#anyway i kind of sort of have a vision. and its maybe not quite coherent bc im not a very coherent person. but thats okay i think. <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[bobzora]

the thing about gamedev that they dont want you to know is that you have to actually dev your game @.@ crazy ! ! !

[rawliverandgoronspice]

hey! do you have any thoughts on demise as a looser/more fluid/symbolic/metaphorical figure in the context of the story of the series- like thoughts on what he represents, and stuff like what his curse could mean thematically rather than the more essentialistic absolutistic "literal satan" interpretation that most of the (at least western) audience seems to take?

i know he may be somewhat contentious as a choice introduced by the writers especially considering from an outside perspective what he kind of did to the majority of fandom analysis and discourse, but i've been thinking about how it's quite possible the writers had a more paganistic approach to what it means to be a deity and how demise doesn't even really have a NAME so much as he is supposed to be some sort of manifestation/personification of the concept of demise, and maybe also of hatred, and also i don't know, like, what the point of that hatred is or why there has to be demise/what implications there could be of this worldbuilding

hope that was coherent enough to make sense of anything i just said but yeah i was just curious if you do!

Heyy sorry never replied, replying now!! Thanks for the ask!

Yeah it's exactly how I'm taking Demise, and I think what you mention connects more to what little I know and understand of shintoism.

In French, Demise has an absurdly long name and is basically called "The Avatar of the Void", which I think is... interesting? It makes me extremely curious as to how Demise is called in original japanese --because to me, "Void" is about the absence of things more than their destruction. It's about the absence, not the inevitability of things crumbling down that comes with Demise. I don't know which of these concepts are the closest to the original vision (if it's Void rather than Demise I think it recontextualizes everything we thought we know about this world and characters, but in my opinion it feels too incoherent with the rest of the world, so my guess is that it was a poorly thought-out translation --but I might be wrong!), but to me it's all in the title: Demise. The curse is that every golden era must end with a reckoning.

I think the curse is extremely compelling in that mythological sense, the way Demeter and Persephone's tale is about the joy and pain of passing seasons; it's the given cause for this world's fate as it is condemned to rise and die continuously; and that their eternal, bright future will always be opposed. To be honest, I'm not even sure it's a *bad* thing. Conflict is not only inevitable, it needs to rise to the surface instead of being suppressed to ensure things do not remain stagnant and shortcomings are being acknowledged and addressed --which is also partially why the suggestion of TotK's golden forever after really doesn't sit right with me, especially since nothing was learned and nothing truly changed in the course of its runtime.

I think the curse sucks when people think it means that Ganondorf is a generic evil demon man without motive of his own. It especially grinds my nerves since I somehow never hear this argument being made for *any* other villain in the franchise. I know they look alike the most (and TotK didn't help matters here), but I never *ever* saw people arguing that Vaati doesn't have motive, for example. Or Majora. Or Zant. Or even literal nothing characters like Bellum, who by all means looks more like a primal demonic evil acting on instinct than anyone else. Somehow, we get to assume they have internal motives that, while obviously wicked and self-serving, are their own! But somehow, Ganondorf, the actual main antagonist of his series with the most amount of games hinting at his backstory and internal moral code, gets flattened as an evil puppet with no internal life whatsoever. It's genuinely bizarre.

Anyway sorry sorry! Thanks again for the ask!

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

I would take a bunch of houses from various different eras and put them together in an interesting way. There's no reason to pretend that there is some overarching "style" for the city as a whole, or even that I don't want it to have its own style. But this means you can combine all sorts of styles with each other: modern house plus pre-modern house, or whatever else, since they are not trying to compete with one another but rather coexist peacefully within the same space. A lot of real cities do this! It doesn't matter if your neighborhood has stunningly beautiful classical architecture mixed right next door to ugly 1960′s office buildings (or vice versa). What matters is how well everything fits together, and how much history it implies -- which means mixing architectural styles by century, period, country, etc., instead of just choosing between The Palladian Villa and The Art Deco Building on every street corner. This also lets me throw in more modern things like parking garages and whatnot without breaking any mood.

These days people are so afraid of using non-monotonous textures that it often looks like someone took a palette made up entirely of shades of white and beige and tried very hard to make sure none of those colors were ever used anywhere except where absolutely necessary. Meanwhile a few centuries ago people didn't care about monotony at all; when my grandfather was growing up he lived in a house whose exterior walls were painted dark red and whose interior wallpaper had a pattern that included a blue background, yellow flowers, orange fruit, green leaves, and brown branches. You wouldn't dream of making such a thing today, because everyone knows that a building should look exactly the same everywhere. Even if you try really hard to mix stuff together, most people will see it as jarring unless everything looks identical throughout. Which isn't actually true though . . . we know that the human brain can deal with huge amounts of visual information quite well. If done carefully enough, you could probably create a world where nobody minds that their shopping center looks nothing like the bedroom behind it, or anything else nearby.

There is, however, a catch here . . .

It seems obvious that if you build something out of multiple sources then you need to think through which elements come from each source first. Otherwise, you might end up putting e.g. a Greek temple on top of Gothic gargoyles or something like that, and while in principle I am okay with that sort of thing, only as long as it comes naturally from a coherent design scheme, I feel that most attempts to avoid it ultimately fail for being too rigid, especially compared to the flexibility shown above. For example, it is impossible to imagine that someone who decided to make their entire house out of found objects would get everything backwards and pick the wrong side of town to shop at, thus ending up with a patchwork quilt consisting solely of Target items. Nevertheless, many "mixed media" artists seem to fear that they won't be able to pull off such a feat, and therefore go out of their way to make sure that they start with something recognizably modern and add random historical details later on. However, once you give yourself permission to use one modern object per room, that makes sense. You still have the freedom to play around and incorporate a variety of designs into your overall vision; you just happen to already know which ones they are.

So yeah, I guess you could say that whenever I want to include random bits of old buildings I'll be thinking ahead to what the rest of the place needs? So maybe it turns out that the nice little balcony on the front facade does fit in after all, it helps establish the character of the building as having a certain kind of attitude toward nature/light/etc. And maybe it ends up looking cool anyway – but if it doesn't, oh well, back to square one until the rest of the design works itself out. In practice I expect I'd need a big file full of references with notes attached to it saying why I picked these particular pieces for each part of the project, including why I ended up tossing half of them.

If you could build an entire city, which architectural style would you choose?

The style I've been thinking about is "everything that exists in the game Dark Souls 1," but it would be difficult to implement, and also probably too elaborate. (I can sort of see how they did everything -- there are a lot of hidden references.)

A more concrete example might be something like this web site by Jonathan McCaffrey? It looks like this:

([not actually a link])

There's no real architectural purpose behind using these old-fashioned methods instead of modern ones – except maybe the fact that they look cooler than what you could build nowadays without them looking "cheap" (like those plastic panels from the '60s). But you know what else was popular in the early days of computing power, but is still considered cheap compared to what you can make with current technology? That's right . . . textures. This building is made entirely of glitches and artifacts, because who cares if there's nothing interesting going on underneath it when you spend most of your time staring at a big ghost face at the top?

Also, notice that they put in fake walls between rows of seats to give the impression of having individual booths. What do you think are going through their minds while they design stuff like this? Are they really trying to do architecture, or are they playing a different kind of game altogether?

[all-about-seggs]

False Love-

Rating: ❌ 18+, Explicit ❌

Pairing- Timeskip! Yandere Oikawa Tooru x fem reader

Word count- 1.8 K

Warnings- Aphrodisiacs, fingering, dub-con, vaginal sex, Oikawa is delusional and sad.

A/n: This is my fic for the Valentine's day Collab that @ultimate-astridwriting hosted. I hope I was able to live up to their expectations (ᗒᗩᗕ).

Roaming around the busy streets of Palermo, ginormous heart shaped props occupying the narrow lane paints Oikawa's vision in scarlet. Love is in the air, as they say, was quite literally true for the beautiful city of Argentina.

In the midst of giggling couples and warm twinkling lights, the annoyed click of his tongue gets drowned out; Unnoticed ;making him recognise his own solitude.

Normally he'd have hoards of girls vying for his attention, trying to take him to their place but maybe it was because of his age, or the mountain of experience with the momentary flings that made him want to search for something deeper.

He used to be fine with superficiality of his relationships, the repeated cycle of getting himself off of any faceless women who came onto him then forgetting her existence the next day was fulfilling in itself. Afterall, his career has always taken priority.

Though the last remaining brain cells of his body tries to rationalise the situation he is getting himself in, Oikawa had already decided what kind of connection he wanted and and was just going to let himself have that. Selfishness is not something he ever disliked anyway.

He felt no need to hide his disdain, Oikawa wasn't one to be subtle about his pettiness either, that's why the contrasting emotions of his own, clashing with the jubilant ones of his surrounding annoyed him to no end.

The chocolates wrapped up neatly in his hand felt heavy, causing his fingers to tremble slightly. It wasn't the weight of the box but what he intended to do with the said item that made his insides twist with excitement.

Yes. It was excitement. Happiness and pure bliss that he felt when he rang the doorbell of your modest appartment in the costal side of the city. Despite having the sea right next to your place, the cold February air still made you shiver as you opened the door to see Oikawa standing at your doorsteps, all smiles with a dash of extra in his typical 'hand on the hip' pose.

Surprised wouldn't even being to describe your current state of shock. You spend the next few seconds just starting at his ever confident form before his voice brings you back to your senses.

" Yooohooo~ babe, I'm sure I don't look 'that' good. I just finished with practice so my hair's probably a mess right now", he continued on with his cheery tone,

" Come on, It's not like you have anyone else to spend Valentine's with, so why not just let me in already and look", dangling the expensive looking bag in front of your eyes, his expression took on a slightly sinister turn in their features, the kind that went away as soon as they appeared not leaving any trace of its original condescending vibes.

" I made these chocolates for you", emphasizing on the made part he stares right into your eyes, as if waiting for his well earned praise. Heaving a sigh of defeat you release the door know you didn't knew you had in a death grip, opening the door completely in a gesture to usher him inside.

Oikawa quickly makes himself at home, plopping down on your couch with his long legs stretched.

This was the first time you had seen him after the rejection of the high in demand position of his girlfriend. The face he made when you turned him down was of utter disbelief so much so that you almost reconsidered your decision. But you weren't that wishy washy in your opinions and his was a type you made sure to ignore.

You were aware of his salty personality and the habit of holding grudges, so you thought after that fateful day he'd ignore you like the plague, but for all his arrogance Oikawa's face was the epitome of gleeful.

" Soooo", starting off with an awkward note you casually try to sit on the furthest arm chair from the couch Oikawa was currently occupying and tried to ask what exactly was he expecting out of his current visit but he quickly cut you off by his own booming voice.

" Before all that, why don't you try these?", Pointing to the chocolates he starts unwrapping them, as he pulls the decorative ribbon, two rows of brown, heart shaped delicacies appeared.

"Don't be shy, I made these for you afterall", he remarked, pushing the box on your side of the table.

You didn't think much of it, afterall, 'making' chocolates just means buying store bought ones and just melting them into different shapes right?

Popping one small cube in your mouth you let it dissolve, your taste buds filling up with the sweetness of the treat. Just as it finished you heard Oikawa speak again.

"You probably know why I'm here, but I'll tell you again", readjusting his posture, he sits straight, both the look in his eyes and tone taking a more serious turn.

" I thought about why turned me down that day and I finally realised......You were just scared weren't you?", rather than upset he sounded relieved as he continued with self assuredness ,

" Of commitment? Or because of my job? Either way I can already assure you that I was already prepared to put you above everything else if the situation calls for it".

You were just sitting, listening to his outrageous conclusions when you felt your heartbeat increase. The sweaty palms of your hand to the moistness in your core, your entire body started reacting in ways you'd never experience before.

"You thought that I'd keep our relationship on the back burner and only focus on my career? You were just lonely weren't you?", With every passing second his delusional words seemed to work with more and more intensity that didn't helped your hyperventilating state at all.

"And you rejected me because you didn't wanted to have an absent boyfriend right? So in reality-", by the time he finished he was already in front of you, the fire in the depths of your core made your mind hazy and eyes unfocused. You wanted to ask what was happening or what he put in those chocolates but forming any coherent words was a feat on its own in your current condition.

He smoothly takes one of your burning hand in his cool ones, the contact making you instantly lean onto him for more. You're sitting in a daze when he pulls you up from the arm chair and places you on his lap back on the longer couch.

In your already aroused state, the soft strokes of Oikawa's fingers on your scalp made you succumb further into the need for release as you sit on his lap with your head resting against his shoulder. The room was now quite safe for his soothing voice that came from right about your head.

"You love me right?", the words that come out of his mouth in the heated moment betrayed all his attempts at feigned composure. He may have spiked the chocolates with some sort of aphrodisiacs but the way your heart hurted after hearing this made it seem more like a love potion.

With his barely audible voice they sounded almost like a plea, another desperate measure to get what he wanted.

Before you could even notice, your vision tilts and you find yourself pinned to the couch, with Oikawa hovering right above you. His hands on your sweatpants, lowering them all the way to your ankles. And the weirdest thing?

You didn't wanted him to stop.

Not when he spread you out completely in front of him. Not when he was shamelessly staring at your naked pussy with a maniacal glint in his eyes and definitely not when he shoved two of his thick digits up your leaking pussy that covered his entire palm in your slick at the slightest of contact.

Your soft walls clenching around his fingers was all he needed before he stared unzipping his own pants. He gazed at your panting body while he pulled his cock out, flipping you on your stomach with your ass up and face shoved down.

You barely cared about anything but getting fucked good at this point when you heard some rumbling behind you, as soon as Oikawa was done putting on a condom he lined himself up against your entrance.

Not wasting any more time he slips past your folds until he is buried to the hilt. The feeling of being stretched out and filled to the brim coaxed out a few lewd moans from your mouth.

Your slick was enough to make Oikawa pick up a hard and fast pace, your entire body shook with every thrust of his. He kept his hands on your waist, pushing himself as deep as he can before pulling out until only the tip remains. Your own orgasm started building up with his every action.

His member throbbed against your insides and the moans that slipped past his gritted teeth indicated he already came but his cock showed no signs of softening as he kept going with his brutal pace.

You bury your head sideways, tongue lolling out and covering the fabric beneath it in your drool as Oikawa lodges his cock further into your pussy from behind. He moves in and out of you with ease, the slick from both your pussy and his previous release was more than enough to keep his memeber going.

Gripping your ass cheek in one hand, he trails his other one in between your thighs. Quickly his digits grazes your clit, the pressure they added along with the heavy thrusts pulled you closer to the edge. The anticipation of your impending release was all your lust laden head could think about the feeling of ecstasy that you desperately needed.

The intensity of your orgasm made your eyes roll back, and if it wasn't him holding you firmly in place, you probably would've fell down the couch. With your entire body shaking your panted heavily from your mouth to calm yourself.

Oikawa doesn't make any attempt to pull out or move and even after your breathing becomes even his member is still lodged deep inside you. He gently starts gyrating his hips against your pussy again and it becomes obvious that you weren't the only one under the effects of aphrodisiacs.

