#ghosts of the grove

[luna-saguaro-photo]

Thinking of resurrecting this ghost photography series.

📸 @luna-saguaro-photo

[solmesia]

sex is nice and all but have you considered just laying there... holding your vampire lover... and talking about the first time you broke your oath...........

[starry-bi-sky]

Stuck in the middle of a forest made of

Flesh and bones and they're all scared of

A lost little boy who has lost his heart

Fear's not enough, they have to

Tear him apart —-------

There are two things Daniel Fenton knows that his family knows as well: 

He’s adopted.

He can’t remember anything else before that.  

‘Adoption’ is a loose term, implying that they went through the official legal processes and troubles of adopting a child into their home willingly, and with the full intention of doing so going into it. That is not what happened. What happened is that Jasmine Fenton found a half-dead child, in strange clothing, in the middle of the woods at her Aunt Alicia’s cabin, and then she went and got her parents. 

What happened is that a twelve year old Danny woke up in the same cabin, wearing clothes much too big on him that didn’t belong to him, and with very little memory of before that moment. He wakes up like a spring being set loose, sitting up so fast he scares the daylights out of Jasmine Fenton sitting next to him. He wakes up, reaching for his sleeve for something that isn’t there, and when it isn’t his mind stutters, like he’s tripped at the top of a steep hill. 

When they ask him for his name, he tells them, clearing muddled thoughts from his mind; Danny. He’s twelve.

(He thinks that’s his name, at least. It sounds right; it feels right. If he thinks really hard about it, he thinks he can remember someone calling him that, utter adoration in their voice. So it must be his name.) 

The Jasmine girl convinces her parents to take him home with them, and they give him the spare guest room upstairs. He has nothing to fill it with.

It’s… a strange experience, to go to a ‘new’ home when he doesn’t even remember his old one. 

The official adoption process… happens. He can’t say it’s easy, or difficult. He’s oblivious for the most of it, Jasmine intends on helping him settle in and Danny can’t say he enjoys the smothering. He learns that he is stubbornly self-independent, that’s one new thing he knows about himself. 

His adoption papers say ‘Daniel J. Fenton’. Danny remembers staring at the name ‘Daniel’ for a long, long moment, something curdling sour in his sternum. His name is Danny, that he knows. But it’s not Daniel. But he doesn’t know any other way of saying it, so he keeps his complaints to himself.

(Jack Fenton boisterously claps his hand on Danny’s shoulder and jerks him around, grinning wide as he welcomes him into the Fenton Family. Danny’s mind blanches at the touch on his shoulder, an instinct snapping like the maw of a snake, telling him to cut off the man’s fingers for daring to touch him.) 

(He keeps the thought to himself, tension rising up his shoulders the longer Jack Fenton’s heavy hand stays on him.) 

They found Danny in the summer. It’s a perfect coincidence, Maddie Fenton says before she goes back into her lab with Jack Fenton. She says it’s enough time to allow Danny to adjust; that they’ll enroll him into the school year in the fall. Then she stuffs a canister of ectoplasm onto the top shelf, and disappears like the ghosts she studies back down the stairs.  

(There’s something eerily familiar about the ectoplasm sitting in the fridge, something unsettlingly so. Danny knows what that stuff is, but he doesn’t know where. When the house is empty, he takes a can from the fridge and inspects it.)

Jazz wants him to leave the house. Danny doesn’t want to step foot outside of the FentonWorks building until he has something that quells the feeling of vulnerability he gets whenever he does. He tried to once, and he felt exposed. Unsafe. 

He turned back around and went inside.

—-------

Where do we go

When the river's running slow

Where do we run

When the cats kill one by one

—------

One day, when the house is empty — or, as empty as it can be; the Fenton parents down in the lab, and jazz out with friends. Danny is making a sandwich, and he caves into the urge to flip the knife in his hands between his fingers. A childish impulse, but one he falls for nonetheless. It comes to him easily, like second nature, in fact. The slip of the blade between his fingers is seamless, flowing with an ease like water running down the wall.  

He’s almost startled by it; his body holds memories that his mind does not. Muscles that know which way to move and twist, limbs that know how to hold and how to throw. He continues twirling it, fascinated, as if he were a scientist discovering a new species of animal. 

It’s not for a handful of minutes when a new thought hits him; an impulsive thought that pops in the back of his mind like a firecracker; Danny moves without thinking. 

