#I’m proud of my loose and messy and sketchy drawings

[keferon]

Sorry if this is going to sound bad, but I appreciate how loosely you draw transformers??? Like genuinely, I get so lost in the desire to get proportions/details right that I just stress myself out of practicing at all. However I love your art dearly, and it's making easier for me to just. Fuck It We Ball while drawing. LIKE THE RENDERED ART STILL LOOKS AWESOME DON'T GET ME WRONG but alot of my fav drawings you post have like. Just the sketchest arms imaginable. Just wanted to say thanks, and hope your week is doing well

Half assing my way through drawing process is the skill I'm actually very proud of because I took the time and effort to learn it so thank you ehehe

[writinginthesecrettrees]

Jus in Bello

Currently thinking of Henriksen, and he may want vengeance (not justice) for Matt Guntram, but he’s not a fool. He lets his team know about the message from the Winchesters, lets the higher ups know too, and they take a couple days to craft a trap for Sam and Dean. They pull in agents from different offices, agents who Henriksen has never so much as met, send them to Colorado Springs undercover. They surround the address given to Henriksen, set up surveillance days in advance of the meeting, coordinate with local police to keep watch for the Winchesters coming to town. And Henriksen gets there a day early, pretends to be alone, pretends he doesn’t see plainclothes cops keeping a discreet eye on him from the airport to the hotel he’s booked, pretends he doesn’t know which hotel housekeeping staff are really feds watching out for him.

After the door to his room closes, leaving him alone, he checks the minibar and finds it stocked with tiny bottles of cheap booze and since he hasn’t been able to sleep without a drink since Matt was murdered, he takes one at random and knocks it back.

Henriksen wakes with an aching head and yesterday’s rumpled clothing, sun streaming through curtains he forgot to close before passing out and just enough time to make it to the next town over and address given - an empty studio apartment in a somewhat sketchy building in Monument, Colorado. He doesn’t bother making contact with any of the agents involved in the takedown, can’t risk the Winchesters seeing that he brought backup.

Lots and lots of backup.

There’s a single chair in the middle of the apartment and Henriksen sits there, refuses to glance at his watch as the seconds tick by into minutes, then an hour. Then two. He’s starting to wonder if Sam or Dean has somehow sensed the trap, despite all precautions, when his phone buzzes. He checks it.

Incoming.

His pulse races, heart hammering against his ribs, breath quickens, and he stands, takes a single step towards the window before checking himself. It’s maddening to have to rely on dozens of agents he doesn’t even know, but he doesn’t have a choice, not if he wants this hunt to be successful.

His phone buzzes again, and he doesn’t need to check it this time, knows that it’s the director letting him know that the trap has been sprung, and now he doesn’t need to stop himself from going to the window, looking down at the scene below.

His first live look at Sam and Dean happens from half a block away and two stories up. They fought, vicious and deadly, took down a few agents and killed a few deputies, but they’ve been subdued. Dean’s on the ground with a deputy’s knee in his back and an agent cuffing his hands behind his back, but his face is turned to stare directly at Henriksen’s window and he’s grinning. Sam’s on his knees, fingers laced behind his head and at least three guns pointed at him, and his eyes are fixed on the deputy kneeling on Dean’s back. Two stories up and half a block away, the expression on Sam’s face makes Henriksen’s blood run cold as he watches the Winchesters get shoved roughly into the back of a patrol car.

🗡

It’s almost midnight by the time Henriksen gets through with the press, thanking the agents who came in to help out, and the paperwork his boss insisted had to be done immediately, and through it all his mind is on the murderers sitting in the sheriff’s office, locked in separate holding cells. So when he walks into the office and sees Sam seated at a deputy’s desk, with a steaming mug of tea and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, his first instinct is to shout “What the fuck is going on here?”

Sam Winchester, body count in the high seventies by conservative estimates, flinches away from his shout, and Sheriff Dodd rubs his back in comforting gesture. “God’s sake, Agent, don’t you think the poor kid’s traumatized enough?”

Henriksen’s brows raise. “Traumatized? You think Sam brotherfucking Winchester is traumatized?”