As cum trickles down your inner thighs, all you could decipher was the overwhelming bolts of pleasure Oikawa's cock provided and the sounds of your skin smacking against eachother's.

With his hands on both of your sides, he lowers himself down until your back was flush against his toned chest, his raspy voice rumbled through your ear as he spoke in a dark possessive tone,

"Don't forget..... we are in love"

[remedial-wit]

(I've been missing) your hand in mine

Some wanda angst set between civil war and infinity war

....

vision asks her to marry him and, even though she does love him and so she's always known all of this would lead to something, it feels like a kick in the teeth.

it's just them, luckily. vision knows that's what shed prefer and she truly loves him for it. they know each other all the way through, after all. theres no big fanfair except a candlelit dinner in a space that they've made their own, in relative peacetime. and all of this, it's something she never thought she'd live to get.

anyway, she's glad it's just them, because vision goes down on one knee, classic black velvet ring box in hand and says a sappy little speech and pops the question. and wanda hesitates.

"wanda, will you marry me?"

theres a beat. and then another. and then several more. and then it becomes too much and impossible to break.

vision, because he knows her, seems to sense that the silence is due to her not-quite indecision and her not-quite panic, and not just her being too choked up from emotions, and falters. it's a little cruel, too, because it's not as though it's his fault, not as though they havent discussed the future or entertained ideas of marriage and families before. it's not his fault.

(isnt it though?)

both of them seem frozen because wanda cant exactly say yes now, and she certainly cant say no, and vision cant exactly retract the offer. and neither of them are capable of looking away which is the worst part. visions eyes are the most ordinary part of him, the most human, the most constant part of him. a dark bluish grey, more ordinary than wanda's sometimes, when hers flash red. theres something dissonant about them, something uncanny which means she cant look away but nor can she look for too long as well.

vision, ever the gentleman, is the first to mercifully cut through it. "I'm sorry," he says.

"-- no, dont apologise! I-- I'm sorry. I just, I just dont know... I cant--" it's hard to work out what she's trying to say, really, or what she's even trying to think.

she must somehow articulate something to vision, though, because he looks back down at the ring, a white-gold band with some sort of delicate twisting, knotting engraving, and closes the box. "I understand."

wanda winces and thinks she might cry except by some miracle she doesnt. "I love you," she says, and at least that is convincingly coherent.

"I know."

and she thinks it might be more reassuring to kiss him now, or perhaps hug him, at least. but instead she just stares at her hands in her lap, her fingernails painted black which for some reason still makes her feel a little childish sometimes, the lines on her palm not really telling her anything.

in her peripheral, she's acutely aware of vision rising from the floor, dusting his trousers off a little, seating himself back at the table, opposite her. it's a good thing he'd thought to wait until they'd finished eating at least.

"Wanda," he says, urging her gaze up to meet his eyes once more, and she does. "Wanda, it's okay."

hes right, of course. it is okay. vision is just so selfless like that its almost sickening and its why she loves him. and it's why she cant understand it.

he leaves her there, not really doing anything except that he gives her a small but genuine smile.

wanda wants to scream just as much as she wants to choke.

if Pietro was here he'd probably whisk her off the seat and speed her to some exotic place until she either forgot about everything or was ready to face it. he wouldn't even have to really say anything, but hed just make it better.

but Pietro isn't here.

and that's just the whole thing, isnt it?

-- but, dont you deserve a happy ending?

Pietro would want to be here. but he isnt. and maybe Wanda still, despite this, deserves a happy ending. maybe she can have one, even if it could be happier. but it could always be happier.

she can't take back her "sorry", though. and even if she could, she's not sure how much she'd mean it.

there's a kind of gulf between her and this happy ending of her's because she thinks maybe, once she reaches it, it might just make her sadder.

at least this way it seems less like it's over.

[intervieweird]

CARAVAGGIOVAGABOND:

“ I UNDERSTAND YOU. ”

Daniel lays on the bed, four fingers of whiskey full, plied with a fifth of vodka and the stirrings of something frothy in his stomach. He figures he’s got enough booze fermenting in him to make a brewery.

He puts out his butt in the ash tray, burnt to the filter and bland as the scratch in his throat. Everything else in the room swims as he stirs; a blurred wave of neutral tone and unexpressive landscape paintings.

But not those eyes. Those eyes stay right where they are.

“Yeah?” He asks, pleasantly slurred and sluggish, moving his limbs mechanically on the bed to turn and face the creature watching him from the chair. He feels good now. Real good. Warm and tingling all the way to his toes, though the way his brain is having trouble keeping up with his eyes tells him he’s going to feel it in the morning. He just can’t mix his spirits like he used to. “And how’s that?”

caravaggiovagabond: @intervieweird cont. from [x]

The dimly lit, unspectacular hotel room isn’t exactly Armand’s usual preference, but currently he’s given little choice but to follow wherever his current obsession leads him. Tonight, that just so happens to be by his bedside, the young man lying charmingly inebriated across the bed.

To see Daniel in such a state is also not Armand’s preference – he would much rather that he was active, coherent, and fit enough to be dragged from pillar to post all over the globe. Those plans, however, are quite clearly foiled as it’s looking very much doubtful that Daniel will be able to travel even to the bathroom unassisted, never mind anywhere further afield. He dips into the mortal’s mind for just a moment, morbidly curious, but soon pulls away again, the dizzy, room-spinning stupor clouding his thoughts not at all a pleasant experience to him even secondhand.

With a sort of languid, animalistic grace, the vampire slips from the chair that he’s taken up residence in, half-crawling to the side of the bed where Daniel now faces him and crouching beside him at eye level, both arms folded on the mattress near the man’s face, his marble cheek resting against the thick, baggy sweater clothing his own forearm.

“Because we are kindred spirits,” he murmurs, cool, iron-scented breath a sigh against Daniel’s heated cheekbone, amber eyes fixed on him as one fingertip emerges from the cradle of his folded arms to prod at Daniel’s shoulder.

Armand is like a crooked creature, skewed limbs unfolding, too long. A monster. A monster crawling from under the bed and slipping under his skin like an itch. It’s a trick of the eyes, Daniel knows. Mortal eyes; eyes made of cells dying every second. He remembers what Louis told him once, how the undead moved too fast to process with the feeble chemical impulses of the human brain. Maybe it’s the old, primitive vestiges that are telling him to run, run, flight sparking in the dull grey matter, clogged with fatigue and poison.

But Daniel doesn’t run, and he wonders, distantly, why.

He turns towards death at his shoulder, a frown on his face as he fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand.

“Quit poking me.”

His vision blurs, sets, settling into a fixed image of that beautiful damned boy. Daniel peers at him, curious, and he wonders if Armand hears the catch in his throat, the fine movements of the muscles, the ache in his jaw as he feels it clench. “What makes you say that?”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

“Don’t you feel it?”

The words are barely more than a whisper; seductive, addictive, persuasive, a gentle smile twisting the corners of the boy-demon’s mouth upwards at the other’s tense reserve and slurred reprimand. He stops, his fingertip resting only gently now against Daniel’s arm as though in rebellion, staking a silent claim.

“I feel it, Daniel. Your heart sings for me.”

Armand’s sharp fingertip is removed from his arm, slender hand sliding across the mortal’s prone chest to clutch the sheets on his far side, using them as leverage as the boyish frame pulls itself effortlessly upwards. He kneels beside Daniel on the mattress, leaning over him until tangled, auburn curls almost brush his cheek, staring down at him with that frighteningly preternatural, chestnut gaze as though he’s the most fascinating specimen of human life.

His demand is unspoken but nonetheless powerful. He will be taken notice of. Daniel will listen to him.

“Sometimes you run so far and so fast that I almost start to believe you don’t want to be found. Almost.”

Does he? Does he want to be found? Sometimes, no. Sometimes he’s felt the safest in a Fresno flop house or Amsterdam bordello, red light winking at him through the vinyl slats, an unfriendly demon eye, haunting him like his own vision of the devil.

And sometimes - sometimes he’s slumped over a payphone, coins rattling like his fingers on his last pack of smokes, and he calls Armand to take him home.

And isn’t he here now? Didn’t he come? Daniel doesn’t recall the push and the pull, doesn’t remember where the knot of their tug-of-war finally crossed the mark. Armand finds him anyway, in the Waldorf-Astoria or slumming it on a bench in Hyde Park. And as far as he runs, doesn’t Daniel also let him?

���You think?” Daniel growls, scratchy-timbered and aching for a glass of water. But his hand finds its way to touch that cheek - so fucking glacial, his fingertips brushing against a cold steel hull, for all the perfect flesh didn’t give. A chill runs up his arm, to touch this thing looming over him. This beautiful, awful thing. He laughs, low and throaty. “Maybe I should buy a submarine.”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

His beloved’s short-tempered quips might be more painful to hear, were it not for the fact that Armand knows (perhaps even better than Daniel himself does) just how besotted he is. Even were it not for the promise of the Blood, he knows that Daniel could not turn away from him now even if he so desperately wanted to. Their lives and fates have become so intertwined – after all, how could Daniel turn his back on the one person who understands him more than any other?

The reporter’s hoarse laugh has a wry, little smile blooming on Armand’s face all over again, the touch to his cheek pleasantly warm. He turns his head so that those brave fingertips catch just barely on the corner of his lips, dangerously close to teeth that could rip them off without hesitation. He wonders, if Daniel came face-to-face with a wild jaguar would he try to pet that, too?

“You know I could buy that for you too if you really wanted,” he husks against the prone fingers. “But wouldn’t you be terribly lonely all the way down there without me?”

With lazy, feline grace, he topples over, rolling across Daniel to tuck in against his side, writhing his way close beside the boy and resting his pretty, auburn head against Daniel’s shoulder, pressing so tightly against the inebriated young man that he has no choice but to pay notice.

“You could just love me instead, Daniel.”

It’s a strange kind of heaven they make together.

It takes no thought for Daniel to fold around the boy in his arms, to breathe in the copper curls, the slight body crushed, crushing - against him. Armand is so slender, so terribly, deceptively delicate. It’s almost a tragedy, the two of them embracing like this in the wan yellow light, midnight minutes ticking away like so many hours of his life.

“Of course I would.” Daniel murmurs into his hair. Muscles spasm at the corner of his lips, but it’s no smile. “I’d go crazy.”

His hand tremors.

“I would. I do. You don’t need to give me anything. Except the one thing you won’t.”

He regrets immediately, pang like a hot knife cutting through his gut. His stomach cramps, a shiver twisting through him as he swallows back bile. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he wants to say. I didn’t mean it, he wants to confess, and hold that cool body closer against him. But he did mean it, all his wretched viciousness and bitter hooch breath. He meant it, like he meant it all those times before.

“So do it. Goddamnit, why won’t you do it?”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

As quickly as he’s enveloped by the docile affections of his lover, they’re whisked away again as the age old argument once more raises its ugly head. He feels a strange, rather hollow sense of loss as the easy domestic bliss crumbles around them, Daniel’s hand shaking against him with all the bitterness and animosity that the young man can muster towards him.

Face betraying his disappointment, even though the regret underlying Daniel’s brash reaction is prominent against his mind, Armand pulls back, disentangles himself from the embrace as though it’s a punishment, sitting instead straight-backed against the headboard.

“I’ve told you so many times before, Daniel. The answer hasn’t changed. The answer will not change, regardless of how many times you ask me.”

Sad doe eyes glance reluctantly towards his companion, a frown disturbing the otherwise smooth flesh between his brows.

“I couldn’t bear to live with your eternal resentment, my love. Why can you not trust me when I tell you that this - whatever you think it is - is not what you want?”

If you loved me, you would not ask of me the one thing that I cannot give you.

“So you can bear to live with me dead? The fuck am I supposed to feel?” Daniel leans forward, coils of bedsprings protesting against the shift of weight. His feet swing over the side of the bed, barefoot on the whorls of carpet. His back is a faceless, unfriendly plane to Armand, slouched over his knees in as his head bows into his hands.

He can’t bear to look at Armand. He can’t bear that too-knowing, mournful look. Ages old.

“I’ve heard this before.”

From Armand, from Louis, too. It’s no gift, you don’t want this. But Daniel does want it. He can’t help but want it, this singing, killing blood in him. Only in drops! Agonizing, evil drops that Armand would dole out as he saw fit. And what did Armand care about agony it put him through? It’s a selfish, unjust thought. But he still thinks it.

That honeyed voice slithers into his mind, same as it always had. Daniel knows it so well now, he can hear it whispering things to him in the electric pulse of his brain, in the moments before sleep - in his dreams - in his nightmares - when he wakes. He hears it, knows its timbre, its faint accent and the way it sharpens when Armand feels pain, or rage, or the way he’s feeling right now.

“I’m tired.” He sighs. His body aches, and he’s dizzy even when he presses the palms of his hands to blackness against his eyes. And he’s tired of this fighting. Tired of hurting, tired of being hurt.

“I want to go home. Take me home, Armand.”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

In an act of uncharacteristic vulnerability, Armand stays rooted to the spot, moving only to pull his knees upwards to his chest as though trying to make himself smaller, as though wishing he could disappear altogether. He feels chilled right through to his bones by Daniel’s bitterness, the hateful burning of tears already working behind his eyes.

“You don’t know what you are asking me for,” he hisses defensively, his whole posture mimicking that of a coiled viper. “You have so many beautiful years, Daniel, and you would squander them away to become… this!”

In one whip-quick, agitated movement, he gestures towards his own being with one hand before pulling it back in towards himself, covering the palms of his hands with his sleeves protectively.

“Death is better than this, believe me; I’ve seen both and I know which one I would choose - which one any of us would choose - if given my time again.”

Face pinched with pain, he drags his sleeve across his eyes briskly where vicious red begins to well up from his tear ducts, leaving coppery stains smeared across the white cable knit, the evidence of his shame. Truthfully, he can’t even think of turning Daniel, of making him cold and distant, his stomach twisting with some strange, foreign anxiety at the idea alone. He wants to obey Daniel’s wishes, to take him home and forget all of this nastiness, but he CAN’T, the atmosphere too oppressive, choking his voice as he forces it out.

“Don’t you think I realise the consequences of my choice?”

“God damn you!” He grates, suddenly explosive. He moves with combustive, kinetic energy, hand swinging like a mallet against the bedside radio, plastic pieces imploding with a clatter against his fist and falling with a muffled thump against the motel carpeting.

“How the hell can you be what you are and tell me you love me, you son of a bitch.” He rounds on Armand, rage whiting out the image of the huddled, wounded boy curling into himself on the ruined bedspread. “What kind of sick nerve you’ve got. Maybe it was better when you let me starve in that cesspit. At least I came to terms with croaking it. Now you’re killing the both of us. So do the fucking vampire bullshit already. Put me down like a dog. Is it better now, Armand? Is it really any fucking better? I don’t want any goddamn twilight years! I want all of it! I want to be with you!”

His face is feverish, wild and glistening. For all the unsteady, gut-roiling omen of his liver, Daniel holds his ground. He boils with blown-out pupils, sweat pricking at his temples and chest and the soft flesh under his arms. “I want the blood. I want it. What’s the point without it?”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

It’s impossible to suppress an overtly human flinch as the radio goes to pieces and he can’t help but stare at the action bitterly, desperately wanting to reciprocate. One small, white hand balls into a fist, desperate to lash out, but no matter how badly tempted he is, he won’t – he could never put Daniel in harm’s way and with his preternatural strength, there’s no promising his safety were Armand to lose his temper.

