#got this one in under the wire

[temperedink]

can i be close to you - COMPLETE!

4/4, 7.3K words

Elain and Lucien have been feeling out their tentative new relationship for a while, and Elain is getting antsy about the slow pace she's set for them. But maybe it's time to take things to the next level.

Chapter 4: Day Court. And finally, finally: they bang.

Thank you to @bibliophiliaxvignette and @itsybitsybluesy for betaing!

This chapter features:

Declarations of love

Day Court architecture

Daddy Helion just trying to help his boy get laid woo

First time!

Elain fully owning her sexual power

Read on AO3.

This is the longest chapter I've ever written, and the longest story I've ever written. (I am not meant for long stories.) I've loved this Elain and Lucien SO much, and I'm going to let them ride off into the sunset now.

Here is the titular song that I realized I've never actually included in any of these posts:

So much unnecessary detail about setting below the cut!

Writing description is really hard for me, so describing Day Court was a challenge. (Why can't I just keep them in a white room??)

I knew I wanted them to have their first time outdoors and in some sort of bower. I was originally going for something like the Bower of Bliss in Spenser's Faerie Queene, but I couldn't find a good picture or description of it. (Also, the Bower of Bliss? Actually not as blissful as it sounds.) This was as close as I got, and we can all agree that it's kinda creepy:

John Melhuish Strudwick, "Acrasia"

Then I tried for some kind of outdoor bed/drapey/viney/flowery thing, but only found terrible AI. Finally, Pinterest randomly served me up this, and I had my bower!

This is "Fancy's Bower" by Patrick Dougherty, who builds these incredible, huge sculptures from branches. This one is in Montreal.

(In the story, the bower's origin is loosely based on Stonehenge.)

The statue inside is similar to this:

by Anna and the Willow

(I had another one in mind, but when I went to source it, it seemed to be AI.)

[deelavis]

THE STAR.

UPRIGHT: hope, inspiration, renewal, serenity, healing REVERSED: despair, lack of faith, disconnection, discouragement, imbalance The Star represents a person who brings hope, inspiration, and a sense of peace. Others look to you for guidance and support in difficult times. Can you live up to the expectations?

[neonhellscape]

uhhh mr and mrs haneumann everybody

[welcometogrouchland]

[ID: an 11 panel comic featuring characters from the owl house. Panel 1- a cloaked Darius sneaking around a wall. panel 2 he peaks around the corner, saying "well? Did you retrieve...the package?". Panel 3 Hettie Cutburn (who has old Hollywood style text announcing "surprise Hettie Cutburn!" next to her) says "Darius! Of course! Took some digging but I found them eventually. Tell the boy I say 'hi!'". Panel four- she hands documents labeled "classified" to Darius. Later, Hunter (post timeskip) walks through a door in Darius' home, saying "hey Darius, hey Eber, I'm ba-". Next panel- Darius, Willow, and Eberwolf on the couch. Hunter says "...willow?", She replies "hey hunter!", he asks "what are you guys doing?

Darius says "oh nothing...except looking at pictures of you as a baby!" Holding up the documents from earlier. We see two pictures of a younger hunter framed like panels- the first is of hunter as a baby/toddler aged hunter freshly sprouted out of the ground with a blanket around him, covered in dirt, while the second one shows a young scout Hunter covered in bandages receiving his sprig plushie. Darius' narration reads "courtesy of Hettie Cutburn- she found the only surviving copy of your early life medical records and gave them to me". Willow says "aww, you were so cute!". The final panel shows Hunter looking embarrassed/stunned as Willow takes a photo of the documents, and Darius says "I'm considering it an early father's day present- so, thank you, Hunter". End ID]

MERRY DADRIUS WEEK!!! Thank you to @sergeantsporks for hosting! There's other prompts I wanna do but they'll probably be late (maybe I'll do them in bulk and upload them on the final day). Til then here's a silly comic!

