#I've been looking forward to this day for months

[steddieunderdogfics]

This week’s writer spotlight feature is: thisapplepielife! @thisapplepielife has 37 works posted to AO3 in the Stranger Things fandom and 24 of them are in the Steddie tag!

Our anonymous nominator recommends the following works by @thisapplepielife:

Tuesday's Gone With the Wind

Take the Money and Run

You Oughta Know

Never Not Mine

Let the Boy Be Merry

"They are my favorite Corroded Coffin writer. I found by accident their fic “Tuesday's Gone With the Wind” and loved everything they wrote since!" -- Anonymous

Below the cut, @thisapplepielife answered some questions about their writing process and some of their recommended work!

Why do you write Steddie?

Steve Harrington. I found myself not connecting with S4 when it premiered, and decided that I probably just needed to rewatch the other three seasons again first, since it'd been a while between seasons. Well, Steve was always my favorite, but I left that re-watch with his voice fully lodged in my brain. So, I had to write something for him, just for myself. That was You Oughta Know. We all knew Eddie identified as a runner, and that just felt like the story to tell. Then somehow, for some unknown reason that I still cannot possibly explain, I decided to actually post it. I still don't know what possessed me to do that, honestly.

What’s your favorite trope to READ?

I love a good second chance fic: A divorced couple that eventually rekindles. A missed first chance that they get to take another crack at, later in life. I also like a good heartbreaker of a fic. I know, I know. Don't get me wrong, I still love happy endings, but I don't require them. Break my heart. Do it.

What’s your favorite trope to WRITE?

Slice of life? Is that considered a trope? I know I like to write about things we all deal with in real life, from the small and inconsequential: a mattress with a bad spring. The delight of clean sheets. Or the bigger: the real life heartbreak of unavoidable loss and grief.  And older Steddie is my favorite, I think. I love to spend time writing for them. These boys that turned into men, who made a full life together, and it's great. Maybe not perfect. But they wouldn't trade it for the world. That makes me happiest.

What’s your favorite Steddie fic?

The One in Which a Time Loop is Fucking Exhausting by badpancake is the one I think of that grabbed me first, and did not let go. I still need to read the final part of the trilogy! My fic TBR is so, so long because I definitely struggle with writing and reading at the same time. I know there is amazing work out there that I've just never read yet. But I look forward to it, absolutely. It's just something I've never figured out how to manage well. Joining Tumblr has helped that immensely, though! Reading the shorter fics here has been wonderful, and I've enjoyed it so much. There are amazing things being posted every single day! And I gotta say that don't start (too late) by Ark is one of the best "first time" fics I've ever read in any fandom. Eddie's inner voice is wonderful. I believe every word he thinks while he experiences this brand new thing with Steve.

Is there a trope you’re excited to explore in a future work but haven’t yet?

It's not brand new to me, but there's a found family one that I've been tinkering with for a very long time, and that excites me.  And I do love events for tossing me situations or prompts to write for that I may not have thought of, independently. @steddiemicrofic especially has been so, so fun. I think it was the very first event I wrote for on Tumblr, and the challenge of having a very limited amount of words, but still trying to make it feel like a whole story has been told, has been a blast. Thanks to @wynnyfryd and @steddieas-shegoes for challenging us all each month!

What is your writing process like?

I don't outline or anything. I just write, and edit, as I go. And I'll edit obsessively. I'll tweak and change small things over and over, ad nauseam. And even then, I know I still miss mistakes. But my mistakes are my own, I have no beta, because I kind of like being solely responsible for anything I write. Right or wrong. Here it is, take it or leave it. I also talk things through things in my own head a lot, especially dialogue, or I'll open a document, and just see where that takes me. And if I'm writing a long fic, like Tuesday's, I write totally out of order when scenes come to me. I wrote on every single year of that fic all at once. Then kept writing until they'd stitched themselves together into a full story. That's my last part of writing. Putting in the transitions from one scene to the next, when needed.  Sometimes ideas are more fully formed before I start putting words to the page, and other times I literally just start and figure it out as I go. There's one fic I wrote for Steddiemas last year where I sat Steve down at a mall food court and then just started writing. I had no idea what that was going to be. (It was Eddie turning up as the Mall Santa.)  Also: Research, research, research. I love the research aspect of writing. I'm curious in general, and if I can even think to look something up to see if it's true, or of the right time period, I will. And I like to add mixed media to my fics. That was a huge part of Take the Money & Tuesday's. All the newspaper articles and such. I felt like they were needed to make it feel like this really happened to these characters we all love so much. I did newspaper articles all throughout writing Tuesday's. In fact, I think that main article, the one at the top, was written and designed very early on in the writing process. They weren't all done at the end, they were done as the story needed them.