“Stop it! STOP IT!”

The hoarse cry boarders on a scream, both fists slamming down either side of him on the old, worn mattress, undoubtedly adding a few more broken springs to its collection.

“How could you do it to me? Why are you doing it to me?”

Staring up at his lover balefully, he can’t stand to hold his anguished stare for long, burying his blood-streaked face in both hands, unrestrained sobs wracking his body now. He isn’t sure what’s worse – Daniel’s rage or the incessant reminder that someday, Armand will have to let him go. He isn’t ready for it; he isn’t sure he’ll ever be ready for it. And as much as it breaks his heart, the thought of cursing him for all time is still inconceivably worse.

“Why isn’t this enough for you, just as things are? Am I not enough for you, Daniel?”

Even Daniel flinches, eyes shuttering like from the flash of a camera bulb. His head turns - involuntary - for only a split second, but he feels stung; wounded by Armand’s naked despair, wounded that even this isn’t enough.

His hands hurt - every fiber of him hurts - a live wire, raw and ragged and sparking. That’s Daniel Molloy, boy-reporter: a ruined man, shorting out and burning himself up from the inside. Is this enough for you? He thinks. Enjoy before your warranty expires.

“Stop it, Jesus, you’re gonna — ” Daniel grimaces, blinking away the sight of Armand on the bed like that, so fragile and so monstrous. He isn’t sure what he meant to say, what words died in his throat as he half looks away, embarassed and ashamed by the nakedness of feeling. "Don’t you dare ask me that. Don’t you fucking ask me that. It’s not the same.”

Light pulses behind his eyes, pulls on the nerves woven through the lattice of his skull like the fistful of a careless child, and he brings up a hand to squint away the pain.

Fuck. Fuck.

“This isn’t some ‘til-death-do you-part’ bullshit vow. Don’t you have any idea what it’s like?” Daniel leans into the pain - it’s pissing him off, sharpening the edge. He offered an out - he did. And he knows it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t real; it was just some half-assed excuse, too tired for this familiar old fight. But Armand wouldn’t let this of all things die, and Daniel found his second wind. “Don’t come at me with pretty words about mortality. I’ve heard it before, from you and Louis and Keats and Neruda and Shelley. It’s all the same.”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

After everything that he’s lived through, consensually or otherwise, Daniel is the only one who, in this day and age, could possibly rip such unfiltered feeling from him – intentionally or otherwise. The intensity of this - of what they are - has such a habit of racing from 0 to 100 in milliseconds; entwined as lovers one moment and a raging war the next. And for what? All because Armand loves him more than Daniel thinks, than Daniel could ever comprehend. Even wretched and enraged, Armand could never bear to part with this and trade it for some cold, dead imposter.

“Then why won’t you listen?” he begs. “Do you think that we all say it for the sake of our hea-ealth?”

His voice, though reedy and underdeveloped, has always been so clear. Now, it is broken with hiccuped sobs and jumping like a scratched record.

“Of course I know what it’s like, I’ve been on both sides, haven’t I? And believe me, I would take death first. I would take death one thousand times before this!”

If it was so simple, if he thought that he could live with himself for it, of course he would change Daniel. But he knows that to do so would be a date worse than death. All of it, from the process of creation itself to the loss of the very essence of Daniel’s humanity… he can’t. He curls in on himself, arms coming to wrap loosely around his torso as though trying to comfort himself, the fight suddenly seeming to drain out of him and leave him helpless instead. He wipes his sleeves across his face and then leaves his wrist there to cover his mouth, to stifle any further cries.

It’s so much easier to be angry. It’s easier when Armand is angry, too. But this - this wretched, hiccoughing misery - Daniel doesn’t know what to do with this. How small Armand looks, folding in on himself in a kind of helpless resignation. Armand - giving up ? - he doesn’t know what it is, but the wrongness of it makes him angry.

How’s this any better? Daniel thinks. Living off crank and cough syrup. Not eating, not sleeping. He hasn’t seen the sunlight in weeks. This isn’t being alive. This is barely being human.

Where the hell do we go from here? It’s as much a thought for himself as a challenge, bold-faced; direct - to Armand. Where the hell do we go?

Daniel stares at him, bleary-eyed, barefoot among the broken things.

“Quit it,” he says lowly. “C’mon, just — ” Just what? Now that’s bad writing, building the suspense without fulfillment. This makes for the shittiest story. Daniel has always loved speculative fiction; worlds parallel to their own, something just close enough to see the reflection of what you know. But something different, something bigger than the awful, looming monotony of an ordinary life. It had been so goddamn simple to transcribe Louis’ words, to insert himself only in the spaces left in-between. “The boy” wasn’t really him, wasn’t really Daniel so much as it had been the world. The audience’s oeuvre into this fucked up, violent, beautiful other life he had tumbled into.

But he’s living it now, or - living alongside it. That’s worse. To be so close to feel it and never to break inside. No matter how many times Daniel might beat his fists against the shell, no matter how it fractures - how Armand fractures - he can find no purchase. And each time, he finds himself slipping, loose and unstrung, falling deeper and deeper into the void. Don’t you see, Armand? One of these days, I’m not going to get out again.

He doesn’t want to write this story anymore. Not now, not that it’s his.

“Goddamn you. So just kill me already. You’re doing it anyway. God damn you.”

Daniel’s fists clench and unclench, casting long, distorted shadows in the shitty light of the flophouse room. He sits again on the bed with the creak of the cheap metal springs, hunched and sullen next to the figure of the wounded boy weeping silently beside him. Daniel says nothing else, staring hollowly at the stain in the peeling wallpaper, imagining it resolving into the shape of a long-legged insect with fractal wings and the smell of blood.

[myghostmonument]

13 x Reader: Home

Notes: Wow this took forever! It’s entirely too long but hopefully still an enjoyable read; I couldn’t find a good way to split it up. I really enjoyed this request and it’s been stewing in my mind for a WHILE, which is where most of my first drafts are usually written. I have another one or two fics planned that will probably also be around this length (or longer), but I’m really focusing on making the majority of my requests more concise. lmao we’ll see. This is also gender neutral for the reader!! Yay! As always requests are open so long as you understand that I’m slooooow Summary [anon request]: Could please you do an OT3 fic with Thirteen/Reader/Yaz, (Ryan can be there too but as a friend) where they just finished a really messed up adventure and they all have to reassure each other they're ok and it's all fluffy and maybe some angst? Warnings: None WC: 5500 oops

