#No time to mourn because there’s Toro

[silverthelovebug]

Okay, so, who do I have to commission to make a “Yaz dies from the Mosasaurus” fic?

NOBODY GIVE ME WEIRD LOOKS BECAUSE YOU GUYS LOVE MAKING BEN ACTUALLY DIE TO THE PTERANODONS !!! I’ve seen the fics ,,

The scenes happen back to back too, so it’s like — almost equal amounts of angst !! Because when Yaz breaks her ankle and Sammy runs over to her, she’s still pissed at Sammy, so imagine the guilt Sammy must feel if she watches Yaz die in front of her without ever making things right ??? Not to mention Ben’s guilt of feeling like he caused her death bc he was slowing them down with Bumpy. Maybe even Kenji too for not pulling her to safety fast enough with the feeding hook !!

Which is an ironic name..

I’d write it myself if I had the motivation to finish things ..

[pinksilvace]

.

[fallenclan]

"...then from this day forward, you will be known as Hailcrash." Goldenstar's voice rang throughtout the camp but was quickly drowned out by a rush of cheers. Toro was probably the loudest, cheering from her perch a bit below Goldenstar.

Goosewing had a goofy grin on his face, one tooth sticking out. Moonstep and Stormsight were both more reserved in their affection, but their gazes gleamed with pride all the same.

Hailcrash couldn't stop purring. Hailcrash. What a brilliant name! And it was her name and would be hers forever. Unless she became leader one day, of course, but Hailcrash didn't want to get ahead of herself. She was content with being a warrior, her heart full of joy for what she'd achieved.

Otterslip was standing a few pawsteps away as well, a tiny grin on his face. Truthfully, he had been the best mentor Hailcrash could have asked for. He'll probably be the one who becomes deputy someday. Then I'll have had a deputy for a mentor on top of having a deputy as a mother.

Basking in the warmth of her clanmates' cheers, Hailcrash felt nothing but happiness.

The day Hailcrash became a warrior had been the third best day of her life.

...

Hailcrash couldn't believe it. She was deputy. She was still mourning Stormsight, but in her heart Hailcrash knew he, Goosewing, and Toro were all cheering her on from StarClan.

Hailcrash knew the clan was still mourning Goldenstar, and she was as well. He had been a great leader and it would be hard for Maplestar to follow his pawsteps. Hailcrash hoped he would find his own way of leadership rather than attempting to emulate his father.

Still, Hailcrash couldn't help but feel glee at her newfound position. Her clanmates thought she was best suited to deputyship. The thought made her heart swell.

The only cat more excited than Hailcrash was Hopepaw, who was practically vibrating with energy. "This is the coolest! My mom is deputy!" Cherrypaw, as usual, was more quiet, but she still nodded along with Hopepaw, grinning.

"Oooh! Maybe Cherrypaw will be deputy too someday! Just like you and Toro," Hopepaw continued, bouncing up and down.

Cherrypaw flustered. "Oh, I don't know... I don't think I want to be deputy. That seems like a lot of responsiblity." Hopepaw stuck out her tongue, causing Cherrypaw to roll her eyes fondly.

Chuckling, Hailcrash swept both of her kits into an embrace. "Just because I have more responsibilities now doesn't mean I won't have time for you guys anymore, okay? I'll always be here for you."

With Cherrypaw and Hopepaw nestled against her, Hailcrash felt nothing but excitement for the days going forward. Her children were going to grow up to do great things, and Hailcrash would do great things too. She was going to make everyone so proud.

The day Hailcrash became deputy had been the second best day of her life.

...

"Hopepaw! Cherrypaw!" Hailcrash yowled her kits' names at the top of her lungs, drowning out the rest of her clanmates' cheering. Her babies were finally apprentices! Hopepaw was practically dancing with excitement beside the more even-tempered Eaglestripe while Cherrypaw stood still beside Mothspots.

As soon as the meeting ended, Hailcrash raced up to her daughters. "I can't believe it!" she purred. "You've both grown so much." Hailcrash couldn't help but sniffle as well, eyes watering. "I'm so excited for you both."

Hopepaw grinned, tail swishing wildly. "I'm going to the best medicine cat ever." Leaning in close to Hailcrash, Hopepaw whispered, "Even better than Eaglestripe and Silverbelly."

Eaglestripe dutifully pretended not to hear this remark, instead making idle conversation with Mothspots.

"I'm sure you will be," Hailcrash murmured. "And you'll be a great warrior too, Cherrypaw."

Cherrypaw's gaze brightened. "You think so?"

"Of course I do, sweetheart." Hailcrash was overflowing with love for her kits. She wanted only the best things for them. She could remember how excited she had been once her own apprenticeship started, and seeing the mixture of anticipation and anxiety in Hopepaw and Cherrypaw's eyes, Hailcrash knew they were just as excited.

Hailcrash hadn't thought it possible to adore two cats as much as she adored her daughters.

The day Hailcrash's daughters become apprentices had been the best day of her life.

...

"Mom!"

Hailcrash stumbled blindly from her nest, out of breath. A strangled sob escaped her throat. Ever since the attack, she'd been having nightmares.

Hailcrash had always been a failure, taking moons longer than any other apprentice too become a warrior. And now, the latest of her long line of failures, Hailcrash had failed to save her mother and sibling. Toro and Goosewing were dead, among so many others.

What was she supposed to do without them? Without Toro's soothing guidance and fierce protectiveness? Without Goosewing's ability to make light of any situation?

At least she had Stormsight and Moonstep in her grief. After the attack, Stormsight had thrown himself into his duties as medicine cat, doing everything he could to take care of the injured. Moonstep had hardly left Hailcrash's side. Even now, the tom was sleeping in the nest adjacent to Hailcrash's own.

Hailcrash felt as though the grief would consume her, drown her like a restless tide.

As she sank back into her nest, Hailcrash took a few calming breaths. She wasn't going to wake Moonstep again. She knew what he would say. It wasn't your fault. There's nothing you could have done. But was that really true? Maybe someday she would begin to believe it, but for now, all of her long buried insecuries were resurfacing.

The attack had been the third worst day of her life.

...

"No." Otterslip. Otterslip. Otterslip. He killed Stormsight. Murdered him. Threw him off a cliff. Crack. His spine snapped. My brother. Murdered. By Otterslip.

Hailcrash's heart was racing. This couldn't be real. It had to be some sick joke. Otterslip, sweet, compassionate, understanding Otterslip would never commit such a vile act.

Yet the tom hadn't denied it. In fact, he had attempted to justify his actions, snarling that he had been avenging Grassroot.

Otterslip hadn't even looked at Hailcrash. Was he ashamed? Could he not bare to look at the cat who had trusted him, whose brother he had murdered? Does he even care? Hailcrash could feel her thoughts spiraling.

It took hours for the she-cat to regain her composure, but deep down she knew some part of her would never recover from this betrayal.

The day Otterslip was exiled had been the second worst day of her life.

...

"What's going on?" Hailcrash shoved past the crowd of murmuring felines, her anxiety racing as the seconds flew by. She had been discussing recent developments with the other clans with Maplestar when a commotion began in the middle of camp.

It was only when Hailcrash got to the center of the gathering of cats did she understand. Hopethistle was dead. The she-cat's body was limp in the clearing. Someone had had the foresight to cover her body in rosemary before dragging her into the clearing, masking the smell of death and covering some of her wounds. But only some of them.

Hailcrash let out a low wail of agony before collasping. She could faintly hear someone trying to explain to her how this had occurred.

Hopethistle had been discovered near ArchClan's border. No one knew what happened. She had been missing all morning (But no one had thought to tell Hailcrash. Why hadn't she noticed?).

Hailcrash's daughter was dead. Cherrydust was sobbing as well, desperately attempting to convince Hopethistle to wake up, as if death were something that could be negotiated.

"I'm so sorry," Hailcrash whispered, not sure whether she was apologizing to Hopethistle or Cherrydust.

The day Hopethistle died had been the worst day of her life.

...

"Mom?"

Hailcrash blinked. Cherrydust was standing in front of her with a concerned look on her face. How long Cherrydust been standing there?

"Are you all right?" Cherrydust asked.

"I'm fine, sweetheart." Hailcrash's response was quick, words soft but expression unreadable.

Cherrydust frowned, but didn't press Hailcrash further. She knew there was no point. "Okay. I'll be nearby if you need me."

Hailcrash nodded. She had been lost in her memories again. Watching Cherrydust go, Hailcrash could only hope the other she-cat would never experience the same heartache. Or maybe she already was experiencing it, after losing her sister.

No matter what, Hailcrash would make sure Cherrydust would remain protected. If that meant only sending her on hunting patrols with a large group of warriors, then so be it. No fox, no ShallowClan cat, no illness, nothing would ever hurt Cherrydust while Hailcrash lived.

She would not let down another cat.

Especially not herself.

-🐉(grins evilly. this is dedicated to mouse anon! hailcrash was a character who i had a lot to work with so i made a much longer fic. as always, i'm open to requests/suggestions for characters people want to see fics about. i love to write and i love fallenclan 👍)

OHHH MY GOD DRAGON THIS IS FANTASTIC!!!!!! i didn't think it was possible for me to feel even more emotions about Hailcrash but HERE WE ARE IG. sobbing throwing up eating drywall. i love this sm

[allgirlsareprincesses]

Lord of the Rings

Okay listen, when Fellowship came out, I MIGHT have read Hobbit at some point, and I'd seen the Ralph Bakshi Hobbit, but I'd never read LOTR and I knew N.O.T.H.I.N.G. about it. I went in completely blind. And I was TRANSFIXED. To this day, that opening gives me chills and takes me right back to how I felt in the theater ("The world has changed..."). I saw all three films in the theater 3-4 times each, which was and is still my record. I have minor quibbles, but overall I think they're gorgeous and I'm so glad they exist!

I've since read the trilogy and while they're still not my literary cup of tea, I appreciate them more and am now enjoying the return to Middle Earth in The Rings of Power. I didn't bother with the Hobbit movies because Peter Jackson is the type of director who needs limits in order to produce good films (sorry but his King Kong SUCKED), and I was still mourning what we could have had if Guillermo del Toro had stayed on.

Anyway, love them and I'm definitely due for a rewatch soon!

[glassandmetalwings]

Alright, so, after listening to Radical Face's Always Gold again, I have proposed to some people the idea of a role swap AU of Shizuki and Kagemaru. I have feelings about this now and want to explain it.

Keep in mind this isn't thought all the way through and I would love contributions.

Spoilers ahead for both Shizuki's and Kagemaru's books, and a few misc spoilers for other books (Koga and Toichiro come to mind) and As the Leaves Turn Gold.

