#her hot [dead very dead] wife that was also incredibly fem

[ronnyraygun]

Some more of my Earth’s Frankie doodles because this woman is a different breed [she is going to pummel you to death].

[fizzyxcustard]

Wrong Place, Wrong Time (6) - End of part 1

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Masterlist here

Read the completed version on AO3 here

Summary: You find yourself in 1209AD after a science experiment has gone wrong, and you are now making a new life in a small village in France. However, Sir Raymond de Merville has his eye on you and will not take no for an answer. You both embark on a passionate love affair which leads to Raymond’s downfall.

Fandom: Pilgrimage (2017)

Pairings: Raymond de Merville x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Sexual references, violence, bad language, sexual language, smut

Comments/Notes: Re-post of original story which was posted on Tumblr last year in two 12-part stories. They will now be posted in two 6-part stories instead, just to condense the story down. Now has new name rather than it being a list of imagines for each chapter. If you wish to be added to a particular tag list, for a fandom, character or actor, message me or send an ask.

For a further few weeks, you and Raymond kept to your meeting place, the dairy barn. Each night you would make love, feeling the passion of your forbidden love rise. Raymond’s father had been pushing to dissolve your marriage, but he used this to his advantage, it becoming leverage to push his son into going on one last quest in their family name. “Raymond, you go on one last mission for me, and I will not see your marriage dissolved,” the old man had said, drawing a growl from Raymond.

“Whether I go or not, my marriage to her still stands,” Raymond hissed.

Then, finally, Raymond’s father had had enough of trying to make his son see sense. “If you do not go, I shall have her killed. If we go, then I shall spare her.”

Raymond knew that if his father made a threat then it was incredibly rare that he did not follow through on it. If he did not go to meet up with the travelling Irish monks on the road who were carrying a sacred relic, then you, his world, would be killed. And there was no way that Raymond could risk you, especially when you gave him news that evening.

“I think I’m pregnant,” you said softly, smiling.

Raymond swept you into a kiss, his hands brushing through your hair. “My love, I swear that after this last quest with my father then I shall remain by your side; we shall move from this god forsaken village, and I will bleed my father dry of everything. No one threatens you and my unborn child.”

“Make sure you come back to us,” you told Raymond, kissing the ring you had given him which was around his neck on a cord.

Raymond fell to his knees and lifted your dress, kissing your stomach. “I will return to you both, my love.”

The next morning would be when Raymond left, so you made sure you savoured each other in the barn that night. You made love way past the midnight hour, your cries falling onto empty air. Both of you fell asleep in the hay, wrapped together with your clothes over you for warmth.

*****

For the next few weeks that you were without Raymond, whilst he was travelling, you exchanged letters via pigeon. Every other morning and the same pigeon would come to the barn, dropping a small piece of parchment into your hand. Raymond would declare his love to you and your unborn child in each letter, swearing that his quest would uphold your honour and your vows as husband and wife.

Each letter you kept in a small wooden box which Etienne had given you as a wedding gift, a box which he had made himself, carved with roses coming into bloom.

But, suddenly, the letters from Raymond stopped.

*****

Your Raymond was dead. He had died staying true to his word and honouring you through betraying his father, trying to bring the bastard down and take away what he truly cared about. Upon hearing the news and you had fallen to your knees, weeping. Then you stormed out of the barn where you were working, kicking open the door and screaming into the open air.

Raymond’s body was brought back to the village, wrapped in a burial shroud. You kissed the fabric, your tears falling onto him. In a fold of the fabric, where you kissed, your lips touched something cold. You opened the cloth, and there across his chest, protruding from a hole in his leather gauntlet was an arrow. The sun shone down on the weapon, and on the very edge of the curled, modified shaft, you could see a small droplet of blood.

From the very day that your beloved Raymond was buried, you vowed to avenge his death. Firstly, you took his sword from his body along with the arrow, and watched in secret from behind a tree as his body was placed into the ground. His bastard of a father stood before his son’s body, his arms crossed.

He would be first.

Revenge was coursing through your body, filling your blood so it was red hot. Raymond’s death would not be in vain; you would make sure that every man who was responsible for your husband’s passing would feel pain, excruciating and raw.

The night of Raymond’s funeral and you gagged his father after sneaking into the back entrance of the house. The old man squirmed on the bed beneath you after being woken by your knees pressing into his chest. You held a dagger above the man’s body and drove it slowly downward into his chest, hearing him scream around the gag. Something dark overtook you and a sly smirk crept onto your lips as you watched the bastard die slowly, choking miserably on his own blood. But before he died you whispered in his ear, “Raymond’s child grows in my belly, and he will rise to take everything you own.”