Do you have any writing quirks?

Short paragraphs. I love 'em. You'll pry them from my cold, dead fingers. Also see: Long sentences.  Honestly, I do like to throw out the rules, a bit. I write by feel. How does it sound, to my own ear? If it works, for my character, my fic or just me in general, I'll use it. "Don't use two "ands" in a sentence." Okay, but sometimes I'm gonna when that flows the best. Or: "That's a run-on." Okay, but I like the way it reads. "You don't need a comma there." But, I like the way that it breathes, so it's getting one. All this is especially true if writing from someone's POV. I know I don't always think in proper grammar, and I don't expect them to either. I don't want things to feel hard to read, but I do want them to feel natural. If that makes sense. I walk around, pacing as I write or edit on my phone, as if the moving somehow lets me see it differently. I think it does! And I don't know if this is a quirk, but some of the characterizations formed while writing Tuesday's have stuck, hard. Gareth is Gareth Jones, and where you find him, you'll probably find Di. Freak is Goodie. Jeff is Jeff Williams. These things have been decided in my brain, and now I feel compelled to take them with me, fic-to-fic. I didn't intend to build a headcanon I wouldn't be able to shake, but here we are.  I feel like I can transplant Steve and Eddie anywhere, into anything, and be comfortable changing things up. But the Corroded Coffin boys are cemented, as they were created, for the most part. Maybe that's because I did have to do so much shaping for them. Steve and Eddie, we know. We're all working off a decent amount of canon content. Corroded Coffin only had a few moments on screen to help flesh any of us flesh them out into real characters. And now that I've made my choices, for good or bad, they're here to stay.

Do you prefer posting when you’ve finished writing or on a schedule?

Finished, definitely. My three long fics were all mostly written before I started posting, and I still struggled to get the last part of All of Across the Universe out in a timely fashion. Tuesday's was posted over one week, one chapter per day, and I really enjoyed that fast schedule. It didn't give me any extra time to overthink the finished product. It was going out, and that was that. I had to trust that I knew what I was doing when I deemed it finished.

Which fic are you most proud of?

Tuesday's Gone With the Wind. I truly thought I was done after Take the Money and Run. And then this idea slapped me in the face, and I spent five months just lost in their world. These versions of the characters came so naturally, and they are still with me today. I feel like most of what I've written since then is shaped by those versions. Also, that was the last fic I wrote without anything else coming down the pipe. The last one before I joined Tumblr. The last one that had my full, and utter, undivided attention. It's really special to me, and I'm beyond grateful to everyone that has embraced it and recommended it to friends. I know it's got some scary warnings, but for those that have dove in and let me know that it spoke to you in some way, you've made me so happy. It spoke to me, too.

How did you get the idea for Tuesday's Gone With the Wind?

By watching the documentary "If I Leave Here Tomorrow" about the band Lynyrd Skynyrd. As I was watching it, there was an interview section where one of the band members spoke about their assistant road manager, saying: "He was like a bartender roadie. Where he took care of us really good, you know? Anybody who was sick, or needed a little more attention, he was just there for you. He was like the big brother, and sister, and your mama and everything." My brain whispered, Steve Harrington.  And that was that. Corroded Coffin were going to get Road Manager Steve Harrington, and he was gonna take care of them as they headed towards this unavoidable disaster. I wrote like 5k words the first night. It was just in there, waiting to spill out, somehow. And I think it's also an anomaly for me, but I'm fairly certain I started that fic with what turned out to be the opening. That first bit of Eddie's first interview section. I think that's where I started telling the story, and it held throughout. That's pretty rare for me. (Fun fact: I wrote all the interview bits in a separate document, and then just fit and tweaked them into the story, as needed. But not that opening. That was the launch pad into everything else.)

When writing Tuesday's Gone With the Wind, what was something you didn’t expect?

