#but from what I found this seems right

[obiscribbles]

Valentine's Day - February 14th, 2024 'Somebody To Love - Remastered 2011' - Queen Spotify / YouTube

Yep, I am giving him a flower crown. A burden made of nature, light of life and Force, for a man alone and learning to live again.

Baby’s breath - everlasting love Clover, white - think of me Iris - Faith, trust, Wisdom, Hope, Valor Lotus Flower - Purity, Enlightenment, Self-regeneration, and Rebirth (Only open in the light, with the sunrise) Rosemary - Remembrance

And finally, surrounded by Zinnia, which is “thoughts of absent friends, Lasting affection”. Because his heart has never wavered from that love he had for everyone, that burned him alive, bright and full.

Enjoy!

[sacchiri]

Hellsing 2002 calendar illustration.

Ein wunderliche und erschröckliche Hystori von einem großen Wüttrich genant Dracole wayda Der do so ganz unkristenliche marrter hat angelegt die mensche, als mit spissen als auch die leut zu Tod geslyffen

A wondrous and frightening story about a great berserk called Dracula the voivode who inflicted such unchristian tortures such as with stakes and also dragged people to death

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

Imagine you're Mr. Wu and your weird gay daughter runs away in tears after destroying some unespecified object while yelling about you ruining her life. Because you told her you'd be moving to another state. This is the last time you see your daughter in half a year, and when she comes back, she comes back... wrong. She's wearing a light leather armor, a fur-lined cape, and a green flower crown. She has two long scars, one alongside her spine and the other along her chest, the tissue around them covered in burn scars. Doctors say she shouldn't have survived. Doctors say she didn't. Yet she's right here, in front of you, hospital gown clinging to her small, fragile, trembling frame. She fidgets with her hands. Getting her to stay still has always been difficult, but now it seems impossible. She won't let go of her phone. She's always texting her two friends. When you take it away, she gets anxious. You always knew those damn phones cause kids to act weird, but your kid having a panic attack seems too extreme, even for her. Then again, she's always been odd. Nowadays, she wakes up crying and screaming almost every night, and you realize she's been stealing her phone from your bedside drawer every night to text her friends, returning it before you wake up. You catch her once and decide to give her that damn phone back. It's the only thing that calms her down, as if she were a baby with a pacifier. She spends her last weeks in LA clinging to her friends, having sleepovers and playing her weird board games with them. Everytime they drop her back at her house, there's an excessive amount of hugs and tears. But the moments when they call her, or when she leaves to meet with them, or when they show up at their door to pick her up... those are the only moments in which you see her happy. One of her friends, the rude and disobedient one, came back with a big scar on her face. She's been acting a lot nicer, though. The other one too. She acts a great deal more adult now. You doesn't know what happened or where your daughter went. She won't tell you. But you can tell this friendship is the only thing keeping her afloat right now. Maybe you know, deep down, that no one else would understand.

And then you decide to move anyway because fuck her amirite

[harbingerofsoup]

screaming crying throwing up because both buck and eddie were raised to view love as conditional then grew up to find unconditional love with each other and the family that they chose

[cerise-grenadine]

older Snape fans, what are your oldest works like?

i’m curious 🤭

found the old display book where i stored my second (and longest)(and unfinished) fanfic and i’ll have you know the highlight was Severus stabbing a dragon in the throat with a poisoned dagger to save Hogwarts, in front of everyone 🙌🏻

he was able to jump on the dragon because he had ✨angel wings✨ black covered in ebony feathers, of course 🖤

and every chapter had deep poetic introductory quotes bc i was a dramatic teenager.

