#intemperate hearts

[015friends]

our intemperate hearts vmin, 12k, interstellar rescue

No one really knows what happened to the Singularity. They have the ship’s data, the crew’s logs, until the scheduled transmission point just past S0-2 — they have all the indications that the mission was going as planned, until the Singularity and its crew vanished.

No one has told the crew of the Serendipity that their mission is to hunt for their predecessors, but it’s an unspoken acknowledgment that follows them around the compound, into press conferences, under the breaths of all their technicians. They’re called a rescue team by the press, and by the other squads on base, and within themselves; it’s how Jimin thinks of himself, as he straps himself into his flight suit.

A slingshot around the galaxy lands Park Jimin face to face with his own worst fear.

[k0yaz]

hello hi sorry i know your inbox is probably super full rn 😭 but can i request a one-shot of arlecchino comforting female reader while they have a panic attack, preferably without specifying the reason for it if that’s okay <3

burning flame.

Pairings: arlecchino x fem!reader

CW: sfw, female reader, panic attacks, big anxiety wow, it’s a rlly short oneshot sorry, this is off my own experience of what ik of a panic attack so I apologize if what you were hoping for is a little different i hope i covered atleast the fundamentals of it, soft arle yay, symbolism woah, wlw, fluff, not proofread.

A/N: More arlefreaky content yayayayaya this actually turned out really good I’m proud 🕯️

“There you go, breathe.”

Arlecchino’s calloused hand pressed flat against your chest as she whispered to you in hushed tone, heart thudding against your chest so quickly and violently that she could feel it against her hand. Still, she didn’t budge, pushing her hand further up as it grazed the cloth of your shirt along your skin. Your mind still spun as a storm continued to brew up within you, vision all blurry and your surroundings unclear. You begin to question where you were, only able to hear the fervent beats of your pulsing heart and shaky breaths emanating from you.

However, Arlecchino’s hand didn’t budge from your chest, keeping firm despite your intemperate heartbeat pounding so viciously, as if it was actively clashing against her palm. Shallow breaths fanned over her blackened hand, your uncontrolled hiccups and wide eyes making you jolt with each rough jerk of your body. You nearly tumbled forward as it grew hard to maintain any semblance of tranquility, both within your messy thoughts and your surroundings.

The harbinger’s broad arms circling your waist and hemming you into her grasp slowly began to subside the intense whirlwind of dread swallowing your subconscious whole, making your breaths become more drawn in and elaborate. Yet that awful unrest and distress resumed to gnaw at you continuously. Arlecchino didn’t take long to notice this, proceeding to trace your tensed up muscles from the collarbone down, outlining your silhouette slowly.

“Deep breaths, (Name).”

Flickers of light above outstretched your own shadow before you, causing you to nearly stray away from Arlecchino’s easing words, yet you did as she instructed, drawing in a deep intake of air through your nostrils and pushing it out of your lips. “There you go. Keep doing that. And focus on my hands.” She asserted, giving a gentle nudge to your shoulders and coaxing you to relax them.

You complied, lowering your hunched shoulders and fixing your mind to feel her nails gliding along your skin from the way she held you, back flush against her chest.

Repeating each deep breath, you gradually found yourself slowly fluttering your eyes open, submerged in a mellow sense of comfort flooding your senses. Your squinted gaze weakly shifted over to the flickering candle rested atop the bedside table, its flame jittering in the blink of an eye repeatedly. You leaned further into Arlecchino’s touch, seeking her warmth as her hand shifted to rest atop your head.

You were strangely similar to this alluring candle, your brightness always flickered with each gust of wind threatening to erase your flame of a soul in a seemingly endless battle. However, Arlecchino stood with you through thick and thin, at your worst and at your best. No matter how you saw it, Arlecchino was your burning flame, who kindled the wick of your candle. She was the lighter to your flame.

“Feeling any better?” Arlecchino mused, glancing down at your slumped body as she continued to hold you. You only gave a quiet and exhausted nod in response, signaling that you wanted to rest with her for a bit.

No matter what, she‘ll always be there for you.