It's not exactly a Steddie answer, but - Gareth! Gareth Jones, my beloved. I wasn't on Tumblr when I wrote Tuesday's or any other social media in a fandom way. I was in my own bubble, doing my own thing. So, I didn't know the fandom had given him a fanon surname. I chose my own, and now he's just Gareth Jones to me, and always will be. He's also Eddie's best friend. I've pondered on more than one occasion on if Take the Money and Run would be different if I knew that first, lol. Just exploring my version of a character that had so little screen time to work off was incredibly fun. And has remained fun. Gareth is definitely gonna show up again in my future works. He's to Eddie, as Robin is to Steve in my head now and forevermore.

What inspired Take the Money and Run?

These lyrics from the song "Me and Paul" by Willie Nelson: Almost busted in Laredo But for reasons that I'd rather not disclose But if you're staying in a motel there and leave Just don't leave nothing in your clothes I had a literal shower thought that made me laugh. And thought, well, why are they even in a motel? Oh, they must be on a road trip. So, I wrote that little scene mainly in my head, but jotted it down, just in case, and assumed that was the end of it. But then I just kept writing it. Until I was knee deep in maps and mileage and research trying to figure this road trip out from a logistics standpoint. All because I thought it'd be funny if Eddie left weed in his pants and Steve got all put upon because of it.

What was your favorite part to write from You Oughta Know?

I loved getting to include all the fun 90s things, since that's when I was a teen, and can remember a lot of it very distinctly, first-hand. And I loved getting to use El's powers to look in on Eddie, so while they might not know where he is, they did know that he seemed to be doing okay out there in the world. Also, if I could go back and change one thing about it, I'd fix that I said Eddie's never had an acoustic guitar. I didn't notice his acoustic in his room until my re-watch. Oh well. This version of Eddie didn't, I guess, lol. (This might be from the second part, Eddie's POV. But still. It's my Roman Empire. I think of this mistake at least once a week and beat myself up. If I'd been on Tumblr at the time, I feel this would have never happened, because someone would have blogged about it, drawing my attention to it, surely.)

How do/did you feel writing Never Not Mine?

This one is heavily inspired by the Taylor Swift song imgonnagetyouback. It was fun to dig into a slightly angstier world for a bit. Because things don't always work out, or if they do, not always the first time around. I like to think they'll find each other again, in any universe, but they might not take the easiest path. They aren't perfect, and that's realistic.

What was the most difficult part of writing Let the Boy Be Merry?

Crying while writing it. This one slapped me around a little while writing. Life isn't always as romantic as fic leads us all to believe which, the audacity, honestly, lol, but the kind of love and relationship in this fic? That feels real to me. Old, and familiar, and even as well as you know a person, you can't read their mind. You don't always get what the other needs immediately, you don't get how important things can be to them, but figuring out how to compromise is love. Real, lasting love.

Do you have a favorite scene and/or line from any of your fics?

This question was hard! I'm gonna pick two from Tuesday's: For the first, I cried while writing and then cried again while editing the scene where Eddie and Steve hash out how serious their relationship is, and realize they've kind of been on different pages. There are two scenes in Tuesday's that got to me, and made me cry while writing them, over and over, and I don't even know why. (The other is Gareth picking that fight with Steve. Yeah, yeah, I know. Neither of these parts are the saddest parts of Tuesday's. But they stripped me raw, for whatever reason.) And a second, more fun, favorite: I'm gonna go with the scene where Eddie's naked and tripping on mushrooms in the backyard while Steve hangs out with him, and Eddie thinks they've written "Tom Sawyer" by Rush. That was so fun, and just a feel good write, if that makes sense. That whole summer they spent at the lake I look back on writing fondly. They are so in love there. They are all happy. And this scene is carefree in a way that they won't always be, due to circumstances coming down the pipe.

Do you have any upcoming projects or fics you’d like to share/promote?

I run @corrodedcoffinfest and I've got a whole list of planned pop-up events coming up over the next few months for that. Steddie is absolutely welcome, so if anyone would like a little more Corroded Coffin works in their life, consider coming to join us! I also finally updated my masterlist, so everything I've written for Stranger Things is finally gathered together. There's a lot that's still only on Tumblr and not on Ao3 at this point.

Outside of these questions, Is there anything YOU would like to add?

Thanks so much for including me and my works in this! And to the person who nominated me, thank you, thank you! You really made my day. It was fun to think about these fics again, and answer these questions. I've really enjoyed writing for Steddie, and I've also enjoyed making friends in the fandom. Thanks for welcoming me. Thanks for showing my fics love, and commenting or leaving kudos or reblogging. Just, thank you all so much. And I'm sorry if these answers were too long, lol. As a habitual "end notes" kind of writer, that's just the way I roll. 

