#i follow 2300 blogs or someth | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sstormyskyess · 11 months ago

Text

Holiday Movies

author's note: hello and happy new year's eve everyone!! i've gotta say that these past three months have been absolutely insane for me, i could have never expected the support i've gotten and i have to give a big thank you to all my mutuals [i swear i was doing backflips when all of y'all followed me, a little baby blog, out of nowhere. fr i was losing it] with all of that out of the way, please enjoy a gaz fic as my final post of the year! i'm looking forward to next year and all the things i have planned 😊

cw: smut, afab!reader [no gendered language], voyeurism, some dirty talk, masturbation

word count: 2300+

Kyle "Gaz" Garrick / GN!Reader

It was a cold December night and the new year was right around the corner, a few hours away. He would’ve much preferred to be with you, celebrating with your friends and a bottle of champagne, watching some of your favorite movies, and simply relaxing. But, as was common with his job, that wasn’t in the cards. Not this year.

Moonlight beamed into the small, dusty motel room Kyle sat in. It had been a little while since he’d been on a solo mission; he was all alone with nothing other than the occasional check-in from Price or Laswell to keep him company.

Well, except for one thing.

He lets out a shuddering sigh, his hand lazily palming over the bulge in his pants. He scrolled through the various pictures and videos on his phone: pictures of pretty things he had been seeing on this undercover mission thus far, funny videos he was ready to send you when he was able to connect to the internet again, and lots of pictures and videos of the two of you doing a variety of things.

He had some selfies of him smiling at the camera while you slept soundly beside him, a few videos he took of you when a stray cat had found its way into your lap while you sat on a park bench, and plenty more. But he was on the lookout for one particular video that the two of you recorded together earlier that month.

“Wait. You want to do what?” You tilt your head, your cheeks rapidly heating up. Your eyebrows were practically up to your hairline at the mere suggestion of what Kyle was planning.

“I want something to take with me when I go on missions. Just a little something to keep me occupied in my downtime.” He had that signature grin on his pretty face, the one that always made it so hard to even register what he was saying.

You blink, a stunned look on your face. The concept of recording a homemade sex tape was something you would have never considered had Kyle not brought it up. You weren't opposed necessarily, but it still had you getting flustered regardless. “I mean… okay. That sounds fun.” You say with a shy smile.

Kyle leans down to kiss you, cupping your jaw and pulling you close. You hum into his lips out of surprise. Apparently Kyle had already gotten himself worked up just from hearing your consent, a fact that had you squirming in his spot and getting excited yourself.

You’re practically tackled down to the couch cushions, your legs making room for Kyle to maneuver between them without breaking the kiss for even a moment. He tilts his head to deepen the kiss, his tongue slipping between your lips and mingling with yours, enjoying the quiet moan you let out at the feeling.

When Kyle pulls away, his eyes are dark and begin to trail down the length of your body. Despite being fully clothed, you feel completely naked under his gaze; it felt like you were being undressed by his eyes. You had to look away, your face flushed from embarrassment.

Kyle chuckles, running his hand up and under the hem of your thin shirt, feeling your warm skin under his fingers and squeezing at your stomach, hips, and chest. He pauses for a moment to grab his phone and smiles at the picture of you on the lock screen before pulling up his camera.

“Get undressed for me, love. Nice and slow.” He mutters and hits the record button. You bite your lip, doing as he said. You grab the hem of your shirt and pull it upwards, slowly revealing your torso and chest, the cool air making your nipples perk up. You wiggle away from Kyle for a moment to pull your baggy sleep shorts and underwear down your legs, having to pull your legs up toward your chest to pull them off in the position you were in. You notice Kyle pointing the camera downwards to get a look of the heat between your legs, making you suddenly feel even more shy.

Kyle takes hold of one of your knees and pulls it away from the other, revealing your core to him. He sighs, running his hand down your thigh and running a thumb up and down your slit, pulling it open and getting a good view of your hole. You shiver, both from the chill and the timid feeling threatening to spill over inside you. It was one thing to be so exposed to just Kyle, but now with a camera involved, it was a whole new experience.

“Fuck, just look at you…” Kyle muses to himself, playing with your wet folds with his thumb, smiling at the sight. “So pretty just for me.” You moan softly when his finger brushes up against your sensitive bundle of nerves, stroking it up and down. His thumb dips inside just slightly while he trails it around the rim. “This is all mine, isn’t it?”

You nod, but that wasn’t enough for him. He tuts down at you, gently pinching your swelling nub between his thumb and forefinger. “I wanna hear you say it, sweetheart."

You whimper at the sting, looking up at him. "I-It's yours… I'm yours, Kyle," You try to keep your voice louder than it usually would to make sure it would pick up on the camera microphone. "A-All yours."

Kyle nods along with your words, humming affirmatively. "All mine," he parrots back.

"Now, be good for me and hold your legs apart, okay?" You nod at his instructions, making Kyle smile happily. You hook your fingers under your knees, pulling them up to your chest to spread yourself open wide. "There we go." He grins wider.

Kyle uses his free hand to cup your chest, twisting one of your nipples between his fingers, then running it back down your stomach to paw at the soft skin there. "You're gorgeous, love." He sighs.

Finally, he reaches down to free his cock from his sweatpants and boxer briefs, tugging at it a few times. It’s stiff and leaking, pre-cum slowly sliding down the underside of his cock from the swollen tip. You look him up and down, watching his cock twitch and jump in his hand.

Kyle watches through the screen of his phone, gliding the tip of his cock through your folds and chuckling breathily at the way you jump when it bumps against your little bundle of nerves.

You suck in a breath when the head of his shaft notches on the rim of your hole, teasing it in and out. "You ready for me, sweetheart?"

"Yeah, I'm ready. I want it, please," You whine, wiggling in place.

You bite down on your lip when his cock slides inside you slowly. You stare at Kyle holding the phone closer to where your bodies connect, a tiny moan leaving your lips at the sight. The thought of Kyle watching this later made your walls flutter around Kyle’s cock, making him grunt in return. "Fuckin' hell—so fuckin' tight, baby…"

You shiver at the slow but steady intrusion. You look up at Kyle, and in turn the camera, your eyes half-lidded. You swallow thickly and fight the urge to hide your face behind your hands, knowing that he wouldn’t let that slide.

The tip of Kyle’s cock presses right against the back wall of your hole, sending that all too familiar pleasant sting that you had gotten used to over the course of your relationship through your body. You gasp and let out a long moan, your face scrunching up. “Kyle…” You whine, your voice drawn out and high-pitched. He was just so deep. It was making your head spin and Kyle hadn’t even started moving yet.

You open your eyes back up to stare at Kyle pulling his hips back and pushing them forward again slowly, holding them there for a few moments. “Y’feel so good, love. Can’t wait to fill you up good.” He groans. He thrusts again and again at his slow pace, warming you up and stretching you out to make room for his cock.

Your breath catches in your throat when he starts moving a tad bit faster, and pressing in just a bit rougher. “I-I want more, Kyle, please,” you whimper, looking up at him with a newfound need in your gaze. His cock twitches at the sight but he still shakes his head. “I’ve gotta savor this, love, need something nice and long to keep me occupied.” He chuckles when you huff, pouting at his resolve when you were so worked up, so needy in comparison.

Soon, your hole was squelching around him, the lewd sound picking up on the video with just how loud it was. His pace had picked up, and he was holding your hips up for you to wrap your legs around his waist, letting him hit a deeper angle. Your moans were shaky and your eyes had gotten glassy from his cock kissing your cervix with every thrust.

Kyle made sure to get all of you on camera, from head to toe, his brain getting foggy as he watched the beautiful display you were setting for him. He was brought back to reality when you started to speak, or try to at least; you were having trouble getting your words out in a coherent way with him managing to brush up against your sweet spot with every time he pulled out and pushed back in.

You tug on his free arm, looking up at him so sweetly, a look that he could never say no to. “I need it faster, please, please, please—” Your whining is broken off by him sending a few particularly rough thrusts into you, causing you to cry out. You don’t notice him propping his phone up on the coffee table until you feel both of his hands on your hips.

He starts panting and pulling you into his thrusts, the skin of his thighs slapping against the plush of your ass. “Don’t wanna hear you talking, sweetheart—fuck—just wanna hear you scream for me,” he groans lowly. You do exactly what he says, a loud moan echoing around the room. He had pushed your knees up to your chest in a mating press, bracing his knees on the couch to get better leverage. The power behind his ministrations increased, his grunting now consistently mingling with your beautiful noises.

“Kyle—Kyle!” You cry out. Your legs start to shake as you neared your climax. You start to babble out praises and pleas and your stomach muscles tighten, the pleasure building up and up, so close to spilling over…

Then, your hole clenches down around Kyle’ cock, practically squeezing the life out of it. Kyle cries out at the feeling of you tipping over the edge, relishing the string of moans you let out with each of his thrusts. He needed more, though. He only picks up the pace and everything becomes too much quickly.

Jolts of overstimulation, pleasure and pain, shoot through your body and down your legs as they tensed up hard. You whine his name desperately, begging him to keep going, slow down, you didn’t know anymore. The feeling of his cock twitching and throbbing inside you mixed with his hips stuttering as he neared his orgasm was too much for you to handle.

“Fuck—I’m close, love, I’m gonna fuckin’ cum, sweetheart—clench down on me again,” he groans out when you do what he asks. “J-Just like that, o-oh fuck—!” He tips his head back and buries himself to the hilt, his mouth opened in a silent moan as he cums, painting your walls white. He puts his hands next to your head, smiling down at you with a heaving chest.

He grabs his phone from the table again. “I’m gonna pull out now,” he murmurs before doing just that, a shiver running down your spine. His cum dribbles out of you and he uses his free hand to collect it with his thumb, spreading it around and smoothing it across your over-sensitive, swollen nub. You whine at the overwhelming feeling, looking up at him and at the camera.

“You felt perfect, sweetheart.” He plays around with you for a while longer, letting you catch your breath. “Can’t wait to start up a nice collection of these with you.” He smiles at you when your eyes widen a bit at that notion.

Kyle’s head tips back onto the headboard of the motel bed, his breathing heavy and his cock spent. He looks back down at the video on his phone, his eyes locked on your pretty face looking up at him so sweetly.

His hand looked similar to the way your wet heat looked that night: covered in his thick cum, pent up from a couple weeks of not being able to satisfy himself. He had gone a few rounds and rewatched the video more than a couple times, and it ended up with his cock slicked up with his own spend. He wished he could show you how fucked-out he looked and felt, but he would just have to send you the pictures he took later. Maybe you’d use them to get yourself off. The thought of you touching yourself looking at his lewd photos had him hardening up again, even though he had gotten lightheaded from how much blood had rushed down into his cock for so long.

