#and that feels fundamentally wrong

[bright-eyes-strawberry-lies]

Luke's quest lives rent free in my mind.

What do you mean there was no reason for him to go on it?

What do you mean he was the only one who came back?

What do you mean his only scar is a tiny little scratch on his face?

Like Luke was sent on an unnecessary, dangerous quest for Hermes' personal satisfaction, faced a giant hundred-headed dragon that took out his quest mates, and his only injury was a baby kitten scratch?

A giant hundred headed dragon so scary our resident monster slayer, Percy, was like "actually I'll pass on this one."

Left a teeny tiny little scar on Luke.

And for some reason this is why quests were banned for two years?

Make it make sense????

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[kiddokori]

i dont think kim dokja is transgender unfortunately but he makes up for this by being so wholly disconnected from his body that he gets about the same experience anyways

[yeyinde]

This might sound so cringe and cliche, but I wanna be of help in some way-

how about price faking injuries to see a specific nurse he has a crush on but won’t admit.

Cringe and cliche are quite on brand for me, tbh.

It starts as a concussion, a stiffness in his neck. A pinch in his shoulder. 

Then it changes shape, shifting, evolving, into something more. A tenuous dance held together by silken threads. He tugs on the ends sometimes, just to watch little pieces of you begin to unravel. Raw skin, untouched and new bared to his curious eyes. 

You’ve thrown him off-kilter, left him feeling strange. All asunder. 

He shouldn’t be too surprised by the way you unmoor him so easily. Your eyes swallow the atmosphere around him, eating through gravity. Weightless, he’s left to drift in the aether until you snatch him from the air, leaving him wing-clipped, and kept cupped in the soft swells of your palm. 

It’s greed, he thinks. That awful little thing that makes him keep coming back for more.

The helicopter crash did a number of things on him—mild concussion, a fractured rib, sprained wrist; it seemed to have flipped his insides all askew for a moment when he plunged to the earth before somehow righting themselves when he'd landed—but in retrospect, hindsight, whatever, it could have been a lot worst. 

A fact Gaz seemed to have picked up on quicker than he had when they'd met in the medical bay together, holding their broken bodies with trembling hands. 

(Or maybe threaded together by a statuette of Nefertem laced in the fibres of their hearts.)

"What's this now," Gaz asked when he limped in, knee smarting without the surge of adrenaline keeping him upright. Mirth rolling through his teeth, ge offered Price a fractured grin that very likely might have been a grimace. "Two for two? Might be a sign, cap…"

"A sign for what?"

Gaz shrugged, pressing tender fingers against the gash on his forehead. "Stay the fuck out of helicopters. Take the bloody bus instead."

There's a retort in the back of his throat, but it's swallowed when you walk in, hands gripping a medical bag between blanching knuckles. He's closest to the door, and you turn to him with an air of pensive uncertainty that nudges the spot inside of him that preens under authority. That likes law, order, and the simplicity of life. A natural-born leader. He plays the part, of commander and captain, and dips his head toward Gaz, a silent motion meant to convey him first. 

The always in that is ironclad, he thinks. Brassbound. Even if he was bleeding out on the pavement. His men, his boys, first. 

Except, he catches Gaz doing the same thing toward him. A stalemate, then. 

You're new, he notes; ears still wet, face still green. He braces himself to step in, to lay down the authority you need before you flounder, unsure what to do, but instead of being met with uncertainty, he finds himself breathing in your ire. 

"Well, heroes," you snip, brow pinching together in displeasure. "One of you has to go first, don't you? So while I put my stuff on the table, I expect you to have figured it out amongst yourself, yeah?"

And it's—

It's something. 

A strand of static in the air. Direct current to his heart. It thuds in a strange murmuration, off rhythm, off balance. But it makes sense. You'd thrown him so wildly off kilter. 

He clears his throat of the soot that congeals the back, and nods once. Sharp and jerky. 

"Right, yeah…" 

Price turns to Gaz, brows pinched in the middle. A messy bow. 

It isn't like him to be so askew, but you turned everything upside down before he could familiarise himself with the world in its right state. He's adrift for a moment. Floundering, he notes, tasting something sweet behind his teeth. 

Gaz meets his eyes somewhere in the fog, the furrow in his brow asking the questions he won't voice aloud—you alright, cap?—but he isn't sure what he's meant to say. Everything feels like it was knocked loose inside of him, left to roll off shelves and clatter to the floor. Disorganised chaos. Awash. Lost in tangled webs. He isn't used to this. To feeling so useless, so askew. 

He later finds it just the concussion warping the edges of his mind, turning his thoughts into a slurry. That the mild part was an oversight, one that was immediately corrected by you—firm fingers holding his chin still, nails scratching against his beard as you peered into his eyes with a clinical air of detachment that shouldn't have made his heart beat as loud as it was. 