Thank you to our author, @thisapplepielife, and our anonymous nominator! See more of thisapplepielife's works featured on our page throughout the day!

Writer’s Spotlight is every Wednesday! Want to nominate an author? You can nominate them here!

[roseofhybrids]

there's something I've been thinking about recently, and tonight seems like a good enough occasion to talk about it

back when I was in therapy, every session my therapist would ask the same question

"What is something you're looking forward to this week"

The first time she asked that, I just figured it was a part of getting to know me as a new patient. Building rapport and trust and such. But when she repeated it every time I spoke to her, it made me wonder why she'd ask that specific question every time

Well, after thinking it over for a while, I think the reason she asked that is because it's really important to have something to look forward to regularly in life. Even if it's something small, as long as it's something you can find a little joy in See, nearly every time she asked me that, my answer would be that I was looking forward to my weekly DND game. It wasn't something too grand, just me and a few others messing around for 2 hours on roll20. But I felt happy when DMing for them, it wasn't much, but it still something that brought a little bit of fun every week

I feel like that's a critical part about staying alive on the day to day. Your life doesn't have to be filled with every day excitement like you're living a wealthy influencer lifestyle in order for you to carve out a bit of happiness for yourself

Like I said, it can be something small. Maybe it's DND games, maybe it's seeing the new episode of a show you like air, maybe once a week you let yourself order a pizza or eat out, maybe you and some friends get together to a watch a movie. Could even be that you just set aside a few hours where you can do something you like, literally anything as long as it brings you some enjoyment. Just a bit of time when you don't have to be productive and working and worrying about everything

I know the idea of doing something just for yourself can feel selfish, like you're wasting precious time. Especially with everything that's going on in the world, it can make you feel guilty for letting yourself find joy when some many others are suffering and in danger

Take it from someone who spent the latter half of their schooling dealing with dysthymia, self harm, and constant panic and anxiety attacks. Feeling nothing but misery 24/7/365 will help nothing. Depriving yourself of any positive emotion day in and out will fix nothing. All it will do is land you in either the grave or a mental hospital, and you certainly won't be able to help anyone from either of those places

If you want to help others, you'll have to be able to support yourself first. And that means not letting the stress of being alive build up to the point of crushing you under its weight. Take an hour or two every few days to let yourself truly breathe and relax. Think of it as fortifying your self for what's to come. You'll need some way to maintain your strength through the storm if you ever want to see the other side of it I'm not saying to ignore the bad parts of life, just don't ignore the good parts either. Even if you have to make those good parts with your own hands Eventually, the world will get better. But that will take time, so you will need to work to ensure you are around long enough to see it

This week, I'm looking forward to the new Dandadan episode, and going to get my new dog his name tag This month, I'm looking forward to making Thanksgiving dinner and getting to have some turkey and pumpkin pie Next year, I'm looking forward to starting a project that I've been thinking about for months

What is something you are looking forward to?

you don't gotta tell me it if you don't want to, just make sure you have one

[mathmusicninja]

*Peach the starfish from Finding Nemo voice*:

TODAY'S THE DAAAAAY!! The sun is SHINING!! There's five new chapters! And we're finally getting resolution--

There's five new chapters.

TheRe'S FiVe nEw cHaPtErS?!?!

[50000bears]

Day 14

I planted kale, chives, garlic chives, and 6 varieties of tomatoes.

[mimimar]

♡the love fairy♡

just launched a new tier on my patreon with monthly printable paper doll and stationery rewards! you can learn more about it and join here♡

these are the february 2024 rewards:

join any time this month to receive them!♡

[kyouka-supremacy]

Hi. I've calmed down a bit, and I think it's better if I just take a break from Tumblr for a while. Right now, I don't feel the fandom to be the same chill and safe space as I felt it to be, so I'd rather take some time until I can feel comfortable again with posting. All my side blogs will be on hiatus too. I'm terribly sorry for any discomfort this may cause.

A deep, wholehearted thank you to anyone who reached out in the last hours in replies, asks and dms to share their support and love. Seriously, you can't imagine how much it meant to me, how meaningful every single message I got was to me. Yesterday I was really believing my blog didn't bring anything but negativity and hatred to the community; thank you for reaching out to tell me I was able to share a little happiness, too. Words cannot express how indebted I am to you; you made me feel again like the posting I made on my blog was worth it, for you alone.

