#but I'm going to anyway

[sgt-tombstone]

WIP Wednesday

I haven't done much writing this past week because of the start of the semester, but here's a snippet from the very beginning of my Dex fic! As always, this is unbeta'd and unedited, so go easy lmao

CW: mentioned/implied domestic abuse and suicide under the cut but nothing explicit or graphic

Dex had never gotten used to Arkansas summers. He and his sister, Mel, had been born and raised in West Virginia, where the average temperatures were at least ten degrees cooler, and the dry central southern heat never failed to dig under his skin, as if the dust itself were embedded in his very bone marrow. It was one of the first things they both had complained about when they had been adopted at the age of twelve, and in the six years since, their shared hatred of the scorching temperatures had never wavered.

It was 2000 hours, and the thermostat on the dashboard still registered temperatures in the upper 80s. The setting sun did little to quell the heat-induced mirages pooling above the pavement on the horizon, and the air conditioning in his rust bucket pick-up truck whined pitifully.

“Fuck, I’m not made for this heat,” Mel groaned, sticking her sweat-sheened forehead against the vent, her red-brown hair blowing slightly in the breeze, and even though he hated it too, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to yank her chain a bit.

“At least it’s not-“

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled quickly, sitting back up. She had met him at the airport just over two hours earlier, and evidently, she was already sick of his shit. “You spend twelve hours every day running in hundred-degree heat without food or water, with two hundred pounds strapped to your back, we know.”

“Mhm,” he hummed flippantly, because if there was one thing he could reasonably be expected to do, it was antagonize his sister. “Uphill, both ways. This is nothing, really.”

In some ways, it was true. Basic Military Training had been hell; seven-and-a-half weeks of physical training and drills in southern Texan heat, rolling around in the dirt or running for hours on end. On good days, they were allowed to wear their PT gear. On bad days, they were in full fatigues, weighed down by full packs, and carrying fully loaded weapons. Sitting in an—albeit badly—air conditioned truck at sunset was heaven in comparison.

In other ways, though… Both of them carried Irish blood in their veins. They had grown up running through wooded copses and shallow streams, had spent their childhood-hazy days climbing trees to catch glimpses of far-off ridges over the misty Appalachian mountaintops. The relentless, crushing heat of Oklahoma in August was oppressive at best, suffocating at worst. He had grown to love everything else about Oklahoma; he loved the wide expanses of flat fields, he loved the never-ending skies, he loved the deeply embedded culture. He loved the rodeos and cattle and storms and sunsets, but he had absolutely no love for the heat.

He’d rather die than tell Mel that he agreed with her, though. Such was the nature of siblings, he supposed.

“You’re a dick,” she laughed, shaking her head where it was lolled back against the headrest, and Dex glanced at her with a grin. A grin that quickly dropped when his gaze was drawn down to the sleeve of her shirt. It had been properly in place when she’d met him at the airport but the stifling heat and sweat-soaked skin had caused it to ride up, revealing a dark circle of bruises around her bicep, unmistakably in the shape of a hand.

“Where did you get that?” He asked, suddenly deadly serious, his eyes back on the road but all of his attention laser focused on the way Mel tensed beside him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her tug her sleeve back down, self-consciously turning her entire body away from him.

“Patrick-“

At the mention of the name, Dex growled low in his throat. Patrick had been Mel’s on-again-off-again boyfriend all through high school, and Dex had never liked how possessive he’d been of her. Mel had always accused him of being over-protective, but he’d never been able to help himself. The two of them had only ever had each other; orphaned at the age of eight, they’d clung to each other like life rafts in a storm as they weathered the foster system. It hadn’t been kind to him, but it had been worse for her. When they’d finally gotten to a place where safety wasn’t just a bedtime story to lull themselves into short bouts of fitful sleep, he’d become fiercely protective of it. For himself. For the both of them. If Patrick had graduated from possessiveness to physicality…

“It’s not like that, Dex,” she said, knowing exactly where his mind had gone.

“What’s it like, then, Mel?” He demanded, low and angry, his throat tightening with the force of choked-off words clawing their way up his esophagus, bitter like bile and twice as acidic. “Did he do that?”

“It was an accident, that’s all.”

“He grabbed you hard enough to leave bruises… accidentally,” Dex scoffed, blatant disbelief stealing all of the mirth from his tone and all of the air from his lungs.

“It- He didn’t- Dex, please,” she said, and he wasn’t exactly sure what she was begging for. Understanding, maybe, or for him to let it go completely.