:readmore:

How it all begins:

Kage is more shaken by his parents' death than he lets on. Sure death isn't uncommon, especially in the Senkitai, but just...taken down by humans? Just like that? He can't wrap his head around it. In his mourning, he can't help but feel isolated from the rest of the Senkitai, because they just don't get it.

What's worse, recently, he's been noticing that Shizuki seems...distant. They still pull their pranks together and everything, but something feels off, and he doesn't like it. He knows Shizuki so well, so why can't he figure this out?

It's Keijiro. Because of course it is. He's trying to drive them apart. Also why did tumblr have to take out the strikethrough feature.

Cut to the night of the raid on the kitsune village. Kagemaru recognizes what a big task Shizuki's been given, taking out the village head, and decides his best course of action is to help his adopted brother. They're supposed to be the strongest together, and maybe this will set things right.

But when Shizuki fails, he manages to make his escape. He doesn't realize until it's too late that he left Kage behind, bc he didn't know Kage was with him.

And now Kage has to pay the price of the attack.

Kagemaru:

To be fair, he doesn't go down without a fight. He refuses to just accept his execution laying down. And that fiery spirit catches the attention of Toichiro.

He knows the Senkitai won't take him back. Even if Shizuki comes back for him (and he doesn't, and it throws Kagemaru into even more confusion and heartbreak), being captured and detained just will serve as proof that he's not cut out of the same cloth as his father, to whom this would never happen. But his dying feels so pointless.

When Toichiro suggests he wants Kagemaru to be his valet, he's completely thrown for a loop. Why should he wait hand and foot on this little kitsune runt?! But, maybe...if he brings back the head of the kitsune village leader, either future or present...maybe he can rejoin Shizuki and continue where they left off.

He has to catch the village off guard, though, and that's not happening anytime soon. So he'll play along, bide his time, earn their trust...but he will complain very vocally about it thre whole time.

Slowly, though, things shift. A kyubi is no weakling, after all-just a shame his last tail is sealed. But more than that, Kagemaru finds himself wanting to see how Toichiro plans to succeed where Keijiro failed, especially taking such a different path. They also share a tendency for trickery, and a belief in huh humans being inferior to ayakashi.

Kagemaru also eventually figures out about the marionette charm, and suspects Keijiro's foul play and killing his parents. Words cannot describe his anger. But the old fox is dead now, so there's nothing he can do about it.

When it comes to their time with Teach'...Koga and Kage just fundamentally can't get along. It never works. Koga is too pro-human, and Kage doesn't understand the distress he causes saying he wants to see the oni's carnage form. But! When Koga and Toichiro are going at it, occasionally Kage will side with Koga, just to be a little shit. This continues into adulthood, and everyone just has to accept that he does his own thing regardless of his loyalty.

Likewise, he wants to fight Kuya, too. Poor boy doesn't get much rest between three hot-head housemates.

As adults...he performs his role as valet well enough, abet with a lot of commentary about what a pain it is sometimes. He still calls Toro a 'runt' and 'brat'. Toichiro pretends not to hear him.

When the two of them aren't in a constant sass-off, they're enabling each other. Worst of all is when one challenges/dares the other to do something. It's like they're still teens or something. Maturity goes out the window. Koga has to step in sometimes, but they manage to maintain things just enough for Toichiro to pass as a respectable aristocrat. Held together by Kagemaru's strings.

Sadly, there is no Yuzuru, but Kage is still fond of women's clothes and will treat himself on occasion. He and Toichiro have toyed with the idea of one day pretending Kage is his mysterious fiancee, just to see everyone's reactions.

--

That's all I can squeeze in before work, but expect Shizuki tonight hopefully. Keep an eye on this post as it will be a reblog.

[flying-elliska]

i rewatched the Pirates of the Carribean movies as a comfort thing for the first time in a veeery long time. the first aged pretty well (bar some moments of uncomfortable humor) and is still a solid, fun adventure movie. i watched it so many times as a kid, i could almost remember the lines before they said them.

the two others...well. objectively, they're a mess. a very interesting one, though, but frustrating, because i actually really like the character arcs and plot ideas. it's everything else around it that is just....why.

the first issue is the length ; they're massively bloated at almost 3hrs each and much of that is padding that doesn't contribute much beyond the fact that some marketing exec must have said 'people liked that in the first so let's give them more' at some point. But in the stupidest way possible. So they've moved from the staged and slightly improbable but very fun and mostly grounded fight and action sequences of the first one, to CGI-soup that constantly bends the rules of physics and ends up coming off as video-game-y and ugly to look at and just...Boring (very much like in the Hobbit movies). there is also just...Too much of Jack Sparrow's shtick. He was fun and fresh in the first one but in the sequels it just comes off as lame and tiresome, I found him a lot less entertaining than I remember. I find him most interesting when he supports the other characters' growth.

Then there is all the racist stereotypes and sexist, vulgar humor that has just aged like milk and made me go wow i didn't remember it was this bad, especially Elizabeth being constantly objectified by semi-sympathetic characters and it being supposed to be funny ?? i know they're pirates and everything but it's the cheeky tone that's just gross. the whole cannibal tribe sequence though, beyond the fact that it's completely irrelevant plot wise, is just as bad as I remembered, and...like i know there is still a lot of problems but i am also kind of glad to feel like the 00s are a bygone era. somewhat. please. let it be bygones. Also the plot is so confusing at times esp in the third, where half the time I couldn't tell who is on whose side and side crossing who and why.

it's frustrating though because it feels like two awesome movies hidden inside two shitty blockbusters. i like that they went a lot weirder and more fantastical with the mystique of the sea ; there are some really fascinating visuals there - like a boat navigating an ocean reflecting the stars, the boat turning upside down to exit the land of the dead, the land of the dead itself with all the spirits sitting in boats with lanterns, the last green ray of sunshine (it's a story i actually grew up with irl!!!), Davy Jones playing the pipe organ while the kraken attacks (honestly pipe organ sounds and the kraken are just...a galaxy brain match, because they're both kind of solemn and terrifying and mourning and powerful and undeniable and horrifyingly beautiful and majestic like the sea, it's just perfect), Davy Jones' heart in a box...in an alternate reality this could have been just such a fascinating, poetic, dark nautical monster story, but I guess Guillermo del Toro can't do everything (sigh). Also the actor playing Barbossa is clearly having the time of his life and it's so much fun to watch.

And I just love the whole character dynamic between Will and Elizabeth, both their fathers, Norrington, Davy Jones and Calypso, there are so many juicy themes there !!!!! it's like loyalty and duty and revenge and longing and betrayal and making your own path in the world !!!!! hello !!!! Will and Elizabeth were my first OTP (and definitely part of my bi awakening lmao), I used to be embarassed by it because romance is for silly girls or whatever but I'm cured now and I still think they're amazing. They start out as so smitten for each other but they both have this arc of growing independently of each other, they disagree and there's miscommunication but they still just admire how badass the other has become and !!! their ending is the sort of wonderfully bittersweet that has my Romantic heart all aaaaaaaaaaaaaa. plus the scene where they get married right in the middle of the final battle on the edge of a whirlpool still makes me so happy.

i'm pretty sure whoever loved these movies as a kid has a much higher chance than average to a) have turned out bisexual and b) be a Black Sails fan now like it was a gateway drug to the whole pirates are freedom and the British Empire is evil thing

also I heard that Margot Robbie is in talks to replace Johnny Depp as the head of the franchise and with an LGBT aspect to it so you know what. you have my attention. as long as they keep the stupid CGI and clichés bullshit out. can we please learn from the mistakes of the past.

but yeah these movies will always have a special spot in my heart bc I think nothing before or since quite captured how scary and fascinating the sea is like this

[b0n-chann]

Happy new year everyone! I hope everyone had a wonderful start to the year. I’m starting a tag list for my stories so please let me know if you want to be added! And I’m open for subs if you have any ideas you’d like to be written out 💜💜 Hope you enjoy!

Starlight

The Mandalorian leans against the doorframe as he watches you put the child to bed. He smiles to himself as he listens to you hum a lullaby that he’s heard you sing before—it seemed to put him at ease just as much as it did the child. The kid has been fussy as of late; always needing you or the Mandalorian near him before he goes to sleep so this has been the routine. One of you would put him down for the night while the other dealt with dinner. It felt almost domestic.

“Right on time,” you say as you close the sleeping pod. “He should be down for the night.” You make your way over to the armored man and wrap your arms around him. The child had been extra needy tonight and you spent a good portion of the evening rocking him in your arms. Din returns your embrace and runs his hand through your hair.

“Another rough night?”

“Just a little. I think he’s got some separation anxiety after what happened in Tattooine.” You sigh as you think back to when Toro tried to take you and the kid hostage.

*****flashback*****

“Look, you and the kid are gonna be my ticket to getting to Mando. Neither of you gets hurt and I get myself into the Association by bringing him in,” Toro tries to reason with you at the docking bay. He’s got a blaster pointed at you and the kid cradled in your arm.

“You’re out of your mind,” you reply, your own gun aimed back at him. You had been helping Peli repair the ship while waiting for the Mandalorian to return when Toro showed up by himself. “Now, where is he?”

“Oh don’t worry, he’ll be back soon, I’m sure of it.” The child chatters in your arm, and you can tell that he knows something’s wrong. At that moment, Peli returns from gathering supplies in town and you curse at her poor timing. Toro grabs her quickly as she walks through the entryway and aims the blaster at her head. “Now, be a sweetheart and drop your weapon or this one gets it.”

“Shit,” you mutter. You scan the area quickly and realize that you’re stuck. Toro is blocking the only way out and now he had Peli too. You drop your gun and kick it away from you, waiting for the Mandalorian to make his way back to you.

The child continues to nervously chitter in your arms as he looks around. It’s obvious that he’s looking for Mando, and to be fair you were anxious for him to be there too. Toro seemed unpredictable and you knew he would go to great lengths to get what he wanted.

It feels like an eternity before you hear the docking bay doors open. You hear the Mandalorian’s cautious footsteps as he navigates his way to the Razor Crest. “Took you long enough, Mando.” Toro says. “Looks like I’m the one calling the shots now, huh, partner?” He forces Peli in front of him, a gun trained on her and another on you and the child. The Mandalorian looks over to you and you nod slightly to him, letting him know that the both of you are safe. “Drop your blaster and raise ‘em.”

You watch him throw his blaster to the ground and raise his arms behind his head. You slowly reach behind you to the hidden blaster tucked into your belt, mentally preparing yourself to shoot. Toro commands Peli to cuff the Mandalorian and when she gets behind him, he sets off a flash bomb. You quickly draw your blaster and shoot at Toro and you watch him fall to his side. The Mandalorian checks to make sure the bounty hunter is dead before running to you.