He turns, and throws the knife. The pull of his shoulder, the flick of his elbow, is familiar like a hug. He knows when to let go, and the blade flies through the air in impressive speed, embedding itself into the wall with a hearty, loud thunk. Sinking into the drywall like butter. 

Danny stares at it in shock, he feels relieved — about what? — before he feels the guilt. He scrambles across the kitchen to pull it out, heart racing in his chest at being caught, and prays no one notices the hole it left behind. 

(He runs up the stairs before anyone can find him, food forgotten, and hides the knife beneath his mattress like a guilty murder weapon.)

After that, he leaves the house more. It’s more out of fear of being caught than the desire to leave. But Danny is quickly learning that among all things, he is someone who was dangerous, before he lost his memory. Even with his mind in fractures, he is still dangerous. 

He’s not sure how to feel about that — he thinks he should be scared. He feels a little proud, instead.

—------

Hazel beneath our claws

While we wait for cerulean to cry

Unsettled ticks run through time

Enough for the hunt to go awry

—-----

There’s another thing he learns about himself. That he knows about since he woke up. He knows that he left someone behind. He doesn’t know who, but he knows they must have been close; he’s always looking down and finding himself surprised when the only shadow he sees is his own. 

He thinks that he must have sung to them a lot; he finds himself humming familiar melodies when he’s lost in thought. Lullabies lingering at the tip of his tongue, an instinct to turn and sing them to someone beside him. He can’t remember the lyrics, but his mouth does, it tries to get him to say them when he’s not thinking. He can’t. 

Danny’s found himself humming under his breath more times than he can count, trying to recall whatever it is his mind is trying to claw forward. 

(“That’s a pretty song, Danny.” Jazz tells him at breakfast one day, Danny screws his mouth shut. He hadn’t realized he was humming. “What is it?”) 

(Something mean and possessive rears its head on instinct, uncoiling like a snake from its ball. His shoulders hunch defensively, he bites his cheek to prevent himself from baring his teeth. He doesn’t know what song it is, but it’s not for her. “I don’t know.”)  

He misses his person. Dearly. He knows, the longer he is without them, that they must have been close. Otherwise, he wouldn’t feel like he’s missing a chunk from himself. He wouldn’t be turning to someone who's not there; reaching for a hand that’s missing, birdsong on his tongue, a story to tell. 

A dream haunts him one night. Warm and familiar, he’s holding onto someone smaller than him, they’re tucked into his side like a puzzle piece. He’s humming one of his songs that is always playing in the back of his mind, an unfinished tale of a harpy and a hare. Danny can’t remember their face, not all of it. He remembers green eyes, hair dark like his own, skin brown like his. 

He loves them more than anything else in the world, a fact he knows down to his soul. He loves them so much it fills his heart with sunlight. Danny squeezes them tight, nuzzling into their hair; he makes them laugh. Then, he proudly boasts something. That when he takes something of their father’s, that his person — a sibling? That feels right — will be… the word fades from Danny’s mind before he can make sense of it. 

His person hugs him tight, his… brother? And their mother — a woman whose face he can’t remember either, but who he loves like a limb nonetheless — appears, smiling. Her hands reach for them both, voice calling them, ‘her sons’. There’s ticking in the distance, it sounds like the fastening of chains.

Danny wakes up cold, tears streaming down his face. The details of the dream already fading from his mind like the cold pull of a corpse.   

—-------

Harpy hare

Where have you buried all your children?

Tell me so I say

—-------

When school starts that Fall, Danny joins the sixth grade class, and quickly learns more things about himself. One of those things being that he’s smarter than the rest of his grade, whatever education he had before, it was better than the one he’s getting now. 

Everyone knows he’s adopted right off the bat. He tells them when the teacher forces himself to introduce himself, but it’s not like they needed him to tell them for them to know; he never existed in their little world before now, and the Fentons are pale as they come. Danny is not.

He befriends Sam Manson and Tucker Foley; they ask him about the scars fading up and down his arms, they ask him about the scar carved diagonal across his face.

Danny, as politely as he can, tells them he doesn’t remember. He thought kindness would come second nature to him, his dream burned into his mind where he hugged his brother so sweetly. Apparently, his sweetness is only second nature to people he considers his own. 