Sam flinches again, but looks up from under shaggy brown hair. His eyes are wide, glisten with unspilled tears, and his lip trembles. “P-please, sir, I’ve been so scared. You d-don’t know what Dean did. What he said he’d do t-to me.”

“You’re a hell of an actor, Sammy, but I’m not buying it.”

Sam folds in on himself, leans against the sheriff. The man wraps his arm around the killer, glares at Henriksen.

“That man is in FBI custody, Sheriff. Put him back in his cell. With cuffs.”

“This kid is scared and abused. You realize he’s been under the control of one psycho or another his whole life?”

“How many of your men did he kill just this afternoon?”

“None!”

“What?”

Sheriff Dodd huffs out breath. “Oh, his brother fought like a damn demon, no mistake, but Sam here… he surrendered immediately. Smart kid, knew this was his best chance to escape,” he says with a proud smile in Sam’s direction.

Sam gives a wavering smile, turns big guileless eyes back to Henriksen. “Please, I’ll b-be good. I don’t mind the cell, but…”

“We’ve only got the two cells, agent. Putting Sam in the one leaves him barely three feet from his abuser.”

Some trick of the light makes Sam’s eyes flash at that, hazel turning almost gold when the sheriff called Dean his abuser. Henriksen’s jaw clenches. “Chain him to a desk then. I don’t want him loose.” He doesn’t wait for the sheriff to argue, just turns and heads to the back of the building. To Dean.

🔪

“He’s saying you abused him. Molested your baby brother.”

Dean looks up at Henriksen’s words. Grins. His teeth are bloody. “Yeah? Always was a smart one, my Sammy. Think a jury’ll buy it?”

“I think a jury’s gonna hear that poor girl saying he gave her to you for your birthday. We recorded the call.”

“Maybe I forced her to say that.”

“You want Sammy to fry with you?”

Dean lunges at the bars, is pulled up short by the chains locking him to the bed frame.

Henriksen smiles. “What’s the matter, Dean? Don’t like hearing me say Sammy?”

“I’m gonna rip your lungs out!”

Henriksen steps right up to the cell, close enough that his nose brushes against the bars. “Give it your best shot.”

POP-POP-POP from the other room has Henriksen whirling towards the door, hand dropping to his hip and scrambling at his holster. The doorknob starts to turn as Henriksen draws his gun.

Then drops it when arms reach out of the cell at his back, one catching his throat in the crook of an elbow and the other pulling it tight. The door opens, and Sam is there, the light behind him looking like a cloak of flames. He points a stolen sheriff’s gun at Henriksen while Henriksen claws at the arms cutting off his air.

The last thing Henriksen hears before he passes out is Dean whispering, “You should have come alone. We might have let you live.”

⛓

Henriksen wakes to blaring music and a flashlight shining in his eyes.

“Rise and shine, Vicky. Time’s a-wastin.” Dean flips the light off.

Henriksen blinks at the sudden darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He’s locked to cell bars, arms cuffed behind his back and chains around his neck and waist. Dean’s lounging against the far wall, arms crossed over his chest. “Where’s Sam?”

Dean laughs. “He likes to pretend he hates Asia.”

“And Matt’s head?”

“Deal was, come alone if you want it back. You didn’t. We’re keeping it.” Dean sighs. “Y’know, we’re kinda gonna miss you.”

“Don’t worry. There’ll be a new agent on your trail tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Vicky. That really cheers me up.”

Henriksen nods. “So what now?”

“Well, like I said. I’m gonna rip your lungs out.”

☠️

Dean’s standing in a pool of blood, admiring his handiwork, when Sam comes back from raiding the weapons locker.

“Messy,” Sam says.

“Mmmm.” Dean threads a bloody hand through Sam’s hair, pulls him down for a biting kiss. “You like it messy.”

“I like you messy.” Sam leans around Dean, inspects the body still chained to the bars. “You did that bare-handed?”

“Yup.” Dean pops the p with a smirk.

Sam pouts. “And you didn’t wait for me?”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

Sam doesn’t answer.

“You can choose the next one, and how we do it.”

Sam still doesn’t answer.

Dean sighs. “And I’ll eat a non-potato vegetable with dinner.”

