#also :eye emoji:

[ciircex]

Alastor [ @culling ] declared, "there you are, darling. ” 👀 || My muse is being hit on by someone they aren't interested in and are visibly uncomfortable. Send, "there you are, darling" for your muse to come and wrap their arm around mine's waist to guide them away.

The ALLURE of a femme fatale seemed to have followed her EVEN in death, which was flattering but it also could be such an... annoyance. Compliments were all FINE && DANDY, stroking her already HIGH self-esteem, but it was a problem when the compliments just became LEWD comments that just irritated her to no end. [ IT WASN'T EVEN TASTEFUL FLIRTING, SOMETHING SHE COULD PLAY ALONG WITH. HOW DREADFUL! ] "How ADORABLE, you think you have a chance with me," she TEASED, though an edge was gleaming under her words, threatening to cut the fellow sinner if they persisted. All she wanted was to walk home from her boutique, alone && without a CARE in the world. Circe should've known that her TEASING remark would have just flown over the horny sinner's head, thinking it was an invitation to invade her space further. A SCOWL presented itself upon her lips && she was fully prepared to bite the head off the other [ METAPHORICALLY, OF COURSE ] but she stopped as she saw the sinner's expression turn VISIBLY afraid. How curious, why did this sinner, who seemed to have been so ADAMANT about going home with her now seem so AFRAID? Circe got her answer within a few SECONDS, an arm wrapping around her WAIST guiding her away from the sinner && a voice accompanied by RADIO STATIC, simply stating: "there you are, darling." She let a SMILE cross her ruby red lips, allowing Alastor to guide her away, anything to get AWAY from any other... unwanted attention. "Thank you for HELPING out, little old me. I SWEAR a lady such as myself can HARDLY walk home alone anymore without some... PRICK thinking he can rizz me up." Her demeanor had changed, FINALLY relaxing now that she wasn't STRESSED at being so lewdly talked to.

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[nooskadraws]

exu trio 🌿🌸🎵

[waveoftheocean]

"i can see it in his eyes" 🥰

[salamispots]

hmmm probs won't go with this style but we'll see

[art-is-kayos]

Long day in the shitpost mines

[thatbuddie]

after buck and eddie get together, eddie starts giving buck absentminded kisses all the time.

kiss on the forehead after he passes him his morning coffee. kiss on the cheek while buck is cooking dinner. kiss on the back of his hand as buck drives them to bobby’s house for a family bbq. kiss on top of his head while they cuddle watching a documentary. kiss on his shoulder while they sit on the station couch reading in between calls.

but buck’s favorite kisses? the ones edde blows him from a distance. when no one is looking during a call and they have to separate, buck doing evac and eddie treating some minor burns. when buck is pulling out of the their driveway to go meet maddie and jee for lunch and eddie sees him off from the front porch. during their family night out at the movies with chris in between them before the action film their son chose and they’re both probably going to hate begins.

every single blown kiss is always followed by eddie mouthing “i love you” at him, and every single time buck feels himself start to blush, the butterflies in his stomach staging a very chaotic and uncoordinated flash mob.

there’s something so exhilarating about knowing that no matter how close or far away they physically are eddie always wants to be kissing him. like eddie knows just as well as buck does that his lips were always meant to graze buck’s skin and leave behind goosebumps for hours to come.

even when they can’t see each other at all, buck knows eddie is thinking about it too because eddie does not go more than 3 hours without sending him little 😘 emojis. he doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t contextualize them because he doesn’t need to. it's just random 😘 throughout the day, scattered in between the rest of their texts.

buck [3:33pm]: got caught in traffic, chris and i will be there soon! eddie [3:33pm]: ok, hen and denny just arrived eddie [6:03pm]: 😘

&

eddie [11:27am]: can you write “chris dentist appointment” on the kitchen calendar for 10/17? buck [11:31am]: done! eddie [11:32am]: thanks, baby eddie [2:16pm]: 😘

&

buck [10:08am]: we also need eggs! buck [11:43am]: remind me to replace the lightbulb in chris’s bedside lamp eddie [1:14pm]: 😘 eddie [3:09pm]: your amazon package just arrived buck [3:09pm]: yaaaaaaay eddie [7:24pm]: 😘

&

eddie [6:02am]: 😘 eddie [8:56am]: 😘 eddie [9:07am]: 😘 eddie [12:31pm]: 😘 buck [3:17pm]: 😘😘😘

[harbingersecho]

are we the sins we have committed? are we the things we have endured? [...] who are we?

[ref]

[cosmicwhoreo]

I love you and your art!!