You left the town, watching on in sadness as Etienne slept soundly, not knowing what fate would await you. In your bag you put rations of food, weapons, clothing and your box of letters from Raymond. His sword was snug in its scabbard at your waist and the arrow was placed in an inside pocket of your tunic. The few riding lessons you had had with Lucille and Henri would prove useful as you took one of the horses from the stables and left the village for good.

Word had spread in the village whilst you were there, remaining away from Raymond’s family, but still listening for news, that Raymond had been killed by a mute. This mute was tall, broad and had a cross tattooed on his back. That was enough information for you to begin searching.

You travelled far, inquiring where you could about the mute. Your sickness began, rendering you unable to travel during the first half of the day, but your resolve to see Raymond’s murderer dead was enough to keep you going. At night, lying beneath the stars or in abandoned houses, you would look upon your late husband’s letters, crying yourself to sleep.

Finally, you got a lead. He had last been seen approaching the coast, ready to get a boat to England to move back into Ireland. You stuck to the shadows, keeping your hood up out of your face. You ate at night just before sleeping and travelled by day.

In your pocket you fingered a small bottle which you had picked up from an apothecary. It was used during surgical interventions to paralyse parts of the body, but also used as a poison if it got into the wrong hands. An overdose could easily paralyse someone completely or slip them into a coma.

You found him. You saw him sitting alone at a tavern, his dark eyes watching everyone as they walked through the building. You kept your hood up and walked in, keeping to the edge of the room, your eyes smouldering in anger. You would make the fucker pay! All the people you had asked for information had served their purpose well, guiding you to him.

Being a woman may work to your advantage here, you thought. You looked across the room, through the masses of bodies, and approached him. You sat beside him, smiling and slid your hand down onto his thigh. Repulsion racked through you for touching another man who wasn’t your dearest Raymond, and more than that, this was the man who had murdered him.

An hour later and you found yourself in one of the upper rooms of the tavern, having brought a room for the night, and you were in the arms of the mute. He was kissing you, drawing all the disgust out of you, but you were doing this for Raymond. You stopped for a moment, quickly slipping the liquid from the bottle in your pocket into the ale, and then handed him the cup. “Come and drink,” you whispered. So far and he had not noticed your slight of hand.

He drank from the cup and moved forward to kiss you again, but suddenly stopped and collapsed to the bed. A grunt of frustration rose from him as he tried to move, his eyes wide in shock.

Laughing, you straddled him, and tied his arms to the bed posts, making sure that he could not move one inch. “You’re probably wondering who I am,” you told him, grinning at him. He stared at you, swallowing hard, his body completely paralysed. “This will answer your question.” From your inside pocket of the tunic you wore, you pulled out the arrow. You slid the metal down his cheek, onwards to his chest, his eyes widening even further. Slowly you ripped open his shirt, looking at the scars across him.

His body arched as you dug the metal into his thigh and twisted. Then you followed with the other thigh. Followed then by just above his chest, digging into his collarbones, each one in turn. “This is for my Raymond, you bastard!” you growled, forcing the arrow into his neck, in the exact same place that your husband had been bitten by this animal before you.

You slipped away that night, leaving behind the bloodied and mutilated body of the mute, satisfied that your beloved had finally been avenged.

**** FIN (Part 2 is on AO3 and can be posted here if people request) *****

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[silver-leaf-girl]

so I read Record of a Spaceborn Few

so, I just finished the audiobook of Becky Chambers Record of Spaceborn Few last night, and haha do I have some feelings. it is a beautiful, and lovely book?

mild spoilers, and initial review-y thoughts below?

I think a lot of my friends will be familiar with Becky Chambers’ stuff, but for context (since context is such a theme in this book) - they’re queer-positive, fairly soft sci fi, focusing on the relationships (shipmates, romantic, rivalries, friendships) between individuals in the world, rather than colossal Events of Galactic Significance (esp. compared to stuff like Ann Leckie, who I also like a lot). they’re also focused on humans (and their creations, <3 Lovelace in Book 2) as a kind of marginal and hardscrabble recently discovered species that’s not up to much, rather than casting us as the kind of ‘Humanity F- Yeah!‘/humans are special/have a unique manifest destiny that a fair amount of other sci fi does (a lot of people compare Chambers with the Mass Effect universe, which I genuinely don’t like because of this).

