#a masterpiece of writing i think

[softiedingo]

*look* dear god *sighs intensely*

[002yb]

"How did you find me?"

Because it's been a lifetime for both of them. Because Jon was there one day and gone the next - taken someplace where Damian could never follow. Jon was missing and Damian couldn't find him, help him, save him.

Because Jon was a bright-eyed boy stolen away before he was beaten to be something less and forged into something more. He's different in all the ways that matter and all the ways that don't.

For all the relief Jon feels to be home, he's resentful that he was brought back to a place he doesn't fit anymore.

It's painful. It's distressing. And Jon wants to be that warm, kindhearted, foolhardy boy he was before - adaptable and adventurous, untouchable and invincible because youth is that way, but Jon thinks that boy burned and all that's been left behind is brittle obsidian - sharper than steel and easily broken.

"From your heartbeat."

Because seven years is too many, but even a lifetime couldn't be enough for Jon to forget it.

His pulse. His breaths. The way his feet strike the earth. His smooth-spoken articulate, the click of his tongue. The way he mourns and the stillness that follows it.

"You know my heartbeat?"

Intimately. Ardently. Jon listened for it across time and space and circumstance - only Jon could never tell if it was something he genuinely heard or if he clung so hard to his memories of it that he was able to delude himself into thinking it was there.

"Yeah." Jon breathes, eyes closing so that he can listen for it again - so it can be all he hears.

"What is it like?"

"Steady. Strong." Jon tells Damian around a fond, melancholic smile. Vulnerability might blindside Damian always and forever, but it's been a lifetime for both of them and Jon is - everything has changed and he hasn't found the good in it yet; he's home, but he doesn't fit anymore. "I missed it."

There's a beat and it's not so much that Damian's heart stutters so much as it settles. Because Damian knows. He feels it, too.

I missed you.

"I don’t know yours." Damian admits after a few beats more. "I only know what it is to be without it."

"What’s it like?" Jon asks.

City lights pollute the sky, but far below where they stand on a high-rise, the yellow-gold glow from windows and the flash of traffic stops and taillights feels as beautiful as any star. The noise is easy to let fall away. All Jon hears is the wind and the slow breaths Damian takes that keeps his heart thumping strong in his chest.

"Lonely."

Terribly.

Dreadfully.

"And now?"

Damian turns and finally they make eye contact again. There's a pensiveness to Damian's expression as they take one another in. Making note of all the things that changed because Jon is different now. He feels different in all the ways that matter and all the ways that don't. Jon is home, but he doesn't fit.

The way Damian has to look up, up to meet Jon's gaze is wrong. For all Jon wanted to grow and torment Damian for being the smaller of them, Jon finds no joy in it now.

It feels like something was stolen from him and he mourns it. Anger burns hot through his veins, like ice in his lungs. It's as twisted as Jon feels - tormented until it's something unrecognizable; rage and wrath and anguish. Grief.

Jon wants to go back to that time he was young and brash and untouched by the unfairness in the world. A lifetime has passed and he doesn't know how he fits. He is not steel; he is volcanic glass and every breath he takes feels like it pierces his lungs and Jon is meant to be strong, but all at once the world is unbearably heavy and-

Damian drops his head to Jon's chest and - oh. Everything settles.

"A beat too quick, but strong. Resilient." Damian tells him and Jon blinks hard against the burn in his eyes. There's a lump in his throat that he can't swallow past and if Damian feels the hitch in Jon's chest - he says nothing of it. All Damian does is rest his head over Jon's heart, counting the beats until Jon lets go of his tentativeness and uncertainty and brings his arms around his friend and holds him close, closer until Jon can take Damian's steadily beating heart into his own chest - so that no more lifetimes will pass where he can't feel it. Damian's own arms reach around Jon, his too broad shoulders and the too large span of his back. Damian heaves a sigh and clicks his tongue and Jon doesn't need to see it to know that Damian's scowl has stayed the same. "Never let me be without it, now that I know."

A watery smile pulls at his lips as Jon breaks forward over himself - trying to be small where he is not. He nods, unwittingly lifting Damian off the ground despite Damian's grunts of protest if only to be closer to him after a lifetime apart and marvel the ways Damian has changed - the ways he hasn't.

Jon doesn’t feel himself after everything. Safety and security is something stolen from him - he doesn’t know how to go back to the life he lost. It’s overwhelming, so he closes his eyes and feels Damian's heart beat against his and lets it be his anchor.

