#i must need to percolate more

[aerodaltonimperial]

i am encountering severe post-fic WHAT DO I WRITE paralysis. send help lol

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

if Crozier had a nickel for every time someone close to him kept a mortal wound secret from him he'd have two nickels which isn't a lot but it's definitely enough to give him some very specific trauma for the rest of his life

[thydungeongal]

As someone who creates 5e adjacent content I have a dark secret I must confess...

I love dice-pool games.

The only reason I don't create a dice-pool game is that there's so few levers to pull for dice-pool manipulations that make any kind of meaningful distinction in the resolution mechanic to generate a mechanical-to-narrative sensation of character differentiation.

The day I solve that problem as it percolates in the back of my mind is the day we get a new dice-pool game system.

There's a few interesting tricks I've run into in dice pool systems:

Dice pool systems usually start by taking some features of a character, usually something like an ability/attribute and something like a skill, but it could be anything, and combining those into a dice pool. Now, most games don't actually do more in this step than just counting the final total of dice. But there's one axis of information that is rarely used: the type of dice.

For an example, in a hypothetical Attribute+Skill system, assume that a character assembled their dice pool from Strength (an attribute) and Athletics (a skill) and the rolled dice were color-coded depending on their source.

Now, if you want some proper oWoD jank in your game you can make it so that dice that come from attributes have a higher threshold of success than dice that come from skills, representing the importance of training over raw strength. You've now addressed the "untrained skill" penalty that is often tackled via penalties to dice pools. However: this does result in extra friction. One of the benefits of having a static threshold of success is that you can quickly eyeball how many successes you have.

Which leads to the next question: why limit the dice in your dice pool to a single type of die? Staying with the above example, let's assume that the success threshold is a 5 or above, and the average die in the pool is a d6. Now you can introduce d8s as a type of die that represents. Something. Incidentally, the switch from a d6 to a d8 in a system where the threshold of success is a 5 results in a similar change of probabilities as keeping the dice d6 but changing the threshold of success to 4.

Anyway, there's other types of neat tricks you can do. nWoD has "10 again" which means that dice that come up a 10 count as successes and are rolled again, with some abilities allowing for "9 again" or even "8 again" on specific tests, or if they represent a hindrance or penalty on the character they may even counteract "10 again" in specific circumstances.

And I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff that can be done with dice pools. Heck, I've seen games that use dice pools of Fate dice, where results of + are used to add benefits or bonuses to the action from a pick-list while results of - are used to cancel penalties or misfortunes (which are all assumed to happen by default!). So there's a lot of information you can get out of dice pools, you just need to keep looking for it!

[hungharrington]

Could I request something from the prompt you reblogged:

“I had a dream about you last night. Woke up hard/wet. Wanna hear about it?”

kitchen counters (kisses, and more)

this was hard to think of a sitch! it's a bit weird (?) but also a bit goofy at times, which i love and i hope u love anon! not any warnings needed, it's hot consensual sex except they don't use a condom but we know this is fiction and we should totally use those things irl. ok be safe and enjoy <3 2.8k words. minors do not interact.

It’s a bit of a strange morning, being here in Steve’s kitchen when you haven’t spent the night.

Not for lack of want, mind you. You hadn’t been able to is all, some family event that rolled way too late into the evening. And even though you know Steve would’ve come and picked you up if you asked, even at some point past midnight, you didn’t want to ask that of him. You knew he’d had a long day. Steve tried to insist he’d sleep better with you beside him.

“I don’t want you driving, s’all,” you said into the receiver last night, your tone apologetic. “It’s just, it’s late and you’re tired. I’ll come over in the morning, okay?”

“You promise?” Steve grumbled back. He never was in the chirpiest of moods when he went home to empty sheets. 

“Pinky.” 

And you followed through, driving over as soon as you could after your wake-up. Your own spare key lets you into the house and it’s only mildly surprising to find it quiet. The kitchen is empty, lights off. 

You think of your boyfriend, who must be still asleep upstairs, and take a couple steps up the stairs, and— ah, there it is. The sound of the shower. If you strain your ears, you can hear his faint rendition of a George Michael song. It makes you grin.

You head for the kitchen anyways, flipping on the lights as you go— it’s a bit later than Steve’s usually up but you’re willing to bet that without you there to bug him awake, he’s dozed past his usual alarm.

There are Eggos in the fridge, enough for both of you, and fill the toaster with them, pressing the lever down. You begin brewing the coffee, the scent of it percolating the air and it’s nearly ready by the time you hear Steve coming down the stairs.

He appears in the doorway, shower towel still hung around his shoulders, his chest bare. You automatically dip your gaze to drink up the sight of his chest, a mixture of love and lust competing in your chest. His hair is shaggy and wet. He’s scrubbing the back of it with the towel but he pauses, delighting at the sight of you.

“I thought I heard you,” He smiles easily, and you meet him in the middle when he comes over for a kiss. His hands circle your waist. You press up on your toes and hold his face gently, pressing your sweetest good morning onto his lips. Steve hums. His eyes are still closed when you pull back.

They flutter open and he smiles again, blindingly handsome. “Missed you last night,” he says, pulling you closer by your waist. “And this morning too.”

Your heart sings just a bit, your thumb stroking lovingly across his cheekbone. “I bet you did, handsome.”

Steve raises his brows like he thinks you don’t believe him and his hands slither down, nearing the curve of your ass as suggestiveness creeps in his tone. “Uh huh. Even had a dream about you last night.”

His head ducks into the curve of your neck, lips ghosting along your throat as he continues, voice still husky from his sleep. “Woke up hard.”

His body pressing into you confirms that his high-running hormones haven’t managed to dim in the time between his dream and now — his cock is half-hard, nudging against your thigh. You can’t help the way you shiver when he kisses your neck, wet and warm, and murmurs, “Wanna hear about it?”

He’s a bastard. That’s the first thought in your mind as his kiss turns harsher, suckling at the skin of your neck in a way that weakens your knees — he’s a bastard who knows exactly what he’s doing. Your hands slip from his jaw to his shoulders, clutching them a little tighter. You try to pull yourself together.

“Something tells me you’re gonna tell me anyways.” You remark, a pant already making your words sound a little gaspier.

Damn, he makes you needy. Your head falls back and you let him nibble along your neck, feeling your arousal sparking — and catching fire quick, burning low in your stomach.

“Mm, I could,” Steve replies, between his lovebites. His cock has gotten harder, his hips lightly grinding against you to work it the right way. You keen into his touches. “Or… I could show you?”

Your hands move to tug his face up, out of your neck, and you kiss him, hard. Steve groans appreciatively into the kiss, beginning to walk the two of you backward til his back hits the counter. He uses the leverage to pull you closer, his knee nudging between your thighs — your cunt pulses hotly as you grind down against his thigh, lust licking hot at your spine.

“Mhm, definitely…” Steve starts, words tumbling out between his kisses. His teeth scrape your bottom lip, tongue soothing along after. “Definitely started like this.”

“Oh yeah?” You huff, giving a pleasurable shudder when the seam of your jeans lines up just right, rubbing rough right on your clit. A breathy moan escapes you and pushes into Steve’s lips, sealed in your kiss.

Not breaking his kiss, Steve’s hands grip your hips, his knee nudging higher as he pulls down to grind on him again — another bolt of pleasure pulls a moan from you as you clench around nothing. For a hot minute, you two play this game; Steve dedicating himself to your bottom lip, kisses hot and hands wandering, while you rub against his thigh needily. You reach a breaking point eventually.

“Steve,” you pull back from your sloppy kiss to whine, unsure exactly what you’re asking from him.

Face more flushed than before, Steve eyes you hungrily, lips swollen from your steamy kisses. He pulls your hips forward once again, groaning at the reaction it gets him— another pitiful whine, your hands on his neck flexing.

“God, you’re a fuckin’ angel,” He muses, more to himself. He bites his lower lip and takes a second to compose himself before his fingers take a walk, eyes tracing the path they take along the edge of your jeans. Steve pauses at the button, eyes flicking up to your face, eyebrows raising an inch.

“Take ‘em off?” He asks.

“In the kitchen?” You counter, sounding a bit appalled. Not that you and Steve have ever been restricted to the bedroom, but, well….

The Eggos in the toaster pop right at that moment as if to prove your point. You and Steve's heads both whip to the side to look at it and there's a moment of silence. Steve giggles first and you join in quickly, leaning into him. The noise tapers off and when you look back to Steve, you think about the night you would've had if you hadn't been held back.

You don't owe it to him, but you certainly are eager to find out the contents of his dream.

Stepping back out of his hold, you pull your shirt off swiftly. Next, you unbutton your jeans and shimmy them down your legs, kicking them off. Your legs prickle in the sudden coolness. You enjoy the wide-eyed boyish joy on Steve's face maybe a bit too much. He clearly wasn't sure he'd convinced you.

“You did say you'd show me what happened in this dream." You say, hooking your thumbs into your panties, like you're about to work them down your legs next. You pause, tilt your head, the fire in your belly fueled by Steve's greedy gaze drinking you in, "Or do you want to be the one to take these off?"

Steve growls, stepping forward and capturing your lips with his. It's fast and messy, his lips taking and taking, hands raking fast across your body as he lets desire run free. One hand kneads at your breast, pinching lightly at the peaking nipple beneath your shirt, stirring up heat within you. The other hand delves down, down, pushes gently into your panties.

A gasp stutters out of you as he runs his middle finger along your slit, gathering the wetness welling from your entrance. The pad of his fingers drags your slick forward, searching for your clit and you're nearly embarrassed by the hiccupy whimpering noise you make when he finds it.

"There?" Steve says, though his finger has already started to circle it, treacherously slow motions. You nod, your hand slipping and grasping his bicep tightly, giving a sweet sigh of pleasure. "Oh, good girl."

The praise sinks into your skin and you can feel yourself getting wetter, another futile clench of your cunt around nothing.

"Y'think you can handle my cock?" Steve murmurs lowly, checking in with you. He meanly speeds up his soft rubs on your clit as he asks, nearly making it impossible to answer for a minute, but you manage another nod, swallowing your noises for a moment.

"Yes," You say, voice nearly a whisper. Your breathing comes out in soft little pants, chest heaving. "Yes, yes, please, Steve."

Steve hums, pulling his hand from your panties and reaching for his own pants, the buckle clinking as he undoes his belt clumsily. His jeans pool at his ankles, kicked off in the direction of your own, and for a moment, it makes you laugh — two pairs of crumpled jeans on your kitchen floor all because of Steve's horny sleeping brain.

"So," you say, glancing for a moment at his tenting boxers. It makes you salivate just a bit. "How do you want me? How did the dream go?"

You emphasize the word dream, bending over to rest your forearms on one of the counters, sticking your ass out behind you tantalizingly. Steve's eyes stare intensely, chest rising and falling as he steps closer — his hands fall onto your lower back, dragging down lightly, til his fingertips curl under the elastic of your panties.

"Mhmm," He drags them further, revealing the swell of your ass and hot cunt and releasing a resounding groan of appreciation. He sounds breathless when he says, "Just... fuck, just like this."

Your panties gather round your ankles and you step out of them. Behind you, you can hear the sound of his boxers dropping, one warm hand leaving your skin for just a second. It's back in an instant, both his hands shifting down again, spreading your cunt wide for him.

Steve lets out another raspy groan, one of his thumbs coming down to play in the well of slickness building at your hole — your head tips forward with a shaky pleasured sigh of relief.

"Oh, so wet for me already." He says, bordering a tease. You resist the urge to wriggle your hips, to push back and see if he'll relent and touch you more. "Already so messy, huh?"

His light tone of mock twines up your desire and tugs it harshly, your cunt clenching with a whine so loud you nearly don’t hear his chuckle. You're nearly dizzy with relief when the next touch is his cock, nudging against your hot entrance lightly. One hand holds your hip.

Steve goes easy, sinking into you tortuously slow til his thighs meet the back of yours, a sighing moan scraping out his throat as he does. You keen, a strained mewl pushing out your throat as you get filled— so full it aches deliciously, aches for more.

“Ste— fuck,” His name is stolen from your mouth in a gasp, your hands gripping the counter as he pulls his hips back slow, the drag so so fucking delectable. Shit.

Steve rolls his hips forward, pushing back in gently and he pauses again, giving you a moment — even as you tremble and huff out high little noises, clearly enjoying yourself. Warmth spreads across your back as he leans over, pressing himself against your back and his cock further in. There’s a soft kiss on your spine, then another.

“Fuck,” he breathes heavily, breath fanning across your back. He gives another leisurely roll of his hips, a gentle fuck into your heat. You can feel his cock twitch inside you as your cunt clamps down on him. Another whiney noise passes your lips, heat curling up tight in your lower tummy. “Fuck, s’like you’re made for me. Like this pussy was just made for me.”

“Stevie,” you plead, managing to get the word out this time. There’s another ghost of his lips along your skin, then his arm shifts, wriggling under your tummy. He scoops it around your middle, hand pushing up between your breasts to rest on your sternum. Still folded atop you, Steve finally begins to move, hips pumping his cock in and out, faster and faster.

You squeal, body humming like a livewire as Steve finally fucks you, the soft squelch of your cunt sucking him in filling the kitchen. Steve’s chest burns hotly where it’s pressed to your back and you can hear every grunt that pairs with the snap of his hips, his hand on your hip and his arm under you pulling you back to meet every thrust.

Your eyes slip closed, little uh, uh, uh’s coming from your pretty mouth mixed with whimpers of Steve’s name. You’re stretched up on your toes, trying to get the angle that only Steve has ever found. Your core is burning with desire, a throbbing growing in your clit.

“You’re- shit, you’re better than a dream, sweetheart.” Steve grunts, hips never slowing his motions. The stretch of his cock has gone by now but the shape of his hard cock feels like he’s moulding your insides — and you love it.

“Nothing beats this pussy, mm. Nothing,” He drags out the word with a groan, breath coming out in hot pants against your back. “Beats fucking my girl.”

You’re nodding, beginning to feel too fucked out to even think of words. Steve’s hand shifts your hips up and you know he’s looking for that spot inside you— because you can feel his grin against your spine when you whine loudly when the head of his cock finds it.

“Oh, is that the spot?” Steve asks, voice dripping in condescension. You nod frantically. He starts to bully it with his cock, every fast thrust hitting it over and over, til nothing but the melted words of more and please leave your mouth in a drooling ramble. You’re whimpering and whining, cunt drooling all over his cock, down your thighs.