You smell of summer rain. The musk of water on a hot pavement. He breathes it in until it's clogging the back of his throat, so thick he can almost taste it. So heavy, so heady, his head swims. Ozone. Charred wood. War tucked in a bottle.

The soft fingers against his pulse was a shock, made potent by the little curl of your brow when you counted the beats per minute and found they were much too fast. He isn't embarrassed. Doesn't think he has it in him anymore to feel that way, but there's a sense of frustration in the back of his mind as you move around him, commandeering him with an ease that leaves him feeling a little breathless. 

"You're concussed," you say at last, lips pitching downward as you read his charts, the scrawl left behind by the nurse who'd seen him earlier. The one who promptly sent him to you. "And it isn't mild."

With that, and a list of things he ought to do (non-negotiable), you send him on his way. Gaz, too. Fixed up with gauze and made shiny and new. 

Soap asks why he's so quiet later when they meet for a debriefing later on (one that he knows is definitely on the list of things you told him not to do), and has to stop the rip current from spilling past his lips. 

"He's concussed," Gaz supplied, narrowed eyes clipping the side of his face when it lands; a physical blow. "Doc said he needed rest. But good luck telling him that."

"Don't need rest," he grumbles. There's a blossom of pain in his temple. A little sapling that flourishes under the waning sunlight. "'M fine."

They don't believe him, but the debriefing is too short to push him to lay down, and he spends the next hour pretending he's not seeing shadows in his periphery. That the words on the pages don't bleed together. 

(That the scent of Petrichor doesn't glue to the back of his throat.)

When the hurt in his head dims, he finds his thoughts drifting back to you. Meek and unassuming. A wolf in sheep's clothing. It lingers long after the meeting has ended and he's ushered to the barracks for rest. Home tomorrow, Gaz promises on the tail end of yawn. Gonna sleep for a whole year, I think. 

Aye, gonna head home in the morning, Soap murmurs, but his eyes don't stray from the corner where Ghost leans, chin dipped low to his chest. 

(Price wouldn't put it past him to be asleep already.)

They tell him to get some sleep, dressing the worry in their voice as a friendly admonishment, and he takes it as it is. 

But rest doesn't come. 

He's curious about you. The little hellion that managed to snatch him clean from the air, and cup him in the palm of your too-small hands. 

(He wants to feel it again.)

It begins as idle curiosity.

Price is a large man full of bulk and grit. The snarls in his throat command authority, respect. He isn't used to feeling so wing clipped, sidelined, and he blames that on why he seeks you out. 

A pinch in his shoulder. His chest feels swollen around the broken rib. His knee hurts. There's an ache in his throat. A throb in his kidneys. 

Each time is met with the same stern expression, firm hands. You commandeer him around the room, dragging out the ailments with ease that always seems to leave him off-kilter and breathless. 

He realises what it is the fourth time he comes to your office, exacerbating some mild pain. 

You take up space. All of it. Any crevasse, or corner is immediately filled by you. You have this presence about you that is so at odds with the meek façade you carried on your countenance like an ill-fitting mask when he'd first laid eyes on you. 

You're an enigma, a paradox. A riddle begging to be solved. He wants to take you into his hands and pull you apart until your insides are bared to him, true and real, and known. 

He's met people like you in his lifetime. Leaders in roles that don't fit them. He thinks you belong in worn pages of history, tucked behind a desk as you commandeer the world around you with firm hands and a gnarled smile instead of standing before him, musing softly at whatever ailments he throws your way. 

Despite his plethora of issues, you tackle them all with an air of severity and seriousness that he finds kinship in, touching softly at the twined mass that writhes before him. The cuts in your gaze are made from the same shorn razor as his, and he wants to see what's behind that ill-fitting mask. 

He wants to see you slip. 

But you don't. 

Tongue between teeth, clenched so hard that blood blooms and swells in the tip, you keep everything locked tight to your chest, and usher him out with pantomime remedies to heal his farcical hurts. 

Price isn't sure why he keeps going—curiosity, maybe. An attraction that cracks like lightning striking through his chest. A gale of turbulence that leaves him seaswept and standing on shaking knees. He doesn’t know what to do with the kinetic energy that buzzes in his veins, begging to be free, and so he tests. Pulls and tugs at the seams that keep you spooled tightly together just to see that fissure that once split across your face, leaking fury and fire into the air until it ripped through his nerves, an electrical fire, and set him alight from the inside out. 

(He finds he likes the way it hurts.)

As much as he tugs, he finds he likes it when you pull back. 

