#believerindaydreams

[copperbadge]

A very pleasant lilac day to you, Sam

And to you! I had a hard boiled egg for lunch. No reasonably-priced affection on offer so far, but I suppose the night is young...

[serpercival]

🌹

From the next chapter of Mating Habits:

"I could believe he loved me when I was there, when he was tellin’ me every single day, but after that… when he wasn’t in front’a me, it was hard not to believe he was keepin’ me around just to get dicked down in a way nobody else was gonna be able to give him.”

[paulgadzikowski]

I am losing my mind this week. Any chance of a fun Harry Sullivan comfort sketch? Maybe doing something Counterintuitive and or silly

[classicwho-meetngreet]

- Your URL: @believerindaydreams

- What can people call you:

URL. Or D for short.

- What eras or spinoffs do you post about:

ATM, Four, although I have and will talk about Seven or Three or anybody else as the mood strikes me.

- What type of content do you make (e.g. fic, art, playlists, gifs, analysis, memes, textposts, tag rants):

Fic. Text posts. Doing a watch through.

- Are there particular characters or relationships you focus on:

Four/Sarah/Harry. At the moment anyway.

- Is your blog safe for minors (yes, no, usually but no guarantees?): No

- What do you wish people would ask you more about: literally anything about the Sarah Jane Smith period of Four's era. I have fic! I have headcanons! I have an unreasonable amount of behind the scenes knowledge!

- Non-DW topics or interests that you also post a lot about:

Clint Eastwood movies, Fallout

- optional: Where else can you be found (AO3, Teaspoon, Dreamwidth, Twitter?):

A03 as believerindaydreams

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 8/29/2023

my ENTIRE SUMMER has been either worrying about moving or actually moving. ALL OF IT. however an incredibly hot butch milf on the gay community bulletin board/dating app lex has finally answered my piteous call for gun safety classes with an invitation to her private range. unfortunately she is a landlord who owns a VERY large apartment complex. houston is a land of contrasts

listening

more joywave! one of my favorite bands bc they are best listened to in full album format, and i did a fuck of a lot of driving this weekend. little lies you’re told has an opening like a big machine warming up while you are in a control room way high up on a gantry somewhere. spotify

-

reading (2x bonus round)

All The Trimmings by Tesni Morgan (published 2001 in the UK) is a gift from @believerindaydreams. it is “erotic fiction written by women for women” (debatable) and “the publishers recommend that this book should be sold only to adults”. also, “Black Lace novels contain sexual fantasies. In real life, make sure you practise safe sex.” idk i’ve ever seen that kind of notation on an american novel before? fascinating precursor to the saccharine little “stay safe kids” ao3 authors notes

i do find the premise genuinely fun and compelling— two divorced milfs opening a hotel/bordello with historically themed rooms. i have had to look up a lot of british purple prose and i refuse to believe anyone says “rogering” in real life.

im being edged with glimmerings of bisexuality. every time one of the milfs gets turned on and goes out roaming to distract herself from being turned on, i go “oh?” like at a pokemon go egg, but so far all the dalliances and encounters have been dudes.

had a very strange experience with cormac mccarthy's blood meridian. i don’t normally interrogate whether or not i am the intended audience for a work except when it’s literally made for children, bc i as a modern bisexual woman am the intended audience for vanishingly few works. for example, many entire genres (westerns) are very challenging to enjoy.

a western has never made me go "wait so why DO i like westerns at all" so hard. like, what AM i doing here in this genre that is often deeply fucking uncomfortable to consume as a woman, and where the most foundational american and european works of the genre often uncritically embrace the worst parts of the american mythos in the most violent way possible? i do believe critics when they say mccarthy is not embracing violence for the sake of, and in fact has something to say with his revisionist western, but my god is it hard to wade through. anyway, dad media will not fuck me and i still have only a tenuous grasp on why i try so hard to glean enjoyment from it.

i know what mccarthy is trying to do and the overall tone of “weird old maybe-uncle” spinning a yarn to a big group of you and your cousins around a fire somewhere is pretty effective. unfortunately I have less tolerance for mccarthy’s style now than when I read The Road thirteen years ago in high school. i was immediately super invested in The Road’s single dad and how he and his kid were surviving, which does not need a lot of interiority.

blood meridian also has very little interiority. the first five chapters are a teen falling in and out of various fights. i was not, and am still not invested. if im reading A Man Goes On A Journey western (as opposed to A Stranger Comes to Town western) i would like to know two or three things about the man, especially if it seems to be angling at a bildungsroman. i don't typically care for third-person objective narration when it is this closely focused on one guy, and i really don't care for loving descriptions of maggots. comforting to know a lot of critics were also squicked out by this book. so it goes.