It hadn’t hit you, not at first. There hadn’t been time initially; there so rarely ever was. Not when there was so much going on, so much to do. And even after, when you had slammed shut the doors of the TARDIS and left the planet behind, you were still riding the wave of exhilaration. It was that particular brand of adrenaline utterly unique to traveling with the Doctor, and it kept your mind focused on moving forwards, with nothing more distant than the here and now. It was glorious, chaotic, intoxicating. It was survival. It kept the awareness of even bodily injuries from distracting you, because it didn’t matter that you couldn’t make a fist with your left hand, or that Yaz’s shirt was more blood than anything else, or that the Doctor could only draw in measured, shallow breaths. The only thing that mattered was the next step, the next breath drawn, the next moment unfolded. Surviving. And when you had survived, when you leaned panting against the doors of the TARDIS and watched while the Doctor flew around the console, her hands a blur and her voice a continuous counterpart of conversation to the groaning of the timeship as it took flight away, away from there- that was when the wave was at its peak. It flooded you with triumph and coloured everything golden, bright. It was a sort of pride that said yes, we did it, another adventure completed, another win. So no, it didn’t hit you right away, the impact of what you had just seen. What you had just done. The choices you had made, the consequences you had watched unfold. It wasn’t till you stood swaying in the console room and watched as the Doctor and Yaz moved away that you started to feel it. To understand. Horror trickled through you, slowly at first, but building. Between one breath and the next, it was a flood. Your face felt cold even as your injured arm began to burn, and you couldn’t stop remembering, couldn’t stop seeing, not even when you closed your eyes- And then, nothing. Your mind had carefully and firmly blanked. At some point you had ended up in your room, sitting on the floor. You weren’t sure if that was by choice or not. It didn’t matter. You sat and stared at nothing, safer by far than closing your eyes. Your wounded arm was not exactly numb; you were aware of the pain. It just didn’t touch you. (You were also aware, distantly, that you should probably have followed Yaz and the Doctor to the medbay, but you hadn’t. Had just stood there, alone in the gently humming console, until your feet moved on their own, took you away.) It was Yaz who eventually found you, sitting against your bed with your knees drawn to your chest. She might have spoken to you, or she might not have. It was only when you realized that you were warmer and turned your head that you noticed her, settled down next to you on the floor. You shook your head slightly; you got the impression that you weren’t keeping track of time in an entirely coherent manner. You blinked slowly, realized belatedly that Yaz had said something. “What?” “I don’t want to be alone,” Yaz repeated, and paused. “Do you?” The words were raw, scraped too thinly over exhaustion and pain to be in any way gentle. But they were for all that kind. Kind, and sincere. Because they were coming from Yaz. What she said, she meant. “No,” you whispered, and leaned your head against her shoulder. Your hand found its way into hers without conscious effort or choice, or perhaps it was her hand that found yours. You both sat that way for a while, with clutching hands and distant eyes. You were still in a conflicting state of numb fog mixed intermittently with flashes of horror, but it was easier with Yaz there. Or if not easier, at least… better. She had seen the same things, had made the same choices, was living with the same memories. Eventually, a separate thought floated to the top of your mind, and you mumbled it into Yaz’s shoulder: “What’s the Doctor doing?” “Wondering why her friends are hiding on a floor, and not in the medbay where they’re supposed to be.” You felt Yaz jump, and you lifted your head, looking over the edge of your bed to see the Doctor framed in the doorway. Yaz leaned around the edge of the bed to look for herself, then settled back against you with a released breath. “She really loves making a dramatic entrance,” Yaz muttered, and despite everything, your lips twitched in an approximation of a smile. It was true. “I heard that,” the Doctor said as she moved into the room. Her boots appeared in your field of vision, followed abruptly by the rest of her as she crouched down in front of you and Yaz. You blinked, focusing on her face and noting idly how her ear-cuff glinted in the dim light as she turned her head from you to Yaz. Her lips were pressed into a thin line, and her eyes were narrowed. She looked worried. Tired. “You didn’t follow us to the medbay,” the Doctor said, and you realized that she was looking at you again. “Weren’t you hit by one of those blasters?” Her tone was neutral, but her eyes were flickering with a restless, almost angry tension as they moved down. You looked down as well. “I- didn’t think about it,” you said truthfully, looking blankly at your left arm. You felt Yaz move. “That looks bad,” she said, and the genuine concern in her voice reached you even through your hazy disinterest. “It’s not, but it does need tending,” the Doctor said, though she was looking at your face as she spoke, not your wound. “I didn’t think about it,” you repeated, your voice hollow. Something in the Doctor’s expression shifted, and you struggled to elaborate. You wanted to appease that look in the Doctor’s eyes, but it was hard to find words when emotions themselves eluded you. “I just- I- I didn’t-” you were trying to articulate, but you could feel those emotions (your pain, your memories) welling up in your chest, in your throat, and they were choking you. Yaz tightened her grip on your hand, and the Doctor’s expression shifted again. “Hey, alright, it’s fine, you don’t need to explain-” she began, soothingly, but the memories were still rising, building, and something had to give, something had to give. “- and I can’t- if I try- I can’t make it stop-” “Can’t make what stop-” “They’re… even when I- I close my eyes and I- I see it all again, again and again-” you shuddered and fell silent as you choked on your own words. Yaz was also silent, but tears were running slowly down her cheeks and her own gaze was glazed and distant with remembered horrors. The Doctor’s lips had parted slightly, but as her gaze moved from you to Yaz and she saw the tears, her lips flattened again, pressed tight over words she did not say. They were present in her eyes, though. The Doctor was tired, hurting, and now she was angry too. Angry for the pain she saw in her companions, for the damage done. But her voice when she spoke was absent of that anger. She was good at that, at misdirection. Only her eyes ever betrayed her true self when she let her guard slip. But you weren’t looking at her eyes, or anything else. Nothing in that room, anyways. “Oh,” the Doctor said softly, “oh, my poor fam. Come here, you lot.” Leaning forwards, she pulled you both towards her and into an embrace. You closed your eyes as your face pressed up against the fabric of the Doctor’s coat and inhaled the familiar scent (vanilla, with hints of machinery and something else, something distinctly her). You could feel Yaz next to you, your hands still entwined. It was an awkward, precarious embrace, huddled as you were on the floor and with only four good arms to go around for the three of you. Yes, it was awkward. It was also suddenly as necessary to you as air, as the next drawn breath. You shuddered again as the Doctor spoke, her voice still gentle and absent of the storm that lurked in her eyes. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” she murmured, her head bent over you and Yaz. Her own eyes slid closed, and you could hear the exhaustion in her voice, the way it rasped slightly. She had taken damage too, you remembered.  Anger stirred in you, a sharp jab that pushed away some of your numb fog. You lifted your injured arm and wrapped it painfully around the Doctor, holding her to you as tightly as you could. “Are- you okay?” you asked the Doctor, your voice muffled by her shirt and coat. The Doctor made a quiet sound, something not quite a word, and you felt her shift, pulling you more fully into her arms while her head bent closer over yours, her nose resting in your hair. You could feel her heartbeats against your own chest, and unconsciously you began to match your breathing to hers. “Oh, yeah. You know me, I’m the king of okay.” The words were almost (almost) convincing, falling breezily from the Doctor’s mouth with what was close to her normal light, irreverent tone. Close. She obviously heard the discrepancy too, and cleared her throat. “Have you seen anything like that before?” Yaz asked. “Have you- done that-” she trailed off bleakly, and the Doctor was silent for a few moments. “I’ve been traveling for a long time,” she said finally, quietly. “I’ve seen the worst of the universe, in so many forms and species. Death and famine and war and senseless, needless cruelty, selfishness and fear…” her arms tightened around you and Yaz as she spoke. “But I’ve seen the best of the universe too. People who leap to protect others without even a thought, who stand in front of those in need and go above and beyond to make the universe a better, kinder place.” She pressed a soft kiss to your head, then did the same to Yaz. “Does it get easier?” Yaz asked. “Having to see the- the worst bits?” Again, the Doctor was silent, and this time the moment stretched just a little bit too long. “Come on then,” she said, and she had layered her words with that breezy cheerfulness again, avoiding Yaz’s question. “Enough moping around on the floor. How about some tea? I love tea-” she was moving as she spoke, extricating herself from the embrace and standing. She helped up Yaz, then held out a hand to you. You started to reach up with your injured arm, then dropped it with a wince and proffered your other hand. “Mmm,” the Doctor said as she pulled you up, her eyes sharp on your bad arm. “But before tea, you need patched up.” She had kept a grip on your arm, eyed it critically while moving it gently back and forth. You blinked slowly. The presence of Yaz and the Doctor (and the touch of their skin on yours) was an anchor, but you were still drifting as your mind tried to shield you. To forget. “I’ll start the tea,” Yaz said, wiping surreptitiously at her cheeks. The Doctor’s eyes moved to her briefly and her expression softened, though she did not comment, only nodded. The three of you left, Yaz vanishing in the direction of the kitchen while you trailed after the Doctor (who couldn’t seem to make herself walk slowly to save her life) into the medbay. It didn’t take particularly long to clean and bandage your arm (the wound was largely superficial, if painful) and soon you and the Doctor joined Yaz in the kitchen. True to her word, Yaz had started the tea, and when you came in it was to the sight of her straining to reach some mugs, her face tight with frustration and pain. “I got it,” the Doctor said, stepping forwards quickly. For someone who was by the most generous of estimates barely an inch taller than Yaz, the Doctor nonetheless rarely missed an opportunity to flex her superior height. You rather suspected that Ryan and Graham had begun storing items in higher and higher places, and for precisely that reason. (You were for example sure that the coat hook in the console room had been stealthily and consistently adjusted until it was several inches higher, and counting. One of these days the Doctor was going to try to hang up her coat and find herself to reach, and then… well, you weren’t sure what would happen but you doubted popcorn would be out of place.) You’d been meaning to broach the topic with Yaz and brainstorm possible counter attacks against Ryan and Graham’s mischief… perhaps the TARDIS could be wheedled into lowering the door frames? You accepted a mug of tea automatically from Yaz, your gaze distant as your thoughts pieced themselves together sluggishly, disjointed. Ryan and Graham… you looked up suddenly, and met the eyes of the Doctor. She’d been watching you, and there was a crease next to her left brow. “Are you- are- Ryan and Graham?” you said haltingly, not sure why the words were so reluctant to form. “Yeah, we should probably be picking them back up soon?” Yaz said, though her tone made it into a question as she too looked at the Doctor. “You know how Graham gets,” she added with a faint smile. “Right you are,” the Doctor agreed, setting down her tea. Her eyes flicked between you and Yaz, and her lips pressed together again over more unspoken words. “I’ll just be a mo,” she said, and slipped away. A vacuum of silence was left in her wake, and you and Yaz looked at each other. The memories seemed somehow brighter, more real in that ringing silence. As if they filled the room with a swelling, tangible presence and left no room for you and Yaz. She must have felt it too, because after a moment she stepped to your side, and her free hand found yours again. Not long after the familiar groaning wheeze of the TARDIS filtered into the room, followed by a brief silence and then muffled voices, growing louder. You had one of those sudden painfully clear thoughts that cut so sharply through the fog, and realized that you were not prepared to talk to Ryan and Graham. Yaz’s grip on your hand was suddenly tight, or perhaps it was your grip on hers. You clung to each other, silent in solidarity and apprehension. The voices grew louder, then suddenly muted as another voice spoke over them. It was the Doctor, and though you couldn’t hear her actual words, you could hear the cautionary tone of her voice. There followed a few more exchanges, more subdued, and then a brief silence. When the Doctor stepped back into the room, she was alone. She lifted a hand and brushed hair out of her eyes as she approached you and Yaz. Though her face was drawn tight with exhaustion, her eyes were as sharp as ever as they focused on the two of you, and she noted immediately the way you were clutching each other with pale, wan faces. “Oh,” she said, and there was something so deeply, painfully sad in that one quiet word that you felt as if it shivered in the air, in your heart. You were too raw for it, and closed your eyes- no! You opened them again, afraid of what you saw when you closed them, when you shut out the distractions of the world, when you let yourself still and think and- There was a tug on your hand. You blinked, and realized that the Doctor had grasped Yaz’s other hand and was pulling her away, and you with them. You followed as they moved to the library. Partially because following was easier than resisting, but mostly because when all else failed, you had that, had them. You would follow those two women into anything. “We’ve got tea and biscuits,” the Doctor said, sitting down on a sofa next to Yaz. You had just settled on Yaz’s other side when the Doctor had snapped her fingers and leapt back to her feet. “I know! A fire, we should have a fire. That’s proper cozy, just what we need.” She took off her coat and tossed it over the arm of the sofa before moving to crouch in front of the fireplace. She muttered all-but inaudibly to herself for a few moments as she poked around (you thought you heard a flippant ‘this should be fine’ which didn’t inspire an awful lot of confidence). A few experimental buzzes on the sonic however produced a very respectable fire indeed, and one that didn’t seem too likely to burn down the room. “There,” the Doctor said in a satisfied voice, rocking back on her heels and dusting off her hands. “Cozy.” She placed her hands on her knees and glanced briefly over her shoulder at you and Yaz. Her hair had fallen across her face again, and strands of it were limned in gold by the light of the fire. You stared at her, crouched, disheveled, tired, shadowed. Yet she glowed. She glowed. She caught your eye and smiled, pushing some of her hair out of her face. “You’re going to stay with us?” Yaz asked, moving over as the Doctor resettled herself on the couch between you and her. “‘Course,” the Doctor said easily, leaning back against the cushions and crossing her legs. She reached out and grasped one of Yaz’s hands, then yours. Her fingers curled gently around yours and she gave a soft squeeze. “For a bit, anyway. I think we should be together after… after that. And,” she added, an attempt at sternness as she looked between you, “this seems better than huddling on a floor.” The sternness was somewhat undercut by the way she squeezed your hand again, however. You leaned your head against her shoulder, staring sightlessly into the fire. On your other side Yaz copied you, and the Doctor made a quiet sound, dropping quick kiss on Yaz’s head, and then yours. “My fam,” she said softly. “I’ve got you.” “We’ve got each other,” Yaz corrected, and you nodded in agreement, feeling the Doctor’s hair brush across your face. “Right,” the Doctor said, and her voice sounded odd. She cleared her throat. “Do you… want to talk about it?”  Your breath seized. The shard of bright, unflinching memory pierced your fog, tore it to shreds like damp paper. You stiffened, clutching convulsively at the Doctor’s hand and turning your face into her shoulder, away from the light. Your chest had tightened at the thought of- at the thought- and your arm jerked as it gave a sullen pulse of pain, as if the conversation had woken it. “Or… maybe we just talk, about any old thing,” the Doctor continued. She was looking down at you, and for a moment the reflected firelight was nothing compared to the fire in her eyes. You couldn’t see that, though. You could just feel her warmth against you, and her gentle hand around yours. Yes, it was only her eyes that ever betrayed her. “That sounds good,” you heard Yaz say faintly. So that’s what you did, the three of you. You talked. Mostly the Doctor, spinning stories of past adventures and regenerations and friends. The stories often brought up more questions than than they resolved, but that was okay. You had long since accustomed yourself to the Doctor’s whimsical and rapid-fire method of speaking, the way she blended the ordinary and extraordinary with effortless, capricious casualty. She was youthful and brilliant; she was ancient and utterly mad. She was both the raging storm and the anchor that kept you safe, and as she spun her stories in that quiet room you felt your mind finally begin to quiet. Not all the way, not even close, but… a veneer of normalcy crept over you, and you relaxed. Eventually, impossibly, you fell asleep. You hadn’t wanted to, knowing what you’d see when you closed your eyes with nothing left to confront but yourself. Those thoughts, those memories. But you weren’t alone, and the Doctor’s familiar voice (along with her presence, and Yaz’s) slowly suffused you with enough peace that your mind quieted. And with the quiet came, blessedly, sleep. Your head was in the Doctor’s lap at that point. She had draped an arm over your side, and the gentle circles made by her fingers had been a countermelody to her voice, another anchor. At some point Yaz drifted off as well. She had moved to the floor (she said she liked her feet toasty, though the Doctor suspected that in truth her shoulder was aching) and dozed with her back against the sofa and her head just touching yours as it rested against the Doctor’s thigh. The Doctor stopped talking, eventually. But she did not sleep. If you had been awake, if you had seen the fire reflected in her ancient, solemn gaze, you might have wondered if she too was afraid of what she would see behind closed eyes. So there was silence for a long time. Until- “How are they doing?” The Doctor looked away slowly from the hearth to look at Ryan. She gave him a tired smile as he lurked in the doorway; his posture was worried, unsure. But at her smile the young man stepped farther into the room, his gaze moving between you and Yaz. The Doctor followed his gaze, her eyes fixing on Yaz in the flickering firelight. Yaz always managed to look worried when she slept, so that at least wasn’t new. But the Doctor felt that the policewoman’s face was more stark, the skin more tightly drawn over her bones than normal… and the heavy bandaging on her shoulder didn’t do much to help dispel the image. The Doctor’s gaze moved to the side, followed slowly by her head and her hair fell partially across her face as she looked down at her other sleeping companion. You. It was less normal for you to look so harried, so upset when sleeping, and the Doctor’s eyes might have tightened as she stared. But her hand that rested on your side remained soft, gentle. Protective. “I don’t know,” she answered finally, and even she could hear how tired her voice sounded. How helpless. “Not worse.” “That’s something, then,” Ryan said, though his tone lacked conviction. The Doctor looked up at him and managed another tired smile. There was no joy or happiness in it, but there was genuine appreciation for Ryan and his kindness. “Yes, it is.” “If you want a break or anything, I can sit with them-” “No.” Guttural, low, raw. The word was an instinctive reaction that left no time or room for softening, and even the Doctor was startled when it left her lips. Just one word, but it had been torn from a primal place of raised hackles, bared teeth, flashing eyes. “No,” she repeated, more gently. “I’ve got this.” Her voice was still ever so polite, and it didn’t match her eyes even a little bit. Ryan nodded cautiously, his eyes moving from the Doctor’s left hand (which had moved to cup your head, fingers splayed as if to shield) to her right (which had dropped to Yaz’s un-bandaged shoulder). The gestures were small, but there was nothing subtle about them, and Ryan was wise enough not to push. Not when he saw the cracks in the Doctor’s composure, confined though they were to her eyes (and to that one devastating word). For someone normally so open and upfront with her emotions… it was more alarming than if she had shouted. Those bared fangs and flashing eyes lurked just beneath the surface of her familiarity, a familiarity which suddenly seemed so thin, so insubstantially draped over the ancient, feral thing that she truly was. Ryan had to remind himself again that this person, this friend of his, was not human. But she was his friend, and he did not fear her. So he nodded again, and he did what friends do. He offered his help once more, even in the face of her pain and rejection. “Well, if you do need anything, Graham and I are around, okay?” “I’ll keep it in mind,” the Doctor said, and the wildness had receded from her eyes as she watched him move to go. (Receded, yes, but it lurked. Always, it lurked.) “Ryan-” he turned, looked at her, “thank you. Really.” Ryan nodded, because he heard the tacit apology, because he understood. He left the Doctor alone with you and Yaz, once again staring into the depths of the fire with unreadable eyes while her hands remained as they were, draped protectively over you both. Keeping you to her. When you woke a while later, for a moment you thought she had gone. Then you heard the soft sounds of murmured voices and stifled weeping. You opened your eyes slowly, forgetting for a moment where you were or why there was such a heavy, cold weight in your gut. Then you remembered. You lifted your head and blinked blearily. The fire had died down to sullen embers, and the light in the room was muted, somber. You realized eventually that you were looking at the back of the Doctor’s head, and she was sitting on the floor cross-legged next to Yaz. “-nothing to be ashamed of,” the Doctor was saying. Yaz wiped almost angrily at her face, and you realized she had been the source of weeping. “I’m not,” Yaz said, her voice low and miserable. “Or- well, maybe I am. I mean, I have training for this kind of thing. Trauma and violence, and that sort-” “Training isn’t meant to produce apathy,” the Doctor interrupted firmly. “Training means you can still act and handle yourself in a tense situation, not that you’re unaffected by it, especially after.” “Well, yes but-” “And,” the Doctor continued, slightly louder, “I doubt training for the Sheffield police covers intergalactic warfare, hm? More parking tickets, fewer bio-morphic super-weapons, possibly?” Yaz smiled despite herself and ducked her head. “You did brilliantly,” the Doctor added, quieter. “That was-” she hesitated. “Horrible,” Yaz whispered, and the Doctor reached over, grabbed her hand. “Yes.” There was a lengthy silence, and though you couldn’t see the Doctor’s face, you could see when she took in a deep breath and tensed her shoulders before speaking again. “I can take you home,” the Time Lord said softly, as if the words didn’t tear at her as they left her mouth. But even you could see how rigidly she held herself. “If you want-” “NO!” The Doctor actually winced as you and Yaz both shouted at the same time, turning to look at you with a scrunched nose as you shoved yourself upright with your good arm. “No,” you repeated. “Absolutely not,” Yaz added, and despite the recent tears her voice was steady. The Doctor looked between the two of you. Her expression was serious, determined; she fully intended to take you and Yaz home if asked. But you could see the burgeoning hope in her eyes. The relief.  “I can’t promise that this is the last time,” she warned. “It could happen again. It probably will. I would understand if you wanted to go home-” “We said no,” Yaz interrupted. She was still holding the Doctor’s hand, and you slid stiffly off the sofa so that you could crouch on the Doctor’s other side and grab that hand too. “We are home,” you said. You might have tilted your head, gestured at the room. But your eyes remained steady on the two women. Home. “But-” “We are home,” Yaz repeated, firmly. “We’re a fam, right?” The Doctor was uncharacteristically silent as she looked from Yaz to you, then down at the chain made by your linked hands. You saw her throat move as she swallowed. You met Yaz’s eyes, and then the two of you leaned over and enveloped the Doctor in an embrace. Your face rested somewhere between the Doctor’s neck and shoulder, and you could feel the delicate flutter of her pulse (as well as Yaz’s hair tickling your nose). It wasn’t even remotely comfortable, that embrace. You were all of you stiff (injured, exhausted) and your arms and legs met in a lumpy, disorganized, awkward jumble. And you wouldn’t trade it for the world. Yours, or any of the others you and seen, any you had yet to see. This was home. The three of you remained that way for several quiet, fragile moments. Even the Doctor was silent, and you could feel the hitch in her breaths. It might have been from the smoke inhalation, from her injury… but you didn’t think so. You could still feel her rapid pulse, could still feel her hand gripping yours so tightly. Could still remember the fear in her eyes when she spoke of leaving you... and the relief when you refused. Several moments of fragile silence, that stretched into the shadowed corners of the room and to the stars beyond. Then you felt the Doctor stiffen, as if remembering something. Her chest rose as words made their way to her mouth, and some sliver of premonition (or perhaps more accurately, past experiences) made your lips twitch into the beginnings of a smile before her words were fully formed. “How do you lot keep ending up on the floor?! There’s furniture, proper furniture, and yet once again I find you like this- funny, is it?” the last words were delivered to Yaz, who had begun to giggle. It was infectious, and you began to as well, you face still pressed against the Doctor’s neck. “You two started it,” you pointed out, your voice somewhat muffled. “No, Yaz started it,” the Doctor said automatically, as if scoring a point. Yaz lifted her head and gave her a dirty look. “I- hey! It’s not like either of you had to join me-” “But you did start it,” you replied, giggling again in response to Yaz’s indignant sputter. “That’s- hang on, you started it! Back in your room!” “Well, then you’re both copy-cats who have no one to blame but yourselves,” you said loftily, and were rewarded when both women made sounds of outrage. It only made you laugh harder, especially when an exasperated Doctor tried in a grand gesture to stand up, but utterly failed to escape the tangled embrace. Eventually the noise attracted Ryan and Graham, who poked their heads cautiously into the room. The apprehension that had lined their faces shifted into confusion, and ended up somewhere between amusement and exasperation. “They’re mad,” Graham observed, absently taking a bite out of sandwich that Ryan didn’t care to guess the contents of. Ryan was silent as he watched for a moment longer, taking in the gasping, arguing, laughing pile that was the three of you. Your arms were still entwined, and Yaz had her head thrown back against the couch as she giggled. The Doctor was still making an effort at standing (and was unsurprisingly in the midst of delivering what appeared to be a lecture, though it was largely undercut by the amused curve of her lips) but was thwarted, both by Yaz’s entangled legs, and by her coat which had slipped off the soft to drape across all three of you- indeed, your face was completely covered by it, and Ryan could only hear muffled sounds of laughter and protest coming from beneath it. “Reckon so,” he said finally. Graham noted with some surprise that he was smiling. “C’mon, let’s leave them be. They’ll be fine.” And he was right.  It would take time, of course. All things do. But you all had each other. You were, after all, a fam. You would be fine. There was still so much of the universe to see.