A/N: I LOVE HOW THIS ONE TURNED OUT PERSONALLY WAWAWAW also I hope that you’re doing well anon and that you’ll get through whatever you’re going through <33

[laurashapiro-noreally]

Looking for something to read?

Oh look, it's another recs post! This time I'm featuring two stories per author. These are writers I always make time for, whose work stands out as unusually hot, clever, funny, or smart -- sometimes all of the above.

I'm gonna start you out strong with two by @werpiper: After Hours takes Aziraphale and Crowley to the baths after their oyster supper, and all sorts of interesting pleasures are there for our angel to sample. Piper's Crowley is one of my favorites: always evaluating the situation, not quite aware of what his own heart is doing but feeling it anyway.

Fitting In is a new story, still a WIP, but I am utterly tantalized by Muriel's first taste of love -- and tea. This is already rich in detail, soft and fragrant, and I can hardly wait for the action to get going in earnest. The pairing seems surprising but when you think about it for ten seconds of course it makes sense. Sex workers help the curious, the awkward, and the inexperienced every day, bless them.

If you enjoy these, check out @werpiper's back catalog -- they have done a ton of ineffables-through-the-ages, and their series Miracles and Heresy is worth many delightful hours of your time.

I love what @copperplatebeech has been doing lately:

He's Not My Friend is a T-rated story that explores Aziraphale's constant refusal to acknowledge his relationship with Crowley, and Crowley's mirror of that, and how things glacially shift over time. It is subtle and yet specific, it will make you ache and smile.

All Of The Above, also T-rated, is a warm and fuzzy alternative to that, a hilarious celebration of true friendship that made me laugh out loud and still got me right in the feels.

@copperplatebeech can do everything, from quiet, gentle, and romantic to devastating plotty AUs to extraordinarily horny established relationship to absolutely ridiculous humor. Do dive in if you haven't already.

Next up, @cumaeansibyl, master of kink:

better living through technology manages to shove everything I want in a dirty story into less than three thousand words: uptight Aziraphale reduced to sodden wreck, Crowley gleefully showing him what he's been missing, character-driven erotics, and exceptionally funny dialogue.

indulgentiam peccatorum nostrorum is somehow all that and more, turning the "I was wrong" dance into a kink (something I can't get enough of, recs welcome). This one is post-Bastille so it is extra-juicy. Mind the tags!

@cumaeansibyl has a gift for established relationship one-shots, which readers of mine will know are my entire jam. They also have a mind-meltingly hot inverse!omens AU that features different variations of angelic/demonic Crowleys and Aziraphales for our ineffables to play with.

A new-to-me author, Calico, has me hanging by a thread with their Ineffable Romans series. If you want to remember that your ineffables aren't human, that they are inordinately clever but very stupid, that the feelings they have for each other are truly beyond what anyone alive has ever felt, Calico may be the writer for you. This stuff is deep. Also hot af.

Sub Rosa reads like a nasty shag at Petronius', but there's so much more going on here. It is Extremely Queer, driven by power dynamics, and Crowley is fully demonic here and absolutely in control...or is he?

The Intemperance of Liber Pater continues on this theme, with dialogue-driven smut that reads less like a seduction than an inevitability. There's another story in this series, unfinished, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

Last but not least: two short pieces by @ineffabildaddy. I stumbled on their stories just this week and I absolutely love their approach, which I've not seen done quite this way before.

take me as your wife has a tight first-person perspective as Crowley meets Aziraphale for a meal and imagines (or is it his imagination?) that Aziraphale is suggesting Certain Things about how they might occupy themselves later. Indeed, is he suggesting even more? Something about their relationship? Or is it all in Crowley's head?

Only in Dreams is kind of a companion piece, from Aziraphale's point of view -- though hundreds of years later. This one's set after the events of S2 and although just as romantic as take me as your wife, it also offers an ineffable take on the ol' glory hole concept. Just in case you thought I was getting soft. 😏

@ineffabildaddy has a whole series of poems and ficlets like these and I can't wait to explore them all.

[the-writer-ofthe-fandoms]

Silent Cosmos (Edward Cullen)(Ch. 1)

Pairing: Edward Cullen x GN! Mute!Reader

Words: 3.0k+

Warning(s): Mentions of past car accident, mentions of minor character death/parents dying, swearing, implications of past bullying, mentions of high school lacking services, blood mention.