[ghostinharrenhal]

@gameofthronesdaily​ event 02: pride

daenerys targaryen + arya stark

[thegreatyin]

as revenge for all of the various atrocities veils has inflicted on the scoundrel (physical and psychological) she's decided to enact the ultimate form of revenge: walking around in broad neathlight with the worst fashion sense possible. i'm talking the WORST fabric quality in existence. i'm talking colors that clash so bad she's inventing 90s radical fashion like a century before the 90s even happen. i'm talking shoulderpads that can't even shoulderpad right. the vake annihilates her before she even makes it out the door

[molagboop]

High-echelon Mawkin suit modules can be pretty wild, and the Energy conversion module in Raven Beak's suit is no exception.

When exposed to an active current or energy field, the module accounts for the level of charged particles in the local atmosphere and converts the detected matter to power. Most substantial forms of power and radiation are compatible with its function, and it's calibrated to work more efficiently when exposed to substantially powerful forms of plasmic matter.

The conversion module is similar to (but should not be confused with) the thermal charge module, which charges the power suit in extreme heat. That technology is also implemented in the protective exosuits found in Cataris' lava zone. The Mawkin use thermal energy to power a number of their facilities: that they'd implement it in their more mobile works is only natural.

Back to the subject at hand, the conversion module's practicality is twofold: to keep Raven Beak's suit sufficiently charged and to maintain his vigor in battle. His particular biometric modifications are such that his suit, combined with his level of physical fitness, can theoretically keep him fighting without fear of exhaustion in perpetuity.

Raven Beak's juiced up version of lightning armor is the inverse of this module: it absorbs charged particles for the purpose of coalescing into a projected wave. The use of lightning armor in this manner negates the function of the conversion module for restorative purposes. Additionally, lightning armor works best against oncoming projectiles, while the reactive conversion module is at its peak when the suit is exposed to ambient radiation or concentrated, consistent flows of power.

Suffice to say, Raven Beak is probably the only person who could stick a fork in an electrical socket and have it do the exact opposite of killing him.

[bellamysgriffin]

after the storm

Summary:

Bellamy and Clarke have been English professors in the same department for four years when Bellamy's ex-girlfriend comes to town as a visiting professor. She's been invited to read the short story that all but ruined Bellamy's life. Little does he know that Clarke has a history with Echo too and will do anything to get under her skin. Ensue an elaborate fake dating scheme designed to prove to Echo that she's wrong for what she wrote in her story and that she's wrong for what she did to Clarke.

The only problem? Bellamy and Clarke have been enemies since the day they met. If they're going to convince Echo they're together, then they'll have to get through the next few weeks without fighting. And if that's possible, then who knows what could happen next?

(my @bellarke-events gift for @dustinswill with academic rivals to lovers & fake dating bc why choose? happy holidays!)

[quasarkisses]

I hate driving. I hate the car. I hate losing everything in the car. wallet, important keys, anything that matters I will apparently lose it in the car. it makes me want to tear my hair out

and there are ALWAYS a million little terrible cracks and crevices to convince myself things could have fallen into while I was busy paying vital attention to the road. no security except compartments that turn invisible when you close them so I will also forget they exist

no clear containers. no spot to even put a clear container. kill me

[happi-tree]

hunter’s mark, reversed

You never forget your first kill, they always say. 

What the monster manuals and hunting guides and mentors forget to say is that sometimes, your first kill never forgets you, either. 

Grant trudges to the master bathroom, attempting to muss his hair out of its unruly bedhead. He flicks on the lights, runs the water, lets the cool chill of it splash against his face and rouse him into a loose definition of wakefulness. Washes his face, turns off the water, looks in the mirror as he pats his face dry. 

His own reflection stares at him, tired. 

His eyes veer to his right, where a pair of vacant, milky white eyes look back.

Or: Grant Wilson, and the things that haunt him.

ao3

This is my fic for @dndadsfanweeks' Halloween Week day 6: ghosts. Like previous days, this is part of the supernatural au @llumimoon, @kaseyskat, and I planned out together. Content warnings for blood, gore, death, and general angstiness.

Hunter’s Mark (reversed): You choose kill a creature you can see within range and it mystically marks it you as your its quarry. Until the spell ends, you it deals an extra 1d6 psychic damage to the target whenever you hit it with a weapon attack, and you have disadvantage on any Wisdom (Perception) or Wisdom (Survival) check you make to find it.