(It becomes even more apparent when Dash Baxter tries to bully him later that day, and Danny ruffles like an eagle threatened. His mind whispers, hissy and agitated, sinking like a shadow at his shoulder, several different ways Danny could kill him for talking to him like that, and fifteen more ways he could cripple him.)

(Danny ignores those thoughts, up until Dash Baxter tries to grab him. Then he breaks his nose on the wood of his desk. It’s easy how quickly the rest of his grade sinks him down to the status of social pariah.)

(At least Sam and Tucker still talk to him after that. When Danny goes to the principal’s office later, he wisely doesn’t mention the worse things he could’ve done than break Dash Baxter’s nose.)  

—--------------

It clicks and it clatters in corners and borders

And they will never

Hear me here listen to croons and a calling

I'll tell them all the

Story, the sun, and the swallow, her sorrow

Singing me the tale of the Harpy and the Hare

—-------

More dreams come, of course they do. Each one halfway to forgotten whenever he wakes up, ticking faint in his ears. He is many different ages. He is young, shorter than a table. He is older, holding onto his little brother. He is singing in almost every single one. He is singing to his brother. 

Danny can barely remember the lyrics, he’s begun leaving a journal by his bedside so that it’s the first thing he can write down when he wakes up. He’s a storyteller, he learns. He feels like a historian, trying to piece together a culture long dead and forgotten. 

His most vivid dream-like memory is not a happy one, and for once he’s almost relieved he barely recalls it. He is somewhere that isn’t home, but his mother and brother are there. He is dressed in black, blades keen in his hands. 

They are atop a moving train. They are fleeing something. His brother is struggling to keep up, he is small, and young. It’s beautifully sunny, they are somewhere green and lovely. 

It is a fast dream. 

His brother stumbles on something, and Danny, fast as a whip, snatches him by the back of his shirt and hoists him up to his feet before he can fall. “Watch your feet, habibi.” He murmurs low, a hand on his back. It’s hard to hear, there is wind in their ears.

His brother, face obscured in all but his eyes, which are green as emeralds, nods. 

The dream blurs, but Danny falls behind. His foot catches on air — impossible, it should’ve been, at least. He never trips. — and he lands against the roof with a thud and a grunt. His mother and brother stop, and turn for him. 

The train hits a turn before Danny can get up, and he shouldn’t have, something pulls on him, he swears, but he slips. He can’t find the purchase to pull himself up, cold fear hits him as his nails scrape against the metal. 

His mother and brother’s horrified faces are the last thing he sees before he disappears off the side of the train. 

(The ticking is at its loudest when he wakes up, pounding against his inner skull. He only manages to write down ‘train fall’ in his journal, before he’s flipping over to press his head into his pillow to get the pain to stop.) 

—---  

She can't keep them all safe

They will die and be afraid

Mother, tell me so I say

(Mother, tell me so I say)

—-------

When Danny is fourteen he is still humming songs he can’t remember, his mind still in a broken puzzle. But his room is now decorated with stars and plants in every corner. He has a guitar he keeps in the corner of his room, and he plays the lullabies in his head on the strings over and over again. 

The ectoplasm in the fridge still unsettles him, still reminds him of a past he can’t recall. The knife beneath his mattress has returned to the kitchen — he doesn’t need it. He found a box in the attic last year, it had his name on it, and inside he found familiar, strange clothes, and more weapons than he thought was possible to carry on one person. 

(Even without knowing that the Fentons prefer guns to blades, Danny knows, instinctively, that they were his weapons. He was — was? Is — a dangerous person. He takes the box down to his room to sort through. The weapons all fit into his callused hands almost perfectly — the grooves worn to fit his palm. They’re just a little small.) 

(He tentatively takes a small blade with him to school one day, and feels much more comfortable with it sheathed beneath his shirt. He’s kept it on him ever since, like he’s reunited a lost limb to himself.)   

Danny doesn’t have a name for his person, his little brother, nor does he have a name for his beloved mother. He’s haunted by dreams every few weeks, many of them repeating. He’s ingrained the words he can remember to memory, and the ones he doesn’t, he writes down in his journal. His little brother; Danny calls him a bird, he can’t figure out what kind. His little bird of some kind; when Danny takes something from their father — what, he can’t remember what — then his little brother will be a little bird. 

(He doesn’t have a name for his brother, yet, but he’s calling his birdie in his head. It’s better than nothing.)