[skrunksthatwunk]

ok soooo im like 5 episodes into dear brother and i need you guys to know how much i love rei so far if only for her staggering around like a rain-soaked stray dog just haggard and unseeing all the time. like we know very little about her thus far except that every scene she's in she steals the show by flopping and wilting all over the frame

[moongothic]

We all know how a lot of Luffy's opponents have been in some ways premonitions of the type of person Luffy could end up as if something went wrong in his life. For example Moria is what Luffy could've become had he truly lost his entire crew at Sabaody if Kuma had not saved them

And we know Crocodile is what Luffy maybe could've become had Luffy given up on his dreams and become jaded after losing to him. But like, when you think about it, that's not the only dark reflection of Luffy in Crocodile, is it

'Cause Crocodile, despite employing people for Baroque Works, did not trust anyone around him and did not considder anyone to be anything else but an employee to him. And we know he had been planning on taking over Alabasta for like 14 years (at the very least), BW being a thing for only the past four (pre-timeskip)

So like. Did Crocodile spend the last 14 years alone

Like yes he had his workers at the Casino and Robin etc, so he was like, around people, he wasn't like Brook who was in Total Isolation. But on an emotional level, has he not spent the last 14 years all by himself, completely detached from anyone, unable to trust or rely on anyone else?

That is sad as fucking shit, holy hell

'Cause then you compare him to like Luffy and like

Our sweet baby boy was so afraid of being alone that Luffy literally went through hell just to gain Ace's approval despite Ace trying to signal to him he wasn't interested befriending him

And through out the whole series Luffy reiterates time and time again how he needs and wants his friends around because he literally can't live without them, both on a literal "he can't cook or navigate or have fun by himself" level but also on that emotional level

And Crocodile just. Spent 14 years of his life, if not longer, alone.

Sweet jesus what happened to this man

And that just makes me further wonder, what the absolute fuck were Crocodile's Rookie Pirate days like?? Like did he have a crew or was he just yolo'ing it by himself???

Like. Mihawk's never been on a crew as far as we know. Kuma was a Revolutionary, not a pirate, but he wasn't like alone still. Doflaming, Hancock, Jinbei and Moria however have/had crews of their own. So what was Crocodile's deal? Did he have a crew before? Was he a captain or was he on someone else's ship? (Although surely the Government wouldn't offer the position of a Shichibukai to a cabin boy or the first mate, right)

And if he did have a crew, the hell happened to them??

Like we know Crocodile got his ass kicked by Whitebeard, I just find it unlikely Whitebeard would've pulled a Kaidou on Crocodile's crew and slaughtered them, that's not a very Whitebeard-y thing do, right?? ...Unless Whitebeard was just different 20+ years ago and was willing to annihilate entire crews. We don't know. Or maybe Crocodile and his entire crew were like Turbo Rotten from the beginning and Whitebeard figured they deserved to get wiped out, much like how we saw Shanks wipe out Kid's crew at Elbaf. Or maybe Whitebeard saw no reason to have mercy on someone affiliated with the World Government.

That all said, if we wanted to assume Crocodile had somekind of trauma that lead to him viewing people not only as disposable but also untrustworthy, then maybe losing people dear to him like that wouldn't lead to that mindset. Like Moria witnessed his beloved crew die and that caused him to want to create a crew he couldn't die, so he wouldn't go through that emotional trauma again.

Which leaves me to wonder. If something caused him to lose his ability to (emotionally) trust people, and if Whitebeard broke his dreams... Maybe Crocodile had a crew. And maybe they abandoned him when he lost to Whitebeard. Figuring they didn't need a weak captain who was probably going to bleed to death anyways. Or maybe the crew tried to take his head (after Whitebeard kicked his ass), after all, he was already a Shichibukai, anybody who took Crocodile's head could maybe attempt to take that title for themselves if the Government allowed it, and if not, at least gain more fame for themselves.

Either of these scenarios would certainly result in you losing your ability to rely on others. And leave you willing to spend the rest of your life alone. Who would have in them to go through that again.

Or maybe he came out of the womb unable to trust people and he was just yolo'ing it by himself like Mihawk right from the begining, who knows

Regardless I'm just

[wonder-worker]

"Any assessment of the emotional component of the reconciliation of [Empress Matilda and Geoffrey of Anjou] remains speculation: the chroniclers are silent on the issue of whether [they] grew to love, hate, or like each other. We do know, from their movements and actions, that Matilda and Geoffrey eventually arrived at a businesslike arrangement with a united viewpoint toward the dynastic, geopolitical goals that had dictated their marriage in the first place."