“That’s it, honey.” The words come out a bit choppy like Steve’s own orgasm was rearing its head and his hand moves off your hip — deftly finding your clit. You make a pathetic moan of his name as he circles it harshly, quick circles with the pads of his fingers.

“Fuckfuckfuck, Steve— uh, fuck,” You’re spewing anything that comes to your brain, your hips rocking back to meet Steve’s hard thrusts instinctively as you chase your high.

“Shit, honey,” Steve moans, voice climbing higher and breathier. His hips begin to jackhammer, stuttering as his orgasm tips over — a whiney string of curses sung into your skin as he fucks into your wet, hot cunt, hot cum dribbling from his cock inside you.

You’re desperate now, teetering close to your own edge but not quite there. “Stevie, please,” you cry. His fingers on your clit which had slowed regain their speed, his hips picking back up as he begins his murmurs to you.

“C’mon, honey, you’re so close, can feel this pussy sucking me in.“ He whispers hotly, his hand on your sternum moving to grope at your breast, fingers twisting at your nipple. “Want you to cum for me, okay? Please fucking cum for me.”

You don’t get a lot of choice with his cock drilling into you, pushing that sweet spot enough that your orgasm finally builds and melts — a strangled whiney moan of his name warbles out of you, instantly met with Steve’s praises, murmurs of how good you are for him. It feels like every nerve is alight, turning over and pulsing as the waves of pleasure ride out in your body.

You exhale, trying to catch your breath as you half melt into the counter, finally lowering off your tiptoes as you relax in the post-haze. Steve eases his cock out of you, the quietest wince, and you give yourself another minute before you drag yourself up, beginning to look for your abandoned panties. A thought strikes you.

“So,” you pant, leaning back against the counter; you’ll definitely need to sanitise that later. Steve’s rescued his boxers, tugging them up as he raises his brows to indicate he’s listening to your question. “How’d we do on the dream recreation?” You ask.

Steve grins cheekily. “Oh, in my dream we fucked on the couch.”

[bcacstuff]

Sunrise somewhere near the east coast of Brazil.

I’m not sure what time it is, or really where I am. Somewhere near the coast of Brazil, I know that; sometime during my birthday - I know that, too. I've flown past the Hindu Kush Himalaya, Pamirs, Caucasus, and Atlas Mountains, and will soon cross the Andes. I'm headed to Chile to meet my family after a long time away. A blessing, to be sure, and made even more sweet coming as it is on the heels of an incredible adventure in Nepal.

I’ve spent much of the 12 hours since Istanbul sorting through photos, visual portals into experience far away yet close at hand, pixel-born reminders of a trip, a trail, impact and experience and immersion.

I’m never quite sure how to share tales of any adventure, less so one with such meaning (to me at least) as this past one. The standard travelogue seems too mundane, too pedantic, to capture it all. Some deep and philosophical tome equally missing the mark.

So, perhaps neither, maybe some of both, a hope of struck balance, or at minimum translation of time and place and experience and people. And not all at once: Like any expedition, these things must be savored, a bit at a time, building and percolating and settling and expanding yet again. So, first, the beginning…

Me on the Kongma La back in 1993, wondering about remote valleys less-trodden than Khumbu.

I guess it was about 31 years ago - December 1993 - that Stuart Sloat and I bashed our way across the lower Khumbu Glacier from Lobuche and, laden with heavy packs, made our way to the Kongma La. We had no map, just a vague point from locals and the knowledge that there was a lake up there somewhere. We found only a puddle and a frigid night, but awoke to a splendid sunrise and the Star Wars zaps of sun-warmed ice cracking, alerting us to the real lake on the east side of the pass (as opposed to our mud wallow on the west). Glorious views, backlit Lhotse and Nuptse and countless more unknowns behind, peak on peak and valley on valley leading who knows where. I knew someday, maybe, I’d get into those valleys, wander the paths away from it all.

Thirty years later, I sat in a teahouse in Chheskam, the northern triumvirate of Mahakulung, with Jhanak Karki and Harka Kulung Rai, talking about opportunity over a steaming mug of tongba. We had just trekked parts of the Mundum Trail from Phedi over Silicho to Mahakulung visiting dZi Foundation work and communities; and then we went up above, following the Hunku Khola just enough to get a taste, an idea of what may lay above. The townspeople and government were excited as we were, having had the same idea for years: create a trail up the Hunku, connecting Chheskam to Kongme Dingma and the quite-popular Mera Peak trek.

It was all possible, all doable, but like the proverbial tree falling silently in the woods, this new trail would be all for naught if no word got out about it. But, I had an idea, and it seemed possible.

Two months before, I shared coffee in a small cafe in Glasgow with Sam Heughan. We’d “met” months earlier on Zoom calls for an ill-fated film project, and then I stalked him down in Scotland; he was, as is his manner, kind enough to indulge me rather than call the cops. I mentioned this idea, going to Everest Basecamp, but doing it the back way, the hard way, the way no one would know or understand or really care about, but the way that would be far deeper, more profound, more meaningful and purposeful and fun. He was game, but I needed to see some of it, understand it more, before committing to guiding anyone up there.

Tongba steaming and heads spinning, Jhanak, Harka, and I knew now it was doable. A route possible, something that promised to bring meaningful tourism and tourist dollars to this long-forgotten part of Nepal, so close to Khumbu and yet utterly left out of the economic boon of the Everest economy. Now I just had to convince Sam.

Trekking to Basecamp is not for the faint of heart, even doing it the standard way from Lukla up the Khumbu Valley. There’s long days, cold nights, high altitudes and dry air and new foods and more. It kicks people’s butts with glee. But this route? It promised much more: camping rather than lodges; an unknown trail through unknown country (How steep would it be? How long each day? Would we find water where we needed it, flat ground?); a 19,000-foot, semi-technical pass to cross into Khumbu; and more.

As I thought and hoped, though, Sam took little convincing. An adventurous soul with a heart of gold, he was excited immediately about it all and was on board. And, to be honest, my little coffeeshop meeting was both to suss out his interest and let him meet me (and judge me) in person, but also, more importantly, to feel him out. Guiding for me is not simply an economic thing, transactional, but about time and people and experience. I’ve done too many “off-the-shelf” trips in the past to have zero tolerance for sharing the mountains with people whose goals and values are misaligned with mine. It took but minutes with Sam to know our worlds, while vastly different, were built upon similar ideas and ideals and approaches.

And so, on December 3, we met in Kathmandu, a year’s planning finally coming together.

Unfortunately for Sam, I don’t really believe in the sugar-coated version of Nepal; fancy hotels and windowed views of life are little more than television with smell. I want people to see the real Nepal, wander the back streets, immerse in the smoky incense of dawn on cobbled streets, bells chiming and dogs barking, ambling through the visceral reality that is Pashupatinath, taking in the respite of Bodhanath, embracing the comforting chaos of alleys and backways of Lalitpur.

Sam rose to it all, never flustered or bothered, always interested and engaged and inquisitive. We had but 24 hours in the Valley, but Sam saw and did and digested a lot.

And then we were off, an Altitude Air B-3 piloted expertly by Moreno whipping us up and out of Kathmandu, through the clenching smog of the city to sprawling views of the Himalaya: the Ganesh and Langtang ranges, on to Dorje Lhakpa and Gauri Shankar as we fluttered high over Kavre Palanchok. Then the jumbled jags of Rolwaling and behind, finally, the Everest range, giants piercing the morning sky, Cho Oyu, Nuptse, Lhotse, Everest. Makalu behind, hiding a bit, masked by multitudes, a distant Kangchenjunga almost a mirage eastward.

Before long, some 40 minutes, the show was over, the reality about to begin. We dropped down, our mark Chheskam, a small village clutching the flat ground hundreds of meters above the Hunku Khola, a river raging and carving down from above. Moreno, Swiss to the core, politely but abruptly ushered us out with our duffels and, counting fuel minutes, was off in a jiffy.

We were here, and town was ready.

Going into this trip, I knew Chheskam was excited. A new trail represents economic possibility for the village, the chance to not just be small pawns in the bigger Khumbu trekking economy, but rather to capture some of that themselves, to control it, to reap the benefits and build it out in a way that fits and flourishes.

I guess, though, I didn’t know how excited: We were met at the chopper by many, locals and officials, all adorning us with kathas and warm welcomes. We then walked around the village, Sam getting to see firsthand the impact of dZi Foundation’s work here, projects like one house-one tap, one house-one toilet, kitchen gardens, and more resulting in a very self-sufficient, healthy, clean, place with relative prosperity. Thanks to Jhanak’s connections, we met the oldest man in town as he demonstrated traditional weaving of nettle fabric, sipped raksi in our friend Prashanta’s house, and briefly sat with wedding guests tipsy from revelry. And then we were summoned to the local school for a bigger gathering.

Our team ready to leave Chheskam for the Hunku Khola valley and the new Muddhi-Kongme Dingma trail.

It was huge, much of the town was gathered, hundred of school children, the local government officials, and more, all in the school grounds. We were run through the welcome gauntlet of ceremonial recognition, our necks strung with dozens of kathas and marigold garlands before being treated to local cultural dances and speeches of excitement and gratitude and welcome. Gratitude and ceremony are big in Nepal, and it was strong enough in Chheskam to feel a bit awkward: after all, Sam and I and our team were here just to walk up the valley. We had no guarantees of success - for us or for the future trail. But, the point I think was far bigger than either of us, any of us; the celebration on that day was one of excitement for the future, of possibility, of potential signified by the two of us being willing, caring enough, to come and do this and see where it leads, literally and figuratively.

Thirty-one years before I stared off into these valleys, selfishly hoping that one day I’d wander them, filling my personal cup with some adventure. It took a long time, and was beyond gratifying to finally be here, but doing so with great people, a great team, and a goal beyond anything personal.

[himluv]

Losing Control

Oh my goodness! My last post for my Rookanis fic, Say My Name (Say it Twice), received SO MUCH LOVE?! You all are amazing and I am just floating around on a fanfic author cloud of joy. Thank thank thank you!

If you want to catch up, or read again from the beginning, you can read it over on AO3.

Lucanis woke with a start. Blood. Everywhere, blood. Up to his elbows, soaked in his leathers, splashed on his face. He would never be rid of it, never be rid of Zara. She was soaked into his skin.

NO! Spite growled. Zara. Is. Dead.

Lucanis blinked and the bloody haze of his memory faded to the familiar dark of the pantry. He sat up and groaned at the ache in his head. He felt like he’d drank Viago’s entire liquor cabinet. 

“How did we–”

Rook.

Right. Of course Rook would get him back to the Lighthouse. He just didn’t remember any of it. He remembered the fight. Mierda, the blood. So much blood, the iron stink and persistent itch behind his eyes would stay with him for a long time. 

He remembered Zara offering to talk, to give up the traitorous Crow who had sold him out. And then–

Illario. Spite growled his cousin’s name, like he wanted nothing more than to shred the man to pieces.

Lucanis rubbed his eyes. “Fucking illario.”

Used blood magic, Spite seethed. On. US!

“What?”

Yessssss. Remember?

A wave of distorted purple images flashed through Lucanis’s mind. The metallic tang of blood filled his nose and mouth, so potent it made him gag. But he was helpless against the images. He could not look away, could not block them out. He had no choice but to watch as his cousin broke Zara’s neck in just one hand. As Lucanis lunged for the only family he had left and struggled for control of his own dagger. 

He heard his voice, yelling for help. For Rook. And then Illario pressed a hand to his chest. “That’s enough,” he said, and Lucanis fell back to stare up at his cousin. Illario stared down at him, anger, pity, and a hint of fear warring over his face. Then he raised a hand and said, “relent.”

Lucanis remembered nothing after that.

“How? He isn’t a mage.”

Neither. Are. You!

He shook his head. “But, that was Zara–”

Yessss, Zara, Spite growled. He. Betrayed. You! Betrayed US!

“No,” he said. But, even as he did, he couldn’t deny that something was very, very wrong with his cousin. Lucanis might have a heart, might be too sentimental, but he was not a fool. “I need coffee.”

Lucanis got dressed and tried not to think about how all that blood had been washed from his skin. 

Mages, Spite said. 

Lucanis sighed, but let the matter drop. When he stepped out into the dining hall, he was greeted by the smell of coffee. Rook sat before the fireplace, a cup cradled in both hands. Mierda. Rook. She had seen him… like that. Out of control. Had seen him nearly kill the only family he had left. What must she think of him?

She looked up at the sound of the pantry door opening and gave him a brittle smile. “You’re awake.”

“Yes,” he said. He approached the percolator with some trepidation. “You made this?”

“I did,” she said. “It’s…” she tilted her head from side to side. “Drinkable.”

He sighed, but poured a cup and took a cautious sip. He suppressed a cough as he worked down the bitter brew. Mierda, what did she do?

“At least I didn’t boil it,” she said. 

“I would never forgive you if you had.”

She smiled at that, but was a fragile thing. They both knew they were avoiding the unpleasant conversation that came next. 

He sighed again and took another bracing sip from his cup. “I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to you. And…” he shook his head. “There aren’t words enough to apologize. I never wanted you to see me like that.” He didn’t want anyone to see him like that, least of all her. 

Her smile was sad, but genuine. Her crystal grace eyes unflinching as she met his gaze. “And yet, I’m still here.”

He wanted to shake her, to yell at her that she shouldn’t be. That she should run far, far away from him. But, selfishly, he couldn’t bear to think about how it would feel if she walked away from him right now. So he stuffed those feelings down and moved on, like he always did.

“We need to talk about Illario.”

Spite growled as he paced back and forth before the fire. 

Rook nodded, her eyes distant as she stared into the flames. “He wants you to stay away from Treviso,” she said. Her voice was dull and passionless, as unimpressed with Illario’s wishes as she was by the man himself. “From the Crows. He thinks you’re a danger to your family.”

“He’s not wrong,” Lucanis said. 

Her head snapped up, a glint of outrage in her eyes. 

“If I cannot stay in control…” he shook his head. Even if Illario had betrayed him, Lucanis would never forgive himself if he’d killed his cousin.

Bah! Spite spat. Deserves it!

Lucanis ignored the demon. “He used blood magic to control Spite.”

Rook frowned. “What? How? He’s not a mage.”

He looked down at his cup, the liquid steaming gently. “I don’t know,” he said. “But something’s not right.”

Zara, Spite hissed. 

Rook fidgeted with her cup, rotating it idly while she considered his words. Finally, she shook her head. “I didn’t say anything, because he’s your cousin,” she said.

“… but?”