[normal-goatboy]

heart pumping blood

Pairing: Carver Hawke/Merrill Words: 3050 Summary: The kids are momentarily stranded with Merrill’s clan

Read on ao3

The glow washes over him, harsh against his eyelids, waves rocking unrelenting. Made it another night. His insides may never recover, twisted all up in knots. Carver cracks a glance and swears. Thatched ceiling slowly rotating, straw poking out at angles. He isn’t at sea; the motion is in his head.

He’s mid rolling over, anticipating minding his head when it occurs there’s no top bunk above him to mind. This is not his house.

Sitting bolt upright is neither a good course of action for his stomach nor his head. He groans and heaves, and then gasps as Merrill’s voice finds him.

“You should lie back down. I expect you’ll be a bit dizzy.”

He does so, clenching his jaw against another wave of nausea, vision blurring as he lowers himself. Maker, this is the sickest he’s felt in years. Maybe ever. He must have been very drunk.

“I’m so sorry, vhenan. I feel a bit responsible.”

When he opens his eyes again, she’s crouched next to him, and he reels. He’s ruined it. The few times he’s even been in her house, he’s left with a kiss at the most, and now he’s undressed in her bed and doesn’t even remember.

“What’re you sorry for?” he mumbles. His mouth tastes of vomit and blood and grit.

She looks at him sideways. “Do you know where we are? What’s the last thing you remember?”

Someone sharpening a dagger, Marian laughing, flashes of black and red. His last coherent memory is of following Marian out of the house, the tip of her staff bouncing behind her head. It was afternoon. How long ago?

“We were headed to Sundermount,” he says, and then it rushes back. Those beastly giant spiders. Hands and knees in the dirt, oh Carver, not on my boots. He can still hear Marian’s laughter faintly repeating in his ears. For a panicked moment, he thinks he might vomit over the edge of the cot, but he braces against his boiling insides until it’s passed. Merrill backs up incrementally, and he tries to think of anything but those things and their fangs, poison in his veins.

“I’ve never seen anyone react to spider venom like that,” she says, a hint of relief in her voice, alongside what sounds dangerously close to amusement. “You must be quite sensitive to it.”

Sensitive, that’s just great. Merrill moves to perch next to him, her hand flitting up towards his face. She cards a hand through his hair, comforting until her delicate fingers come away with white webbing pinched between them.

He shudders as she flicks it onto the floor. Her face creases, a hand on her chin, “I should have seen it. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Where did- I don’t see any bites,” Carver says, tentatively lifting the skins draped over him. He can’t feel his upper thighs at all.

“They’re not terribly big. And they’re all treated and bandaged now. The healer said it’s just a matter of letting the toxin run its course.”

She isn’t looking at him anymore, thankfully. She glances around the room, crosses over to a chair with some clothing tossed over the back, his sword leaning against the wall behind it.

The Keeper agreed to let us stay here until you’re ready to make the journey back. She’ll expect you to thank her, just so you know.”

“I know,” he says, more irritably than he meant to. He reaches for his clothes, but finds he has little desire to move. “Did my sister leave?”

“She went back to the city with Varric. I told her I would see to you.”

Varric was there. Fist to his mouth and Marian leaned sniggering into his shoulder.

Merrill’s put on a dark green tunic that billows around her slight frame, loose around the arms. “You should sleep more. It’s quite early still.”

He curls into himself, letting his limbs fall heavy into a position that’s almost comfortable if he doesn’t think about it too much. Eyes closed, he listens to the rustling and shuffling of Merrill trying to be quiet moving about the room. His chest lurches when she runs her hand over his shoulder on her way out. She said it’s early still; he must have lost several hours.

But he smiles to himself because she called him vhenan, and though she might not think he knows what that means, he does. He thinks he does anyway.

Carver doesn’t exactly sleep, but he can’t do much other than lie there burning and shivering and cursing Marian, spiders, the Maker, and anyone else who may have been involved in this turn of events.

The bites are on his ass, he discovers. Well, one is, and the others are on the backs of his thighs. Marian’s laughter makes a bit more sense now; she’s forever found that sort of thing hilarious.

Merrill confirms it when she returns. “She felt very badly about it.”

“Nice of her,” he grumbles.

She laughs softly and turns away. He is making things uncomfortable with his mood, something he has a talent for or a habit of or whatever his sisters have always said.

She’s pouring water into a cup from a flask, the curve of her hip, the space between her thighs shadowed when the light catches her clothes. It feels familiar somehow, and a sudden but not unpleasant thought descends on him, that he’d like to see her like this every morning.

Just as soon as it comes, he chases it away. “Is that for me?”

“You’re meant to drink as much as you can,” she says, turning to him and raising the flask. Her left arm is bandaged where it wasn’t before. “You need to replace your fluids.”

He’s nervous he’ll spew the water right back, but he doesn’t. “So… we’re with your clan, then?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, then, “I’m surprised. I thought you’d laugh at the bit about fluids.”

She’s teasing, but something cloudy has crept into her voice since he asked about her clan. “No, I- I mean,” he struggles, “I’m not the one who- I’m not Isabela.”

He gets a smile for that. “No, certainly not. Your boots aren’t nearly tall enough.”

It gets worse before it gets better. The water comes back up just a moment later, as if his stomach has suddenly reversed its stance on fluids. And the healer makes it sound like he was even worse last night.

“I see you’re not on the floor now, at least.”

He never learns the healer’s name, an older pot-bellied man, hair graying around the ears. When he speaks, he doesn’t look at either of them, which makes Carver itchy and irritated, the way he feels when people talk to Marian and act as if he isn’t there.

The way almost everyone does.

She left him here, her own brother, an inconvenience to her plans. He can only imagine what’s so damned important, that took precedence over his being violently ill and apparently lying on the floor at some point.

Probably Anders. Probably… whatever they get up to when they go out for days at a time. She can’t be going home; mother would throw a fit.

She likely already is. Fuck.

The sun is going down by the time his fever breaks. Carver wipes down his face and chest, but still feels sweaty and grimy when he leaves the little structure.

“I didn’t think the Dalish… built things,” he murmurs to Merrill when he finds her sitting cross-legged on a log. His knees shake when he settles next to her, and he remembers her unstrapping his sword from his back yesterday and carrying it for him.

“They don’t usually. Nothing permanent. But w- they don’t expect to leave soon, and the weather here is tricky.”

She was writing in a little book, but she put it away when she saw him coming. About the camp there’s movement, back and forth, figures dark against the sky’s dusky pinks and blues. They’re cooking, cutting, cleaning - about the same activity as you’d find in Kirkwall or Lothering or wherever, except outdoors. That grumpy woodworker has his coveted blue bark, and the slow rhythmic scraping of his tools is oddly soothing, makes everything else quiet in comparison.

The Keeper finds them, asks after him. Her voice is kind, but her eyes flicker to Merrill’s arm, wrapped just underneath the elbow, back to him, and narrow.

“What happened to your arm?” he asks once she’s gone.

He forgot to thank her.

She touches it, puts her hand over it like she’s hiding it. “We can talk later.”

“Who is Mythal?”

A very old man squats in front of a group of restless kids, all jabbering and climbing over each other. They answer, but not loudly enough for Carver to hear them. He only hears the man as he replies to them.

“All-Mother, protector, keeper of justice…”

Merrill must notice him looking. “That’s Paivel. He’s our story-teller.”

“And what did she do?” Paivel asks.

Carver remembers he and Bethany sitting in the Chantry in a group like that one, some Sister or another talking at them. They didn’t ask questions, though; they only talked. Beth always sat at the front, while he hunched in the back and stared longingly out the window.

His stomach growls.

“...from the sea, yes…” Paivel is saying.

“I heard that,” Merrill smiles sly, and inclines her head towards his center.

“Yes, the moon, that’s right, Adara. Now what-”

Carver puts a hand to his belly. Less sore than it was. “Heh, yeah, I guess I’m…”

She nods, brushes off her bum when she stands, turns around three quarters or so like a dog. The way she nearly always does when she stands up. “I’ll get you something.”

“...and quelled Elgar’nan’s rage, so that the sun could return, and the world be remade. What does this story tell us...”

The others avoid her, part around her as she moves through them. No words, that he can hear at least, but glares, grimaces. There’s a shoulder bump, brief enough to be accidental, but it isn’t. She doesn’t react. His head buzzes and his throat hurts. When she carefully hands him a steaming flat piece of bread, he has to unclench his fist to take it from her.

She called him vhenan. He wasn’t imagining it. And he thinks he knows what it means.

Eating was a good idea. He feels sturdier, more focused. And ready to get out of here. He almost asks Merrill if she’d like to go now, but it doesn’t make sense to leave in the dark.

They stay one more night, he on the same cot as before, her elsewhere. He wishes he knew where. He wishes he’d at least asked her if she’d like to go home.

He wakes to arguing outside, and wishing hardens into regret.

“I am not a child-”

“I understand that. I wonder if you do, Merrill.”

He slept in his clothes this time. He still feels vaguely hungover.

“I wonder if you’ve considered-”

“Even if I hadn’t, haven’t you conjured every horrid scenario, every-” Merrill’s voice climbs several steps, threatening to break, “dire consequence you could think of by now? And haven’t I answered you? Every time, haven’t I-”

They stop abruptly as he rounds the corner, two faces whipping towards him.

He doesn’t say anything, and wouldn’t be able to think of anything if he had intended to.

Merrill looks him up and down. He must look awful. “We should go.”

The Keeper is taller than Merrill, and standing up straighter. She is slightly out of breath, and looking at him like he’s a fox in her hen coop.

“I’ll get your pack,” he says.

They don’t go back to Kirkwall. She heads further up the mountain without waiting for him, and he has to run to catch up to her.

Now even she’s leaving him behind.

He shouts after her once he’s caught sight of her again, and she turns quickly as if she’s startled to see him there.

And something jumps out behind her.

“Merrill!”

She yelps and lets out a wave of energy, knocking both he and something brown and furry back a few paces.

He stays on his feet. The goat tumbles backward and rolls, hooves flying.

It was a goat. “Oh,” he says, slinging his sword onto his back again, “I thought that was…”

Merrill nods and straightens. “I know.”

She thinks he’s an idiot. He’s sweating again, exhausted, and he needs a bath. And no matter where he goes, no one wants him there.

“Can we-” he shrugs, exasperated. “Can we go home?”

A sharp intake of breath, and she crumples, her hand over her mouth, and everything aches.

“Merrill…”

He’s ruined it. If it weren’t for him, she would have left two days ago and none of this would have happened. She wouldn’t be standing here crying. She’d be probably doing whatever Marian’s doing right now.

Feeling useless, he takes a few tentative steps towards her because, well, there’s no one else here to do it. She doesn’t pull away when he lays a hand on her shoulder; she leans into him, her head on his chest.

“I’m sorry, Carver,” she says.

She called him vhenan.

“No,” he replies, arms around her shoulders, and leaves it at that.

“Can we sit for a while,” she asks, “first?”

She leads them to a small lake off the path, and he leaves her to sit on her own while he washes off. Even in summer, the water is freezing. It feels awful and nice at the same time.

He pulls his trousers back on, his boots, stubborn on wet legs, and finds her again.

She’s sitting on a rock with her knees pulled up to her chest. She looks like a ghost in the fog, like something mysterious. “Do you ever feel like,” she says after a while, “everyone in the world knows something that you don’t? Something so obvious they wouldn’t even know to tell you?”

“All the time,” he answers without hesitation. “Like if someone couldn’t see colors or something.”

“That’s how it’s been since we got here,” he says. He doesn’t even remember getting here, not really. “I feel stupid. I- What’s going on? What happened to your arm?”

She winces. He must have spoken too harshly.

“Blood magic?”

A nod. “What I’m doing isn’t safe.” She’s not crying anymore, her voice more confident than he expected. “But I know that, and I’m being- I’ve taken precautions.”

He should disapprove. That’s what his father would do, what Marian would do. Though lately, he isn’t entirely certain he knows that about Marian. “Merrill…”

“This is what I’m supposed to do. I’ve studied for this my entire life. This is- This is what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t understand why it’s all gone so wrong.”

She’s crying again, a shaking hand wiping her nose and then thrust out in front of her as if she’s choking someone. “I don’t understand. And there’s no one I can go to. A Keeper is supposed to help, but she-” She puts her head between her knees, and he wants to take what’s hurting her and snap it in two.

“I don’t know why you’re any of you doing this,” he says.

She looks up at him, questioning. “Why torture yourselves over something that’s gone?” he asks. He’s speaking louder than he should, his voice an intrusion on the peaceful scene in front of them. “Why does everyone pray to gods that don’t listen to them? I don’t understand it. Why dwell?”

“What would you have us do?”

She says it gently, not intending to scold him or make him feel stupid, so he tries not to feel that way anyway.

He tries. “I… I don’t know. Look forward instead of back, I guess. That’s- I don’t know. All anyone talks about around me is what they used to be.”

Merrill shakes her head. “It’s different for you, for your family. You know where you’ve been. All we have is what we’ve been. And from what I do know, it’s worth searching out.”

She sounds sure now, in a quiet way. He sighs.

“You’re a lot smarter than me.”

“No I’m not,” she says immediately. A reflex, politeness.

Her ears are flushed. He touches behind one of them, soft with his knuckles, the backs of his fingers, and she jumps a little.

“Sorry,” he says.

“No, it’s-” She hugs him, slipping arms around his waist, and he hugs back. It’s been too long since they haven't had eyes on them.

She’s warm, her face wet and pressed against him, and he should have put his shirt back on. As if she’s read his mind, she says, “Carver, don’t you ever wear a shirt?”

He laughs weakly. “Uh…”

“I’m teasing. I like it.”

She called him vhenan.

“You’re not alone,” he says. “Not if you don’t want to be.”