"Matilda and Geoffrey effectively transitioned from a Divide and Rule model to a Collaborative Union from 1144 onwards, in which they worked together throughout their marriage to ensure rulership over their territories and gained their rightful lands, as well as ensuring the inheritance for their children. Matilda and Geoffrey’s political partnership can effectively be argued as the most successful through applying different models of rulership. Ultimately the Plantagenets regained Matilda’s inheritance through Henry, conquered Normandy, and produced several male heirs."

Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History / Gabrielle Storey, Co-Rulership, Co-operation and Competition: Queenship in the Angevin Domains, 1135-1230

[kiddokori]

guys i caught a mouse at work today

[kuromi-hoemie]

i am once again thinking about The Boy

not the movie lol

[denkies]

I know that thematically speaking, Miri is going to go back to Rei and Kazuki. The point of the entire show is found family. But episode 10 SHATTERED my heart into a million pieces and I started crying.

And this is more incentive for Rei to kill his dad. This man is the reason why Miri had to leave, he basically took their daughter from them. Neither Kazuki or Rei are going to just roll over and let that happen. Maybe Rei would have, before Miri, but she changed him. He's going to have the strength to stand up to his dad, because to be loved is to be changed.

[sysig]

Bad time of it, all things considered (Patreon)

[ehlnofay]

It’s not until she hears Sissel’s knees hit the floor that Efri is jolted back into her body.

She blinks, whipping her head around. Sissel is kneeling, bracing a palm on the ancient stone pavement, at the barrier – no, the barrier’s gone, it’s just Sissel on the floor. She lifts her head and meets Efri’s eyes; her hair is wispy and wild, the little plaits meant to keep it neat come loose and tumbling, her eyes wide. The barrier's gone, but still, her pale face is lit up blue.

“Are you okay?” she asks. She doesn’t speak loudly, but it echoes in the great stone chamber.

Nine, Efri doesn’t know.

She blinks again, looks down at her hands, clinging to the metal stick so fiercely that her joints ache. (Her own stick, her nice wooden one, is still on the floor somewhere, where it slipped out of her grasp when she hit the wall.) The lumpy heavy end of it, the clobbering end, is still resting on –

Not on. It’s in the thing’s head, fitted neatly in the opening of its dented helmet, the horns spiralling over the floor. There’s a tooth, perfectly preserved, by Efri’s foot.

One by one, she unwraps her gloved fingers from the handle of the metal stick, letting it drop to the floor with a clang so loud it makes her wince. Kazari is nosing at her side. (When did they let go of it? When did they get so close? She must have missed that. She feels out of the loop. Her heart is juddering like fish on a line, battering like some frightened trapped thing at her ribcage, and her breath is coming fast and heavy.) Absentmindedly bringing up a hand to press over her sore shoulder, she says, “’M fine. Not too – barely touched me.”

Kazari turns and spits on the floor. Efri blinks. She does it again, tongue lolling out of her mouth, face very disgruntled – and oh, Efri gets it. She does not glance down at the thing at her feet; she doesn’t need to, she knows what its arm looks like, chewed almost to pieces even through its banded armour. (If she hadn’t been so busy being scared of it, that sight might have made her a bit scared of Kazari. But not now, when they’re trying to hack and spit the taste of dead man arm out of their mouth.)

Efri unclips her canteen from her belt and holds it out. “Here,” she says. Her voice is rough. Her heart is racing too much to let constructing sentences be easy. “Not much, but –”

Kazari stands still while Efri tips half of the remaining water onto her tongue, and then Efri watches her swilling it around in her mouth, trying to bathe all of her teeth in it, before she spits it again on the floor at the dead thing’s feet.

The water is still clear. That’s something, at least; the dead man was too old to still have blood in him. Or maybe he was embalmed, drained of it hundreds of years ago, thousands.