@pechaghtlecha

[caterpillarinacave]

Using the computer as a babysitter for Jed and Octavius is all fun and games until they figure out how to use Larry’s credit card

[laurapetrie]

His gloved right hand was on her waist, their outstretched arms were interlaced, their eyes were gazing into each other's. The black of his tailcoat and the pink swirl of her dress combined, forming a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script.

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958)

[emoangel44]

i think the thing that makes people mischaracterize and completely miss the point of chara is that theyre written to be two very different things concurrently that dont really mesh together.

from what we know concretely about chara as a character, they were a very mentally ill child and complicated person who simultaneously hurt and helped people around them, who held both a lot of love and hate in their heart. they are fairly vague but also have specific character traits such as liking chocolate and filling up water glasses to the brim to maximize efficiency. they take speaking patterns from toriel and an interest in gardening from asgore. if you believe in the narrachara theory, they even have a character arc that changes depending on the route you take. they are inarguably a character who haunts the narrative due to their decisions in life having lead to tragedy that shapes the very plot of the game inextricably; and arguably a character that haunts the narrative and shapes the story much more literally in being a conscious force and companion that accompanies our journey.

at the same time, chara isnt treated as a character at all and is instead a meta-narrative device meant to act as an in-universe player stand-in. in this way chara isnt actually a person with character traits, but a vehicle for toby to provide commentary about the people who play video games. they are a concept that represents the state of thoughtless exp grinding. in the no mercy route their main purpose is to be a reflection of you and your mindset, even more directly than flowey. the reason theyre named after you is because, for a number of aspects in the game, they are supposed to be you; with no notable separation like there is with frisk.

this problem also heavily applies to frisk, for who there is an effort to separate their identity from yours at the end of the pacifist route but who still ends up with no real character traits of their own. people compensate for this by using black-and-white thinking; which results both in assigning frisk and chara a sort of "good-and-evil" dichotomy leading to their early fan interpretations, and in thinking that frisk and chara can only be either fully fleshed out characters or mindless player inserts leading to people favouring option one and basically ignoring the player as a concept except to occasionally use it as a generic big bad.

i think toby prioritized meta-textual implications over actual textual characterization for the human characters in undertale. this left chara as a character feeling unclear, unfocused, and incongruent due to them trying to be several things at once with no real through-line; and frisk as a character feeling practically non-existent outside of being a vessel. there are effectively two different charas in undertale, the character and the plot device, which makes it hard to talk about them as one consistent whole. i think this is why in tobys second game hes been putting such a focus on kris as a character and their separation from the player, as to improve on what he didnt properly touch on in undertale.

[acciomjolnir]

hey if you're in those toxic-af dramione fic rec groups on facebook trashing the authors whose work you supposedly love might i suggest eating out of an outdoor floridian garbage can while you're at it

[yogacatdeskknit]

fanfic idea wherein the strawhats come across a very dangerous pirate with the devil fruit ability to steal voices, who makes a sick show of “collecting” peoples’ voices, especially if they’re the voices of famous (or infamous) people, and Luffy sacrifices his voice to save Zoro’s life. Mute!Luffy ensues but he literally doesn’t care that his voice is gone. He’s just happy Zoro is okay. ofc the strawhats fight and get Luffy’s voice back (and manage to free everyone else’s voices in the process), and when Luffy gets his voice back he has the BIGGEST and purest laugh of the century

[errorryx]

I've been falling off the quackity sexyman train despite having made a propaganda post for him, but it's 4am and i'm kind of obsessed with the idea of him winning now. i was fully ready to call it here and maybe i will be again tomorrow but right now. quackity covered in blood, quackity increasingly desperate as everyone he knows falls around him, quackity alone in the world against a bunch of strangers who have all murdered his friends, that kind of melodramatic imagery as well as the 4am insanity that lets me actually think about dream smp lore again in the way it deserves—i don't know, guys, i actually think it would kick the most ass ever if he managed to win.

one of the things that draws me to cquackity the most is his rage. he's always so confident in the righteousness of his anger, in the inherent justice of his cause, and god knows he gets into fights. especially fights he knows he can't win. he gets so caught up in his convictions, and his trauma is so, so clear in everything he does. you can see this in his fierce anger against perceived injustices, in his constant need to prove himself, in his desperation, in his short-sightedness being his own downfall, again and again and again. but he gets back up! he gets back up every fucking time! even at the end, he gets up and he rebuilds because he literally cannot do it any other way. he can make himself into something abhorrent, but he can't give up and die.

i won't campaign against joe hills, who has also thoroughly earned my respect, but i will keep campaigning for quackity, the last member of the dream smp left standing. the only one, in the end, to hold his fucking ground and fight to the bitter end. and he will fight, because there's never been another choice for him.

dear god, i want him to win. i want him to win for every one of his fallen friends, enemies and allies that should have been stronger than him, but fell while he slipped through the cracks into another slim margin of victory. i want him to win for himself, because no matter how awful he is, he's a goddamn masterpiece in his own right. i want him to win for me, because i am fucking insane about him.

and win or lose, i think i am going to write a goddamn fic.

anyway, dsmp people, vote for quackity. he's the final girl we deserve.