The look in her eyes was pure apology. “The night you were captured, did Illario know you were boarding that ship?”

His stomach clenched and a chill cascaded down his spine. He’d asked himself this question countless times in the Ossuary, and no matter how many loopholes he contrived, the answer was always the same. 

This time it was his voice that was devoid of any feeling. It had to be, or he’d lose control all over again. “Yes.”

Betrayed. You, Spite said. Hurt. US!

“Maybe there’s an explanation,” Rook said. Lucanis might admire her eternal optimism if he wasn’t convinced it would get her killed one day. 

“There’d better be,” he said. “For my cousin’s sake.” 

Rook met his gaze, and he knew it matched his tone – dark and lethal. She understood him in a professional sense, knew he excelled in bringing death to powerful mages who deserved it. But that was work, clinical and precise with no emotions attached. If Illario had betrayed him, then this was personal. It would get ugly. Better she understood that now.

“Rook,” he said. “If he did– If I have to–” Mierda, he couldn’t even say it. 

“I’m with you, Lucanis.” She said it so quickly, so firmly. As if she had no doubts.

Why?

The answer to that question scared him more than he liked to admit. It made him want to hope for something he shouldn’t. 

Rook.

But, after what happened? Losing control so completely? No matter how badly he might want to pursue these feelings, he couldn’t do that to her. She deserved better than an abomination. Which meant he needed to draw that line between them again.

He didn’t think he was strong enough otherwise. 

He looked down and shook his head. “I need proof,” he said. “I’ll talk with Teia and Viago.” He turned away and headed back toward the pantry. “I’ll let you know when I have something.”

Lucanis didn’t wait for her response, but he still caught the confusion and worry in her voice when she said, “okay.”

Then the pantry door closed, cutting off Rook’s voice and sinking Lucanis back into silence.

[killerpillar]

any book recs? looking for something to hold me over inbetween your updates! anything you’ve found yourself pulling inspo from for your fic or that you think a fellow levi fan would love?

hi!!! ofc, i've got plently of fic recs, i'm pretty sure i've read 80% of all levi fics on ao3 atp😭 I sadly have not had the time to read as many fics nowadays like I used to, but here are some of my all time favs!!

(also i apologise, my summary skills are terrible and so it's just me gushing over the fics for a whole paragraph🧎‍♀️)

Death's Door by SongsOfApollo

one of the first fics I read, and a fic that has literally never left my brain since then. It's amazing. It's very popular so I'm sure you've heard about it already if not read it, but if you haven't, it's a must read!! levi x doctor reader!

Dust, Diamonds by maokitty

the best way i can describe this fic is that it drove an iron stake through my heart multiple times, pulled it out, then delicately rearranged the pieces and stitched it back together with gentle fingers. take it how you will but after a certain chapter i stopped reading it bc it was too painful, and then came back two months later to finish it off AND I AM SO GLAD I DID.

A River Of Three Crossings by maokitty

this fic literally ruined my life it was so fucking good but its incomplete and hasn't been updated since 2020 i am SO SAD. but please read this, it's so good, so heart crushing and sweet and amazing I love it sm

ALSO I JUST FUCKING REALISED ITS THE SAME AUTHOUR WHILE WRITING THIS LIST😭

reciprocal sin by captain-hawks (@captain-hawks)

SO UNDERRATED!??! must read, i cannot say anything else but READ THISSS. its a kinky smutty oneshot so make sure you read the content warnings, but its sooo good😭 amazing writing too!

silver soul by oi_levi

sadly this one is incomplete and hasn't been updated since 2021, but it's brilliantttt. if you're craving some good post-war levi fics, then this one's really good!!

also read In the Land of Gods and Monsters by them for a fun time😊

a sip of sunshine by taomyou (@taomyou)

speaking of post-war fics, this one is amazinggg. super cute and fluffy, angsty ending for part 1 (😭) but I know for sure their next part will be worth the wait. also they've got a complete modern au fic called The Romance Of Reimbursements which is so fucking beautiful, definitely read this!!! (also mchs, acoc... yeah just read all of them tbh)

silver underground. by tothestrongones (@amywritesthings)

this one's a recent read, but omfg i cannottt get enough of it. absolutely love this, it's levi x underground reader, amnesia trope done right. 10/10 must read!!!

we all bleed red by littlerequiem (@littlerequiem)

also a recent read, but omfg this fic is so good. it's vampire au, victorian era, slowburn brilliant writing, and healthy communication!?!? no way. checks all the boxes for me😫

Percolate by heichoe

modern coffee shop au, its so good omfg. it's such a cute fic, classic grumpy levi, friends w benefits, lots of smut and the DRAMA gosh. i was so invested, it was so good. (also ur gonna need an account on ao3 to read the fic!!)

this is a story of the sea by shinzouing

this one is levi x erwin x reader (i read it for the levi x reader bc erwin was gonna die anyways lmao) but i fell in loveeee with it!! wonderful writing, amazing story, 10/10 angst & slowburn, a definite must read! (also 20/10 smut, it was so fucking good)

(also literally every fic by wellitcouldbeworse3 on ao3 is amazinggg, check them out if you haven't already. which i'm sure you have, and that is the only reason i haven't listed out all of their fics here😭 The Feeling's Mutual is my fav modern au fic of all time no questions asked)

THIS IS A JUST A FEW!!! if you want more, then feel free to ask, i will gladly rec more <33 and ty for reading my fic btw!! LOVE U LOADS🤗

[racefortheironthrone]

BOE, the Messenger(s), and the Trillionaires

Introduction

I’ve been doing a re-read of the Locked Tomb - although technically it’s a re-listen, because I like the audiobooks - and I stumbled across a particular passage that hadn’t stuck in my memory before that made me rethink my understanding of the origin of Blood of Eden. Ever since Harrow the Ninth and especially since Nona the Ninth, there’s been this common interpretation that the BOE are descendants of the trillionaires who abandoned Earth and that’s why John is at war with them. I’m not so sure that’s true any more. 

Here’s why. In Nona, when the whole business with Crown/Corona infiltrating the barracks kicks off, there’s an interesting exchange between Camilla and We Suffer about the Oversight Committee that includes this statement:

“Hect, what you must understand about Blood of Eden is that we own things in common, we share responsibilities and resources in common. She could have moved these resources at will...but I must make one move at a time. And above all, I must place the safety of...Blood of Eden’s continuity...even above the mission.” (Emphasis mine.)

This took me aback somewhat, because the emphasis on militant communal ownership doesn’t really fit with the idea of “descendants of trillionaires.” I suppose one could say that it’s been ten thousand years, cultures change and drift over time...except that, as I’ll get into later, the BOE seems very very insistent on cultural preservation, so it would be a bit out-of-character if they changed that stance on this one particular issue. 

And that’s what made me think: what if the BOE aren’t the descendants of the trillionaires? What if they’re the descendants of the non-trillionaires on the FTL ships?

East of Eden: A Theory About What Happened After the FTL Ships Jumped

So here’s the question that’s been percolating in my mind: once you’re out in space, why keep listening to the trillionaires, especially about the vital question of who owns the precious resources brought from Eden and who gets to decide happens next? There would probably be some residual cultural deference to the visionary disruptors, but the traditional answers of property law backed up by the state or men with guns paid to enforce the orders of the capitalists kind of break down when you consider that:

In John’s chapters (and verses) in Nona, we get an account of what happened leading up to and during the Resurrection: according to John, the trillionaires pulled a con job on the planet with their FTL ships, pretending that a fleet of twelve ships, each carrying a few thousand people (made up of “hand-picked guys” and “two hundred nominated people”), was merely the first wave of a planetary evacuation. As Mercymorn and others worked out, there were no future waves, no plan to come back and pick up more, the trillionaires had liquidated their cash and financial assets in favor of buying up material resources they’d need in space, and everyone else was being left for dead.

These twelve ships (possibly minus one, it’s not clear whether John managed to destroy the one he grabbed before it jumped) and the 20-odd thousand people on them must be the ancestors of exo-humanity as it exists in the myriadic year. But we know that of those 20-odd thousand people, only a “half-dozen” were the trillionaires. Everyone else was staff they’d selected to do the work of planetary colonization, plus a tiny group of people chosen by the governments of Earth Eden. 

other than 200 randos who are likely to be recruited from the ranks of elected officials and upper management bureaucracy rather than Special Forces, the forces of the state are not only light-years away but also just got eaten by John Gaius.

it’s a bit harder to pull off the Jay Gould method when you’ve turned all of your cash into raw materials, there’s nowhere to spend cash in space, and it doesn’t take long for men with guns in that scenario to decide that the resources belong to them actually, because they have the guns. 

While we know that some form of a market economy exists on New Rho and the other exo-planets, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of an oligarchical ruling class based on ownership of capital. Rather, we see a state of anarchy where there is no hegemonic entity but duelling centers of power. This suggests to me that the trillionaires’ power did not last very long after human settlement outside the solar system, possibly due to a (potentially bloodless) revolution in which the only surviving members of humanity just decided not to listen to six old (white) men and took their shit in order to survive.

In that scenario, I could see it being the case that the collective memory of communal ownership of property in the midst of a crisis could linger among a certain sub-population and provide the origin for this aspect of BOE’s internal culture. 

So where did BOE come from?

Well, in large part it emerged as an organic response to John Gaius’ imperialist campaign against exo-humanity. As I noted elsewhere, John’s revenge against those who abandoned Earth in her hour of need is essentially a re-enactment of colonialism - the Cohort shows up with their overwhelming military might, forces the local population into subjugation with unequal treaties, imposes its language and customs, destroys the natural environment in a drive for short-term resource extraction, and then forces people into an endless cycle of being resettled on reservations over and over again - which makes a certain sick sense, in that it’s probably the worst thing that a Kiwi of Maori heritage could think of doing to their enemies. 

He even goes to the extent of modelling the Cohort uniforms on 19th century British Army uniforms with the colors reversed, and coming up with his own gloss on the Christianity that was imposed on indigenous populations in the name of “civilizing” them. This campaign is only mystifying to outside observers like Augustine and Coronabeth because they don’t have the cultural context to know what John’s up to (in no small part because he’s used his necromantic powers and political position in order to suppress all knowledge of that context). 

And thus, it’s not that surprising that John’s imperialism provoked anti-colonial resistance: when his Empire made contact with exo-humanity, to the extent that anyone still remembered him, it was as the horrific necromantic cult leader who murdered the ten billion and destroyed Eden, and now he’s come to finish the job in the name of collective punishment for the sins of six dead men, and by the way he’s bringing death and the defilement of the dead and the destruction of everything you’ve ever built with him. There probably have been dozens and hundreds of resistance movements - some local, some planetary, some multi-planetary - that rose up and got crushed over thousands of years. 

So what makes BOE different from all other resistance movements?

The Messenger(s)

I want to go back a few thousand years and talk about what happened when the FTL ships managed to escape the solar system. While interplanetary colonization would always be an incredibly stressful experience even without a revolution, the fact that all of this was happening in the wake of John nuking Earth and killing the ten billion, then devouring the solar system, and their narrow escape from his wrothful grasp would have added an entirely different level of terror to the event - but also a new sense of responsibility. 

Because - regardless of whether people on the FTL ships knew about the trillionaires’ supposed plan to abandon humanity on Earth or believed John’s accusations - they were now the sole survivors of humanity, the carriers of all culture and history. The ao3 author Griselda_Gimpel has a really good series of fics imagining the development of exo-humanity from the FTL ships onwards, and in one scene they mention the enormous sense of cultural loss that people on those ships would have felt when they realized that the internet was gone forever. 

And this got me thinking: what if some nerds on those ships had that kind of profound reaction and decided to preserve as much of Earth’s heritage as possible? How would you do that with limited access to computer storage and humanity potentially scattering across multiple planets, and knowledge being lost forever with the march of time as the original settler generation died off and was replaced by new generations born outside the solar system? I think the answer is:

Oral tradition. See, one of the things that fans of the series have been talking about for a while is the implications of the myriadic duration of the Empire, what that would have done to language and culture in the Nine Houses and among BOE, how is it that people can still be speaking the same language or reading the same writing as from the time of the Resurrection, let alone remember memes and cultural references from the 21st century? This is a fair reaction from a Western perspective - after all, ten thousand years ago would be roughly 8000 BCE or smack dab in the Early Neolithic. Surely it would have been impossible for the memory of Earth to have survived that long. 

But, as people have said, Tamsyn Muir is writing a very Kiwi series. And one of the things that is very distinctive about the culture of��Aotearoa is the oral traditions of the Maori and Pasifika cultures more generally. While Maori oral histories go back to the 13th century CE when Aotearoa was settled, Australian Aboriginal oral tradition goes back as far as potentially 30,000-40,000 years. Oral tradition is not perfectly reliable, it undergoes drift and change over time, it can experience loss and disruption (from colonization, for example), but it can endure across millennia. 

My theory is that these nerds on the FTL ships or their descendants dedicated themselves to the mission of cultural preservation through oral tradition, and thus the Messengers were born. And at some point, the Messengers met up with Blood of Eden and explained that John Gaius’ colonial campaign wasn’t just an unjustified act of aggression and imperialism, but an act of cultural genocide stretching back 10,000 years:

“I charge you with...the utter disintegration of institutions political and social, languages, cultures, religions, all niceties and personal liberties of the nations, by use of-”

“...they’re dead words--a human chain reaching back ten thousand years...how did they feel?” (Harrow the Ninth)

Somewhere around this point, then, BOE took as its mission the preservation of the Messengers, which is why they are given BOE bodyguards, why discharging a weapon in their presence is grounds for execution, and why they are both deeply respected and honored by BOE but kept away from sensitive missions and not necessarily kept in the loop on critical intel. 

Why AIM is “They”

This part of my theory suggested an explanation for why AIM is called “they” by Blood of Eden, and why Palamedes Sextus sensed a necromantic implant when they “stumbled” into AIM at the school. We know that the Sixth House has been in contact with Blood of Eden for a very long time, and that Cassiopeia was not only responsible for the Sixth’s “break clause” but also was BOE’s “Source Gram.”

My theory is that Cassiopeia and the Sixth, being a bunch of librarian nerds obsessed with the preservation of cultural knowledge, would never have been entirely comfortable with taking John Gaius’ word for what happened during the Resurrection and what life was like on pre-Resurrection Earth. The natural place to look for an alternate source of documentation would be exo-humanity, and I think she/they went looking clandestinely and came across the Messengers and BOE. Somehow, they avoided killing each other and came to a modus vivendi.