And if you don’t mind can you explain Gold Choco’s lil eye thing? Looks neat.

bokay why not-

Gold's monocle serves a couple functions, acting more like a monitor screwed into Gold's face than just a regular eye. He mostly uses it to take notes, discreetly research random things and (his personal favorite) hack into cameras around Earthbread and be a little nosey nancy. He doesn't need it to have control over his extra limbs or workshop, but it is vital for him to always be watching and always be listening. which is why he hates going without it, he HATES the idea of not knowing everything.

His "tell" on what emotions are more genuine than others is if the monocle is sparking or not. He also can't actually blink with that "eye", even if it makes it seem like a cheeky wink or whatever, it's always perceiving. (unless of course he's going through to many thoughts, then it becomes staticky and fuzzy-)

[crocodilenjoyer]

hey. don't cry. one piece really good, ok?

[rubberbandgirlme]

another interesting piece of exchange between mhin and leander that caught my eye 👁

indeed, it seems baffling that leander, our reliable man, our nice guy, the nicest of the nicest, just forgets to warn mc about such a tiny little detail, easily forgettable for sure — that eridia's streets are unsafe at night 💀

he quickly covers it up by flirting — and boy, can i wait (can't, need this game right now) to see more of such instances, because he seems to master this craft, and it is working on most people, — hinting at mc's beauty and/or the intimate (and it is intimate for mc, whether you like leander or not) moment they shared.

but do you know the most important, tasty nuanced thing this tiny, blink-and-you-miss-it dialogue reveals? leander doesn't care about mc, about their life and safety; he's niceys, it's all just an act. sure, cap, you might say, we already know leander is a manipulative titty shit, what's new? but look at it another way: we know this because rss kindly backed us up with all this additional info and content so we don't starve to death while waiting for the release (rss, i would have gone through content drought anyway. this is not a shade, take your time, i love you). now imagine playing this game for the first time without a pile of lore stacked at the back of your mind and seeing these discrepancies in his behaviour (check out my previous post on this), foreshadowing that he's not as good as he seems and his path might be dark and gritty as hell.

and now, my fellow leander girls/gays/whoever else is there, imagine how it would feel when leander cares (faints).

[slushiepizza]

1980s supercomputer-horror project meridian AU that nobody asked for (marcus still on his bullshit regardless.)

the year was 1979. ETS released their latest supercomputer, the A553-T. It was state-of-the-art, an invention that would revolutionize how computers work forever. 240 million calculations per second. It took the breath out of your lungs- you had never seen anything like it. It perfectly blended form and function- and it was the most dense a computer has ever been, a towering, multiple-sided object in the middle of the room like a heart in a ribcage. Underneath it, a cooling system was installed- a network of pipes and cables and freon like what mycelium was to fungi. As you untangled the system- you found what seemed to be a lump. You tell yourself that it was dust- or some sort of buildup of dirt. But you know what it was. Vessels started to form in the lumps. Maybe you weren't so different from 'it' after all. Meanwhile, your coworker struggled with workplace discrimination due to his heritage, the looming political conflict left a bad taste in everyone's mouths. The same conflict, though, that funded the creation of the object of your affections. (pronoun monolog inspired/ based on a passage from I have No Mouth yet I must Scream)

[cainternn]

i binged all of the glory when season 2 came out and its been on my mind ever since

[beaulesbian]

no but the parallels between the names of the books

the foxhole court - for neil -> who found his new home and family with the foxes, who became so fast so protective of him after three books of finding out whats all had happened with him, and grew closer as a family

vs

the sunshine court - for jean -> who found his new life with the trojans who took him in and gave him space to live and grow, and to see the sun! (and hopefully we will read all that progress he did. ouch. can't wait).

[gayeddieagenda]

for your consideration… 🍻📽️😳 + 55: tracing the lines on the other’s hand

another scene prompt game! this one is for real long sorryyyyy. also it features the actual smallest amount of blood u can imagine, but it IS there. and it IS plot critical.

--

“You’re right,” Buck called. “They’re all Pokemon.”

“I’m really fine,” Eddie said.

Buck came back into the living room, box of band-aids and Eddie’s first aid kit—not the everyday one, the big one, from way in the back of the cabinet under the sink—in hand. Eddie didn’t even know how he’d known where to find that one. “No,” Buck said. “You’re getting Pokemon.”

Eddie pulled a face.

It really, really was not a big deal. It was a Friday night with no Christopher around—Denny and some mutual friends were doing a video game night and sleepover at the Wilson’s—so Buck had shown up at Eddie’s at seven with takeout from the banh mi place, the good one that he had to drive nearly to Chim and Maddie’s to get. Eddie swung the grocery store after dropping off Chris and picked them up plenty of beer—a pack of Buck’s usual brand and then a weird one, whatever seasonal flavor Eddie could find that he knew Buck would love trying just as much as he would hate actually having to drink it.