-

watching

finished watching s1 of spy x family! a Legally Not West German spy in Legally Not East Berlin has to go into deep cover and pose as a family man in order to gain access to Legally Not Erich Honecker, because the only social events Legally Not Erich Honecker goes to are the ones at his son's elite prep school.

this man FLINGS himself into being the absolute best husband and father possible. for the mission, of course.

i found the first few episodes the best, which is generally the opposite of my normal anime experience. i think it does a really good job of balancing high-octane spy hijinks and chases and explosions with very domestic concerns (he PROPOSES. with a THE RING OFF A HAND GRENADE. AFTER THROWING IT), and once you're really hooked on these characters it turns into a bit of a curtainfic. curtainanime? i had fun with all of it and anxiously await season two, but the actual applied spycraft does drop off significantly as the series goes on.

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playing

we're going to continue with out of context genshin screencaps for the duration. the watery land of fontaine has a neat smorgsabord of visual style-- freshwater but also saltwater but also the aquarium section at petsmart.

-

making

unpacking mostly. acquired this coffee table and its mother. needs a very deep cleaning and some touchups but is intact. the individual tables are a bit large for like individual party drinks tables but all six together are QUITE large. four tigether would be a comfortable coffee table size for many apartments imo but! bc everything truly is bigger in Texas including my apartment it works for right now. for the first time in my life i am considering a sectional sofa bc the living/dining room is that dang big.

[sybilius]

Tagged by @norfkid to post 5 songs I'm really into lately! In no particular order:

Losing My Religion, by R.E.M. Oh silt verses we are really in it now...

make me thomas, by supercooper. Whatever you think this song is....I promise you're wrong. Alternatively it's exactly what's on the tin.

Young Blood, by Angus and Julia Stone. Oh orange-catsidy takeover playlist we are really in it now...

Rule #27: Drunk on Pride, by Fish in a Birdcage. I am not immune to a wicked narrative sea song. Boy does the line "you might find the skull of a ship that was breached" rattle in my brain.

Trumpet Sketches, by Janko Nilovic, a recommend from @girlfriendsofthegalaxy 's Spotify wrapped 2023.

Tagging @orange-catsidy, @girlfriendsofthegalaxy, @shiny-good-rock, @jaimehwatson, @morrak, @believerindaydreams if you fancy sharing!

[99griffon]

Two frames as requested by @believerindaydreams

I swear, I'm gonna be so good at drawing Nick by the time I'm done smh smh

And the lovely references they shot me:

[believerindaydreams]

I have committed Fic

containing many black comedy jokes about the BBC, theology, metafiction, and how an angel and a demon handle waking up to find they are in a morally compromised story

[fire-tempers-steel]

Sunday Six

I had some fun doing this last time and it kept me writing last week :) Another excerpt from the Sawa Lives AU -- this time the cold open!

Tagging (thanks for playing last time!), @carbonatedcalcium, @passthroughtime, @overdevelopedglasses, @woundedheartwithin and then @bibright, and why not some from main, @grand-magnificent, @girlfriendsofthegalaxy, @believerindaydreams (hi all this is Syb again, you're welcome for not subjecting you to TOO much RGG content) . Share whatever writing you like, as always :)

*

The swallowed scream is quiet. You have to listen for it. 

It’s a desperate, choked thing. A yelp in a woman’s voice, suffocated to nothing. Silence from where I am, frozen on the apartment balcony at night– yet I know, know from being the one whose hands are usually on the choke– that silence is being filled with a hissed whisper, a promise that death, that pain will come even faster with a scream. 

Except, it’s no bully or scum of the earth trapped in that place. It’s Sawa-kun. I slow my escape up the balcony. I can hear Yagami’s fists connecting with that stupid blonde yakuza’s jaw.

My instincts beg me to run in my uncle’s voice. But I don’t think I can. 

I turn, walking up the second floor balcony, and pressing myself beside Sawa-kun’s door. Still silence. She’s still alive. I pull for my phone, run an old trick. Fill the silence with a recording of police sirens, tinny but just enough to create a sense of doubt. I glance at the security cameras, but set the camera to record video. Old instincts. 

From my place by the door, I just manage to catch a whispered, “Stay quiet.”

Footsteps. A pause, the click of the door. Come on, I think. Pale white fingers prise open a crack in the door. 

That's my opening. 