I think part of this modus vivendi was an offer by Cassiopeia/the Sixth to provide the Messengers with an improved means of preserving their oral tradition: namely, a necromantic implant that would preserve the ghosts of dead Messengers and let them communicate with their successors, ensuring that the oral tradition could be passed down perfectly from generation to generation. After all, not only are the Sixth House spirit magicians, but they are specialist psychometricians who know better than anyone else how to pull information about and from the past from material objects, and it was Doctor Sex who gave Palamedes the idea for preserving revenant spirits after death by giving them a physical anchor. 

Hence, AIM is they because they are a collective “human chain” of all the Messengers who came before them - they have the voices of hundreds of cultural preservations in their heads, telling them of all that was lost with the fall of Eden. No wonder they want to play school teacher and be “she” for a while. 

Conclusion

TLDR: BOE aren’t trillionaires, they’re commie terrorists with a fetish for cultural preservation. So I guess this makes the whole war a case of leftist infighting, considered in the long run?

[dbacklot99]

2024 fic roundup game

Can I just create an ask game? said @cheeseplants

Yes!! Thanks to @cheeseplants and anyone else you tagged me.

What fandoms do you write in? Good Omens! Only Good Omens, Forever Good Omens.

How many words have you published in 2024? Ok, including some chapters for an upcoming [redcated] collab, I'm estimating 150k that I actually wrote. Which....isn't much in this incredibly talented fandom BUT was a lot for me.

What is your greatest achievement this year? Getting out there and collaborating!! I talked to artists (y'all are magical and terrifying), I joined the [redacted] project and wrote amazing angst with @gaiaseyes451, @sixbynine-da, @kneelbeforeyourdogbabylon, @groovynightstrawberry, and MxThirteen, PLUS more artists, @apocalyptic-scenes & babyrubysoho.

And then kept on writing with a lot of those folks to create some amazing crack - and Lucicrow?

My point is, once you start collaborating, you have no idea where it will take you!

What are your top three fics you’ve written this year? Mirrors (E, WIP but almost finished): Angsty reverse omens AU, but there's a happy ending I PROMISE. With amazing art from @daneecastle and @c0smicdisaster.

Cracked Pepper (E): Utterly absurd birthday crack for @kneelbeforeyourdogbabylon. I'm still tickled that I somehow wrote this.

Have We Been Here Before? (E): A one-shot love letter to the fandom (also podfic from the amazing @nosferatini )

What was your biggest pit of despair moment? Hmmm, I got kind of lost in my subplots in the middle of After Heaven. But it worked out and I actually love the ending.

I regularly despair that I will never have enough time to write - or to write as well as I want.

What have you learned? I've gotten some sense of the things I'm ok at. And learning to work on adding descriptions and feelings, not just plot.

Still need to improve my gif game!

What fic did you want to do but never made it off the ground? I have three historical scenes hopping around, but not fully formed yet...

Did you beta any fics? Any favs you want to shout out? Yes!! I can't name all of them - and some aren't published yet (looking at you, @on1occasionfork). But some to throw love at:

Saint of Lost Things (E) by @gaiaseyes451. This would have gone on my year's best list, but I'm sneaking it in here. Post S2 angst and redemption is absolute marvel of story telling!

What Have I Lost (M) Another post2S fic, from MarieCuriosity that I can't wait to see how it comes together!

The Show Must Go On (M) A great 1941 follow-up by @vieux-yeux

Lady of Rheged (E): A West Essex historical AU by @mageofthepeople

Seasons of Nightingales (M): A massive, sweet post2S fic from @nosferatini that is almost done!!!

but i still want more (E): An intense but heartachingly lovely postS2 fic from @cordsycords

Confeitor (M): pure poetry from @adverbian

What three fics have you read this year that you love? Lol, 3!!!

Tethered (E): WIP by MarieCuriosity based on a Gleafer prompt

Someone is Calling Him Shorewards (E): by @harlotofupdog. Gah, if you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for?

Trial & Error (M) by @fellshish. I love everything postS2 and this one was so original!

Anything ginger_cat wrote

Angel-Centered Therapy (G) I thought this was the perfect counterpoint to its big brother (sister?), Demonology.

Rosae series (E) by UKCalico. Sure, it's incredibly hot, but then hits you with these deep insights into the characters and their lives.

If I loved you less, We Could have Coffee (M): The Chapell Roan fic you didn't know you needed; excited to see what happens next! By @spectrallydistracted

Teach me, both the art from @gahellhimself-blog and the fics from Jeans. A really amazing collaboration!

What ideas are percolating for next year? Going to start off with a couple sequels, and then we'll see where the plot bunnies take us.

Who do you want to thank? @goodomensafterdark for endless support and entertainment. Wibly for maps!! @ireallyneedmoretea & @moderndayklutz for being beta rockstars on [redacted]!

Are you somewhere in this post? Should you be? Go on and play the game!

[fanficsbysteve]

Note: So, I had this idea percolate in my head, and I had to get it out, so you all get to read it now. Hopefully, you enjoy.

This acts as a Prequel, Sequel, InBetweenquel to THIS

***

Tommy felt like he was floating. His eyes were closed but he felt like he was lighter than air, and floating. He could hear the gentle lapping of waves against the shore, hear the gulls as they made their rounds, trying to find whatever scraps were left on the ground. It was peaceful, calm. Tommy enjoyed it.

The calm was broken by the sound of sirens. Something must have happened on the beach. Tommy knew how to ignore the sirens. Sirens were part of his life. He needed to know how to tune them out or go insane. Focus on the waves. They are calming.

The sirens grew louder. Tommy was wondering if something had happened near to where he was. Focus on the waves. Listen to the waves. The sirens blared even louder as he heard vehicles stop near him. He sighed and opened his eyes. It was absolute chaos around him. There were several ambulances, firetrucks, police cars just milling around. He was watching from above. Seeing the chaos as if he was floating above everything.

Something caught his eye. Far below him. Why was he so high? He wasn’t in his chopper. There was a dark shape near the waters edge, just barely out of the water. It was disfigured and Tommy couldn’t make out a face. Something had happened to this figure.

Tommy wanted to go and investigate what happened to this figure. Within an instant he was no longer floating above the scene but was up close towards the figure. He could make out some more now. Looking at the figure he found a mop of brown hair that wasn’t burned. The face was burned and looked like it had been crushed. The figure was in a blue jumpsuit, similar to the one that Tommy was wearing. Was he wearing his Jumpsuit? He looked at the hand and saw something sparkle a bit. A small diamond ring was on his left ring finger. That looked similar to the one that Evan had given him on their wedding day years ago. His heart skipped a beat and fell silent in his chest with what he saw next. A name on the back of the blue jumpsuit. Kinard-Buckley. Oh God what had happened?

Tommy closed his eyes.

***

Tommy opened his eyes, and he was floating again. This time it was in a hall somewhere. There were flowers along the aisle. Nobody sat in the chairs. He looked around and his eyes fell on a coffin. A picture of him was sitting in front of it. He was smiling that crinkly smile that he always had when someone took his picture. Evan loved that specific picture of him. He had a bit of stubble. It had been their honeymoon, and they had decided to go skiing. And by skiing he meant Tommy would go falling down the hills. What did you expect from an LA boy though.

Suddenly people started to fill into the room. He saw Chimney and Maddie, they both looked like wrecks. Maddie had definitely been crying. Chimney was stoic but you could tell that his emotions had gotten to him. Same with Hen and Karen when he saw them. Bobby and Athena came as well. Eddie had come from Texas with a now Adult Chris. Chris still needed some help with his disability mostly related to travelling, but he was a fully independent adult living on his own otherwise.

He saw his people from Harbor Station. Lucy Donato, Richard Meyers, Julian Eskans, and Sydney Innes. Tommy smiled as he saw all the people who were coming. He didn’t honestly believe that he had this much of an effect on anyone’s life. But he had been so very wrong. Then he saw Evan. Evan sat in the front row. Staring at his hands. They held a pamphlet, but he really wasn’t paying attention. Tommy felt weightless still. Based on everything he was witnessing; he must be dead. So why was he still around as a spirit.

Evan stood up and Tommy stopped his internal dialogue, “Tommy Kinard-Buckley. You were the love of my life. I don’t know if I’ll ever meet anyone as perfect for me as you were. Its almost like the universe had deemed that one day we two would meet and our souls would fit together,” Evan chuckled, “Tommy always enjoyed my silly facts. So, here’s a silly fact for you. Did you all know that Greek Playwright Aristophanes gave a speech in 300 BC talking about the origins of humanity,” There were a few groans in the rows of chairs, but Evan ignored them all, “According to him, all humans were created as giant beings, kind of like balls, two faces, two sets of arms, two sets of legs. These original humans tried to go to Mount Olympus and this angered the gods, so all these humans were split in two. And forever, humans will always try and find their other half. The other half of their single being,” Evan choked a bit, “I found mine. And now he’s gone.”

Evan started to sob at the dais near the coffin. It was closed. Tommy knew why. Maddie came up to the dais and helped Evan down to his seat, his body wracking with sobs. Music started to play, and people grabbed the palls of the coffin. Bobby, Chimney, Eddie, Richard, Julian, and Lucy all carried the coffin out of the hall.

Tommy closed his eyes.

***

Tommy opened his eyes, and he was in their home again. He didn’t know what time or day it was, but he was in the house that he and Evan shared for years now. Evan was in the kitchen cooking dinner. The table was set for a single person. Tommy could feel his heart ache seeing this. He wanted to hold Evan one last time while he cooked. He wanted to have one last meal with Evan. He tried to think back to the day it happened, but that memory was foggy. Everything before right now was so foggy.

Tommy hovered over to where Evan was standing over the stove. He was humming a song that Tommy felt was familiar. He couldn’t place what it was, but it made him feel emotions. Love. Acceptance. He wanted to listen to this song forever.

Tommy brought his arms around and embraced Evan. His hands interlocked with Evan’s hands, and he held him close. He didn’t know if Evan could feel him, but he felt Evan. Felt the warmth that his soul brought to everything he did. Felt the love that radiated from his body. Evan sighed deeply; Tommy felt him almost lean into his embrace. This one last attempted to feel one another.

Tommy closed his eye.

***

Tommy opened his eyes, and he was at the 118. There was a celebration going on. Tommy hovered around, trying to see what was going on. Seems that Bobby was finally retiring. They hadn’t announced the new captain. Tommy hovered around. He spotted a picture of himself on the wall of the 118. He didn’t expect to find that there. He had left the 118 a long time ago. Tommy watched as the 118 was partying. How long had it been?

“To Hen,” Someone called out. Tommy thinks it might have been Howie, “The new Captain of the 118.”

Tommy watched as people raised glasses. Evan was smiling. The smile didn’t reach his eyes though. They looked sad still. Tommy wished that he could make Evan’s eyes smile again. He tried to embrace him again, to hold him again, to make him feel loved.

Evan let out a sigh of content when Tommy embraced him as best he could. Someone noticed and asked, “What’s going on over there?”

“Just felt good,” Evan replied, “Like someone is wrapping me in a warm hug.”

“I get those feelings sometimes,” the person said, they must have been a recent hire as Tommy didn’t recognize them. How long had he been just hovering around, “My Grandma says that when you feel like that, someone you love is thinking of you and hugging you.”

Tommy wanted to yell out that he was there. But he couldn’t find a voice. He had to be content with just feeling Evan.

Tommy closed his eyes.

***

Tommy opened his eyes. He was in a cemetery. Evan was sitting on a blanket at a headstone. It looked weathered. Tommy saw Evan put a tiny Helicopter on the headstone’s base, and some flowers next to the headstone. It was a nice place. He saw his name on the headstone. Well, if he had to be somewhere forever, this was a nice enough place. There was a tree nearby. Its branches hung down and created shade for someone who was sitting there. It was a nice spot.

Tommy watched as Evan was talking, “Maybe I just need a sign. A sign that you want me to go ahead with dating. If you approve of it then maybe I won’t feel so guilty. Any sign will do.”

Tommy wished he could just tell Evan that it was OK to find love again. He would be there forever. Evan was Tommy’s last true love, but he didn’t expect Evan to close off his heart. Evan held too much love for the world. Tommy just willed and willed for something to happen, something to show Evan that it was OK to move on.

As if Tommy had commanded it, a single blue jay flew over and landed on the headstone. Tommy smiled as he watched Evan smile and take that as a sign to at least try dating, “I’ll see about going out on maybe one or two dates. But don’t you think I’m going to just start forgetting about you. I have to find you again in whatever the next life brings.”

Tommy watched as Evan packed up his items, leaving the flowers and helicopter on the headstone. He watched as Evan walked away from the headstone towards his Jeep. Tommy looked back at the headstone ‘Thomas Kinard II, Loving Husband and Friend. 1984 – 2030’. He had always hated his name. Preferred to go by Tommy to not remind him of how he shared a name with his father. His horrible, abusive father. But this time he liked the name.

Tommy closed his eye.

***

Tommy was floating in a sea of white light. He was disoriented. Where was he this time? “This is your afterlife,” a voice echoed around him. He couldn’t pinpoint where exactly it was at.

“When you pass from this world,” the voice continued, “You go into a sort of holding state. You see snippets of your life, or what came after your end. Then you come here. You await the other half of your soul.”

Tommy was confused by this statement. What did they mean by the other half of your soul.

“At the time of creation,” The voice continued again, “Each being is given half of a single soul. You don’t know what an entire soul feels like as you always had half of one. It is not until you find the other half of your full soul that you feel complete. And your complete soul cannot move onto your chosen afterlife until both halves are here. Sometimes one half passes away before the other, and they come here to wait for them to arrive.”

Tommy was still confused.

“Your other half is still in the mortal world,” the voice said, “They will come soon or late or always or never. Time is irrelevant here.”

Tommy felt himself floating. The light of where he was began to dim slightly. He could see further around him now. He spotted a dark figure in the distance. It was too far to make out any details other than it was a figure. Slowly the figure got bigger, not quite walking, but moving towards where Tommy was.

“What you are seeing is the other half of your single soul,” The voice explained, “When it gets to you, you will see your other half. And you can go to your chosen afterlife.”

As Tommy watched the figure come towards him, as promised there were no details to see who it was. Tommy didn’t know who or what it could be. He had his hopes, but he was used to never getting those up, “They are drawing to a close on their existence and will be here with you soon.”

