saw that you had an education?”) you step in, pretending you’re her governess. When Mycroft grills you with questions, you answer all of them sufficiently and confidently, maintaining your composure and eye contact. When they point out the state of the house, you reiterate you’re a governess, not a housekeeper.

Despite your exemplary performance, Mycroft is a stubborn old mule and doesn’t think you’re good enough, so he brings in Miss Harrison, who “offers” to take away Enola to a finishing school for girls so she may receive private tuition in literature, history, deportment, and elocution. After witnessing Miss Harrison strike Enola across the face and her desperate display of pleading to her brothers, you and she hatch a plan in the night so you go instead while she escapes to find her mother. At first, Enola couldn’t possibly ask you to make such a sacrifice, but you let her know that, despite realizing what it’d mean for you, you want to go. It could be good for you, since your background means you have no prospects. You’re in your late twenties or early thirties and are already considered an “old maid” by society. By the time Enola’s brothers and Miss Harrison realize a switch has been made, it’ll be too late. You’ll never tell them where Enola is. She doesn’t have to be miserable and you can get your much desired education, even if it’s repetitive and monotonous lessons in how to be a proper lady. After all, Sherlock wouldn’t love you if you couldn’t read or write. He’d think you stupid, uneducated, and beneath him. When you absentmindedly say this thought out loud, Enola hums to herself and begins brainstorming to play matchmaker and set you and her brother up. When Enola is caught and brought to the school, you’re taken out. You confront Sherlock and talk some sense into him about Enola. You know he cares for her, he’s just been too afraid to admit it, so accustomed to living the busy life of a bachelor and detective, where he never forms attachments or gets emotional in his line of work.

“You overstep.”

“She is your sister.”

“She is Mycroft’s ward, and thus his responsibility.”

“Responsibility?”

“You’ve done more than enough. Do not make this any more difficult than it already is.”

“I wish to know something, Sherlock. Tonight, when you leave this study that you continue to keep at your family home, are you to return to your bachelor lodgings at 221 Baker Street, or will you pay a visit to a certain woman of the night that you pick up in a bar on the other side of town? If your father was still here, Enola wouldn’t have so much pressure put on her to be matched. The man would have let her pave her own path and find love in her own time. The man, who already had two grown sons, would’ve never seen a need to push his daughter to be a wife and mother when she’s just barely a woman, because it’s his eldest son’s responsibility to have a wife and child, not yours and not Enola’s. And yet here Mycroft is, unmarried and childless, relying on your younger sister to one day do the job that he and you will not. You sound just like him. You and he like to speak of responsibility. My dear Mr. Holmes! Of duty? Pray tell, what should you know of it? What should Mycroft know of it? When you both went away, I came to be employed here since I was but seventeen years old, not much older than Enola is now. For at least twelve years, I’ve been by her side. For twelve or so years, neither you nor Mycroft ever wrote, nor visited. And yet it took your mother’s disappearance to bring you home. Now you think that because you’re older, that because you’re men, you can just waltz back in this house and dictate how your sister is to act? What she is to do with her life? I sat with her in that drawing room for years and do you know what I saw when those women manhandled her and measured her, when Mycroft spoke to her in such a detestable manner, all of them treating her like a horse to be trussed up and sold off to market, while you said and did nothing? I saw a young woman who is terrified because she knows what kind of life, what kind of future awaits her should you and Mycroft continue to get in her way. Mycroft only sees her as an object to be beaten down and molded into what society wants. He only seeks to use her to further his position. ‘You have to go to school, Enola!’ ‘But I don't want to go to a finishing school, Mycroft.’ ‘Well, what else are we going to do with you? You're a girl!’ But I see her as an unusual and independent person, capable of her own thinking, dreams, ambitions, and paving her own path. She’s still a minor. She’s not even of age yet. It’s perfectly normal for her to not want a husband. She doesn’t need that ‘educated out of her.’ You don’t get involved with people, unless they’re clues. So you must ask yourself, Sherlock, are you merely the world’s greatest detective and all the rest of your accomplishments, or are you Enola’s older brother? Will you be her legal guardian and the man of this house or won’t you?”

Throughout your speech, he tried to interject, to object, but you wouldn’t let him. You swiftly turn and leave the room, leaving him to think on what you said. But even without your interference, Enola still escapes from Miss Harrison’s finishing school with the help of Lord Tewkesbury. You’re proud of her for finding the true culprit and getting there before Sherlock, so you and she go out to celebrate. Meanwhile, Sherlock is also very proud of his sister and starts to realize that he may care for you. That he may love you.

While Enola turns down his offer of a Holmes and Holmes partnership, she points out that she likes this new version of him and that no one should be alone all the time. A friend would do him well. So he asks you to work with him, (not for him, he made it very clear you’d be equals) and you agree, on the condition you can dedicate some of your time to Enola and her cases, should she need your assistance. You’re the only person to not filter yourself around him. You’re not starstruck or intimidated by him in the slightest, despite his fame and reputation as the world’s greatest detective of the time. He keeps you on because you’ve got brains and a keen eye, able to see things in the tiniest of details that others don’t, just like he and Enola do. Enola likes you a great deal, and your sincerity is refreshing when he’s surrounded by fake smiles and major suck ups. The constant fawning and groveling gets old. You whip him back into shape whenever he’s being difficult. When he gets himself drunk and is wallowing in self-pity and frustration at getting stuck during a case, you’re the one to pick him up. “Remind me again why I should feel bad for you? You’re a famous and accomplished detective, scholar, chemist, virtuoso violinist, expert marksman, swordsman, singlestick fighter, pugilist, and a brilliant deductive thinker. You got all of English society practically worshipping the ground you stand on and always asking for your services, and while you choose to live in a flat, your childhood estate is among one of the most expensive and beautiful houses on the planet! C’mon, Mr. Holmes. You’re famous, handsome, and rich. So chop, chop, fix your hair, put on some clean clothes, drink some water, and let’s get going.” God, he loves you. He hasn’t admitted it to you yet, but he’s been thinking of courting you. He has everything. Everything…except someone to share it with.

18. Nanny McPhee inspired: For an alternate telling of events for the above prompt, Instead of Enola, it’s you who goes to Miss Harrison’s finishing school, posing as a Holmes sister even though in reality, you’re just a scullery maid. Mycroft isn’t there to make sure it’s Enola that gets in the carriage, which makes this switch possible. Thinking it’s Enola that’s being taken away in the carriage, Sherlock chases after it, calling her name.

“Enola! Enola!”

“Now then, you better tell me your name, little girl.”

“Enola!”

“Don’t be shy, my dear. What is your name? Sit up straight and tell me your name.”

“No! Enola!” Just as he yells out her name in desperation, he hears Enola’s voice calling his name.

“Sherlock! Sherlock!”

She runs to him, and he embraces her in relief.

“But if… Then… Then who’s…”

“Y/N. My name’s Y/N.”

“And what a pretty name it is too.”

“Y/N. Oh.”

Later, It’s Sherlock’s wedding but, unbeknownst to everyone except him, it’s all a ruse so he can bring a culprit out of hiding for one of his cases. You hide your heartbreak at what you believe is the man you love marrying another when you return to see Sherlock and Enola again.

“Delectable to see you again, Mr. Holmes. And how nice to see the young lady, Miss Enola.”

“Welcome back, Y/N. You look well. Are you well?”

“I am most content.” The smile you give him is noticeably forced. “You must be very happy to be marrying.”

“Yes. I’m…I’m… How did you put it? Most content. Of course.”

“I am so glad. Pray, excuse me.”

~

“I’m concerned you’re being bought on the cusp of your true independence, on the finding of your own powerful words. I fear you’re being seduced.”

“Well, I fear you’re behaving like an irritating sister. How about, ‘what a lovely party, Sherlock. Please extend my thanks to your generous bride-to-be.’”

“Generous? She humiliated you.”

“She did not humiliate me.”

“She laughed at your expense.”

“It was a moment or two of teasing.”

“That debased you.”

“If I’m not fussed by it, then why should you be? You don’t care about me particularly. You made that quite clear when I asked you to marry me. You said no, if you recall.”

“She’s unkind to you, in public, no less which isn’t right for you, Sherlock. Don’t you see? You deserve someone who is adventurous and curious and—”

“Someone like you?”

“Yes. Someone like me. But not me.”

“A yahoo tributary.”

“What?”

“It’s an Indian name for a tributary that runs beside a main river. It flirts with joining it. It comes very close, but it never does. A woman exactly like that, untied to the suffocating social mores, the very opposite of any number of women down there. And the opposite of you too. So full of judgment yet trussed up like a turkey in your corset and your fancy dress. I decided, unlike you, that I want not to be alone, childless, lonely, corseted. You’re no taxi tributary. In fact, you’re swimming right down the middle of the stream.”

“Sherlock, wait. I— In my mind, it was easy enough to tell you how I felt, what this has meant, but…but words fail me. All I want is to be worthy of you.”

“I am to be married, Y/N. Within an hour, I’m to be a husband. It’s just not that simple.”

“It could be.”

With help from Enola, when the time is right, he sabotages his own wedding.

“Enola, Tennis practice.” Sherlock uses a violin (not his own) to bat and Enola pitches a mini cake, but when he hits it, it flies in your direction, and hits you in the face and/or chest. Sherlock is embarrassed, until you stand up and throw a cake back at him, hitting his sleeve. Your laughter encourages him to throw cake back at you with the violin as a bat as you participate in the ensuing food fight or other disruption, ignoring Miss Harrison’s scoldings of, “Y/N! Where are your manners?”

“Sod my manners, you old trout! This is the first fun I’ve had in weeks!”

Until the bride and/or the bride’s family gets so angry she/they call it off. They try to leave, but, whether the bride is guilty or not, Sherlock stops her and her family when he reveals in front of everyone the true culprit of the crime and how they did it.

“As for your youngest sister, a lengthy spell in a corrective institution is long overdue. And you, Y/N, I can see you’re as wild as her.”

“And proud to be. I love Enola, Miss Harrison, which is more than you do.”

“Insolence! Come away now!”

Enola tries to grab your hand, but you let it go as you follow Miss Harrison. Enola then gets a bright idea. Why waste a good wedding?

“Wait! Wait! My brother will marry today.”

“What?” Sherlock asks incredulously.

“What?” Miss Harrison asks incredulously.

“Who?” The officiant asks.

“He’ll marry Y/N!” She says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

You and Sherlock look at each other.

“Incest?” Miss Harrison asks, disgusted and aghast.

“No! No, Miss Harrison! Y/N isn’t our sister!” Enola is quick to clarify.

“Not your sister?”

“Of course she’s not our sister!”

“Well, who is she then?”

“I’m the scullery maid.” You admit, finally.

“What?”

“Y/N, do you love Sherlock?” Enola asks bluntly, cutting straight to the point.

“Of course not. I know my place. That wouldn’t be right. I mean… Yes.”

“Sherlock, do you love Y/N?”

“What are you saying? That would be totally improper. I mean, anything like that could never happen. I mean, obviously… Yes.”

You and Sherlock smile at each other, while Miss Harrison exclaims, “He’s marrying a scullery maid?” and faints.

“What I said, I did so because I needed to hurt you. They were watching. I had to uphold the charade or else they would’ve suspected something was amiss.”

“I know.”

“I’m deeply sorry.”

“I know that too.”

“Too often, things said in anger come from a place of…of affection. And what should be spoken out loud is left unuttered. And life is too short for that. You will feel quite comfortable here.”

You and Sherlock are happy as husband and wife, and Enola loves you as her new sister-in-law.