A/N: YAY i finally have this done. I’ve had this idea since before i started grad school and finally got it done! I hope yall enjoy :) This series takes place before Victoria’s army comes to Forks and Edward may be OOC but like, oh well.

Also in this series, Bella and Edward had a mutual break up w/ no hard feelings <3

Series Masterlist

---

"On foot

I had to cross the solar system

before I found the first thread of my red dress.

I sense myself already.

Somewhere in space hangs my heart,

shaking in the void, from it stream sparks

into other intemperate hearts."

--Edith Södergran, 'On Foot I Had to Cross the Solar System'

On one unfortunate night when you were seven, a drunk driver hit your parents car. Your mother on the passenger side died instantly, your father later succumbed to his injuries in the hospital. You were injured severely, but the doctors managed to keep you alive... At the cost of your voice. Chunks of glass tore through and stabbed your neck; the damage to your larynx was the worst, the second was nerve damage. You could speak in a very harsh, almost whisper-like, voice but it caused an intense amount of pain. You were upset. You hated that driver for what they took from you.

Your aunt and uncle took you in, and were able to help you adjust as you grew. They learned and taught you sign language, they helped you cope with the loss of your parents as best they could, and were always supportive. Despite their work lives keeping them away, they always tried their best to give you attention when they had the free time.

You found ways to enjoy life again, particularly in the stars. They were almost comforting to you when you were alone, looking out your bedroom window. You weren't sure why you have such an affinity for space and what it holds. Maybe because your father brought you out at night to point out all the constellations and their stories. Those moments with him started your interest. And now, you believed your parents were amongst the many stars in the vast universe.

You grew content with not having a voice. You adapted and overcame the curveball life sent your way. You just wished the pain wasn't constantly lingering.

---

It was the day you started going to your new highschool in Forks. It wasn't ideal transferring to a different school, but your uncle's job called for it. He was a firefighter and he was offered a sizable pay increase and rank promotion to fire captain if he took up the position for the Forks station. Your aunt, a nurse, was able to transfer to Forks hospital. They discussed the idea of moving with you of course, and you not wanting to hinder your uncle's promotion or damper his excitement, you supported the move from California to Washington.

You could already tell this rinky dink school wouldn't have anyone that understands ASL and the school said they are still looking to hire someone to be an interpreter of sorts, so you were mentally preparing yourself for the mess you may be entering. At least you transferred only three weeks into the new school year, that would make any school work you needed to catch up on relatively easy. It also helped it was your senior year as well.

As soon as you got out of your car, all of the heads of the student body snapped in your direction. You guess they've never seen a new kid before. You make your journey towards the building, hoping that no one would bother to talk to you. You already saw a teen walk up to you, he had straight black hair and a toothy grin.

"Hi, I'm Eric. You're the new kid." He seemed friendly.

You offer a little wave and sign, hoping he would get the inclination you could not speak.

"Shit... I don't know sign except..." He gave you the sign sorry before pointing to his ears and back to you. You shook your head and tapped your throat. "Oh! You can't speak." You nodded. "Sorry about all the confusion. Welcome to Forks High, home of the Spartans. I'm pretty much the eyes and ears."

You simply nod along when necessary and smiled as he gave you the very quick run down of most of the immediate gossip of school, which was centered around you, the new kid. He seemed like a nice guy but glancing at the clock you passed by in the hall you knew it was close to your first class.

"And don't get me started on the Cul-What?" You interrupted him as you held out your schedule to him, pointing to your first class. "Oh yeah, guess class is starting soon. Lets see... you're in 103 for English with Mr. Baker which is..." He glanced up. "Right down the hall. I have History right next door."

You smile at his help and follow him through the sea of students.

You wave Eric goodbye and enter classroom 103. You felt eyes of everyone land on you, but none more eye-catching or captivating as the gold pair near the back of the classroom. His gaze was intense, eyes wide, as he stared at you. You held his gaze. You weren't sure what to think at the moment but before anything could come to mind, an older gentleman walked in and stole your attention. You assumed correctly this was Mr. Baker.