“Are you okay?” Efri asks Kazari when they’re done, because they were the one doing most of the fighting, who was closest. They tip their head, shift their weight – wince when they put weight on one foot. Their lips peel back from their teeth. Their clothes on that side are singed.

Efri points it out. “Your robe,” she says, which makes it sound much fancier than it is. She’s too tired to think of a better word. She rubs a hand over her face, pushing the hair back over her forehead, says, “I’ll reinforce it for you when we get out.”

Kazari noses at Efri’s shoulder – the shredded fabric of her dress, the fraying edges stained with blood. Efri says, “I know. I’ll have to sew that up too.” Over her shoulder, she calls, “Kazari’s leg’s hurt, I think.”

“There’s blood on you,” Sissel replies. She peels her hand off the floor and leans back on her heels.

Efri touches her shoulder again. “’S fine,” she says. “Just a scrape. The blood’s drying already.”

It’s really sore, actually – the flesh abraded and tender, an ache sinking deep into the muscle – but it’s normal sore, the kind of sore you really should be after being thrown into a wall. It doesn’t feel sprained or dislocated or anything like that.  Just like it will be bruised a whole rainbow of colours come tomorrow.

Kazari noses at it again. She leans too far forward and falters on her maybe-hurt leg – rights herself, wincing, and rolls her shoulder. It gleams, just for a moment, and she nearly stumbles again. Efri puts out a hand to steady her. (It doesn’t really accomplish anything – Efri’s strong, but she’s not that strong – but it’s the principle of it.) “What was that spell?”

“Pain relief,” Sissel says from behind her. “I think. Doesn’t actually fix anything, but.”

“You’ll be okay ‘til we find someone?” Efri asks, and Kazari nods. She presses a hand against their shoulder and nods back.

They both turn to look at Sissel, then, who’s just kneeling on the floor, sitting on her heels.

“You all right?” Efri asks her.

“All right,” Sissel confirms. She doesn’t look at them. “Didn’t even come near me.”

She’s staring.

Efri crosses the floor to stand with her. (She needs to lean on Kazari – her legs are too wobbly, and she doesn’t want to touch the dead thing’s stick, doesn’t want to look for her own. Kazari limps a little on their sore front leg.) There’s a moment of total, humming silence – all of them still and staring, necks craned back, looking up at the thing.

Whatever it is.

It’s a ball. Big and blue and shimmering, it floats above a wide crystalline dish set into the floor, spinning on an axis. Just spinning and spinning and spinning, endless motion. Its smooth surface is cut through with dark wavering lines, etched with lettering, and it doesn’t quite glow but it doesn’t not glow, either, the light moving across it silkily, like clouds in a blue sky. It looks like something that should be humming – a low pitch in their ears, an eerie shiver dancing over their skin – but it’s silent. Inert, maybe, but for the spinning.

“What is it?” Efri asks. Her voice cracks as she speaks. She looks down at Sissel’s face, staring as though mesmerised, illuminated by the room’s dim lighting – the fires that should not still be burning down here, the luminous not-glow of the ball.

Sissel says, “I don’t know. Something important.”

Hovering above the dish, it spins, and spins, and spins.

“Is it what the ghost was talking about?” Efri asks. She tilts her head and squints at it. It doesn’t – well, it looks strange and unearthly and powerful, but it isn’t doing anything. And it hadn’t been clear what the ghost was talking about, exactly, according to Sissel, just that it was something important – but what else could it be?

Sissel, still watching it, shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I think so.”

Efri watches it with her, brushing a bit more hair out of her face. It’s sticking to her sweaty forehead. She feels a drip of not-dry blood running down her arm under her sleeve.

Kazari is staring at it too – just as confounded as the rest of them. Efri sees the light in their irises shifting as the ball spins.

They’re not learning anything from staring, the ball staying strange and mysterious as ever, so Efri raps her knuckles against her sternum to steady her breathing (it’s slowed a bit – not normal, but closer to it) and climbs up onto the stone rimming of the dish. Kazari, behind her, lows in consternation; Sissel catches her breath, a noise like a creaking door. “Careful,” she says.