19. You have an identical twin sister who works as a secretary or other for Mycroft Holmes. Your sister respects him as her employer, but she can’t stand him as a person, believing him odious, too much of a stubborn old goat who hates the very thought of any microscopic change in the word around him, and all around dull and exhausting to be around. He lacks practicality and is completely dispassionate. While he’s talented like his siblings, he’s far too lazy and is unwilling to ever use his gifts or put any physical effort into working. Something unexpected happens in your sister’s life that makes her ask (more like beg) you to switch places and pretend to be her just for a few weeks. Nobody will even notice, and the Master of the house especially won’t since he’s so busy and traveling all the time, she assured you. But doing what she does daily is much harder than you thought it would be, and things get more tense when his younger brother, Sherlock, keeps running into you while on a case.

At least for Sherlock, he’s never met you or your sister before, so he’s none the wiser. And as for Mycroft, he just thinks your “behavior shift” is because you’re a woman and acting hysterical or ridiculous. He’s completely disinterested in you/your sister, so long as you get the work done. The longer you pretend to be your sister, the more you get entangled with the case Sherlock is investigating. Turns out, your sister is involved in something that may be very dangerous. A conspiracy of some sort to reveal corruption or some other crime. She’s something of a spy. The more you and Sherlock bond, you break down his walls as he opens up to you. He never gets involved with people unless they’re clues, but you’re different. You develop a friendship which may turn romantic. When it comes time for you and your sister to switch back, the situation becomes complicated as Sherlock is left wondering why he’s suddenly getting the cold shoulder and strictly professional treatment as if nothing’s happened between the two of you the next time he sees you in public. Why won’t you let him hold your hand or kiss you? He thinks he’s in love with your sister, but it’s you. It’s always been you. And the woman in front of him now is not you. And he isn’t aware of what you and your sister had done. An already bad situation is made worse when the bad guys your sister has proven herself to be a worthy adversary against mistake you for her and kidnap and/or try to kill you by poison or drowning in an attempt to silence you. They may use you for leverage to draw out your sister’s group. Whatever the case, your sister goes to Sherlock for help, revealing to him what you and her have done. After the bad guys are killed and/or arrested, he saves you, carrying your unconscious or nearly unconscious body bridal style into the hospital. You’re laid up for many days or weeks, and he and your sister both watch over you the entire time.

20. You’re a journalist who’s been tasked by your chief editor to get an interview with Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest detective, and one of the country’s hottest bachelors on the market due to his many, many talents and accomplishments, not to mention his devilishly handsome good looks and family house. Every time you think you have a good story, a competitor gets to it first, so your workplace has been on your ass about getting this exclusive interview. Too bad Holmes is a very elusive and private man who works alone and doesn’t do interviews or anything like that. He’s the one who asks the questions, not the one who gets asked the questions. He keeps to himself, outright refusing and slipping away from any news outlets no matter how hard they try to corner him. Your boss pitches a new idea: Sherlock has never met you, so he has no idea what you look like. If you can go undercover, gain his trust, and find out everything you can about his personal life, then you’ll be promoted. A man like him must have secrets. You’re very attractive, intelligent, and clever, so if anyone can do this, it’s you.

“Get a load of my next piece. ‘Ugly Fall Sweaters of the Stars.’ It's gonna be brilliant, I tell you.”

“Excuse me.”

“Uh, not now.”

“No, this'll just take a second. I just had a couple of questions about your article, the Fashion Week piece that I'm editing.”

“Uh... go.”

“Well, see, the thing is that the boss wanted 300 words, and this is 650. And one of the designers you quoted wasn't even on the floor, so...”

“Y/N, I don't have time for this right now. Just clean it up.”

“It's not just a clean-up, it's a major rewrite.”

“What are you, the executive editor now?”

“No, I'm just trying to explain that...”

“Just fix it, okay?”

“That went well. Let me guess. You're gonna rewrite his stinky old article and save his butt. Just like you always do.”

“Well, it is my job.”

“You could tell him where to put it.”

“I'm not telling him anything.”

“Y/N, we're junior editors, not writers.”

“Well, how else am I supposed to become a real journalist?”

“You'll get there. Of course you will.”

“Five rejection letters in a month. Hardly killing it on the freelance writing market.”

“Y/N, big boss man wants to see you in his office, now. Have fun.” They then answer the ringing phone. “…Magazine, how may I help you?”

“If this is about the article about Fashion Week...”

“Forget Fashion Week. I got something else for you. Sit. So, what do you know about the Holmes Family of England?”

“England? Wait, their father died, and the boys left home not long after. They have a younger sister, Enola, but I don’t know much about her. The eldest son, Mycroft, works for the government, the younger son, Sherlock, is a scholar, chemist, virtuoso violinist, expert marksman, swordsman, singlestick fighter, pugilist, and a brilliant deductive thinker, one of the world’s most famous detectives. Enola is being courted by a young Tewkesbury who’s a Lord or Viscount, but both sons are unmarried and unattached. People say Sherlock is a playboy, and the mother, Eudoria, never remarried and is a scandalous socialite fighting for women’s suffrage or equal rights.”

“Playboy Sherlock Holmes took off after Daddy died, which wouldn't be a problem, except he leads a busy life, so it’s near impossible to get close to him. When he’s not working on a case, how does he spend his days? Why is he not attached to a woman or married despite being thirty years of age? Who is he underneath the public persona he puts on for his clients and admirers?”

“Right…” you trail off, trying to see where they’re going with this train of thought.

“That's exactly what you're gonna find out. Mr. Holmes is due back this weekend. But just in case he absconds, I need somebody there to follow his trail. I need boots on the ground.”

“I don't mean to shoot myself in the foot, but why me?”

“You're talented, hungry, smart. And none of my regular writers can go this week.”

~

“This guy is your assignment?”

“He thinks he's so hot. Mm, another secret girlfriend, possibly?”

“Gross. What a creep.”

“Chill out. He's like a 12.”

“Not my type.”

“Honey, he's everyone's type.”

“Not mine.”

“If I set you up with one more hot, successful guy who you blow off I'm gonna punch you, girl.”

“Ouch. I'm just not on the market.”

“You and your beau broke up, what, a year ago? You can't let him make you gun-shy.”

“Can we just not talk about my love life right now?”

“Seriously, this assignment could jumpstart your career.”

~

“What? What is it?”

“My editor has given me a story to cover.”

“Your own story?”

“It's about the Holmes family of England. The younger son, he's a bit of a playboy.”

“This sounds like it's gonna be your big break.”

“Yeah, but the thing is, I'd have to be away for weeks, possibly even months. And I know that you'd be alone. I just—”

“Sounds like you need a bit of Fatherly Advice 101. When me and your mom opened this place, there were a million reasons why not to, but your mom said, ‘Honey, you gotta take a chance.’”

“So you're telling me to open a bakery?”

“Ha. No. I'm telling you to stay true to your dreams, all right? And success will follow. Huh? That's good, right? Sounds like a fortune cookie. All right. Anyway, the point is, you gotta take a risk if you're gonna win. So don't worry about your old man. I'll be fine, all right? You go over there to English-whatnot--“

“England.”

“England, that's it. And you make us proud.”

“All right.”

“Still $4.95, though.”

~

When you do meet Sherlock for the first time, it’s not at a big fancy event like a rich person’s house party or a concert, but rather a coffee shop, a dog park, the street, or somewhere else that’s common. Maybe he saves you from being trampled by a runaway horse/carriage or steals your cab. For the case Sherlock’s currently investigating, he’s cleverly disguised himself so he looks nothing like Sherlock Holmes and so forgettable that nobody even recognizes him. The little gray man.

“Excuse me!”

“I'm sorry, I really have to go.”

“No, but this is my cab!”

“I apologize.”

“You can't just do that. Selfish jerk!”

“That man just took her cab. Seriously, can you believe that guy? Who does he think he is?”

“First time?” Another reporter asks you while you’re surveying your surroundings and taking notes for your piece.

“Hm?”

“First time covering the Holmes family?”

“First time covering anything. Any words of wisdom?”

“Pick a new career.”

~

“May I help you?”

“No. No, I... Yes. I was supposed to be...”

“Ah. American.”

“Excuse me?”

“You must be the new American tutor for Miss Enola.”

Seeing an opening, an opportunity, you decide to go with it and play along. “Yes. That's me, the tutor.”

“Very good. Follow me, please. Miss Edith? Miss Enola’s new tutor has arrived.”

“[fake name]?”

“That's me. Pleased to meet you.”

“Oh. I thought your agency said you weren't available till the first of the year?”

“I wasn't, but then my last assignment ended early, so...”

“So you thought you'd just show up...here. Two weeks early.”

“Sorry, I know that it... I can leave, if it was a bad idea.”

“Mrs. Holmes did mention that she wished she had someone to occupy Miss Enola over the summer months. Her last tutor left rather abruptly.”

“What happened?”

“That's no concern of yours. Something about a mouse in her bed. Come with me, please. Where's your luggage?”

“At the inn.”

“I'll have somebody fetch it for you.”

“No, no, that's okay. I can get it.”

“I'm surprised you were able to find a room with all the press in town. Parasites, the lot of them. Scum of the earth. Mr. Holmes will want to meet you.”

“The elder or the younger?”

“It’s Mr. Sherlock Holmes who is Enola’s guardian now, so he will be the one to talk to. I trust you're familiar with our English etiquette.”

~

“I needed some time to think.”

“You've had time, Sherlock. You may be the younger son, but you can't keep missing these official engagements.”

“Yes, Mycroft.”

“Not anymore.”

You then enter the room and Sherlock’s and your eyes light up with recognition at the same time.

“You.” You both say simultaneously.

Mycroft looks between the two of you. “You know each other?”

“Our paths have crossed. Selfish jerk, at your service.”

“I am so sorry. I had...”

“No, no, no. It's I who should apologize. And you are?”

“Mr. Holmes, may I present Miss [fake name], Miss Enola’s new tutor.”

“Sherlock!” Enola yelled, running into the room and towards him like a bat out of hell.

“There you are, my little imp.”

“I am not an imp.”

“Yes, you are. You're a little imp.” He picked her up and swung her around.

“Sherlock, put her down. Sherlock. Put her down, Sherlock.” Mycroft keeps pestering.

“As you wish.”

“I am not a china doll, Mycroft.” Enola huffs in annoyance.

“No, but you’re a lady. And a lady doesn’t run indoors.”

Enola rolls her eyes and turns her attention towards you. “Mycroft doesn't let me do anything but study and go to the loo.”

“Well, now I do feel sorry for you.” You smile.

“Beard looks awful, by the way.” Enola says to Sherlock.

“Yes, you do look like a derelict Santa Claus.” Mycroft agrees with a crinkle of his nose.

“Yes, I only grew it so I wouldn't be recognized. And it appears to be doing the trick.”

“Who are you and what are you doing in my house?” Enola asks you bluntly.

“Enola, manners. She's your new tutor from America.”

“I'm... I am [fake name]. So pleased to meet you, Enola.”

“You are supposed to call me Miss Holmes or Miss Enola. Don't they teach you anything at tutor school?”

“You'll be starting your lessons right away, Enola.”

“But it's summer.”

“I hope Miss [fake name] lasts longer than your previous tutor. Place your bets.”

“I actually like mice.” You say awkwardly, trying to get Enola to warm up to you.

“Mrs. Lane, would you show Miss [Fake name] to her new quarters, please?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you. Good day.” With that, Mycroft puts on his coat and top hat and left, leaving you with Sherlock and Enola.

~

Later in the afternoon, while Enola and Sherlock are out, you sneak away to make a long-distance phone call to your friends and coworkers.

“I'm actually inside the Holmes house. Undercover. I love it. This is better than an exclusive. But I had to lie to get in here.”

“Who cares?”

“Could I go to jail for this?”

“Two, maybe three weeks tops.”

“Oh. Not helping.”

“Listen, just play this out as long as you can. Get lots of material, whatever you can grab. Can you do this?”

“Absolutely.”

~

“I trust you have the curriculum and lesson plan I sent your agency.” Sherlock tells you.

“I, uh... No, they must have forgotten.”

“My experience with US agencies could best be described as loosey-goosey.”