“Quick shooting, Ace,” he says lightly. He has a hand around your shoulder and another on the head of the child in your arms. The child lets out a cry and holds his hands up to the man, demanding to be picked up. You laugh and hand him over.

“We missed you.”

*****end flashback*****

Din takes you by the hand and brings you to the next room over where your dinner waits for you. Almost always, you both eat dinner separately, but more recently he sits with you while you have your meal. While you enjoy his company, you always feel a little odd having him watch you eat. When you take your seat you realize that both plate settings are still out.

“You didn’t eat?”

“Ahh, not yet. Kinda wanted to wait for you.”

“I’d love to, but how would we go about doing that?” You ask. The meal that was laid out before you was simple, a broth of some kind with bread and some fruit.

He hesitated with his next words. “Well, I was hoping that we could use this again...” he brought out the blindfold you would use whenever his helmet was off. Your eyebrows shoot up in surprise and he’s quick to shoot down his offer. “It’s okay, it was a stupid idea anyway...”

“Din.”

“Yes?”

“Shut up and blindfold me.” You blush lightly at how suggestive that sounded.

He chuckles at your statement. “Yes ma’am.”

He ties the blindfold around your head and you hear him remove his helmet. He places a kiss on your forehead before helping you sit down at your side of the table. You’ve noticed that since that first night he admitted his feelings for you and you removed his armor, he’s been more and more open to experiencing new things with you. You realize then, how such simple things like having dinner would mean so much to him. When was the last time he was able to share a meal with someone? To hold someone without armor on? It breaks your heart to think about it, and you promise to yourself and to Din that you would do anything to give him those experiences back.

You lightly skim the edge of the table with your fingers to get your bearings. The bowl of soup of directly in front of you with the bread and fruit on either side. You feel slightly disoriented but try your best not to make a fool of yourself. “Don’t laugh at me if I get food all over myself.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll help you if you need,” Din replies, taking your hand in his. His thumb strokes light circles over your hand and being blindfolded makes you even more aware of his touch. His hands are strong and calloused but familiar and inviting. These are the hands that kept you safe. These are the hands you trust.

You carefully find your bowl and take a sip of the warm broth. “Is it your turn or mine?”

He has an amused smile on his face as he watches you clumsily navigate around your meal. He takes a piece of your bread from your plate. “Mine, I think. But first, here. Open.” He commands, placing the bread in front of your mouth. He gently touches it to your lips and you open your mouth slightly to accept the food he’s feeding you. You feel the heat rise to your cheeks at his actions.

“I think you’re enjoying this entirely too much,” you tell him between bites.

“Probably, but I can tell you are too,” he replies. You drop the subject because you both know he’s right.

“Quit distracting me, it’s your turn.”

Lately, you both have been taking turns asking questions about each other’s lives; about where you grew up and what you were doing before you met each other. Simple things that only endear him more to you.

“I remember my mom and my dad. We weren’t rich by any means but he always managed to bring her flowers every time he came back from a long trip. He called her Starlight and sometimes I’d catch them dancing in the kitchen when I was supposed to be asleep.”

He continues to tell you small stories of them here and there throughout your meal. He tells you that he grew up always wanting what his parents had but that those feelings had to be buried when he joined the Mandalorians. And it’s all just too much. You try to hold your tears back but it’s no use. You cry for the small boy who lost his parents too young, and you cry for the man in front of you who is too gentle and too good for the life he currently lives.

“Din...I...” you start, your voice breaking. And that’s all you can manage to get out before your emotions betray you. You feel him get up and move to your side.

“Hey, good bounty hunters aren’t supposed to cry,” he says, trying to lighten the mood. He’ll never tell you how much it means to him that you would cry for his sake. He never had a chance to properly mourn his parents after they were killed, and to have you here crying for him was more than he could ever ask for. He brings his hands to your face and lightly strokes his thumbs across your cheeks. “You’re too good to me,” he says lightly. He tips your chin up and kisses you softly. “Thank you.”

He pulls you up easily and wraps you in his arms. You both sway side to side in a slow, rhythmless dance that brings images of his parents back into his head. Hadn’t he said he wished that he’d find someone to do this with? The late nights talking, the small touches of affection. It had been so easy to fall in love with you, he barely even noticed that it happened. And now that he had it, he would fight like hell to keep it.

Tag list: @momc95

[thevividgreenmoss]

Inherent Vice seeps into your soul, like the Neil Young songs and that faraway boat Doc and his maritime lawyer, the lovable Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), are always looking at or that almost inexplicably mournful opening shot of Gordita Beach – that gap between beach pads – the light, the colors, the music (shot by Robert Elswit). Why is this is so heartachingly beautiful? The movie doesn’t so much require multiple viewings, it seduces you to revisit it, again and again, pulling you in far enough, while remaining just enough out of reach. You feel as if you need it. There are those who yearn to untangle the plot, but for me, among the many riches of watching Inherent Vice is searching to find something; something elusive, something you attempt to hold on to. But you know you’re not going to find it exactly because the movie works on an emotional current unlike any other I’ve ever seen. It’s like the first time I heard Love’s “Forever Changes” (and then listened to it over and over again), that masterful merging of haunting beauty, darkness, mystery, romanticism, crafted by a Los Angeles band who challenged any idea that the sunny Southern Californian 1967 Summer of Love was something every hippie bought into. As writer Andrew Hultkrans said of lead singer Arthur Lee: “Arthur Lee was one member of the ’60s counterculture who didn’t buy flower-power wholesale, who intuitively understood that letting the sunshine in wouldn’t instantly vaporize the world’s (or his own) dark stuff.”

By the 1970 of Inherent Vice (adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel), characters seem attuned to the “dark stuff” – they’re already feeling coarsened to the new decade, weaving together once heroin-addled saxophone players turned COINTELPRO informants with dental syndicates of drug cartels and Nixon and Reagan and . . . a hippie movement picked up by the establishment to exploit for monetary reasons or reasons more nefarious than that. It’s haunting and humorous, and Anderson strikes the perfect surrealistic duality/mind-melding balance (if “balance” is the right word) between the two opposing forces that are now merging into a deadened, dreamlike reality. Like secretly tortured Lt. Det. Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin)/sometimes Adam-12 TV extra and ad pitchman puts on an afro wig and hippie beads and talks youth jargon from Doc’s TV: “Hey man, I don’t want you paying rent. Rent’s a hassle. I want to see you in your own pad. The Channel View Estates, Artesia’s newest and grooviest housing development. No buzz-kill credit checks. No minimum down payments. That’s not your bag. But check this out: fully equipped kitchen with automatic self-cleaning oven and breakfast nook. Out of sight. Attached one car and available two car garage and best of all, a view of the Dominguez Flood Control Channel that can only be described in two words: Right On!” Doc freaks out a little when, in a minor hallucination, Bigfoot leans into the ad and addresses Doc personally: “What’s up, Doc?” How far away are they from each other, really? Doc could go crazy wading through all of these correlations.

...Doc is given opportunity to make spinning, divergent connections regarding his ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), that night she sways into his little Gordita Beach pad (serving for Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach). She’s looking beautiful but “flatland,” looking like she swore she’d never look. She’s also dragged in a dramatic entanglement and, now, a new case for Doc. In her own way, she’s back with him, but then, as they say separately, twice in the film, “of course not.” This relationship will grow ever poignant as we watch Doc remember Shasta in lyrical sequences, and we see that at its center, this is a movie about a doomed relationship. So, all of the theories, dark operations, conspiracies and period-detail gloom mix in with Doc’s sentiment and sadness towards Shasta. They divert him, and yet, they make him closer to her.

...Doc’s relationship with Shasta is like a simultaneous love and ghost story. Often she appears like an idealized dream, the way we frequently remember those we pine for, forgetting the bad times. A flashback of the two running through the rain to Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” is so overwhelming romantic and stirring that it feels personal, like even personal to the viewer (who hasn’t had this kind of idyllic memory come to them before? Who wouldn’t want to return right back to that perfect feeling?). Things become, perhaps, real (in a still dreamy sense) in a powerful extended scene in which Doc has angry/emotional sexual encounter with Shasta. She sits naked detailing what Mickey made her do – is she taunting him? Expressing sadness and trauma? Is she getting off on it? It could be all things, and not because she’s a “femme fatale” or a bad person, or merely fucking with him, it’s much more nuanced than that. And so is Doc’s response. This scene’s been deemed controversial by some, a male fantasy even, but that takes away all of its complexity and rawness, for both Doc and Shasta. It’s an extraordinarily thorny moment, between two people who really know one another. It’s supposed to be discomforting and sad and emotionally honest. You’re supposed to think about it. It also shows that their relationship is more complicated than his idealizations.

...These characters will have more rabbit holes to dive down, but the case is over, and rather than rejoice, there’s a sadness that ends the picture with a  . . . what now? As Sortilège narrates: “Yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.” That’s why we like to whirl with endless conspiracies because, well, they often never end.

The one bit of closure has a poignantly heroic Doc saving Coy and dropping him off to his wife. But while you’re happy for Coy, the camera lingers on Doc’s bittersweet, forlorn face sitting in his car as Jonny Greenwood’s gorgeously melancholic score underscores the emotion. Nothing is wrapped up for him. Even when he’s driving off with Shasta, nothing is for certain. Who knows what’s in store? Who knows if it’s really even happening? Should we attempt to figure it out? “Of course not.”

https://thenewbev.com/blog/2017/05/kim-morgan-on-paul-thomas-andersons-inherent-vice/

[agentemo]

The G note hits different.

It’s 2006; like many a pre-break up emo, I hear that note and listen to that song and watch that video, and I feel epic and powerful. ‘We hear the call to carry on.’ I’m ready to radically face life even when death feels closer to me, marching to the beat of those drums. Some of us are gay or depressed or experiencing a darkness or some combination of things. But it’s all of us. We’ve all got this song now. The G note says we’re about to start something epic that is going to embed itself in the history of music and pin itself to a generation.

It’s 2013; I’m so caught up in the euphoria of the Fall Out Boy reunion that I forget about the rumors that MCR would break up soon. The signs had been pointing that way for months. It feels like we enter a period of mourning. We joke and meme about it in present day, but the song and the feelings it illicits from us are burrowed deep in our little black hearts, and full of love and hope. In a time now when hope is hard to come by. 'And though you’re dead and gone, believe me…’ The G note makes us feel loss. We are mostly okay, but the world is going to get scarier soon.