---

Edward was the first to arrive for his first period class. He was always punctual, but there was a difference now. He no longer had Bella in tow.

It was a mutual end to their quick relationship. While her blood did appeal to him greatly, the fastness of their relationship hurt them both emotionally at the end. It was purely fascination of each others beings that they mistake as something else. While it did hurt, Edward could admit to himself he wasn't distraught over it. They remained friends and he was content with that.

Slowly, other students began filling the classroom as the clock ticked on. Everyone filling seats they usually sat in despite there being no assigned seating. No one ever sat next to him, often feeling intimidated by his status as a Cullen. The vampire paid them no mind, occupying his attention to watching the typical Forks rain traverse down the window he always sat by. He tuned out everyone's thoughts the best he could, letting his usual melancholy about his nature linger in his mind.

Edward perked up when he heard an fast-beating heart breakthrough his attempts of zoning out. Shifting his focus to the doorway his eyes latched on to the new student.

You.

It didn't take reading thoughts to feel the buzz of a new student arriving in the small school.

He felt... strange. Much like with Bella, your scent invaded his senses and made him thirsty, yet, that wasn't what caught his immediate attention.

It was the eyes. Something about them captivated Edward. He wasn't sure what about them had him staring at you, who now stared back at him. The vampire attempted to discern your thoughts and he caught an inkling of curiosity starting to bleed out before the teacher took your attention away.  His stayed on you, and didn't pay him any mind or had any idea he wad, and focused his enhanced hearing on the conversation.

"Hello, new student?" The teacher greeted and softly spoke your name. The auburn haired male watched as the you nodded.

Edward's curiosity peaked when he finally heard their thoughts, clear as the days outside of Forks.

"Yes, that's me. Do you know sign?" He heard their thoughts as he watched their hands easily relay in sign language. I'm expecting a no they internally sighed.

"Oh shoot I wasn't told..." A worried look passed on the teachers face as his sentence trailed off. Edward can hear his thoughts complain that the school failed to inform him about the new student outside their name and grade. A look of exasperation briefly flashed on your face.

Who would of fucking thought Forks High, a small-ass school, would not inform their teachers. Fantastic. Wonderful. I love it. It was a pointed statement that had Edward both mildly shocked at the language and pretty amused. I wonder how much others outside of Eric will put up with me here.

Edward sighed. He knew he shouldn't involve himself with another human but he couldn't help it. Whatever captivated him and the resignation you mentally expressed already had moved him. He got up from his spot and quickly moved to the front of the classroom.

"Apologies, I don't mean to cut in but I know sign."

---

You blink at the golden-eyed student he approached you and the teacher. You felt a grateful smile tug on your lips as you faced him. Immediately, you felt some appreciation and felt good about being wrong on your previous assumption.

"Thank you, Edward." Mr. Baker smiled in relief. Edward gave the teacher a small, tight lipped smile at him and faced you. The teacher introduced you to him. "And this is Edward Cullen."

"I'm sorry for any inconvenience." Edward spoke as you signed, his voice soft and velvety. Observing his face, you watched as his brows furrow at your statement, which became almost a second nature for you due to the way your previous school treated you. You often faced irritated glances or your existence ignored entirely outside the feo close friends you accumulated.

"Please relay to them-" Mr. Baker spoke but you immediately shook your head and held up a hand.

"I am neither deaf or hard of hearing, sir. I just can't speak." Edward translated for you again. "I look forward to class with you both." A smile appeared on his face again.

"You too. And you aren't being an inconvenience at all. It's the fault of the school, really." Mr. Baker offered a kind smile. Edward left the two of you, as if knew he wouldn't be needed again. "Take a seat wherever you want, I don't do assigned seating unless it becomes an issue." Mr. Baker gave you a kind smile and gestured for you to pick out a seat, while he moved to the classroom computer. You take a glance around, only seeing three spots open.

Your eyes landed on the one next to Edward, causing you to perk up. Though, you hesitated, his small smile and the single, subtle nod assured you it was fine to sit by him. Holding your backpack strap a little tighter, you move between desks to join him.

---

Edward watched as you sat next to him. You offered him a quick smile before you started pulling out your notebook and your small pencil case. You didn't look over at him as you stared up at the board, waiting for class to start.