“What else?”

“What else what?”

“What else will you eat tonight?”

Dean grins. “You. Until you come, baby brother.”

Sam smiles.

The sheriff’s office explodes behind them when they leave.

⚰

(masterpost)

[isoscele]

Child’s Play Chapter 17

The Moves Like Dagger Badge

Knives can be useful tools, but are also important in a fight. Understanding how to use one is a staple of a Lumberjane's experience.

(ok so there are 3 chapters that i never ended up posting to tumblr but did end up posting to ao3. i would really recommend that you read chapters 14-16 before reading this. you can find them here

AO3  other chapters

warning for blood, death, and minor suicidal thoughts)

Mal drew a quivering line in the dirt. “I just- I don’t know.”

Molly squeezed her shoulders. “We trust you.”

“If we stay here-,” Mal started, then shook her head. “We should keep moving, right?”

April squinted from between sunlit chinks of hair, angled awkwardly across Jo’s torso. “We can’t run forever.”

A sharp pain in her scalp brought Jen back to reality. “Careful,” she said, one hand drifting up to protect her hair from Ripley’s fingers. She hadn’t seen a brush in ages and was beginning to question the sense in letting Ripley braid it.

“Sorry,” Ripley said. “Do you think the District One boy and the District Two girl are friends?”

“Probably not,” Jen said. “Their alliance isn’t like ours, remember.” Still, a nagging corner of her mind supplied an image of them laughing together, teenagers on top of the damn world. They’d gotten this far, but surely they knew that only one of them could go home.

“I vote we end it,” Jo said. “There are more of us than them, especially if one kills the other. Stay here, let them come for us, and be ready when they do.”

An uneasy silence settled over the group. There was certain finality to Jo’s words that none of them were quite ready for, acknowledgment that however this stupid game ended, it was going to end, and it was looking like it would end soon, with twenty-three cannons and money trading hands in the Capitol.

“So if we stay here . . .” Mal said, crouching down to draw a few trees in rough correlation to each other, “. . . and we position ourselves here, here, and here. . .”

“What if someone comes from this direction?” Jen asked. She crawled forward to place a twig on the ground, much to Ripley’s dismay.

“We can’t predict which way they’ll come from,” Jo said. Her eyes were closed and her forearms had dug into the dirt. “We need to be able to get them no matter what.”

Bored with Jen’s hair, Ripley scooted over to the bags, which lay mostly forgotten on Molly’s other side. She pulled the one marked with a bold 4 until it touched the corners of her knees and started to poke through it.

“I’ve seen them move, though,” April said. She shifted her weight, drawing a soft “oof” from Jo. “They’re both crazy fast. No way we could catch either of them without their spotting us first.”

“Guys!” Ripley interrupted, flinging herself into the middle of their semicircle. Dust curled up against her clothes like some sort of ignition. “Look!”

Curled tight in her hands were several knots of rope.

Slowly, April reached over and took one of them, running a finger over its length. “Huh,” she said.

“We could make a trap!” Ripley said. “With this and April’s amaaaazzzing netmaking skills!”

“I could actually . . .” April held the rope up to the sunlight and squinted. “That might work.”

Jen had a sudden, vivid image of the April in her dream, hanging loosely from a bloodstained rope. She shook her head. “Really?”

“I don’t see why not.” April twisted the rope around her hands until her veins popped. “I’m not sure what we could use it for, though.”

Molly laughed and nudged Mal with the tip of her foot. “I bet I know someone who is.”

Mal scratched the back of her neck, trying to hide her pink face. “We’d need to figure out a trigger.”

Something rose, bright and messy, in Jen’s throat. She’d never let herself believe they would make it this far, never let herself get her hopes up.

There were two more people in the Games, two more people with blood under their fingernails and an ocean of sponsors. They outnumbered her, and it would be done soon. One way or another, this long, exhausting charade would end tonight. It was a terrifying idea, but also relieving. No more playing the Capitol’s game.

Mal started to talk, outlining a sketchy plan in jolted flashes of inspiration. She rocked forward on her heels to draw diagrams in the dirt, letting Ripley trace the trees and smiling stick figures. Something insane and visceral was pulling itself together under them, and Jen was too proud to speak.