Tommy watched as the figure came closer and closer. Soon it was right in front of him, a blank slate standing before him. Slowly features started to melt into the figure, a nose, some hair, slowly the features of the figure turned into those of Evan. He looked older but it was still the same Evan that Tommy knew and had loved. As the features appeared, the eyes opened and a smile broke out on Evan’s face, “I knew I would see you again,”

Tommy smiled and grabbed Evan, “I knew I would see you again as well,” Tommy said back, “I missed you so much. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you.”

Evan’s features melted as they appeared to de-age, showing a younger face. The face that Tommy had seen the day he had left for work that fateful day, “It was apparently your time,” Evan replied, “Fate can be a fickle mistress as the saying goes but we are together now.”

The voice that had been explaining things to Tommy came back, sounding everywhere and nowhere all at once, “Your single soul is now complete,” the voice said, booming aloud, “You can move forward to your next path.”

Tommy looked and a path had appeared in the light that surrounded them. He grabbed Evan’s hand and the two of them walked along this path, hand in hand, looking at each other and smiling. They didn’t know what was going to happen to them next, but they knew that they would be together.

***

Note: I just had an idea that stuck in my head that I wanted to get out. It was similar to the movie Ghost starring Patrick Swayze. But not quite. This doesn't get a title because my brain can't think of something right now.

[see-arcane]

Van Helsing Venting (Vent Helsing)

Requisite apology goes here: I am sorry in advance to everyone with a soft spot for the funky old man.

But the reread combined with the podcast has helped put into focus an aggravation that has been nettling me forever without quite knowing how to articulate it.

I’ve brushed the edges of it more than once in several rants about how the Harkers are so constantly given the short stick in every single adaptation of Dracula for a hundred and a quarter years.

Jonathan is either erased, made into a bore, a brute, or unceremoniously killed off while all the amazing character traits and actions he’s responsible for in the story get stolen away and parsed out to others in the cast, often Dracula, Van Helsing, or [INSERT FEMALE THROWN INTO THE CASTLE TO BE BRIDAL CARRIED TO BED HERE].

Mina is alternately a feeble damsel who’s only there to be the pure maiden who gets to live through her seduction*** by Dracula (versus the suddenly scandalous-and-salacious Lucy), or a hashtag girlboss (reincarnated wife syndrome applied as desired) who divorces or otherwise abandons her milksop husband to hook up with a REAL MAN like DRACULA who sexily sex-liberates her. With sex. That she totally for sure wanted along with the bloodsucking.

But on one thing, the Harkers are equal—they never. Ever. Ever. Get to be the true protagonists of any Dracula adaptation, or spinoff, or offshoot, or revamp, et cetera.

This, despite Jonathan being the one to spend the most time with Dracula, alone, in his gothic horror novella of an opening, for Two Months, in which he got the most interaction and dialogue with the Count out of anyone else in the book.

This, despite him and his diary and his love to the point of blasphemy and his nerve and his kukri all being instrumental for the novel to work.

This, despite Mina being the one to literally compile the entire novel out of the transcripts it’s stitched from.

This, despite her connecting the dots to oust the bastard and showing immense courage all on her lonesome in confronting the Count for others’ sake more than once.

But why?

For the longest time, I was ready to grind my teeth and grouse over the obvious reasons of Jonathan and Mina Harker being so gloriously subversive then—and now!—that writers and directors of a certain sneering bent refused to acknowledge anything of their characters beyond the names when slathering their latest cookie cutter vampire bodice ripper with Stoker’s cast titles. The Harkers’ approaches to gender, to heroism, to defeating a villain whose entire role is being the worst of the Gothic Masculine Monster who bullies and preys upon pretty victims to collect for himself (hello harem and power fantasy combo, let’s make THIS guy the ultra-cool totally misunderstood sexypire star of the show!) all chafe against the mental rewrites too many filmmakers and writers make to turn the novel more palatable to their tastes. Assuming they read the book at all.

And that’s all its own pile of rants. But I’ve realized, only now, that this is just part of the problem. The other issue stems from Bram Stoker himself.

That issue being the conversion of an otherwise tight narrative and set of primed protagonist characters into the Abraham van Helsing Show.

I don’t know what it was about today’s entry specifically that made it all click home. Maybe it was already percolating since yesterday, or the day before. But somewhere in Van Helsing’s latest filibuster of dialogue—‘We must share everything! No, wait, tell her nothing! We must make all haste and not lose a moment! Let me turn five minutes’ worth of information into a monologue about bloom and blood and then suggest we all take a siesta on our laurels since we definitely have time to beat the Czarina Catherine! Jonathan, you stay at home with Mina while me and my non-questioning ducklings/the others who don’t really need lines anyway take care of the problem, doctor’s orders! And all my orders are followed, unquestionably, every time, despite them very clearly having only a 50/50 success rate, as is right!’—it all really hit me.

The moment Van Helsing turned into the never-doubted, never-need-apologize, yes, do kiss his hands like a fucking mafia godfather in gratitude for Doing the Things He Should Have Known to Do in the First Place After Lucy, ‘leader’ rather than ‘the lore collector/mentor’ is when the novel turns on its heel and starts breaking its back to accommodate him at the expense of everyone else.

The Harkers get it the worst, naturally.

Once they arrive in Purfleet and the documents are handed over, Van Helsing leads the pack in peer pressuring them into sequestering Mina away as their cheerleader who Need Not Suffer the Icky Horror of -checks notes- finding boxes. Not sent away anyplace safe and guarded by home rules and garlic and crosses; just left to Yellow Wallpaper her days away in the asylum suite.

Meanwhile, Jonathan proves to be literally the only useful member of this group project via hauling ass all over London to gather information to bring back to the table…which Van Helsing then oh-so-helpfully disseminates on top of the obvious point that, hey, yeah, there’s probably boxes there. We should do Wafers about it.

Now, in fairness, Van Helsing was a vital character up to a certain point. Jack called him in for his broader expertise, for how open his mind was as far as what he was willing to investigate or believe as a threat. Without him and his lore collection in Amsterdam, a lot of the details regarding anti-vampire tactics and Dracula’s history lesson wouldn’t have come into play. All this, plus providing the hideous proof of the Bloofer Lady’s reality, making the last three nonbelievers into members of the Drac Attack Pack. Last but far from least, he helps reassure Jonathan to free him from his crushing self-doubt, and then brings in both of the Harkers to create the full group. Fuck yeah!

All that considered, it does make some sense for him alone to give his little seminar on the Dracula Issue…

…except for the fact that Mina has absorbed and transcribed all the info herself. Literally all of it. And the fact that Jonathan personally knows the fucker. All three of these characters should have been at the head of the table, sharing what they know.

But they weren’t. It’s starting to become all about Dr. Abe—because that’s how Stoker keeps his OC self insert in the lion’s share of the spotlight.

This is also when Van Helsing is fresh off the nightmare with Lucy, fresh off of acknowledging that there is literally no reason at all to keep vampire secrets from anybody in this room, fresh off of being oh so thrilled with Mina’s helpfulness and canniness, fresh off of what should have been him learning his lesson and—in open-minded fashion—cutting off any benignly sexist chivalry at the knees to keep Mina in the loop and share the mastermind role.

And what does he decide?

Off to the tower, princess. It’s man work time! Man work here meaning: Investigate some scary dirt. Some rats are there. Everyone break up some Christ crackers, men. Thank God Mina isn’t here to suffer this, amirite? Oh, and Jonathan, be a dear and gather all the information on Dracula’s locations and properties while me and the others…do whatever. Read? Smoke? Something. Anyway, attaboy, such a good hard worker you are, Only Non-Titled Fresh-From-the-Lower-Class Man in the Group!

And then, after October 3rd?

He’s horrified. He’s upset. He’s King Laughing about Dracula’s good meal and within inches of being kukri’d. But you know what he isn’t?

Apologetic.

Oh, he says sorry for the crack about Dracula eating well—but all the actions that led up to the attack? Not a peep.

And when he falls right back into the ‘withhold as much information as possible until it’s time for a Big Specialboy Meeting and my Big Specialboy Corn-flavored Monologue of the Day, in which I’ll give more orders with full expectation that everyone here will hop to it like good little student-soldiers because the author says we can only follow me me me?’

The only saving grace is that Jonathan—not even Mina! JONATHAN!—finally puts his foot down and refuses to chase the stick without conferring with Mina first. Mina, who has always taken precedent to him, period, but also Mina, who has proven herself to be the soundest mind in the entire group and already well aware of the dangers Dr. Abe has been rambling about and trying to be oh-so-covert and sneaky about with Jack.

On that subject? Van Helsing is STILL living a fantasy world where he, and occasionally Jack, are the only ones who can put 2 and 2 together and consider taking anti-vampire measures against Mina.

When everyone has already read everything.

When Mina knows exactly what the risks and measures are.

When Jonathan ‘Would Sell His Soul for His Love and to Slaughter Dracula’ Harker knows all of this.

WHEN EVERYONE HAS EYES THAT CAN ALSO SEE MINA’S TEETH.

Brammy Pajamas. Bramothy Stokerton. Bramward Stokerbroker. My guy.

Your OC, by your own text’s rules, is not special here. He is not the protagonist. He is not the extra-clever center of the narrative’s universe, per your own fucking writing. Stop forcing this man and his refusal to evolve from his preconceptions and his main character pedestal-theft and his goddamn corncobs down our throats.*

*Note: This will not happen.

The one silver lining yet to come will be that Jonathan and Mina get to roughly shoulder their way back into the story’s forefront by the book’s climax. In a huge way. Jonathan even gets an upcoming scene in which he gets to finally, rightfully, chew Van Helsing to ribbons for casually declaring a Certain Horrifying Action has to be taken (Again! No questions asked! No explanation offered until after said chewing-out!) and the narrative treats this as the right move!

But still. Still. Van Helsing is showered with Stoker’s overblown attention to a character that should have had his influence and dialogue whittled down to a supporting role rather than crowding out the Harkers for two whole thirds of the book, complete with them batting their eyes at how brilliant~ he is for much of it.

Despite.

The facts.

In The Text.

That Mina and Jonathan could have led the the whole fucking thing themselves.

We’ll see in later chapters that Mina is ONCE AGAIN the one to figure out Dracula’s plans ahead of time and set everyone on the right course. Jonathan is ONCE AGAIN the one laser-focused on seeking and slaying the Count almost on a supernatural level. On top of all that? What galls me almost as much as the Harkers being robbed of their story spotlight IN THEIR OWN FUCKING STORY?

If Van Helsing hadn’t been one-man-showing the bulk of the dialogue to make sure Brammington got to wave his self-insert around as much as possible?

We could have let Jack, Arthur, and Quincey be actual presences in the book. Jack has a big role! Absolutely! But even he gets relegated to an orbiting figure rather than an active one once Van Helsing starts hogging the pages. Arthur is practically reduced to a mutely mourning money machine. Quincey gets a few moments to remind everyone Hi, Yes, I am a Cowboy. And that’s it.

THAT’S. IT. FOR ALL OF THEM.

Hell, even Lucy and Renfield get whittled down to wisps of dialogue compared to the whole trees’ worth of lines Van Helsing rattles off.

All because Stoker couldn’t bear to let Van Helsing be the character he should have been.

The support. The guide rather than the commander.

Star Wars isn’t about Yoda, but it wouldn’t be the same without the wise little weirdo! That’s what Van Helsing would and should have been great for! But no!

I see now that I owe at least one small retroactive apology to those movie makers and spinoff writers who try to spin Van Helsing as the very real definite archnemesis of Dracula despite the fact that they have exactly two (2) scenes together and no dialogue. It’s not just the cool name. It’s not just because all of the (frequently male and/or Dracula-crushing) directors and writers refuse to acknowledge Jonathan Harker’s existence or importance.

It's because Stoker himself damn near choked his own book to death with the old man’s screentime, backed up by an utter refusal to let the narrative or the characters acknowledge when he’s fucked up. He always has to be the wise scholar. He always has to command the room and the story when neither of them belong to him.

I’d genuinely like to see one of two adaptations in the future.

In one, we could see a Van Helsing who, following October 3rd, chooses to step back. One where he and others logically point out that he has misled everyone with forced unnecessary ignorance and following stodgy hindering social rules, again, and it has doomed someone precious to them, again. One where the Harkers finally get proper center stage, likewise for the Suitor Squad—the latter of whom are written in canon as having a legit history of dangerous adventures undertaken together. Flesh those out, writers! Let these characters be present in their own fucking story! It’d be a golden opportunity to highlight a point Stoker fumbles even as he champions so many other forward-thinking notions:

Sometimes the older generation has to let go of the reins. Sometimes progress doesn’t come just from following and nodding along, but from forging ahead with new concepts and fresher minds. Case in point, Mina and Jonathan, who are apparently still too radically-written to be bothered with depicting accurately in the 21st century apart from a podcast that is literally just reading their lines verbatim.

The other option an adaptation could take? Supposing it really wanted to lean into the horror and heartbreak and forcing the ducklings to stop grasping at the Dutchman’s coattails?

Kill Van Helsing.

Dracula would absolutely think to target him, assuming that he, the elder with his acquired lore and scholarly nuisance, must surely be the keystone keeping his young enemies together. Given the chance, he’d follow that assumption to its conclusion and, on top of burning what he assumes is all the documentation on him, murdering his fellow clever old man in cold blood, ala Renfield. Bonus points if this comes at a bittersweet cost of Van Helsing landing a parting blow on the Count as thematic penance for ‘failing’ Mina, the second young girl who trusted him and paid for it, giving the bastard his second scar to match the shovel blow on his brow. Double bonus if the mark comes from a Wafer burn.

“Any last words, old man?”

“God bless you.”

Cue him slapping the Son right in the fucker’s face. He doesn’t last long after that, but it’s still a good view to go out on as the Vampire curses and sizzles.

And, natch, he will have been wise enough to leave another memorandum for Jack and the others just in case this very thing should happen. A rousing farewell speech, some parting intel, some apologies made. Perhaps a more personal goodbye to his pupil; complete with Jack’s professional mien cracking like glass and the long-put-off tears finally pouring. Then, finally, the crew move forward as one; no longer leaning on or chafing against Van Helsing’s assumed lead, but using the exact same tools they’d always had at their disposal, along with their own wits that the narrative forced them into ignoring in favor of the Professor’s lectures.

Anyway.

Van Helsing is not a bad character. He’s richly made and interesting, as any worthwhile member of a cast should be! But Stoker crammed him into the wrong role and spread him far too thin across the whole book. Doing so has been detrimental not only to all the media which followed it, but to the actual leads of the novel.