—------

Seeker, do you ever come to wonder

If what you're looking for is within where you hold

Will you leave a trail for them to follow a path

You'll soon forget

Home

—---------

When he’s fourteen, Danny dies. It does nothing to fix his fractured memories, much to his consternation. It just confirms something he already knows; that he was someone dangerous, and that he still is. 

When the shock of death has worn off, Danny inspects his ghost in the metal reflection of the closest table. It’s blurry, hard to see, but shock green eyes pierce back at him, green like the portal. Lazarus, Danny’s mind whispers, and he blinks rapidly.

‘Lazarus,’ he mouths to himself. It’s familiar. Sam shows him with her phone what he looks like, joking that he looks like an assassin. Danny doesn’t think she’s that too far off. 

He doesn’t tell her that. He tucks the thought away with the rest of his secrets, and fiddles with the hood gathering at his neck, attached to a cape with torn edges swinging down to his ankles. He pulls it over his shock white hair. It shadows over his face impossibly so, until all you can see are his green-green eyes peering out like a wolf hiding in the brush.

He ends up calling himself Phantom. 

(Maybe now he can start putting lyrics to his lullabies; his memories may not have returned, locked away with the sound of a clock, but the dead can talk. One of them may just have answers.) 

----------

Home is where we are

Home is where you are

Home is where I am

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

Dedicated to @gascansposts for being the one who introduced me to the band Yaelokre, and thus being the whole reason I was inspired to write this in the first place >:] Those lyrics at the line breaks are all from their album Hayfields.

[burntsodas]

i drew bill!

first one in awhile so i can’t tell if it’s just me or if he looks wonky.

let me know!

🦇🦇🦇

[flagellant]

The more I think about Wildmender the more I grow invested in it. It's a fascinating interpretation of terra nil and solarpunk since so often the genre is fundamentally rooted in settler-colonialist philosophy, and even games which are intended to be the opposite of that--terra nil comes to mind as the obvious one--just end up actually revealing a different side of the factorio problem, because terra nil is an incredible impersonal restoration of ecological systems. Terra Nil acknowledges climate destruction on a global catastrophic scale and it accepts the responsibility to fix that, but it isn't shown as a human act, nor does it really allow itself the realism of just how terrifyingly impossible the task is to try and literally fix the entire world. Its game structure is supposed to be the anti-factorio but its puzzle structures focusing on efficiency and robotic engineering patterns of rewilding end up feeling more like a dialogue than an inversion. It's trying to say that the idea of humanity as fundamentally destructive is wrong while it doesn't actually ever address the human element.

And then there's fucking Wildmender. A game where you are a single human child in a world of endless wasteland and death, where the only other things are ghosts who remember a halcyon era and the hubris that ended it, wraiths which are consumed by their own greed and destruction of the land for their cursed immortality, and a couple god statues. The entire map is just ceaseless grief, filled with the literal dessicated remains of all the biodiversity that came before the countless disasters. And it's a big fucking map.

And then...the game gives you a shovel and a sickle and a mirror that shows the wraiths what twisted reflections they've become.

And the game says, "The entire world is waiting to be better, and the only way to do that is by doing it yourself, long and hard and hopeless as it seems."

I cannot emphasize enough how overwhelming the task you're handed. There is not a single speck of life left in the world. You are given a shovel and a water bottle and just...expected to do something about it. To look at the literal endless wastes and think you can heal it.

This is what Wildmender cherishes that Terra Nil denies: This is an impossible task for you alone. But it has to be done...and you can actually do it. The way you can turn sand into soil and dig irrigation channels is beautiful. Every single scrap of land that you reclaim is something you had to do on purpose. You had to do it yourself. You had to actively choose how to do it.

And the game makes the reward of even just getting a bit more water into the sand feel like victory. Your starting oasis turns from soil into lush and beautiful meadows--sure, technically instantaneously by doing magic on a specific type of plant. But it took me 4-5 hours before I got there. You have to travel so far into the desert to learn how to grow grass again, and then you realize that this endless hostile wasteland is a fraction of the map you're given. And you look at this sudden profusion of meadowy grassland surrounding your spring and despite how sudden it feels you remember how big the world is. You made more progress in a minute than you did in 5 hours and it's not even a speck on the map. How the fuck is this gonna happen?

And the answer is by accepting that it's going to take a long fucking time and a lot of hard work.

That's how it's gonna happen. Get to work.