RoSF is very much in the tradition of this kind of small-scale ‘cosy’ sci-fi, dealing with the Exodan Fleet and its inhabitants who fled an environmentally devastated Earth, and who are under the three strains of the loss of one of their Generation Ships to metal fatigue, the visit of a well-meaning but intrusive alien anthropologist (whose broadcasts back home to her wealthy alien planet are really well-captured), and the issue of emigration/immigration/decline (?) of the Fleet. It follows a variety of plot lines - a fleet archivist, a recent immigrant, a restless teen guy, a caretaker (a kind of priest/funerary worker, really interesting), and a harried mum who’s considering leaving the fleet. It really inhabits their everyday lives and concerns; it indirectly tells a bigger story about uncertain cultural identity, but is focused on these small intimate stories.

The big through-line in the book is a sense of community, shared history, and what we owe to the past. The ships of the Exodan Fleet are maintained and patched together from their own scraps; people carry on identities, meanings and (as is discussed in one rather haunting bit towards the end) even bodies and ways of living as relics from a planet they will never set foot on; and (a really key theme) the nutrients of the bodies of the dead are recycled in a really emotive and heartfelt funereal ritual. How different people struggle with the past - rejecting it, chafing against it, seeking it out to fill holes in themselves, finding meaning in it, preserving it, making it - is so key throughout the book, both in the fiction, in the language, and the structure (bookended by two naming ceremonies, using a form of words that is so beautiful I feel I have to put it in a reblog), and it puts together a beautiful picture of a changing society where people are trying to preserve the values they built it on. The notion of recognising the fleet/the fleet you grew up in - is really powerful, and honestly a bit heart-in-throat.

But the notion of keeping shared history for its own sake isn’t enough - what’s worth preserving? Politically, it’s v. interesting too - there’s quite a lot of (well-blended-in) exposition and description of how the Fleet operates, and it’s ... well, if not Post Scarcity Fully Automated Luxury Gay Pacifist Space Communism, then at least Low Scarcity Labour-Egalitarian Lib Fem Space Anarcho-Socialism. The way that humans live and coexist alongside each other - where people come together, and where the faultlines between them are - is really well-illustrated without becoming didactic, and the idea of the fleet as this utopian, half-realised, desperate-but-now-slightly adrift project is really beautiful and well-evoked. The book is hopeful and convincing about the liberatory potential of this project (there’s a beautiful bit towards the end about even people leaving the fleet still being part of it and embodying what it values and means, but is ultimately clear-eyed about the fact that it’s the marginalised, minority part of a species that is nothing special on the galactic field and is surrounded by wealthy and powerful neighbours. It’s clear about the lingering crud of human social structures, about being undercut by intense, tragic disaster, by unequal external trade and internal corruption, and about the dubious appeals of the austere space-borne (and spaceborn) life compared to what the capitalist world beyond offers - but it’s hopeful nonetheless that people can make something of it, and that the fleet can carry on.

In terms of ~queer content~, it’s not quite as rich a vein as some of the previous books (first one had a lot more queer aliens and relationship structures, second had an incredibly strong trans metaphor as a through-line with an AI working out embodiment), but it’s got a lot of stuff that works with this too? Isabel, one of the main characters, is in a beautifully described and lovely wlw relationship, and her date with her wife where they’re remembering how they met is one of the most lovely bits of the book? Sometimes it’s OK not to have difficult queer feelings be an important part of the book. Sometimes just happy elderly lesbians is all you want/need! There’s also some interesting stuff with Sunny - a sex worker - and his relationship with Eyas, a funerary worker/caretaker - about the concept of ‘caring for bodies’, and the emotional labour that goes into that?

In terms of writing, it’s beautiful and lovely, just as much a warm hug and cup of hot chocolate as any of the other books in the series - it’s not super-lyrical or evocative in its use of language, but that’s not the point - it’s heartfelt and evokes real, flawed-but-good people in messy but fixable situations. The narration by Patricia Rodriguez on the audiobook version that I listened to is fantastic - I particularly like the way that she subtly changes language and accent on the different viewpoint characters to evoke the way different cultural perspectives and denaturalising the protagonists’ narrative voice.

So yes - it’s a small, beautiful, character-focused book with an extremely evocative sense of community and history. I cried a few times listening to it.

I’d definitely recommend it - probably on its own, but ideally in the context of the other two books before it, to flesh and round out the world(s) it evokes.