#I wrote this back in 2014

[ailelie]

Real Magic (Nick/Louis; from 2014)

​"Watch the coin, love," Nick slurred, carefully folding a 10p coin in a tenner. "Call this a 10 in 10. Terrible name, really. Don't know why I don't think of something better."

He gave the folded square a little shake. "Good and trapped now, isn't it? Go on, feel it. Funny, isn't it. Whenever you think you've gotten something good all properly sewn up, it just slips away from you."

He folded it in half right over the missing coin and laughed. "Fingers never forget, I guess. Here, for the drink."​

It wasn't that Nick didn't like close magic. Like many magicians he'd started with cards and coins, making up stories while hiding his Jacks on the top of the deck. Patter came easy to Nick, even when his tricks failed, he kept his audiences engaged. Got compared to David Devant and Ricky Jay now, didn't he?

But Nick didn't dream of small rooms and table-tops. All he'd ever wanted to be was on the stage, thrusting swords in a box and conjuring rabbits. The big illusions. The real magic.

But, under stage lights, his hands, so sure even when he was dangerously tipsy and edging on drunk, faltered. His mouth would keep running, but his tricks would break down into little disasters.

He'd told all this to Harry last year, even though he knew Harry, so popular at children's parties and known for the long, entertaining rambles that somehow tied his tricks together, couldn't understand. 

Harry had slow-grinned like he had a brilliant idea and said, "My mate's an Assistant. Sort of."

His mate had been Louis. Clever, bright, frustrating, infuriating, wonderful Louis. 

"Of course," Nick said to the bartender, "I buggered it all up." 

He pulled the 10p from his pocket & spun it on the bar. Suddenly, he slapped his hand down and when he lifted it back up, the coin was gone. "Palming," he said, turning his hand over. "Good enough and you can pick things up without anyone the wiser. Took me a full year to learn the trick of it." Took nearly as long to realize he was falling for Louis.

Louis hadn't liked any of Nick's ideas, called them boring. No one worries when you stab a sword through a box anymore, without the fear where was the awe? 

When they performed, Louis improvised. Nick got so caught up in keeping up with Louis, he forgot about the lights beating down. He kept up the patter, did tricks out of order, and coaxed the audience into belly laughter. He and Louis argued over it and the role of the assistant after, but, honestly, it was the best show Nick had ever done. All their shows were.

Nick flicked the coin into the air, caught it, and then immediately opened both hands wide and empty. 

"Down your sleeve," the bartender said. 

Nick smiled. "Nah," he said, "You snagged it from me." He tapped her hand. When she moved it the coin was underneath. 

"How?" 

Nick shook his head. "Secret, now, isn't it?" 

The bartender rolled her eyes. "So why're you here then?" 

Nick's smile pulled down. "Coin's not the only thing I've got snagged from me. You ever hear of the Pendragons?"

It didn't take Nick long to realize that, like Charlotte Pendragon, Louis was a magician in his own right. Bit of an escape artist, he worked that into their tricks, always upping the awe. And Nick would catch him at odd hours practicing, running through steps, picking locks. He was better than Nick at stage magic, good enough to go solo. But when he'd told Louis this, his grin turned brittle and he didn't talk to Nick, except on stage, for a week. Eventually Harry explained.

Louis, too, had dreamed of being a magician, but no one took him seriously. He'd tried to use the assumptions against his audience, but hecklers still asked when the real act was showing up. No matter how good he was; people saw what they wanted to see. As an Assistant, though, he was allowed. Small and agile enough for box jumping, strong enough for lifting, talented enough to keep tricks moving, magnetic enough to charm and distract the audience--he was everything a magician could want.

"So of course," Nick said, walking the coin up and down his fingers, "I threw it in his face." 

Harry had mentioned friends of theirs returning from overseas and possibly doing a group act & Nick had struggled to breathe because Louis hadn't said anything and Louis was going to leave. So, that night, he'd turned routine bickering into a row. Told Louis he was replaceable. Said people didn't come to magic shows for the scenery. Not a single drop of drink could drive Louis' surprised hurt out of his mind.

"Hence tonight's disaster." Alone on stage, he'd forgotten every trick. He was never going to catch that magic again. Nick flipped the coin in the air again, but another hand grabbed it. 

"You gave me top billing," Louis said, handling the words like a knife. 

Nick shrugged. "Wanted to make sure they knew who the real magician was." 

Louis stared and it was like he'd stopped time altogether. Even now he was bloody magic. "I'm still very angry with you," Louis said, slipping the coin into Nick's pocket. "Why'd you do it?" 

"Scared to lose you, I guess. Scared to admit I already had." 

"You're an idiot." He curled his fist in Nick's collar like he was preparing for a punch and then dragged Nick down for a biting kiss."Partners?" 

"Yes." No hesitation. He wasn't losing this again.

[hersurvival]

Five years since the cathedral fire,

Renovations yet to be finished,

We fell to our own ruin.

Where I once made a wish for you

And cried as it came crumbling down,

I am now rebuilding on my own.