"Should be careful," you coo, and the syrupy sweetness of your voice sparks against some dormant part of his mind. "You seem to have a lot of bad luck when it comes to ailments."

He shrugs. "Just unlucky."

"Or you're being cursed." 

"Oh, yeah?" He hums. "Could be." 

You offer a flimsy smile, but it’s enough to soothe the ruffle through his plumage. 

"What's your name?" He asks, fingers plucking at the gossamer that sits between you, unsettled by the quiver in his chest. 

The smile you flash at him is all teeth. "Sekhmet."

Laswell doesn't ask why when he requests your records, but he senses the confusion in her voice when she calls. 

"All of them?" 

He grunts in response. 

"I vetted them personally, John… but," there's a shuffle in the background. Boxes sliding on linoleum. She's overseeing the tearing up of Shepherd's office, and this minute request suddenly turns his stomach sour. "Fine. If that's what you want."

"It's just—"

He isn't quite sure what to say. He was weakened and flummoxed by the world around him. You turned the tipping axis on its head, leaving him feeling asunder. 

"Heard they were quite rough with you," she teases, an olive branch. An excuse. "Bossing around the boss. Is this what it's about?"

He scoffs, then, and only feels an inkling of pain. "No, Laswell. And I wasn't bossed around."

"Manhandled?"

It gives him pause. That feeling from before swells in his chest. Soft hands against his talons, clipping his wings. 

"No," he mutters, but the airiness of his voice gives him away. 

Laswell, in a feat of mercy, just hums. "They're good, John. Good for this team."

Good for you, she doesn't say. John thinks she doesn't have to. He hears it, anyway. 

There are cracks inside of him, ones made from the chipped clay that once concealed an unslaked black hole. 

You fill space, he thinks. 

He isn’t surprised to find you fill the gaps inside of him, too. 

He goes again, but this time it’s real. A bullet grazed his shin, deep enough to warrant stitches, and finds you waiting for him with that clipboard pinched between your hands. 

The look on your face gives him pause. It’s pulled taut, coiled like a defensive viper, but where he expects the same clinical efficiency and detached airs, he instead is met with a palpable sense of uncertainty—too much, he thinks, like the first time you walked into the room, unsure and wobbling on unsteady feet. 

His heart thunders under your prying gaze. “Need some stitches,” he says, if only to fill in the terse silence that settles over the room, hushed and aggrieved. 

“Right,” you echo, eyes dropping to the blood that runs in streaking rivulets down his leg. 

And you say nothing else after, working quietly as you knit skin back together and sponge the drying blood from the wry thatch of curls that blanket his shin. 

Price takes in the paleness of your lip, pinched tight against your clenched teeth. The deep ravine that cuts a line between your brows, heavy with shadows and flooded in some strange amalgamation of anger—potent enough that he can catch the embers in the air on his tongue—and this uncharacteristic sense of disquiet that makes your shoulders tense, your hands slacken. The firm, sure touch is gone—replaced, instead, with clouded unease—and you no longer commandeer him around the room, catch him from the air and manoeuvre him to your fanciful whims. You nudge, now. Soft utterances; requests. 

You don’t move space to fit yourself between the brackets. You linger in the periphery. 

He isn’t accustomed to this, and the hesitancy in your brow needles behind his ribs, pinching and pushing until he’s left feeling that same, strange sense of weightlessness as before. But where you led him around by the tip of his ears, he finds himself unmoored. 

(He likes the loss of control, but only when it’s tethered to your hand.)

His wound is patched up, skin knitted together with silken black lines that cut a neat crisscross through his tumid skin. There is no reason to linger, despite the weight on his tongue urging him to speak. 

But you strike first, catching him at the door. 

"Is there a problem?" You ask, words stripped bare, and masticated between clenched teeth. Reluctance is a heavy weight on your brow when he turns to you, as if you don't want to ask, but are compelled to. Forced to. 

It's the first time he's felt any sense of control around you. He stretches his wings. 

"Problem?" He echoes, and tucks his hands beneath his arms. Steadying his stance. Preparing for the fight. 

You mimic his pose, but grab the knobs of your elbows between tense fingers instead. There's fire in your eyes. The room fills with smoke. 

"You asked for my papers."

The meagre file tucked away in his cabinet spoke of your accomplishments in the same detached, clinical distance as one of the many façades you adopt. It listed your education, your former employment, and your accolades in Times New Roman, all standard affairs. Impressive, of course, but he found it all to be quite lacklustre. 

It didn't mention the firmness of your fingers when you take his pulse or commandeer him to your liking. It said nothing about the paralysing weight in your gaze, vipers tucked in the corners of your eyes when he meets your stolid authority with his own fiery wrath. 

(Or the softness of your cheeks when you try to hide a smile. The admonishing pinches made in jest when he says something that distracts you from your task.)