“Promise,” Efri replies, and places her feet very, very carefully on the glassy blue flooring. Nothing happens. She doesn’t step on the dark curved lines as she treads toward the ball in the centre, slow and wary as if she were approaching a skittish animal. Nothing happens.

She reaches out, and, with just the tips of her fingers, she grazes the ball’s surface.

Nothing happens.

It’s cool to the touch, and smooth, like polished metal or not-frozen ice or delicate glasswork. It continues to spin gently under her fingers, warming her glove with friction, no smudges left on its clouded face.

 It really feels like there should at least be a tingle running up her arm, a strange and unfamiliar current, a spark. But it’s just Efri, standing with an arm outstretched, pressing her hand to a ball.

“It’s not doing anything,” she reports, and Sissel clambers up onto the dish with her, fitting her palm to its gently hovering underside. Kazari balks, begins pacing agitatedly. Efri frowns. “Why isn’t it doing anything? Shouldn’t it be doing something?”

“It’s important,” Sissel says definitively. There’s ancient dust on her fingers, but none of it seems to transfer. “It’s something really special, I think.”

Efri shifts restlessly. She shifts her grip and tries to grab onto the dark ridged curves ringing its surface, but they slip easily away from her grasp as though her touch was no barrier at all. “But what does it do?”

Sissel shrugs.

Behind them, Kazari lows.

Efri drops her hand and grabs Sissel’s wrist. “C’mon,” she says, and when Sissel frowns at her, “We’re not going to learn anything about it this way. We have to look for clues!”

Kazari makes a more impatient noise. (Efri thinks she found a clue.)

Sissel gives the ball one last searching look and lets Efri tug her away, off the weird blue dish and down to where Kazari stands on the stone floor, at the head of the table where the dead man sat. Efri sniffs loudly and tries not to think about it too much. The table is smooth polished stone, worn a little away with time; Efri trails a gloved finger over the edge and directs her attention to where Kazari points with their chin.

There’s something carved into the surface, the edges blunted and shapes softened by however many years it must have been since it was put there. Efri squints, trying to make it out. She has to stand right up on her tiptoes to get the right angle to see much of it in full.

“That’s not letters,” she says eventually, frowning. She’s pretty sure she knows her alphabet well enough by now to know that. “Is it magic?”

Sissel shakes her head. “I don’t know what it is. It’s not like magical writing I’ve ever seen.”

Efri looks at Kazari, who also shakes her head. “Maybe it’s a different sort of lettering,” she theorises. It must have been written a long time ago, if it’s from back when the city had people. Onmund’s been reading all about it for ages, and he’s told her a bit – Saarthal was the city of Atmorans, populated by proto-Nordic people. All complicated history stuff. But they weren’t quite the same as Nords today, he said, so it stands to reason they had different writing, too. They’re supposed to be uncovering and cataloguing artifacts (at the thought, Efri glances back at the hovering ball and swallows an inane bubble of laughter) so she suggests, “Maybe you can copy it and we can show it to someone. I’m sure there’ll be someone at the College what knows what it is.”

Sissel, also standing on her toes, nods dutifully. “What will you do?”

The chamber they’re in is cavernous, and about empty but for the ball in the dish, the altar and chair, the body on the ground. “I’ll check him,” she says, and points. “See if he has anything on him that’s special.”

Sissel follows her finger and grimaces.

She digs out her note-paper and her stick of char, and Efri assumes it’s clues time, but when she turns she feels a hand grip her elbow. She looks back over her tattered shoulder at Sissel’s face, her furrowed brow.

“Promise you’re really okay?” she says, voice anxious and solemn.

“Promise,” Efri says, twisting her arm to touch her friend’s hand. Sissel presses her lips together and lets go of her arm.

Kazari trails after Efri to look at the dead man.