Guess he’d have to take care of this little problem yet again. Luckily, he had plenty of material to take care of it. His free, clean hand tilted his phone up again and his thumb tapped the play button once again. He had a long night ahead of him.

𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

#kyle gaz garrick #kyle gaz garrick x reader #gaz x reader #kyle gaz garrick x gn!reader #gaz x gn!reader #kyle garrick x gn!reader #kyle garrick x reader #gaz mw2 #gaz mw3 #gaz modern warfare #gaz cod #mwii #mwiii #mw2 #mw3 #gaz mw2 smut #gaz mw3 smut #storm's creations #sstormyskyess

35 notes · View notes

novanhistorian · 23 days ago

Text

I must say, thus far I have been quite a poor correspondent. The point of this blog is to slow the rate at which I pester my friends with elaborate—and winding, when verbal—rants about various facets of the Imperium Novel, as well as to have a convenient public point of reference for them when I offhandedly mention something like the “regional parliaments” or when I forget myself and accidentally talk about the gender binary as if it were the gender trinary. (It is partially also because I want a public forum to yell to my very small audience about this thing I’ve been working on for years.)

Needless to say, I have thus far done exactly none of that.

To jumpstart things and give my readership at least something, I have made this massive post.

You can also get this split into separate posts for a better, but less linkable, reading experience:

The Fundamentals

A Sketch of History (masterpost with sublinks)

The Fundamentals

1.3k words.

I am here to talk about the Imperium Novel, which I must immediately clarify is not a novel. What it actually is is a rather massive and intricate worldbuilding project. Now, I could tell you that its name is a relic of the earliest days of its development, when it was really to be one novel with an increasingly cartoonish amount of backstory, and that would be true enough; but the heart of the matter is that I am a painfully pretentious artiste in this specific way. I could have changed the name; I didn’t.

(As for why it is no longer a single novel: As I write this, the [pseudo]historical period I concern myself with covers almost fifteen centuries, most of them quite complicated. Any attempt to cover the whole in one novel would wind up a gargantuan, winding, likely quite boring mess possessing more pages than a medical textbook and less plot than a wet blanket.)

Anyhow, hard segue.

The other basics you need to know are the following:

We are not in our solar system. References to the sun are to the star Scientia (to us, Era Cassiopeiae A), and references to Forsuno or the Far Sun refer to, well, Forsuno (Eta Cassiopeiae B).

The main planet, Terranovo,* has twenty-six-hour days and slightly stronger gravity than Earth. Its days are the standard in most other regions; we are ignoring Ilajn for now because I haven’t formally named their planet. (It has 21.5-ish-hour days and markedly weaker gravity. Let’s hear it for large, fast-rotating terrestrial planets.)

All the planets we care about after 2300 orbit Scientia, and—at the risk of misrepresenting the gravitational dance—the orange dwarf Forsuno basically does too. Scientia’s stellar classification is G0 V, which is to say that it is more or less like our sun, though slightly brighter. Forsuno’s is K7 V, which makes it either an orange or a red dwarf, depending on which classification system one follows. Basically, it’s small, it’s dim (only 6% of the Sun’s luminosity, still far brighter than a full moon), and it will live a very long time after Scientia is dead. Although their orbit is very eccentric (that is to say very elliptical rather than circular), the closest approach between the stars is 36 AU, or just this side of the Kuiper Belt; this allows for stable, although compact, planetary systems around both stars safe from the worst of the gravitational interference of the other star.

Novanity (non-collective singular novan and plural novans) is the sapient species the Novel follows for most of its history. They are, as many of them will bitterly tell you, the products of genetic engineering and a whole lot of moral stupidity on the parts of various humans—but we shall get to that in the history.

* At other points in its history, Terranovo was also known as Terra Nova, Terranova, Tero Nova, and Nova Tero. By the current working date, 745, variation is only historical.

The gender trinary is probably the most relevant thing in here besides the location, but thanks to narrative flow I have to put it down here. The three novan genders occupy roughly the same position as the human two, which is to say that the majority of the population falls into one or another, but there are a large number of outliers besides.

Two of the dominant genders are descendants of our concepts of male and female, and they remain mostly similar and are called by their names. The third is called sendua (an adjective), and people who have it are called senduoj. Its name derives from a shortening of senduuma, a rather nonstandard way of saying “nonbinary;”* it somewhat evolved from the use of the word as an overcategory for a variety of genders,

* It literally means “without a binary;” the human standard, neduuma, is a calque from English.

If you encounter something like Ĉlr or Nŝx/n, that’s reference shorthand, a standardized system used in the Imperium (with War-Era predecessors); it tells you a person’s gender and pronouns, and sometimes their preferred grammatical gender and physical sex.

The capital letters stand for gender and are derived from the gendering suffixes in the Imperium’s dominant language: Ĉ stands for male, N for female, S for sendua, and X (from crossing out the category on a form) for anything else. The lowercase letters, of which there are often more than one, stands for pronouns: l for li, the equivalent of “he;” ŝ for ŝi, “she;” r for ri, “re;” and x for anything else (which is quite rare, but in practice means “ask”).

The lowercase letter after the slash, if it exists, describes grammatical gender—and boy do I wish English had a shorter way to say that. The Imperium’s dominant language is largely non-gendered, and for words which could be gendered—titles, professions, and so on—the default is to use the genderless base word rather than add on one of the gendered suffixes. But some titles are routinely declined by gender, and several minor languages gender their adjectives at a minimum and their verbs at a maximum. As a result, some portion of the population has a preference about which gender is used, and that’s usually denoted like this. (The letters themselves follow the same rule as the actual gender indicator, and good lord have I said “gender” a lot of times in this paragraph.)

Occasionally, an italicized x or y or a centered asterisk, placed after the pronouns, indicates physical sex. The x and y, mean roughly what one would expect—XX or XY chromosomes respectively, without any sort of intersex condition. The asterisk, which in some state governments has subcategories, indicates that the person is intersex. Sex is mostly irrelevant in social life, so its denotation is circumscribed to medical and governmental records.

As you may have guessed by now, the dominant language is Esperanto—or, well, a version of Esperanto that’s evolved like a (fairly regulated) natural language for a millennium and a half. Some people speak one or more of the so-called “minor languages,” usually regional dialects descended from natlangs.

There are two different calendars in use over the course of the Novel, one that continues roughly directly from the Gregorian calendar and is dated relative to the traditional year of birth of Jesus Christ and another dated relative to the Year of Fortifying the Peace (the official end of the War Era, covered in the last two sections of the Sketch of History).

The first or human calendar can be identified because it will almost always have a four-digit year, and in cases where it doesn’t it gets labeled (B.)C.E. The second or novan calendar can usually be identified by having a three-digit year, or else because it uses a minus sign to indicate its negatives. It may also be distinguished by the ᴊ (from jaro, “year”) that precedes single- and double-digit years, as well as any three-digit years that require disambiguation. The novan calendar has a year zero; this is, as can probably be predicted, the Year of Fortifying the Peace.

Technically there are four major dating systems (standard, human, Terranovan orbital, and Ilajnaplaneta orbital). The orbital calendars exist because neither of the inhabited planets have years particularly close to 365 days, so their seasons are wildly out of sync with the administrative calendars. I should probably also note that neither planet has 24-hour days, and that the administrative calendars are standardized on the 26-hour Terranovan day.

I think that’s about it. I’ll write up instructions on how to pronounce all the random Esperanto words soon; for now, the vowels are like Spanish and the J makes a Y sound.

A Sketch of History

Human Future History, 21st to 23rd Centuries

I will cop to it up front that this period is the least interesting to me and has had the least work put into it; I hope to settle most questions about it here and keep the blog to a mostly novan focus. You are welcome to inquire further, but since humanity’s time on Earth is mostly just background to the background it will likely not receive much coverage organically beyond this. If you, like me, are mostly here for in the genetically-engineered cat people and their post-human politicking, you can probably jump ahead to the next section. 2.1k words.

For all my fine talk, we start with humanity as the sole species, and we start with them on Earth. Everything that led up to our time happened. After 2024, humanity narrowly survived climate change with their civilization battered, but in one piece. The sciences progressed; the most relevant for our current purposes are astronomy and space travel, and the most important later on are the advancements in batteries and synthetic biology.

Public interest in space grew, at least partially fostered by escapist thinking, and the World Space Agency (a terrible name, but so is “the World Health Organization” and they get on alright) was formed. At the outset it was more a collaboration of national agencies than an agency unto itself, but over the years it slowly gained authority and independence and evolved from a coordinator into a major player in its own right. It had quite extensive scholarship programs, which probably contributed.

The Moon was not so much settled as populated by sparse construction and mining towns with few steady inhabitants. I will spare you most of the details, but in short the main business of the Moon was construction for spaceflight and asteroid-mining. Its lower gravity (a) made construction rather easier and more importantly (b) made it much easier to reach escape velocity—that is, to launch something off it and into space. Almost no one stayed for more than five years.

Several things built on the Moon were space telescopes, eventual heirs to the long-defunct Webb, with one being roughly comparable to the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory. During the climate crises (plural intended) a dedicated minority of the public attention had turned toward exoplanets. Whether or not humanity could reach them now, they said, we should try to develop the option.

Most of the advocates, being laymen, did not understand how mind-bogglingly far such exoplanets were, nor how mind-bogglingly difficult it would be to get there. Most reasonable astrophysicists, and those in related fields, cautiously encouraged the public fascination because it had caused a funding boom, but rightly downplayed the possibility of finding and settling anything.

Then Eta Cassiopeiae Ae fell into humanity’s collective lap. A terrestrial planet, slightly smaller than Earth; in the habitable zone of a very sunlike star; in possession of an atmosphere, but not too much of one; wet, but not too wet; showing evidence of volcanic activity that likely indicated tectonic action—all this, and only (“only”) 19.42 light-years away! Careful observation even indicated it had a moon comparable in size to Earth’s!

Humanity took the hint. In the middle twenty-second century, relatively shortly after its discovery, η Cas Ae (at the time known as η Cas Ad, as it was discovered after the two outer super-Earths) was confirmed to have the right amount of water to potentially support life. No life yet existed, at least that humanity could detect; but that didn’t mean they couldn’t go over and put some there.