"I did."

"Okay," you breathe heavily through your nose. "Why?"

"Is there any reason why I shouldn't?" 

"You just—" another breath. He has the peculiar urge to syphon the next directly from your lungs, to taste your air on his tongue. "You come here, week after week, with some—illness, and just—"

"Just what?"

"If you have a problem," you say at length, eyes flashing. "You could have come to me? One on one. I would have—"

"A problem?" He singles the word out, tossing it back at your teeth. “I don’t have a problem.”

You laugh, but it's scathing. "Are you undermining me? Is this—hazing?"

“Hazing? No,” he shakes his head, chasing the tail end of your derision. “Consider this vetting.”

And there it is—that fissure. Heat pops from the lavascape, spilling down the split of your lips. 

“Right.” You snip, shaking your head. “Well, I hope I met your expectations, Price.”

He huffs, then. The noise is a broken facsimile of a laugh forced through crooked teeth. “Of course you do.” The pinch in your brow wobbles. “Wouldn’t be here if you didn’t, love.”

He rents the air with his admission, splits the seams of this tenuous dance you make each week he shows up, speaking of some phantom pain ripped the pages of the textbooks that sit, worn and well-loved, on the shelves behind your desk. 

You say nothing when he leaves. 

(Or when he rests a piece of himself on the doorframe—a glossy feather from his primary remiges just for you.)

He doesn’t go for the next three weeks, but it isn’t cowardice that drags him away from this oddly shaped choreography. He’s caught in a storm halfway across the world with sand in his hair, and the curve of your confusion nudged between the fibrils of his chest. 

In the softness of night, he wonders what you've done with his clipped feather. 

Price meets you at the beginning, but this time, he stands in the medical bay with firm knees, and a clear head. Searching, seeking. 

The thread vibrates, and he finds you with your back to him, doling out gentle, firm, commands to the medical staff congregated around you. Clinging to your breathy orders with the same listless uncertainty that makes his chest swell with the urge to lead whenever it's rested on his shoulders. 

He isn't sure if you can feel the reverberations through the thread, the leftover sutures from when you weaved a needle over the cut on his forearm, and accidentally sewed a piece of yourself into his skin, or if it's just the heavy weight of his gaze burning brands into your back that draws your attention. 

(It certainly garners enough from the staff around you, their flighty eyes flickering from the mountain of a man seething at your back, to you—feigning obliviousness as he strips you bare beneath his glacial gaze, cutting a path to your membrane where he knows he'll find the piece of himself that you snipped off months ago.)

When you finally turn, you give a peculiar look over your shoulder, eyes clouded over, gaze inward. He watches you for a moment, taking in the curve of your cheek, the slope of your nose. Foreign, of course; but familiar under the cloak of darkness and the hail of gunfire. 

The fire still burns in your unreachable depths, but the embers are smouldering. He feels the heat even from this distance, but when you return from whatever thoughts were racing through your head, he finds the look that fixes itself there to be strange. Pensive. 

A quiet contemplation as you take in the length of his shoulders, the width of his chest. 

His heart hammers against the cages of his sore ribs, leaping to the base of his throat where it pulses like a raw wound. 

The whole of his body smarts like a massive contusion—muscles bending at odd angles, bones brittle—but he knows in an instant that he won't mention it to you. He'll tuck the hurt aside. Let it moulder. Let it rot. 

This thing between you—crafted from the design of his heart—has been pulled and pinched, flexed and stretched too taut. It's ready to snap. To break. 

He waits for that moment, bracing himself for the inevitability of the recoil clapping him against the chest, but it doesn't happen. 

You give a small dip of your chin. 

Then, you're gone. 

You've been moulding him between form hands since the beginning, moving him around however you please. 

So, it just feels natural when he follows. 

This time it's his chest. 

You go through the same dance, steps known. Ingrained in muscle memory. Your hands are firm, authoritative as you lead him on this little chase, pushing and pulling, tugging on the threads that keep him sewn up and whole. 

But an incipient path is born. A new routine. The hand on his cheek, as you read his temperature, lingers, thumb brushing over the dividing line that separates skin from wry curls. 

The touch is familiar. You’re no strange to feeling around the phantom aches and pains he presents to you, but this is an electric shock that rattles through his nerves. The trail your thumb leaves behind as it strokes idly at his skin prickles and burns. Goosebumps rise, creating cresting hills and peaks along his topography. You map it all with nimble fingers, firm and sure. 

You take the thermometer out of his mouth after a moment, not even pretending to read the results (thirty-seven degrees, always), and it’s tossed back on the tray quickly before your hand returns to his skin, drawn there by that same innate pull he feels in his iron bones. The warmth of your palm threatens to suffuse his skin, mated together in ferromagnetism. 