[kirkwallguy]

like don't get it twisted i think everything should be gay and transgender and video game mechanics tend to be built on violent white supremacy that needs to be dismantled. da2 is my favourite game of all time. but old bioware hits so different and they'll never reach its highs again.

[formosusiniquis]

this doesn't have a title cause it's late and I have work in the morning. this is a surprise gift for @cauldronoflove cause her fic last week and the whatever is going on with this show did something to my brain (positive) wc: 860 | T | pre-Max/Avery/Tristan (odt3?)

“Welcome to Eyes Wide Shut week, doctor.” Tristan's smile pulls up higher on the right side, Max’s side, as he wiggles his fingers in a wave at a woman boarding. Her dress is tight as her hold on her husband's arm. She's older than him, easily old enough to be Tristan’s mother.

“Don't call it that,” Avery chides, still it's hard not to miss the amusement that sparkles in her eyes.

“That's the Tom Cruise movie?” He finds himself asking. He hadn't read the briefing, he never reads the briefing, far preferring this rundown where his experienced team tells him what he actually needs to know.

“So he knows the finer details of the Barbie Dreamhouse but not one of the best Cruise films to date?” Tristan muses.

That earns an actual reaction from Avery. Max can feel the smile playing on his own lips as her eyes widen and she leans enough to see around him to stare at Tristan, mouth dropped open just a breath in her disbelief. “Not Interview with the Vampire?”

“I did say ‘one of.’ I can like more than one thing.”

“Oh yes, I forgot you hit two of the B's for your little poker game.”

The quip is right there for the taking and something about the two of them has made it harder and harder for Max to resist taking. “Our Tristan is pretty butch, isn’t he?”

Pleasure ripples across Tristan’s face instinctually accepting the compliment implied with the claim before the next wave crashes over top of it, him catching the tease.

“Funny.” There’s a charm to his scowl. If Tristan weren’t so handsome when he was mad, he wouldn’t be so fun to rile up. As it stands, there’s a light in his eyes as he plans his next comeback, and the tight draw of his brow somehow compliments the line of his jaw. “Maybe you'll find someone who appreciates your wit during this year’s swingers week.”

“That’s what this week is?” He can feel his smile in his cheeks and his eyebrows arching up his hairline. In the milieu beneath their feet he watches with fresh eyes the way the boarding couples greet one another. The way greetings linger, hands on elbows and kisses pressed to cheeks.

“Officially,” Avery says, a warning note in her voice that the fondness on her face betrays, “we are hosting high ranking guests from several fraternal orders.”

“And unofficially?”

“Priapism is the diagnosis of the week.”

A grin that's all boarding school charm melts across Tristan's face. “Good thing for your steady hands, Doctor Odyssey.”

His own smile turns small, his face feels warm as he takes his eyes off his crew and looks back down at the boarding passengers. Faces with the bland similarity that he associates with wealth and power. A former Midwestern Senator moving around the floor holds his focus but not his attention.

That is devoted to the memory of Avery, laid out on his table. His fingers alongside Tristan’s inside her, her life in their hands.

“I thought swingers were couples.”

“Yes, that’s the point.” Avery says.

“No, I just mean that couple was just making eyes at Tristan.”

“Some are just looking for a third,” he says, lips twisting into something coy. “Have you ever known me to deny a damsel in distress?”

The former Senator has found the woman that smiled up at them in the mezzanine. A scowl has found Max’s face and his hand has found Avery’s. Their knuckles graze against one another, seeking comfort in a way that’s becoming increasingly common. He thinks he could pick their hands, strong and sure, out of a line up. 

He understands more than ever the bright flashes of green eye irritation every time he and Avery emerged from a room with a locked door. Tristan laid out against white sheets with… He doesn’t even want to finish the thought.

“Don’t tell me you’re a prude, doctor.” A coy smile grows wider, teasing. Mirth and something Max has come to recognize as curiosity dance across his face, in the lines beside his eyes. 