[notmorbid]

twin peaks: season 1.

dialogue prompts from season one of twin peaks.

is this going to happen every damn time?

now means now.

i thought the only time you cared about was making time.

i'll see you in my dreams.

don't do anything i wouldn't do.

come on, cowboy, light your fire.

i thought i was your little pick-me-up.

quit worrying and start scurrying.

nice day for a picnic.

don't walk away from me like that.

you're not telling anybody anything.

buy you a coffee?

i've never seen so many trees in my life.

have any trouble finding the place?

the whole town's really badly shaken up.

what kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here?

i told you i had a feeling we'd see ___ again.

you gonna let me in on whatever the hell is going on here?

don't tell me where i ought to be.

muffle it, junior.

i'm not your friend.

i sure know how to pick 'em, huh?

i don't need any damn sympathetic anything.

is there some law against having a picnic?

who are you protecting?

what kind of cigarettes do you smoke?

you're not drinking and driving, are you?

the best-laid plans of mice and men...

don't do it for me. do it for yourself.

there's liable to be a little trouble this evening.

you want me to follow at a discreet distance?

i changed my mind. i'm not sorry.

do your palms ever itch?

who would do a thing like that?

guess why i'm so happy today.

you woke us crying in your sleep last night.

if we tell the truth, we don't have to get our stories straight.

we got places to go and people to see.

i think now i understand how you feel about ____.

don't drink that coffee! you'd never guess: there was a fish in the percolator.

don't 'sweetheart' me, you old dog.

i respect your rebellious nature.

the quieter we become, the more we hear.

you think you got problems?

let's get the hell out of here.

i was up all night working on that invention.

you cannot come by here like this.

it's not the first time and it won't be the last, but i'm in that doghouse again.

god, i love this music.

i've seen some slipshod, backwater burgs, but this place takes the cake.

you don't know what you've done for me.

i told them you were on your world tour and they should contact your press agent.

get your boots off my bed and go to your room.

what is going on in this house?

i mean it like it is. as it sounds.

when i saw the face of god, i was changed.

let's rock.

where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there's music in the air.

thank you for talking to me.

let me tell you about the dream i had last night.

do you know where dreams come from?

i've got compassion running out of my nose, pal.

stupidity is not a necessarily inherent trait.

i do not suffer fools gladly, and fools with badges, never.

the old rustic sucker punch, huh?

in ceremony begins understanding.

don't be afraid. we will all be there together.

sounds like you've been snacking on some of the local mushrooms.

what are you looking at? what are you waiting for?

you damn hypocrites make me sick.

save your prayers. ___ would have laughed at them, anyway.

this must be where pies go when they die.

there's something evil out there. something very, very strange in these old woods.

something horrible is going to happen.

they want to hurt me. i know it.

be a man about it. ask me to my face.

i'm a terrible person. i pretend that i'm not, but i am.

people think of me as their friend. the truth is, i really don't care.

nothing is going to happen to you. not now, not ever. not while i'm around.

do you believe in the soul?

you always said you could never tell us apart.

in real life there is no algebra.

maybe you should run away and join the circus.

i swear on my life, i have changed.

the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line.

not too many secrets left around here.

i've got one man too many in my life, and i'm married to him.

there isn't all the time in the world. i see that now.

to be perfectly honest, i'm tired and a little on edge.

i can't believe you were ever my age.

i have to put gas in my car like everyone else.

maybe that's our trouble. we never want to hurt anyone. we never just take what we want.

i got your note. are you alright?

you little fruit loop.

they move so slowly when they're not afraid.

i've got tea, i've got cookies. no cake.

shut your eyes and you'll burst into flames.

fire is the devil, hiding like a coward in the smoke.

you're not going to hurt me again.

what you need right now, more than anything else, is a friend.

secrets are dangerous things.

i don't appreciate your attitude.

i'm a little better at faces than names, i guess.

you think people really change?

every day, once a day, give yourself a present.

mother always said i was born lucky.

no names. you don't offer and you don't ask.

there used to be something caring between us.

i never should have taken you up to that house on the hill.

if somewhere under all that scar tissue there's the faintest flicker of what we used to feel for each other, i'm asking you to feel that now.

given what i've become and the way i've treated people, there's no one else i can turn to.

i can't blame you for dreaming.

i always talk too big. that's my biggest fault.

what kind of dangerous game have you been playing?

[septembriseur]

i just went in for another reread of the old words, and it remains one of the most gorgeous and brutal character studies ever posted on ao3 dot edu lol. i have found myself thinking about it a lot recently, since it is so much about violence and survival and existential anxiety when one's country has basically ceased to exist and one's citizenship is toxic. your musings on that kind of victimhood/perpetration balancing act and the resulting power paradox have really clarified things for me. but it is quite a different experience to be reading it in october 2024 than it was to read it in may 2021. and i know that your own life has changed so much since then. i seem to remember you saying somewhere that you went into writing it with ethical questions, and writing it didnt answer those questions, but it got you closer. it would be interesting to see you do a postmortem on that fic now. only if you want to! much love.

Well, first of all, THANKS.

It's crazy reading that story and seeing how clearly ideas (or revelations?) were percolating that would become fully formed after August 2021.

In terms of the central moral statement, I think it holds up. Actually, I'm struck by the light it sheds on a struggle I've been having recently: how to explain to people why torture and collateral damage are wrong. (Yes, this is a real, practical problem I'm dealing with.) I find myself wanting to explore the idea more, particularly because I'm surprised by how much I really like the Zemo that I created. (I was so good at writing dialogue then!)

I suppose I also feel that I didn't too badly at communicating other things, because there are parts that I feel so much more strongly about now that I could almost cry reading them, even when they're a little heavy-handed.

There are definitely technical things about the story that I would change. I don't think I had a fully formed idea of what I thought Sokovia was, and that ended up developing in more detail in my subsequent WIP. (Somewhere I have an extraordinarily detailed timeline of Sokovian history.) I had a shallower understanding of almost all of the issues involved: what it means to live with a history of violence; what it means to have lost your homeland; what it means to be "developing." I also think that I was more cautious and less radical than I am now:

I'm struck, in particular, by how I felt the need to clearly signal (at least inasmuch as I ever clearly signal anything in my stories) that, while rape was used as a weapon of war by Sokovian forces, Zemo did not participate. This seems cowardly. I'm very troubled by the way that, in general, fic treats rape as a kind of moral horizon. Characters can torture, murder, even mass murder— commit a variety of other war crimes— but to rape makes one an Evil Person. This, of course, is crazy. The men who rape in war are just as banal as other war criminals. I can imagine a more effective and less popular version of this fic in which Zemo did use rape as a weapon of war, which is consistent with the historical examples I've drawn on, and must overcome that as well as the rest of his sins. In fact, I very much want to write that story— if only I could carve out the time to do it.

Somewhere inside me is a great truly radical postcolonial fic. Or, well, I have an original sci-fi novel that I've outlined that gets into some of the same issues, but really I'd love to write a truly savage Zemo fic, in part because I want it to be a commentary on the sanitized antipolitics of the MCU.

In summation: it's not perfect, but I still love it, and I wish I could write more.

[joelalorian]

Tides of Desire - Chapter Three: The Cut of One's Jib

Pairing: Yacht Captain!Joel Miller x f!reader

Series Summary: TLOU no outbreak AU. Joel Miller is a luxury yacht captain running charters in the Caribbean. You join the crew as a deckhand and unexpectedly complicate Joel's peaceful existence. Basically the TLOU bunch on a Below Deck yacht.

Series warnings: 18+ MDNI, adventure, alcohol, injuries, fluff, angst, smut (eventual), slowish burn. Reader is a badass. Smallish age gap (reader is 32 or so, Joel is 40). Additional warnings will be posted with each chapter as needed. No use of y/n.

Series masterlist

Chapter Three: The Cut of One's Jib

Daylight barely made it through the porthole to pierce your eyelids, aggravating the fucking epic hangover you were sporting. Every part of your body ached, but none more so than your head. There must have been several angry little men with jackhammers battering away at your brain, it was the only explanation for the level of pain being inflicted.

Dreading the very thought of getting out of bed, you slunk onto the floor, legs already unable to perform their function. You needed sustenance asap, and no light breakfast would suffice. You needed a full, greasy spread and about a gallon of diet coke to take off the edge of this wretched hangover.

What was it you said to Joel that first day aboard the yacht? You liked to make sure your hangovers were worth it?

Yeah, that was a fucking lie. You had lots of fun last night, but not enough to justify a Stage 5 Hangover like this – what the hell?

It had to be the fucking shots. They were always enough to ruin a fine night out.

Food. No more thinking, you needed food before your aching brain could process much of anything.

Stumbling out of the cabin in rumpled pajamas, hair a wild mess around your head, you headed straight for the fridge in the crew mess and grabbed two cans of Diet Coke, two eggs, bacon, and cheese. Next, you grabbed a large bagel from the bread box, and proceeded to fry up the eggs and bacon. In record time, you were seated at the table devouring your greasy breakfast sandwich – an American staple as far as you were concerned – with a heavy sigh.

Your mouth was full, a bit of grease dripping down your chin, when Joel entered, his eyes raking over you with a furrowed brow. Too hungover to feel embarrassed, you merely nodded your head at him and kept eating.

“Fun night, I take it?” His tone was more clipped than usual while he turned to get a pot of coffee going. He preferred the pot rather than the Keurig, you noticed early on. Something about freshly grinding his own beans and letting the coffee percolate, he told you during a prior conversation.

“Mmhmm,” you replied around another mouthful of food. You swallowed, followed by a large gulp of soda from the can. “Listen, about your offer to guide me – how and when would you like to do this?”

Turning back to you, Joel assessed the view before him, dark eyes cataloguing your current hot mess state. “Well, you’re clearly in no shape to start anythin’ today. I’ll talk to Tommy later – once we pull lines on the next charter, you’ll come up to the bridge to steer us out of the marina. Good?”

Eyes widening, you nodded. “Er, yeah, that sounds spectacular. Thanks, Joel.”

His eyes softened slightly though he remained a tad standoffish compared to prior interactions. You weren’t sure why he was acting that way, but you also did not have the mental capacity to worry about it too much. The food and soda merely took the edge off the massive headache. You needed a shit ton of water and several more hours of sleep.

“Well, I’m heading back to bed to sleep this shit off,” you informed Joel as you grabbed a couple bottles of water and shuffled back to your cabin. He watched you go, face shadowed with a frown.

…………………………….

“Did you enjoy yourself last night?” Tommy’s eyebrows shot upwards at his brother’s tone. It was almost accusatory and left him bewildered. The events of the night before flashed through his mind trying to recall whatever he’d supposedly done to annoy Joel. Aside from getting quite drunk and dancing, mostly with you, he couldn’t think of anything. Unless… wait, was that it?

It was a routine on the yacht for the Millers to gather for breakfast as a family on their off day prior to each new charter and the three of them sat on the flybridge while the rest of the crew relaxed elsewhere. That morning, breakfast was rife with abnormal tension from Joel and Tommy’s hangover had him in a mood. Sarah merely sat watching the two of them with curiosity.

“I did, actually. Not sure why that annoys you though, brother.”

“Hmph,” Joel grunted in return, turning his attention back to the eggs Tess was kind enough to make him.

“You really gonna take that tone with me and not even tell me why?” Tommy growled in annoyance, matching dark eyes clashing as they glared at each other across the table.

“Oh, for the love of…” Sarah sighed, her fork clattering against the empty plate before her. “You two are ridiculous. You know you’re supposed to be grown men yet you both act like sullen little boys fighting over the same toy.”

“’Xcuse you?” Joel muttered, matching Tommy’s sputtered utterance of, “Rude.”

Scooping her fork up, Sarah used it to point at her father, her eyes meeting those of her uncle. “He has a… thing… for England and you were practically all over her last night.”

The scowl returned to Joel’s face – fucking hell, was he really that obvious? – and Tommy’s eyebrows popped up to nearly meet his hairline. “Well, shit,” he sighed at the realization that Joel had the hots for someone, finally. Sucked that it was the same woman he, too, found extremely attractive.

“Yeah, so maybe the two of you could keep it in your pants until the season’s over? She doesn’t need you both perving over her while she’s trying to do her job.” Sarah was only half-serious, having already picked up on the way you react to her father, which was entirely different to how you reacted to Tommy. You clearly had the hots for Joel as well and she thought you would make a nice couple. Knowing her dad as she did, though, Sarah knew that he wouldn’t do anything about it while on the yacht.

“For fuck’s sake, can we put an end to this conversation?” Joel stood, the words coming out of his mouth with a hint of mortification mixed with his obvious annoyance. Before either Sarah or Tommy could respond, he was gone.

Turning back to her uncle, Sarah looked at him pleadingly. “Maybe just chill this season, yeah?” He knew at once that she wanted him to back off from flirting or making a move on you and Tommy agreed. He wasn’t looking for a relationship anyway – seasonal or otherwise – just a bit of fun that he could find elsewhere. Joel was the relationship guy, when he allowed himself the indulgence, and you deserved that kind of treatment.

……………………………………………

Joel’s voice was a deep rumble over the radio calling for Sarah, Tess, and Tommy to meet on the bridge for the preference sheet meeting the next day. It was time for the rundown on the next charter.

“Our next charter is a bachelorette party.” Joel passed out copies of the preference sheets, the announcement drawing groans from Sarah and Tess and a gleeful grin from Tommy. “Eight women in their thirties – I need you to be on your best behavior, Tommy.”

“Why you gotta call me out like that, Joel?” the younger Miller brother grumbled, feathers ruffled.

“Gimme a break, Tommy. We all know you’re a sucker for bachelorette parties and you know the rules on charter.” Joel’s voice was firm, not willing to budge on the rule against fraternization with guests, no matter how attractive and willing they might be.

“Yeah, well, fifty bucks says at least one of them tries to get in the captain’s pants,” Tommy fired back earning himself a piercing glare from his brother.

Focused back on discussing the preference sheets, the department heads reviewed the primary guest’s requests – beach excursion with a barbecue lunch, water activities, a tour of the historic streets of San Juan, and, on the final night, a male review featuring the male crew, including the captain.

The contrast between Tommy’s glee and Joel’s distaste at the final request was comical, Sarah and Tess easily gave in to laughter at their expense. The blazing burn of the glare aimed at them from Joel did little to temper their amusement.

“Zip it already,” Joel grumbled, crossing his arms in front of his chest as he sat back in his seat. “Tess, why don’t you run through their food preferences for us.”