His chin rests, plinthed in your palms, and there’s a sudden swell, a rush, that gorges on his heart. The façades fall, clattering to the ground. The broken pieces lay in remains by his feet. 

Price doesn’t spare them a glance. 

Can’t, maybe, because in azimuth he finds that solidary feather he plucked for you resting between your teeth. 

Wonderment. Awe. He feels the surge of something ripping through his body—a paroxysm—but he can’t look away from the shapes of your bare face; the imperfect asymmetry, the wrought iron lines, the convulsing atoms. It’s mesmerising. 

And maybe it’s an electrical phenomenon—no let go—but he doesn’t spare it a single thought, even as the current burrows deeper into his chest, igniting his tissue until red-hot, blistering, charred. Even then, even with the scent of smouldering, necrotising flesh brimming cloyingly into his scenes, the absolute apathy he feels for himself at that moment is a testament to the unshakeable draw, that primal magnetism that glues him to you; met in perfect equilibrium in the middle.

It’s you who moves, who splints the poles until they fall apart when you let your hand drop.

But you’re not finished. The tips of your fingers move, a long peregrination down the twisting, sloping topography of his visage; snaking down his temple, the dip of his nose, the rough bushel of curls, the soft pout of his lips, the ulotrichous hair along his cheek and jaw, the long decline of his check, the ridged of his collarbones, the swell of his chest. It’s there where it lingers, fingers spreading like webs along the birdcage of his thundering heart. 

Price watches you, rapturous and nearly choking himself on the avarice that spills from his heaving lungs. 

You rest the flat of your palm there for a beat; lost in perambulation. Feasting on the thud of his heart. 

He thinks you’ve had your fill. Quenched yourself. 

But when you look up from the slight tremor of your hand, pulsing in time with his hurried beats, the look in your eyes is distinctly unslaked. 

(—and he can’t stop the rumble from spilling out of his chest at the sight.)

Price isn’t sure how long you stay like that. Minutes, seconds, hours. Aeons might have passed since you let your mask slip. Since he plucked at threads keeping it upright. But he shakes back into cognisance when you pull away, cutting through space and time, and filling the gaps once more with the heavy weight of your presence. 

“You’ll be fine,” you say over your shoulder, reaching for your clipboard. “A little rest is all you need, captain.”

There’s an insurmountable number of things he can say, but you press on his throat, and he swallows them down, nodding at your back instead. 

The cloven strands fall around him, broken with distance. There’s an urge in his bones to sew back into his skin, to press them like drying flowers into the folds of his heart where they’ll say, nurtured on his blood and suffused into his being. He rests his laurels on it for a moment, feels the weight of his want, his desire, and compares it to the fraying wisps dragging along the linoleum. 

But he doesn’t reach for them. 

He is wing clipped and flightless. You hold the only feather that gives him lift between the monoliths of your teeth. 

A fine place to keep it, he thinks and turns around, ready to leave on unsteady feet, but—

"Seven," you say, firm and sure. No nonsense. But when he turns, he catches the pallor of your knuckles gripped tight around the clipboard. You hold it to your chest like a shield. The vipers in your eyes quiet their hissing, tongues lashing out to scent the air. "There's this place in Manchester that makes the best Beef Suya."

You're not asking him. 

(But you don't really have to, do you?)

His lips pull up. He catches the drifting threads in his bare palm. "Manchester, mm?"

"I hope you like a little bit of spice."

"I can handle the heat." 

You swallow thickly, and he thinks the action on anyone else might be easily mistaken for nerves, but the livewire that pulls taut between you thrums with a heavy sense of anticipation. 

"I hope so, John," he startles at the mention of his name. It makes your lips curl back, and he shouldn't find it so mesmerising when can't tell if it's a smile or a sneer. "Otherwise I'd be quite disappointed." 

His chin dips to his chest. It renders his voice to little more than smoke and ash, but you shudder from across the room at the growl. 

"Wouldn't want that, now, would we?" 

It isn't breathless when you speak, but he licks his lips and tastes the pulsing excitement that sparks in the air. It curls in his lungs. Saltwater on burning coals. 

"Don't be late." 

It's a promise, he thinks; a warning, too. A threat. "Wouldn't dream of it, love."

He turns away from you, shielding the growing smile from your searching gaze, but your voice stops him short at the door, fingers curled around the frame.

“And Price?”

“Yes, love?” He calls, featherlight in a way he hasn’t felt since he was eighteen and free. Ready to soar, to fly.

"You know," you say, brows knotting together. Despite the severity of your expression, there's a note of playfulness between your teeth. "If you wanted to see me, you could have just asked." 