“Not to worry, Mr. Holmes. There is nothing loose about this goose.” You want to hit yourself for saying something so stupid.

“Enola. You remember Miss L/N.”

“Good morning, Miss Enola.”

“Go away.”

“Now that's no way to treat your new tutor. Please, be seated.” Sherlock pulls out your chair for you at the breakfast table.

“Thank you.” You nearly want to scream when you see a small mouse on the chair. Instead you pick it up and put it outside.

“I thought you said you liked mice.”

Sherlock gives Enola a pointed look, but she ignores it.

“Not as a seat cushion. Now if you've finished with the excitement for this morning, I suggest you start on your lessons. I started with Modern Art. What do you think?”

“Delightful. I'll leave you to it.” Sherlock is soon out the door after that.

~

“So, how did I do?”

“Looks good to me.”

“I got 92 on the state exam.”

“Well, seeing as you're already so good at math, why don't we do some writing? English is my best subject.”

“You're a writer?”

“Yes. No, no, but I studied it at school in New York.”

“I thought you're from Minnesota.”

“I am, but I went to college in New York.” You quickly cover.

~

“Morning.”

“Good morning.”

“What are you up to?”

“Just catching up on some letters. Are you ready for your lesson?”

“No. We're going to bake cookies instead.”

“You're gonna get me in big trouble if we don't start your lesson by 9:00.”

“Not nearly as much trouble as if I told my brothers your real name. Miss Y/N L/N. Don't even bother denying it.”

“But, how—”

“You don't know the first thing about tutoring, for one. Also, I looked at your journal yesterday while you were in the loo.”

“It's locked.”

“Yes, but you put the key in plain sight. Big mistake.”

“I'll pack my things.”

“Wait. No one has to know.”

“You're not gonna tell anyone?”

“Not as long as we have a deal.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“You write the truth about my brother, and I'll keep your secret.”

“You mean the things that are written about him, they're...”

“They're not true? Not even close.”

“So he's not a playboy or a philanderer?”

“You've seen him. His idea of fun is working a case or playing William Tell with a bow and arrow. So, do we have a deal?”

“Deal.”

“Good. Now, about those cookies...I hope you have a big appetite. We are making a lot of cookies.”

“So, what's going on with your brother and Irene?”

“Is this for your story?”

“I need to know the truth if I'm gonna write the truth.”

“He used to love her, but that was a long time ago. Now she's back, so who knows? Mycroft’s into her. Mycroft’s wanted everything Sherlock had since they were boys. Seems like everyone wants what we have.”

“You are the Holmes family.”

“Things used to be different before my father died and my mother left. And now that they’re both gone...”

“Hey. They’re not gone. You'll always have your father in your heart and your mother is always nearby, watching over you from afar so she can keep you safe. Now, come on, we've gotta get these in the oven.”

~

Over the course of your stay, you and Sherlock catch feelings for each other and what started off as pretend becomes real. When Sherlock uncovers the truth about why you got close to him and that your “fateful meeting” was actually all a set up for your new piece, and realizes who you really are and why you’re here, he’s not as hurt as you thought he’d be. A part of him is hurt, but the other part of him is impressed you were clever enough to be able to get past him. Still, he can’t in good faith allow you to stay.

~

“Sherlock, wait!”

“What for?”

“You have to know that I didn't mean for this to happen.”

“I don't know anything anymore. I don't know who you are. I don't even know who I am.”

“I'm Y/N. Y/N L/N. That is my real name. And I didn't come here to— Things just got so out of hand.”

“Well, you've got a grand story to tell now. I wish you well in your aspirations.”

How can you ever hope to make it up to him? Maybe Enola will have to be brought in to talk some sense into her brother and get him to see reason.

~

“So, what did you think?” You ask your boss as he reads over your story about Sherlock.

“It's a thoughtful, mature, well-written story that will never see the light of day.”

“What?”

“It's a puff piece, Y/N. Pure schmaltz. Not our brand.”

“But it's honest and it's the truth.”

“You were at ground zero. You were living under the same roof as Sherlock and Enola. He let you into his flat! You had personal papers and case documents written by Sherlock himself in your hands. You might as well have had his private journal in your possession, and you did nothing with it. You really blew it big time.”

“But this is who he is. This is what happened.”

“I really don't care. In the meantime, I need you to jump back on the copy desk. There are articles that need a polish.”

“You know what? Find someone else to do your mop jobs.”

“Excuse me?”

“I'm done.”

~

“So, what are you gonna do?” Your friends and former coworkers ask you as you pack up your stuff.

“Time to focus on my own work. That's what I've been saying all along. I'm gonna start with a column about Sherlock Holmes, the real story.”

~

“What are you doing here?” You ask in surprise as you go outside to meet Sherlock, who is standing in the street right outside your dad’s bakery. You thought he was an illusion at first, a trick of the mind. But no, he’s here in the flesh.

“I never had the chance to say goodbye. Or thank you.”

“You don't have to thank me. I'm responsible for this whole mess in the first place.”

“No. You opened a door that needed to be opened. That's what a great reporter does. Enola showed me your columns.”

“She did?”

“Why didn't you publish it in your magazine?”

“Too much schmaltz.”

“Schmaltz?” He’s clearly unfamiliar with this American phrase.

“It means it was too sentimental. I wrote the truth about you, that you're kind, compassionate. That you stole my cab, and that you're gonna solve cases from the heart as well as from the mind.”

“Enola misses you terribly. So do I.”

“I miss you too.”

“A flat is a lonely place for a man without a flatmate. But a home is an even lonelier place for a man without…a wife.” He gets down on one knee.

Your brain doesn’t know how to process this. Your mouth opens and closes like a fish for a few seconds before you stammer, “But my whole life is in America.”

“Well, we can come back as much as you want.”

“But my career, I'm not ready to—”

“I don't want to make you give up anything, Y/N.”

“I could never leave my father.”

“I can give him his own wing at the main house. There’s plenty of rooms since Mycroft, Enola, and I moved out. We only go back there for special occasions now. Or I could buy him his own flat in London. Or we could just pick this building up and move it to any corner or any street he wishes. How long do you plan to keep a detective on his knees?”

“You haven't thought about this. I mean, we barely know each other.”

“I've never been more certain of anything in my life. And I've been known to be indecisive. Look, I know it's sudden, but… Is that a yes?”

“Yes. Yes, yes, yes.”

21. Spy AU: Something major has been going on in the underground crime world, and you’re asked to intern under Agent Holmes and go undercover to find out what it is. You're a tailor, spy master and survivalist who has both designed and worn state of the art disguises/outfits that allow you to conceal microphones, cameras, weapons, and anything else you may need according to the mission. Holmes is your boss and senior agent/director by night, and his cover as a dorky American news reporter named Kent by day works well. He provides you with only the latest and best in spy gadgetry, both for everyday and espionage. The latest tasks of which is impersonating a celebrity/socialite and designing devices that can be small and inconspicuous enough to be worn under or with a designer dress that was originally supposed to be worn by a female spy at the World Summit as a bugging device so they can get very important intel.

The trouble is, the intended agent can’t perform the job for whatever reason. And you’re the only other woman with a close enough resemblance. So it looks like it has to be you, or else the whole operation is a bust. The closer you seem to get to uncovering the truth, the weirder things get. Holmes begins acting very strangely, when he starts receiving threats from anonymous persons - Magazine cut out notes urging him to work faster, untraceable phone calls with modulated voices, dead flowers, etc. You and he begin to piece the mystery together, but will either of you live long enough to see it through?

22. Spy/Crime/Political Espinoage AU: You work for a cute little boutique as a seamstress. You are highly skilled, best known for your high-quality evening/formal wear and handbags. You typically cater to affluent businessmen and the like. But what nobody living knows about you is that you were the youngest member of a secret society of women that schemed and plotted for social reform, even if it was through violent and illegal means. The very secret society of women that Eudoria Holmes and Edith are part of. You were eighteen when you joined, only two years older than Enola was when she discovered her mother’s secret. You used to work as the Secret Service's Secret Seamstress. It was your responsibility to protect the President from any possible wardrobe malfunction (ripped trousers, food stains, sweat marks, etc.) while in the public eye, as well as protecting him. You had to take precautions before and during any large event and, despite leaving that career behind and “retiring”, you still have habits that you learned and kept with you, such as discreetly eavesdropping and people-watching. Recently, an atypical customer stops into your shop with a strange request and a LOT of money. You’re on guard, as always, but how can you refuse? You’re closing up the shop for the night when you see five men walk in through the front door and lock it behind them. You’re very surprised when one of the men go to an inconspicuous framed picture hanging on the wall. It’s just a picture of flowers or something generic, what’s so special— oh. He turns it counter-clockwise, revealing a secret passageway behind a one-way mirror. After he performs the typical complex unlocking mechanism, you’re ordered to follow. Turns out this “cute little boutique” has been a front for special operatives for many years. In their secret meeting place, they give you your new alias and the run down of your first assignment. You've been tasked with a special project: 12 poison-laced suits to go with a poison-laced dress. You unwittingly cross paths with Sherlock Holmes, alias “Sherrinford Hope”. He’s a special kind of agent, a man who not just provides disguises but also weapons for assassins and wet workers. He’s now getting ready to send new suits to the men who are about to start a revolution, lined with poison and concealed weapons to use on their targets. This is part of a conspiracy plot of assassinating world leaders and other prominent individuals of power and social status. Other key players among this revolution are John Wilson, alias “Ormond Sacker” and Irene Adler, alias “The Woman”. And since you were in the wrong place at the wrong time and are now a witness, the only way these people can keep you alive is if you become involved in the conspiracy and join their team. Perhaps they’ll fake your death and give you a new identity to go along with their newest round of aliases. You could be a sparrow, a secret agent trained in the act of seduction. Later, You receive a knock at the door and an important looking man in a black tailored suit hands you a sealed envelope with your name on it. You open it to find a check written to your name for English pounds that equal to about $65 million USD with the note, "Let's do this" in the memo.

23. A group of would-be criminals kidnaps you, the sister or wife of Sherlock Holmes (platonic or romantic, up to you). They plan on holding you for ransom in an isolated location while sending Sherlock on a wild goose chase or running him around in an endless dance, but their plan starts to unravel when they discover that you, their captive, are actually so much more than what you seem. Their first and last mistake was in underestimating you and your abilities. You escape from them quite easily, but that’s just the beginning as you’re still on the run and need to find a way to either send a message to Sherlock and Enola (the latter may or may not be your twin sister) and to find your way back to them. The people who kidnapped you won’t stop hunting you until they’re dead. Whatever their motive, whoever’s paying them, it must be good for them to go through all this trouble.

[doberbutts]

Okay well I watched the first episode of Blood Origin and honestly my thoughts are:

I just don't understand why people are so resistant to changes/new plotlines/some lore breaking of *recent* franchises but gobble it up when it's older. People telling an untold portion of a common tale is well established in storytelling culture. The first example that springs to mind is Lancelot, who straight up does not exist in original Authorian legend and was a FRENCH invention when the myth spread. Nowadays, most casual enjoyers of King Author stuff don't bat an eye to Lancelot's presence. Lancelot, who comes to mind, because Sapkowski writes said Lancelot to be in love with Ciri, and we're totally cool with *that* but not with changes to Sapkowski's work.

It's really telling that there's such a bigoted negative reaction to this because honestly? The black people so far have been BLACK black, darker than me, darker than even my black family sometimes. I'm enjoying seeing melanin in fantasy don't mind me. And the hair on the sisters is excellent, I'm liking the costuming, and I *really* like Eile.

The accents are kind of all over the place. Both as individual characters but also as the actors themselves. Sometimes Fjall goes from generic American accent to some form of fake Irish to ????european???? and back and it's distracting and weird. HOWEVER I do like the Irish and Welsh accents in high born kingdoms, because too often those accents are for commoners and poverty only, and this sort of turns the trope on its head.