A certain august international body, in company with the World Space Organization, put out a call for anyone of skill interested in the prospect of settling η Cas Ae. The public response was immediate and enthusiastic, and demands were made to give this new Earth an official name rather than its sterile initial designation. In their exuberance, they unwittingly named it after Newfoundland; this was only noticed several months after the fact.

Thus was the Convention for the Terraforming and Settlement of Terra Nova called. The Convention gave way to the Committee for the Terraforming [and so on]; no one wanted to say all that, so most languages shortened it to “the Terra Nova Committee.” In English it was often called the rather snappy “New Eden Project.”

The official language of the project was declared to be Esperanto. This left most of the world very confused and astonished the handful of people who knew what had been going on behind the scenes—they had never expected it to actually work.

(Esperanto, as I hope you know, is an international auxiliary language created by L. L. Zamenhof and first published in 1887. It is designed to be simple and easy to learn, but still capable of a full range of expression. It is the most popular I.A.L., though that does not mean it has ever been exactly societally prevalent. Most everyone I mention it to has never heard of it, or else has only run into its name in passing. I have never, to my knowledge, met an Esperantist—unfortunately including myself, as I am grammatically sound but not yet fluent.)

Most of the work of the Committee was one of five things:

How do we get there?

How do we build that?

What do we do once we get there?

What do we need to accomplish the above?

Whom do we send?

They solved the first question by commissioning various independent teams of experts for potential starship designs, choosing the best three or so, and bringing their creators onto the subcommittee responsible for the actual final design. That committee was given ten years to come up with a first design and was intended to run for thirty overall, then handing things off to another committee that would be responsible for bringing that plan to fruition. It wound up taking forty, but that more or less happened.

The second question was solved incidentally by the first committee from question one, and their answer was “in space.” Given humanity’s off-planet expansion, it seemed the natural choice. By the time of the conclusion of the design phase they were also mining the asteroid belt, very carefully and mostly via robots, which provided the Terra Nova Committee another much easier fount of resources for their project.

The solution to the third question was rather more complicated than it might initially appear. Clearly they had to terraform the new world—that atmosphere, in its current state, was poisonous—and that would require a timescale measured in centuries at the minimum; but whence were they to do it? Where do you send potentially tens of thousands of your children and their children’s children to live and work in pursuit of a goal they themselves will never see?

The best choice was obviously the moon around the planet—it was well-positioned for a base and it should have enough gravity to beat off the worst of the developmental effects. Life on the moon had been proven possible long before, although few who took up residence there stayed very long; so had life in the asteroid belt, whose recently-sighted Terra-Nova-system counterpart they planned to mine. There would have to be improvements—these hypothetical “canned generations” would have to spend their whole lives on the moon, so their situation was not really comparable to that of the human-contemporary lunars.

It fed into the fourth and fifth questions, which were uncomfortably close to one and the same. Once the starship arrived at Terra Nova, its occupants would be alone. Earth would be unable to send help in anything resembling a timely manner, and supply runs were an outright impossibility. The lunar settlement, and later the planetary ones, needed to be self-sufficient and capable of performing the terraforming work laid out before them. But they also had to be able to build the ship in the first place, within reasonable materials constraints. Mass is a major consideration in air- and spacecraft design for many reasons (the most relevant here being its effect on the amount of energy needed to alter a craft’s course, be that for maneuvering reasons or simply to get the blasted thing moving in the first place), so cargo had to be minimized too. As a result, they tried to maximize the amount they could derive from materials in the new system or renewably produce aboard ship—food, water, clothing, plus metals and more water after Advent.

I’ll omit the math and any more of my rambling here, as I have already gone on far too long about the fourth question. Just understand that the fifth question was decided under the same material constraints as the fourth. They decided to send a few hundred carefully-chosen scientists, other “people of expertise,” schoolteachers, and their immediate families, all given training on how to handle the isolation they would face and on how to deal with the vastly different cultures their new roommates would come from. The number of people—around eight or nine hundred—was high enough and their sources global enough that they ran very little risk of problems with genetic diversity or in maintaining their population. Only three of the twelve highest-ranked officials in the Committee (which by this point was more of a Division) opted to go.

Probably in the early twenty-third century, the project was finally ready. The great starship was built, the people were chosen, every single possibly necessary thing had been loaded aboard in triplicate. (That last is an exaggeration—the things allowed on board were very strictly controlled and pared down, and while they were given a margin of error, it was far from triple the expected need.)

They set out—and novan knowledge goes entirely dark.

I write from a post-Departure novan perspective, and although I have my guiding theories and research on how humanity got to Terra Nova and what they did on their way, at the end of the day I like to keep it a black box. With that said, feel free to speculate wildly in my inbox. God knows the novan scientific community has been doing the same for centuries.

We will get to why this disappointing blank exists, and why the dates on the Committee period are so fuzzy, when we arrive at the Departure and then the Devastation. We think the voyage lasted two to three generations, if that helps in your guessing.

We pick up their trail again somewhere between five years (short chronology) and two decades (long chronology) before their arrival at the new solar system, and we do this mostly by reconstruction. The early Lunar period, beginning about two years post-Advent (that being the general term for arrival at the Scientia system), was not targeted for destruction, and thus its records have a much better survival rate. By this point the miracle starship had apparently been disassembled and re-formed into Prime Dome. As Prime Dome is known to have been nearing completion two years after Advent, that allows us to use its culture and current events to reconstruct those of the late Shipboard period.

Shipboard politics were generally quite a restrained affair. Government was handled mostly by an elected committee of respected scientists, professors (these from the shipboard university), and career public servants. It was called simply the Leadership Council and held wide-ranging authority. Social norms, like politics, were fairly rigid, and there was a strong emphasis on the social contract. Cohesion was to be prized and praised, and the good of the collective came first in all cases. The ship required its human components to be in as perfect of working order as its mechanical ones, and any societal crisis would potentially damn everyone aboard to death in the void. In this unstable environment, the Terra Nova Committee had determined, a strong hand was needed at the tiller and social cohesion had to be prized above other goals. (Every member of the project who had embarked from Earth had agreed to their peculiar form of government, which was to be replaced with a less-overbearing republic once they were safely settled on the Moon and could afford such things.)

Scientists from, or whose recent ancestors had been from, certain countries often had minor rivalries or feuds with scientists from certain other countries; but this was kept to a background tension, heated competition over sports and that sort of thing. The ship had a population of perhaps eight hundred at the outset and it seems a similar number arrived at Terra Nova, so there may have been some amount of regulation on reproduction.

Independent organizations of more than a handful of people required official permission, and until they got it were given very little leeway. Political parties were unofficially banned as engines of disunion; one was to vote based on an assessment of the relative merit of the candidates. Most political discussion took place in private discussion clubs, which usually met in a member’s apartment or a restaurant. These clubs, which I will for ease’s sake be calling by their later name, “salons,” generally numbered ten to forty people, the average being twenty-six. Since the population was so small, at their peak there were only nine such salons worthy of the name; by the arrival at Terra Nova four had dwindled out and only two newcomers had risen to take their place, yielding the Seven Salons so notable in later history.

The Pre-Novan Lunar Period, 2300 to 2450

This part of history is predominantly based on the actions of a few key people. I swear to God this is very condensed compared to the amount of canon that actually exists. The next section should be more trends-based, as we and history are no longer working with a population of less than a thousand people wherein everyone knows everyone and individual actions have outsize impact. Please be aware that this section of the summary contains descriptions of what I can only describe as a mishandled crush leading to nonconsensual use of genetic material. I really don’t know if that needs a warning, but what Sikora does is creepy as hell. 4.5k words. Part of “A Sketch of History;” preceded by Human Future History; followed by the Remainder of the Lunar Period.

The Advent, in this instance, has nothing to do with Christ—it refers instead to humanity’s arrival at the new solar system. The shipboard government decided it was such a momentous occasion that they should jump the calendar forward to the suitably impressive year 2300, so they did. (This is important later.) The aim of those aboard then shifted from the holding pattern of life in transit to frantic preparation for their final landing on Terra Nova’s moon.

The early Lunar period is largely dominated by two figures: Alexei Ilyasov and Darya Staravya. I’ll discuss them as briefly as I possibly can here, given that I’ve already had to cut two drafts that spent eight paragraphs on them and them alone. Expect a cleaned-up version of one of those to be posted at some point as an extra.

Alexei Kirilloviĉ Ilyasov was, at Advent, forty-one and supposedly a climatologist. In practice he was a politician of the rather subdued shipboard breed; he ran with no party and gave his rousing speeches on paper. His major focus was preparing for Advent, an event which, while yet unnamed, had loomed large on the horizon for most of his life. He had been an Illustrian—that is, part of a large salon known for meeting in the poshest restaurant on the ship—for about ten years. Like most of his fellow members, he was a reformist and an amateur linguist absolutely convinced he and he alone knew how to perfect Esperanto; also like most of his fellow members, it never came up unless he was asked about it point-blank.

It surprised even him when he was elected Council Chair* shortly before Advent; he was serving a Council term at the time, but had made no bids for the Chair and had planned to guide the Council toward a successful Advent from within rather than above. Regardless, he acquitted himself wonderfully in the office, and his administration—twenty-two years long, with a two-year gap after his eighteenth, when he was voted out of the Chair—did likewise. It was under his authority that the starship was broken down and re-formed into Prime Dome, the first and largest of the lunar dome-habitats; he inaugurated the First University. When he finally retired, construction and terraforming were both proceeding ahead of schedule and the first mining expeditions into the asteroid belt since the construction of Prime Dome were underway.

* His election was the result of a compromise on the Leadership Council between deadlocked Illustrians and Blue-Roomers, who both saw him as inoffensive and unlikely to make any terrible decisions.

Toward the end of Ilyasov’s career, Darya Staravya, the other major figure of this period, comes to prominence. She was born three days after Advent, the first baby of the new solar system, and she would have been notable for that alone. Her parentage—Brits Clarence and Marina Staravia, who had, in accordance with a contemporary fad, made up a “new name for the new world” upon their marriage—is necessary to mention to explain her surname, but they’re most notable as her later collaborators. I should also mention that she was Ilyasov’s goddaughter; he was about a decade older than her parents, but they aligned politically and intellectually and had met in their mutual salon.