They ate at the dining room table, decanting the takeout onto real plates. After cleanup, they settled into the living room couch like they meant to stay there a while. Eddie made a show out of squabbling with Buck over the movie choice, before making just as much of a show out of giving in.

It was a Friday night. It was a well-worn routine, as comfortable as the old t-shirts Eddie had had almost as long as he’d had Christopher. Tonight was the same as every other night they’d had for the past six, seven years. It was pretty much Eddie’s definition of perfect.

Until—

Something happened with the bottle opener. Eddie still wasn’t sure what, only that he’d been trying to open the beer and watch the screen and talk to Buck all at once, and then suddenly something slipped and now he had a shallow scrape running the length of three knuckles on the back of his left hand, weakly leaking blood.

“Hand,” Buck said now. Eddie rolled his eyes, but did as he was told, holding out his hand to Buck.

Buck settled himself back on the couch next to Eddie. He took Eddie’s hand and set it gingerly in his lap. 

Gently, he pressed a cloth against Eddie’s knuckles. Three little spots of blood soaked slowly into it, each smaller than the last.

“See,” Eddie said. “It’s nothing.”

Buck ignored him. When he was satisfied the bleeding had stopped—in Eddie’s opinion, it had barely started—he got the Neosporin spray out of the first aid kit. After the Neosporin was on, it was Pokemon time. Eddie got a Pikachu, a Magikarp, and a round blue guy he didn’t recognize, carefully Tetris’d together to cover the scrapes around the ridges of Eddie’s knuckles.

“Will I make it?” Eddie said drily.

“Consider yourself lucky there was a firefighter in the house,” Buck said.

He was still holding Eddie’s hand.

Neither of them had bothered to pause the movie when Eddie started bleeding. On the screen, a car spun out of control dramatically, then exploded.

Buck turned Eddie’s hand in his, flipping it so his palm was facing the ceiling. His eyes were on the TV. Eddie almost could’ve convinced himself he didn’t realize he was doing it, fidgeting with Eddie’s hand the way he sometimes did with pens or a walkie-talkie at work, if it weren’t for how carefully he was touching Eddie.

Buck’s thumb found the soft center of Eddie’s palm. He ran his thumb up Eddie’s hand, following the curved line that outlined the meat of Eddie’s thumb. His touch was feather-light.

Eddie couldn’t help it. He shivered, and Buck looked up.

“Sorry,” Eddie said.

Buck’s nose crinkled. “I can stop,” he said, not moving.

“I, uh.” Another explosion on the screen, lighting the side of Buck’s face up in orange. “I don’t mind.”

The corners of Buck’s mouth lifted, a smile so small it could barely be called a smile.

He looked down at his lap, where he was still holding Eddie’s hand in both of his own. Eddie followed his gaze.

It was just Eddie’s hand. The lines across his palm showed up clear and mostly unbroken, which his abuela used to tell him meant something. Eddie couldn’t remember what. He had calluses on his palms, some from work, some from the gym. On his index finger, he had a thin scar, a relic of a kitchen chopping mishap when he was twenty.

Buck began moving his thumbs in small circles across Eddie’s palm. He started light, barely brushing Eddie’s skin, so gently that it was almost uncomfortable.

Eddie breathed in slowly through his nose and tried not to move.

When Buck dug his right thumb in a little deeper, right at the joints where Eddie’s fingers connected his palm, where his hands got stiff after a particularly long day, Eddie made a quiet, involuntary noise.

Buck looked up.

This, they didn’t do. They were physical with each other, always had been, in ways that Eddie never thought bore commenting on. They were on top of each other on the job, more often than they weren’t, squeezed in knee-to-knee in the truck and reaching over each other with practiced ease in the field. At home, they were even worse. Fridays had room for a lot of things—for knocking into each other in the kitchen when they cleaned up after dinner and tussling for the best seat on the couch. Elbows bumping together on the couch, hands brushing when Eddie handed Buck another beer. Sometimes, Buck fell asleep on Eddie halfway through the second movie, his head a heavy weight on Eddie’s shoulder. Sometimes, they fought over the remote, wrestling each other on the couch until one of them dragged the other all the way down to the living room rug.

Touching Buck—being touched by Buck—was nothing new to Eddie. This, though…

Eddie could feel the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. Eddie had an old feeling brewing in the pit of his stomach—the yawning sense that they were standing on the brink of something.

Somewhere in the back of Eddie’s head, he’d been waiting for something like this. For a moment, when all the things they’d been holding back between the two of them came bubbling up to the surface. He’d never said it outright, not even in his own head, but sometimes, Buck looked at him and Eddie just knew that something was coming. A breaking point. When Buck would look at him and Eddie would look back and they would both know—okay, now. here we go.

This, though—he wasn't sure this felt like it.

This was...this was nothing. This was a Friday night. This was pumpkin beer and Eddie's bandaged knuckles and the stupid action movie still playing on the TV. This was so totally, spectacularly unremarkable.