“What if she came in over here?” Jo said, poking one of the stick girls. “We’d need to change positions too quickly to pull it off.”

“Not necessarily,” Molly said. She squatted next to the drawings and traced a swooping arrow from a figure that was probably supposed to be April to a different tree. “If we had someone here instead, they could cover both spots.”

Mal pushed her fingers through her shaggy undercut. “That could work! Molly, you’re a genius.”

Molly blushed. “It’s a really good plan.”

“Just kiss already,” April stage-whispered to Jo, who giggled.

Dusk came in the way it always did, the sky tripping over itself. Eventually, Ripley scuffed over the illustrations, whispering a quiet goodbye to the stick figures and silence fell.

“Should we take our positions?” April said, voice so quiet it broke Jen’s heart.

She swallowed. She had to be the adult here, had to rub their shaking hands and give reassurances to their unspoken worries. It was undoubtedly the hardest thing she’d ever done when all she wanted to do was curl up in her mom’s lap and go to sleep.

“Yeah,” she said, hoping the catch of her voice wasn’t noticeable. “Yeah, I think- I think that would be best.”

“So this is it, then,” Jo said.

“This is it,” Jen repeated.

“We should do some kind of cheer,” Molly said. “Like- I don’t know.”

“My mama used to call me her little lumberjane,” Ripley said. “Like a girl lumberjack. That could be us.”

“Cutting down trees and bad guys,” Mal said in a low voice that sounded remarkably like her Caesar impression. If Jen heard the tears, she didn’t say anything.

“It’s settled,” April said with a sort of forced cheer that she shouldn’t have had to learn for years. “Everyone, put your hand in the center. We have to do it for good luck.”

Luck was one thing that nobody reaped for the Games had. Jen placed her hand atop the sweaty pile of limbs. “On my count,” she said. “One, two, three . . .”

“Lumberjanes!” they whisper-shouted, throwing their hands into the air. She was sure it looked silly, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. They needed this. They needed to be children, just this once, before that too was taken from them.

Jen traced the stark white whorls of the tree. She wanted something to do with her hands. She wanted the factory, the soothing rumble of machinery, of thousands of pieces fitting together perfectly. If a product came out malformed or broken, it was always easy to tell where it had gone wrong, and she yearned for that now, some small certainty.

Ripley and April were locked in a furious match of rock-paper-scissors. There was a decided swiftness of their motions, no looking back. Neither was smiling, which felt so wrong that it made Jen’s chest ache. What was wrong with people, trying to take smiles away? Which machine broke while making the Capitol, turning the people shrewd and twisted?

Something wasn’t working in her brain. They’d gone over their plan a hundred times, but it felt disjointed when she tried to call it up. This couldn’t be real, none of it could. In the real world, girls like her died in spades. In the real world, she never would have gotten here, to this tree and this clearing and this sickening anticipation, humid in the air around them.

Maybe when you died, there was some part of you that pretended to keep living, like a dream or the way you feel after you get off a train, like the world’s still rushing by and paying you no mind. Maybe there was a part of you that kept wandering around, kept trying to survive in motions rife with pity. Maybe the whole world was filled with ghosts who believed themselves to be immortal.

The cannon rang in her ears. It took several seconds for her to figure out what it meant.

Somewhere below her, Mal gasped, very quiet. Maybe the world around you eventually began to fall apart, little pieces breaking off and disappearing forever, so slow that you couldn’t remember exactly when things stopped making sense.

Someone was dead and someone else was coming. Their plans, their stick-figure diagrams paled in comparison to the actual moment.

“It’s okay,” Jen heard herself whisper. “Remember what we talked about.”

Ripley nodded, confident in herself if Jen was. She wanted to take all of them right now, wanted to climb down and lead them far, far away from the arena and all of its poison. She wanted to walk to the very edges of this place and hammer on the walls, scream until she was hoarse. She wanted to make noise until someone carried them away. She wanted to take them to District Four and build a raft so they could sail to a better place, one that appreciated kids as something other than a creative way to punish their parents.