[the-lazy-llama]

The Full Page of the Inspekta Drawing!!!

[blood-grove]

MASTERLIST

Call of Duty

Kyle Gaz Garrick

unnatural bleeding — a mer!gn!reader x human!gaz | ongoing fic

werewolf bites — gaz trying to help you recover from a dog attack | ongoing fic

magical accidents — who were you to say no to your mage boyfriend innocent request for you to try a potion?

scar trails — you and your older brother try to survive the apocalypse and try and make a few friends..or enemies!

John Soap Mactavish

shapeshifter! child! reader & soap — a alt version of another random thing i wrote about a shapeshifter reader :3 tws in fic

the hunt — a medieval fantasy soap x male reader! | ongoing fic

solar and lunar marks — werecat reader and werewolf soap shenanigans w 141

Simon Ghost Riley

dog au! ghost & child reader — this one is so old!! + old dog au intro!

the devil comes in pairs — :3 fic i wrote based on a prompt! , cowboy au

animals grind there teeth at bars — fic idea :3 monster circus au?

mistaken sacrifice — turns out your loyal worshippers are batshit crazy but ghost seems alright maybe in need of saving.

John Price

dog au price & child reader — another oldie </3 + old dog intro

labs and speedsters — taking in a new stray cheetah shifter (you) riddled with anxiety and price sees to help you.

old man — random anxiety hole you've dug yourself into has you now overly worrying about growing. (me projecting)

Multi + Parings

adoption au dad! simon & soap + adopted reader (school fights)

shapeshifter reader + 141

avian/harpy ghost & soap + child naga reader - tws in fic

jungle book au - upcoming

Other

dog au art ! — ghost and soap , graves , price 1 , price 2 , graves 2 ,

König — dog au intro! (old)

i may give him this own section but for now im not rlly focused on him kinda...

a/n; will be making separate master list for when i write for my fandoms :3 this is my first masterlist so please excuse my inexperience...ALSO IM MY ASK R OPEN AND ANON ON PLS

[floral-grunge]

Gloomy Grove

[alphabetbill]

Macabre [ HEMLOCK GROVE ] - Chapter 6

~ description ~

A werewolf whose only skill is running from his fears, a half-upir with no idea of the true darkness lying inside of him, and a girl found alive in the woods months after her mysterious death.

Some secrets in Hemlock Grove should have just stayed buried. In a town that isn't so sleepy after all, monsters of all kinds are wide awake under the surface, crawling their way up.

~ warnings~

This story will contain mature and heavy themes that may involve potentially explicit content, gore and murder, talk of kidnapping and stalking victims, animal death, supernatural/paranormal/religious themes and trauma, any other themes not covered in the general description will probably be tagged here at the start of the chapters that other significant warnings apply to.

A list will be linked here upon completion and upload of each chapter:

Cicada and the Snake

Chapter 1 . Chapter 2 . Chapter 3 . Chapter 4 . Chapter 5

. Chapter 6 . Chapter 7 .

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

c h a p t e r s i x .

Jude Evergreen

<<>>

"I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU DIDN'T EVEN GO TO MY FUNERAL YOU JERK," she drove a playful fist into Roman's arm. She wasn't mad in actual fact, she wouldn't have gone to Roman's either. She wouldn't have been able to stomach it.

"Hey– I had more important things to do," the boy answered as he flicked the ashes of his cigarette away with practised ease, "like drinking away my sorrows."

"You really did miss me," Jude ruffled his hair, and in response, he grabbed her hand and threw it away with a grumble under his breath that wasn't quite intelligible.

Of course he missed her– she'd have to be blind not to see the troubled look in his eyes, the way he wouldn't look at her for too long, the way he would swallow sharply whenever she smiled at him. She couldn't imagine what it must have been like for him and in that moment she hated herself for what she must have put him through. She knew that she would not have any luck in getting him to talk about it. Roman wasn't the type to open a wound unless it was to salt it.

"I did, I went" Peter raised his hand as though he were a student hanging out for that fat gold star. He was sprawled out on a hammock strung between two trees, shirtless, beer dangling from one hand. If anyone looked relaxed, it was Peter Rumancek, drinking and grinning in the warm, sticky early-morning air like none of this was even a little fucked up.

"I assume that's why you're in town?" she assumed.

"Well you're not that special. Vince kicked it too, Lynda and I moved in not long after you skipped."