-Ranger Spell List, D&D 5th ed.

You never forget your first kill, they always say. 

What the monster manuals and hunting guides and mentors forget to say is that sometimes, your first kill never forgets you, either. 

Grant trudges to the master bathroom, attempting to muss his hair out of its unruly bedhead. He flicks on the lights, runs the water, lets the cool chill of it splash against his face and rouse him into a loose definition of wakefulness. Washes his face, turns off the water, looks in the mirror as he pats his face dry. 

His own reflection stares at him, tired. 

His eyes veer to his right, where a pair of vacant, milky white eyes look back, expressionless, framed by dark locs and pallored skin. 

“Hi, Yeet,” Grant says softly. 

You never forget your first kill. 

You never forget your first crush, either. 

And for Grant Wilson, he’s unlucky enough that those two people ended up one and the same. 

There is no response from the boy in the mirror, just a blank, glassy stare, like one of the taxidermied animal heads that had decorated the walls of his grandma’s house. 

(As a little kid, he’d always thought their severed heads and marble eyes were a bit uncomfortable to look at, a bit creepy. He would make a game in his head of seeing how long he could be in the family room at night before he chickened out and turned the lights on. It was good, harmless fun, to look at the things Grandpa Frank had shot and convince himself that they were watching him from somewhere beyond the veil.)

(That was before he met Yeet, of course. Before his father had pulled him aside and told Grant what Grandpa Frank had told him.)

“Honey,” Marco calls from beyond the bathroom, and his husband’s soothing voice manages to pull him from his thoughts, just a little. His white-knuckle grip on the edge of the sink loosens (when had he grabbed it?). 

“Hey, I’m headed out to work,” Marco says, poking his head in through the doorway. 

The sight of Grant’s favorite person relaxes him further.

(He tries not to think about the way he had looked with a bullet wound between his eyes in his dream last night, his eyes fog-covered and glass-marbled, his jaw slack and dripping with gore.)

Grant feels Marco’s stubble brush along his cheekbone as his husband gives him a quick peck. 

“Okay,” Grant hears himself say, although it feels like his head is underwater (it feels like his head is stuck twenty-five years in the past.) “Love you.”

Marco’s eyebrows knit together above his half-moon glasses. Grant hates and loves in equal measure the way that his husband can read him so well, even when he’s busy and frazzled from his morning routine. Some sort of witchy ability of his, he’s sure. 

The concern in those onyx-flint eyes make Grant want to run and hide, sometimes, to cower and shy away like a prey animal under the weight of his affection. 

Grant stays still, though. He’s gotten better at that (at least, that’s what Marco tells him).

“You sound awful.”

“Good morning to you, too, sweetheart,” Grant says, trying to inject some lightheartedness into his voice.

“The adjustments I made to the sleeping draught didn’t work much, huh,” Marco frets.

Grant sighs. “Yeah.” Among other things.

His gaze slides to the mirror again: his warm, wonderful, magical husband on his left, a ghostly shade of a boy on his right. Grant in the middle, somewhere between living and dead, between predator and prey.

Marco follows his gaze, sees the way it lands on negative space.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, but I could always try an exorcism,” he muses, squinting at the silver-backed pane like he’s trying to force himself to see what Grant does.

“Too risky,” Grant says, like he has every other time Marco has offered. “He lashed out a lot, when I was younger. I wouldn’t want him to hurt you.”

It’s true. In the first few months - years - afterward, Yeet was a complete poltergeist. Gusts of wind would rip through every corridor of his childhood home, piercing shrieks and wordless screams echoing right next to his ears, those milky-white eyes narrowed in fury as wave upon wave of pity-disgust-betrayal-anger-fear reached through to his chest with icy cold fingers, emotions that were his burden but not his own siphoning between his ribs and pulling .

Phantom blood had drenched his teenage hands, red and sticky and awful but also strangely beautiful, congealing into chunks around shaking joints, caking into his fingernails, and Grant would pick at the skin there until it bled anew, as if disposing of the flaking crimson would absolve him of his sins.