It’s 2019; I hate October because my mom never let me celebrate Halloween growing up and it’s getting cold out. MCR is back. Oh. I guess I have a new favorite holiday and it’s Frankie’s Birthday! The most cryptic band of the 2000s is like “yeah see you guys December 20th, whatever” and California 2019, The End! Then I’m sitting at my computer watching low-quality livestream of a livestream (praise be, you know to whomst). Fourteen years of me watching MCR end their sets with Helena, the song comes up and I think it’s over. Then we realize. Black Parade. They haven’t played the G note. A decade and a half since Helena has been the mainstay final song, and they’re ending the Resurrection show with Welcome to the Black Parade. Across a bunch of streams watched by tens of thousands, that G note says we’re back. Across thousands of better quality pieces of footage uploaded later (technology!), the final song bookends an epic-feeling night of joy and aggression and love: the G note feels triumphant. We made it. We had carried on and will continue to do so, just like My Chem predicted. They have so many new, younger fans, and older fans coming back. They’re bringing us into the new decade and they look so happy to do it. And we’re so happy to witness that.

I’ve been listening to this song on repeat while writing this essay. The G note and every other note, those drums attached to my heartbeat, Gerard Way’s wailing, Ray Toro shredding, everything about it feels hopeful again.

The anthem won’t explain it. It’s good to be back in the parade.

[therealfluke]

hello hello ! wld j like to say that if ur already following me and ur like “why” it is because. this is may. i j reserved from my rph so the alias it went under was lucky. which actually,, so fitting w this theme (goes by a name that means an unlikely coincidence, last name is associated with luck, etc.). in addition, if “lucky” by britney spears immediately got stuck in ur head... that was the ultimate goal. also listen,,,, u r not the only one who hates my url. and finally! i saved the old posts on here and j made them private for posterity (obviously) and also,, my sanity.

‹ OLIVER JACKSON-COHEN, HE/HIM, CIS MAN, BISEXUAL. › levi “fluke” fisher is the twenty-seven year old from salem, massachussets / new york city, new york. when a friend asked them what they thought of the manor they said, ❝ IT FEELS LIKE I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE. ❞ they claim final destination is their favorite scary movie, and if they were to die in a horror film they would form an alliance with the murderer, then annoy the murderer into killing him by asking too many questions. their fears include rats, isolation and living the rest of his life without muse d, and they don’t know we know, but… in spite of a promise he made to his family, friends and self, he has a baggie of heroin on him at all times so he can prove to himself he’s strong (which is a lie – it’s really for a ‘just in case’ situation) . hope they enjoy their stay. ‹ MUSE C from OTHERSIDE penned by, LUCKY, 20, EST. ›

QUICK FACTS:

full name: levi “fluke” james fisher

hometown: salem, ma // moved to new york city, new york at twenty-two

date of birth: march 10, 1992*

*does not perfectly reflect the below Big Three Zodiac Chart™ because that’s so much math

zodiac big three: pisces sun, scorpio moon, pisces rising (he is!! so ruled by his emotions!!)

gender & pronouns: cis man & he/him

sexual orientation: bisexual

occupation: museum night guard ( fired ) / leech off of his older siblings

mbti: infp

enneagram: 4w5

the song i listen to on repeat while i write the intro: “stars” - nina simone ( cover )

BACKGROUND INFO:

triggers: death (under mysterious circumstances, but officially dubbed murder), night terrors / hallucinations?, drug abuse / addiction ( oxy, heroin ), accidental overdose, death by overdose

it began with josephine (“jo”), levi, charlotte (“lottie”), and christopher (“chris”) – in that order. or, perhaps, that reverse order – see: chris was the oldest.

they were all born to very kind and lovely parents. the majority of levi’s memories with his parents take place in a large house they were intending to flip. given its size and the price it would sell for, they spent more than their fair share of time in there. that being said, because their parents were often busy flipping and marketing the house, they all relied on each other for fun, even in spite of the sizable age difference between himself (and jo, who i have forgotten to mention is his “younger” twin) and christopher.

the longer they spent there, however, the more uneasy they grew. i mean, it was basically its own version of the manor – it was also guillermo del toro’s wet dream. levi could’ve sworn he’d had some run-ins with spooks, but no confirmation was ever, nor could ever be, offered. so the manor feels... very normal.

anyway, when levi was eight, his mother and father met an untimely demise. a break-in gone wrong while the kids were with their grandparents, they were told. at the time, levi... was eight and, therefore, had no doubts. now, however, he mulls over the many possibilities – it was a big house, the likelihood that they really could’ve been in that wrong of a place at that wrong of a time felt very unlikely. some form of suicide? something otherworldly? they seemed about as likely. he’s pretty sure lottie and chris know the truth, but...

after that, they were sent to live with their grandparents. while not particularly ideal, they recognized that it was far better than the foster care system. however, these recurring spooks didn’t just stop when he moved. his grandparents and older siblings blamed it on childhood night terrors, jo believed him. 

as they continued into his teen years, they claimed it was sleep paralysis. he confided in jo, in secret, that they weren’t strictly at night. he knew very well that, if he shared that with his grandparents or older siblings, they would think he really needed help. maybe he did, he never truly learned.

when chris moved out to go to college, and when lottie followed just a few years after, levi found it was just jo and himself. their grandparents were beginning to go past old age and reach senility. they had bouts of forgetting. 

levi chose not to go to college, but insisted jo, who’d always wanted to go, go without him. she went to new york city, he stayed behind with his grandparents in salem up until their death when he was twenty-two. it was early in his eyes, but for, say, his brother, it was pretty record-breaking. 

when he was twenty-one, after the death of his grandparents, he left salem and all of its reminders of childhood terrors and lies. he found jo in new york and began living with her and working as a night guard at one of the many museums.

but a mere one (1) year later, jo, usually straight-edge, decided she would finally go to her first college party in celebration of being so close to graduating. yeehaw. levi was invited to go with her, but had been warned far too recently that, if he missed one more shift, he’d be fired.

on the topic of his night shifts, his terrors seemed to go away when he moved to new york. it seemed as though he’d left them all in salem, but there were definitely moments in a huge and empty museum that he could’ve sworn he’d seen something. anyway, back to the main point:

jo didn’t return until the next morning and, when she did, she expressed the excellency she had experienced the night before. she wasn’t afraid of telling him she’d tried drugs for the first time – no, that night, it’d just been weed. he’d tried weed in high school, trying to figure out if it would help with his terrors. for a hot second, it did... which is what led to his own demise.

(OK! so from here on out, i’ll be talking about the other muses in the subplot. i’m gonna do my best to leave their story and keep their drug of choice vague! anyway!)

jo began falling deeper into the drug world after meeting and beginning to date muse b and eventually fell into harder tingz™. she never tried to pressure fluke into trying anything, but he witnessed the reaction to it. between that and having looked up to his younger sister ( by, like, two minutes ) for nearly the entirety of his life, he decided to try whatever she did. 

however, unlike her, he quickly escalated to heroin.

he started out smoking it... then snorting it... then began shooting it. he liked shooting it the best – not only because he reached the high quicker, but also because it required more of a ritual. as a fan of ritualistic behavior, the lead-up was almost as enjoyable as the high itself. unfortunately, it did leave him with many trackmarks and an even higher risk of reliance and overdose.

he didn’t go out to many parties after that. he preferred shooting in the company of the few, not the many. if his sister and friends did, that was their prerogative, but it was just... more peaceful...

suddenly, he didn’t ever think about the terrors or the lies or the shadows in the museum. he was eventually fired, yes, and had to start ‘earning’ money via asking his other siblings. 

when the topic came up between himself and his little group of friends on whether or not they should quit, he had no answer. 

in 2018, at twenty-six, his usual dealer had cut him off due to the money he was no longer good for. finding a much cheaper one, he took the same dose, but the amount of other chemicals it was cut with sent him to the hospital. given plenty of naloxone, he came out of it alive and clean and, due to the nature of it all, was deemed a fluke.

he didn’t take to that at first. he was lucky, yes, but a fluke ? it couldn’t have been that unlikely... especially when he fell back into it after finding another dealer and being totally fine. however, when he heard jo had overdosed and actually died ?

yes, he was a fluke.

he was so blinded with rage at muse a at first for leading his absolute crutch to her death, he was so blinded with rage at muse b for first introducing her to a world of harder drugs, he was so blinded with rage at himself for being the one who survived when she was the one who actually could’ve done something with her life.

so he embraced the word ‘fluke’ – he acknowledged that he was one during her eulogy, he told his other siblings he’d been the fluke at her wake. when he began saying it enough times, it caught on, whether he meant for it to or not.

he’s no longer so angry at muse a  and muse b for what they did. muse b wanted to get sober, after all, and muse a , much like himself, was simply an addict. they couldn’t help not being prepared to give it up. he’s still furious at himself.

now that they've all gone clean, however, fluke is somewhat more pleased. he’s fairly certain he’ll never not be in mourning. quite frankly, he’s fairly certain he’ll eventually relapse. even worse, in spite of the group promise, he’s brought contraband with him to “prove his strength” ( see: that’s what he tells himself ).

riffing off of that, in the manor, his terrors have begun returning and he’s unable to nail if it’s because of the similarities between it and the home he remembers so well or if it’s because he’s now sober of it it’s because... it’s just the manor itself. 

he’s still certain it’s all real.

TL;DR:

basically lived in a replica of the manor when he was a kid with his loving parents and three other siblings. is pretty sure he saw some paranormal stuff goin on. parents were “murdered” but he suspects something else. moved in with grandparents and continued seeing some paranormal stuff. only his twin sister, muse d (jo), believed that it wasn’t just night terrors. jo went to college, he stayed behind. grandparents died rip. he went to nyc where jo was and eventually met muse a and muse b when they all fell into hard drug use. almost died because of poorly cut heroin. jo died some months later. hates himself. rip. alexa, play “my heart will go on” but the recorder version.

PERSONALITY INFO:

sad boi energy

if u read thru this and didn’t think “why does she keep basing her characters off of characters from thohh” then,,, u should go watch thohh bc,,, it’s so obvious (we even over here picturing victoria pedretti as jo unless someone applies for her at some point afhsljk) hlfajdsa

has a terrible tendency to find someone to feed off of – someone to be codependent off of. without jo, he’s floundering.

is very * eyes emoji * at,,, many things. the explanation for his parents’ death? * eyes emoji * the spooks that almost everyone came up with excuses for? * eyes emoji * staying sober? * eyes emoji *

didn’t mean to start going by fluke, but started using the word to describe himself so much, it just happened organically.

i have stated before. that im bad at these sections. so feel free to j consult the zodiac / mbti / enneagram above haofuwdlijk

not rly personality but lil hc is that he goes back to that huge victorian house all the time and uses a ouija board to see if he can contact ANYONE :\ the ultimate eeyore :\

another lil hc is that he’s actually a v talented pianist. his mother sort of taught him the basics and he went on to learn classical through sheet music and schooling, then songs from rock bands/artists who incorporated keys in their music. brought the 7-octave keyboard his grandparents bought him... apparently doesn’t need it because there’s a huge piano hajfdkls

if u want 2 hear abt some of my paranormal hcs lmk i wld put them here but?? some r actually creepy (and/or involve blood) which we luv for me!!