After dinner, they fucked so nasty that Qadesh could be heard gagging across the aether.

[starliteonearth]

Love Oshamir but I'm not sure I quite agree with this insistence that Qimir isn't at all being manipulative because first of all, he basically kidnapped Osha. She is not in his mancave on some unknown planet in the middle of fuck-knows-where of her own freewill. Let's not forget that. Secondly, he may be honest in what he's saying to her but he for sure isn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He wants something from her, wants her to be something to him. He's deliberately pushing her in a specific direction to make her what he thinks she can be, what he wants her to be, to be like him. That IS manipulation.

[valtsv]

i'm not going to lie i hope that the jon sims and alexander j newall text-to-speech voices on the computers that read out the incident reports aren't jon and martin. not because i'm a hater but because i just... don't really want another story about those guys. their story is over. they were both central pov characters in the magnus archives who i got to spend plenty of time with already. and yeah, they'd hardly be protagonists anymore as ghosts in the machine, but considering how much tma fanwork centers around them i'm worried their presence will continue to dominate the fan community. okay maybe i'm a little bit of a hater.

[dykedvonte]

Ulysses obsession with the Courier is a special type of sad to me cause the Courier’s part was so important but so unwitting. They had no idea what was in the package they delivered and neither did he. Neither had an idea of what it could’ve done and the Courier was only caring out their job (mind you the Courier could be killed via notes in the express contract if they don’t). To them it was just another regular delivery to the divide and one that they likely thought would help, just like all the ones before.

It’s so tragic for Ulysses to hold so much ire to the Courier when it really was the case of it could’ve been anyone. Anyone could have delivered that package but they did and so he focused the blame on them and it destroys what he is trying to instill in the courier on a fundamental level.

[uncanny-tranny]

I love you smile lines and worry lines and grey and white hair and wrinkles and purple spiderweb veins and the process of aging and living in a body that is standing the test of times. I love you experiences that make you wiser and stories that make you laugh, and every little process that happens to get to the point where you have so many memories because you have the fortune to be here and be so radiant

[ciricegh0st]

yesterday the trailer for the crow (2024) popped up on my fyp and the misinterpretation of core of the graphic novel just fucking sends me.

the horror at the centre of the novel, the utter despair and pain that shroud Eric, both in the source material and the 1994 movie, works because Eric and Shelly were a normal couple of lovers. It's because of such mundane tenderness that the horror of the murder leaves such a staggering and profound impact on the viewer, the violence is totally uncalled for and highlights how humanity's depravity can befall anyone, even the kindest of people (following the drammatic personal story of O'barr).

twisting Eric and Shelly's backstory into a kind of wattpad misfits' one, the viewer looses the element of immedesimation that held inside the emotional value of the movie. By depriving both characters of their normality the intimate sorrow is lost. What was a desolate tale of personal loss, to me, feels more like the search for the next halloween costume.

[al-luviec]

compiled whatever this is (and I run out of tag space)

meh HoT gifs (3/?)

[pestilentbrood]

VERY long Ramble incoming

honestly now that I'm looking at the auraboa lore situation, I'm just disappointed. There was such POTENTIAL in the idea of the Loop and the horror of a new generation inexplicably being disconnected from it, forcing the newly hatched children into a world totally separate from that perceived by their parents (I mean, hell, they perceive TIME differently!).... but then the writer(s?) just fell ass backwards into Icky Tropes.

I feel like I can see what the idea was, especially with the recent alterations to the Encyclopedia entry... It seems like staff fundamentally understands the true Horror potential here, but... Instead, through the short story, they proposed it through the lens of a condescending outsider character, turning the fears of the older generation into something trivial. And also weirdly demeaning the Auroboa's situation by portraying them as overreacting.

Why... why would you do that? Like, from a storytelling perspective? What's gained from that? Why not embrace the true horror and even Emotional significance of that disruption? Why instead go for "ohh we NEED outsider help we NEED to be saved because we are so helpless and it is so Silly that we, creatures who have never experienced such things, do not know what sleep is"????

And if they WANTED to have a condescending outsider, I feel like they COULD have done that, but it would have to have that character realize the horror at some point. And make it obvious that their attitude towards distressed parents and children facing Eldritch Shit and the Sudden Deconstruction of it was not cool!

(or at the very least be a bit more...idk. Consistent with said outsider character? Juniper just goes from "omg I am so honored that the fascinating creatures of the behemoth have chosen me to speak to" to "oh their wasting my time because they don't know what sleep is. I'd rather be sleeping!! 🙄" like girl... c'mon now. Why are we trivializing it like this. Do you want me as the reader to be invested in their plight or not.)