@nosebleedclub September 20th - French

[peachfuzz-nygma]

i like giving emotional lore to characters who are just evil/villains. i do believe josef is just manipulating his victims to lure them into his trap. but at the same time i like to believe that there’s more to him. if you don’t agree i don’t mind but keep that to yourself :3 bc this is real to me

josef (if that even is his real name) has had mostly mediocre kills in his life. or later in his life as he hints at in creep 2. he builds relationships with his victims before doing his thing but it’s just an act. it’s mundane and the relationships don’t really give him anything exciting to work with anymore. even though we haven’t seen josef’s other victims (other than dave) it’s clear that aaron and sara were something completely new to him. and even though we haven’t seen the mediocre kills, these feel special to us too

in my mind aaron and josef had something romantic going on between them. josef was in awe that someone really cared about him and listened even after every red flag. and aaron did really care. i feel like josef’s last video to aaron was completely genuine. you could just watch this film through the lens that aaron is stupid (which he definitely is) and extremely easy to manipulate. or you could watch it through the lens that aaron is still stupid but somehow always genuinely there for josef. and josef’s never had that. and that is new territory for him. none of his past victims have reciprocated the feelings back to him this well. and we can even see him try to create a romantic bond with dave. trying to repeat the feeling he had with aaron. and that was his proudest work. he even shows sara his masterpiece (that gay guy who can’t shut up about his ex)

like aaron, sara was completely new to josef. but in a very different way. she was confident and fearless. i think josef knew that aaron was afraid of him. but josef really thought sara wasn’t afraid of him. well we as the viewer know she was at times but she put fears aside and faced josef with confidence. josef met his match. someone who wasn’t fazed by his theatrics. who was there out of pure curiosity. who tried to one up him. in the jacuzzi scene you can see how speechless josef is that sara climbs in with him, clothes and all, and gives him (a very sexual) massage. he just told her about his first kill? and she’s now making sexual advances on him? he hasn’t ever been out crazied like that. and it amazes him

with both of these of course it doesn’t matter how different these victims were because they still became victims. in the end, relationships don’t change his wants and needs as a murderer. these are only slight bumps in the road that might set him back and make him think “could this be different”. but that thought never stays around long enough to stop his need to kill. but it does stick with him

[yansurnummu]

TESfest day 4: thief

Mirvyn, my sweet little disaster. He was my first Skyrim oc I ever took seriously, and thus became the reason I ended up here in the first place back in 2014. It's all his fault.

[ansburg]

[mitsukuri]

why are the only old accounts i have left my fanfiction/fictionpress profiles and my youtube account (but i deleted my old videos so does it really count)

[charles-snippy]

Going thru the reg show tag and seeing all these people creating geneson content… where were y’all when I was 14

[danthropologie]

a points gap clause………. you just made me 🤯

honestly i don't even know if that sort of thing exists, i'm fully just talking out of my ass, but hypothetically.......if there WAS one......perhaps it would advantageous to max to secure every last point possible if he wanted a change in teammate.........idk 🤷‍♀️

(referencing)

[minijenn]

Been playing a lot of Hyrule Warriors lately

It’s giving me ptsd flashbacks to my shitty novelization of it I never finished

[quicktimeeventfull]

Ship opinion bingo:

Kai/Tala

Rei/Mariah (I'm coming for your beyblades)

Destie-

thank you!!

kai/tala listen you would think i’d be obsessed with these two but what i actually read as a kid was four billion oc-is-kai’s-sister-and-falls-in-love-with-tala fic. slight modification to one of these options bc they’re like, twelve years old or something dfgjlgdf. they’re sweet, though. i have dabbled.

rei/mariah i genuinely can’t remember if they’re actually literally canon or if they were just heavily hinted at haha. i don’t have any deep feelings about the but i appreciate them. they always felt a bit comphet to me but i think you could draw interesting things out of them if you were so inclined

i’m going to throw everyone for a real loop by announcing that my main beyblade ships are actually kai/hilary & kai/emily

destiel fgjlgf i appreciate you writing about this as if i have some sense of shame about destiel but i just openly ship them haha. everyone go read my kickass destiel fic. read this one.

sam/raiden (from the other ask you sent) i read a lot of them & i have enjoyed many sam/raiden fics bc this is what like, 90% of the raiden fics available fgjlg but i am not actually personally all that into them. idk why!! this is going to sound insane coming from a lawlight shipper but homoerotic enemies is not actually generally my thing. lawlight just got grandfathered in haha

[palms-upturned]

Needed to listen to some music while I did the dishes and for some reason picked “von” from the zankyou no terror soundtrack and jesus god. Experiencing emotions that don’t exist.