I'm not sure how much I like the pan-Asian vibe I'm getting from some of the props and architecture. Some things look vaguely Chinese while others solidly Arabic while others a weird fusion of Indian and Korean and it's just odd to me. At first I thought it was because of clan structures but then I saw that it's just sort of everywhere. I have 0% Asian in me so I'm not really a good authority to speak on it but it's a weird vibe, a little Orientalist to my eyes. I'll freely admit that I like the aesthetic since I was raised pretty pan-African but I recognize that most continentally grouped cultures don't love that and it's mainly the black diaspora that's embraced it because we don't really have much of a choice.

I STILL feel that doing away with this short-season "but the episodes are an hour long!" nonsense would help pacing so much. Literally every time I thought the episode was going to come to an end, it's been roughly at the 20-25 min mark, which a standard TV episode would have been ANYWAY. So there's not really much point to having this be 4 hour-long episodes when it could be done better as 12-15 20 minute episodes... which would be the eqivilant of a short season while 24-32 is a more "standard" season (instead of 8 hour-long episodes). It gives you more time to flesh the characters and plotlines out while also allowing you the chance to trim some of the long-and-boring content people get tired of watching.

I really do feel bitter that the witcher tags continue to be people making racist and misogynistic memes instead of a fandom happily discussing a pretty strong first episode that introduced a billion fantasy characters of color. It really sucks that black people in fantasy is received so poorly when my inner 10 year old is happy to see people who look more like me having fun with the genre. I long for the day when I can exist in a fandom space and happily discuss my favorite black characters without having to justify their existence every 2 seconds.

Oof that CGI is pretty rough though. Which surprises me because the S2 CGI was not this rough so idk what happened here. That monster in the first episode is, uh, bad. And the background in the weird magicky place is also pretty, uh, bad.

I don't understand why the first witcher being an elf would piss Geralt off except maybe because that means Jaskier knows more about witchers than Geralt does? All of Geralt's iterations- the books, the games, the show, the comics- are pretty chill with elves as long as they're pretty chill with him. He only pursues certain elves and elf-blooded mixed race people when they pose a direct threat to him or his loved ones. Same as humans. So I don't really get that line at all unless, as said, it was more a "wow Geralt's gunna be pissed that I know this story and he doesn't"

[t34-mt]

How is the Vexology of the Manuel and kyhuine?

Completely obsolete worldbuilding 2023

i was craving to mention flags some days ago so this is awesome ( for those who don't know cause I didn't either, vexillology is the study of flags)

Flags are not really a thing for maanuls and kyhuines, they do not feel the need to have a flag to assemble everyone in x region under a single piece of tissue, they kind of see it as a way to just divide their own species by creating a weird nonsensical pride for a flag that supposedly represents them all, when within a single region there are various cultures and subcultures, and nomadic groups. They see their species as like a network of mycelium roots(? idk if that sounds clear), that they can connect to each other no matter where they're from. So the thing of belonging to a flag would feel like an unnecessary barrier

They already don't have no borders so flags? i don't think that would fit them. But colonies do have symbols that translate to where they're from, by that I mean an example is on stustumali's botanist gear. a flat wooden piece with one side saying for example "west", flipping the piece there is the specific name of the colony they're from.

That's something maanuls that go out of the colony for x reason have, kyhuines can use a specific rock only found in their region, a little wooden symbol which is either a plant, animal, or mythical animal that shows they're from x colony that uses that as their little emblem thing which is the closest thing to an actual flag.

But that doesn't mean flags never existed in the history of altuyur! they did appear once, tho unfortunately they appeared in GA for the worst reason: Propaganda. The propaganda of kaar'kchir used a distinct flag to be impactful, and the red troupes seeing how effective it was adapted the same technique. And it did work well,it added to the impactful imagery and made their campaigns more aggressive.

The flag of kaar'kchir section 4 (GA)

now forgive me it's my first time trying to draw the flags correctly so it's not perfect as I'm not specialized in that. But this is the flag created after tamtam became captain of section 4. harboring their distinct color. Compared to the red troupes, they're easily spotted from far because of the green, while the red of the red troupes can hide them a bit in certain biomes.

The flag of the red troupes.

When the council appropriated the north star to use it as a focal symbol in its propaganda it harmed what the north star was about in the first place, for a while during the silver age people were too scared of using that symbol anymore. before had more meaning to it than being related to some terrible group of GA. it was a symbol of myth, power, and wonder for the world around them. But with time, they detached its connection from GA and started reusing them like they used to in their culture. But they still can't put a north star on a single red background with nothing else, that just calls back to the red troupes flags.

Devious branch of Kllte (timsitkah)

Now that's not a flag for a brainwashed military faction like the two above (section 4 and red troupes), but they still used the imagery of having a flag so people would notice them more, if their symbol was "tagged" people would know who did this. Tho they decided to use a square flag to stand out from the rectangle ones.

Now Ktlle is an anti-war, pacifist movement created during GA as a response to the war. Ktlle uses blue clothing to be recognized but does not use flags as they associate that with section 4 and the red troupes. But a devious branch of it ,"timsitkah", led by Äme and Satmuh, who had enough of ktlle not acting started to use violent methods to fight off section 4 and the red troupes. While them using violence is understandably justified when it comes to fighting against military oppresing factions, they still got banned from ktlle because ktlle did not accept any use of brutality in their group as they wanted to continue traditional philosophical rules of the two species, that any violence equals stupidity and spiritual blindness. That banned devious branch left, and then made up their own faction on their side, with a flag/symbol (the timsit worm), thus is how Timsitkah was created.

Although the start of timsitkah was quite messy, and unorganized. It had people in their rank wanting that wanted to use radical tactics, these people were mostly made up of teens and sub-adults that would do acts of literal vile terrorism, using kunsip (a section 4 invention, equivalent of gunpowder) in the name of timsitkah. While these people would get quickly shut off from timsitkah when these accident would happen, section 4 and the red troupes would use the terrorism accidents for more propaganda. Saying that timsitkah is all filled with violent terrorists that would kill civils in the name of their illogical ideologies. Which is completely hypocritical of section 4 and the red troupes to say. but its propaganda, so yeah it will always be stupid.

Ktlle is a full pacifist faction, and Timsitkah wants pacifism to come back AFTER fighting off section 4 and the red troupes and thus going back to times like AOS (tho that new age after GA gets called SA). Timsitkah will not hesitate to kill a member from any of the two military factions, in its ranks it had spies for section4/red troupes. But in the section 4/red troupes there was also spies for Timsitkah, notable people that did that are Qua'tuli (spy the red troupes) and Kaasim (spy in section 4)

thank you for reading i hope you liked my answer :)

[skayafair]

What is it with me being drawn to the most fucked up personalities ever 🤦‍♀️

Let's talk Hilbert, pt. 1

There was a post where I was totally freaking out in the tags but it's got buried in the drafts, so I'll just go off it here, but hopefully in a more constructive way. I really hope my mind didn't lose its ability to do this yet. Buckle up, this is going to be a long one. (I mean it.)

I want to rant about how wrong the accent sounds and how the character is yet another example of a distasteful trope in north american media, but the fuckheads in the government confirmed this trope in multiples so whatever. Besides, I can't really complain when the character turned out to be compelling and... well. "Complicated" would be a bit of an overstatement I think, but - complicated enough to spur some thoughts.

So my first thought was the one I started the post with, because after the first shock of Hilbert's mutiny settled and future episodes revealed more of his behaviour, backstory and character overall, I had to admit with a certain amount of inner horror (10% to 20%) and frustration (at least 80%) that yes. "Oops, I did it again".

I have a history with such personalities, feel drawn to them and have been really, really trying to stop this nonsense for a year, but. Uh. Looks like this code runs too deep to scoop it all out just like that, huh. Anyway, back to the topic.

Well, this time I at least know exactly why the character compels me so much. "Airlock, please."

I'll start with why I've grown to be okay with "mad evil russian scientist" trope - not because the above mentioned fuckheads in the Gov confirmed it (they did and I hate them and what they're doing but unfortunately can't do anything about it), any generalisation based on a trait like nationality, gender, race and so on is a very bad thing I don't want to participate in no matter the circumstance, - but because Hilbert was given an actual well-rounded personality, and, most of all, I can't help feeling tons of respect to it. He is pretty smart, after all - knows several languages, has a degree in molecular biology, and apparently AI programming is a walk in a park for him, although his skills in this department aren't as great compared to actual specialists (but then again Maxwell is in a league of her own and is far above most of her colleagues even, so everything is relative). Being this well-versed in a field not directly connected to his own and mastering several foreign languages is. Well - wow. I'd respect this alone.

Hm, I'll start again, from the beginning.

Hilbert turned out to be the character I felt more interest towards pretty soon (the other two being Hera and - later - Eiffel), probably after that joke about "people keep saying that, and yet my problems keep going away". There wasn't much time between the moment he stopped being just a comic relief and his betrayal, but that time was enough I guess. Because the very first thing that grabbed my attention and kept it till the end was just how easy he is to understand. Seriously, of all the characters - I can barely trace what they could potentially do or think, they aren't defined enough for me (and that's fine, I feel this way about most people), - but this one is crystal clear.

It's his whole... personality frame? the way he speaks and thinks? It's just very clear. Not always as logical as he'd like to believe, but close. Most things he says are very reasonable, and... ugh. I'll round back to this anyway, so better let the cat out of the bag right away: I'm ND, and I've seen some people headcanon him to be autistic, and I don't really have any better way of describing why he's so understandable to me. It's just the way neurodivergent people think - different for everyone, of course, and NTs can do this like that too (after all, there are SO MANY unintentionally autistic or ADHD characters out there), - but there are still patterns, and I recognize them here.

It's in his reasoning and actions before the Christmas "surprise" - mostly calm, collected, speaks very directly and straight to the point. He mostly keeps up this pattern even when he lies.

And then, once you learn where you stand with him - after the mutiny - you know. Even when he hides something, it's clear that he's keeping things. He has a very distinct moral code and follows it, so when lying has no point anymore, he doesn't. I don't think he lied to the crew after the initial betrayal at all? Idk, I may be forgetting things, listened to it just once yet save for the first 10 eps (because I can't get through the last one and went back to the beginning).

There's a kind of trust in this transparency. Yes, everyone knows that Hilbert knows far more than he tells and if he doesn't see a good reason to, he probably won't say a word he doesn't want to. But the fact is, you still know about that. It's obvious when something's missing, the spaces are glaring. I have a feeling he doesn't like lying all that much, or rather doesn't see the point of it unless it's strictly necessary. Why wasting the resources when you don't have to and can direct them to more pressing matters, like saving the humanity, am I right?

So that's two points. The third - one when I REALLY realized I'm stuck well and deep - was the "Airlock, please". No hesitation, nothing. Just a polite choice. That short line fucked me up well.

Because after his betrayal I was horrified. I like how the podcast doesn't let any terrible moments slip or stay "behind the scenes" - no, if there's a life threatening situation, the audience doesn't have the luxury of sitting it out safely unaware. We're going to experience and hear it all, "present day, present time". So when Minkowski was shut out of the ship in outer space, while Doug was desperately trying to come up with a solution, I obviously empathized with them. And all this time we were listening to the doctor, proceeding with his orders in the most cold-hearted manner possible. He heard it all, too, and didn't waver. This was terrifying and I honestly couldn't imagine how this character was going to be present for the most of the podcast - I wanted him dead, the sooner the better. And - as a parallel line of thinking - couldn't help feeling it was such a waste. I started liking this character, he was goofy but really easy to understand, and it's very nice to have someone like this. Obviously everything was going to change from that point.