"Yikes. Nothing says best family ever like making yourself at home in your dead uncle's house. I'll bet this is his beer too?" she asked as she took a swig of her drink.

"Probably," Peter replied with a shrug, clearly unbothered.

It was all in good fun, and it was easy to imagine that nothing at all had changed. It was all so weirdly normal, the three of them sitting there, passing beers back and forth like nothing had changed. For a moment, she could almost believe that it hadn't. Roman still sat perched like a king on his throne [otherwise known as the broken lawn chair], Peter sprawled out like the carefree guy he was. And Jude, somehow, in the middle of it all, laughing at Roman's sarcastic jabs and Peter's wild stories.

It was easy to forget about the darkness inhabiting the edges of the clearing. The way the trees seemed to lean in closer, as if listening. Easy to forget about the thing in the woods.

Since returning from the reserve trail, they decided it would be best for Jude to hide out at the Rumancek residence until they figured out just what the fuck was going on, because Peter had figured his mother would be the only woman with sense enough not to tell anyone. In the event that anyone else would be able to see her, she did not fancy waltzing in through the front door of her trailer park home and scaring the shit out of her poor old man.

The clock above the trailer door had ticked past four a.m, but none of them felt even close to tired. There was too much to think about, too much to process. They all suffered from the conclusion that Jude was not alive.

She could eat, drink, taste, feel but was not warm to the touch. She felt cold even while wrapped up in three blankets, and the ache in her bones seemed primordial like it had been there all along. Her skin was a pale ash-grey colour, her freckles faded and her red hair dull, the closing wounds beneath her skin a distant memory that never seemed to have happened.

The flickering yellow light above the trailer door snared her attention, and for a second, staring into the light took her someplace else.

She was naked when she woke. 

Battered, dried blood caked onto her skin and ants poured over her body. She shook them off, shook the singular shackle around her ankle. The rusty metal clinked, loud– too loud in a forest filled with silence. The chain was rusted. Stiff. Heavy.

It was dark and she was lost.

The grass beneath her was dead and scratchy. The trees were wrong. Twisted, gnarled things that reached toward her with clawed branches. The wind around her played a haunting tone, and a nearby voice whistled a tune to a song she didn't like. Jude sat up and saw nothing but the night. Then she stood up. Then she walked.

"Earth to Judith–" Roman leaned over to snap his fingers in front of her face.

"What?"

"What do we do now?" he asked, looking her up and down as to take in her ghastly appearance. "What do you want to do now?"

"Mmm. Get shit-faced?"

"That's not what I mean, dumbass" he rolled his eyes.

"I don't know," she shrugged. "I guess.......I guess we try to find some answers".

"Answers. Right. Sounds easy enough," Peter shrugged. "We get a lot of those around here."

For the next few days, like a dog begging for scraps, they waited for their answers. The first day- drink and sleep and dreams. The second day discussion about said dreams. Peter asked his psychic bitch-witch cousin Destiny who decided she didn't want anything to do with it. The third day consisted of weed and waiting. The fourth day; Jude was tired of this shit.

So Roman drove her to her house.

The trailer park was quieter than it had any right to be. The early morning sun filtered weakly through a hazy sky that hadn't woken up yet. She followed Roman along the cracked asphalt path. Grass wilted where she walked, shrivelling and scrambling back into weeds. 

She did not have a heartbeat. She could not hear it drumming in her ears, could not feel the flutter in her chest that always used to make her feel sick. Breathing was a chore she no longer cared for. 

She was still swamped in the oversized hoodie and sweatpants Peter had dug up for her, both of which hung off her thin frame. A stale smell was starting to cling to her, not of rot but more of dust, of something old and wrong, something that did not belong in this life. She wanted her old clothes, anything to bring her humanity back.

They looked through the windows of the beat-up trailer. They went to the back door. It creaked loudly as Roman eased it open. He slipped inside, motioning for her to follow.

It smelled the same as she remembered—beer, stale cigarette smoke.

They crept down the narrow hallway to her bedroom, Jude's bare feet making no sound on the worn particle board. The door was already ajar, and she hesitated before stepping inside.

The room was exactly as she'd left it. Clothes strewn across the floor, and posters of bands she didn't listen to anymore covered the walls. Her bed was unmade, the comforter bunched up at the foot like she'd only just climbed out of it.