Staravya was a prolific inventor and engineer, and in her forties she was the primary mind and force behind the Starry engine (officially the “New Standard Engine, Mk. IV”), which would be the basis for most all interplanetary flight for centuries to come. That was arguably her most distinctive invention, but her most pervasive came about by accident when she was in college. She, like all Scientian children, was in some form of school from age four until eighteen; during the latter half of that time she and a friend* progressively refined a private phonetic script or cipher, which they mostly used for the extremely teenage purpose of snarking at their teachers without them knowing. While students in the First University, they taught their other friends the cipher, and, generations being small when the total population is 1,021 people, it quickly spread through all of theirs.

* Yoshikawa Namiko, about a year older than Staravya, later a biochemist and historian. (Her parents, by contrast to the Staravias, and the Myleras a generation later, were not caught up in the new-name-for-a-new-world craze, seeing as they were Red Hats and didn’t bother with that sort of thing the way the Illustrians and Spider’s Nest did.)

Now I have to step back and give a bit of context. The problem of naming had been under debate since shortly after Advent, when Ilyasov had tried unsuccessfully to force everyone to fully Esperantize their names. (“Aleksejo Ilyasofo,” who did not by any means like writing that version of his name in every blasted language, was almost glad when the motion was shot down by seven elevenths of the rest of the Council.) Debate, among the perhaps sixty percent of the population who cared one way or the other, was split between those who favored the invention of some new writing system and those who instead favored regularization of sounds in names to match the phonology and writing system of some language. The former were called Sonskribists and the latter Regularists (though I anglicize their names here).

Staravya was in the forty percent. She thought it all kind of silly, having heard every possible argument at her dinner table growing up. She had been an unofficial test subject for too many of the new scripts (her parents being ardent Sonskribists, to Ilyasov’s alternating consternation and amusement) to actually take them seriously as a solution; she dismissed the Regularist position out of hand. While she did use her phonetic system to note down names’ pronunciations, it had always functioned as more of a code for her. She and her friend, Yoshikawa Namiko, actually had a minor falling-out over whether or not to encourage the growth of the script, which Yoshikawa believed they should and Staravya dismissed as irrelevant.

Yoshikawa won.

Now we come to a more trend-based as opposed to person-based period, which I can—finally—cover pretty quickly. Staravya went on to be a prolific inventor, as described in the second paragraph of her description, but she never crossed over into a major public figure the way so many others did. The Yoshikawa-Staravya phonetic script became the standard way to note down pronunciations, though it would take a century and a half more until it started replacing Latin and Cyrillic outright for the writing of names. (It never entered some scripts at all, including Arabic, which even well into the novan period adapted all names to its own orthography.)

The Leadership Council does not so much give way to as become the Academy, a name initially belonging to the board of directors of the First University set up by the moon-dwellers. Akademio, translated here as “Academy,” is also the term used for Esperanto’s regulatory body in our world and theirs. The University’s Academy had absorbed the Akademio de Esperanto, to the great consternation of the salon called the Spider’s Nest, back in the early days of the project. The Leadership Council in turn absorbed this unified Academy, at first thanks to near-complete overlap in membership and later by official decree; having so done, it declared itself the Terra-Novan Legislative Academy. (Later historians know it as the First Terra-Novan Legislative Academy.)

Staravya died in 2358, just under two decades after Ilyasov; Yoshikawa lived into the early 2370s, meaning her lifespan just barely overlaps with the next people we need to talk about. They, as they are ultimately more historically important, will take proportionally longer.

Florentine Sikora was born in 2370, or shortly after the official merger of the Leadership Council and the Academy. She grew up in an era of immense (compared to the mostly-static shipboard culture) change, but we’re not going to talk about any of that. We’re going to talk about this thing called the Catgirl Principle, and then we’re going have some bad lesbian representation. (Quite likely it also qualifies as bad allosexual representation, seeing as your author is ace.)

The Catgirl Principle is an oft-cited novan aphorism, most common in the first few centuries of the Imperium and believed to have reached its permanent form sometime in the middle War Era. The sentiment it describes is far older, and we will get to it in due time. The Principle is this: “A statistically significant proportion of the human population would want to fuck a catgirl were the opportunity to present itself. A statistically significant proportion of them would be willing to take active work toward that goal.”

Sikora was in that second proportion, and unlike the vast majority of them she refused to handle it by any reasonable means. I will spare you the details of what I mean here, but in short, Sikora never considered just getting a girlfriend and discussing arrangements for role-play involving a cat-ear headband and a tail.

Sikora wanted a catgirl, and—given the advancements in synthetic biology since our time, which I almost completely glossed over back in “Human Future History”—she figured she could just go ahead and make one. This was an absurd proposition—doable, maybe, for a team of two dozen with good funding, a few decades, unfettered access to the supercomputers in the heart of the First University, and fairly loose ethics. Sikora was a schoolgirl with a dream. But she wouldn’t remain that way forever, and soon enough she was off to the First University, designated a student without work* and planning to major in genetic engineering.

* Most university students had, in addition to their classes, to perform some menial office for perhaps ten hours a week, or two hours per day of the core week. The “student without work” designation was given to those who showed remarkable aptitude in some useful field, as a way of softly forcing them in the direction they would most benefit society or the sciences. With Sikora it paid massive dividends in the most awkward way possible.

Because Sikora lived on the far side of Red Dome (the second erected and first constructed, by the classical reckoning), she was offered the chance to move into an apartment inside the University itself. She took it and was assigned Mieke Nagtegaal as a roommate. Nagtegaal was also a student without work for her promise as a genetic engineer, but—in contrast to Sikora’s animal focus—particularly interested in plants. She was outgoing, very attractive, and the kind of person to listen intently to what someone was telling her no matter how long the explanation lasted, and Sikora fell hard for her. Nagtegaal, for her part, saw Sikora as a surprisingly charming person beneath the quiet exterior, and they became fast, close friends.

As you can imagine, this went badly.

In university as in tertiary school, Sikora was driven; intelligent; especially talented at genetics; and very, very good at ingratiating herself with teachers. In her first year, one of her professors brought her onboard a project that had as one of its goals the development of a large research database of fully sequenced human genomes. Sikora saw this as an excellent opportunity to—instead of, say, confessing her feelings and maybe trying to start a relationship—convince Nagtegaal to contribute her DNA to a public University database, from which Sikora could later retrieve it and use it as the base for the catgirl. The samples were supposedly anonymized, but Sikora figured she would, like Caesar, build that bridge when she came to it.

Their second year brought Nagtegaal a girlfriend, later her wife, and Sikora greater technological access that did not quite make up for the loss. This greater access came in the form of a laptop, powerful even by that time’s impressive standards, running the University’s full suite of cutting-edge-five-years-ago gen-eng software. The project she joined to get access to it is unimportant; it did, however, give her a foot in the door that would prove vital later.

Then she used a professor’s administrative access to locate which anonymized human genome belonged to “Nagtegaal, Mieke,” waited a few days for appearances’ sake, and downloaded roughly seven gigabytes of her roommate’s DNA to her new computer. Creep.

That brings us to what would later be marked as the beginning of (drumroll please) the Novan Development period. Some reckonings have it starting earlier, with Sikora’s initial decision to make a catgirl in her early adolescence or else with her entry into the University; but while she clearly worked on the catgirl project on and off, mostly by research, before acquiring the suite, the actual development begins only now.

It ran ten more years. Sikora was in the University the entire time, pursuing first a master’s and then a doctorate after her baccalaureate failed to give her enough time and access, and often sidelining that doctorate to hop aboard professors’ projects and even headline one of her own. In that time Nagtegaal, who got an excellent offer right after she finished her master’s, moved out and started work, leaving Sikora alone in their apartment.

Sikora’s magnum opus progressed in secret, extensively annotated and tested almost every night (as running it still took four to six hours). Back in her second year, she had quickly and euphemistically named the project file containing Nagtegaal’s DNA “nówka,” roughly “new thing.” The name wormed its way into her head over the years, and in time she came to think of the catgirl as the nówka instead. (It doesn’t hurt that “nówka” happens to decline in the feminine.)

As for the development of the nówka, her ears expanded and shifted down her head to match the too-complicated-to-move human ear canal while keeping a tall-eared silhouette; her tail came along nicely; working claws into her human fingers required completely redesigning her distal phalanges; Sikora quickly abandoned all pretensions at whiskers. (I bold “ears, tail, claws” here because they will come back with a vengeance when we get to the identity crisis of the second century, and that’s not to mention the Novan Nationalists.)*

* Nor “hearing, balance, defense.”

Eight years in, Sikora had done all she could with the simulation capabilities of any of her succession of laptops. The version of the software she had, the one that didn’t have to run on a supercomputer cooled by a lake, could do full simulations of the effects of short genetic sequences (i.e., the resultant biomolecules) and rough simulations of much longer material, but the human genome was more than twice the length of its ostensible input cap. Given a few hours it eventually managed, but her laptops suffered for it and the results it produced were necessarily inexact. Having now gotten the best draft possible with her current resources, she set her sights on better ones.

In flight the supercomputers had been used to manage the ship; now the Academy and the Terraforming Bureau had right to them, and a subset were used for genetic simulations of great accuracy and almost unlimited size. You can see where this is going.

She had by this time been brought onto a project (ultimately ill-fated, but later to inspire the sand-wolves) with an Academian at its head, and although she was in one of the lower rungs she had caught the said Academian’s attention. She had over the years maintained public side projects, partially out of interest and partially to impress her professors, and now it paid off. The Academian—and a few of her colleagues, Sikora’s professors—tacitly suggested that it would not be such a bad thing were Sikora to run the occasional after-hours experiment using one of the supercomputers, if nothing too urgent was going on.

Sikora, given an inch, made like the Devil and the British and took a mile.

She spent the next few years patching the gaping flaws in the nówka’s design that this more precise testing revealed. Finally, in 2407, she had something good. It ran perfectly in the supercomputer; it had all the features she wanted. It would work, she was sure, if she grew it in the real world; so she finangled her way into a frankly absurd set of permissions, never quite letting anyone know just what she was using them for, and actually managed to slip it by the review board.

The first nówka experiment was an utter failure. The nówka fetus, difficult to create and so promising, died before three months were out. Sikora couldn’t understand why, and she couldn’t get together the materials and permissions to do it again. She gave up utterly on the project, wallowed in self-pity, and tried to re-focus on her much more boring normal life.

Here Nagtegaal re-enters our story. She had never left Sikora’s, even though they drifted apart over the years as Sikora failed to call or write. She knew, vaguely, about her former roommate’s attempts to “create a new species,” had gathered that this new species was supposed to be sapient, and had overall thought it was neat. Too ambitious and not in her—Nagtegaal’s—area of primary interest, but neat. She asked about it one day, having asked Sikora out to coffee and Sikora having taken her up on it delightedly. Sikora almost started crying and said she had given up on the project, refusing to give Nagtegaal any more information.