But then. The way he went through all the interrogations, all the insults and mocking? And his fucking choice to die right away rather than to give away the information he didn't think was intended for his former crewmates? Before that answer I thought he was keeping his mouth shut because of the company only, fear of the higher-ups or something - he did follow their orders and threw away the lives of two people who weren't strangers to him, so it was a reasonable assumption! Minkowski seemed to think the same, judging by her remarks, but no. And that moment, that single answer turned my understanding of this character upside down. None of that dignity was just a show, he really meant it.

I realized he didn't fear for himself. At all. A complete disregard of self, was it? It seemed so that moment, and yeah, it was fucking compelling - the only thing that mattered was his work and his dedication to it. If it was only that, I wouldn't be typing all this though.

Before I continue, I'll note that even this trait - this dedication - is very relatable and understandable to me. Some years ago the only value I saw in myself was in what I loved to do the most - drawing and translation. I'm very mid level, and even this may very well be an overestimation of my skills, but those were the only things that mattered to me. If I didn't do them, what was even the point of me? I didn't feel I fully lived otherwise. I overcame this way of thinking as it is pretty damaging, but I still remember it perfectly. And I still need for what I do to matter. If I manage to make some positive impact on the world around, however small it may be, that would be enough, and that would be the only thing that matters after I'm gone. Hilbert though makes this approach absolute because of his trauma. So yeah, I have a lot of complicated feelings about this all at once. It's tragic, it's admirable, it's heartbreaking and feels like the only way at times, it should never happen.

I also know very well what it means to be able to disregard pretty much anything if I believe this is the right way or the aim to be important enough. I unintentionally made my friend cry once because of this and keep this memory as a reminder of why I should always try to see other POVs and a broader picture. The absolute, applied to human principles, is a bad idea in most cases.

Also, I like that he has a no-nonsense personality but regularly engages in said nonsense. I know in the first few episodes the creators just didn't understand where to go with the podcast yet and that's why everyone and everything is so different there, but I need for things to make sense in-universe, so I'm partial to the POV that Hilbert just put up an act and dropped it later. But still, he did participate in the crew's shenanigans and didn't seem to complain about it. And Funzo? Please, it was A DELIGHT. There was NOTHING, no reasons to take part in the game but he still did. The doctor is pretty goofy when he lets himself, huh? I like this fun part of his personality. The best sign the personality is still very much present.

[beloved-daydreams]

Folktober2023 Prompt: "My sister, the serial killer." 🔪🌼

An attempt by

Hosted by @jurdannetrevels and @jurdannet

📘 1 400+ words

😎 Characters: Taryn, Jude mention, Myriadh, Tatterfell, The Ghost/Larkin

✒️ Tags: self-reflection, sharing, sweet

📢 Summary: Taryn has made it to her sister’s place along with her attendant Myriadh. As she learns that Jude’s not home, Taryn decides to take a stroll in the palace's "garden", which is also the graveyard of Elfhame's enemies. More specifically, the ones who have fallen under Jude’s sword.

🧐 Author’s Note: Part 2 of the Taryn 3-parter I have prepared for Folktober! First part was for "Corn maze" and the third and final part will be out for "graveyard meet-cute"!

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As we arrive at the palace, I'm immediately recognized to be the High Queen's sister. Before, clothes and crown aside, it was still sometimes a bit harder to tell, but now with the size of my belly, we are unmistakable. Myriadh extends her hand to me as I'm about to jump out of the carriage, I politely hold it, not actually putting any of my weight into it.

We pass through the front garden that is used to make all visitors fear for their life. Each spot of the garden is covered in a different type of flower which gives it a strange charm, yet knowing the reason behind such an arrangement makes the fae sweat from anxiousness. It has only been 6 months since Jude and Cardan are both reigning over Elfhame, yet all those flowers show the amount of fae Jude has killed.

All traitors and enemies. Jude is now known as the mortal high queen who ends the fae's immortalities. She has already outlived all the fae in this beautiful graveyard by killing them. This graveyard that everyone has to pass through in order to enter the palace. She was now a Queen but still very much with the spirit of a killer. Though maybe it sounds too harsh, I should say assassin since her killings supposedly have meaning. "Don't fuck with me." That's the meaning. I breathe the scent in. I love it. Myriadh is trying to keep a straight face but I can tell she feels a bit uneasy by the sight.

Well, to be fair, I also feel a bit uneasy at the sight but for a different reason. Witnessing how beautiful the fae are even after their death. Not like us, rotting corpses with no pretty flowers to grow from our bodies. The only flowers on top of our graves come from those who miss us. And by how inconsequential I am, I'm not sure if anyone other than my siblings and child will leave flowers on where I will rest. I sigh at the depressing thoughts. Pregnancy mood swings be damned. Pheromones be damned.

"Are you feeling okay, my liege? Shall we go back after all?"

"No need. It won't take long."

I make my way to some guards, they inform me that my timing is unfortunate, that my sister has left just a little while ago. Thus I ask for Tatterfell. When they invite me in, I turn them down. We make our way through the garden, I catch so many new flowers that weren't there 3 weeks ago, last time I visited. I like finding new flowers, wondering from what type of fae they're growing out of.

And before I can stop my big mouth from spilling the words, they're already out.

"I'm so envious, you know."

Myriadh blinks at me, not sure how to answer since my words are so half-assed and nonsensical. So I continue.

"Of you. The fae. You're all beautiful from the moment you're born, magnificent while you live, powerful when you die and still beautiful after death. I mean, you've been living with me for the past 4 months Myr, you've seen how bad I look in the mornings."

I think back to how Locke looked when I killed him. When yellow roses grew out of him as I tried to dispose of his body. I thought it was so unfair, he was still flaunting his superior beauty at me even from beyond the grave I wanted to put him in. I think of how I would eat those faerie fruits at his revels as if I'm a pet of a wife, a fun little human who will obey the whims of her caring husband. Oh so benevolent for marrying a human who's only redeeming quality is being agreeable. Pleasant to spend time with because she'll listen and laugh, and agree.

Myriadh gathers her thoughts, probably trying to find a proper way to answer me. I like that about her. How careful she is with words and etiquette, maybe just as much as Oriana was. I miss her.

"Although you are right, I believe humans have things that may stir up envy from the fae's side as well."

I fake a laugh like I always do. I hope it doesn't sound too bitter.

"Is that so? Tell me."

We're now standing in place, I realize this might take some time so I sit at a bench and gesture to her to do the same. She sits next to me, but not too close as a sign of respect for my personal space.

"Do you know how old I am, my liege?"

Of course I know, I remember everything I'm told.

"If I remember correctly, 120 years or so?"

Rhetorical question, I know I'm right.

"Yes. I've been trying to have a child my whole life." She pauses. Probably measuring her words again, trying to not make it sound like she's accusing me of being too ignorant, too unaware of what they might go through in their long lives. "It's something I've been yearning for, giving life. Twenty years ago I gave up and made my way to the human world where I worked at a daycare for a while, putting the little ones to sleep."

I turn my head towards Myriadh, my eyes that were focused on the garden are now observing the faerie woman who looks like she can't be older than 25. She spares me a glance, seeing that I don't look offended but rather shocked, she continues.

"Homesickness got the better of me in the end, I came back recently. And, well… my coworkers started to wonder why I didn't seem to age at all despite having worked there for 20 years."

I chuckle, this time a real laugh.

"I guess you didn't think that far ahead." I smile kindly.

"I guess not. I should've glamored myself to slowly look older and older through the years. If I had made myself suddenly look older after hearing them gossiping about it, it would've been strange." She agrees.

I see now. To her who tried to have a child for a century, I must sound quite small-minded with my beauty talk. It's not like my envy has dissipated but it's good to put things in perspective.

Far away, I see a familiar figure approaching us. Tatterfell.

I tell her about my request to have the maze around my house be eradicated. She doesn't ask me why but she notes how, although Jude isn't home at the moment, since the request is coming from me, it can be done easily. Before going back to work, she shares with me something unexpected.

"Consider visiting us more often. Although Ju- Her Highness is often busy, I suspect she misses you. I have no answer to give her every time I'm asked about your whereabouts and she has seriously considered sending some of her people to guard your household."

"... Are you sure you're allowed to tell me this?"

Tatterfell shrugs and smiles.

"So you're still more preoccupied about etiquette than your sister's care for you. That's good to see, Oriana would be proud of the consistency."

I blush. I know this is not a jab at me since Tatterfell isn't the type to do so and she must truly believe the words she's saying, coming from her mouth this is not sarcasm. Yet I feel embarrassed at the idea that I haven't changed all that much.

Tatterfell leaves us be. I suppose it might be good to go back now.

As we're walking back to the carriage with slow steps, Myriadh looks as if she wants to tell me something. I welcome her to do so.

"Well, about before-"

Her sentence is cut short as a figure is suddenly in front of us. As if it materialized out of thin air. Myriadh jumps in front of me in a protective manner, she's about to open her mouth, letting her voice put the creature to sleep. But having the time to process the sight, I quickly realize it's not a creature.

"Wait!" The indistinct voice begs. I hold Myriadh's arm, a sign for her to hold on.

Hood down, mask off, the individual suddenly becomes recognizable to us. Jude had gifted the court of shadows some masks that can blur their presence. I realize now this is what it was. The faerie, or rather, the half-faerie standing in front of us is actually Larkin. Better known as the Ghost amongst his "fellow colleagues" if we can even consider spying and killing as work.

He shoots a smile at me, a tense one. And suddenly, I’m not so sure on how to act anymore.

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I’m excited about the next and last part!!! (For obvious reasons at this point.) Let’s say that the "character interactions" I wrote for the next part were... interesting to figure out? 😂 I’m quite pleased with it although I know it won’t get much traction since the central character in this is Taryn 🫠 It’s okay girlie, if no one’s here, I’m here!

Please leave comments/tags!!! 💖

[zerolostwalks]

you say childish like it's a bad thing but I see you eyeing that life size Pokémon plush don't kid yourself for Willie/anyone

Carrie had never in her life anticipated date nights to be this unpredictable. 

Then again she hadn’t exactly planned to be part of the web that was Julie and the Phantoms either. There were an abundant number of rumors circulating at the state of what exactly the relationship dynamic was between any of them. You’d have to be blind to not see the way the four of them looked at each other while performing. 

Fond looks that lingered even off the stage and extended to Flynn, and Alex’s friend Willie. 

It’d been a pleasant surprise when Reggie had asked her out. An even bigger one when Flynn and Julie eventually confessed their own attractions. And now somehow despite everything in their history, Carrie found herself as integral to their web as the rest of them.

This month’s big group date event was a board game night. Which turned into going to the massive games and comics store to buy an entirely new board game or two. Since no one had bothered to check if anyone actually owned any board games they could all play at the same time. 

Carrie didn’t know if such a game existed but Alex and Reggie were adamant they knew of one and had gone off to find it. Luke got distracted by the wall of t-shirts while Flynn pulled Julie away to show her some comic characters she wanted to attempt to replicate the look of. 

Carrie tried her best to not feel abandoned, feeling out of place and unfamiliar with the store. Plus it wasn’t like she’d been left completely alone, Willie was still with her. Even if she’s barely said more than a sentence to him. 

Her eyes trailing over the many shelves of the books, figurines, and other merchandise. THere was a lot here. No matter which way she looked or turned she continuously found herself staring at one particularly large stuffed animal. Some sort of pink and white dog with blue tipped ribbons that must have been half her size. 

“You’re getting anything?” Willie asked as he rocked on his feet.

“I don’t know, isn’t this kind of…” She regretted what she was saying even as she said it. Knew how judgmental it sounded, how much it could sting. How much it had the potential to ruin everything. But was powerless to stop herself, old old anxieties and paranoias flaring up. “...childish.”

“You say childish like it’s a bad thing.” Willie spoke with a smile. Carrie would never be able to articulate the relief that coursed through her veins seeing it. Then he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “But I see you eyeing that life size Pokémon plush.”