She didn’t. She clutched the branches of her tree with sweaty, scraped hands and waited like she had all her life. If she made it out of here, she wouldn’t let anything come to her. She would meet it in the middle, fists raised.

A very long time seemed to pass, but the sky stayed the same. A cloud passed over the stars, and Jen squeezed her eyes shut. It was stupid and childish, but she didn’t want the stars to see whatever was about to happen. The beautiful Pleiades, impassive Orion. She needed them to stay pure.

Footsteps, quick and sharp. Jen could pick out the snap of each individual twig, but there was no reason for anyone to be quiet now, was there? Stealth was for hunters with challenging prey- game, she supposed. The very word made her want to peel her eyes out.

“You can’t hide!” someone shrieked. It was the girl, from District Two. Jen tried not to imagine the boy, a slash across his throat, eyes still wide with surprise. “I was born to be a Victor!”

It hurt to imagine her as a baby, still filled with hope for this desiccated world. No one was born to do this.

She was drawing nearer. If she looked up, just once, she would see Ripley’s eyes, wide as dinner plates, or Molly’s hair, silvery in the moonlight. If she looked up just once, it would all be over.

There was no God, only Panem. That was what you were told, from a very young age. God would not save your children, your crops, you. Only the Capitol had the power to save anyone.

No one was getting saved tonight.

The girl did not look up.

Pretty soon, she would be too far away for the plan to work. They had backup plans, too, but those were messier, harder, more chaotic. There were elements they couldn’t control.

Jen cupped her hands around her mouth and whistled, a few short notes that resembled a birdcall. The girl stopped and glanced upwards. She had time to lock eyes with Jen, eyes filled with more hatred then she had ever seen, and a dawning fear.

Jen couldn’t look away, even though her every cell screamed to. Where was Ripley, where was Mal, they should be moving by now, had they forgotten, were they stuck?

Ripley shrieked, animalistic and so powerful it gave Jen goosebumps. She turned and saw Ripley leave Mal’s arms, kicking off with enough force to push Mal backwards. She yelled something Jen couldn’t make sense of, a blurred mix of syllables and emphasis that sounded something like a war cry.

She watched as if in her living room in District Eight, curled into her sleeping mother and chewing her thumbnail. She watched as if she were just another citizen of Panem, anxious for the whole charade to end so she could get back to her life. Her last year, and then she would be safe.

She watched the way everyone else was as Ripley landed an off-center kick, clipping the girl’s shoulder and almost falling as she did, and Jen couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe, why had she engineered this plan so she was so damn useless? Why was she allowing them to take her risks?

Jo grabbed Ripley under the arms and pulled her to safety, a messy tangle of limbs. Ripley still wasn’t smiling, her big eyes, and the blue in her hair almost gone. It was too much, all of it.

The cloud passed and the stars gazed down as the District Two girl stumbled backwards. Her lips quirked into the start of a victorious smile, believing it was all they had. She was still standing, and she was going to kill them.

Her foot caught the snare. Netting burst from all sides, like some flower curling around her and swallowing her whole.

There was a beat of heavy silence. The girl thrashed around, clawing at the rope and snarling, actually snarling. Blood dripped from her lip, an old injury, maybe from her fight with the boy. She painted the ground with her victories, her losses.

Jen eased herself down, clinging close to the trunk. All of this, and she still couldn’t climb a tree. Everything had gone very quiet suddenly, and very far away. Frogs were singing somewhere, how could they sing at a time like this? Even the girl in April’s well-constructed net felt surreal, just another hallucination. The arena did that to you, it built you things to keep the Capitol entertained.

She’d managed to extract a dagger from her pocket and was trying to saw through the rope. She would have to work hard to get there, and even so, there were hundreds of little squares. The knife would be dull before the net released her.

Jen wormed a few fingers in through the largest gap. The girl slashed wildly at her hand, splitting the skin over and over again. Somewhere, Ripley shouted her name, still so concerned. Didn’t she see? It was only blood, it was only ever blood. The Capitol needed blood, and Jen understood need.

She closed her shaking fingers around the handle and yanked it free. The girl was crying, salt and iron crusting together on her upper lip. Humans were made of carbon and nitrogen, cells and nerve and tissue. Panem never could appreciate a good miracle. It was such a stupid thing to forget.