FEARS:

rats: when he was living in that big house™, there were plenty of rat infestations. he often got those mixed up with his spooks™. there were also a lot of rats at his grandparents’ house and at his and jo’s apartment. it’s more of a general fear, but. (also... rat poison? drug abuse? symbolism.)

isolation: for an introvert, he’s really bad at being alone. for one things, he gets lonely which is very detrimental to his already fragile mental state, especially considering he’s pretty sure he’ll relapse. in addition, he’s much worse at dealing with any spooks™ that come his way when he’s completely alone. when someone else is in the room, even if he isn’t actively talking to them, at least there’s the comfort of not being alone in it all. 

living the rest of his life without muse d: even if she was the one who began their drug journey, she was the only person who ever believed anything fluke said – she was the only person he ever felt actually listened to him and cared about him with no ‘if’ or ‘but’ attached. he also always found her much wiser than himself and could’ve sworn she would’ve gone to rehab after getting well with muse a one last time. she was the one who was going somewhere and she was the one who loved him unconditionally. no wonder he’s got sad boi energy :\

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

his other brother and sister! i’ll probs send in wcs for them to the main, but if you think they wld sound cool, lmk. luv that. (update!! take one of them you cowards.)

the dealer who actually dealt him quality heroin

the dealer who dealt him heroin cut with god-knows-what

someone he accidentally starts to sink with himself

exes

fwb

ons

enemies (not super great at making them, but is still able to)

the new person he’s decided to latch onto

childhood friends (if there are other salem (or at least massachussetts) characters!)

idk!! we can also look at urs and/or brainstorm!!

ok ! like this or hmu if you’d like to plot !

[mystery-deer]

Kevin and Jake bond in the safe house and it's emotional?

“Detective-” “You can just call me Jake you know. You don’t have to keep up the whole ‘detective’ thing.” Kevin stared at Peralta to discourage him from interrupting again. The other man seemed to panic under the silence and began blabbering more, a nervous smile spreading across his face. “I mean!! Detective’s cool yeah yeah yeah worked my whole life to be- well not my WHOLE life because-” “I shall not be calling you Jake. I have only met you once.” “We’ve…you’ve seen me!” “When?” “Uhh, when Holt got stabbed!” “Ah yes. You dragged me around the city and instigated a fight between me and my husband.” “That’s..not how I would describe it.” “Pray tell.” “…What?” “Pray, tell me how you would describe it.” “Who says ‘pray tell?’ and I wasn’t gonna mention it but shall not?” “…..” “I mean are we in a Shakespeare play?” “Goodbye, Detective Peralta.”_______________________

“So….” “………..” “…we gonna sit here in silence or?” “……….” “Kevin buddy? I’m getting a bit worried here.” “……..” “…Keeev? Kevvie? K-” “What.” Kevin’s voice was like choking on ice and Jake’s stomach tied itself in a knot. He hated this, he wished he’d just let them switch who watched Kevin. He obviously didn’t want him here and he honestly didn’t want to be here anymore. “Do you want to talk about it?” “I do not.” “Yeah yeah cool cool cool like I get that buuut.” “…..but what!?” “What?? Why are you yelling?? What’d I do!?” “You left the sentence incomplete. Open-ended like my time spent here in this hell hole of a ‘home’ with you!” Jake grit his teeth, feeling weeks of annoyance and anxiety bubble up to his lips as anger. “Like it’s such a picnic being stuck here with the most humorless robot man on the planet!? Leaving the outside world behind, in this shitty fake house I get dumped here-” “Danging participle.” Kevin murmured. “…What now?” “Your participle’s dangling.” Kevin repeated, now turning around so his back was facing the other man. Jake got the feeling that he’d lost the argument although he wasn’t sure how it turned into an argument or exactly how he’d lost it._______________________________“So how are things going with Kevin?” Amy asked quietly, once the man in question had fallen asleep. He went to bed at eleven o’clock like clockwork it was unbelievable. If Holt was a robot then his husband was an alien whose biology had no room for emotions. Or a heart. But then he remembered Kevin’s hurt. “How could you not know that? Raymond, you are unbelievable.” and he felt bad for thinking it. Jaked cursed himself for being so good morals-wise…and face wise. “He’s great! No, I lied, he’s the most difficult person on earth. All we do is argue and life’s a living hell.” “What!? That’s awful!!” Amy sat up and reached for her phone, eyebrows scrunched up in worry. “I’ll tell Terry that we should go ba-” “No no no no Ames it’s way too late for that! If we have a bunch of random dudes coming in and out now it’ll be hella suspicious! I was exaggerating, it’s not that bad!” Amy looked at him, doubt splattered across her face. He’d always been a horrible liar, again, he’s so damn moralistic he can’t help it, also he has a cute smile. Which wasn’t vain to think, Amy had told him that. It’d made his week. “We just need to..click, you know? Get to know each other better! I’m gonna ask him to watch some movies with me tomorrow.” Amy sighed and laid back down, cuddling into Jake’s side which made his heart feel warm and skip-y. She kissed his chest. “Alright…just, a word of advice?” “Hm~?” “Don’t show him any like, Die-Hardy movies? I don’t think he’d like them.” “Yeah, of course not Babe! What, you think I’m an idiot?” he said, laughing stiltedly and thinking about the pile of exclusively Nick-Cage films he’d bought with him. Maybe having a theme would make it more artsy? In the darkness Kevin kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady as he has at eleven o’clock every day since being locked away in here, if only to get the illusion of a moment alone. He kept his eyes closed and longed for Raymond._____________________________________“I will admit this is…not terrible.” “Saying you’re enjoying yourself isn’t like, against the law you know? I won’t arrest you for having fun.” “…….” “Also, you just tore the movie to shreds for the entire hour. Are you the man behind cinemasins?” “Cinema what? What are you talking about?” “Oh my god you know what?…that’s kinda cute.” Kevin made a gesture that Jake had come to understand meant he was close to getting up (getting down?) and leaving (crawling) so he changed the subject as quickly as he could. “My dad used to like this one Adam Sandler movie- he’d like, watch it al the time and it was basically just about being a shitty dad and not caring.” And he’s stepped right into an emotional landmine, a lot of those popping up lately. “So I guess he found a kindred spirit in him. Only it wasn’t nearly as funny when my dad did it.” And there it was, the explosion. “……..” And his toro was near the door and his arm was on the ceiling fan and his foot was directly in his stupid idiot mouth. “Let’s watch this one next.” They watched four more movies in a quiet that slowly grew more and more noisy as whatever thoughts Jake’s words had pulled around Kevin’s head dissipated. It turned into a sort of a game, Kevin pointing out the smallest inconsistencies or “logical gaps” and Jake vehemently defending them. They fell asleep like that, and for the first time in nearly a month it wasn’t plagued with nightmares.Not the bees!! Not the beeeesssss!!!!_____________________________________ 

 “I believe my father shared some similarities to yours.” Kevin said primly one day. They were sitting in the ‘kitchen’ and Jake was nursing coffee like a dying man nurses water. Kevin was drinking nothing, having finished his morning water. “He also liked Sandler?” “Oh absolutely not. He was a very well respected surgeon and was never there for me or my brother.” “Too busy saving people’s butts?” Jake slurred deliriously. Kevin had woken him up at eight am, which was when he woke up. Every. Day. “Was he a butt surgeon Kevin?” “…….” “No ifsandsor…ohhhh….god it’s so early.” Kevin stared at the nearby wall, sun-dappled and bare. Jake groaned, resting his head against the cool wood of the table. Later Jake would realize, after having injested his coffee and taken a four hour nap, that Kevin had been trying to do something. So he waited for him to try again, swearing he’d be on the lookout for it._____________________________________ One night after they’d both awaken from independent nightmares, Jake had had to wrestle Kevin to the floor to prevent him from crawling out a window. There’d been a lot of screaming and a lot of tears and mournful wailing for escape escapeescapepleaseletmegopleasepleasepleaseimsorryimsosorrypleasebequietpleasepleasepleaseple They were silent now except for heavy breathing, both of their tears drying on their cheeks and pajama shirts. Jake was holding Kevin down like a corpse in a coffin, arms crossed and pressed together so he couldn’t use them to climb out windows or hit him for stopping him from climbing out windows. “Do you think your father ever loved you Jacob?” Kevin said, voice faraway. “Uh…I think so. I think he still loves me, as much as he can love anyone? He just doesn’t…care. About me or anyone.” He responded. He had a headache and he was worried someone had heard their fight. He wasn’t thinking about his words, or Kevin. He was thinking about death. “My father would hate to see me crying. He always hated that.” “…….” “I hate him so much.” “…..yeah, I hate him too. My dad I mean. And…yours too, I kind of hate him too now.” “I hate your father as well.” “Thanks.” “I miss Raymond.” “You saw him like earlier to-” “I miss him.” and Kevin’s voice was so strangled and broken Jake had to take care not to cut himself on it. He felt his throat knot. Kevin began to sob and then cough, wet and awful because he was sobbing on his back, eyes up on the ceiling and it was choking him. Jake let go of his arms and watched as he immediately curled up into a ball like a time lapse of a flower wilting. The safe house was silent and undisturbed but neither of them slept that night, spending their time in the darkness wandering around the house like spirits, wailing and weeping for their lost loves._____________________________________ “In one minute Kevin and I will finally be able to leave this awful place!”“And yet we’ll never be free of the nightmares.”“Nope, those shall haunt us for always.”“Whoa..things got really intense in here, huh?”“Oh yeah, got dark. This place is a Hellmouth.”

[justforbooks]

Lauda remembered in tributes at sombre Monaco

Poignant tributes to Niki Lauda, including a solitary red baseball cap left hanging on his earphones peg, were all around the Mercedes team motorhome and their cars on Thursday morning as practice began for the Monaco Grand Prix.

On a dry and hazy morning in the Mediterranean principality, the cramped harborside paddock was in sombre mood as Formula One honored the Austrian, who died overnight Monday aged 70.

Like Mercedes, where he was a larger-than-life figure on the pit-wall as the team’s plain-speaking non-executive chairman, and Ferrari, with whom he won his first two championships, McLaren were also honoring the memory of the man and where he won his third drivers world title.