Nagtegaal spent three weeks trying to figure out what happened and to convince her clearly distraught friend to resume work, or at least talk to someone. Then, after the last of a string of near breakdowns on Sikora’s part, Nagtegaal’s concern reached a boiling point. She broke into Sikora’s apartment and tried to find her notes on this “nufka” project, to see who—Nagtegaal was sure it was a who—had so badly damaged her self-confidence.

What she found instead was complete, fastidious, impossible documentation of the genetic code for a new sapient species. At the top of the folder a pinned text file held data about a practical test, ending with a paragraph about the final failure of the experiment.

Nagtegaal was floored.

So was the Academy, when she showed them Sikora’s research (which she had quickly copied onto a flash drive).

With the Presentation to the Academy we come to the Public Phase of Novan Development. The Academy, with Nagtegaal’s advice, privately contacted Sikora, who—despite being a normally dignified doctor in her thirties—sent back a moody email saying simply that the nówka wouldn’t work and there was no point in trying. She refused all involvement, but wanted credit for the initial development of this impossible dream. Maybe there would be a novel about it someday.

She also requested they rename the project from “nówka” to the less Polish and more Esperanto “novo,” which preserved the pun in almost exactly the same form. (Nówka is the adjective meaning “new” plus an ending that turns it into a noun, and so is novo.) It did create some confusion regarding the adjective nova, which now could mean either “new” or “having to do with the project called novo,” which never really got solved. The way the novans later deal with it is to use novara (“having to do with the novan species”) as the adjective form of novo, which works well enough but breaks the stated purpose of Esperanto.

Without going into excessive detail, the Academy liked “novo” mostly because it was so similar in structure to to homo, “human” or (at that time) “person.” Copying that pattern let them quickly produce versions for other languages, including novan (English), and the species name novaro (off the pattern of homaro, “humanity”); it would later produce the Latin novō, which is a homograph of an existing verb and must often be distinguished by context.

The Academy then published Sikora’s research and announced it widely, but declined to form an official committee to continue it. The nówka was in no way relevant to their main focus, that being terraforming efforts,* but anyone to take up the project would be given liberal resources. Essentially, they left it to open-sourced community development. It fostered a surprising camaraderie among the different teams who formed to take up the challenge, and it actually soothed political tensions between diametrically-opposed salons.

Well, it did portions of all these things. Novans have a tendency to assume their creation must have been a society-wide effort, but really perhaps a hundred people ever had more than a surface-level involvement over the decade and a half of novan development. A twelfth of society, yes, but only a twelfth. (Nagtegaal was not one of them, even after someone realized it was her sample used as the basis for novanity. She was, as she put it, just and only a botanic engineer.)

* There were persistent rumors that the Academy fostered the development of early novanity in search of a servant species, and in later days it was commonly believed as fact. It is in reality bullshit. Not unreasonable, given the Academy’s persistent monopoly on and heavy-handed use of power, but bullshit. I have to mention the rumors here because of the influence it has on the Darwins and the various novan identity crises, but the Academy was genuinely focused only on the flagship scientific achievement that novanity represented.

Fifteen years after the Presentation to the Academy, Novan Test 42 was successful. On the seventh of November 2419, a successful novan infant was born to delighted and somewhat terrified foster/surrogate parents the Augereaus. When it looked like she would survive, she was given the name Evo Darwin—Evo being one of two Esperanto forms of Eve and Darwin, of course, being for Charles. (Esperanto lacks /w/ and has very regular emphasis, so her surname lost its original pronunciation. The end result was a name said /ˈe.vo darˈvin/, something like AY-vo dar-VEEN in English phonetic spelling, with “ay” standing for the sound of the name of the letter A. This concludes the awkwardly-shoehorned-in phonology section of this essay.)

Evo proved bright and excelled in school despite her very obvious differences; she had her entire growth charted and wanted to be a genetic engineer when she grew up, just like her mother. When she was twelve, the first male novan (who had been in development for a while) was born; he was given the name Adamo Chikaonda, partially at Evo’s suggestion.* Another female novan followed shortly thereafter, off Evo’s pattern, as that was proven to be stable. Her name was Espero Darwin, thus making the Darwin lineage or gento the first of many to have duplicate line-headers. They were each raised by different families, which may account for Evo’s and Espero’s startling later differences.

* “Chikaonda” is in reference to the late lead developer of the software Sikora had written the initial nówka genome in, who had in his later years had some involvement with the novan project.

Evo fell in love with and married a human after they met in university; they communicated well and were mostly happy together, even when the human started getting strange medical issues they seemed to have inherited from their father. They did not try to reproduce, but adopted a handful of children: a later Darwin, her spouse’s nephew, and a novan patterned off the said spouse’s genome. Adamo and Espero, on the other hand, saw nothing to do but get together and propagate the species, in exactly those terms. They did not love each other romantically, nor share particularly many interests, but they understood each other better than anyone else would. Their seven children, plus an eighth that they wheedled Evo into carrying after Espero suffered an injury and became infertile, split their surnames between them (the first child being a Chikaonda, the second a Darwin, and so on); this would be common early-generation novan practice for the rest of the novan creation period.

Having gotten the rest of their lives out of the way, we need to jump back to when Evo was fifteen, because it was in that year that Sikora asked Nagtegaal out to coffee to celebrate the three-days-past birth of Espero. This was a tradition of theirs, having been started after they had met and held Evo for the first time fifteen years before; but, fatefully, this time Sikora brought moonshine.

Sikora, once tipsy, confessed that—or more accurately joked about how—she had known full well whose genome she was using and that it had its roots in a longstanding crush on Nagtegaal. Then, well, the whole sorry story of novan development came tumbling out of her mouth; it became increasingly clear the nówka was ultimately the result of a sexual fantasy; and Nagtegaal, horrified, exploded. The resulting scene—Nagtegaal standing up and striking the coffee table, irate, while Sikora leans back in her chair and laughs—would later become a frequent subject of paintings and tableaux, especially during the first and second centuries. What would not become such a favorite of the artists was how hard Nagtegaal wept that night, or how she filled a notebook and a half in the next two weeks with everything she knew about Sikora. They sometimes depict her internal torment over what to do with this new horrible knowledge in light of its potential effect on fifteen-year-old Evo Darwin, but they tend to make it a lot prettier than it was.

Three months later, Sikora died of a stroke. Nagtegaal drafted a letter that night.

Mieke Nagtegaal’s memoirs of Dr. Sikora, created with the full approval of then-seventeen-year-old Evo and her parents, were published two years later. The scandal rocked the Moon and destroyed Sikora’s reputation—but not that of the novan project. That, by now, was far more associated with the community of developers and harried university students that had brought it to fruition. The third novan genome sitting in their mutual drafts was originally intended to bear Sikora’s name, and work ground to an internally-snarled halt. After a worrying two-month stall, a public appeal from Evo and Nagtegaal brought it back into motion under the name Moreau.

And that’s the condensed version.

There are three more major sections of history to get to, and hopefully I’ll get them out soon. I’ll both update this and put them up separately, so you don’t have to watch this post for edits.

#📌 major posts #📘 history #FINALLY #it's been three months since I started this. life got very chaotic very fast.#the plan was to post it all -- finished -- in one go but honestly I've just kind of said screw it to the timing lol #---------#and now the discovery tags:#worldbuilding #sci-fi worldbuilding #conworld #writing #(I did much better discovery-tagging on the Fundamentals post so I’m going to call that good for now)

2 notes · View notes

houseofwolvess · 1 year ago

Text

i decided to go through the blogs im following and clean shit out (just like.. blogs that haven't been active in 2+ years, deactivated blogs, stuff i don't like anymore, etc) and like. it went down from 2300-something blogs to just barely over 1600. what

#i always forget how many blogs i follow on here #to be fair ive been active since like 2018 so. a lot of these blogs were from really early on #but still

2 notes · View notes

crackinglamb · 2 years ago

Text

I posted 7,159 times in 2022

That's 1,391 more posts than 2021!

248 posts created (3%)

6,911 posts reblogged (97%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@lilbittymonster

@ir0n-angel

@sorrelchestnut

@pip-n-flinx

@bitterotter

I tagged 5,578 of my posts in 2022

Only 22% of my posts had no tags

#sound on - 774 posts

#always reblog - 349 posts

#*snort - 342 posts

#this - 310 posts

#cats - 245 posts

#no lies detected - 241 posts

#awesome art - 239 posts

#hahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!! - 210 posts

#solas - 151 posts

#lamb writes - 128 posts

Longest Tag: 136 characters

#... & to all y'all that have to watch could have been better spent monies get pissed down the drain of an overblown funeral & coronation

My Top Posts in 2022:

Til It Squeaks, a Series

Today, on the anniversary of its beginning, Da'Fen Carly Mayers Lavellan's story came to an end. Two years, 337,909 words, 7 works. So I thought I would put together a masterpost of the series, with links to AO3, for all of you.

Twist

The fic that started it all. Carly Mayers, a woman from Earth, gets transported to Thedas and becomes the Herald of Andraste. And she decides that canon needs a hammer. A Solavellan fix-it with a happy ending. Rated E for sexual content. Also contains canon typical violence. ~197K words.

The Cutting Room Floor

A snippet fic, full of little bits the main fic had no room for. Includes screenshots of the ensemble cast. Also includes 'deleted scenes' and versions of the first draft that never got off the ground. Rated T for occasional swearing, adult themes and canon typical violence. ~27K words.

Choice, Pride and Trust

A oneshot of Carly and Solas defeating Imshael at Suledin Keep. Rated M for graphic depictions of violence. ~2300 words.

Waiter, There's a Fluff In My Soup!

A multi-ship collection of prompt fills for Fluff-uary 2021. Pairings include Carly and Solas, Varric and Marian Hawke, Dorian and Iron Bull and more. Rated E for sexual content. ~28K words.

Twist Some More

A sequel to Twist. Carly and Solas continue their work rebuilding the Dales, taking down the Veil and having a surprise baby. Incorporates events from Tevinter Nights, but is overall self-indulgent and fluffy. Rated E for sexual content. ~67K words.

Earth Pizza and Qunari Street Food

Takes place four years after the events of TSM. Carly and Solas welcome Dorian and Iron Bull for a visit. Cooking and family fluff ensue. Rated T for some adult themes, but with a happy ending. ~4600 words.