Arms squeeze him tighter. “The Keeper doesn’t like you. Doesn’t-” She seems to think better of that statement, “Doesn’t approve of you.”

“You told her?”

“Not intentionally. She has a way of just knowing things.”

That’s what she says, but she’s hugging him still. And she likes it when he doesn’t wear a shirt. She shifts fully into his lap, fits in the space between there and his chin easily, her back against his chest. She’s light, easy to hold. No trouble at all.

He waits for her to tell him either way.

“I don’t care about that. Do you care?” She lifts her arm, and he catches it, examines the wrapping, where she bound it up.

“Does it hurt?” he asks.

“Not anymore.”

“I want to- What does vhenan mean?”

She tilts her head back to look at him. “It means ‘heart.’ Ma vhenan, my heart. I’m sorry, I assumed you knew, but I shouldn’t have.”

“I was just making sure.” He pulls her against him again, backs straight and even. “I want to help however I can. I don’t know if that’s what I should do, but I want to.”

He wants her to be safe.

“Just keep me company,” she says. “That’s all the help I need.”

“I can do that.”

[dontcallmecarrie]

By Myself But Not Alone

Another day, another test, another fic-idea-that-won’t-leave-me-alone. Specifically: time-travel fixits are really fun to see, but there’s a few takes on it that’ve stuck with me throughout the years, across fandoms. Even more specifically: ones where it’s not just one person waking up in the past, but several, and not always in the same place. Add in my weird mood where anything I touch turns to not-crack, plus glimpsing some Infinity Wars spoilers despite not being caught up, and ta-da! [Aka oops, I did it again.]

Heads up for quite a bit of angst, possible shippiness [depends on the version], and unapologetic canon-dropped-the-ball-on-Tony stance.  Title from Metallica’s ‘Wherever I May Roam’.

So, AU where, for whatever reason, people in the MCU after a certain point wake up in the past. 

Kicker being, it’s pretty damn scattershot from there; Steve’s memories kick in when he first sees Times Square after waking up from the ice, Natasha’s mid-mission somewhere in Bangladesh when she realizes some of her fellow operatives are probably. HYDRA and she can’t do a thing about it, Thor’s just seen his brother fall from the Bifrost and he’s alarming his parents because he’s acting even stranger than usual in his grief. Bucky wakes up after falling from the train, sees where he is, and goes “oh hells no” and promptly fucking off to Wakanda because even if they’re mistrustful of outsiders and will be for decades, between what he’s managed to pick up on the language, and his skills, there’s probably something he can do to help out, right? [Between long naps, anyway...or maybe he just goes full-on ninja instead, idk] Fury’s mid-conversation with Maria Hill in HQ when they both go “oh fuck what year is it” and the list just goes on. 

At first, everyone’s assuming they’re the only ones who traveled back, and they set out to fix things even as they’re reeling because hello, old friend who I haven’t seen in years since your painful death, how are you?

The more time goes on, though, the more everyone realizes they’re not the only ones running around, and the fact that people’re arriving at different points in time means it is a headache. Was AIM running around this early, last time? When the fuck was the Winter Soldier a mercenary and not the fist of HYDRA? What do you mean he’s infamous for his bodyguarding contracts and not assassinations?! Wait, you mean Howard Stark’s still alive?

On the plus side, after a while they realize the time travel thing’s not a one-off. The more time passes, the more people start to remember. [They’ve got a support group going by the time Steve remembers.]

Cue tearful reunions, feat. “oh god I didn’t think I was going to see you again” and “oh thank fuck I’m not the only one”. Everyone who remembers starts to put their heads together, sorting out their timeline to fix things without tripping over each other, to figure out what they can and can’t fix.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, though; Bucky punched Steve after the ‘yeah, I didn’t tell Tony about who actually killed his parents thing’ after it comes up, and he’s not the only one judging him hard afterwards and he resolves to fix it because he really is sorry. But hey, this is a whole new world, one where SHIELD never got corrupted, where the Winter Soldier is just a handle Bucky uses instead of decades’ worth of HYDRA conditioning. In many ways, it’s almost a vacation; seeing and reconnecting with loved ones, especially given the clusterfuck that happened in their original timeline.

...however. This is a whole new world, and that’s not necessarily always a good thing. Like, sure, there’s quite a few things that’re better here, but. 

Thanos is still coming, and due to the butterfly effect, there’s a whole slew of new guys that hadn’t come up in their timeline, like MODOK, like Crimson Widow, grad students they should keep an eye on because this Richards kid was going places and so was his friend, Victor von-something. Stark Industries is still selling weapons by the bucketload, since Howard Stark’s an unapologetic war hawk, has been since the Manhattan Project. But the biggest problem? 

It’s 2008, and Tony Stark has yet to make an appearance. Not in a way that matters, at least, to the people who remember him from another life.

———————

okay, from here I can see this going several ways:

[under the cut because this got long and RIP mobile users otherwise]

the super-angsty break-it-even-more version:

Warning: this one’s got suicidal thoughts leading to Major Character Death. Also, vaguely shippy, with possible Stephen/Tony.

Tony’s last coherent memories are of the bomb with his name on it, when it hits. Suddenly, it’s not just his past flashing before his eyes, but his future as well—years’ worth of memories, of trauma after trauma with next to no support whatsoever because the world did its best to break him—and...in that instant, he’s tired. 

He’s so, so tired, and he sees the road ahead and the idea of having to do that all over again is just. Too much. He knows the agony that follows, and knows that he was lucky to have survived a bomb to the chest last [this?] time, and...even if he’s terrified at the prospect of Thanos coming, he just. Can’t. 

He can’t, anymore, he’d barely managed to pull through last time, asking him to do it all over again was too much—and, seeing the bomb with his literal name on it, Tony sees an out. 

The world’s better off without him in it, anyway.

—

Everyone is shocked and dismayed, when the reports come in. Tony Stark never came back from Afghanistan, and there is a lot of grief to go around, in the time that follows. The world mourns a prodigy; the people that remember Iron Man, remember Tony, mourn a good man who they never really had the chance to meet. 

Fury in particular’s very, very quiet, after hearing the reports come in; he’s lost good people before, but...he’d seen Tony grow up, what with him being the kid of one of the founders of SHIELD and all. He’d seen the potential, seen it realized, seen just what kind of force for good he was—so when he hears the reports come in, he feels every single one of his years weigh down on him in a way they hadn’t before. It takes slightly longer than normal, pull himself together, to focus on how this latest development’d affect things now that they were minus a heavy hitter [in more ways than one].

Steve, meanwhile, is inconsolable. He’d had his regrets, had been working on fixing them, and one the biggest ones had been with Tony. He’d never had the chance to set the record straight, never had the chance to apologize—and now, he never will.  

Tony’s loss ia a huge blow, to those who remember Iron Man. 

Especially the more time goes on, and the impact of what could have done are felt: it’s in the scandal that erupts, when the VP of Stark Industries is caught double-dealing, it’s in the incredibly tense sociopolitical climate that follows because even if they’ve done their best to fix things, nobody’s around to privatize world peace. It’s in the recklessness the new Spider-Man’s actions, after Peter remembers—pushing himself so, so hard, trying to save everyone the same way his mentor once had him.

...it’s also in the questions everyone has, after Thanos rocks up and apart from the Avengers, there’s a goddamn robot army flying out to wage  war because apparently Tony’s AI were a bit more Skynet than anyone had expected. Or, actually, no—more sentient than expected, and wasn’t that a kick in pants, that JARVIS remembered not only his but Vision’s experiences as well, after hearing about Tony’s death?

wait, no. Too angsty, here, have a fixit.

Dr. Stephen Strange wakes up right after his first fight with the followers of Dormammu, and the Ancient One and Mordo are more than slightly worried when he looks like he’s about to cry when he sees them afterwards. Even more worried, once they check for magic, and the following conversation gives them all a migraine because they’re still not quite sure what sent him back in time, and that the Eye of Agamotto seems to have taken a liking to him only complicates things even further.

When he hears of Tony’s death, well...he doesn’t take it well. Specifically, after finding out he’s not the only one who remembers Tony from a different world, there’s a bit of yelling, and him storming out afterwards in grief.

To sum up: his emotional state after getting wind of it’s more volatile than anything else, which, as it turns out, makes for some interesting results when you’re the Time Stone’s favorite person. 

Specifically, Stephen opened a portal intending to go the Sanctum to mourn in privacy, how the fuck he ended up in the middle of a desert, he doesn’t know. How the fuck he ended up right by the same outcropping as Tony did the moment the bomb landed not ten feet from them, he doesn’t know but isn’t about to question. He just sees Tony’s face—fear shifting to shock shifting to remembering shifting to despair—realizes what’s about to happen, and grabs Tony as he immediately makes a portal back to the Sanctum. 

Cue even more headaches. The Ancient One, Mordo, and Wong are not amused by how fast and loose they’ve been messing with the timestream, and that the Eye is showing blatant favoritism doesn’t help. At all. 

On the plus side,  they’re also able to table that in favor of helping the shell-shocked guy who’s like a breeze from having a nervous breakdown. Cue therapy. Lots of therapy. Also, the ‘oops we accidentally faked your death’ reveal, what with the time travel thing, which then leads to some reunions because Tony could go a lifetime without seeing Steve again but he hasn’t heard JARVIS in years. 

...is this a shatterpoint of  a fic idea? Can’t tell anymore.

The more-bittersweet-than-anything-else version:

also slightly shippy, only it’s Steve/Tony here instead.

Everyone remembers. Everyone, but Tony.

They keep as close an eye on him as they can, given that JARVIS’ pretty paranoid about hacking and they’d have to go through Pepper to actually see. him. But they manage, even if it’s pretty tricky before Afghanistan.

Fury’s the  most straightforward; he’s shameless  about  using his connections to get an excuse to see how Tony’s doing, and Tony remembers seeing him around the mansion with Howard as a kid often enough to let it slide. [Especially  since SHIELD’s also buying quite a few guns for their personnel, there’s that, too.] 

After Afghanistan, the rest of them start to trickle in, similar to canon. 

Here, however, the dynamics are a lot kinder, a lot less terse. No thinly-veiled threats, no blackmail; when Tony returns after his ‘I Am Iron Man’ press conference, it’s because JARVIS remembers and Fury managed to convince him that he’s genuinely trying to do better this tine. Howard’s notes and old stuff get shipped over as soon as Phil Coulson can come with an excuse for it, because palladium poisoning is just...no. 

...you get the idea. Canon ensues, and Tony’s doing his thing, kicking ass, taking names, and trying to make the world a better place. Except here, everyone who remembers is seeing him in a way they hadn’t really, before, and treating him differently because of it. 

Tony picks up on it pretty fast—kinda hard not to, considering everything.  There’s an element of regret he sees some people, sometimes, but he doesn’t know why and it is baffling. Not only that, but...it’s almost like they know him? Almost like they can see pasts his masks? Weird.

Meanwhile everyone else’s low-key expecting Tony to remember any day no, but no dice. Kind of a bummer. Oh, sure, Pepper and Rhodey’ll give him all the hugs regardless, but still. Also, Steve wants to get some things off his. chest, and this Tony’s both so similar and so different to his, it’s almost painful.

Time goes on, canon ensues, only this time, a lot of missed opportunities are taken. 

Bruce sees the way Tony tentatively reaches out and listens, Steve calls him  when he gives him his number, Thor returns earlier, and the list just goes on. [...aka all the self-indulgence. All of it.] There’s a lot of impromptu hugs that Tony’s still very confused by, and strange looks, but...these people care, for some reason. It’s weird, but...he likes it. 

More and more people show up,  and it’s the same thing: he clicks with Strange almost as fast as he did with Bruce, although Peter’s hero-worship is still something that takes a while to get used to. 

Even if he sometimes feels like they’re seeing someone else when they look at him, but that can’t be right, can it? Well, fortunately that feeling goes away after a while, but still. It was weird while it lasted.

Tony doesn't remember because of Reasons. Maybe he repressed said memories because of the trauma, maybe that part of him was just too tired to make the trip, idk, you decide.

[ncfan-1]

Accidental Innuendo

Ezra accidentally oversteps, learns some things. [Fanfic written for Fictober 2018, prompt “Do we really have to do this again?”]

[Also on AO3]

Okay, I like Ezra. I really do. I recognize that making this my first fic with him in it, my first fic from his POV, was not the best way to express my affection, but this is a prompt fic and I’ve always wondered what happened to make him realize he needed to stop hitting on Sabine. Because I feel like he didn’t just stop on his own.

-----------------

Sabine really wondered about Ezra, sometimes. The newest addition to the family had quickly carved out a niche for himself as the obnoxious little brother—though the obnoxiousness could be forgotten after an eye roll and a sigh given the way nothing felt quite whole without him around; funny how quickly he’d become essential to Sabine’s vision of what life on the Ghost was supposed to be like. (But then, when families were as they were supposed to be, families were like that. You don’t feel the naturalness of their being together quite so much as you feel the unnaturalness of being apart.)

He was definitely a part of the family, now, but… Yeah. He was definitely the obnoxious little brother. The obnoxious little brother who couldn’t get it through his head that one) their function in the family was siblings, and two) she was not interested in him.

Yeah. Fun times.

To be absolutely fair, he didn’t try to hit on her every time they spoke. Ezra was a bit… Ezra, and didn’t always seem to know what the limits were, but he never really graduated to what Sabine would call pushy, skittering away after she got to the point of glaring at him. She’d never felt threatened, just annoyed. And that annoyance was mounting to something closer to anger more quickly the more this went on.

-0-0-0-

Ezra Bridger knew none of this. Well, he knew Sabine got a little annoyed with his flirting, but he thought he was making progress. Maybe. It was hard to tell. He wasn’t a mind-reader, after all, and Kanan told him that no matter how far his Jedi training went, the chances of his actually being able to read minds was pretty much nil. What the uninitiated thought of as mind-reading, Kanan told him, was really just being able to pick up on emotions and sensations and guessing at someone’s general train of thought. Which sounded a lot more boring than mind-reading, to be honest, but a lot of things tended to be a lot more boring than advertised. Ezra didn’t like it, but he hadn’t liked being homeless, either, and his dislike hadn’t changed the fact that he was, in fact, camping out in an abandoned communications tower instead of living in an actual house with—

Anyways, he thought he was making progress with Sabine. Not enough progress that she’d actually call him by his name instead of just calling him “kid,” but every little bit helped. Where this progress was supposed to be leading, well, Ezra hadn’t thought that far ahead. The only objective right now was to get her flirting back.

And now, with Kanan and Zeb not onboard to roll their eyes or laugh at a failed attempt, and with Hera doing some routine maintenance in the Phantom (and thus also not on hand to roll her eyes or laugh if he managed nothing more impressive than another pratfall), was the perfect time to try again.