I don't think I'll deactivate for the time being. The temptation is still very strong, but I've poured so much time and dedication and love on this blog, I don't think it'd be fair to delete it. I hope in the future there'll still be people who my posts can make happy.

Lastly, I want to apologize once again to the people for whom my posts evoked so many negative sentiments. I know it's impossible to avoid, but I'm still sorry that happened. I apologize to you.

Please, be kind to each other. Make some ss/kk posts on my behalf while I'm away :)

[johaerys-writes]

I wanted to say I love your writing and works! Are you still writing high flying birds? (Not pressuring just a curious fan!) 🤍

Thank you so much dear anon!! I'm glad you're enjoying my works 💙💙 I know it's been a minute since I updated HFB and I really do miss it!! It's not abandoned, but I don’t have a specific timeframe for when it'll be updated. Sorry about that 🥲

[blackjackkent]

Made it to the upper level of Sharess's Caress, but if Rakha is hoping this will make it easy to finally find Voss, she is doomed to disappointment, because the first thing she walks in on is definitely NOT Voss:

"Tell me... am I beautiful?"

"More than beautiful. You are the aurora stretched across the north skies. You are the golden dunes swept across the Calim."

"You are the fruit of the forbidden palm - soft on my skin, sweet on my tongue. You are my sin... and salvation..."

(A/N: LOL. I laughed out loud in my chair at this shot. Rakha just standing there like, "...Am I interrupting something?"

Also please clock Jaheira in the background, definitely once again thinking this is fucking hilarious, and Wyll, who hasn't yet figured out what's going on:

)

Both women turn, hearing the sound of Rakha's footsteps, and stare with bemusement at the seven-foot-tall half-orc that has just interrupted their tryst. Rakha, who has bluescreened a little bit on walking into this accidentally, stares back wide-eyed.

And then pain stabs through her head, staggering her back onto her heels.

Narrator: Your parasite stirs, and you gaze at the nymph through the Flaming Fist's hungry eyes. Your muscles shiver with her longing; your skin burns with her heat.

The realization comes, bright and sharp through the fog of pain. The Flaming Fist officer has a tadpole in her head.

"What-- what's wrong, Jara?" she dimly hears the nymph say with concern to the Fist, who has also doubled over in agony.

The Fist doesn't answer, but lifts her head and stares at Rakha, an unearthly glow suddenly lighting her eyes with pale green.

"What are you--" she hisses. "Wait. I know you."

Rakha struggles against the sudden overwhelming awareness of the tadpole connection, and the pain that comes with it. She fights to control her mouth enough to speak. "This-- looks personal," she says, her voice slightly too high-pitched, and takes an unsteady step backwards. "I should-- leave--"

But of course she knew before she began to speak that it would not be that easy.

"Your face..." the Fist rasps. "The Absolute has shown me--"

"Jara, what's going on?" the nymph starts to ask. "Who's this woman?"

The woman doesn't respond. She can't. The change has begun, her body becoming a vessel for the overwhelming voice inside her head, surging over her skin, pouring from her mouth.

"--gather-- ---PREPARE--- BECOME------"

Narrator: Your head screams in agony. The change has come - pustules boiling beneath your skin, your bones twisting, your flesh rupturing... and suddenly... silence.

(A/N: I know I'm very Jaheira-brained lately but I'm amused thinking about what this is like for her. In the animation, she's the only one of the party not at least mildly freaking out here, presumably because she has no worm, so from her perspective everyone around her just went cross-eyed simultaneously and all she can do is sigh, unsheathe her scimitars, and say ye gods, now what...)

Rakha's vision clears slowly, and she slowly focuses her eyes on the fallen form of the Fist officer. Except she isn't there anymore. In her place quivers a new form, a shivering and slimy newborn creature sloughing off the remains of her shredded clothing.

"What's happening?" the nymph quavers, backing away.

The mind flayer arches its back, rising into the air, staring them down.

-----

It takes the whole party's combined efforts to take the horrible thing down. Rakha is trembling violently when the fight is over - both from the headiness of the kill and the lingering pain of the Absolute's contact with her mind.

Your face, the Fist said before she transformed. The Absolute has shown me...

Not a surprise, really, given that the Watcher at the checkpoint recognized them as well, and given that Rakha was apparently the face of the entire operation at one point, when she stood at Gortash's side. But it's a harsh reminder, nevertheless, that there is no anonymity here for them - that nowhere is safe.