The Ferrari SF90 cars ran with a decal marking his time with them in the form of a replica graphic of his name as used on the side of the cars when he raced for the team from 1974 to 1977.

It was underlined in black as a sign of mourning.

Sebastian Vettel, the four-time champion who is a keen historian of the sport and was close to Lauda, wore a special helmet livery reflecting the famous red one the Austrian used in his racing career.

Mercedes marked the passing of the man who was instrumental in persuading Lewis Hamilton to join from McLaren with a red star, Lauda’s signature and a message of thanks ‘Danke Niki’ on their cars.

"As you can imagine, this is a very difficult time for the team, for all of us, and it is very difficult, most importantly, as a friend," said team boss and fellow-Austrian Toto Wolff.

"It’s not an easy situation to try to go back to racing especially not in Monaco with so much media attention.

"I am trying to keep it together emotionally in speaking about a friend. This is what matters most and what hurts the most. It is one thing that the world and the F1 community has lost the biggest icon, but it is totally different, and more difficult, to have lost a friend."

- 'Heart and soul' -

Speaking to reporters ahead of Thursday’s practice, Wolff asked the news media to respect the team’s emotions as they continued racing "as Niki would have wanted us to do nothing else".

"It’s so hard to talk about Niki, the icon in F1 that he was," he added.

"The biggest icon that we had. My emotions are so overwhelming as a friend. The 48 hours have been terrible. I feel like a zombie – I keep looking at the pictures and find myself with tears in my eyes every half hour because he’s not here anymore.

"This isn’t easy. There’s a huge black cloud and there is someone who is so dearly missed in this team and in F1. I feel we’ve lost the heart and soul of Formula One."

Vettel not only sported a near-replica Lauda helmet, but revealed also that, after learning of his friend’s lung transplant operation last year, he wrote a letter that he described as being “a great pleasure” and “full of fine words.”

Other teams including Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Haas carried tributes on their cars as championship leader and defending five-time champion Lewis Hamilton set the pace.

The Briton was excused from appearing at a routine pre-event news conference on Wednesday due to his emotional condition following Lauda’s death, his place being taken by Silver Arrows team-mate Valtteri Bottas.

The pair swapped fastest laps to stay ahead of the chasing pack as Mercedes sought to extend their record breaking run of five one-two season opening triumphs to six at this weekend’s classic blue riband street race.

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[moonlitmoth]

Favorite LA spots for food/fun

I had to sit and think about this for a bit because I don’t…like…do anything usually lol. I go to work and come home and lock myself away, tbh.

-I love the Huntington Library. It’s an art museum with a large public garden. I love to go in the spring when everything is blooming.

- The Getty Villa features Greek and Roman art. The whole building is designed after a Roman villa. It’s on a cliff overlooking the beach. The Getty Center is also great and has a nice mix of styles. 

- Record shopping at Amoeba

- Heritage Square Museum is a lot where they’ve moved a bunch of historical homes to one area and you can go tour inside all of them. In late October they do their Mourning Tours where they reproduce an entire Victorian Funeral (complete with costumes and an actual casket) and you can go watch and get a daguerreotype taken of yourself. I’ve never been. I’ve been saying I was going to go for the past 3 years. 

-Movie screenings at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. They’re playing Beetlejuice next month, I’m trying to talk my friends into going. 

-Seeing movies at the old movie palaces like the Chinese or the Egyptian (The Egyptian mostly just does premiers or festivals now and fucking Netflix is trying to buy it which would fucking ruin it I’m sure). 

-If you come around Oscar season, at FIDM they have an exhibit of all the costumes from the movies that have been nominated that year. It’s free. 

- It’s changing due to gentrification, but Magnolia Blvd in Burbank has basically been Goth Town USA for the past 10 years. Lots of antiques like the Bearded Lady and the Mystic Museum, 3 Halloween Town stores (open 365), a bookstore called Dark Delicacies (they’re moving a few blocks away and Guillermo Del Toro helped raise money for their move), and cool coffee shops. 

-Group night hikes up to the observatory

-I’ve talked about it before, but I just like hanging out in the canyons. They’re secretive and have a bohemian, rock n’ roll history. But there are waterfalls too and caves to explore. 

- I don’t actually go out to eat that much, but I like getting ice cream from Little Damage (black ice cream in a black cone makes my goth heart happy) and coffee from Rad Coffee (I get a Dracula which is a blood red velvet flavored iced drink). 

-Clifton’s bar and lounge. It used to be a restaurant. It’s 3 levels and full of taxidermy. There’s a giant fake tree going from bottom to the top level and a church pulpit for no reason. It’s just quirky and cool. 

- The Edison bar. The building was the original Edison power plant in LA. Very 1920′s industrial vibes inside. 

- Le Petit Four in West Hollywood is probably my favorite restaurant in all of LA. Little french place. Everything on the menu is great. I like going and sitting outside and having dinner around sunset time. Feels like a little slice of Paris in LA. 

That’s all that I can think of for now

[wavemaker9]

a concept for gta au. mainly a concept that could allow toni and cami to stay together. can’t be canon, but it’s a thought

so a stray thought i had a bit ago was of part of the reason toni ends up growing more attempting-to-be hardened about his crime friendships is there’s some sort of evidence or rumor or something that someone higher up within his crew ended up being the one who leaked the info that helped arthur stop that job of toni’s, and combining all of that with everything else, arthur’s own (perceived to toni) backstabbing of him and ivan’s attack on gil, that being the thing that really flips him into a i shouldn’t trust anyone in the crime biz. he looks into it and maybe deals out some punishments, but can never confirm the origin of the leak, and so moves on but never really lets it go. 

and i don’t know if i actually want to do this, but i’ve been considering tiago being the one that does it. at first i was thinking it being an ambition thing of tiago, wanting to shake toni out of power, but also i just like them having each other’s back, so another idea i was considering of like. tiago seeing toni being super ambitious himself. young him was an unbelievable fighter, young toni never /stopped/, he kept pushing, kept wanting more more more, and tiago just not having that much ambition, and wanting toni to pull back as well. he’s going to overstretch the crew and, even worse, he’s going to overstretch himself and get himself killed, whether it’s via actual murdered during a job or something or just working himself to death. and tiago doesn’t want that for toni, but toni won’t listen to tiago’s warnings so he figures just being nudged off his pedestal slightly will at least get toni to take a fucking step back and readjust and shit and maybe slow down even slightly. makes the deal that toni doesn’t get hurt or anything, just the shit gets stolen, it’ll be fine. the toros aren’t struggling for shit like this, it’s fine. the thing he’s not planning for is for it to combine with everything else and really make toni fold in on himself and his crew for a while, but i mean. it still works? toni still starts to play it a little safer even after he starts to poke his head back out more directly into crime shit. it sucks seeing how badly this shakes up toni but the plan succeeds and he never comes out about it. 

so fast forward through toni slowly starting that climb again. gil comes out of it and he retires but toni slowly moves past the shake up of that. toni never fully forgives arthur but they grow to be frienemies again which is fine for them and toni slowly moves past that. toni finds that making his crew’s name more well known again doesn’t make him a harder to hit target, and that’s so frustrating for tiago. toni was /learning/, he was playing it /safer/, it’s like ugh. toros only need to be good, they don’t need to be the best, toni! but toni insists they do, and that becomes a focus point again until toni meets and then starts dating cami. once cami is in the picture, that’s suddenly his focus, that’s suddenly the thing he cares about. and the crew is important too, at first more so, but slowly, cami becomes a higher and higher priority until toni is suggesting the idea to tiago about what if he just left to pursue another idea and tiago took over? toni trusts tiago, he knows he’d do a good job with the crew too, it’s fine. and tiago is so pleased. shocked, he never thought he’d see the day, but happy. /finally/. 

until toni has the whole plan shaken by the second attack on the bakery, and he falls back on what he knows, because he feels cami is in danger and he knows he can protect her if she’s not tied to him and he keeps his ties to the crew. but tiago hearing that and just /so upset/. you had a dumb way out, finally. you were finally going to settle, something i didn’t think you’d ever be able to do, so you can’t throw away this one chance you have. but toni admitting it’s already done, he broke it off with her yesterday night. it’s /fine/, tiago, let it go. except tiago can tell it’s not fine with toni either. he’s mourning this loss more than anyone and. and that’s tiago’s friend, his best friend since they both moves to los santos so many fucking years ago. he’ll always have toni’s back and he knows the same is true in reverse, so like. after a little argument, tiago finally just coming out and telling toni he’s the one who worked with arthur before, though doesn’t explain why. 

and toni reacts just as tiago expects. toni’s first surprised, then in disbelief, and then just furious. it immediately sours him to everything about this, the whole idea, the whole gang, everything. in that moment, he can’t trust any person tied to crime. so he snaps some shit at tiago, telling him to have the crew if he cares so much about it, if he cares more about it than he does toni. then he storms off, and after a bit of walking, goes right back to camille’s. because he /can’t/ trust anyone tied to the crew but the one person he still feels like maybe he can trust, he turned his back on, so him going to her to almost plead for forgiveness because he was a fool to turn his back on what they had and he knows that he probably hurt her by breaking things off but he realizes she’s the most important thing to her now and he’d /never/ want to see her hurt, like he said, she’s his sunshine on every cloudy day. and i think after making it clear enough how sorry he was, probably also his being a bit more honest with her, explaining his ties to crime and that being why he felt he had to leave. and basically him able to make enough of a case to at least get her to temporarily forgive him, even if it takes a little time for her to let him back in as a friend/boyfriend again. and after a couple days of thinking + tiago probably calling and leaving messages, toni is willing to listen to him too and also realizes that tiago probably specifically told him to push him away from the crime so he’d pursue cami again. an dwhen that’s confirmed plus explaining to toni tiago’s reasoning, they can at least get along mostly again. toni doesn’t trust tiago as much as he did but they’re still friends and toni gets to stay with cami in the end so it’s technically a good in the end. 

