#i love this song with all my heart

[ix---wx]

[sprinedankle]

don't let me listen to demi moore don't let me listen to demi moore don't let me listen to demi moore don't let me listen to demi moore don't let me listen to demi moore don't let me listen to demi moore don't let me listen to demi moore I Listened to demi moore How will i get out of this void of infinite sadness

[savebylou]

Science ❤️😭

[mybedroomceilingsbored]

when you're young you don't thing

about how good things have a bad side

you spend your time waiting around

for the fall, not the goodbye

when you're naive and so green

it makes it hard to believe

how life works when you're older

-The Art Of Getting By, Laura Zocca

[somethingsgottasaveyou]

Seeing a video of All Time Low playing Last Young Renegade earlier on the US fall tour instantly catapulted me back to 2017, getting to hear it for the first time 3 days after the release

[humbuns]

please never go away

[kbsd]

bucky egan // "free" by florence + the machine

the feeling comes so fast and i cannot control it i'm on fire, but i'm trying not to show it

[kimtaegis]

I wanna be with you. ↳ REBIRTH (INTRO)

[tubbytarchia]

Somewhere in the woods, a moth tires of seeking light

[starry-bi-sky]

Stuck in the middle of a forest made of

Flesh and bones and they're all scared of

A lost little boy who has lost his heart

Fear's not enough, they have to

Tear him apart —-------

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

He’s adopted.

He can’t remember anything else before that.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He turned back around and went inside.

—-------

Where do we go

When the river's running slow

Where do we run

When the cats kill one by one

—------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—------

Hazel beneath our claws

While we wait for cerulean to cry

Unsettled ticks run through time

Enough for the hunt to go awry

—-----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—-------

Harpy hare

Where have you buried all your children?

Tell me so I say

—-------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—--------------

It clicks and it clatters in corners and borders

And they will never

Hear me here listen to croons and a calling

I'll tell them all the

Story, the sun, and the swallow, her sorrow

Singing me the tale of the Harpy and the Hare

—-------

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

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

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

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

It is a fast dream. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

—---  

She can't keep them all safe

They will die and be afraid

Mother, tell me so I say

(Mother, tell me so I say)

—-------

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

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

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

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

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

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

—------

Seeker, do you ever come to wonder

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

Will you leave a trail for them to follow a path

You'll soon forget

Home

—---------

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

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

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

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

He ends up calling himself Phantom. 

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

----------

Home is where we are

Home is where you are

Home is where I am

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

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

[slavhew]

And I just have to tell you that I

Love you so much these days,

[gentlebeard]

If I could hold you for a minute, Darling, I’d go through it again

For @edsbacktattoo & @stedesearring 💕 Show: Our Flag Means Death - Season 1 & 2 Music: Francesca by Hozier YouTube

[rin-solo]

I love. LOVE. Get In the Water

It's one of the objectively best songs in the musical; I will die on this hill.

Poseidon was always, despite being pretty much the main antagonist of EPIC, a really underdeveloped character in my opinion. He just needed a little more nuance, and the fact that one (+ kind of one more) song managed to add so much to his characterization pretty much exclusively through subtext and implications is incredibly impressive writing. Because it did!

At the start, he's yet again playing games with Odysseus, the way he did in Ruthlessness. In both songs, he could kill him easily at any point, yet he chooses not to for the sake of playing games. In Ruthlessness, this becomes his own hubris as it leads to Odysseus escaping.

If you listen closely, at the start of GITW he already sounds slightly different. He's still trying to keep up this "God of Ruthlessness" front that he's so proud of, but he's no longer more or less carefree the way he was in Ruthlessness. He's been obsessing over this feud for ten years, and even if he would never admit it, it's actually clear just from his voice that he really is tired of it too. Not in the sense of it emotionally draining him the way it probably does Odysseus, but in the sense that it's a bother, a loose end in his life, a book that he finally wants to slam shut.

But he still has a reputation to uphold, and he still cannot close this book until Odysseus is dead, so he keeps up the game. Instead of just killing him, he's taunting him to kill himself. He might associate the idea of just striking him down with a sort of loss, like then he'd have to get his hands dirty. Then he's rambling about killing his people, his family. He's provoking Odysseus on purpose, likely trying to get him to snap back, to hate and fear him the way that Poseidon would think any mortal who has consumed this much of his time should. In his eyes, Odysseus deserves nothing less than to curse him with his last breath as his "darkest moment," the god who became the bane of his life.

And Odysseus replies, of all things, with ... sympathy.

Honestly, I don't blame Poseidon for being speechless for three full seconds. He literally just threatened to gauge Telemachus' eyes out the way Odysseus did with Polyphemus, and this absolute madlad of a man replies with an acknowledgment that he (might have) caused Poseidon pain too.