The requests amounted to typical yachting delicacies, but Tess knew that a group like this would consume a fuck ton of alcohol and the culinary cravings would likely shift to requests for fried or comfort foods. After making a few notes, Joel called the meeting to an end. The crew spent the rest of the day readying the boat.

The following morning started out with an unexpected squall – high winds and rain battered the marina for a few hours, leaving Joel to stress over the weather radar, hoping for a break in the storm in time for the arrival of the charter guests. If it didn’t, they would be stuck in the marina far longer than he’d prefer and it would affect his ability to have you steer the boat out to sea.

Joel found himself waffling back and forth between excitement to work closer with you and fear of getting too close – he still thought the offer to help you was his dumbest idea yet, but the thought of calling it off left him feeling hollow.

The squall blew through just in time for the guests to unload from their taxi, the ground still wet beneath their high heels. The women were already boisterous, screeches and girlish laughter piercing Joel’s ears as he and the crew lined up to greet them on the aft deck. The co-primaries were the maid of honor, a stunning brunette with impossibly long legs and a touch too much makeup, and the bachelorette herself, a tanned blonde with the prettiest ringlet curls adorning her head.

The women’s attention was instantly piqued at the sight of Joel and Tommy as the two most attractive of the crew, their eyes raking over them with hunger.

“Welcome aboard the Radiance, ladies,” Joel greeted the group once they all had flutes of champagne in hand. “Sarah will give you a tour and take you to your cabins. Please let any of us know if you need anything.”

“Would you join us for dinner this evening, Captain?” the maid of honor, Jessica, questioned before following Sarah to the upper decks, her slender hand sliding down his tanned bicep and forearm. The action left a trail of gooseflesh in its wake and Joel’s lips thinned prior to forcing a closed-mouth smile.

“It would be my honor,” he rasped, subtly stepping back from the woman. Joel’s eyes caught yours in a wide-eyed gaze as he realized you witnessed the interaction. You were gone before he could assess your expression.

………………..

You and Ellie worked the lines on the stern, listening to Tommy call out instructions over the radio as the engines spurred to life. You loved the burn in your shoulders and arms from hauling the lines in, it was an excellent workout. Once they were secured, Ellie turned to you.

“So, this is gonna be an interesting charter.” You grunted in agreement, already uninterested in watching a group of women throw themselves at Joel and Tommy. Before you could add anything of substance to the conversation, Joel radioed, requesting your presence on the bridge.

It was time to have your first lesson with Joel. Ellie’s face lit up, teasing you as you left.

Hands trembling with nervous energy, you made your way up to the bridge. Joel stood at the controls, still clad in his dress whites, the material hugging his broad build, and feet bare. You noticed that Joel loved to walk around the yacht shoeless. You weren’t a foot person, often finding them gross, but even you had to admit that Joel had nice feet – they were large, with long toes, and he clearly took care of them.

Your name was breathed into the room, drawing your attention to the fact that you stood there just staring at the man for however long. “Hi Cap,” you greeted with a bashful smile gracing your lips.

“You ready for your first lesson in being a Captain?” Joel waved you over, stepping aside to allow you to stand in front of the wheel. Instructing you on where to place your hands, he began pointing out the sight lines and various meters and equipment to keep an eye on while the yacht traveled out of the marina.

His deep voice was like velvet washing over you as you absorbed everything like a sponge. Despite your clear attraction and nervous energy, working with Joel felt natural, like you’d done it for years. He was a knowledgeable and patient teacher, and you soaked up his instruction and praise. Once the yacht was out in the open water, the pair of you watched the horizon.

“Thank you for this,” you gestured with your left hand across the bridge, the underside of your wrist catching Joel’s attention. His large hand gently grasped your hand, turning it palm up, and a long, thick finger traced over the pattern of the beautiful compass rose tattoo on your wrist. A delightful chill swept over you leaving gooseflesh in its wake.

“Beautiful,” Joel whispered, his dark gaze caught yours, his large hand still delicately grasping your smaller one. “I never noticed it before. Does it have meaning to you?”

You nodded dazedly, the warmth of his touch against your skin a distraction to clear thinking. “It’s an homage to my grandfather representing our combined love for the sea and it keeps me pointed in the right direction on my adventures.”

“Very fitting.” His voice rumbled from his chest and your hand fell from his grip. Clearing his throat, Joel made idle conversation, wanting you to linger on the bridge a little longer until you had to return to your duties. “Where do you call homebase when you’re not yachting?”

“It varies, I move around a lot, but right now I have an apartment on the gulf coast of Florida. How about you?”

“Sarah, Tommy, and I all live in Austin, Texas during our downtime. I’ve owned a house there since Sarah was born,” Joel explained.

“Is that near the water? Sorry, I don’t know Texas well.” You couldn’t imagine him living too far from sea.

“We have some rivers and lakes nearby, but it’s several hours away from the Gulf. We thought about moving to the coast, but there’s just something about Austin that I don’t want to leave.” Joel’s eyes softened further, likely recalling years of happy memories from back home.

You nodded, a tender smile on your lips. “It must be a nice feeling to have a connection to one place like that. I’ve never known that having shuffled around so much, even when my parents were alive. I guess the closest I’ve come was my grandfather’s cottage in England.”

“Do you have any siblings?” Joel asked suddenly and you shook your head. “No, I’m all alone in this world. I’m an only child and lost my parents about ten years ago, only a few years after my grandfather. They were both only children as well, our family was very small.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” he sighed, thick arms pulling you into a tight hug with your head tucked against his chest. Your arms slid around his waist of their own accord. The hug was warm with just the right amount of pressure – a niggling thought squirmed its way through your mind that hugs from Joel were the closest you’ve ever come to a feeling like ‘home’. The pair of you stood like that for interminable minutes, neither willing to let go, until Tommy called your name over the radio startling you from the peaceful moment.

Feeling vulnerable, you blurted a rushed goodbye and fled back to your duties. Your thoughts remained on Joel the rest of the day as the attraction grew the more time you spent with him.

Joel was in the same boat, pardon the pun, feeling the attraction grow as he learned more and more about you, each new bit of information making him curiouser still. His mind was pre-occupied with thoughts of you later that evening while dressing for dinner with the charter guests. It was something he was not the least bit looking forward to, but he could not turn down a dinner request.

The women were already seated at an elegantly decorated table on the flybridge – he made a mental note to commend Sarah and the other stews on their table décor – when he sidled up, dressed in his black uniform. Joel could feel all eyes on him, it felt like he was a piece of meat as he settled at the head of the table.

“Evening ladies,” he greeted, elbows perched on the table and hands clasped. Joel geared himself up as best he could, but these women were an unknown quantity having been drinking all day. He anticipated this dinner would be… annoying. Joel already sorted out a safe word with Sarah as a signal for her to call him away for some made up emergency if things got out of hand.

Almost immediately, the tipsy women began flirting, fluttering their eyelashes and staring with glassy doe eyes at him. The woman nearest him immediately squeezed his bicep without regard to his discomfort. “Do you work out, Captain?”

Joel grunted out a no, stating that yachting and staying active on the water was often a workout in itself.

“I bet it is,” Jessica, the maid of honor, chimed in from across the table, eyeing him with that hungry gaze again. Yep, he was definitely a piece of meat. “Tell me, Captain, are you single?”

Knowing that question was bound to pop up, Joel groaned internally. He briefly considered lying as thoughts of you flashed through his mind, but he settled for the truth in the end. “Yes. I don’t really have time for dating right now.”

“You’re still a man with needs that have to be satisfied,” Jessica purred, the rest of the table letting out collective sighs and giggles.

Good lord, Joel thought, this woman was downright predatory. “Sure, yeah.” The first course finally arrived, and Joel met his daughter’s eyes with a pleading look, silently begging her to get him out of this awkwardness.

The incorrigible maid of honor barely waited for the stews to place the plates down before continuing her pursuit of him. “Tell me, do you ever satisfy those needs with charter guests?”

You happened to step out on the flybridge at that moment, gasping with the impertinence of the question. Joel’s eyes shot to yours, wide and mortified. Your gazes remained locked as he replied with a sharp, “No. I don’t partake in nor tolerate that kind of impropriety on my boat.”

Sarah caught the safe word – impropriety – at once and stepped up to her dad’s side, bending to whisper in his ear. “Jesus Christ, dad. Let’s get you out of here before they rip off your uniform and have you for dinner.”

Joel’s face remained stoic as he nodded, gaze finally breaking from yours and turned to those seated at the table. “If you’ll excuse me, ladies, there’s an urgent matter I must deal with on the bridge.”

Shot from his seat like a rocket, Joel stormed past you, waves of anger and embarrassment washing over him. What a fucking disaster.

……………………….

The charter got progressively worse for Joel – Tommy, too – as the women binged on alcohol all day and flirted outrageously with the handsome brothers. Tommy was more tolerant of it, dancing flirtatiously along the edge, giving just enough sass back to keep them entertained without ever crossing the line. On the other hand, Joel had more than enough of the harpies after that first night and did not respond to their efforts beyond valiant attempts at polite, tight-lipped smiles. He kept to himself as much as possible the entire week, trying his best to avoid further embarrassing interactions.

It was all for naught. The maid of honor was relentless, going so far as trying to bribe Ellie into showing her where the captain’s quarters were late one night while she was on anchor watch. You were horrified on Joel’s behalf when Ellie told you the following morning. You were surprised the lecherous woman hadn’t explored the whole ship to hunt him down.

Sarah and her team were running ragged, constantly ‘on’ trying to keep the women entertained enough to distract them from harassing her father further.

Somehow, you all made it to the final night of the charter – the night the guests requested the male review. In all her infinite wisdom – before she realized quite how horrid these guests would be – Sarah ordered special uniforms for the men to wear for the review. They were basically Speedos patterned in the flag of the state or country each man was from. The women on the crew were lost in hysterical laughter when you informed them that your Australian ex-boyfriend always called them ‘budgie smugglers’. That became the crew’s new name for the small strips of fabric and the look on the faces of Bill and Joel when they were shown what they’d have to wear was something you’d never forget.

“What the fuck is this?” Bill barked gruffly, the scrap of fabric dangling from his pointer finger. His bearded face was marred with clear disdain. “I am not wearing this in front of guests. Or at all, for that matter.”

“Oh, come on, Bill!” Frank chided; his handsome face lit up with glee. Along with Sammy and Tommy, he was far too entertained by the idea of parading around in the tiny swimwear. “It’s all in good fun and will get us a good tip.”

While Frank continued his efforts to persuade Bill to participate, Joel’s eyes were shooting daggers at his daughter. “Sarah, baby girl, you can’t be serious with this shit,” he murmured. “I can’t wear this and only this in front of these women. They’ll eat me alive!”

As much as you would love to see Joel in a budgie smuggler, you were inclined to agree with him that he could not possibly wear one in front of these women, especially when you all knew they would be several sheets to the wind at that point.

Tommy, however, disagreed. “If I have to wear one, then so do you, brother. Man up, Joel.”

“I know, I’m sorry. But I promise, Dad, you will only be in front of them long enough for one song,” Sarah added, “then you can go back to hiding.”

Knowing he couldn’t make his crew do it if he wasn’t also willing – he was a collaborative leader, after all – Joel relented, grumbling under his breath the whole time. On the other hand, Bill adamantly refused to give in and even went so far as to tell Joel to fire him for insubordination. Of course, Joel would never, not for such a ridiculous cause, so he let the gruff man off the hook.

After a decadent dinner of pan-seared monkfish, sea scallops, and a bunch of other delicious-looking food you had no idea how to pronounce, the women were practically vibrating in their seats awaiting the show. The wine flowed along with the hooting and hollering for the male crew to come out once the table was cleared.

With Bill taking anchor watch, the rest of you were allowed to attend the show for the fun of it. You and Ellie stood off to the side with Emmy and Talia while Sarah played the MC. The men didn’t allow any of you to see them in their outfits before the show, so your mouth dropped open in authentic surprise when they each burst through the door to the flybridge, chests bare and bronzed, cocks secured in their budgie smugglers.

Tommy volunteered to be first, always willing to show off in front of the ladies. Your eyes widened at the size of him in the small bit of fabric. He was definitely above average, a thin happy trail leading down his toned stomach, and all of the guests noticed. Frank, Connor, and Sammy followed, each putting on a little show as they danced onto the deck. You were quite impressed with Frank’s moves.

To no one’s surprise, Joel emerged last, posture stiff and unyielding, bare feet practically stomping onto the flybridge. The sight of so much of him bare before your eyes caused your stomach to flip. Broad, tanned chest sparsely peppered with hair. Tummy slightly soft. Arms and legs thick with sinewy muscle. His budgie smuggler was patterned with the Texas state flag, just like Tommy’s, the lone star distorted with the sheer size of the bulge beneath the material. He was fucking huge, putting all of the other men on the boat to shame. Your eyes drank him in, pink tongue darting out to moisten your lips, your heartbeat staccato in your chest, your thighs clenched.

Joel’s scowl was etched in stone until his darting eyes met and held yours. Your reaction to him was visceral and he drank it in, using it to power through the awful experience. There was no doubt in his mind now, you were definitely attracted to him, and his confidence soared. The catcalls from the guests became background noise as he held your gaze, body moving without thought to the beat of the song playing through the speakers.

The song ended, the jeers of the guests the only sound left filling the night air.

“Take it off, Captain! Let us see that thing you’re working with!” the maid of honor exclaimed, practically salivating over the gorgeous man. Her body was already out of her seat trying to get to Joel, a desperate, feral gleam in her eyes.

You could read his lips as his heated gaze broke from yours, that sinful mouth forming the words ‘oh shit’ as the insane woman’s fingertips closed in on his bare chest. With panic in those soulful dark eyes, Joel turned sharply and fled to the safety of his quarters.

………………………………….

It was a relief to everyone when the bachelorette party charter finally departed for destination unknown. That was the strangest charter you ever experienced; the women were downright desperate for the Miller brothers, particularly Joel.

A mix of concern and lust for Joel plagued you all night, leaving you feeling dirty and no better than the women who objectified him the entirety of their charter. Your mind would not let go of the picture it snapped of him standing nervous yet proud in nothing but the budgie smugglers, looking like temptation incarnate. It flashed across your eyelids every time you closed your eyes. It played on repeat in your dreams. It haunted you in the shower in the morning and you caved to the unyielding throb in your core, fingers dipping to strum at your clit until the pressure snapped, teeth piercing your bottom lip nearly hard enough to break the skin in the effort to suppress your moans.