Wyll starts to try to apologize to the nymph for interrupting her and forcing her to witness this terrible mess. The nymph, however, seems surprisingly unbothered by the development.

"Hells. I'd heard tales of mind flayers. Talons sharp as daggers, and tentacles yet more fearsome. But no tale did justice to its ethereal beauty." Her eyes close with an expression of beatific bliss. "It floats like a butterfly. Its blood shimmers like silver."

Rakha stares blankly at her, then looks down at the mind flayer's slashed-open corpse. Certainly the beast in her head finds beauty in the killing, but she tries to see past that, to what this odd woman is seeing. Tentacles, slimy skin -- none of it holds much appeal to her. But the illithid is a creature of magic, and its very skin shimmers with the Weave, with the echo of the Astral Plane to which it truly belongs.

"They are... beautiful, indeed," she says slowly. "And most lethal."

The nymph smiles faintly. "Is it not in the illithid's barbarity that we find it's splendor?" she asks, the words rolling elegantly in her mouth. She takes a step towards Rakha, lifts one hand just shy of brushing against her cheek.

"Your eyes are no less monstrous, I assure you," she murmurs. "A lesser woman might be frightened. But I am no lesser woman."

Rakha swallows, flinching backwards from the touch. You should be frightened, she thinks bitterly. You don't know what I am, what I've done. What I would still do, should I slip...

And yet something in her twists painfully to hear those words of acceptance, just it did to hear Gortash greet her broken, corrupted self with glee.

Narrator: Her gaze intensifies. Your breath quickens and your heart skips a beat. [INSIGHT] The woman's senses are heightened and her fires stoked. The mind flayer is no mere curiosity, but an object of desire.

Rakha's head swims. The last few minutes have been overwhelming, and the juxtaposition of the woman's lust-filled eyes and the smell of illithid blood in the air is making her dizzy, confused. She doesn't understand what's happening or how she should respond to any of it. The pain of the worm stabs in her temple.

"The creature... aroused you?" she asks unsteadily.

"Why should I deny it?" the nymph purrs with blithe pleasure. "My urge is as natural as the grape upon the vine."

But it's dead... Rakha almost says aloud, plaintive with confusion, but decides not to bother at the last moment. Anyway, the nymph is still talking.

"But perhaps..." She draws closer to Rakha, biting her lower lip. "There are other flavors that might satisfy my palate."

Rakha goes still, suddenly acutely aware of Wyll standing behind her. A feeling something like panic rockets through her, sending the short hair at the base of her neck up on end.

"I'm... not interested in sex," she manages to say, her voice strangled. "But thanks."

Instead of being offended, the nymph laughs. "Not sex," she says, her eyes narrowing in amusement. "Something far more intoxicating."

She steps forward again, until she and Rakha are almost chest-to-chest, and peers up into Rakha's eyes. "Rapture..." she murmurs.

Before Rakha can figure out how to respond, the nymph lifts a hand and presses it against Rakha's chest, directly over her heart. "Close your eyes," she says, whisper-light, "and listen."

She can't help it. The instruction is so gentle and yet so direct, so soft and so commanding, that she obeys before she can even think about it.

Close your eyes and listen.

Narrator: You see only darkness. Her voice shines through it, warmer than sun yet cooler than night.

Silence. Peace. She's dimly aware that even the subtle sounds of breath from behind her have vanished. Time has frozen around her and there is only this moment, the sudden rush of the Weave on her skin, the whisper of the nymph's voice through her mind.

"The all-being..." the nymph says softly. "Here, there is no suffering. Here, you want for nothing. Here, you are anything. You have one word. Tell me. What will you be?"

Rakha's breath catches. She floats in this infinite silence, her mind soothed, muscles loosened, the smell of blood gone from her nostrils and the taste of it gone from her mouth.

You have one word. What will you be?

Even through the stillness, the beast growls at the back of her mind. There are a thousand things it wants, always - destruction, power, satiety, the prey-fear in its victim's eyes in the moment before the kill, over and over and over, forever, always...

And she hates it. She hates the jagged tear down the middle of her psyche that divides what she wishes she could be from what she is. She hates that every moment is a battle, that those she cares most for must sit up and watch in the night to be sure she doesn't become a mad animal. She hates the patchwork brain that she was born with, and yet she does not know what would be left if she could cut the broken pieces out of it.

What will you be?

"Sane..." she whispers. It's a plea, a prayer, an uncertain question.