[gothprentiss]

the hour of lead! for the director's cut ask thingy

for ref: [the hour of lead] Post Valhalla + Lauren. Derek mourns Emily’s death. / 2.9k words / rated g

ok so! this is SEVERELY too long:

one fun thing about this fic is that i typically take about a week to write a fic due to my proclivity for narrative hubris (rounding out multiple ‘episodes’ or whatever is, i discovered writing this, more time-consuming than simply just doing one linear thing) and the 5-15k range. this, i’m pretty sure, i sat down to write at like 3 and had finished by 8, or something like that. and it’s under 3k words, although i believe when i first posted it it was about 200 words shorter— i also have a cool and normal tendency to edit fics *after* posting them, meaning that the fic i post and the fic that’s on ao3 a week later are often two marginally different animals. but the point is that this was like, a bit of an achievement in terms of writing process.

as i'm rereading it now i'm very like, oh this is me leaning on all of my sort of typical supports— very heavy repetition and recursion, a lot of motifs, tonally a bit overdramatically Lyrical, and the ending feels a bit rushed and saccharine in its use of the future-perfect. i also have this annoying tendency to make english majors out of every character i write lol. i was clearly also thinking about derek in the same way i think about emily, probably— i think with both of them i like to defer moments of, say, emotional ‘depth’ to something more external, functional, or actionable, and this fic gets very into materiality as a result. but like that being said—

one funny behind the scenes thing: i cribbed a section from a different fic i was thinking i’d never post anywhere (it’s the exorcist-themed one— you can see the precise section i snagged this from [here], about midway through, in emily’s vision of the death of father del toro). normally i’m very careful about cribbing wholesale from my drafts because i think that uh the topic should generate the language or something? but in this case it’s about the death of a priest in a story where i’d also been exploring derek’s own religiosity (e.g. [here]), and i’d been thinking it would be either him or jj to eventually perform the exorcism in the fic (i.e., stepping into the role of a priest), so there’s a sort of parity there. point is, i had this paragraph written:

Father del Toro screamed. He gave off, in a great mushroom cloud, a massive volume of steam, hissing and roiling above his vestments, miraculously dry. It was as if, in a second, he dehydrated to the precise fatal degree. Then he crumpled to the ground in an inhuman heap, folding over himself heels to pelvis and knees to shoulders. The dull thunking of his knees, then his head, meeting the floor rang infinitely through the cathedral’s vast and vaulting interior, built as it was to amplify human song to the magnificence of the heavenly host. It rose in pitch as it went, and screamed until it last ceased to sound. On his downturned face, a droplet of blood welled in his right eye and folded there, in the tear duct, too small to drop.

and made it this one:

He thinks about what it would feel like to shut the door behind him and fall to his knees in the hall. He thinks he might crumple entirely, into an unrecognizable heap, folding over himself heels to pelvis and knees to chest. The dull thunk of his knees, then his head, meeting the floor— it might echo in the vast, seemingly endless space of the apartment. It might echo the way sounds echo in churches, sound waves climbing higher, reflected off each other, up to Heaven.

reshaping in the process an description of a destructive encounter with Pure Evil! into a sudden wave of enervating grief. 

off that sidebar— i think i must have begun this fic thinking really hard about pathetic fallacies, on one hand, and about how that sort of magical thinking plays out. like this is obviously quite overdetermined in 

He’s been hiding from this. As he slips out of his front door, the red maple that casts its shade over the front yard sheds its collected rain down onto him. A fat drop catches in his eyebrow, and another slips down the back of his neck.

It’s not that the rain feels fitting, but that it feels wrong. Wrong, that they aren’t frozen in February. Wrong, that this hearkens the change of seasons. Wrong, that the first shoots of daffodils have already crept up from the ground. A patch of the shocking white variety known as ice follies has sprung up, just tucked inside the wall surrounding his front yard, since she died. He nearly dug them up, then decided that would be barbaric. 

where, first, going outside to confront what he’s been avoiding (acting as if she is dead) also brings him out into the rain, so it’s not that it’s reflecting his mood but rather that he’s caught in it. then there’s the very explicit problem of the rain, which isn’t moody weather but rather simply portends spring and sun. i did like the ice follies bit! i remember being like “oh shit! oh that’s going in!” when i was googling different daffodil varieties and ran across those. i think it’s one of those extremely minor cosmic serendipities that they have such a sort of like, toothlessly cruel name, in the same way that the pathetic fallacy does?

i think that kind of magical thinking runs headlong into itself later, too, when he’s finally come to emily’s and the skies have cleared up. i’m not entirely sure about how i feel about narration here— there are parts where i was clearly playing with, beyond unhealthy coping mechanisms, some element of unreliable narration. so, for example, “It’s about to be a rainy night when he finally makes it out to Emily’s apartment” is proven untrue here, which was deliberate, but i think looks like a mistake. or similarly, i leaned pretty hard into different, like, qualities of reported thought? this is definitely something i snagged from thomas harris, who has it down to a gorgeous science in silence of the lambs, and i think i have it down to, approximately, my catholic school’s science class. so, for example:

You have to face her eventually. Emily lives— Emily lived closest to him of all the team.

“You have to face her eventually” is thought, pure and simple. “you” is direct self-address. but the following lines also borrow his voice, with a similar quality of presence; it’s only because it’s expository that it’s relegated to the prose narrative proper. it feels kind of ham-handed to me. given that the fic begins with a similar, i don’t know, problem of voice—

In the no man’s land between sleep and waking, he thinks it’s someone knocking out a message in Morse code: it’s spring.  Times have changed. You must change accordingly. 

— i was also thinking about how there’s a sort of tertiary thing present here, a form of truth emerging from the dramatic irony of this magical thinking: this rainfall, failing to be mood weather, announces spring; the intruding present tense reminds us that emily does still live, a fact which he’s not capable of grasping. i find this sooooooo annoying of me!!!!

i’m gonna speed this up!

1) obviously religion and prayer— i think their mutual lapsed catholicism is really neat and derek’s apparent (if rarely addressed) desire to return to a meaningful relationship with religion is really fascinating to me. without getting too deep into my extremely elaborate views on religion, i also was thinking here about what constitutes a prayer, and what it might do for him— thinking back to derek praying in “penelope,” it strikes me as something he’d be very deeply invested in, and very careful about too; not in a superstitious sense, but with a desire to direct things correctly. like the precise problem for derek’s relationship with religion is that he does believe in an interventionist god but can’t. 

2) materiality:

central to the fic for sure. i think i was rereading house of leaves around the time i wrote this? and if i wasn’t, i was definitely thinking about it, because the description of her (ugly) apartment absolutely whiffs of it. it’s also about the problem of change, where matter doesn’t provide any continuity— he encounters it as a space almost totally transformed, whose last entrants were all uncaring strangers. see as well:

Yet life, he thinks, is often full of guilt. Loss is a relation to a lost object. The danger is when that relation is not one of mourning, but one of replacement; when you build for yourself, in your mind’s eye, a phantom limb. This is a recipe for pathology, a wound of the mind which may never put up a layer of scab and knit itself shut underneath. The old wound of distance, of absence: in not healing to scar, it tempts infection.  But you accept some dangers, in living.

i do like the line about danger! this is very much freudian mourning and melancholia LOL but i felt like i had some license to let morgan be a bit more theoretical about loss here, since profilers are ostensibly highly competent in psychology. but also, i think this part leans into the show’s register of pathology— of danger, of threat— even as it’s more concerned with reconciliation with living. living over life here, with the gerund’s processual sense. this is sort of the fic’s turn, where living becomes an act again rather than a hypothetical?

3) title / dickinson poem— i don’t know if i love this. like i love the title but that's a good line of poetry. see, on one hand, i’m very committed to emily prentiss reading poetry. and i think this is a really cool poem. i also think the show sort of skimps on the other way that this team would work, which is feeling Very Very Bad Very Often together. like "true knight" sticks in my mind as a stunningly naive moment from emily, on one hand, and on the other as a thought process she'd have to keep having. similar to how stricken derek is in "lucky" & "penelope". one of the things about dickinson's poem is that while it suggests itself as being about loss through death very immediately ("Tombs," ln 2), and through its final simile, it's most explicitly just about "great pain". life is of course full of many other forms of great pain, and cm is even more full of it. so the way the poem kind of ends up haunting and restructuring derek's thought processes when he thinks about it there— it's kind of just him realizing its truth, which is a common experience with poetry. it's also finding a thought process which he can move with, e.g. how he notices the orchid plant is fake at the end and is like, oh, that too!

it feels like a problem that every character i try to write becomes a very dedicated english major. i think i like where it got me, though, which was to hands, and the acts of letting go, holding on, gathering, and releasing. this is a very like, materially attuned fic, which is quite rare for me! i like overdescribing things AND i like motifs, so you get a lot of hands stuff throughout the fic, for example:

He remembers that Jonny McHale, in the throes of grief’s icy grip, moved through and as his pen, frozen into it, until even his own blood might have been ink to him. He remembers as well that Emily’s breath guttered and bubbled, as her body contended with its mere materiality. He begged her not to let go, she begged him to let go. All just fluctuations of matter. The folding and unfolding of fingers. The way love and desperation move your hands, and make them unable to move.

or

The texture of her hands still feels live under his own. Emily’s skin, gleaming dark with blood, and bright with the sweat of exertion: in the darkness, the light clung to the evidence of her struggle to live, and seared into his vision. The skin slung between her knuckles felt like silk, or wet paper, suddenly delicate, suddenly at risk. Her clammy fingers were still warm in his hands. 

i think the hands parts (there are like 4 more of them lol) were my favorite parts of the fic to write, and probably are my favorite parts of it now— high levels of synonymy, repetition, apposition, and full of sentence fragments are my go-tos because i enjoy that like, particular texture of writing.

anyway this is TOO LONG i think the only other thing is that i would probably have preferred to draw out the ending longer because i do really dislike its pacing and movement. but what can you do! it's under 3k words! and what i've written in this response might genuinely be longer than that!

[neverreallythoughtaboutthefuture]

Anyone can fall...

So, as some of you may already be slightly aware of, one of my favorite characters of “Pacific Rim” that I strongly relate to is Chuck Hansen.

Therefore, I became curious to see if there was any information on if or how Chuck’s sacrifice was being honored and remembered in “Pacific Rim: Uprising”, and googled “Pacific Rim uprising Chuck Hansen Wall of Heroes”.

This lead me to a preview of the “Pacific Rim: Uprising” official novelization of the movie on Google Books, written by Alex Irvine…

And then, while reading a few excerpts from that book (since I’m a total spoilers brat), what I saw in there spurred me to do another Google search for more details regarding something I found about Raleigh…

Which lead me to a similar preview of a book called “Pacific Rim Uprising: Ascension” written by Greg Keyes, that is meant to be the prequel novelization of “Pacific Rim: Uprising”.

And from there, all I will say is to click on “Keep reading” bellow only if you know what you are doing, and wish to be spoiled regarding Raleigh Becket’s current whereabouts and what he’s been doing in between “Pacific Rim” and “Pacific Rim: Uprising”.