“No, Mel,” he cut her off. “If he-“

“He just gets angry,” she said, and Dex saw red. She must have seen his knuckles whiten around the steering wheel, must’ve heard how carefully he controlled his exhale like he’d been taught in basic training, because she was quick to placate him. “Please, Dex, please, don’t be mad.”

“I’m not-“ He started, but stopped himself, because he wasn’t about to lie to her, at least not so obviously. “Where is he?”

“No-“

“Mel,” he said sharply. He kicked himself internally when she flinched and made a concentrated effort to soften his voice. “Where is he?”

There was a long moment of tense reticence, but Dex had just spent eight weeks enduring the worst hell that the Air Force’s military training instructors could come up with; his sister’s cold shoulder was child’s play in comparison. He simply waited, letting the quiet stretch like a rubber band, until she finally snapped.

“At home,” she said, quietly, and he saw her entire body collapse in on itself, like whatever was between her ribs that had been holding her up had popped, leaving her unbalanced and listing. He wanted to reach out, to cross the unspoken no man’s land that was the truck’s middle bench seat, to pull her against his side and tell her that she’d always be safe with him. That he’d always protect her. He’d always been a man of action, not words, but neither his arm nor his lungs were cooperating, locked in blind anger, and the rest of the drive was spent in strained silence.

Home, for Dex and Mel, was a modest two story, two bedroom house past the edge of town. The driveway was long and winding, but the house could be seen for miles over the featureless plains surrounding it. They had pooled their money and bought it together as soon as they had graduated high school, just days after Dex had enlisted, because he’d wanted a place to come home to that wasn’t their parent’s house. Evidently, they weren’t the only ones living there; in Dex’s absence, Patrick had apparently made himself right at home.

As the truck bounced its way down the pothole-riddled drive, Dex could see lights on inside, glowing yellow through the curtains drawn over the windows, and his heart rate ticked up. The combat drills he’d spent the last two months enduring swirled in his mind; weapons handling, tactical movement, and combat arms training all rushing back with crystal clarity. They pulled up to the front, Dex wrestling the parking brake into submission, and silence descended.

“Dex, don’t-“ Mel tried one more time, but she was cut off by a silhouette drifting past the living room window. The shadow of a man, obviously stumbling in the vague direction of the front door, and Dex’s head snapped up to follow the movement.

“Wait in the truck,” he warned, his voice unrecognizable even to himself. “Whatever you do, don’t come inside.”

He ripped the driver’s side door open and stalked to the bed of the pickup where he had tossed his bag back at the airport. He unzipped the smallest pouch and dug around for his gloves. They were military issued and barely padded, but if he was about to throw a punch, he’d take as much protection as he could get. He turned back to the house and caught sight of Patrick’s shadow moving once again. He’d walked past the front door and into the kitchen; Dex could see the glow of the fridge light spilling out of the open door, faint through the sheer curtains.

He tugged his gloves on as he approached the door, making sure to avoid the squeaky front step. Belatedly, he realized that his house key was on his keyring, still in the ignition, but he didn’t need it; when he tried the front door handle, it twisted easily under his palm, the door easing open on silent hinges. He’d oiled them just before he’d left for BMT, and he was glad of it now.

The entryway was empty when he stepped into it. About halfway down the hallway and hidden behind a painting was Dex’s gun safe, and he wondered if Patrick knew about it. Four silent footsteps brought him face-to-face with the ugly landscape, some god-awful desert in the middle of nowhere, but he didn’t pay much attention to it. He was more concerned with the secret latch behind it, swinging open to reveal-

An empty gun safe. His pistol was gone.

Mindless, irrational anger flooded his system; anger at his sister, anger at Patrick, anger at himself. It spurred him into action, propelling him forward, his feet moving without conscious input, without direction or a plan, just single-minded determination, because Patrick was armed and intoxicated and angry, and Dex was the only thing standing between him and Mel, between Mel and-

He turned the corner into the kitchen and stopped short, eyes widening at the sight. Patrick was closer than Dex thought he’d be, just a pace away, the pistol loose in his fist, his eyes screwed tightly shut as he aimed the barrel under his own chin. Dex opened his mouth, unsure of what would come out in the sudden rush of pure, visceral fear, and screamed—

“LEEROY JENKINS!”

TSgt Dex “Flatline” Murtagh bolted upright at the jarring, slightly mechanical soundbyte blaring over the base-wide PA system. Sweat stuck thick and cloying to his skin, his damp shirt clinging to his back, and he didn’t know whether to blame the heated nightmare or the nightmarish heat. He sucked in a deep breath, trying to clear his fear-soaked mind, but the air was heavy with dust, and he only succeeded in making himself cough, the dryness scratching against his throat.