The vampire was curious and while he knew it was an invasion of privacy, he couldn't help but try and focus in on more of your thoughts. Except he was met with...

What? His brows furrowed. Edward felt overwhelmed for a moment, his sense felt almost deprived as he tried peering in your mind again.

Edward suddenly saw what he perceived as a galaxy. Stars, planets, moons, a sun... it was vast and it was breathtaking. It wasn't something he never saw before, this detailed, in a humans mind. He was able to view this scene for just a few fleeting moments until he suddenly felt warm energy push against his mind.

The vampire blinked. His presence was back in classroom 103. He glanced toward you. Paying close attention, he didn't see anything that indicated you were in any way aware of what just occured. He heard the teacher swear under his breath as he attempted to get the projector working, and used this moment to speak with you.

Softly, he called your name, bringing your attention to him.

"How are you liking Forks?" Edward recognized he was a bit awkward, but you gave no inclination that you minded or judged him.

"It's wet. But I don't mind it. The scenery is nice." You signed and it was as if the cosmos that warded him from your thoughts was lifted. Hearing your thoughts again after being blocked out by the cosmos left him perplexed and curious.

"Forks does have its charm in scenery." He chuckled. "But I assume that isn't why you moved?"

"No, but it definitely is a bonus." You smiled. "My uncle got a promotion so we moved up from California."

"What does he do?"

"He is now the fire captain here."

Edward had a kind smile and offered a small congratulations to him. He then spoke again, "What does your class schedule look like?"

You reached into your zip up hoodie pocket and pull out a folded piece of paper. Unfolding it, you slid it to his desk. His golden eyes scanned the paper and he felt some sort of happiness that your schedules almost align completely. The only class difference was your last two classes, which would have you taking gym and history without him.

"Looks like we will be seeing each other a lot. We have almost all the same classes."

That's a relief. Edward suppressed a smile at your thoughts. I hope we can be at least friendly with one another.

"Since we have most of our classes together, would you like to be friends?" He asked. He could already hear Rosalie scolding him for getting involved with another human, but he didn't particularly care what she would think.

You were another anomaly to his, otherwise, stationary life. He has no plans to try and initiate a quick romantic relationship again. He simply was curious to the stars that lingered behind your eyes.

---

It was nearing lunchtime. You glanced out the window of your math class while the teacher closed out her lesson and began explaining what the homework was going to be. You were very grateful for Edward sticking by you in each course. He was able to help you talk to your teachers, answer and ask questions, and made Forks high a little more welcoming.

You had met two of his siblings in that time frame, Emmett and Alice, who were both a delight. Alice already expressed how much she was excited to finally get to know you, which you assumed she was wanting to meet the new kid, and Emmett offered to watch your back in gym with the biggest grin you've seen on a persons face. It also warmed your heart to find they also knew sign too.

The initial worry of being a forever outsider like before began melting away. So far things have been pleasant unlike your last experience.

As you mind wandered off to old school memories of bullies and loneliness, you were still unaware of Edward trying to discern your thoughts again. You missed the look of confusion and frustration on his face. Although, you did manage to hear him make a noise that sounded like frustration, which snapped your attention on him.

"Everything okay?" You ask him. He glanced up at the teacher who was now facing the board writing the homework down.

"Just... wanting class to be over." Edward gave you a tight lipped smile. "Mrs. Johnsons' classes are usually a bore."

You nodded with a smile and silent chuckle.

The class bell rang, signaling an end, and practically everyone ran out for lunch. You eyed the crowd trying to leave and shrug your shoulders. You scribbled down the equations Mrs. Johnson assigned before putting your class materials away and preemptively pulled out your brown bag lunch.

You glanced to Edward while you both stood up. You weren't sure if you should continue sticking by his side until it was time for your last two periods or find your own corner to decompress. Perhaps giving him a break from-

"Are you ready?" His soft voice cut through your thoughts. You blink, pausing for a moment, before nodding.

"Lead the way." You smiled, though you were sure it came off as nervous. There will be so many people...