“I was born to be a Victor,” the girl said again. “You don’t understand! I was a Career, I trained for years-,”

She did everything right. You weren’t supposed to die if you did everything right. Dimly, Jen registered the rustle of leaves and old branches as her girls joined her, facing their net and their trap and District Two’s deadly Career. Six and one, it was six and one and Jen felt sorry for her. Maybe if she’d had an alliance that wouldn’t turn on her, that didn’t have that hardwired suspicion, these Games would have turned out differently.

Someone had to kill her. Nothing would ever end if they left her in limbo, and it had to end.

“I’m sorry,” Jen croaked. She felt pitiful, the teenager who thought that friendship could solve everything. She tried not to think of her mom. It was late, maybe she was asleep. Maybe she wouldn’t have to watch her daughter do this.

She pressed the tip of the blade to the girl’s throat. Maybe all of Panem was asleep, and she could be alone in her shame.

The girl slowly touched the indentations just below her chin. Her fingers weren’t trembling. “Across the trachea,” she said. “Right here.”

Jen swallowed, acutely aware of her own neck. “I don’t- I didn’t want to-,”

“I know,” the girl said. “Please, just- make it fast.”

“I’ll try,” Jen said. She couldn’t cry, couldn’t blur her vision. She didn’t want it to be painful, but the knife was awfully small.

Later, she wouldn’t remember very much of what followed.

It was painful, and it wasn’t fast. Her hand slipped, the knife shook, and the blood kept coming. She wanted to cover her girls’ eyes, their ears. She wanted to hold them and rock them, gentle and soft. She wanted to tell them that it was okay.

The District Two girl was mostly quiet, only screaming or grunting a few times. Jen hated it. She should’ve been shouting, fighting, trying to knock the knife out of Jen’s hand.

The most awful part was that she didn’t hear the cannon right away, so she kept sawing. It was dark, and she couldn’t see the sputtering rise and fall of the girl’s chest, nor its absence.

A face lit up the sky and Jen tried not to look at it. The boy was grinning in his picture, cocky and confident. The girl wasn’t.

She dropped the knife and turned, bleak and anxious, towards her girls. They were standing in a protective half-circle, watching her.

Several terrible seconds passed in which nobody said anything. How could Jen ever have pretended to be protecting them? She was a curse on them, a weight on their shoulders. She couldn’t contribute to their plans, couldn’t shelter them from the arena.

She didn’t realize she was crying until the force of the tears made her sit down, crouched in the dirt. She scratched at her eyelids, her cheeks, everything that made up the murderer that she was. She gasped and sobbed, trying to cover her face from her girls. They were so young, but so was she, really. So were they all.

She recognized Ripley’s skinny frame and warm arms without opening her eyes. Ripley, tiny hopeful Ripley. Her fastball.

“We love you, Jen!” Ripley shouted, very close to Jen’s ear. “We love you!”

The others joined in, squeezing her neck and waist. Ten hands on her shoulders, ten arms pressed tight. Five hearts beating in tandem with hers, and five voices shouting affirmations until the air was thick with their love for her.

“I love you,” she said, unable to articulate quite how much. “I love all of you, I- I can’t-,”

“It’s okay,” Molly said, quiet because that was how Molly was sometimes. “It’s okay.” Understanding passed between them, the understanding of killers who loved with all their hearts.

The faces in the sky disappeared. A helicopter dipped down, giant and monstrous, reaching its cold arms to pick up the net and the mangled girl within. Jen watched her go, sorry and sad and filled with too much emotion for one person.

Ripley fell asleep and Jen picked her up. They walked until they found a place with no blood, no sweat or tears, clean of the pain of the arena.

“Someone should keep watch,” Jen mumbled. “I- it’s not over yet.”

“It’s over when we say it’s over,” April said and Jen wanted to cry again. Her girls, her beautiful, brave, strong girls. It was over when they said it was over. For once, the Capitol was at their mercy, not the other way around.

They slept in a pile, and Jen listened for their breaths in the sweet, still night. There was still so much that could kill them, but they wouldn’t die alone.

That was all she could ask for, really.