“Pokémon plush?” Sure there were a few Pokémon plushes scattered throughout the store that she recognized from when she was a kid and still played those games. The bulk of the plushes were unrecognizable critters, though. 

“The Sylveon.” Willie said, pointing at the large pink and white dog with the blue tinted ribbons. “Aesthetically I guess it makes sense for you to be drawn to the fairy types. I always pegged you as more of a fire and ice type of gal. Though you could totally rock out an all Eeveelutions team.”

She blinked at Willie, trying to process the nonsense spewing from his mouth without resorting to her usual catty defensiveness. Especially when he dropped what ‘type of gal’ he thought she’d be. It sounded far too similar to criticisms and assumptions she’d heard her whole life. 

‘Oh, Carrie is so cold.’ ‘Look out for Ice Queen Carrie.’ ‘Didn’t you know about redheads and their fiery tempers?’ 

“Don’t you mean fire or ice?” She asked, as they slowly inched towards the wall of plushies.

“No.” Willie casually shook his head, as he knelt down to get a better look at the large–what was it, Silvie-on?–’s price tag. “Imagine the kind of spectacle and showiness it would take to create a truly wicked fire and ice type gym. Not to mention getting the logistics right that you didn’t tear your own gym apart. If anyone could pull that off it’d be you.”

“Huh.” That was different reasoning she wasn’t quite expecting. Not that she knew what to expect of Willie, every time she thought she had him figured out he surprised her.

“Yo!” Willie called out, startling her from the unexpected cry. Despite the size of the store, she saw he’d managed to snag basically everyone else's attention. Before she could even think to stop him he held up the large Pokemon plush. “Who wants to chip in to help get this for Carrie?”

“Oh, hell yeah!” Reggie cried back from where he was at the far end of the store and interrupted her protests to Willie that she’d be fine getting it on her own. 

Her insistent offers to help pay for it were also, politely, dismissed. The others insisted they let her spoil her a bit.Which, she can’t remember the last time she’s heard anyone say that to her that wasn’t her dad. 

Who knew a board game night would lead to her owning a life sized Sylveon, and three more Eeveelution plushes that Reggie, Flynn, and Julie had picked out for her. She might have to pick up those games again.

[soundlesslament]

So I wrote the scene of the final conversation between Revan and the Exile after Malachor. This option tied with "both" in the poll, so I decided to honor that by writing this one first, but also the other one afterwards. I love democracy. I have also gone back and given titles to the previous stories, and all these posts are now tagged 'KOTOR Story' to make them easier to find.

Note: The story is written from the Exile’s (Lysia) point of view.

» This Is Goodbye

“Are you awake?”

I turn my head at the sound, a sting to my eyes as I force them open. The lights of the medbay burn. Colors and shadows melt into each other, ambient sounds mixing with sight, the entirety of the room taking too long to come into focus.  

Standing by the door, opposite my bed, is Revan. She leans back against the wall, arms crossed, having foregone the customary armor in favor of simpler dark-colored robes. My muddled thoughts make me question if she is a hallucination - I do not feel her presence. The energy that always gathers around her, flaring like a beacon, is nowhere to be seen.

“Awake? I think so.” I do my best to sit up in bed, twisting the covers beneath my fingers as if that would ease the pain spreading across my body. My mind suddenly jolts with recollection. “The battle- Malachor. What happened?”

"It is over,” Revan confirms. She pushes herself from the wall, stepping forward. “You did well. I expect we will have a formal surrender in a few hours."

My shoulders drop in relief. It is over, I repeat to myself. This war will at last come to an end. For a second, I feel at peace.

And a second later, it all breaks apart.

Flashing memories cut through the haze, each stabbing like a blade. Destruction, suffering, death. My comrades falling before my eyes. Darkness.

"No. Something went wrong," I rush out the words. "There was too much damage. Our troops-"

"It went as it should have."

Her matter-of-fact tone shifts my gaze to her. She meets it with an impassive expression. A terrible feeling I cannot describe pushes aside all the pain, and my voice comes out like a trembling whisper, ”Revan, what did you do?”

She tilts her head to one side as if just asked a nonsensical question, before giving into a smirk.

“I won.”

For a moment, I forget how to breathe. I try to better focus on Revan through the blur, the back of my mind clinging to some desperate, foolish hope that this woman is not my old friend.

She stands still and collected, as if guessing my thoughts and waiting my appraisal. Her eyes are pale and colorless - were they not blue before? - but the spirit behind them is the same, cleverness and strength and determination shining through. My thoughts tying themselves into knots, I can only lower my head in defeat.

"We are not done yet." Revan shakes her head, crossing her arms over her chest.

"You said-"

"The next target is the Republic. I am sure you agree they have more than proved their inefficiency. It is their time to fall."

All at once, the reality of the situation explodes within me. My vision is overwhelmed by pain and by tears, my body both hurts and feels senseless, my soul aches and yet feels empty.

"This is wrong." My throat burns as I speak. "Why are you- I will not- I cannot allow you to do this!"

"Threats are not so effective when you seem more dead than alive."

"Please, there is still time. Whatever you are planning, don't-'' I nearly choke on my words and my tears. And yet from the corner of my eye, I see Revan only sneers at my pleas. I know she will not listen to me, that she will not give up - when has she ever? My heart clenches. "We should never have come."

Revan scoffs out a laugh. Cold. Cruel. "Are you agreeing with the Council now?"

"Maybe I am. I only wanted to help those who were suffering, and now look at what we have done," I tell her. "Look at you."

"Crawl back to your masters and beg for forgiveness, then," she says, with a voice so disdainful I can hardly recognize it. There is a finality in her tone that crushes whatever is left of me. "Goodbye, Lysia."

Like a broken, listless doll, I say nothing as she turns and walks away, throwing her last words without looking back.

"Let us hope we do not meet again."

[gayhawkelatehomicide]

Names

Honestly I... Don't know what this is. It possessed me and now it's here. Uhh I know that headcanoning Anders a name other than yanno, Anders, isn't everybody's cup of tea, so fair warning? It's not like I plan to have anybody call him that, I just wanted to think about what this conversation might look like and the name bit me. So here, have a handers that I wrote in like 20 minutes on my phone.

***

Word Count: 1339

Rating: G

Additional Tags: Hawke is an adorable dork with a heart of gold and no one will take this from me, cat bf and dog bf are the best kind of relationship, genuinely could not tell you where this came from, names and naming, the importance of calling a thing by the correct name so as to be able to recognize and understand it, boyfriends being soft about stuff that hurt a long time ago

***

Hawke walks in already complaining. Anders smiles and puts down his quill to stretch his aching hand, feeling a twinge of annoyance in the back of his head at being interrupted. He recognizes it for what it is—not entirely his own reaction, but not entirely that of his passenger—and ignores it. He was going to go to bed soon anyway. By the time Anders gets turned all the way around, Hawke has leaned his staff in the corner and is peeling out of the top layer of his robes.

"You know nobody in this entire city but you calls me by my given name? Seriously, think about it! With most of the citizenry, especially the ones in Hightown, it's 'Champion' all day long. 'Oh Champion, my brother's caravan is late' and 'Champion please, you have to help my mother,' and 'Dear Champion, my cat went up that tree and can't get down. Again.' It's as though they've all forgotten I have a name instead of just a title." He unties the fastenings on the leather cuirass he wears between his outer robe and the sweat-stained under-layer. The poor clasps creak protest at Hawke's enthusiasm.

"And I know at least some of them know it! Fifi de Launcet used to simper at me when we first bought the house and Mother was trying to get me married off respectably. Sure, a few of them probably think it's a compliment or some nonsense, but you'd think at least Lady Elegant would call me Garrett every now and then. If not in the course of business, then maybe when I'm poking around her stall doing something irritating."

He bends at the waist to unlace his boots, presenting Anders with a lovely view of his ass as he struggles with laces that he obviously tied while they were still wet. Hawke has been through four sets of laces for those boots in the past few months because he's too impatient to let them dry before jamming his feet in them and running off to do whatever it is he does when he's out of Anders's direct line of sight.

"Most of our friends don't use my given name either, did you notice? Varric calls me Hawke like it's a title more than Champion, which is *fine*," he manages to get one boot off, mostly by sheer brute strength. The sock comes with it. "Even Aveline doesn't three-name me when I'm misbehaving, just says," and here he drops into a worryingly accurate imitation of Aveline. "Hawke, if I catch you trying to breathe fire in the Lowtown market one more time, I swear-!"

The other boot comes loose with enough force to nearly knock Hawke off his feet. He catches himself with all the grace and poise of a moderately sized druffalo, then grins triumphantly over his shoulder at Anders, holding up the boot. The look on his face is incredibly similar to the look his mabari wears when he drops dead vermin (or, on one memorable occasion, a mangled burglar) at his master's feet. Anders applauds politely.

Hawke kicks the boots into the corner by the fire and starts on his greaves and bracers, still talking. "Hell, even the villains and other assorted bastards whose teeth we kick in regularly call me 'dog lord' or 'mage' or something equally obvious. You'd think at least one of them would've done his research. Evets, maybe, of Evets' Marauders. You remember them, don't you love?"

Anders does. Distinctly. He remembers wrapping Isabela in shield after shield as her quick fingers teased apart rows of traps while Hawke traded bolts of fire and sneering retorts with the blood mage on the other side of the bluff, and Aveline kept her shield between the mages and that terrifying longbowman. He remembers the reek of burnt flesh and armor and the despair in the eyes of the guardsmen, and the way they'd rallied around their captain and Hawke. He remembers the way more of them died, pinned with arrows or rent apart to fuel the blood mage's spells. Anders makes a noncommittal noise, which Hawke takes as an agreement.

"You'd think maybe that guy would've learned my name, right? I mean, he spent what, three years tracking me down? Some kind of criminal he was, I've been in the same place the whole time, but it's not like I care." Hawke sets the last pieces of his armor in a pile on the desk and flings himself diagonally across the bed. His curly black hair fans out around his head—it's getting deliciously long now—and he throws an arm over his eyes. The other one continues gesturing emphatically.

"Shit, even Carver just calls me 'brother' most of the time. The last letter he wrote home barely sounded like he was talking to me at all, just a quick update and one of his sullen little 'try not to get yourself killed too stupidly' things at the end. What is this resistance to using my given name, huh? It doesn't make any sense. I have a good name, I think. Mother made plenty of mistakes, but that wasn't one of them. Why does Kirkwall hate my name?"

Anders is gripped by a strange impulse. Later, he'll pick it apart looking for Justice's influence, but in the moment all he's thinking about is Hawke's running complaint and how the names a person wears can come to define them.

"Valery," he blurts before he can stop himself, then clenches his mouth and eyes shut.

Hawke makes an inquiring noise from the bed. The sound of sheets shifting, presumably as he sits up. "What was that, love?"

Anders grapples with a long-kept promise to himself for a long moment before giving up and sighing. He's said it already. Too late to take it back now. He might as well explain. Besides, Hawke already knows every terrible thing about him. What's a name, compared to that?

"Valery," he repeats. "It's the name my mother gave me. She was from the Anderfels; wanted to name me after her brother. My father didn't like it much, but he always let her have her way. Well, almost always."

The old bitterness threatens to swamp him, so Anders forces a smile onto his face and looks up at Hawke, still on the bed, looking stricken. "I've no clue why the templars didn't make a note of it, but when they took me to the circle they claimed they didn't know my name, just that I was half-Ander. I've been Anders ever since."

Hawke is out of bed and across the room in the space of a few heartbeats. He kneels on the floor at Anders's feet. Takes his hands in his own. "Oh, love. I'm sorry. I didn't think... Do you want-?"