Grant has long since rid himself of Catholic guilt. His own is more than any god could give him, now, and he watches as the red fills his peripheral vision, leaving gory smears on the countertop, worming its way into every line of his palm. Its counterpart blooms from Yeet’s chest, flowering and spreading outward, mesmerizing in a way that Grant knows he shouldn’t find pretty.

Marco exhales, places a hand atop his, unlatches it from the edge of the sink (fuck, he had been gripping it too hard again, hadn’t he), interlocks their fingers together. The red doesn’t spread to him.

(Grant hopes it never will. Grant hopes that, at the end of things, he will be buried, soaked in blood and gore, a sponge for all the violence so that his family, his friends, his pack, never have to live in fear again.)

“Okay,” Marco says, calmly, firmly.

Too many people have treated Grant like he is fragile, one moment away from breaking. Blessedly, Marco has never been one of them.

“I’m fine,” Grant says. “I’m fine, Marco.”

“It’s okay not to be,” Marco says, infuriatingly patient for someone who was about to rush out the door.

“You’re going to be late,” he evades.

“Time is relative, dear,” Marco responds, the air tingeing with a very specific mirage of color that Grant has long since learned to identify as his husband’s magic. There’s a slight upturn to his mouth, and Grant can’t help but lean into him and fit his lips to the seam of his smile.

Marco’s hands come to grasp at his waist, grounding, steadying, and the air smells less like a bloodstained forest night and more like clementines and jasmine. 

When Grant pulls away, there is no blood where his fingers cup his husband’s jaw, nor where his hand fists in his clean shirt.

“There you are,” Marco murmurs, smiling gently, and fuck, Grant does not deserve him in the slightest.

(He doesn’t need the lone boy in the mirror, rigor-mortis-frozen at age thirteen, to tell him that. Although the phantasmal reminder certainly doesn’t hurt.)

“You sure you’re gonna be okay to drive Lincoln to school?” Marco asks.

At the edge of his hearing, Grant can hear the uncoordinated puttering of their son in the kitchen, attempting to prepare his breakfast with only his feet.

He smiles, and it feels a little less fake on his face. “Yeah, I can handle it. It’s his first day, I can’t not drive our little boy!”

“Alright,” Marco says, pecking him again on the cheek and turning to leave before pausing at the threshold.

“Oh,” he says. “Before I forget and you freak out, Lincoln and I did some arts and crafts yesterday.”

“Friendship bracelets?” Grant asks.

“Yep.”

There’s a cold breeze only he can feel. “And they work?”

Marco cocks his head to one side. “No reason why they shouldn’t. Iron to ward off fae, silver for werewolves, even soaked the strings in holy water to throw something anti-demonic in there,” he lists. “And of course, imbued with good intent.”

 “Of course,” Grant echoes. 

“I can tell you’re thinking,” his husband says.

Grant hums. “Public school’s gonna be good for Lincoln, it’s just - are we going too far with the precautions?” He frowns. “I just don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“I mean, he’s going to find out eventually,” Marco says. “Whether or not he hears it from us.”

“I don’t want that to happen.”

“It’s going to, one way or another,” his husband asserts, frown clashing against his smile lines.

“I know, I know,” Grant sighs. “It’s just-”

There’s so much blood on Grant’s hands, passed down from his father and his father’s father, monster hunter to monster hunter to monster hunter. (Grant’s idea of a monster has shifted, as his father’s had, but the rush of the hunt remains regardless). The red will spread, as the red always does.

He can only hope it doesn’t stain his son’s hands. He can only hope it doesn’t ooze from his son’s ruptured heart. 

Marco’s features soften. “I know,” he says. (He shouldn’t have to know.) “He’s growing up too fast.”

“Yeah,” Grant agrees.

“If you think the bracelets are too much, though, I don’t think he’s packed yet.”

Grant’s vision is drawn once more to the figure in the mirror. Yeet regards him silently, mouth agape in a silent scream of betrayal. His ghostly form still bears the marks of a witch hunter, wooden stakes and crucifixes and torches that Grant didn’t let him set ablaze. 