Tristan keeps his attention on Max, but with every brush of hand against hand he knows his answer will be for both himself and Avery.

“Personally, I think the only couple I’ll worry about pleasing this week are my nurses.”

It’s not been long, but they react the way he would have predicted. Avery scoffs, smacks the back of his hand with hers before crossing her arms across her chest, playing at annoyance and disapproval. Tristan, who’s need for approval and fickle attachment Max understands much better after meeting his mother, gapes any witty retort he might have managed stolen by the blatant way the thing they have been dancing around has now been laid out like a patient on the operating table.

“Now, is there anything other than fine gauge needles we should be preparing? Antibiotics? Some compresses? Condoms?”

As he wanders toward the elevator his team follows. The previous topic not forgotten but transmuted, changed in his favor like the tide beneath him. It’s something he thinks he could get used to.

[hana-bobo-finch]

found the first pikmin fanfic I ever wrote lmao it was back in may and it was while I was at the dentist in the waiting room 🫡🫡

[5h0w1sh]

"I promise to you, Chaos, if you don't let me die today, I will worship you till the day I die." Tails muttered to himself. When he woke up today, the last thing he ever expected was that he would end up chained up and held at gunpoint.

Went Bat shit insane and started a whole new fic! And worse of all- it's a fucking cowboy Au! Fuck it- We calling it Vaquero AU!

Check it out, tho

[vellichorom]

boyfriends ( yes, the webtoon ) wasn't NEARLY as bad as people bitching about it online would make it seem actually

[overly-verbose]

A whole lot of the next Part is literally just;

Everyone else's brains: *the entirety of the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney OST intensifies*

Meanwhile, SIkuna's brain: *the Wii theme song (occasionally interrupted by falling_metal_pipe_sound.mp3) starts playing*

.

[bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue]

Beboptober 2024 Day 4: Virus

Thanks to @bebopcrew for the prompt list! A short one for today :)

Spike-person and Faye-Faye were out chasing a bounty on the Swordfish and the Red Tail, but they weren’t doing so hot. The two guys they were trying to track down had somehow turned the tables and were now hot on their tails, firing missiles left and right. Spike and Faye’s ships were taking it okay for now, but a couple of more good shots by the criminals and they’d be falling down, down, down….

Good thing Ed was there to save the day!

Because little did those bounty heads know that she and Jet had a secret weapon: a computer virus she’d written. It had worked once before, on those mean old pirates, and unlike then, she could send this virus wirelessly, over the net. Besides, these criminals weren’t pirates; they hadn’t even tried to hack their ship or steal all their data first. They probably didn’t have any antivirus software. In fact, for all Ed knew, they didn’t know their ships could be infected at all!

She could see Jet’s brow all scrunched up in worry as he watched Spike, Faye, and the criminals chasing them out the Bebop’s big window, and occasionally glanced back at her. She giggled as her fingers flew over her keyboard, adding some finishing touches to her masterpiece of a program. Silly Jet. He didn’t have to worry. Never fear, Ed was here!

With a flourish, she gestured to Ein, floating next to her. She’d let him do the honors. Obligingly, Ein pressed his nose down on her computer’s Enter key and barked.

Now she drifted over to the window and watched, too, as the ships tailing Spike and Faye started to veer and spin crazily out of control. They almost looked pretty, like a bird or a butterfly in zero gravity. “Wheeeee!” Ed said, following their path with her finger on the window hoping Jet wouldn’t notice and reprimand her for smudging it.

And then the bounty heads were the ones falling down, down, down, while the Swordfish and the Red Tail zoomed safely away, then turned back to follow them down into the planet’s atmosphere—Spike and Faye had the upper hand again.

The virus had worked!

Ed had known it would, but it still delighted her. She spun and twirled around in zero gravity, laughing and squealing, feeling all filled up with her shiny, sparkly triumph.

Jet’s brow wasn’t all wrinkly anymore, either. “You’re a lifesaver, Ed,” he said, casting a grateful smile her way.

Was she? Maybe she was. She was a lifesaver. She had kept Spike and Faye from spiraling down into Certain Oblivion. Thanks to her, they’d catch the bounty and earn lots and lots of Woolongs to buy yummy treats and souvenirs, and keep the crew happy, fed, and not grumpy.

And without her, they’d be totally doomed. She’d been the one to save them.

She sure was lucky!

[solo-walker]

Guess who just finished taking and editing 50+ screenshots of Strange Noises from the Hole in the Wall to use as context and reference in the Silver Rail analysis post.