[fairy-ganj-mother]

I guess I'm probably gonna be nostalgic for 2014-2016 for my whole life lol

[reflectionsofgalaxies]

fuck I ran out of space in the tags so now I’m writing up here.

anyway. poem about the feeling of loss that comes with not being able to reminisce about a person, place, or relationship because no one left in your life shares those memories, and sharing it with someone new just isn’t the same.

putting ‘ personal ’ up here in hopes i can find this post again since it won’t fit in the tags

[weirdly-specific-but-ok]

for whom good omens is being written

Hey maggots and the rest of the fandom, it's the Good Omens Mascot here. Today I read a post about this tweet:

The accompanying video genuinely made me cry. And I've been thinking about this for a long while, as far back as February, when I saw a lot of conflicting opinions on what people wanted from the third season. It really is true that no matter what you do, some people will be dissatisfied. But what matters is that Neil is writing this for Terry.

And I was reminded of some paragraphs from the Good Omens TV Companion, which I'd read in Amazon's sample excerpt of the book. I know this is a long post, but I really truly do think you all need to read these, I've done my best to select only the most important parts. Here you go:

'His Alzheimer's started progressing harder and faster than either of us had expected,' says Neil, referring to a period in which Terry recognized that despite everything he could no longer write. 'We had been friends for over thirty years, and during that time he had never asked me for anything. Then, out of the blue, I received an email from him with a special request. It read: “Listen, I know how busy you are. I know you don't have time to do this, but I want you to write the script for Good Omens. You are the only human being on this planet who has the passion, love and understanding for the old girl that I do. You have to do this for me so that I can see it." And I thought, “OK, if you put it like that then I'll do it."

'I had adapted my own work in the past, writing scripts for Death: The High Cost of Living and Sandman, but not a lot else was seen. I'd also written two episodes of Doctor Who, and so I felt like I knew what I was doing. Usually, having written something once I'd rather start something new, but having a very sick co-author saying I had to do this?' Neil spreads his hands as if the answer is clear to see. 'I had to step up to the plate.' A pause, then: 'All this took place in autumn 2014, around the time that the BBC radio adaptation of Good Omens was happening,' he continues, referring to the production scripted and co-directed by Dirk Maggs and starring Peter Serafinowicz and Mark Heap. ‘Terry had talked me into writing the TV adaptation, and I thought OK, I have a few years. Only I didn't have a few years,' he says. 'Terry was unconscious by December and dead by March.'

He pauses again. 'His passing took all of us by surprise,' Neil remembers. 'About a week later, I started writing, and it was very sad. The moments Terry felt closest to me were the moments I would get stuck during the writing process. In the old days, when we wrote the novel, I would send him what I'd done or phone him up. And he would say, "Aahh, the problem, Grasshopper, is in the way you phrase the question," and I would reply, "Just tell me what to do!" which somehow always started a conversation. 'In writing the script, there were times I'd really want to talk to Terry, and also places where I'd figure something out and do something really clever, and I would want to share it with him. So, instead, I would text Terry's former personal assistant, Rob Wilkins, now his representative on Earth. It was the nearest thing I had.'

(...) As Neil himself recognizes, this is an adaptation built upon the confidence that comes from three decades of writing for page and screen. But for all the wisdom of experience, he found that above all one factor guided him throughout the process. 'Terry isn't here, which leaves me as the guardian of the soul of the story,' he explains. 'It's funny because sometimes I found myself defending Terry's bits harder or more passionately than I would defend my own bits. Take Agnes Nutter,' he says, referring to what has become a key scene in the adaptation in which the seventeenth-century author of the book of prophecies foretelling the coming of the Antichrist is burned at the stake. ‘It was a huge, complicated and incredibly expensive shoot, with bonfires built and primed to explode as well as huge crowds in costume. It had to feel just like an English village in the 1640s, and of course everyone asked if there was a cheap way of doing it. 'One suggestion was that we could tell the story using old-fashioned woodcuts and have the narrator take us through what happened, but I just thought, “No”. Because I had brought aspects of the story like Crowley and the baby swap along to the mix, and Terry created Agnes Nutter. So, if I had cut out Agnes then I wouldn't be doing right by the person who gave me this job. Terry would've rolled over in his grave.'

And, finally, this paragraph:

"Once again, Neil cites the absence of his co-writer as his drive to ensure that Good Omens translated to the screen and remained true to the original vision. 'Terry's last request to me was to make this something he would be proud of. And so that has been my job.'"

I think that's so heartwrenchingly beautiful, and so I wanted you all to read this, too, just in case you (like me) don't have the Good Omens TV Companion. It adds another layer of depth and emotion to this already complex and amazing story that we all know and love.

Share this post, if you can, please, so that more people can read these excerpts :")

Tagging @neil-gaiman, @fuckyeahgoodomens and @orpiknight, even if you've definitely read these before :)

[lvemenow]

in desperate need to dig out my old ipod and manually put all my favourite albums and songs into specific playlists

[rocksalt-and-pie]

the internet has really become unusable. I wanted to know what kind of shark that was in that video because I was wondering how heavy it was (because it's being lifted by two guys and it looks like they're struggling to lift it) so I googled sharks but only got a bunch of ads for shark toys and stuff like that. I hate it here