He looks, and Yeet morphs before his eyes, locs shortening to dark, fluffy curls, close-cropped at the sides, freckles appearing on boyish, rounded cheeks and lanky limbs. The ghost looks a lot like Lincoln.

Yeet smiles wickedly, and blood pools from the corner of his mouth, runs down his spectral chin.

“No, no, the bracelets are a good idea,” Grant says, eyes not leaving the mirror. “Thank you for helping make them.”

“Not a problem, honey,” Marco says, squeezing his shoulder and dragging him back to the living “All good to go?”

“I need to get dressed, first,” Grant responds, gesturing at his loose t-shirt and boxers.

“I’ll leave you to it, then, I really do have to go,” He says. “I’m gonna wish Lincoln good luck, and then I’m off!”

“Okay,” Grant says, already moving to grab his sweater and slacks for his shift at the library later today. “Love you.”

“Love you, too!” Marco replies, immediate and ever-present, an answer to a question Grant doesn’t deserve to ask. “And Grant?”

“Hm?”

“Lincoln will be fine,” Marco reassures. “Trust me. I have a good feeling about this.”

“I hope so.”

The boy in the full-length mirror stares at him, hovering just at his right, and Grant avoids looking at him.

God, I really hope so. 

[vaguely-concerned]

I've written 5000 words of lucanis and rye fic the last two days and the only reason the wip isn't even longer yet is probably that my brain turns into useless ash and blows away for the day once it's channeled the lightning bolt of writing energy for a couple of hours and needs to sleep before it can stand up to another onslaught.

[askaniritual]

also having finished left hand of darkness brings my total books read this year up to:

1 book

[salt-baby]

wore the wrong shoes and now I have a fucking hematoma on my shin

what kind of shit bag body is this

[arachnophanatic]

WOLF SPIDER (Lycosidae), male

[afniel]

AH I REMEMBERED WHAT I WAS GONNA SAY EARLIER but it's kind of stupid, lmao.

So my partner is getting into brewing beer and I got them a Tilt, which is a Bluetooth hydrometer. It measures specific gravity and temperature, which are things you want to know so that you don't kill your yeast or whatever. Except the sensor's Bluetooth range is super short, and it basically runs via a phone app, and the temperature we're logging currently is the crawlspace, accessible via the staircase closet. So they were like, wait, what do we do about this, because I can't leave my phone in the closet, that's my alarm clock.

In a kind of ridiculous turn of life imitating art, I was like, hold up, I got just the thing right at my desk. Bam. Old phone. We just needed to scrounge up a charger because the battery is so dead that after charging just enough to power on it claimed it was at 53% (to be fair to it, there is a very real chance that it's correct, and it just holds no charge at this point so the capacity is just THAT low) and now it lives in the closet logging sensor data.

And I was like, you know...didn't I just solve a major story detail with a much larger version of this...yeah, no, this is all vaguely familiar somehow, power supply issues and all. Kind of cool that the concept works though. Kind of weird that it came up at all?

We are not gonna talk about the fact that I still have at least two more ancient-ass phones in a drawer where that came from because look, man, sometimes you just need a camera/mic/mini computer with Bluetooth and wifi that fits in a pocket, and people just get rid of these things, but not me. I actually could build a shitty security system out of them if I was reaaaally inclined. I mean. I'm not. But it's technically possible.

For real though, If I pick up any stupid maker projects I still high-key am thinking about slapping Bluetooth into a necomimi headset and running that through an Arduino and learning to code just enough to let me skip songs/change the volume on Spotify with my brain, because it's entirely doable, and I mean yeah I could do that on my phone remotely too, but that's not funny, now, is it. I'm just not sure it's $350+ of parts funny. Kind of a big investment just to prove the point that haha look I am the extremely ADHD type of lazy where I would rather solve a problem via the most convoluted and complicated Rube-Goldberg type ass machine way possible rather than just perform a single simple action.

YEAH I'VE BEEN THIS SCATTERED ALL DAY AND I REALLY SHOULD GO TO BED SHOULDN'T I. I started playing Satisfactory. Mistakes were made. I'm going to dream about conveyor belts again and I did it to myself...

[bawnjourno]

okay, 141 patches sewed in 2023!