“Scramble, scramble, scramble,” the PA system droned, alerting the entire base of the medevac emergency at hand. The mechanical tone was a torrent of cold water over Dex’s mind, washing away the syrupy residue of panic and replacing it with a jolt of eager excitement strong enough to be almost intoxicating.

[olliethecrowboy]

painting my door until my parents notice

days 1 + 2

[ID: a brown wooden door with paint. a small shark with a smile in the upper right. a poorly represented kermit the frog with a mildly disappointed expression in the bottom left. underneath the kermit is a white blob. in the bottom right is another white blob, vaguely shaped like an aquatic tail emerging from water. end ID]

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

that article going around abt firefox's new ad program is annoying bc it's phrased as though "mozilla has finally TURNED on its people and is SELLING YOU OUT for cold hard cash!!" when. that's not what's happening. it is specifically being implemented to discourage tracking behavior, and literally all the data they are giving to advertisers is aggregate and anonymized, which is like, the opposite of what that post wants you to worry about, lol

[pangur-and-grim]

one thing that took me embarrassingly long to learn is "sometimes when people say things, they will not be true."

I used to tell people about this revelation and they'd be like yeah.....duh.....but like, why wouldn't my base assumption be that you're communicating to me in a straightforward manner. anyway, I get scammed a lot.

[astriiformes]

Really says something about the dire state of offerings for men interested in sewing their own clothes that even searching things like "interesting men's clothing patterns" brings up articles with links to four or five whole websites that primarily offer admittedly nice but practically identical patterns for making button-ups and work pants and maybe a varsity/bomber jacket if you're lucky.

(Branching out into historical costuming for everyday wear is like your one shot at variation, and even then, the ratio of men's to women's patterns on every website is frustrating to say the least.)

Patternmakers as a trans man I am begging you. Give me a little more to work with here.

[hallucxnating]

Got too lost in the sauce now it's 3am

And a bonus turbokarun

[mroddmod]

some recent stuff i've done in magma bc im kind of addicted to using it lol

[gojosbf]

[the-sea-anemone]

weather-related migraines are so stupid. the temperature changes like four degrees and suddenly i'm beset by the horrors

[nipuni]

"I am a higher dimension life form, I am a complex space-time event"

A step by step process of this will be available at my Patreon next month, you can find prints of my work at my Store 😊

[crabussy]

reblog for a larger sample size and to reduce sample bias!!

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[gingermintpepper]

I think, perhaps one of the funniest things to come from EPIC popularising the Odyssey is that now a ton of people think Poseidon wanted to kill Odysseus.

In the Odyssey, Poseidon has no intention of killing Odysseus. In fact, part of the whole reason Zeus lets Poseidon do whatever he wants even though he thinks Odysseus is rad and should get to kiss his wife is explicitly because Poseidon had no intentions of killing Odysseus. Poseidon wanted to pay back the suffering/inconvenience blinding Polyphemus would have caused. It's a really abstract thing tbh. How do you pay back someone permanently disabling your son? Poseidon's solution was just to amputate Odysseus from his other half; i.e. Penelope. The end game was never murder, it was always an endurance race.

(Od. Book 1: Zeus reassuring Athena that he is not, in fact, a part of Odysseus Hater-Nation. Trans. Robert Fagles)

Also, for those wondering if there's any sort of in text reason for why Poseidon wasn't around in God Games - at the time in the Odyssey when Athena petitions Zeus to let Odysseus leave Calypso's island, Poseidon was -checks notes- on vacation in Ethiopia. Yep. He left to Ethiopia for a festival and thusly was very much absent for Athena's whole "please let Ody go? Please? 🥺" request.

(Od. Book 1: While Odysseus was suffering, Poseidon went to party in the east)

I am begging y'all to read the Odyssey. It's a comedy for everyone except Odysseus and Penelope who are, in fact, suffering 24/7 365.

[title]

“May I rest my weary head on your shoulder?” (insp.)

In the Mood for Love (2000), Rafiki (2018), Cold War (2018), Your Name Engraved Herein (2020), But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), Moonlight (2016), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), And Then We Danced (2019), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Anatomy of a Fall (2023), Lovesong (2016), God’s Own Country (2017), The Handmaiden (2016), Notorious (1946)

[lotus-pear]

learning to love

[allthewhumpygoodness]

Big fan of when a character's grief/trauma/guilt manifests as physical symptoms. Big fan of characters keeping things so tight inside them that it makes them sick. Big fan of when the line blurs between a character's mental trauma and physical illness until it's hard to tell which is which anymore.