Sabine was sitting in the open doorway into her cabin, and Ezra thought he might have been drawn here even if she wasn’t like-a-bolt-from-the-blue grade amazing. Even from the doorway, Sabine’s cabin was an explosion of color, the most vibrant part of the Ghost by far. Heck, Sabine’s cabin was probably the most vibrant thing on all of Lothal. Ezra had lived on Lothal his whole life, and for all its flaws he did love it, loved it in the tired, slightly exasperated way only a local could love it, but there was no denying that Lothal was kinda lacking in color. Every bit of the planet that Ezra had ever seen was cast in dusty brown and a green that wasn’t parched enough to be yellow, but certainly wasn’t vibrant enough to really deserve the name ‘green’, in dull, muted blues and ashen grays. Even the sea, which everyone agreed was supposed to be some sort of sparkling, shimmering thing, just looked… dull. And the sky over Capital City was perpetually overcast with a faint sheen of sickly-yellowish smog, so that didn’t help.

(It occurred to Ezra that he hadn’t started thinking about colors like this until he met Sabine. Before he met Sabine, he couldn’t have cared less about colors. And he didn’t even think it had that much to do with the crush, either. It just… It just felt like a natural consequence of living on the same ship as her. Ezra didn’t know how else to describe it.)

But there was Sabine, sitting in the open doorway into her cabin, poring over a sketchbook with the ends of her dyed hair partially hiding her face. Perfect opportunity.

“Hey,” Ezra said in a smooth voice, or what he hoped was a smooth voice, anyways; it wasn’t like he had tons of experience with this kind of thing. “Whatcha doin’?”

Sabine did not look up at him. Instead, her shoulders tensed, and her hand clenched on the pencil she was holding. After a little while (Ezra wasn’t sure how long; he stopped counting after thirty), she said, simply, “Sketching.”

Sketching, huh? Okay, he could work with that. Just gotta keep it up with the smooth voice. “Oh, sketching? Sooo, what do you draw when you sketch?”

Sabine’s brow furrowed, and there was another long pause before she answered him. “Landscapes, mostly."

“Just landscapes? No people?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and muttered something that sounded an awful lot like “Do we really have to do this again?” In a more normal voice, Sabine told him, “Not right now.”

“Okay, but ‘not right now’ doesn’t mean you never have, right?”

“………I guess?”

Ezra frowned as he tried to think of something he could say, something that would keep the conversation tied to sketching, and yet still be smooth. It would help, it would definitely help, if he actually knew that much about sketching. As it stood, Ezra’s formal education had ended the night his parents… went away, and what education he’d had since then was, asides from what Kanan was teaching him about the Force, completely self-taught. They hadn’t gotten to art yet when he was still attending school. Ezra wouldn’t be too shocked if you told him the public schools in Capital City just didn’t bother teaching students about art, ever. That kind of crappy, half-assed effort was about what Ezra expected from anything related to the public infrastructure of Lothal. Especially considering how long it was taking them to fix the non-functioning parts of the sewers that he’d used to dodge Imperial patrols for how many years now?

Maybe maintenance on public infrastructure being crappy beyond belief wasn’t all bad, after all.

Never mind the shoddy state of public infrastructure on Lothal, though. Ezra needed something about sketching, and in the scant seconds between Sabine’s ‘I guess’ and his reply, he wracked his brains for anything he knew about sketching. Anything that could be smooth.

A half-buried memory of watching a film Old Jho put on at his bar once guided Ezra as he forged ahead. “So, have you ever done sketching like that one vid?” What had been the name of that film? He’d left the bar in the middle of the film for reasons he couldn’t quite remember, though a few errant noises he half-consciously associated with the film were starting to resurface in his mind. It had been pretty late at night when Old Jho put it on; maybe he’d just been tired. (But somehow, he didn’t think that was it.) “Like that one vid with, umm, I think he was called Steele Brightstar?” More of those noises were coming back to him, and Ezra felt a twinge of unease, but he kept on, “Yeah, that was the guy. He was—what?”

Sabine had finally looked up from her sketchbook, and the look on her face… was less than encouraging. For starters.

“Steele Brightstar?” There was a quality to her voice like she didn’t know whether to screech or to laugh. “You mean Steele Brightstar the porn star?!”

Oh, fuck.

The only thing to do now was to enter immediate damage control, though as sweat began to bead on Ezra’s forehead, he became less and less certain that damage control was even a thing that existed in the galaxy. Ezra had the kind of luck that let him escape life-threatening situations with hardly a scratch, but he didn’t have the kind of luck that let him bow out gracefully from a serious social fuck-up.

The explanation was meant to be coherent. Articulate, even. It was meant to be something that could be quickly deployed, like air-dropping an EMP device over a battlefield to deactivate any droids or electronic bombs before running like hell away.

“Iuhhhhebbehohisthatwhothatguyisi’msorryi’msorrypleasedon’tkillme—”

It would have been better if the earth had yawned open under his feet and swallowed him up, just to get it over with. Or if he just spontaneously combusted; his face sure felt hot enough for that to be a possibility. What didn’t help was when Sabine did something Ezra had never seen or heard her do before, and burst into loud, hysterical laughter.

So the whole situation had devolved into this: Ezra squirming in the hallway, his face practically on fire and his stomach doing backflips like he was gonna be sick at any moment, and Sabine sitting in her doorway doubled over with laughter. Yeah, Ezra would definitely like the universe to just fold in on itself and kill him now. It would have been quicker than what was almost certainly gonna happen once Sabine stopped laughing.

Sabine got to her feet, still laughing. She had been laughing so hard that tears were glittering at the corners of her eyes, and there were patches of color in her cheeks that Ezra might have thought were pretty, if he wasn’t currently in mortal terror for his life.

“What’s going on?”

And the sound of Hera showing up from the Phantom to see what the racket was all about did not make Ezra any more confident about his chances of getting out of this thing in one piece.

He was at least spared the burden of having to explain himself to Hera by Sabine swallowing down her laughter to say, in a still decidedly unsteady voice, “Nothing, Hera. Just the kid shooting his mouth off. Again.”

Now was as good a time to flee as any other, and if Ezra knew anything, he knew when he needed to take advantage of an opening. He saw his opening. He fled.

Behind him, he heard Hera saying, her voice light with a bit of seriousness tinting the edges, “Uhh, should I be concerned?”

Ezra didn’t stick around long enough to listen to Sabine’s response. He just found a nice, safe air vent to hunker down in until Sabine wasn’t angry anymore or the sun exploded and swallowed the ship whole. Whichever came first.

-0-0-0-

Okay, so Ezra Bridger didn’t know much about flirting. You could hardly blame him, considering all the other things that had been more important to him over the past several years, finding somewhere dry and relatively warm to sleep and finding food enough to keep from starving chief among them. Ezra Bridger didn’t know that much about flirting, but he knew a few things about what constituted the limits of good taste. And accidentally referencing a porn star when he was just trying to flirt was so far outside the limits of good taste it wasn’t even in the same galaxy as it. He was not coming back from this one, not for a long time at least, and he’d be lucky if Sabine ever spoke to him outside of missions again. Maybe she wouldn’t even speak to him during the missions—he’d seen her signal the others with hand signals before, and might just switch to doing that with him full-time. And then he’d have to explain to the others why Sabine wasn’t talking to him anymore, and she had been here longer than him, after all, and…

He was spiraling a bit. He was doing that a lot more often than usual, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. He was spiraling, and there was nothing Ezra could actively do to stop it—he’d tried before, and that never worked. It would stop on its own eventually, though the upside-down feeling that accompanied it would take several hours more to dissipate.

Spiraling in an air vent was, well, the air vent was not the best place to spiral. His breathing got harsh and ragged, sometimes, and the sound tended to carry through the whole ship if he was loud enough and huddled in the wrong part of the vents. Kanan and Zeb were still out wherever it was they’d gone today, and Ezra thought he could sneak back to his cabin if he was quiet enough. Sabine did get pretty wrapped up in her work, after all. He’d been able to walk up behind her while she was working loads of times without her noticing until he’d started talking.

Ezra was about halfway to his cabin when any hope of heading in there to hide was dashed against the floor, never to get up again.

“Hey, kid? You got a minute?”

Ezra took a long, deep breath before turning to face her. She didn’t sound angry—at least, she didn’t sound like she was on the verge of punching him in the face. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything beyond the idea that maybe Sabine was better than he was at hiding when she was angry.

Oh, well, better get it over with. Ezra turned around, and the words were pouring out of his mouth before he could stop them: “OkaylookI’msorryIswearIdidn’tknowthatguywasapornstarIdidn’tmean—“

“Okay, okay!” Sabine half-snapped, waving a hand to quiet him. “I want to talk with you, not cave your teeth in.” Somehow, Ezra suspected the conversation could wind up taking a turn like that, if he wasn’t careful; the thing with the porn star had been way, way beyond the limits of good taste. “Just follow me.”

And Ezra did follow her, saying nothing until he realized where she was leading him. “The gangplank?” he asked skeptically.

Sabine just shrugged. “Why not? That’s where every other important conversation on this ship seems to take place.”

Sure. He’d feel less constrained outside, and while he wasn’t sure things would go that far, at least being outside would afford plenty of opportunities to run away.

Wind made the miles-long fields of grass all around the Ghost sway gently as Ezra and Sabine sat down on the gangplank. It might have been picturesque, but the grass was of decidedly uneven lengths and looked like hair on the scalp of a balding man more than it looked like anything else—no vitality to it at all. Ezra looked over at Sabine decidedly gingerly. She still didn’t look properly angry, but he’d be lying if he said she looked particularly happy. Probably better to let her start the conversation.

And it was a long time before Sabine did start the conversation. Her mouth twisted, brow furrowing as if she was trying to decide on what to say. Finally, she sighed and asked, “Okay, how old are you again?”

“Uhh, fourteen?”

Sabine’s lips thinned. “Okay. Unless you were literally raised by lothwolves, I think you’re old enough to know better, but let’s just… Fine, let’s just talk about this.” She turned at her waist to face him, frowning down. “Kid, for the last time, I am not interested in you.”

Well, that did sound pretty final. But just to be sure (and the part of Ezra that knew when he needed to stop pushing his luck was screaming at him not to do this, but he really did need to be sure), “Really?”

“Yes, really!” And she really was nearly shouting this time.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”

“Because the glaring, the eye-rolling, and the refusal to flirt back didn’t make it crystal-clear that I wasn’t interested in you?” Sabine groaned and drummed her fingers on the gangplank. “Because while I may not have been raised in a culture that tells women they need to shut up and let men they don’t want flirting at them flirt at them to be ‘polite,’ I’ve spent the last few years in parts of the galaxy that believes that a lot.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “And Hera and Kanan wouldn’t tell you to back off—Kanan wasn’t taking it seriously, and I’m not sure Hera noticed—and I wasn’t sure how they’d react if I started yelling at you.”

Suddenly, Ezra felt more like he was going to be sick than he thought he’d ever been in his life. That’s not what I meant, but all that came out was a barely audible “Oh.”

As if she hadn’t even heard him, Sabine went on, voice a little shaky, “Like, I think it would have been okay. I think?” She looked at him meaningfully. “But you’re not the only one who feels like they’re walking on eggshells around the crew sometimes.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“You said that already. So.” Sabine poked Ezra on the shoulder. “Just to make sure everything is crystal clear: Not interested in you. I’m not interested in guys; I’m sure as hell not interested in you.”

Well, something had been dashed, though it turned out to be Ezra’s hopes and not his life. You’ve always got to look on the positive side of things, and Ezra supposed that if Sabine was still willing to speak to him at all after all this, there were some positives that could come from this supremely awkward conversation. “Okay, so by ‘not interested in guys,’ you mean ‘interested in girls?’”

“Yes.”

“Okay, just checking, because ‘not interested in guys’ could have meant ‘not interested in anybody,’ and I think I’ve already filled up my jackass quota for the day; I don’t wanna check under the lid to see how much I’ve got left.” Yeah, Ezra had already managed to dodge one blaster bolt and come out of it only lightly singed. He had no interest in dancing in front of the barrel of the blaster again. He didn’t feel like trying his luck that far.

Sabine leaned back, letting her weight fall on her arms. “I like girls, kid. Just girls, although…” She frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know, you can’t really tell if someone’s nonbinary at first glance. I also haven’t had a lot of experience with species who don’t have the same gender constructs as humans and Twi’leks and… I don’t actually know anything about gender constructs among the Lasat; I’ve never been sure how Zeb would react if I asked him. And all that tends to vary between planets and cultures. I don’t like guys. I definitely don’t like guys.”

“Well, there are some pretty girls around Capital City.” Ezra smiled nervously. “If you want me to introduce you…”

A strange, hoarse sound like a choked-off laugh escaped Sabine’s mouth. “……Are you… are you volunteering to be my wingman or something?”

“……Maayyybbee?”

She did laugh this time, a short, sharp bark of a laugh that rang in the air before dying abruptly. “Thanks, but no thanks. If you do wingman like you do flirting, I feel like the only way you could be my wingman is to serve as someone for me to look better than by comparison. We—“ she became more serious “—are like a family on this ship, which makes you and me the kids. Brothers and sisters being each other’s wingmen is weird, kid.”

“I… guess?” But this time, he didn’t find any sadness or frustration in him, not even a slight twinge. ‘We’re like a family.’ She’d said it before, but considering the circumstances, Ezra hadn’t exactly taken it to heart. But maybe being part of a new family would be nice. Having a sister could be cool.

They sat in silence for a little while, neither willing to talk or to get up and head back inside. The atmosphere had turned almost pleasant, and Ezra didn’t want to be the one to spoil it. He didn’t want to be the one to spoil a lot of things.

Then…

“Steele Brightstar? Really?!”

“I didn’t know!”

“Where have you even heard of Steele Brightstar?”

“Well, where have you heard of Steele Brightstar?”

“We have smuggled a lot of shit in this ship since I joined up—“ Sabine made a face “—and as it happens, one of those shipments was a few crates of porn vids. Which we didn’t know where porn vids until we watched one of them to figure out what we were smuggling. Hera was pissed, Kanan made a lot of commentary that makes me really wonder about what he did for work before Hera picked him up, and Zeb just kept talking about how weird human anatomy is. Chopper kept complaining about the lighting for some reason. And you didn’t answer my question: where have you heard of Steele Brightstar?” She raised an eyebrow expectantly.

At least he had someone to pass the… whatever it was (blame or whatever) off onto this time, and quickly. “Hey, don’t look at me like that. Old Jho had one of Brightstar’s films playing in his bar one time when I went there?”

“What?” Sabine all but shrieked. “Oh, that is gross! And the bar’s a public space, too; doesn’t that violate public decency laws or something?”

“The people who kidnap people to make them work in forced labor camps care about public decency? That’s… weird.”

“They usually have pretty weird priorities, but good point. But Old Jho played a porn vid in his bar? Seriously??”

Ezra laughed, partly due to her reaction, partly due to the surfacing memory of his own disbelief and disgust. “Yeah, seriously. It was really gross, and this is coming from someone who’s had to go digging through dumpsters to get food a lot. People like that stuff?”

“Not anyone with good taste.”

“We have good taste?”

“Aagghh.”

Yeah, having an older sister sounded kinda cool.

[cinnamon-toast-whump-blog]

Voltron Sickfic

HEY so I read an amazing prompt by @the-angst-chronicles (It’s not letting me tag you idk) about Lance falling into an alien lake and getting sick and so I did a Thing^TM. I sort of diverged from the prompt a little, but yeah,

Word count: 1979

((This is my first like, actual complete fic, so sorry if it sucks lol.))