Make It a Good One, Peaches

50 years post-canon, mortality affects Carly's inner circle. A final send off including the generation to follow that of the Inquisition. More sweet than bitter. Rated T for major character death. ~1700 words.

Thank you to everyone who has read these fics and come to love Carly as much as I do. My heart is full. 💕

18 notes - Posted March 3, 2022

Six Sentence Sunday

Tagged by @noire-pandora, thank you! 💕

Tagging @about2dance, @a11sha11fade, @sinsbymanka, @mrscullensrutherford, @dreadfutures, @mogwaei and @espressocomfort. No pressure!

R&R grabbed the Muse this morning. Have some Lark Cadash in Skyhold.

---

Something had happened here, some cataclysm that broke the magic of this place. That sundered it.

The Veil.

What she felt under her fingertips and saw in her mind's eye was like the aftermath of a shockwave. A burst dam of energy, exploding outwards from a central point deeper in the bowels of the Stone. Traces of the spell lingered like a taste on the back of her tongue. She didn't recognize it, but felt like she should.

19 notes - Posted March 27, 2022

WIP Wednesday

Tagged by @noire-pandora, thank you!

Tagging @fiadhaisteach, @lilbittymonster, @sinsbymanka, @serial-chillr and @about2dance. No pressure!

It's Fluff-uary, folks. I am neck deep in somft and silly. Have a peek.

---

As often happened, a bolt of inspiration hit Varric while he was bathing. He gave a rueful sigh, wrapped himself in a towel and rushed to his desk without even bothering to swipe his dripping hair out of the way as he jotted down the idea before he lost it. He was never more grateful to Imogen than in that moment, since having his own suite meant having his own bathing chamber in it. He didn't have to traipse halfway across the keep to get back to his room, the mad gleam of words in his eyes. He didn't need that kind of blow to his reputation.

He got lost in the idea after a while, eventually snagging his reading glasses so he could see the page better. His hair stopped dripping onto his bare shoulders and he didn't even notice he was getting chilled sitting there in nothing more than a damp towel. He never heard the door open.

He certainly didn't hear the low, needy hum that Hawke made. If he had, he might have been warned.

Her sharp teeth sank into the ball of his shoulder and he jumped, thoroughly startled. “What the...Hawke!”

She cackled, leaning on the back of his chair. At least she'd bitten the off arm, so the only splotch on the page in front of him was his own fault. He glared at her over the rim of his glasses.

“Oh, your face! That's a weighty look, serrah.”

“What are you doing?”

She smiled at him, warm and loving and he almost melted. Almost. Then she spoke. “Haven't you ever just wanted to bite someone? You looked so delicious sitting there, I had to have a taste.”

Half his blood rushed southward. The rest seemed to have taken up residence in his cheeks. Either way, it left none for his brain and he gaped at her like an addled nug. He scrambled to find anything to say, anything at all.

“Andraste's flaming knickers,” was what came out. Hawke laughed again.

“No, I don't think I'd want to bite those.”

21 notes - Posted February 9, 2022

WIP Wednesday

Tagged by @noire-pandora, thank you!

Tagging @lilbittymonster, @natsora, @blueboxness-art, @whataboutbugs-art, @espressocomfort and @serial-chillr. No pressure!

While The Fluffs(tm) have been keeping me busy, I've still been working occasionally on new chapters for WG. I made myself very emotional with Cole's personal quest recently. And by emotional, I mean angry. I could rant forever (and will in the author's notes), but here, have a snippet.

---

“You!” Cole shouted, advancing on the man. “You killed me!” The Templar scoffed and tried to push him away, but Cole wouldn't be deterred. “You forgot. You locked me in the dungeon in the Spire, and you forgot, and I died in the dark!”

“The Spire?” the man replied. Imogen heard the others behind her.

“Cole, stop,” Solas commanded. The Templar took advantage of his hesitance and ran.

“Cole,” Imogen said gently, reaching out but not quite touching him. “He didn't kill you, he killed the human Cole. You came to him, as a spirit, to give him comfort at the end. He was not you, not the way you are now.”

“A broken body, bloody, banged on the stone. Guts gripping in the dark, dank. A captured apostate. They threw him into the dungeon in the Spire at Val Royeaux. They forgot about him, and he starved to death.”

“Yes,” Imogen said. He turned to her, his watery blue eyes boring into hers with all the power a fully realized spirit possessed. “And you crossed the Veil to help. But you couldn't make food out of nothing, so all you could give him was yourself. Your compassion. You became him when he was gone. Cole.”

“Let me kill him back. I need to.”

Imogen cupped his face in her hands, the Anchor flaring against his skin as it touched the Fade within him. “No, baby. That won't help you.”

“Then what do I do?”

“You need to forgive him.”

“What?” Varric sputtered. “He can't just forgive the man who killed him!”

“You can't,” Solas said. “But Cole is a spirit. His nature works differently.”

“Stop it, both of you,” Imogen snapped. She focused back on Cole. “Make him forget, it will remove the ties that bind you together. You will remain you, and he will no longer carry the pain of his guilt. Can you feel it? Cole, concentrate. Can you feel his pain?”

“'Don't worry, we'll erase his records'. They clap him on the shoulder, smell of oiled metal and blood. They smile at him like Louis did when he made him drown the kittens...”

“Go to him Cole. Help him. He's in pain, and you are a spirit of Compassion.”

She let him go and watched as he disappeared down the path the Templar had run. Varric was staring at her like she'd fallen from the sky – always that look, she thought idly – while Solas looked at her more pensively. She wondered if he guessed that she'd taken his words and spoken them herself.

“I hope you know what you're doing,” Varric muttered.

21 notes - Posted February 16, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Dash did a thing.

55 notes - Posted November 30, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #my 2022 tumblr year in review

8 notes · View notes

enhaheeseung · 2 years ago

Note

or maybe i'm just getting carried away 😂 idek if i can handle writing on top of my 2 jobs and making fanart, esp if i somehow manage to build an audience.

not that that's required! it'd just be nice to interact with people about smut and kinks and stuff outside of anon asks 🤷‍♀️

anyway, sorry for dumping this on you! (though i'd honestly still like to know about starting a fic blog... just in case)

- 🐋

So I’ll tell you how I started first and then I’ll throw in a few tips (but I’m definitely not who you should be asking about this lol)

When I first started I had no idea what I was even doing I didn’t know how to put links I didn’t know about proper warnings or how to add tags and images so I basically started from scratch with no knowledge

Which was highly frustrating at first but when my first fic reached 100 notes all of it seemed worth it

So I used that as motivation to continue writing fics and I slowly starting building an audience however just cause i got followers doesn’t mean my writing got better if anything it kinda got worse but I didn’t ponder on it any longer cause I knew I was capable of writing better than that

That being said it’s basically trial and error so don’t get discouraged when some works get more notes than the others sometimes it’s just cause it doesn’t show up in the tags (for whatever reason)

Bestie an audience is definitely a requirement (for me) I literally almost deactivated because of the lack of interaction I had cause basically if no one is reading what I post there was no point to even create a account and post it

As of late my notes and followers have decreased like crazy which is very discouraging to me and I haven’t had motivation to write for a long time and it’s hard to look past and keep writing but I’m trying

I know I’m getting ahead of myself when I say that seeings how you haven’t even started yet but I just want you to know some of the things that can happen after you start posting.

At first I thought it was fun just posting story’s for your bias and interacting with people however it’s not that cut and dry.

You might possibly have droughts where you don’t know what to write or how to write it which is was also very discouraging for me

In the beginning I didn’t realize how much effort you really had to put into writing even if it is something as unserious as smut is you still have to do research

Since I’ve been writing I’ve searched all kinds of things such as mental illness pregnancy sex positions you name it

So if you have an idea for a fic it’s not as easy to write it down on paper as it is to imagine it sometimes the wording is the hardest part of writing

Another big problem I faced was when I would read others work and compare myself to them wondering how they were getting so many likes and had so many followers yet I didn’t

That was just me being stupid though cause not everything I write is for everyone and look at me now 2300 followers and multiple fics with 1000+ notes

Not sure if I’m the only one who experienced this but it did effect my mental health in a way I was constantly trying to think of plots and I’d bang out 10k words in a day without rest and after awhile that had taken a toll on me especially with working and barely sleeping

And of course if any of this ever happens and you get discouraged you could always quit writing (I should have but I’m way too hard headed for that) but if something is causing you more harm than good I’d say drop it

I know I said way more than I should have but I’d just like to give you a little idea of how I started my journey

So now for a few tips I’d suggest starting with shorter fics to get comfortable with people seeing your content

Oh that’s another thing I was (and still am nervous about people seeing what my mind conjures up lol) but everyone that I’ve encountered has always been nice except a few hateful anons every now and then which I think every writer has atleast three hate anons so don’t sweat it

Second I’d find a plot that’s easier to write about that you don’t have to do so much research on to make it a better first experience for your first post

I’d find something that’s unique to you as well rather that be a nickname or saying.