[theoremproved]

@believerindaydreams​  I found a more detailed image of Four’s Secret Second Scarf on a Robot rewatch.

it’s quite an interesting scarf, actually (though I doubt Four can have a boring scarf, first or second): from the image where you have first noticed it, I thought it had stripes, but the print looks much more complicated here.

All I can make out when it’s folded like this, though, is the green border around the edges...

[fang-revives]

Sunday Six

Tagged by @miserablecreachur thank you! Here’s the opening to my FinJay fic, based on their tag match against YOH and SHO back when both were Young Lions. It’s a good match, I recommend! I’m proud of this bit -- it’s not how most of Finlay’s POV goes, but I like the way it feels...odd and abstract, for writing brain-while-wrestling, and sets up some of the background themes :)

Tagging @grand-magnificent, @believerindaydreams, @nagdabbit, @shinakkyo (hi this is @sybilius on wrestling sideblog) @eaventide if you want to post a snippet go for it!

*

The thing about tagging, his father said once, is that it’s about the give. 

He gets that– fistful of his hair in his partner’s hand, and he steps aside, watches elegant twists, quick flips, that he hasn’t quite mastered. 

The thing about tagging, is that when you go for take, you usually take a fist to the jaw, between he shoulders, hell, okay, but he’s the right man of the two of them to take that. 

And see, then you get to be the one who reaches, buys time, palm cracking as your partner goes in for another hit. Set him up on the top rope a little bit later, just to get to watch him fly. 

Sounds lazy, but maybe it’s about having his partner’s back. Seeing him inches away from pain he can’t take, getting that fist in when it really counts – 

– what counts, this time, is his opponent’s partner. Faster, more give, more sync, tying him up in the exact same hold. 

He grips the rope too late, the clang of the bell behind him signaling that he’s failed. The crowd claps politely. Curtain jerk. 

The real thing about tagging, his father said once, is that no one gives a shit. 

[serpercival]

The Conspicuous Lack of a Retirement Party - Doctor Who (1963)

For @believerindaydreams, who made the post that originally inspired this. There's a lot more incoming that spawned from the basic idea, but I couldn't help but post the first thousand words or so. There's some tentative Third Doctor/The Brigadier, but it could definitely be read as platonic.

Set in the immediate aftermath of "Doctor Who and the Silurians", featuring the Third Doctor, Liz Shaw, and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. They/them pronouns are used for the Doctor :)

~ ~ ~

The Doctor hadn’t stopped pacing for three hours, forty-seven minutes, and… twenty-nine seconds, Liz observed upon checking her watch. She gave her distilling equipment one more thorough check.

Three hours, fifty-two minutes, and fifty-five seconds.

“Do you want me to let you know when you hit four hours?” Liz asked, leaning back against her lab bench. The Doctor grumbled something unintelligible. Maybe it wasn’t even English. They had moved on to predatorily circling the TARDIS, eyes fixed on the lab door.

At four hours, thirteen minutes, and nineteen seconds, Liz got up and stood in front of the door. “You can’t do this forever.”

“No,” the Doctor said, clenching their fists. “Only until Lethbridge-Stewart gets here.”

“You could do something productive during the wait, couldn’t you?”

The Doctor finally stopped. Liz refused to flinch under their glare. It was like they wanted to snarl at her.

“I am not doing any more work for that trigger-happy buffoon! Not ever, do you understand me? I am quitting. Abandoning ship. I won’t stoop so low as to leave without a formal resignation, but if I see him more than once in the next thousand years I swear I’ll–”

“What will you do, Doctor?” Liz asked, tilting her head. She was trying to maintain her casual air of disinterest but it was getting more difficult with every passing moment that the Doctor’s gaze drilled into her. “You can’t actually be considering leaving just because–”

“I’m not considering, I’ve decided!” the Doctor snapped. Liz couldn’t help but step back. The Doctor took a long, shaky breath and sat on their lab stool. “He killed them all, Liz. He could have gone against orders, but he didn’t. I can’t stay here. I can’t condone that.”

“The Brigadier would have lost his post if he went against orders. Then where would you be?”

“In exactly the same position as before,” the Doctor huffed. “I’m stuck on this miserable rock because I disobeyed my superiors, do you remember that?”

“You never stop reminding me.”

The door opened behind Liz. The Brigadier greeted her with a nod of his head. The Doctor’s gaze was burning properly, now. Liz decided then and there that she never wanted to do anything to pull the full weight of their anger. She couldn’t understand how the Brigadier managed to stand there so placidly with it bearing down on him.

The Brigadier lifted his chin. “I know what you’re going to say, Doctor, and–”

“Goodbye, Alistair,” the Doctor said, firmly.