The nymph's voice rolls through her like a waterfall. "You are sane," she murmurs. "Time dances on in sequence. The winding path of time evens and becomes straight. With a quiet head, you can once again hear the song of the birds and the wind in the grass." Fingertips dust along her cheek, over her pulse point, between her eyes. "You pluck a flower, and it does not bleed."

Narrator: Your flesh shivers. Your heart bursts. True ecstasy, for one fleeting moment.

She doesn't cry out, doesn't speak. Ecstasy, yes... but an ecstasy that comes in a wave of peace. Not even her quietest moments in the Astral Prism have compared to this moment of utter silence and calm. For a moment she can picture herself whole, in a place beyond the battle within her mind. For a moment she is free.

"Open your eyes..." the nymph says.

Rakha realizes that she is sitting on the floor in the puddle of illithid blood, her knees pulled to her chest, her eyes damp with tears. Wyll is crouched next to her, holding one of her hands in both of his. The others are looking on from a slight distance - Minthara with disdain, Lae'zel with puzzlement, Jaheira with concern.

The nymph kneels in front of her, looks into her eyes. Her smile has a knowing edge to it now, and she nods with the air of someone satisfied with a job well done.

"I'll remember you," she says softly. "And you'll remember me."

[fluffs-n-stuffs]

"For a self-proclaimed researcher... I thought you'd know by now that Psychic-types are weak against Ghost." "Morty-ehehe! B-But I'm nohohot a type specialist!" "Maybe should've thought of that first before deciding to wake me up so early."

A spiritual successor to this lil doodle of mine 🫣💖💕

[supernovaa-remnant]

I am so incredibly slowly reading through the dreblr big bang fics, but even though I've only read a few so far, I'd like everyone to know that all the fics are so good and everyone should go check them out <3

it was a really fun event to be a part of, and everyone put so much work in, and all the fics and art are absolutely lovely so yeah go check it out <33

[pociondeodio]

exhausted overstimulated got a headache pissed off at my mother got my phone stolen for the second time in three months

[introvert-celeste]

Welp, I can safely say that October and Halloween have been ruined for me. I envy everyone who can actually look forward to the festivities because my heart is just not in it this year :/

[aelyosos]

i've actually been able 2 stick w a skin care routine for the last two weeks & my skin is lookin so good ! the best it ever has, no contest

[sxnctxxry]

.

[natjennie]

that's so annoying :(

[the-physicality]

you know there's a lot of yaps about oh stewie beats dt records by 1 game per. well arike set 3972 [dallas franchise record] in 193 games, stewie in 194, dt in 195. [a'ja in 197, edd in 198]

but as far as ages go, it's lj, dt, arike. [asterisk obviously being lj came in at age 20 and americans came in at 21 or older. in this instance lj started just after her 20th, and dt just before her 22nd. lj is a month and a year older than dt. fun fact maya moore is exactly 7 years younger than dt]

and interestingly enough in the span of a week in 2009, 3 people hit that milestone: becky [8/29], dt [9/1], tamika [9/4]

sheryl swoopes, tina thompson, and katie smith all did it in june of 2006 [2-19]

lisa leslie was the first person in the w to hit this milestone, in 2004, nearly 2 years before anyone else would do it

sue and becky took the same number of games to get there [315]

of the 20 youngest people to hit 3972 [everyone who's hit it under 31 years], the list consists of 14 number 1 draft picks [db and arike went 5, cappie went 2- after Seimone augustus who is also on this list, tamika went 3-but drafted with an sei, and candice dupree and crystal langhorne went 6]

48 players have hit this milestone. of the ones that entered the regular wnba draft [ie were not allocated]

5 did it from 1999, 2004, and 2006 draft classes

4 did it from 2001 class [LJ, penny taylor, tamika catchings, katie douglas]

3 did it from 2002, 2008, 2009, and 2013 classes

2006 draftees 1-4 have all hit it

2013 is the only class to have only 1-3 make it

no one has hit this milestone from the draft classes of 2000, 2005, 2007, or 2017

tangela smith [1998], plenette pierson [2003], tina charles [2010], kayla mcbride [2014], jewell loyd [2015], stewie [2016], a'ja [2018], and arike [2019] are the only players in their draft class to hit the milestone

of the 2019 draft class, only 8 players have hit 1000 points, and the next closest to arike [3972] is napheesa collier with 2724, and she was out for a year on maternity leave

arike has also played nearly 800 minutes more than the next 2019 player, jackie young