So for me at the end of my post I’ll say have a good day / night and that quickly caught on with my followers as well something else was every time I changed my theme I’d change my heart color emoji so if I used blue my followers would use blue and if I used brown they would use brown etc so I think that’s a cute way to interact and have your own unique little signature

Before any of this though make sure you have a good understanding on how the app works (which I’m sure you do cause you post fanart) just learn as much as possible before posting it’s not like it’s the end of the world if you make a mistake but it’s a lot better knowing how to avoid those mistakes (also look at the structure of other blogs that helped me a lot)

So now I’ll break it down to some key points that I’ve covered throughout this post and things that I think a lot of us writer’s experience at some point

1 learn as much as you can before posting so you don’t hit a sang along the way and get caught up

2 don’t get discouraged if all your works do not do good everytime you post cause we’ve all been there no matter how many followers you have

3 don’t let numbers get to you they will come eventually just don’t give up

4 don’t compare yourself to other writers you’re good enough in your own way

5 do your research

6 you get a few haters but that’s just life

7 make something unique for your blog something that people will remember you by

8 be careful and don’t think too much while writing it’s supposed to be fun and if you ever don’t enjoy it take a break/ stop

9 if your first fic isn’t good don’t worry you get better with time and I’m living proof of that (let’s not mention my first fics lol)

10 if you have a plot but you’re not sure about it just post it it’s normal to feel nervous but just know most of the time it’ll be received well

I know I sound like a hypocrite cause I still even face some of these problems now but I just wanted to give you insight of what can happen along the way and that there’s more to fic writing than meets the eye

However this is just speaking from my personal experience you may never run into have of these problems but still

Anyways I hope I’ve helped in some way and I’m not just rambling on and on

And don’t apologize bestie there’s no need I love helping people if you have anymore questions feel free to ask🤍

One more thing I hope this didn’t scare you away from writing cause like I said this is just my personal experience

#ask #inbox #replies #🐋anon

2 notes · View notes

sexdrugsrocknroller · 9 months ago

Text

aight im making a post so i can say im using this shit like an actual diary

right now i have a grandeur of disorganization on my phone (laptop too but thats been a piece of junk since forever, fuck acer), between the basically full storage, mostly from the gallery (as of now i have a grand total of 93k photos. yes, 93 000 photos and videos.) plus my socials are fucked between the excessive saved and liked posts on instagram, same goes for tumblr here and twitter (i dont really use twitter, i only have an account to like and bookmark posts) and the youtube playlists and chronology.

plus my room is all messy with my not enough space for clothes and random papers and shit thrown together on any surface

i decided i dont like that and im changing it.

for the storage, i have already started deleting quite a bit, right now i deleted like 2300 elements but theres a lot more. sad part is that a lot of it is porn, wether drawn or short videos. im not gonna go full monk and delete all of it, though it would be easier, cause some of it i like. not to talk about the amount i already had to transfer on the laptop when i was tired of receiving warnings about the full storage in the last 2 years. i was also thinking of doing a backup of the whatsapp chats on the laptop so i can delete all the data on the phone storage. it would save me like 6 gb but its kinda extreme.

for socials, the solution is the same. tumblr: gradually remove liked posts i dont need to keep saved, and post what ive been keeping to post like i should have. last i checked, i had like 35k liked posts, and again, a lot of it porn. im not sure i want to post porn and erotica on this blog so for now im reblogging it on an alt, hoping it doesnt get deleted again. then ill have to unfollow some of the 4k blogs im following. guess what part of them are?

instagram, im not even going to remove all of the saved posts. its the social i used most to scroll at, i dont have the option to see how many posts i have saved but i dont think it would be an exaggeration to say i have at least a million. yea i know. im just going to get to a certain post i remember saving this summer, once im at that i will probably make another account altogether since i would never be able to clean all of it. i started this on around mid to end january, and as of now im just at mid october. after something like 20 non consecutive hours. yea its bad. it wouldnt be worth it to go past a certain point. better to just make a new one at that time and be more careful there.

youtube, i have the same problem of all social, i open a video just to keep it in the chronology so i can check it later and maybe save it. ive done it far too much. at least youtube is much faster to clean, but again i would never be able to check every single video i have left in the chrono to save at a second moment. thankfully once im done i could just go on settings and choose to do a tabula rasa of it, removing it completely.

twitter is probably also not worth the trouble of sitting thru all the posts i liked as a way of saving them. i probably shouldnt even care about it. this one has the least priority.

saved tabs on the browser? the easiest one by far out of all of it.

my room and the house in general, there isnt any second road, i just have to first remove and throw what i clearly dont need, store away whats left with some degree of order and hope i saved some space, and try to keep clean, plus store things with stricter orders so its cleaner. after my room and things, its time for the rest of the house.

all of this will be slow, gradual, and a major pain in the ass, but it has to be done and i intend to do it.

and all of this doesnt even include having to remake and update my cv and linkedin in preparation for when my contract ends, planning what to do for university between tests and papers and documents needed and all that, and this arguably has higher priority than all of above time and importance wise. but yknow. actually you dont know. even i dont know.

#me post #post of me #diary #journal

0 notes

she-means-everything-to-me · 6 months ago

Text

i was following like 2300 blogs though and now im at like 600

it is wild how many inactive blogs you collect over like nine years or something, i have been on this site for so long

i just unfollowed a shit tonne of blogs that hadn't been active in like five years, so lemme know if i accidentally unfollowed you cause i definitely clicked the wrong blog a few times and i dont wanna lose my besties

2 notes · View notes

shaneshrine · 5 years ago

Photo

#Stardew Valley #Stardew Valley Shane #Farmer Lee #art #[ Hiatus after hiatus! woahh!!!! ]#[ THIS IS A SUPER QUICK SKETCH AS YOU CAN SEE my style will try and remain the same as before i just wanted something cutesy rn hehe ]#[ I'm sorry guys! My interests change so much and I barely even draw stuff i like!! ]#[ This blog still means a lot to me so i'll try my best to keep updating! ]#[ i love you all so much and thank you all for 2300+ followers! ]#[ Super glad you guys are interested in shane and lee hahaha! ]

783 notes · View notes

hollow-knight-hope · 4 years ago

Text

sorry for disappearing again! job hunting is no fun :(

(also is anyone looking to hire a marine biologist? anyone?)

luckily i’ve had some new distractions like getting into Dungeons & Dragons! i think im improving with clip studio too, so maybe i will get to drawing more content :D

#i really need to set up an art blog becasue i already have art of my DnD characters but still want to keep this blog Hollow Knight centered #especially since i reached a new follower milestone! thank you for 2300 followers!!#i want to improve on my art more so i can maybe do requests if i reach another big milstone #and i might need a kofi or something in the future with how job hunting is going #part-time naturalists don't get a living wage even when there's no pandemic complicating things #personal #might delete later

14 notes · View notes

bobafetts-princess · 3 years ago

Note

Hi Karie! Oh my goodness, congratulations on your follower milestone! That's so exciting, and so well deserved. I can't wait to see your blog grow even more! May I please request #43 (soft kiss) with Echo? Thank you so much! x

Sam! Thank you so much!!! 💖💖

I had to make this one a little longer because I couldn’t end on an angst-y note so enjoy the flangst.

Echo x gn!Reader

Not many warnings, just angst that ends happy I promise!

Join the celebration!

Nights like these were the worst. Your boyfriend, Echo, was set to ship out first thing in the morning on a ‘top secret mission’ for the Republic. Nights like these were the worst because there’s always a heavy cloud hanging over your heads at the idea that Echo might not come home.

There was just something different too, about Echo this evening. While he was usually very sweet when he was making love to you, he was almost desperate, hands grabbing at every inch of skin he could reach. His lips never left your body unless it was to whisper in your ear that he loved you -that he loved you so fucking much- and it was unnerving. But you assumed that it was because he had such a high importance mission coming up and swallowed the impending feelings of dread as time came for Echo to head back to base.

“I have to go, mesh’la. Rex told me only had until 2300 to get back to base,” he says, lifting himself off your belly and putting his armor back on. You just nod, picking at your fingernails until Echo pulls you off the bed and up against him. “I’ll be back before you know it,” he said, thumbs stroking your cheeks as he cups your face.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Echo,” you joke, leaning into his gentle touch. He presses his lips to yours, soft and firm against your own. The kiss conveys all the things you’re not ready to say to each other and it feels so final.

“Two weeks. I’ll be back in less than two weeks,” he promises as he leaves your place, the lights of Coruscant illuminating him. Gentle fingers brush away the tear that drops down your face as you nod, leaning against the doorway. You whisper an I love you at his back as he walks away, helmet under his arm before heading back inside.

Two weeks later a knock sounds at your door and you rush to it, itching to see Echo. Since he’s been gone you realize that not telling him that you loved him was the stupidest idea you’d ever had, so you’re determined to smother him in kisses and I love you’s.

But it’s not Echo at the door, it’s Fives and Rex, helmets under their arms and apologetic looks on their faces.

“Where’s Echo?” You ask, even though you already know. Fives hangs his head and it’s Rex that speaks.

“I’m so sorry,” he says as he hands you the medal Echo got when he was promoted to ARC Trooper, almost as a consolation prize. “He loved you,” Rex says but you’re numb. The world sounds like an ocean rushing in your ears and you shut the door in their face and clutch the medal to your chest.

It’s been ages since Rex and Fives came to your door, offering you the only piece of Echo that they still had left to give. Every day has been tough, the pain of losing him nearly too much to bear. But you make it through every day, even if it’s only barely.

You’re cooking a small dinner when a knock sounds at your door and you pause. It’s a Trooper knock, one you haven’t heard since-well you don’t really want to think about that right now. It’s been a good day, no tears and no wishes to join Echo and you don’t want to bring yourself down. But then the knock sounds against your door again and you can’t resist the pull to open the door and see who’s there. The knock sounds a third time as your reaching for the handle and you pull it open to see a ghost at your door.

“Echo?” You whisper, reaching out to touch his face. A face that you could recognize out of a crowd, even though he shares it with millions and it looks different now.

“Hey mesh’la, I told you I’d be back,” he smiles and you fucking lose it. You’re crying and you’re mad but you’re also crazy happy because what the fuck how did he get here?

“Echo. What happened?” You ask because he’s gaunt and pale and fucking thin and missing a hand and both legs but fuck he’s alive. He’s here. At your door, cracking jokes like he just left yesterday.

“We have a lifetime to talk about that, but for now I think I’d like to kiss you,” he says, stepping into the apartment and pulling your body against him. He presses his lips to yours and you fucking melt, missing the way he felt while he was gone. His kiss is so fucking soft and you reach up to cup his face, careful of the new things around his ears and you cry again.

#the siren writes #zinzinina #echo the bad batch #clone trooper echo #echo x you #echo x reader #arc trooper echo #echo tbb #k’s 700 follower celebration

55 notes · View notes

aellynera · 4 years ago

Text

Loose Change (Llewyn Davis x Reader)

LOOSE CHANGE

For this week’s Writer Wednesday hosted by the lovely @autumnleaves1991-blog! Llewyn was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw this, and I really don’t know where the rest of it came from, but I just had to write it. Thank you for reading, commenting, liking, and reblogging! 💜💜

This week’s inspiration:

Word Count: 2300 on the dot.

Summary: How bad can it be when your phone rings in the middle of the night? (An alternate take on what could have happened on the way back from Chicago.)

Warnings: Angsty. Hopeful. Hopeful angst? Angstful hope? Maybe a swear or two. Sketchy phone booths. Wrong numbers. Yearning. Secrets, poor decisions, better choices.

The bed was warm but you could hear the cold rain pounding on the window behind your head. Ignoring it and staying in your cozy, comfortable cocoon was definitely your best option, and you rolled over and pulled the blankets tighter over your head. This was the right place to be and you felt yourself start drifting back to sleep.

Until your phone started ringing.

Your phone, which was nowhere near your bed, or even in your bedroom. It wasn’t even within fifty feet of you; it was securely fastened to the wall in your kitchen, by the sink, next to the pantry door. And your kitchen was clear on the other side of the apartment.