Now, I don't really think Poseidon was particularly hurt over Polyphemus' loss, or hurting in any way in that moment (if he were, I highly doubt he'd still be playing games, and he would've mentioned his son as opposed to speaking about his reputation.) But just the fact that Odysseus acknowledges that he might be hurting too is probably something Poseidon hasn't heard in ... who knows how long? His family is the Olympians. I don't think I have to say more.

It's actually more of a genuine apology than Odysseus' explanation in Ruthlessness ... (even though that was also a perfectly fine apology by Greek standards, as far as I'm aware.) Now he doesn't say "sorry" because he's still not sorry for hurting Polyphemus, since he still needed to do that in order to escape. But he expresses regret over the pain he caused in a more genuine way than ever.

I am convinced that Poseidon is utterly unfamiliar with sympathy or mercy. He's lived by his "Ruthlessness is mercy" motto for centuries, and he doesn't know anything else. No one would try to teach him something different. The other gods all live by this logic, even if he's the most vocal about it considering he seems to have made it his whole personality. Mortals wouldn't dare to question Poseidon in the first place. And barely anyone would be willing to treat someone with kindness who is in turn treating everyone around them with ruthlessness.

It's very likely that Poseidon hasn't encountered anyone like this until Odysseus. Ruthlessness is simply how he treats people and also how he expects to be treated back. The fact that Odysseus doesn't, the fact that instead of hating, fearing, or cursing him, he acknowledges that they have both hurt each other and that it doesn't lead anywhere to still pursue vengeance, must have triggered Poseidon in an unprecedented way.

To him, this was probably the most outrageous thing Odysseus could have said in that moment. And it throws him off so much that he is genuinely speechless, and then simply replies, "I can't." ... his most genuine-sounding line in the whole musical.

I cannot stress enough how much it threw me off to hear this line; in the best way imaginable, it doesn't sound like Poseidon. It sounds almost vulnerable. Almost human. Because he is genuinely at a loss so much that he forgets to put up his "wrathful god" facade for just one second. Standing ovation to Steven Rodriguez for his whole performance, but especially this part.

And then Odysseus goes all out to say something even more outrageous: "Maybe you could learn to forgive?"

... Which is when Poseidon snaps.

Kind of understandable, honestly. There's this mortal whom he has likely fantasized about seeing pleading, hate-filled, and terrified, cowering before him for ten years now ... telling him that he ought to learn something. Even hijacking his own motif and his instrument in order to turn it on its head, "defile" it if you will.

This f*cking mortal pr*ck took his own "Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves" catchphrase and turned it into forgiveness ... Of course, Poseidon is no longer hesitating; of course, he is no longer concerned with getting his hands dirty or not. He yells "DIE!" and unleashes his ultimate move (which is really overkill for simply killing a mortal if you think about it) ... But he does it anyway because this time he genuinely means it.

... That, and I am also convinced he jumps to that in order to simply shut Odysseus up, fearing what he might do or think if he lets him go on. Because you cannot tell me that Odysseus didn't actually reach him for just one moment. He was far too thrown off guard, far too vulnerable in that one second. That moment of kindness did something to him, and he hated it. He also probably didn't trust himself to be able to keep listening to Odysseus speak like that. So, he abandons his (still very technically feasible!) blackmail/intimidation and just straight-up kills him.

This simple exchange (my favorite moment in the whole musical, actually) tells us so much about both of these characters that it makes me want to skitter and squeal in excitement.

Here is Odysseus—the very same one whom Poseidon specifically tried to teach ruthlessness—becoming the first person in a long time to offer him sympathy despite how Poseidon himself showed him nothing but ruthlessness. And then one song later, here is Odysseus showing him the consequences of not accepting said sympathy.

Six Hundred Strike and what Odysseus does to Poseidon would've not hit the same, in my opinion, if he hadn't made this offer, if he hadn't given Poseidon this way out, even if no one watching genuinely expected it to work (probably not even Odysseus himself.)

Six Hundred Strike is not Odysseus exacting vengeance If GITW proved anything about Odysseus, it's that he does not want vengeance. He wants all of the hatred and pain to be over, to the point where he is willing to let go of, and I am inclined to say forgive Poseidon for what he's done to him. Six Hundred Strike is simply Odysseus teaching him this lesson that Poseidon couldn't have learned in any other way, because he has proven in GITW that he genuinely does not speak any language besides that of ruthlessness (more on that in this essay!)

It's just the perfect representation of how Odysseus has now finally learned the balance between mercy and ruthlessness, which seems to be the core theme of the musical: Both have their time and place; one simply has to be willing to act in both ways and know when to use either. No one extreme is the solution. I am genuinely exhilarated that Odysseus finally seemed to have figured out that it's been both all along.

[dizzybevvie]

You're the sunflower/I think your love would be too much