Flaming heat flooded your skin as the shame washed over you, the cold water flowing from the showerhead doing little to temper the burn. How could you face him after this? You really were no better than those desperate women.

You were quiet and atypically reserved as you joined Connor, Ellie, and Tommy in docking the boat, silently following Tommy’s callouts over the radio and nodding to Connor to respond when needed. You avoided gazes while hefting the guests’ luggage off the yacht. You hid at the tail end when the crew lined up, as far from Joel as you could possibly get on the aft deck. Forced smiles and false well wishes sounded down the line as the women thanked the crew, fawning over Tommy and Joel one last time, the maid of honor bold enough to slip her number into Joel’s pocket despite his scowl and complete rebuttal of her advances.

First to return to the deck crew duties, you missed seeing Joel discard the slip of paper in the nearest bin. The next couple of hours were spent sweating out your frustrations as you scrubbed and hosed down every inch of the decks. Once again, you were mentally and physically exhausted by the time Joel called for the tip meeting.

The crew was especially chatty when they gathered in the main salon, conversation about the outrageous charter guests flowing. You remained quiet, sunk down in the plush leather cushions in the corner of the sectional.

Ever observant, Sarah leant over from her spot next you, concern marring her smooth skin. “You okay? You seem… off.” Her voice was little more than breath in the air, not wanting to draw attention, though Tess’s observant eyes were surveying you from her spot. The older woman quirked a brow, silently asking the same question.

How could you explain to Sarah the thoughts you’ve had about her father? You couldn’t and guilt pulsed through you once more. You couldn’t even explain to yourself why this was affecting you so much, how could you even try to make it make sense to someone else?

“I’m alright, love. Just need to sleep for a week, I think.” That was the best you could offer in terms of a response. It was the truth anyway – a deep sleep without any dreams plaguing you was exactly what you needed.

Sarah looked like she wanted to pry, not entirely convinced that was all that bothered you, but Joel entered the salon and called the room to order.

Cheeks already flaming, Joel cleared his throat a few times. “This was obviously a challenging charter and I want to thank you all for the way you handled yourselves. You represented Radiance well despite the circumstances.” His right hand came up to rub at the back of his neck. “They, uh, left us a pretty good tip…”

He broke down the numbers and personally passed out everyone’s share, his deep brown eyes lingering on you when he stopped in front of you last. He longed to see your beautiful eyes meet his gaze now that it was clear to him you were equally attracted to him as he was to you, but you kept your chin tipped down, looking only at the pile of bills held out toward you.

“Thanks,” you muttered after too long a beat, eyes finally flashing upward to meet his for the briefest moment before looking away.

The resulting heavy sigh from Joel as he stepped away caught you off guard. Fuck, why were you making things so awkward?

“Provided your duties have been completed, you’re all free until Monday mid-day,” Joel called over his shoulder, departing for the bridge.

“Cocktails anyone?” Tommy asked, ready to blow off some steam. The rest of the crew seemed interested, even Bill and Frank, but you declined, opting for a shower and a long nap instead.

The afternoon hours passed in peaceful slumber, the soft tones of instrumental music playing through the earbuds you popped in before drifting off. You never budged when Tess came in to get ready that evening – the crew was going out for dinner and drinks to blow off steam.

“Hey, hun,” Tess murmured with a gentle nudge to your shoulder. “Are you sure you don’t want to join us?”

You rolled over with a little grumble, the earbuds slipping from your ears. “No, thanks. I just need a night in to relax. I can’t take another hangover like last week. Have fun without me!”

Tess nodded, knowing that would be your answer. “Thought so. I left you some dinner in the fridge to heat up. Make sure you eat, okay?”

You could hear the crew down the hall, already ramped up from day drinking. You knew you made the right decision when you didn’t feel an ounce of FOMO as they left.

The nap having refreshed body and soul, your mood was lighter when you rose, changing into a bikini for a dip in the hot tub. Padding through the crew mess with a towel slung over your shoulder, you grabbed a bottle of Pinot Noir and a glass before heading to the flybridge.

The boat was silent, gently swaying in its slip, and it felt like you had the entire thing to yourself. The sun dipped lower toward the horizon as you connected your phone to the sound system, selecting more instrumental music to play before you climbed into the bubbling water of the hot tub. A contented sigh slipped from your lips; head tilted back to rest against the padding with eyes closed. Stretching out, the jets soothed your aching muscles after five straight days of laborious work.

“May I join you?”

Your eyes shot open at the simple, soft request. Joel stood before you in just a pair of board shorts, bottle of wine and stemmed glass in hand – he clearly had the same idea as you.

Your eyes raked over his bare chest and arms before realizing you needed to respond. “Of course,” you breathed.

One corner of Joel’s mouth quirked up. “Do you want me to open this?” he asked holding up the bottle of wine.

“Y-yes, please,” you stuttered, quickly clearing your throat.

It was like a scene out of one of your dreams, watching Joel pour the wine and perch the glasses on the rim of the hot tub before climbing in. He sat a respectful distance from you, but he was just so broad and tall that it felt like he was everywhere. Your legs brushed against one another as they stretched out before you.

Joel’s gaze was heated as he stared at you, the burn of it like a laser on your skin. You sipped at the wine, wracking your mind for something to say. You were so overwhelmed with your attraction to the man, and you had no idea how or what to do about it.

“That was some charter, huh?” You immediately cringed internally. For fucks sake, that was the best you came up with. Pathetic.

The resulting chuckle that boomed from his chest soothed you. “It was certainly something, sweetheart. I’m glad to be done with those women.”

Your insides were melting, not from the heat of the hot tub, but from him calling you sweetheart. “Yeah, they were intense and, dare I say, rather… desperate and obnoxious.”

“Agreed,” Joel rumbled, the skin of his neck flushing. “I, uh, it was really embarrassin’ the way they were actin’. I never wanted to jump overboard in my life until this charter.”

The pair of you shared a few laughs at the charter guests’ expense before moving on to other topics. You talked about any- and everything under the sun, the flow of it easy and natural between you. The guilt and misgivings from earlier were long gone, easily explained away as being overtired and overwrought.

A second bottle of wine was opened after the sunset and the stars started to sparkle in the night sky. With each glass, you and Joel moved closer to each other until you were sitting right next to one another, bodies touching from shoulder to knee as the water bubbled around you.

“I shouldn’t say this, not while we still have more of the season left before us than behind us, but… I, uh, really like you… getting to know you, I mean… though I like how beautiful you are, too.” Joel seemed as surprised by his admission as you were, but you flashed him a dazzling smile.

“I feel the same way, Joel.” The words fell from your lush lips without effort or regret.

[mariacallous]

A new UC Riverside study on California agriculture and climate proposes a plan for new water capture, storage, and distribution systems throughout California that will sustain agriculture and keep up with climate trajectories.

Available water for consumption is disappearing because of climate change and failing storage systems, leaving one of its top consumers—the agricultural industry—scrambling, the study concludes.

California’s agriculture sector uses about 40 percent of all the state’s water, or 80 percent of its consumed water. With less water available, agriculture must adjust. The study provides a pathway for the sector to do so.

The study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that groundwater aquifers have more storage potential than surface water reservoirs. So, instead of devoting decades to build more dams and reservoirs that are subject to evaporation and overflow, water should be diverted into these depleted aquifers below the Central Valley and the coastal plains.

Over the past 40 years, aquifers have been overpumped, meaning more water has been taken out than put back in. When aquifers become too depleted, the land can subside. “In some parts of the Central Valley, it’s been sinking a foot or two a year,” said Kurt Schwabe, a public policy professor at UC Riverside and coauthor of the study. Land subsidence can cause infrastructure like buildings and highways to crack and degrade. It also harms the aquifer’s capacity to hold water and the health of the surrounding ecosystems.

Not only can replenishing groundwater aquifers limit these negative environmental impacts, but it can also bolster a water “savings account” during times of drought. When California lacks surface water, water usage shifts to groundwater stores.

But the big problem isn’t simply a quantity issue: “When I moved to California over 20 years ago, someone told me, ‘Don’t let people tell you there isn’t a lot of water in California, because there is. The problem is that it’s just managed really poorly,” said Schwabe.

The drought-plagued state was just drenched by two wet seasons and atmospheric rivers, but its infrastructure failed to adequately store that excess water.

Think of it like a leaky roof. In the past, you could have stored rainwater seeping through your roof in a gallon bucket for five separate rain events. Now, you would need a 5-gallon bucket for just one rain event.

Although the amount of precipitation hasn’t changed much compared to historical rates, “climate change has typically reduced the number of rainfall events but has made them much more intense,” said Schwabe.

Additionally, the climate crisis has led to high temperatures that evaporate surface waters before they can replenish and prevent rainfall from accumulating as snowpack, which has traditionally refilled reservoirs throughout the spring.

Like the gallon bucket, California’s storage facilities are too small. That, together with slow landscape absorption, is leading to flash floods and potentially useful water flowing back to the ocean.

For example, two winters’ worth of snow followed by intense heat created a flood risk in 2023. State officials decided to release water from Lake Oroville and other reservoirs across Southern California and the Central Valley. Although this helped prevent flooding and sent water downstream, many Californians were upset that the fresh water was being wasted. In attempts to reduce overflow releases, water agencies and irrigation districts made recharge basins to capture precipitation. But it wasn’t enough. Constant overpumping and a changing climate leave aquifers depleted to this day.

Their natural recharge process—precipitation accumulating as surface water that percolates through the soil to recharge groundwater aquifers—can also be disrupted by urbanization or impervious covers like pavement, said Bruk Berhanu, a senior researcher in water efficiency and reuse at the Pacific Institute.

The study suggests more managed aquifer recharge (MAR) infrastructure is needed to adequately catch large amounts of water in short time periods and avoid similar water-loss situations.

MAR is an intentional method of recharging aquifers, especially those at low levels. Already commonly implemented in California, MAR infrastructure includes conveyance structures that redistribute water to dehydrated locations, and injection—spraying water on land or, the more costly option, directly infusing water in wells.

Yet, to ensure an effective recharge of the aquifers, more monitoring and measurement is required. “Through 2014, growers were not required to monitor or report any withdrawals or injections to aquifers,” said Schwabe.

Regardless, California has more monitoring practices than other states mainly because water availability is not as big a concern elsewhere, said Berhanu. Monitoring standards vary by state and region. Regulations for urban areas differ from agricultural or industrial areas. Based on Berhanu’s work assessing the country’s volumetric potential for water use efficiency at the municipal level, he found that “there is no federal regulatory framework for monitoring or reporting. In a lot of cases, water supplies aren’t even metered.”

Even in areas that did have regulations, the reports were often infrequent or incomplete; the UC Riverside researchers are working on expanding the few accurate monitoring systems put in place in Southern California by proactive growers.

Additionally, the study proposes voluntary water markets where farmers with a surplus of water can trade it to another farmer in need. It’s a win-win process: The selling farmer makes extra profit and the other gets much-needed water. “With prices based on scarcity plus delivery costs, such a marketplace would have incentives for storage and efficient use,” Schwabe said in a press release.

Berhanu added that water-trading markets can work in some areas but not in others. “It needs a very strong governance framework to make sure all of the players are playing according to the rules.” The process will need to have improved monitoring practices, transparent data, and clear external costs, he said. “The more decentralized you get with how these transactions are being made, it becomes very difficult to coordinate the overall watershed-scale system benefits.”

The study also mentions the value of reusing wastewater. Historically, wastewater has been treated to an environmental safety standard then released into the ocean or groundwater system. Over time, natural processes will clean it. Instead of waiting for the environment to purify it, water treatment facilities can repurpose the wastewater for irrigation, commercial use, or recharging purposes.

As of 2023, water treatment plants can purify wastewater so well that people can drink it. “At some point, the water that we use will become someone else’s water for drinking or irrigation,” said Berhanu. Whether wastewater is for drinking or recharging aquifers, California plants are expanding their operations to include recycling methods so they can produce a sufficient supply.

“The overall volume of water in the world doesn’t really change. We need to shift our thinking from looking at how much water is available at one point of time to trying to better integrate our practices with the entire water cycle,” said Berhanu.

The study goes on to mention numerous efficiency-based and management solutions, like sustainable farming practices, land repurposing, and desalination to help the agriculture industry adjust.

“Now is the time to think about possibilities and opportunities for collaboration across agriculture, municipalities, and the environment to invest in smart investments that capture more water and put it in the ground,” said Schwabe.

[teddybaeran]

“You can kiss me, you know” for Mix and Daeran from the nsfw starters!

OMG thank you so much for the ask, and this is such a good one for them, forcing me to write their first kiss 👀👀

This takes place during the party in Heaven's Edge after spilling wine on the poor guy but before witnessing any memories - it's an option for part of a fic I intend to write and yay now I've gotten started on it!! Not sure if this will remain how their first kiss canonically happens. I may tweak the time and place or just the details of course. But here's the first draft now heheheh.

"- then I ended up here."

Mix and Daeran sat on the bed in silence, both motionless. Daeran absorbed his story, unwitting that the gossip of his own percolated in the elf's mind as well.

After a few long minutes, Mix turned his gaze cautiously to the aasimar. He startled at the sight of bright green eyes already on him - soft, longing, pleading, expectant. Holding so much back. "I feel for you," they both screamed to each other in silence. One out of a carnal fear of getting too close, the other a similar fear but much less literal.

Mix shifted to lean on his arm, facing Daeran. He cautiously reached out and rested his hand on Daeran's comfortingly - a small gesture which was returned by intertwining fingers. Mix blushed and stroked Daeran's hand with his thumb.

"Thanks for listening," Mix whispered. Daeran nodded, lost in thought as his other hand rose and began caressing his own clavicle, seemingly idly. Mix watched the movements, biting his lip. His eyebrows furrowed as his longing took the form of something more physical. Some other way to express his need, his admiration, his empathy - without using words. Some way to feel closer without the risk.

Daeran must have read his mind. His eyes darted to Mix's and a savoring smile crept on his face.

"You can kiss me, you know." The words fell from Daeran's lips draped in molten gold. Welcoming Mix to do what he had only dreamed of until now. Daeran's lips were inviting, calm yet laced with anticipation. Mix's breath stopped and he found his hand squeezing Daeran's. His other hand wrapped around his neck, pulling their bodies closer.

Daeran's lips felt soft and malleable as Mix's pressed against them. His fingers pressed into Daeran's hair, gathering it in the gaps between his fingers. Inhaling him, tasting him, leaning fully into him. They collapsed together into the bed as Mix's hand lowered to his hip, gripping it cautiously yet hungrily.