He’d thought, when it was time, that he would know. It would be something they couldn’t ignore. They both knew what it felt like to experience the world at scale. Earthquakes, tsunamis, fire and lightning. This wasn’t that.

If something as small as Buck holding Eddie’s hand was enough to break open this thing between them, it would’ve happened a long, long time ago.

Wouldn’t it?

Eddie looked down. Buck was still holding Eddie’s hand in his lap, his thumb making little aimless circles in the center of his palm.

“What are you doing?” Eddie asked.

Buck stilled. “I don’t know.”

Eddie tried again. “What, uh. What are we doing?”

Buck shook his head, wordlessly.

Eddie tilted his head back up to look at him. His eyes were huge in the half-light, the glow of the TV and the light from the hall he’d left on when he went looking for the first aid kit. They stared at each other for a long, drawn-out moment.

Then Buck giggled. The tension broke. And suddenly, Eddie wasn’t uncertain anymore.

He closed his hand around Buck’s. Eddie looked at him.

“Okay,” Eddie said quietly. “I’m just gonna…”

He leaned in, slow and deliberate, giving Buck all the time in the world to figure out where he was going with this. Buck didn’t move, didn’t pull away, didn’t blink. When Eddie kissed Buck, it was barely a kiss, putting his mouth on Buck’s as lightly as Buck had first touched Eddie’s hand.

Buck made a quiet noise into Eddie’s mouth and then they were kissing for real, Buck pressing into him almost hard enough to knock their teeth together.

It was a good feeling, kissing Buck, the kind of raw good feeling that Eddie couldn’t remember feeling in a long, long time. Maybe he’d never felt something quite like this. Eddie could get lost in this, he was pretty sure, in the closeness, in the feeling of Buck’s mouth opening under his, in the quiet noise Buck made when Eddie put his hand in the short hairs at the back of his neck.

When they finally separated, Buck’s face was flushed a bright red. Eddie had a feeling he looked about the same.

Eddie swallowed. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears. “Was that okay?”

“No, it was awful,” Buck said. “What the hell do you mean, was it okay?”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “We haven’t done that before, jackass,” he said. “I mean, should we talk about this?”

“Oh,” Buck said. “Sure.” He picked at the hem of his shorts with his free hand, the one that wasn’t still holding Eddie’s hand between them. His eyes flicked down to Eddie’s mouth and back up again. “We can talk, if that’s what you want to do.”

Eddie let out a sigh, faux-exasperated. “Shut up,” he said, and hauled Buck back into a kiss, both of them smiling into it.

They kissed and kissed and kissed. They didn’t stop when the movie credits started rolling or when the TV switched itself off automatically, the room darkening around them. They didn’t stop until Buck had kissed the scars on Eddie’s shoulder and the one on his wrist and the goddamn Pokemon band-aids across his knuckles and a lot of other places besides.

It was a Friday night. They’d had a lot of good Friday nights over the years. Eddie had a feeling this one was going to be pretty hard to beat.

[pandorem]

Obviously going feral over the Orpheus and Eurydice quote but also can’t get over the fact that Orpheus and Eurydice are real people in this universe. Like Orpheus is literally Dream of the Endless’s son. I don’t have anything insightful to say about it, even via stories repeating and reiterating and that being such an important theme in the Sandman universe and how some truths become stories and some stories are more than true etc etc.

Also now just thinking of Hob mentioning that people have given King Lear a happy ending and Dream saying that it won’t last because all the great stories will return to their original forms (Shakespeare was actually the one to change it to a tragedy, and yes Neil knew this when he wrote that line). Still nothing coherent to say, just about how Charles and Edwin beat the odds and just how much of Dead Boy Detectives is like… a rejection of the queer tragedy we’ve grown so used to. Saw some people groan and comparing it to the mess of Supernatural and superhell etc which is wild to me because it feels like a conscious commentary and rejection of it.

Like. Simon and his internalized homophobia landed both him and Edwin in hell and its both made clear that the in universe reason that they were there is not because they were queer but because of the ritual sacrifice/prank, but that the symbolic and writing reason is because of the internal and external homophobia that the world subjects them to, and it is Simon and Edwin recognizing each other and Edwin saying that the way they are does not mean they deserve to be there, that it doesn’t have to be torture, that gives Simon the way out of hell. It isn’t Edwin confessing that sends him back, a demon interrupts him from confessing. Edwin has to confess at the door back to freedom so he can leave all of that internalized poison behind him back in hell where it belongs.

This post got super away from me and maybe I’ll actually write something coherent about all of these themes one day but yeah. Charles and Edwin at the gates of hell defied the trends of two tragedies, one very very old, and one that (while building off of tragic stories that have been around for ages) is far more recent