“What?”

“I’m leaving. Dump the TARDIS on a street corner somewhere. I’ll be able to find her.”

“You can’t leave,” the Brigadier spluttered. Liz was abruptly aware of her position between the two men and sidled back to her lab bench.

“Are you going to stop me?”

The Brigadier was silent, his jaw set. It would be good to be the only scientific advisor around here, Liz supposed, but if that meant losing the Doctor? She couldn’t endorse that, no matter how much it annoyed her that she didn’t get the recognition she deserved.

“I suppose I’m not,” the Brigadier finally said. “It would be courteous to remind you, however, that you are not a citizen of this planet. Were you to tender your resignation, UNIT would be obligated to detain you.”

The Doctor closed their eyes for a brief, eternal moment. The Brigadier shot Liz a glance. He knew as well as she did that they wouldn’t be able to stop the Doctor from leaving if they had a full battalion.

“You should be very glad I’m not like the rest of my people, Alistair,” the Doctor said, softly. They opened their eyes and the Brigadier actually flinched. Liz looked down at her notes and pretended she hadn’t seen. “I don’t believe for a moment that any other Time Lord would leave quietly after being threatened.”

“I’m not–”

“Of course you are!” The Doctor whirled to their feet, that ridiculous cape of theirs trailing out behind them. The effort it was taking the Brigadier to stay in place was obvious. “Tell me what UNIT does to non-humans, Brigadier.”

“Doctor–”

“Tell me!”

“We eliminate the threat. Never you, Doctor. Never.”

The Doctor scoffed. “That’s bureaucratic babble for murder and you know it.”

They turned, beginning to gather their things. Most of it was in the TARDIS, but there were a few bits and bobs scattered around the lab. Their sonic screwdriver. An old coffee tin where they had been shoving the pay UNIT insisted on giving them. The Doctor glanced at Liz for only the briefest moment and she suddenly understood why the Brigadier had flinched. She was reminded of a trip to the zoo as a child. Her sister had banged on the glass in the lion enclosure and the beast had bared his fangs and roared, ready to snap his jaws shut on the morsels that had made themselves so easily known.

Liz looked away, swallowing the bile that had risen in her throat. The Doctor wasn’t dangerous. They weren’t going to pounce to tear her limb from limb, no matter how firmly her mind screamed it. Still, there was no glass. Nothing to protect her if they decided to follow through on the implied threat.

“Liz?” the Doctor was saying. They touched her cheek, gently, and all her muscles went stiff to prevent her from flinching away from the threat and the cold of their fingers. “I’m sorry, Liz. I forget to be careful with all these soldiers around. Their minds aren’t nearly so open.”

Liz decided that her best option was to be empirical. She calmly observed the key placed into her hand, the chill of the Doctor leaning in to kiss her on the cheek and whisper to her.

“So she can find you again.”

There was nothing romantic about the kiss. She didn’t think she would have wanted there to be. The Doctor and the Brigadier’s relationship was strained at the best of times. It wouldn’t do to get in the way of the something that was there, the something that crept around the edges of her thoughts when the Doctor called him Alistair instead of Brigadier. The Doctor considered her a friend and nothing more, as she thought about them. They certainly didn’t call her pet names.

The key in her hand was simple, something that wouldn’t look out of place on her key ring if it hadn’t been so vibrantly metallic. Her eyes slid through it to land on the silvery reflections contained within.

Liz worked to piece together the data. The Doctor’s fury, the TARDIS key in her hand, the way the Brigadier’s knuckles were white on his swagger stick.

“This is a rash decision,” she said. The Doctor closed her fingers around the key and stepped away.

She put the key on the same ring as her others. Her car key, house key, and the key to the TARDIS next to them, like they were all of the same mundane quality.

When Liz looked back up, the Doctor was gone.

[trifoliate-undergrowth]

@convenientalias​ @believerindaydreams​ oh my God the speed of you both was incredible

horrified I watched myself tick every single “intense-complex-fruity” box. I had to. What other option is there.

Ask me about my blorbos!

[creativecuquilu]

Jon Pertwee eating grilled Craiyons - Part 2!

Prompted twelve because @believerindaydreams also knows what the Doc likes 💛

Hope you like them!

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

@believerindaydreams doctor who marathon in my laundromat???

[sybilius]

@caranoirs tagged me to post 5 songs I have on repeat right now! Here's the top 5 from my "on repeat" playlist heh.

Tagging @girlfriendsofthegalaxy @believerindaydreams @dansedan @nagdabbit @grand-magnificent if you feel like sharing some chunes/weather :)