An unexpected feeling began to crush her ribs. It felt like it would break her, the nostalgia and the sorrow of just how abruptly she had left this place. It was vacant and liminal, disturbing to come back to. A stark reminder that she had been here one moment and gone the next without a trace, how entering this space was like she had never left, yet it also felt like it had been years. It did not feel real but the cold was real and the grey skin was real and the bruises were real and the blood was real. It was real and suddenly she knew coming back here was an awful idea.

Roman nudged her shoulder, breaking the spell. "You want me to grab stuff, or—"

"I got it," she whispered briskly, moving to the dresser. Her fingers brushed the handle, but before she could open it, she heard the front door slam.

Roman grabbed her arm and pulled her inside the closet.

The smell of mothballs and old leather filled her nose as she pressed herself into the corner of the closet. Through the slats of the closet door, she saw her father stumble into the room, almost as if Jude's arrival at the home had summoned him from his usual stationary stupor on the couch.

Lance looked worse than she remembered. His dark hair was unkempt, face stubbly, his clothes rumpled and stained. He reeked of drink and vomit and sadness. He clutched a bottle of whisky like a lifeline in one hand, the other clutched a framed photo that he snatched off the desk. He swayed on his feet, muttering under his breath, his words slurred and broken.

She recognized the photo at once. It was one of her favourites—a picture of her and Lance at the lake, her arm slung around his shoulders, both of them grinning like idiots. She hadn't thought about that day in years. She hadn't thought about the fact that she would probably never get to have that again, and it made her feel sick.

Lance stared at the photo for a long moment before letting out a strangled sob. His grip tightened, and then he hurled it across the room as hard as he could. It collided with the wall and shattered, glass raining across the floor as he picked up another and threw it, another and threw it, another and threw it.

Jude flinched, her heart breaking as she watched him sink to his knees. He picked up another photo from her desk—a school picture this time, of when she had been a little girl with ginger braids and a toothy smile.

"Fuck you," he snarled. "Fuck you. You did this to me. You did this. You...you left and you did this! Now fucking look at me!" he screamed at the frame as the glass splintered in his grip, his large hands bleeding. "Couldn't....couldn't keep a wife.......couldn't keep my own kid alive....fuck! I'm sorry," he panted, curling in on himself. "I'm sorry."

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry too.

Jude pressed a hand to her mouth to keep from screaming. She wanted her dad like a desperate child, more than anything she needed him. She wanted to go to him, to collapse to the floor, to tell him she was right there, to hug him, but she couldn't. She wasn't his daughter anymore—not really. She was something else.

Her tears came faster now, her chest heaving. Roman's hand found hers in the dark, his grip steady and grounding. She clung to it, her nails curling into his skin as she fought to keep herself together.

The world was collapsing. 

The false sense of security she'd built with Roman and Peter shattered. She couldn't drink and laugh and smoke her way out of this one. She couldn't sit around and wait for answers. She wasn't alive. She was dead. She wasn't supposed to be here. This wasn't right. This wasn't fair.

Lance staggered to his feet, his movements slow and heavy. He didn't bother picking up the broken glass or the fallen photos. He just shuffled out of the room, leaving the door open behind him, and then he tripped and fell and passed out in the hallway.

Neither of them talked as Roman tugged Jude's arm and guided her out the bedroom window. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

we are so back.

also if anyone's interested i'm looking to make a few different covers for this book to switch it up a bit every few chapters. if anyone would be interested in making some mood boards or covers let me know!

[hikariwolf]

Cozy Grove fanart

[m1ssrenee]

“Jack walked all night with Zero, going deep into the woods.”

“He was most curious about the door with a pine tree symbol.”

[wallboys]

coming back from my 6 month asoiaf hiatus to say the vibes are telling me that mel won’t be the one to resurrect jon

[personinthepalace]

Henry Lewis in The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin

[elliotstalksprite]

cooking up a great god grove oc.. they're a marigold :) more info abt them later when im done w their design. since already have story and character :))

[mariocki]

The Nesting (Massacre Mansion, 1981)

"It may come as a surprise to you that a physicist could even contemplate the existence of paranormal phenomena."

"But you admit to the possibility."

"I admit the possibility of the unknown. I admit that science is only beginning to understand its own discoveries. But I do not believe in evil spirits or painted phantoms in windows."

[hollow-knight-fights]

Hollow Knight Fight Round 1, Wave 5

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