"No, it's fine," Anders shakes his head. "It hasn't been my name for a long time." He squeezes Hawke's fingers, feeling the callouses and old breaks that didn't set right, the faint tremors that tell of using too much force magic without a focus. The way this city weighs on him day after day, expectations pressing, thousands of lives depending on his actions, is always evident in his hands. He always claims they don't bother him, but Anders sees the way he grasps his cup more gingerly on cold mornings than he did years ago, and he knows how quickly a hand massage turns Hawke into a puddle of warm goo. Anders squeezes Hawke's hands, feeling his smile warm into something genuine.

"Valery." He says it so carefully, the same way he's treated every fragile broken-glass part of Anders since the moment they met. The old name sounds so beautiful in his voice, and with his big dark eyes turned up like a sinner in prayer, he looks like a penitent angel. "It's a beautiful name, love. Thank you for trusting me with it."

Anders really can't be blamed for knocking them both to the floor in his rush to kiss Hawke as thoroughly as physically possible.

[hero-israel]

So there's a very long response to this post going around, and when I say "very long" I mean I copied it into a Word doc and can confirm it is 7 single-spaced pages, 50 paragraphs, 3,800 words. Just under twice as long as "The Tell-Tale Heart." It reads like it was meant to overwhelm people, to look unanswerable through sheer volume. So I will not be reblogging it here. Instead, feel free to read it and then see some of the glaring problems below.

"Don't you know that words ['apartheid'] change over time?" That was my entire complaint about this bad-faith ploy. HRW changed the definition of "apartheid" in a way that left it morally unserious. When Ron DeSantis calls LGBT teachers "groomers," he is changing the definition. If he gets more votes, he still changed the definition.

""The example with Mexico/America is ridiculous, because those two are internationally recognized sovereign states whereas Israel is a settler-colonial state built on stolen Palestinian land" So America and Mexico are CONTRASTED WITH settler-colonial countries, international recognition is CONTRASTED WITH whatever Israel is, and America DID NOT steal Mexican land. That is the written context, buried as it is.

"...and America is a settler-colonial state..." The same America that was just used as a CONTRAST to a settler-colony. I remember my own academic years and what a heavily padded paper looks like. Naturally I will point out that Israel is not a settler-colonial country at all, that thinking the story of Jews in Israel in any way matches that of Englishmen in America is not history but historical revisionism, and this will yield a denial and "Is too!," so let's not linger.

"America is an apartheid state" When I rhetorically asked that, I was called "ridiculous," but then it is said to be true anyway, because padding. And here the linguistic and moral unseriousness of anti-Zionists winds up sheltering racists, as it tends to do. This is nothing less than an approving, positive resurrection of Apartheid South Africa's retort to judgments from the outside world: "Whatabout YOUR race problems?" John Vorster is laughing in Hell right now. This broadens the definition of "apartheid" beyond unseriousness and into total meaninglessness: if America is an apartheid state then there can't be more than 20 countries on Earth that AREN'T apartheid states, and as Alfred Kinsey pointed out during a comparable moral panic, "Everyone's sin is no sin, everyone's crime is no crime." Teleport some black South Africans circa 1979 into America - of that year or today. Tell them it's still apartheid and that they won't be able to see a difference. See how well that goes. This is the ultimate problem with the post and the core of our disagreements. I reject the notion that words mean whatever one wants them to mean when angry. I say apartheid is a distinctive concept for something terrible and it is disingenuous to claim it is not heard by all as a 1:1 comparison to South Africa; the revulsion around that case in particular is why the word is used. Time and time again throughout the response, any time I try to deconstruct or reanalyze a claim, I just get the original claim hurled back at me as though I were saying "Where can I find this?" instead of "Can you see the problems with this?".

[Many many examples of what a military occupation is like] I could fact-check many of these ("starving Palestinians" is nonsense) but this will go on forever, people can find it in my tags, and this whole sub-novella segment of the response is redundant, stacking one problem atop another and assuming the final edifice has gotten so big that it must be called "apartheid" instead of "military occupation." In my OP I said people gave up on fighting the occupation and called it "apartheid" out of exasperation, and nothing has been shown here to counter that. Again - no engagement with the original question, just repeating shit back at me like I'd never asked.

"The oppression of Palestinians is absolutely racial. A particularly blatant demonstration of this fact happened on October 16, 2023, when Netanyahu posted a tweet describing the ongoing genocide as "a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle” After the most grotesque butchery aimed at Jewish people since the Holocaust, with widespread rape, infanticide, torture, kidnapping, and desecration of the dead, Netanyahu described the perpetrators as "children of darkness." I'd rather the man had been hanged beforehand but that one quote is not among his flaws. The Hamas attack was beyond any moral event horizon and any respectable defense. And here it really starts to look sinister that the response that opened with confident assurances of academic bona fides and historian background didn't even mention the pogrom nor grasp that as the context of a remark calling those responsible bad. This person, in fact, never made a post about the massacre at all. There is also much focus on "how dare he say children-of-darkness," claiming this as dehumanizing and racist. In context it looks depressingly like the author thinks Israelis / Jews are lighter-skinned than Palestinians. It also begs pointing out that constant syndromic blurting of "genocidal settler-colonist" around majoritarian Jews is pretty fucking dehumanizing and a common tactic of violent racists.

"If Israel hadn't imposed an apartheid regime onto Palestinians and conducted a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide against them, there would have been no need for violent resistance at all." It's always the same ones who say "This conflict didn't start on 10/7" who then go on to insist that it actually started in 1948 and NOW it all makes sense. A purported historian should know of the racialized violence and oppression Jews suffered throughout Palestine and the broader Middle East for literally a MILLENNIUM before Israel was invented. 10/7 was a restaging of Baghdad 1941 or Hebron 1929 or Yathrib 627. There is no valid history of this conflict - and no valid interpretation of when militias started massacring Jews - that ignores the primordial antisemitism that the Jews there had always, always faced.

By hero-israel’s logic, only the last year of the Holocaust counts as a genocide, and none of it counts as a crime because the word didn’t exist early enough for it to have applied. By hero-israel’s logic, the systematic extermination of indigenous peoples in Australia and the United States, to name only two examples, only count as genocides after 1944. Apparently things can only happen if they’re named into existence. "Genocide" was a word first invented to refer to Jews (other words with such origins include "ghetto" and "diaspora"), the whole Holocaust counts, and we certainly can look back through history to see concepts before their etymological naming. What we CANNOT do is try to use two frames at once - the frame of "apartheid being bad because everyone knows how bad South Africa was" and also the frame of "Israel has been apartheid for so long that they invented it". Genocide was bad before the word was invented, and "abortion is black genocide" is still a lie. Long before Pluto was named, it wasn't a planet, and people who call it a planet today are wrong. I didn't enjoy writing this and expect it to resolve nothing. Just as "the cruelty is the point," so too are the faculty lounge word games the point. The apartheid analogy MUST hold, even if it requires stripping the word of all meaning and saying actual 1970s-80s white South Africans were right all along to say that America was as bad as they were and had no grounds to judge them. Whitewashing Jews and the long history of this conflict fits perfectly on that dry-erase board. Whew, there! I hope my reply wasn't so long as to be effectively unreadable, it was merely (*checks*) 3 pages and 1,200 words.

sorry if this is a dumb question and i understand if you don't want to answer but do you have links to posts explaining why israel isn't an apartheid state? i swear i read posts like that on your blog before but i don't know how to refind them

Israeli Arabs have legal equality with Jews. Same restaurants, same pools, same seats on the bus, same voting rights. I would favorably compare the treatment of Israeli Arabs with that of any minority group in any country on Earth.

The West Bank has a military occupation, with (pretty fast) checkpoints and no right to vote about the government running that military. Military occupations are bad and some of us have been against this particular one for decades. The anti-occupation movement hasn't gotten anywhere, they've just been stuck. Being stuck in a military occupation for X more years doesn't make it apartheid, just like being stuck in a bad marriage for X more years doesn't make you divorced. Meanwhile, the 2020 Abraham Accords showed that multiple Arab states were willing to accept this unchanging status quo and deal with Israel as it is. Those two factors - the stagnant, unchanging nature of the occupation, and the clear loss of interest in the Palestinian cause - combined to have the latest crop of awareness-raising college interns at some shifty NGOs try to force change by abracadabra'ing together a new concept of "apartheid" that exists solely for Israel. And it is working, just like "Christ-killer" and "stabbed Germany in the back" worked.

In 2010, Human Rights Watch published an extremely critical report on Israel's occupation of the West Bank. Dragged them up one wall and down the other. Yet there was no accusation of "apartheid" there. In the report, page 33, they cited a lawsuit by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel that had said it was apartheid for the West Bank military occupation authorities to ban Palestinians from driving on Highway 443 after repeated firebombings / shootings against Israelis. The Israeli High Court ruled that it was inappropriate to ban Palestinians from the road, and it re-established their equal driving access - they have had it ever since. The court also said that the accusation of apartheid behind that now-ended ban was dishonest, because the security concerns were not based on race; there were and are no "Jewish-only" roads anywhere, even when WB Palestinians were denied road access, Israeli Arabs could and did drive there. The HRW 2010 report included a long summary of that finding, without challenge. As bad as they saw Israel, they agreed it wasn't apartheid.

Then in 2020 came the Abraham Accords, so while nothing at all had changed in the administration of the West Bank, in 2021 HRW said it actually was apartheid. It really is that simple. The most famous legal convention banning apartheid specifies that it is race-based. HRW instead went with a different legal convention on apartheid, one that says it could be based on national origin if it involves discrimination among citizens of the same country.... and then they up and added their own twist to that, saying they will consider it apartheid if there is discrimination based on national origin AMONG PEOPLE WHO AREN'T CITIZENS OF THE SAME COUNTRY. In a very real sense, HRW declared Mexico is an apartheid state because Americans can't vote in its elections.

In 2022, Amnesty International followed with their own report, saying that not only was the military occupation now "apartheid," but that Israel itself had been an apartheid state ever since it was established in 1948. This moral perversion had the effect of saying Israel literally INVENTED apartheid since in May 1948 it didn't even exist in South Africa yet. It also said that Amnesty International - founded 1961 - had been looking at an apartheid the whole time but never recognized it. To make things even more dishonest, Amnesty said they "are not claiming Israeli conditions are analogous to South Africa," meaning anything that shows how Israel is different from South Africa doesn't count. They're using the South African word for the South African policy but it's actually not like South Africa at all so be quiet, neener neener no backsies.

I shouldn't have to take that seriously. Neither should anyone. Palestinians and their advocates should be ashamed to have to lean on such an obvious bad-faith lie.

Nelson Mandela, who died in 2013, never once accused Israel of apartheid, and instead repeatedly said he supported Zionism and a 2-state solution. Mandela's lawyer, still alive, says the accusation is a lie. Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Islamist party that joined Israel's governing coalition in 2021, says the accusation is a lie. And if people want to bandy around NGO business cards, here is the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2017:

“The Red Cross was very familiar with the regime that prevailed in South Africa during the apartheid period, and we are responding to all those who raise their claim of apartheid against Israel: No, there is no apartheid here, no regime of superiority of race, of denial of basic human rights to a group of people because of their alleged racial inferiority. There is a bloody national conflict, whose most prominent and tragic characteristic is its continuation over the years, decades-long, and there is a state of occupation. Not apartheid.”

There's a lot more you can see about the shifty terminology, unreliable sourcing, and longstanding culture of antisemitism and racism within Amnesty International. People who can cite chapter and verse of why the Salvation Army, Autism Speaks, Chik-Fil-A and Harry Potter are problematic should not be shocked.

[vaspider]

Since the queer post is going around, I want to send an ask thanking you for making me realize something. (It's not about the word queer; I've always been vehemently pro-queer--but that's another topic.) There was something in that post about how someone reblogged your post with rude tags and had a MOGAI/SJW/etc. DNI in their blog. And in the post, you made it clear you just blocked them and moved on. You respected their DNI.

I don't know why it didn't hit me to respect people's wishes even when I so vehemently believe they're wrong, even when they might be sorta-directly sorta-indirectly rude to me on the internet. Logically and without emotions, I know nothing good could come of it. At best, it would be nothing but an unmemorable interaction for that person, but at worst, but I might solidify their views I'm trying to change.