I mean come on. They're beings connected through one networked hivemind-like system, yet each still maintains a silver of individuality that allows them to move freely throughout the Behemoth that they care for. And they've got an eldritch understanding of time that no other dragon could understand. They're seeing the future, past, and present unfold simultaneously. They're witnessing the birth and death of the world at the same time, and have no way to communicate it to other dragons. The best they can do is maintain their home, and even then, they see its roots spread and decay all at once.

And then the newest generation is suddenly disconnected. An inherent link between parent and child and all dragons in-between, that has existed since the creation of their species, is just suddenly GONE for the newest births. With NO explanation for it. The children have no easy way of communicating with their parents. The children are experiencing time in a way that was not meant for their species. They've forcefully been shoved into a circadian rhythm that they are Not! Built for!

The only way a parent could communicate properly with their child would be when the latter is sleeping, something that is also completely foreign to this species. It would be terrifying for all involved!!!

They are literally experiencing eldritch horror from the perspective of the eldritch being forced into the mortal.

Like why WOULDN'T there be panic!!! And why would that panic be trivialized! Why are we only shown the perspective of an outsider who looks at this situation and goes "Oh the silly tree beasts are being so silly over nothing, it's no big deal!"

That and the way the auraboas talk to outsiders. Like. There was such potential there. Real opportunity to explore how ancient, time-bending beings would communicate to someone who couldn't even BEGIN to understand the intricacies of it.

Instead we got what feels more like baby talk (even described as though they were hatchlings enunciating their first words, which... I dunno man, maybe we don't want to compare them to children like That) and less like... Beings that experience all of time at once. I mean, the hatchlings and the adults speak the exact same way, and that doesn't make any sense given the literal time barrier going on.

I totally get why people thought there was just a language barrier and that auraboas had their own language, thus causing the disjointed speak, and not that it was because They Do Not Experience Time Like We Do. And I feel it would've been far easier to get it across by just... I dunno. Do anything else?? I saw someone on here suggest they speak in the "wrong" tenses, or using multiple tenses in the same sentence, which I think would've been far more clear.

Like, as opposed to "saplings wilt! saplings silent!" just "the saplings will wilt in silence, they've wilted in silence, they are wilting silently." Said all at once like all things are true simultaneously. And if we're going for hivemind, have each auraboa speak in a different tense, all at the same time, and have them switch it up every time. Have our outsider get confused and be like "which is it? are they wilting now, or have they already wilted?" and the cluster of auraboas respond in a cacophony of yes's, no's, and maybe's all at once.

Would've probably gotten across the "alien" vibe they were supposedly going for far better than wide-eyed desperation for an outsider's guidance conveyed through disjointed, in-world described as baby speech.

And also maybe would've had less accidental connotations. Because as it stands, I completely see why people have made the connections to the real world where they have. This doesn't read like eldritch timey-wimey intrigue, or even a respectful look at how younger generations can become detached from their families' cultures over time and the struggles that come with it. It reads like a culture being perceived by an ignorant outsider who (despite supposedly respecting these dragons) scoffs and rolls their eyes because the tree beasts with their funny words are being silly again, and that Hey, isn't it actually a great thing that the children are fundamentally different in all manners now? Because now they can join the rest of us in the "real world."

Yknow. Ick.

(I Personally think it would've been better to have the perspective be one of the Auraboas themselves, especially one of the children, to really understand what was going on here. Give us the full brunt of the mind of a creature experiencing all of time interwoven as one shape. The waters fall and the oceans crash with waves. They've now fallen to drought. The ocean has yet to be born. Caves have been carved out through the waters' currents. And when I break from this timeline, I open my eyes to see a child, the child not yet born, the child born now, the child born yesterday. Why can't I hear it? Why couldn't I hear it? Why won't I ever hear it?)

I dunno. People more qualified than me to speak on this matter have already torn the lore apart, I'm just... dropping my own two cents. Potential got weirdly squandered and we ended up instead with unfortunate implications and tropes that could be connected a liiiittle too awkwardly to irl situations.

*Also, before anyone points out: Yes, I know the hatchlings aren't COMPLETELY detached from the Loop and can join it when they sleep. But the fact is, these thangs never had to sleep before. That wasn't in their species' nature. So that's still weird and foreign for them on both sides. And since the hatchlings now have a circadian rhythm, they can't stay connected to the loop permanently. And also Also, seeing as the previous generations aren't experiencing time linearly, who's to say they even recognize when their child joins the loop? They'll speak with an echo of their child when that child was last asleep ages ago, not knowing that it's not them presently, because there is no 'present' for the older generations.