ANYWAYS:

As much as Lance missed Earth, he had to admit that this planet was pretty beautiful—even more so after Voltron had turned its Galra bases into smoking piles of rubble. The battle had been tough, but they’d managed to free the planet’s natives from Zarkon, so that was a definite plus.

Now, they were walking through the gardens of this world’s royalty as Allura talked diplomacy with them—if Voltron impressed these aliens enough, then they could provide valuable supplies in the war. The alien dignitaries were going on a long spiel about a spring nearby, something about how important and special it was—that was, until they were cut off abruptly by a “Quiznack!” and a splash as Lance tripped and fell into the water. At that, the aliens became enraged, yelling indignantly as Lance resurfaced, sputtering.

“How dare you touch the sacred waters in that spring!” A cacauphony of yells broke out among them, with Allura and Shiro desparately trying to calm the alien dignitaries while Lance climbed out of the water.

“Great job, Lance.” Keith rolled his eyes, offering him a hand as Lance emptied his helmet of water.

“What? I tripped!” Lance protested, even as the aliens pointed angrily at him, their voices escalating as they gestured wildly. And these are the guys that we’re supposed to be trying to impress, he thought briefly before being pulled away by Shiro.

“Come on, we’re all going back to the castle while Allura works this out.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Allura didn’t return to the castle for the rest of the day, only coming back as the rest of the paladins were sitting down to dinner. Lance was raving about Hunk’s ability to turn weird

“It took quite a while, but I think I’ve calmed the planet’s leaders down enough to solidify our alliance. I’ll warp us out of here tomorrow, after I rest.” Allura sighed, trying hard not to show how irritated and exhausted she was. Still, Lance’s stomach churned with guilt as he listened to the rest of the debriefing.

If only he hadn’t fallen into that spring, they never would have had a problem to begin with. Allura wouldn’t have had to deal with all those pissed off dignitaries, and she wouldn’t look this tired now. She’s probably furious with you, says a little voice in the back of Lance’s head. You were barely useful at all during the mission, and then you had to go and start even more trouble. Lance spent the rest of dinner silently berating himself as the rest of the team moved on to other discussions. Afterwards, he stumbled into his room, exhausted. He realized vaguely that he was a bit too tired, if he was entirely honest. Maybe falling into the spring had taken more out of him than he thought. He decided not to contemplate it too much, though, opting instead to collapse face-first into his pillow; he fell asleep in seconds.

~~~~~~~~~~

Lance wasn’t sure how long he slept before being woken up by his alarm, but it couldn’t have been very long—somehow, he felt just as tired as he had before, if not more so. He sat up and slammed his palm onto the snooze button, pressing his other hand against his forehead at the harsh sound. His head was throbbing, and in his haste to stop the sound of the alarm he had sat up a bit too quickly, white spots dancing in front of his eyes as he breathed deeply.

“Ugh,” he groaned, collapsing back onto his bed. Something was definitely wrong. It felt like someone had taken a hammer to his brain while he was asleep, his head hurt so badly. Lance felt sort of dizzy even while laying down, and as he tried to take a deep breath to steady himself, it quickly devolved into sharp coughs. “Damn gross alien water,” he muttered, voice rough; he had probably caught some kind of sickness from there. Lance decided to go to Shiro or Allura and ask to take the day off—Jesus, everything hurt. Still, he managed to get himself up and looking presentable before stumbling out of his room to look for his teammates.

 “Is Lance seriously late for training again?” Pidge muttered, tapping absently on her leg as she waited for Lance with the others. Ever since Allura last reprimanded him, Lance had mostly showed up on time for training—except, it seemed, for today. Just as Shiro opened his mouth to say something in response, however, Lance entered, leaning on the doorframe.

“Hey, guys,” he started, trying to keep himself composed until he could go back to bed; God, the entire room was tilting slightly. Before he could say anything else, however, Allura interjected, glaring sharply at him from across the room.

“Lance, I thought we had agreed that you would show up on time! How are you going to improve as a paladin if you don’t train?” She looked more impatient than angry, but Lance was too out of it to really get the message. She was talking about… training? Training. Right. He needed to train to get better. Lance considered again telling her that he was feeling really, really off today—but wait, he needed to get better, right? Someone else was nodding at what Allura said, and he already screwed up yesterday, and Allura was mad about that, yes? Lance made up his mind, even as his head gave a particularly painful throb. He wouldn’t screw up again like he did yesterday. He would train, and get better. Otherwise Allura and everyone else would hate him. You’re just a seventh wheel, a part of him thought. If you don’t at least show up for training, what reason do they have to even keep you around?

“Right, Princess. I’m sorry.” He pushed himself off of the doorframe, giving what he hoped was a convincing smile. “I’m ready now. Let’s go.” He could make it through one day of training like this. Sure, Lance thought, he might be a little sick, but he could get through a cold for the day.

~~~~~~~~~~

Lance could not get through the cold for the day. Actually, he was pretty sure that it wasn’t actually a cold, but his head was hurting too much for him to think up another word for it. Coran and Allura had run them through nearly every training exercise in the book in their lions, stopping just short of forming Voltron—something Lance would be grateful for if he was coherent enough to be grateful, because Blue was all but completely piloting herself at this point. The spots in his vision couldn’t be blinked away any more, and Blue’s cockpit was much, much too cold now. He could barely steer her, much less form Voltron. As they went through another drill, Lance opened his mouth to ask if they could stop now, only to stop himself. It felt like he really shouldn’t do that… why wasn’t he telling everyone he was sick, again? Was it… Lance can’t remember. Thinking hurts. Something important, probably. He can’t tell them. Just a bit longer, and he’d get to sleep. He was fine.

Even as he thought it, he had to mute his mic to go into another coughing fit, much deeper and wetter than the ones earlier—man, why was it so hard to breathe now? Lance didn’t know, but he wanted so badly for it to stop.

“Alright.” Shiro’s  voice crackled over Lance’s coms, sending a sharp wave of pain through his skull. “Let’s head back to the castle.” Lance sighed in relief, only to mute his coms again as he coughed violently. All he wanted was to land Blue and go back to his bed. At least they were done now...

~~~~~~~~~~

“That went very well, paladins!” Coran announced. “Now it’s time for combat training!” Lance bit back a sob at that, shaking violently. You have to keep going, keep training until they say you’re done, you can’t say anything, you’re a failure if you do… He didn’t know why that was true, only that it was, so he went and joined everyone else in the training room, walking in a line that was straight enough as everything, from the lights that are doubling and tripling in vis vision to his teammate’s voices, set his brain on fire. Lance felt like he was dying—everything hurt.

Shiro was saying something, Lance’s name, and then Keith’s, and Keith was walking towards the center of the room. Lance did, too. What was he doing again? He held his breath to keep from coughing, looking at Keith. His head hurt. Everything looked blurry, and the colors were wrong, and the bone-chilling cold he was feeling was replaced with a searing heat, why was it so hot—but   wait, Keith was moving towards him now. He was supposed to do something, right? He was—he was—but then everything went red for a moment, then black, and then there was nothing at all.

~~~~~~~~~~

Keith stood, waiting for Lance to come into the ring so they could spar. Lance’s reflexes had been a bit slow during flight training today, so Keith had already decided that he wouldn’t need to try too hard to beat him—still, when Keith pinned the brunette almost immediately, he couldn’t help but sigh as he got up, already preparing for a second round.

“Honestly, man, are you even trying? Just take this seriou…” Keith trailed off, noticing the unnaturally pale tone of Lance’s skin and the way that oh no, he wasn’t getting back up. “…Lance?” He was out cold. Shit.

“Shiro, something’s wrong,” he called, kneeling next to Lance. Hunk tried to pat him on the cheek gently to wake him up—only to jerk his hand away, eyes widening in horror.

“H-he’s burning up. Like, bad.” Keith felt Lance’s forehead, openly swearing at the heat pouring off him in waves. The sound seemed to wake him up, his eyes fluttering open slowly. They were glazed over, unfocused, and Lance’s face immediately screwed up in pain as the sound of his teammates’ worried voices cut into his skull.

“Lance? Lance!”

“Can you hear us?”

“Lance!”

Lance couldn’t remember what he was doing for a moment… why did everything hurt so much? Why was it all so loud and hot and colorful and—oh yeah. Training. They were training. Was that why everyone was saying his name? Did he mess up again? Lance tried to sit up, only to feel a cool hand on his shoulder, keeping him down.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, buddy. Just… stay there, alright? Pidge is getting help.”

“M’kay,” Lance slurred, blinking slowly. Maybe he could just go back to sleep—

“Lance! Stay awake for now, okay? Just until we figure out what’s wrong with you.” Keith’s voice was too harsh, too loud, but Lance couldn’t disappoint anyone else today. Not when you already messed up this much. Was he crying? Maybe. Everything was too overwhelming to tell.

“M’kay. Sorry.”

The blurry red boy above him was sighing now. “No, don’t cry. I didn’t mean… Lance, why didn’t you tell us you were this sick?”

“Sorry. Keep messin’ up.”

“Wait, what? What do you—oh, for fuck’s sake, if this is about that stupid spring yesterday—“

“Sorry. ‘M a bad paladin.”

“Quit apologizing, you—! Ugh, nevermind. We’ll talk about this later, when you’re better. Making a mistake doesn’t make you a bad paladin. Or getting sick, for that matter. You’re better than that.”

“M’kay.” Keith doubted that Lance could even understand him at this point, he was so out of it… still, judging by the faint smile on his face as he looked up at Keith, he’d got his point across enough. Assuming Lance would remember this bonding moment later.

(Edit: figured out how to put a “read more” on it bcuz it is Long)

[projectnaga]

a 21st anniversary, a 1st anniversary, and the state of the translation

Well, here we are. It’s the 14th of May, 2017. It’s the 21st anniversary of Genealogy of the Holy War’s original release, and the first anniversary of the release of its first complete translation.

God, it still feels so weird saying that. Complete. Not only did i actually do it, but it’s actually in the game and people are actually playing it now. i swear, it was only days ago that i was still puttering away at the earliest drafts in some dim corner of tumblr, just as a lark. There’s something surreal and heartwarming about seeing people play my work en masse. Thanks, people.

After the first release, we published five updates in relatively quick succession up until July, at which point we just.... stopped. And stopped. So what happened?

Full disclosure: it’s squarely my fault. Honestly, it’s getting kind of embarrassing. DDS has put in plenty of work since then and has a nice fat stack of bug fixes and assorted technical cleanups ready to roll out, and at this point i’m literally the only thing holding back the stack. i’ve still got a lot of work that i want to do on the script for the next iteration and i’m still chipping away at it at a very slow rate. i keep setting targets for finishing up, then promptly letting those targets whizz by. Hell, about a month ago i genuinely planned to have everything done in time for another anniversary release to be plausible, and as you can plainly see that did not pan out at all. It made sense up until February, being that university was still a thing i had to contend with, but now? Yikes.

What needs fixing, then? As far as i’m concerned, a hell of a lot. my first pass over the game was, in hindsight, not particularly careful. Working on Genealogy was very much a learning process - i’d certainly never done anything like it before - and it’s as much of a mishmash as you’d expect of a product of somebody whose expertise and translation philosophy slowly evolved throughout it. Before we launched i certainly made efforts to straighten things out and retranslate, relatively speaking, the worst parts at that point (hello, chapter 1) from scratch, but it really came down to the wire so a lot was missed. The current product certainly gets the job done, but i can’t help but wince at screenshots: all the flaws of my work are suddenly blaringly obvious to me much too late.

And you know what? Genealogy deserves better, and not by virtue of being a particularly special game or anything, but because anything i work on deserves better. If there’s only one thing i’m good at, it’s holding my own feet to the fire and demanding stupidly high standards of my work. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious wanker, i can’t say i fancy the idea of settling for anything short of clear, tonally and conceptually accurate encapsulations of the text and narrative, expressed in as natural and readable a manner as i can muster. i’d like to think i accomplished that with the majority of the game, but i can’t sit back until everything is up to scratch.

So, what’s coming up, then?

Tweaks to Genealogy

Fun fact: i am really, really not good at keeping notes on what needs changing and what has changed. It’s kind of hilarious in the saddest possible way. Every time i keep meaning to but then something catches my eye, then something else, and it’s all so fast that i don’t even think to record it and before long i’ve forgotten what i’ve just tweaked. Either way, some of the most prominent incoming changes (that i can actually recall) include:

Lex, i’m sorry to say, did not fare particularly well in my first pass; i did a pretty bad job with portraying his tone and nuances, including literally his first block of dialogue in the entire damn game. Thankfully he’s the only character who got substantially distorted like this, but fixing him up was a top priority. Just about every speaking role he has has been redone from scratch.

The majority of reworking is proving to be in the first generation chapters. Honestly, i’m not surprised; being the first part of the game i did left them much more prone to error than the rest of the game. There’s still a fair few second generation corrections, but still.

boy shitting howdy i used the word “geez” a lot and in hindsight it drives me up the wall. at the absolute minimum that’s been reduced heavily

Probably the biggest amount of legwork involved is tidying up the epilogue’s map narration grand finale, specifically ensuring that the individual parts actually cohere properly when the game combines them in any outcome. The way English grammar is structured makes this somewhat more difficult than it was in Japanese, and it’s probably the biggest reason why i’ve been slacking off. While we didn’t do the worst job in the world as things stand there are plenty of rough spots which i need to sand out. Thankfully the script itself is still sound for the most part, so it’s just a matter of presentation.

Fire Emblem: Thracia 776

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that we absolutely plan on doing Thracia 776 next. I’ve been planning on translating it for several years now, DDS has already done some preliminary hacking work on it (pictured above), and these days i have the fortune of having a lot of friends on hand with a vested interest in seeing Thracia done properly. It just makes sense, y’know?

As some people might know i started work on the script of Thracia a few years ago, but i’ve sort of let it slide for a while because of other commitments. Once i’m done sorting out Genealogy, i’m absolutely climbing back on that particular horse. i’d rather not make any hard time commitments for myself or anyone else since that would be a great way for things to end horribly, but considering i’m now much more experienced at this and have much more in the way of assistance and support in my favour, i get the feeling it’ll be a smoother project than Genealogy. At the very least, whenever we launch, the script will certainly be less bumpy than Genealogy’s was on this day a year ago.

Other stuff?

iunno. probably not, idk. we’ll see what happens

In conclusion

Really, in hindsight, i can’t believe how stupidly lucky i've been to have had the chance to work with such talented people on this. First, to have friends like amielleon and gringe who were willing to advise me on the translation and writing processes and, once or twice, step in to compensate for my shortcomings; then to work with hackers as talented as DDS and Azimuth, who as far as i’m concerned went through absolute hell to make my vision for the finished product a reality. Did i deserve all this? Probably not, but holy hell am i glad it all happened anyway.

okay maybe i should dial this back a bit

And if you’ve played it, thanks to you too! There’s still nothing quite like seeing my work being played by other people out in the wild (specifically, by people i don’t know who most likely weren’t coerced into playing it by my self-aggrandising shenanigans). If you haven’t played it, well, why not give it a try sometime? At the risk of overselling myself here, it’s a good translation for a good game.