First thing is the metal stick. It’s magic someway, Efri knows – he waved it and threw her into a wall, flung spells with it – but she’s not sure how. Doesn’t know enough about enchantments. Didn’t need to, to use it; when Kazari clamped down on his arm she just ripped it from his grasp and –

She doesn’t quite exactly remember, actually, except for the bitter tang of adrenaline in her mouth and nose, the horrible grunting and scuffling sounds, the heft of the stick in her hands. Impact, over and over and over, against something that had a little more give each time.

Efri scrubs a hand over her mouth and grips the handle of the stick. It takes effort to wrest it out of the thing’s face, caught as it is by the edges of the helmet, and when it’s finally yanked free it’s – actually not as bad as she might have expected. There’s no blood, and the corpse was so desiccated it already didn’t even really look like a person anymore, so it registers less as someone with horrible violence done to it and more as a really gross art piece. It’s not nice. She doesn’t like the twisted, gaping mouth, teeth embedded wrong-ways in its tissue and scattered like coins over the floor. And one of the eyes, which had glowed unearthly blue, is now a dull, rotten black, squished like a plum in its socket.

It's worse the more she looks. She sniffs and turns away.

“This is magic, right?” she asks Kazari, testing the weight of it in her hands, the cool surface of the metal, and they nod. “A good artifact?” she adds, and they nod again, emphatically. Efri sets the stick aside and kneels.

It wasn’t wearing any clothes, really – or if it was, they rotted away. She touches the rusted armour gingerly, tries to avoid brushing her gloves against the shrivelled skin at all. Whoever it was had expensive taste, it seems – there’s jewellery in a shockingly well-preserved beard, pendants around the neck, armbands. Efri asks Kazari if each thing is enchanted. No to the armbands, no to the beard-ring, and then, pressed against the wizened chest where the flesh contours to the ribs, she finds some kind of necklace, sharp-edged and thrumming. Kazari nods to that, and, face scrunched up like an old fruit, Efri reaches around the ancient neck to slip it off.

She tucks it into a belt pocket with the tripwire necklace they found at the weird wall.

“Done,” Sissel says. She folds her paper and slips it into her own pouch. Her footfalls on the echo-y stone floor as she approaches the body for the first time are almost silent. “Did you find anything?”

“Necklace,” Efri replies, watching Sissel’s face pinch at the sight of him. “And – stick.” She scoops up the metal stick and holds it out. “He did spells with it.”

Sissel looks at it warily. “Is he a draugr?” she asks, glancing back down at his mashed-up face.

“I mean,” Efri says, “he’s got to be, right?” She’s certainly never seen a draugr before, but what else could it be?

(Calling it a draugr makes her shiver, the set of her shoulders quaking. She’ll stick to dead man.)

Sissel shudders. She reaches out to grip the handle of the stick, and Efri’s not sure if she’s taking it or just trying to keep herself upright. “I can’t believe that happened,” she says. Her voice sounds, suddenly, fragile. “I can’t believe we’re alive.”

“Me neither,” Efri says. She presses the tip of the stick into the ground so Sissel can lean on it, stands a little unsteadily.

Kazari, with a hushed murmur, telegraphs something. Efri recognises the head incline of understanding – she’s familiar with that word, that idea – and, after a moment, the flickering ear of doubt.

“They’ll have to believe us,” she says with conviction, because she means it. “We’ll show them. They’ll see for themselves.”

Kazari presses their nose to her head.

Efri clasps her hands together. “We’ll go tell someone now,” she declares – though it’s easier said than done; they were lost in the ruins ages before they even found the crumbling wall, the halls, this horrible wonderful chamber. But they’ll get un-lost eventually. They’ll get out eventually. Surely. They have practice enough with walking. “But first – help me find my stick.”

[radioscientist]

Me: *delusional* Maybe when I watch Marineford this time Ace will be rescued and hang out with Luffy and Whitebeard

[deus-ex-mona]

rage is a ✨way of life✨

[c0rpseductor]

you know im about ready to write an educational post for dragon age fans explaining the difference between keyword search and tagging and also how rude it is to get snotty with strangers who are just idly talking about their own personal opinions bc it is consistently This Fandom where total strangers see posts of mine that are clearly just me talking to myself and decide to get on my case