Extremely heavy spoilers for “Pacific Rim Uprising: Ascension” under the cut.  Read only if you truly want to know before you read the book (as I’ve read that Raleigh’s whereabouts in “Pacific Rim: Uprising” are not addressed in one of the movie reviews I saw.  So there are no actual spoilers for the movie itself, only the book dealing with what happens in between the two films).

Still here?!

Good!  Sort of...  First, you will need a box of tissues, some chocolate or ice cream, and possibly someone to hug you after...

Because as I was saying, when I clicked on the preview regarding Chuck Hansen and the Wall of Heroes, I came upon this:

And went: “Wait. Fallen Rangers… Yancy AND Raleigh?! OMG!!! What happened to the puppy?!”

So, I continued to search the preview, and then came across this…

And noticed the year…

2026!!!

The Breach was closed in 2025… Meaning Raleigh wouldn’t have remained in the world he helped save back then for more than roughly a year (or perhaps close to two, should that have been late 2026 given that the Breach was closed in the beginning of January 2025).

Doing some research, I then found a reference to it in “Pacific Rim Uprising: Ascension”, where Mako recalls what happened to him.

And JFC! I wasn’t ready!

Because he died in the most Raleighesque fashion ever, quietly reassuring Mako that it’s okay – that all you have to do is fall… Anyone can fall…

Before drawing his last breath, Raleigh used the same words he said to her when he saved her life, finally coming to terms with having been unable to save his brother’s.

The same words that have always made me wondered if what Yancy had been trying to tell Raleigh before his own life, and sentence, were tragically cut short, wasn’t something along the same idea... 

Something Raleigh wouldn’t truly have gotten until he found himself in a similar position of needing to help the one between them with the most chances of surviving - someone he loved and had chosen to become responsible for - carry on...

Raleigh told Mako “I felt his fear, his pain, his hopelessness and then…he was gone,” and somehow, I’ve always believed that Yancy’s despair and fear came in large part from knowing he’d be leaving his little brother behind, and there was no time for him to make sure he’d be okay or to protect him from suffering the same fate.

Sure, seeing a Kaiju stare you down like that knowing you’re utterly exposed and vulnerable to its next attack is plenty terrifying on its own (unless you’re a Hansen with a flare gun. But that’s another story!).

But copilots also know the depth of each others’ souls. Meaning Yancy likely would have known just how much Raleigh relied on him and looked up to him. I can’t remember if it’s Del Toro or Beacham that once expressed the belief that, should their roles have been reversed, then Yancy likely would have stayed with the PPDC and/or continued to get actively involved in some capacity with the war efforts (building walls one doesn’t believe are actually helpful to numb the pain and pass time doesn’t quite fit that category).

That is not to say that Yancy wouldn’t have been greatly affected by Raleigh’s passing, but they seemed to have different sets of coping skills, levels of overall impulsiveness and emotional maturity. Not to mention that Yancy was established as the dominant copilot, the one having chosen to take responsibility for his little brother after their parents died, and having adopted more or less the role of a mentor and a guide to his younger sibling.

Losing someone whose well-being you feel responsible for has the potential to deeply affect you, and perhaps recovering from that will be extremely difficult (and accompanied by feelings of wrongness and failure). But you might be less likely to feel utterly lost and destabilized than if you’re losing the person you’ve been actively relying on to guide you through life until then.

And Yancy did express frustration with Raleigh for lacking initiative in “Tales from Year Zero”. He might have gone about it the wrong way (while reacting defensively to Raleigh’s own anger over the fact that he’d slept with a girl that Raleigh had expressed what Yancy thought was just a passing interest for); but the message was still there – if Raleigh wanted certain things in life, he had to take that clear first step towards them, and stop waiting on them to happen on their own, or for others to lead him towards them!

So, there was that slight annoyed “Jesus, Rals! Don’t blame me for us sharing a lot of interests and wanting some of the same things you do in life – go for them!  I don’t need to oversee or approve of everything you do, Kiddo!  Why didn’t you call that girl, or clearly told me you had feelings for her?  What’s stopping you from taking charge and leading the way, too?” big brother vibe I got from him.

If Raleigh had been the one to die during Knifehead’s attack, I thus think it would have made sense that Yancy would have been able to maintain his footing, and continue to get involved in something that mattered to them both. Or, that he would have found another way to keep on going while honoring his brother’s memory, and mourning his loss.

While Raleigh got the Jaeger back to shore, but then seemingly didn’t know what to do with himself anymore. Not until he reluctantly allowed someone else to take his hand and guide him back to where Stacker believed he was still needed and could do some good.

And deep down, I think that Yancy knew something like that was bound to happen should Raleigh make it out alive. And that his “Raleigh, listen to me – ” might have been his last heartbreaking and desperate attempt to protect his little brother, and let him know that he was much stronger than he gave himself credit for. That he could do this without him, and it would be okay.

Anyone can fall… All he had to do was fall…

Everyone falls, multiple times, every day. Sometimes, you choose to take a chance, jump and start falling while hoping you’ve made the right choice and there’s a soft landing at the bottom.

Sometimes, things happen that will push you, and make you fall towards something good, bad, or even neutral.

Life is unfair, bad things happen to good people, but there are those times when you stumble face first into little miracles that remind you some risks are worth taking, and life’s still worth living.

You fall in love, you fall for an exciting project or idea, you fall back on unexpected new resources you didn’t even realize you had, or you just fall – let go of things outside of your control and find peace in the act of falling alone.

Falling can be scary, falling can be hard, falling can be easy, but it can happen to anyone. And that’s okay.

Sometimes, falling is all you can do

Meeting Mako gave Raleigh the push he needed to fall out of that frozen, numb state he’d kept himself in for five years, start growing again as a person, and actively take initiative. He fell for her – for her passion, her drive, her desire to achieve something deeply meaningful to her, and became dedicated to nurturing that passion and helping her achieve those goals. He became another guide and mentor figure in her life, a positive leader, the supportive “dominant copilot” that Yancy had always been to him.

And in his last moment, according to this, it would seem that Raleigh was given the opportunity that Yancy never had - the chance to quietly remind Mako that all you have to do is fall… Let go, find peace, keep on living and falling… Believe in yourself, and take those chances…

And while she keeps on falling through life, Raleigh will be falling back asleep - falling alongside his brother and all those other Rangers that have fallen before him…

As much as I’ve always said that I’d have been okay with Raleigh not surviving Pitfall while watching the movie because I got that sense of peace and acceptance from him, and was grateful he’d been given the chance to find it – the chance to learn who he was, individuate from his brother, connect with his own hidden strengths, and realize that he was capable of the same heroism, love, and selflessness that I don’t think he’d ever realized was there before, but I’m sure Yancy always saw in him…

I WAS NOT READY TO EXPERIENCE SO MANY FEELS OVER IT, DAMNIT!

I’m not even sure if that preview really is the official version of the final book, or if some things have been changed since, but if it is, that’s a very beautiful and moving (though very painful) ending for Raleigh’s story…

I may have had that slight moment of anger and indignation over the fact that Raleigh only survived Pitfall to then develop a bad case of alien radiation poisoning that ended up being fatal to him, apparently...  But that’s in great part due to the fact that I know that his death wasn’t originally planned to happen at the end of the first movie.

There’s this little part of me that can’t help but feel some bitterness over the idea that they were looking for an excuse to get rid of the character permanently, since Charlie Hunnam asked to be released from the contract that could have forced him to do the sequel in order to do the movie “Papillon” instead.

It’s hard not to consider the fact that, although they said they understood and respected his decision, eliminating any possibility of having him return to the franchise later on might have been some way to make him ‘pay’ for it and entirely cut any ties he could have had with the series.  Though, with what I’ve seen and heard about the sequel thus far, I’m not exactly unhappy that Raleigh’s character won’t be directly affected by it.

But, if we forget the idea that the politics of film-making might have had a role to play in the storytelling choices they made with Raleigh, I find myself being glad that Raleigh had the chance to rise back to the surface after completing his mission, open his eyes – learn that all the efforts and sacrifices that were made to close the Breach were successful - and be given the chance to properly spend some time with his co-pilot and say goodbye before closing them, and falling for that one last time in his life.

(And I won’t even try to pretend that the Chaleigh shipper in me is not comforted by the thought of them being reunited so soon after Pitfall, since I have a very hard time dealing and coping with fictional lovers or even potential love interests being separated by death.

It’s that thing I have…

Real life? 100% in favor of the surviving member of a relationship learning to properly mourn their loss, go on with their life, and use the love they’ve experienced to help them grow while keeping the memory of their partner alive. The death of a surviving partner is not remotely being perceived as a more acceptable nor comforting alternative to them living long and happy lives and recovering from their loss.

In fiction? What do you mean one of the two characters just died? Nonsense! Tell the idiot to walk it off, or the other to hurry up and catch up with him if it’s not something you can walk off from to fix it!

Which Raleigh sort of did… Apparently…

Okay, one of the main differences and possible explanations is that in real life, I don’t know if there’s an afterlife.  So, I’m of the rather strong opinion that you better not waste any of the time you’ve been given, since that may be all you have.  And the only immortality you can achieve is through the love and support you can offer others - those other lives you touch and connect with - so that they will be able to carry that love with them through their own lives, become stronger for it, and, in turn, offer love and support to others, too.

Then again, perhaps each of us has some form of individual spiritual entity that survives beyond death, but I simply do not know, so I won’t bet on it until I do.

In fiction? 

You can bet there’s some sort of afterlife where characters are happy and at peace and continuing their adventures together!  Damnit!  Not even willing to consider otherwise! Lol!

Bring on all that juicy and comforting Chaleigh afterlife fanfiction, so Raleigh can be given a proper greeting after having crossed over, yes?

Poor little puppy deserves some love after having been poisoned to death by the Anteverse...

Becket brothers reunion is also a must!  I say!)

Still haven’t found what happened to Herc, by the way! But his name is not yet featured on that Wall of Heroes besides Chuck’s, so I guess that means he’s still alive somewhere, at the very least. Though I’m starting to wonder how many characters from the original movie will still be left breathing by that time “Pacific Rim: Uprising” ‘s credits start rolling.

At least, if that really is the ending they chose for Raleigh, that means he is in a safe place with other beloved characters from the first movie they can’t hurt or touch anymore… Though, at this pace, we’re starting to move from “there are no heroes in a world where heroes can’t die” to “all heroes of the Breach must die”.

At least, the more it goes the more they can expect to have one Hell (or Heaven) of a welcoming party when they join the rest of the group!

Along with the Jaegers they lost because I’ve suddenly decided they’re totally sentient!  Don’t question it!

So, good morning (or apparently, afternoon) everyone! Hope you’ve been enjoying those feels you totally didn’t ask for as much as I did last evening when I came across those few passages!

You’re totally welcome!