[utilitycaster]

Do you think that Laura and Marisha are deliberately making their relationship somewhat toxic and unsustainable or do you think they see the relationship as healthy? It is just so different from all of the other relationships they have been a part of and not really in a good way. Would love to get your perspective on it if you have one

I am honestly unsure. I would like to say it's deliberate. Prior to it becoming canon, in fact, I, and a lot of other people who were less than enthused by Imogen and Laudna's romance and weren't entirely sold from the start, made the case that we expected they would be talking to each other and would put together a compelling story, not the dull fluff so common in fanon. While whether it's compelling is a subjective judgment, we know for a fact they didn't talk to each other. We know for a fact Marisha was surprised by the question of "Can I kiss you," and Laura was surprised by the answer. We know from a 4SD not long after (4SD #16, Kiss and Tell) that several episodes later they still hadn't talked. We know that Marisha perceives Laudna as holding Imogen back (and that Laudna perceives herself as doing so) from the Rose City Q&A. We know that from 4SD #20 (Episode Twenty) that Laura doesn't like conflict in narrative and Marisha does, and that Laura was thrown by Laudna's regression following Ashton's attempt to absorb the shard (4SD #19, Shard Candy).

I don't know if it's deliberate or not; I don't have any extra insight that isn't public knowledge any fan can easily access. But man, it doesn't feel like these are two actors on the same page about what's going on.

I've touched on this before but mostly in tags or whisper posts but I've always felt ill at ease with a number of for lack of a better term "fandom-approved opinions" and one of the ones that has baffled me the most is this idea that Marisha and Laura have exceptional chemistry. I watched Campaign 1 knowing the endgame ships but deliberately avoiding the fandom, and Vex and Keyleth did not even once occur to me as a thing. I watched the first year of Campaign 2 without a ton of fandom interaction because I was avoiding additional C1 spoilers and it seemed crystal clear that the obvious ship was Beau and Yasha; it felt like Beau and Jester only even had enough potential for me to multiship it as my general "whomever Jester picks" for like, 30 episodes. And yet people - people who didn't even ship either of the above ships and in some cases disliked them- would just say "oh man I can't wait until we get to a campaign where we can finally explore Marisha and Laura's incredible chemistry!" and it's like. I feel like I'm the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes on this! I understand that chemistry is to an extent a matter of taste and subjectivity, but it just increasingly feels like people looked at two campaigns of tables where Ashley was frequently absent and said "well, if I want an F/F ship that's between two of the women in the cast, I guess this is what I have to work with" and repeated to themselves that a flat pamplemousse La Croix was a Piña Colada until they started to believe it. I mean if someone wants to explain it to me in good faith I suppose be my guest and I will try to take it in, but it feels like people just treat this as incontrovertible fact and if you doubt it they're like "don't you have eyes" and it's like, well, pretend I don't. Explain like I'm eyeless and five because I have never understood this. They both have more chemistry with every single other cast member; it's not all romantic but man, I didn't even buy Laudna and Imogen as platonic best friends of two years. I have never had this problem with any other pre-existing character relationships Marisha and Laura have played, platonic or otherwise. It's literally just them. I just never feel like they're quite on the same page.

Back to the relationship between Imogen and Laudna onscreen, this was easily the best conversation since the start of the gnarlrock fight, and it is my hope it doesn't fizzle out the way that did. You can't keep kissing Laudna whenever she fears she's lost forever to Delilah, Imogen. Or you can, but that won't fix the problem. Again: are you disgusted? Do you feel betrayed? If you're not, why did you say that? If you are, how will you move past it? Do you want to be with someone who never feels like they're good enough for you? Laudna, do you want to be with someone who, no matter what they say, you feel you're holding back?

Early in the campaign, my feeling was that of our current situation, switched - Imogen felt her powers were a burden and a curse and Laudna kept referring to them and to her glowingly. It's just...ships passing in the night, no pun intended here. I hope it's on purpose and whatever comes from it is a good story - and either a tragedy or a happy story could be a good one. But I have a nagging sensation that Laudna wants out but is afraid to say no, and Imogen is afraid to let go, and I honestly don't know if the actors have realized this impasse and how the characters might resolve it, one way or another, besides the insufficient bandaid of a kiss whenever the conversation gets too uncomfortable.

[gh0st1al]

some of y'all really never should have been allowed to touch mouthwashing huh

[weirdmageddon]

sorry for liking davejade in 2023 btw its in a cool way though

[mamawasatesttube]

i have to speak my truth. i think timkon clone baby aus fucking suck

[dsabian]

The ABC put ep 1 of new Dr Who on last night. Then followed it with ep 1 of Merlin.

I feel like there should have been dual klaxons going off.

"Please be advised the next two hours may lead to a lifetime of obsession and angst. If you do not wish to turn to fanfic for consolation we suggest you switch off now. Viewer discretion is advised."