A quick check of the clock told you that it was also the ungodly hour of 3:28 am, the red digits blaring at you angrily in the near-dark. Who in the world was calling you at this hour? For a long few minutes you thought about ignoring it. It was probably a wrong number. That happened all the time. Or maybe it was some kids having a party and pranking. In the middle of the night. That was probably it.

But a little tickle at the back of your brain, small and sinewy, kept curling around your thoughts and rationalization and it wouldn’t let go. Maybe it’s important. Maybe it really was. Maybe something happened to one of your parents or your sister or-

The phone didn’t stop ringing. So it must be important.

With an exasperated groan, you launched yourself out of bed, one quilt still wrapped around you to ward off the damp chill. Your bare feet slapped along the tile floor and your balance wavered slightly, your muscles still used to being asleep, until you finally got to the kitchen and yanked the receiver off the ringing phone.

“Hello?” your sleep-ridden voice rasped out cautiously.

“Hey,” the voice on the other end came back. “You got the stuff?”

“The...what?”

“You know, the…”

“The st...No! Do you know what time it is? This is a wrong number! What the hell!” You slammed the phone back down on its cradle.

Figures. It was a wrong number. You wanted to go back to bed, you really did. But now you found yourself wide awake because someone wanted stuff that you wouldn’t have day or night.

So you wandered over to the couch and tried to get comfortable on the lumpy cushions, and watched the rain coming down outside your window bounce dramatically off the fire escape.

Until your phone rang again.

A curse flew from your lips as you hurled the quilt off and stomped back to the phone. You grabbed it, put it to your ear, and shouted, “What?”

“I...are you okay?” a voice came back. A familiar voice, this time.

“Llewyn? Is that you?” you closed your eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s me,” he replied. “Uh, sorry I’m calling you so late.”

You sighed. “I’m fine. It’s fine. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I guess. I just...some stuff happened, and I needed to hear a familiar voice.”

Your heart immediately softened in your chest, despite your very strong desire to still be angry. Llewyn certainly didn’t sound okay, but that was his norm. You wanted to reach through the phone and hold him, care for him.

You always had a soft spot for him, ever since Jean introduced you so long ago, that day in the park when all the musician friends gathered to play at the fountain. He spent a fair amount of time sleeping on this lumpy old couch. You cooked him a hot meal when you could (and when he would let you), gave him a place to stay even if you weren’t home (on the rare occasion that he would even agree to it, which was slowly becoming more frequent.) You went to as many of his shows as you could, and you really just liked to hang out with him when he was around. He’d slowly become one of your best friends.

And yeah, he was kind of an asshole a lot of the time, but he was sweet and you probably liked him a little more than you were willing to admit.

“Llewyn, where are you? Do you need me to come get you or something?” you asked with a yawn. You really hoped that’s why he was calling you at...3:37 am..

His laugh was short. “Well, if you feel like driving to Ohio, sure.”

“Ohio?” you cried. “What are you doing in…”

The laugh from moments before fell into a sigh and you could hear a soft thunk follow. “I’m in Akron. In a payphone booth outside of a bar, banging my head on the glass. I’ll hitchhike home in the morning, it’s fine.”

“You’re in Akron,” you repeated slowly. “Why are you in Akron?”

“Because I was in Chicago-”

“Which is not Akron, the last time I checked. Or even the same state,” you pointed out. You picked the quilt up from the floor and wrapped yourself back in it, settling on the couch again. The receiver cord had just enough reach that you were able to sit with your back against one arm and stare back out the window and the slippery wet metal of the fire escape glinting in the moonlight.

Vaguely you remembered this was the quilt Llewyn had used the last time he stayed with you.

“Well it’s on the way back,” Llewyn snapped. “And I wouldn’t be in Akron if the car I was in hadn’t broken down and…”

“Does this have something to do with Diane?” you asked softly. That sinewy tentacle of intuition was back, curling around your brain again.

The rough exhale of air on the other end of the line was the only answer you needed.

“Llewyn.” You said again, still soft, but more stern. Something was going on, and you could tell he wasn’t going to tell you without some prodding.

After what felt like hours, he finally muttered, “Maybe.”

“Llewyn, what are you doing? You can’t possibly want to talk to her, after everything that happened. Did the car really break down in Akron, or did you request a stop? Because it seems kind of suspect that you would just, you know, end up there of all places on your way back from Chicago, and what were you even doing in Chicago? I just saw you a couple days ago and you didn’t say anything about--”

It wasn’t until Llewyn broke through your rant that you noticed you’d hadn’t stopped for a single breath.

“The car really did break down,” he insisted. “And I don’t actually want to see her. Not really. But...I feel like I kind of have to, and it’s...it’s just a coincidence that I got stranded here?”

You didn’t know what to say. So you didn’t, and after a beat, he continued.

“I have a kid.”

It suddenly felt like all the air was sucked out of the room. “I’m sorry, what?” You knew he couldn’t see you, but maybe he could feel the way your eyebrows shot up your forehead.

“Diane,” he sighed again, “she didn’t...I found out she had the kid. So I have a kid. Somewhere in Akron. Where I’m currently stranded, looking like a drunk bum loitering outside a sketchy bar.”

You blinked infinitely as you stared out the window. What do you say to that? How do you say anything to that? So you just said the first thing that came to mind.

“Are you drunk?”

“Really?” Now you were pretty sure you could hear his brows raise. “Do I sound like I’ve been drinking?”

“No, I’m sorry, I just...holy shit, Llewyn,” you breathed. “And she never told you?”

His chuckle sounded so morose. “No. Why would she? That was a pretty shit time, for everyone.”

“I’m listening,” you whispered.

You knew the story of what happened between them. Llewyn had told you himself, one night over coffee and an entire chocolate cake that one of your elderly neighbors had made for you for helping her fix her leaky faucet. Of course, Jean had (in her own mind) helpfully filled in all the blanks she swore Llewyn left out, but you preferred to go with his version. She only thought you knew the basics. But that night, fueled by caffeine and frosting, Llewyn admitted you were the only one apart from the actual players that knew everything.

But this part? This was something new.

“She never told me,” he explained. “I thought she went through with it and it turned out she didn’t and she’s not even the one who told me, it was...you know, never mind. That part isn't important.”

“So when did you find out? How long have you been in Akron?”

He sighed. “Just before I left for Chicago. And since this afternoon. I thought about looking them up, but…”

And he told you how he tried an old number he had for Diane’s parents, but it was disconnected. And he’d asked around at the diner he found (over something called chili which wasn’t like any chili he’d ever had and just further proved how weird Ohio was) but got no information. And how he didn’t really want to see her, and maybe he didn’t even really want to meet up with anyone, but if he could, he at least wanted to see what his own kid looked like, just to know.

The longing in his voice, the what if, the hurt. It was all laid bare from hundreds of miles away, yet you could feel it hovering next to you on that couch. Wrapped around you in that threadbare quilt.

It didn’t feel like the time to offer any advice, and platitudes, any words at all. Not now. So you simply curled up in that quilt - his quilt - and listened. It was rare for him to open up like this and you didn’t want to interrupt, didn’t want to staunch the flow of emotional honesty that he quite frankly needed.

Until the tinny, pleasantly fabricated, slightly mechanical voice broke in, if you’d like to continue this call, please add funds, otherwise this call will disconnect in three minutes.

“Shit, that was my last quarter,” Llewyn muttered. “I’ll get back to you when I get back in town, yeah?”

Oh no, you brain screamed. Well, yes, but no, no he was not just going to let the issue drop like this, quarters be damned.

“Llewyn, I need you to listen to me. Get home as soon as you can, and we can talk about this more. And get here in one piece, please be safe.”

“Okay,” he replied with a heavy exhale.

“And...and Llewyn, when you get back home, please...please come home.”

There was silence from his end, silence that lasted so long you thought the call had disconnected without you noticing. Your breath stuck in your lungs, for how long you couldn’t tell, but then suddenly his voice came through the receiver again, flustered and short.

“I...okay, yeah, I will, I gotta go, but...damn it, what is there to lose now, I lo--”

And the call cut off.

You stared at the receiver in your hand for so long the fast busy-beep of the receiver being off the hook is the only thing that snapped you out of it.

You didn’t sleep for the rest of what was left of the night.

For the next day, and the day after, you ran the entire phone call through your head more times that you cared to admit. Every word he’d said, every word you’d said, every pause and admission and what he might have been trying to say at the end. Your mind very (un)helpfully offered all kinds of ideas about what wasn’t said, what maybe couldn’t yet be said, and you just let it tumble around chaotically.

As if you could control it anyway.

You didn’t get much sleep.

Later that night, and on the second day after, after a long day at work and a longer day of thinking, you found yourself curled up on the couch again, with a glass of wine and a record spinning quietly on the turntable. Wrapped in that same quilt. Your quilt- his quilt.

You stared out the window, this time not at the rain, but the setting sun and the soft, rich colors it was painting across the sky.

You hoped he had really listened. You hope he knew what you actually meant. You hoped he wouldn’t get sidetracked as he often tended to do and that he would really show up. You didn’t know how you were going to do it, but you would help him like you always had. Together you would figure out what to do, what he needed to do, what he wanted to do, how to do it. Together.

This wasn’t something he should have to figure out on his own. He probably didn’t want to admit it, but you hope he knew he couldn’t, and shouldn’t, and didn’t have to. You hoped Llewyn would let you.

That tickle, that tentacle in the back of your brain, took firm hold. You knew he would come back, but you prayed he would come home.

That he had listened. That he knew. That he--

Your head snapped up at the sound of a knock on the door. You carefully set the wine glass down and slowly walked yourself, quilt and all, over to answer it.

And once you opened it, saw the man standing before you, exhausted and disheveled but...grateful, maybe even hopeful, you wrapped it around both of you and pulled Llewyn in.

~end~

Taglist: @anetteaneta @autumnleaves1991-blog @be-the-spark-flyboy @deeandbobbymcgee @huxdameron @itspdameronthings @jitterbugs927 @littlebopper96 @nathan-bateman @poedjarin @rosemarysbaby13 @sergeantkane @spider-starry @woakiees @writefightandflightclub @veuliee2 @yourbucky084 @waatermelon-sugaar

>>join my taglist here<<

#llewyn davis #llewyn davis x reader #llewyn davis x you #llewyn davis fanfic #llewyn davis fanfiction #writer wednesday #writing challenge #my writing #oscar isaac characters

101 notes · View notes