But that part almost doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter if I could change their mind. What matters is that they have asked me not to interact. If I truly want to respect them in a way that I think is so essential, I need to be able to not interact with people, even when my brain is screaming at me to.

I can't explain why this was an eye-opening moment for me. Maybe it was because you were so upset (and with good reason) and you still chose to respect them. Maybe it was because you didn't back down from your anger over it, you didn't invalidate your own feelings--you just recognized they had the right to their own.

It's hard to explain, because it's not like that urge to yell at these people has gone away. But now I feel an understanding for why it's so fundamentally wrong and against what I believe in. I can't force people to interact with me if I disagree with them. The best I can do is curate my own space online, and take the opportunities when people with differing opinions are actually willing and open to talking to me.

Anyway. Thank you for the post. Both for being so loudly pro-queer and for helping me realize being respectful isn't about being right, it's about understanding.

Honestly, it's not about respecting their DNI. I don't really read DNIs on people who begin interaction with me - if someone talks to me, I'm not going to check and see if it's okay for me to answer them. But like... if I happen to see it, and someone is interacting with me despite their own DNI, or is pulling that whole, uhhh... "I'm talking to you, but don't you dare respond to me or you are violating my DNI," I block them because that shit is tiresome, I'm 45 years old, and I really just don't have enough hours left on this earth to indulge that kind of trifling nonsense.

They have their right to their feelings, yes. Everyone has the right to be a dick if they really want to, for that matter. Whether their feelings are genuine or they are just being a dick about it all, I just don't have time for fussing over it. They're strangers on the internet who think my identity is a word too bad to use.

I really don't know if I'm as understanding as you paint me to be, that is to say. But thank you?

[kagejima]

Words of Encouragement

As the interaction discussion I monitored this weekend comes to a close, I have been struggling to think of what I can say to help everyone. I pride myself on being good with words when it comes to stories, but I am just absolutely horrible when it comes to advice-giving. I'm still going to try though because I am concerned after what I've seen.

One of my favorite shows is an NBC show called 30 Rock. It's about the head writer for a popular late night variety show and the hijinks that ensue.

There is an episode where the main character Liz Lemon is getting so stressed that she needs therapy. She enlists the help of simple yet sweet page Kenneth to be her therapist, but he cannot handle the pressure of it, so it backfires on her. Liz's no nonsense boss Jack steps in to help Kenneth and says, "Put your mental burden in my mind vice, and I will crush it."

Going into this discussion, I wanted to carry the attitude of Jack's "mind vice", but I will be incredibly honest with you all. The further it went, I became as stressed as Kenneth due to my empathetic nature.

It truly concerns me to see a lot of people being so stressed over something that shouldn't be stressful at all. I have been writing fanfic since most of you were five years old, so this isn't my first time dealing with these stressors. It's just a different website.

Some common themes I noticed in the messages were as follows:

Feeling like a third wheel when it comes to mutuals

Feeling like your writing is not good enough because it is not getting reblogged

Feeling unmotivated because you don't receive a large amount of feedback

Feeling used because of spam likers

First of all, I'm so sorry to hear that there are people who have felt one of these, two of these, or even all four at once. You all shouldn't ever, ever feel this way. You deserve so much more than what is happening.

Second of all, I would encourage those that are writers to go back in the tag and find the handful of reader POVs that were sent in after the event is over later today. All of them made very valid points, and I think they are things that we regularly forget as writers. While, yes, there are always going to be spam likers and ungrateful readers, I believe in the bottom of my heart that probably more than half of them are not that way at all, and I think it's very easy for us to just think they're all the same when we only receive a like.

Thirdly, if I could take ratios away for all of you, I would. But I cannot. I can only give you some words of encouragement of what I've learned in my 18 years of writing fan fiction, so I hope that they help someone.

Notes Do Not Matter

At the End of the Day, You Should Be Writing For Yourself

I know, I know. I know, I know, I know. You're like, "What the fuck, Rae, yes they do."

But I feel like there is an alarming amount of people that are equating their worth as a writer (and person) to how well a fic does. We see how well another's fic does and if it doesn't reach that amount of notes, it's seen in our eyes as failure. Or if it doesn't reach x amount of interactions in x timeframe, we also see that as failure.

You cannot do this to yourself. It will drive you absolutely batshit insane.

And honestly? I completely understand wanting to be recognized for your writing, but you really have to think about it. Do you want 12k notes on every fic you put out? The people I knew that had massive amounts of notes the last time I was writing fanfic-- They were MASSIVELY unhappy. When they did get the interaction they craved, it turned out it wasn't what they wanted at all.

I'm not saying that this will be the same outcome for you, but I implore you to sit down and really think if wanting a large amount of notes comes from a deeper issue, like theirs did.

I don't think I'll host another one of these any time soon because it did take a lot out of me, but I do encourage both parties to step into the other's shoes.

You've done it! You've finished a fic!

Were you happy while you wrote it? Did some time pass and you went "Ohmygod, how long have I been sitting here?"? Did you have a fun time while you did it?

Guess what? You did it.

And by you did it, I mean you've already succeeded.

You made yourself happy writing about your favorite little blorbo (Or, if you're like me, writing about someone else's favorite blorbo so you get a DM going 'GODDAMNIT RAE' two seconds later lmaooo)

You cannot be waiting on interactions and note amounts to make yourself happy. It will not come, I promise you.

You cannot worry about what user 472347294 thinks about your fic and if it's good enough to be reblogged or not.

That kind of thinking will absolutely decimate you.

Your bar should be this now.

"Did I have a lot of fun writing it?"

Then you've done it. You succeeded. That's all that matters in the end is if YOU were happy while you wrote it. If YOU had fun while you wrote it.

Writers-- I get it. It fucking SUCKS to sink hours and hours and hours and hours into something and get literally nothing in return (I am TERRIFIED to post a Sukuna fic because of this). But I'm about to tell you some really hard pills to swallow, and some of you might disagree with me, and that's fine. But I feel like it needs to be said.

Just like we don't owe anything to readers (chapter updates, part twos, etc.), they don't owe us anything. I think it's very easy for us to get into the mindset of "I worked on this for x amount of hours, so you HAVE to give me feedback".

No. They don't. They don't owe us anything, just like we don't owe them anything. I can't find a gentler way to say it, but it's something I've thought of for awhile now.

Instead, what I encourage you to do is pay attention to those that DO leave feedback. Reach out to them when they do, and sort of a, "Hey, thank you so much for reading my fic, I really appreciate it!" Or something along those lines. I was doing that but I have been slacking on it for the last couple months, so maybe it's something we can all start to do together.

Readers-- I hadn't thought about it before about how you feel like your follower count is too insignificant for a reblog to do any good, or how the times that you have left feedback, you felt like you were pushed to the side. And for that, I am sorry.

I know we are always ranting about reblogs and how important they are, but I apologize to those who are trying. To those that do take the time out to leave feedback, you are appreciated more than you know. You are the reason we continue to make content, whether we reach out to you or not.

I also do think it's very easy for us writers to forget that there is an incredibly large amount of content out there to consume, and we are basically making it impossible to keep up with. Tumblr's bookmarking system is just fucking awful (if you can even call it that) so I completely understand where you're coming from.

My advice to you is to keep trying to leave feedback, no matter how small. Hopefully there will be some writers who will reach back out to you and tell you thanks.

To those that are too shy to leave feedback, I would encourage you to leave feedback on your favorite writers fics (Please, for the love of god, stay away from the writers who think that they're better than you because their follower count got to their head. You'll know them when you see them.).

And if you are unsure of what to even say, please drop by (I have anonymous on always!) and I would be more than happy to help you!

There are a few more messages queued for today, but I will probably end the discussion at 3pm EST since I have to work tonight.

Thank you again to those that sent things in. I'm happy that we were able to be respectful to one another and I hope that maybe we were able to step into the other party's shoes and can be more kind to each other going forward.

[impostoradult]

And I agree we should talk about. I invited people to explain their POV to me. And part of the reason I started this discourse is precisely because I don't think we're having enough PRODUCTIVE discussion about this. A lot of the AI discussions happening right now are based on:

A) Pure misunderstandings of how AI language models actually work

B) Misunderstandings about how human creativity works (and has worked since the dawn of time; humans have ALWAYS heavily cribbed and imitated other artistic work in their artistic work)

C) General anxieties about how capitalism is going to make everything worse with this, which I recognize is a possibility, but I don't think is a foregone conclusion.

D) Human ego preservation that is about wanting to maintain the idea that we are fundamentally ~special~ in some ineffable way that machines could never POSSIBLY capture or imitate. And I think that's just us being anthropocentric and also unconsciously casting ourselves in the role of Oedipus's father.

*

And so, to address some of your other points in more depth - if someone writing fic doesn't have an original take (and isn't even necessarily trying to have an original take) we still don't consider that a problem in fandom.

In fact, often times we value stories BECAUSE they so closely imitate things we've consumed before. We JOKE in fandom about the fact that we'll read 500 stories with the exact same premise that all end up the exact same way. We often overtly VALUE the highly imitative nature of storytelling (both in fandom and in wider world).

Now, I get that it is complicated how AI generated works might impact fandom dynamics specifically with regard to things like flooding tags, or as fodder in ship wars or whatever. And I agree that's worth thinking through because it COULD have negative impacts. I understand that. I'm not naive.

But part of what I was reacting to in my OP was specifically the accusation that AIs ~*~steal~*~ preexisting work. Which isn't strictly true and I was also making the point that HUMANS steal each other's artistic work all the time (in the sense that most human creativity is highly derivative of the things that came before it)

That's how genres and tropes WORK. They are storytelling elements that have been heavily cribbed and reproduced. And I feel like fandom used to be VERY conscious of that fact, and is now, all of sudden, acting like it is news to them how stories work.

And it just makes me feel like I'm Spike in that one episode of Buffy:

And the AIs ARE capable of creating original enough work that their outputs could definitely pass as another run-of-the-mill coffee shop AU (or whatever) without meeting any conventional definition of plagiarism. They can make 'original' versions of pre-existing story concepts. They aren't just copy-pasting. That's just a pure misunderstanding of what is happening.

Now, as for it being sanitized, yes, it's true the AIs in general are programmed not to do anything risque, which just means humans will always have a role in creating fanworks because if the AIs need to always be kid friendly and non-offensive, they'll never meet the demand for risque stuff, which has always been part of fan culture.

Which frankly should be GOOD NEWS to the people who are worried about AIs displacing fan creativity (which I think is nonsense anyway; just because AIs are producing creative content that would never stop people from continuing to produce creative content as well because creativity isn't a zero-sum game and I don't know why so many people are suddenly acting like it is)

That's the weirdest part of this entire conversation - people keep talking like its a zero-sum game. Like EITHER the AIs write creatively OR humans write creatively, but never both at the same time. And I'm like, why are people treating it like it's zero-sum? It isn't. At all. Particularly not in fandom where there has never been any formalized gatekeeping and the 'market' has always been completely unmanaged and at the whim of anyone who decides to participate.

Okay can someone actually give me an answer to this question....

Why, if 10,000 other fans 'steal' your idea for a coffee shop AU and use it in their almost identical coffee shop AU, that's totally okay and just how fanculture works.

But if the AI spits out a coffee shop romance that reads like a traditional coffee shop AU, that's crossing a line?

Why, if a bunch of other fans steal your idea, is that just the process of human creativity at work, but if a machine generates something similar, that's a bridge too far?

I literally don't get how the one is different from the other (and frankly if either was the outrage, I'd think it be the people who are consciously deciding to rip you off rather than the machine that is just reproducing large scale linguistic patterns and not singling your work out because it literally CANNOT single out pieces of work to rip off individually because that's not how AIs work)