"Would you like to sit with my family and I, or would you like to go somewhere quiet?" You looked at him a bit shocked, were you that easy to read? You could see the twitch of his lip like he was going to respond but he kept quiet.

"Somewhere quiet, just for today."

"Follow me then."

---

Rosalie sighed as she leaned against the table, waiting for her siblings to join her and Emmett for lunch. She then looked to her partner and leaned against him, who laughed and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. Her golden eyes followed Bella's form with a glare as she sat down with her friends.

"Come on, babe. Her and Edward have no hard feelings." Emmett spoke in a quiet tone.

"It's still a danger to us." She grumbled.

"Nope! She still becomes a vampire like us." Alice suddenly sat down with a bright smile.  Jasper was quick to sit down next to her.

"Even after what happened with the Volturi and James?" Emmett asked.

"Yep. While the course of her and Edward's relationship definitely changed, she still becomes a part of our clan."

"Great." Rosalie rolled her eyes and then glanced around at the table. "Speaking of Edward, where is he?"

"Probably off with the new kid." Emmett smirked. "They seem pretty nice. Edward's been helping them since they can't speak."

"Another human?" She looked to her partner then to Alice. "Did you..."

"Have a vision of them? Yes. The day before Edward and Bella parted their romantic relationship, I had a vision of them coming to Forks. And then after meeting them, I saw them and Edward, looking pretty close." She smiled and giggled.

"Great, another human who is going to choose to be a vampire." Rose scoffed.

"Rosalie-" Alice's usually bright expression drops. Everyone at the Cullen table looked at her with worry as it appeared her eyes glaze over. Jasper immediately gripped her hand under the table as he could feel a wave of sadness wash over from her.

"Darling?" Jasper whispered.

Alice blinked rapidly. She looked to the others with a worried expression. "I... I didn't see the specifics but... It wasn't their choice."

It was silent between them. Rosalie's eyes were wide, Emmett clenched his fist under the table, Jasper tried his best to calm everyone, and Alice simply blinked and tried looking to the future again.

She could see you, crying and writhing as the venom from a bite on your arm took hold, blood all over you. Edward and Carlisle were right by your side, speaking. But she couldn't hear what they were saying.

All she heard was a high pitched ring.

And then the vision flashes a blinding white and she swears she could feel intense heat against her face.

She was back at the table again with her family. It was the same vision as before. Never had she seen such a bright light, heard such a noise, or felt anything like that from a vision.

"We have to talk to Carlisle."

[film-in-my-soul]

Dark | 1,369 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: Hob wakes to the sensation of being watched by the darkness in his bedroom. He loves it when Dream gets weird.

Werewolf Boyfriends; The Care and Keeping Of | 3,298 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: There are many benefits, Dream reflects during the full moon, to the keeping of a werewolf for a boyfriend.

Intemperate | 4,402 | cuubism / @cuubism

Summary: Was it like this for humans all the time? Dream wondered. This heavy anticipation in his chest, the bodily attention verging on pain? He hadn’t known it was possible to be so intently aware of another person, but there it was, Hob Hob Hob in the pounding heart he didn’t need, a compulsion that wasn’t intellectual or even particularly romantic, but rather a strained desperation that could only be soothed by touch.

Dust on Trial | 4,655 | Griombrioch

Summary: “And..” Hob pauses, “this was good for you? It’s what you wanted?” Dream closes his eyes and sighs out a breath he doesn’t need, if only to make another attempt at dislodging the rock in his chest. He knew what would happen when he approached his previous lover. He knew their nature, and he’d done it anyway. This is his fault. He just wishes the hole inside of him would fill. He despises feeling so hollow. “Oh,” Hob breathes then, as if understanding some complex problem that Dream himself cannot see, and the frown deepens. “Oh, you’re in a bad drop, aren’t you, love?”

all together now | 5,182 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: "You know I do not require this of you," his lover says, and Hob swallows again. This time Dream doesn't even need to look; his eyes are still trained on Hob's throat. "Is it not so that human lovers keep aspects of themselves...apart from their relationships?" "Hiding a thing for obscure fetish pornography isn't quite the same as keeping an entire part of your personality locked up," Hob says kindly.

Please see below for more recommendations!

Handy | 5,612 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: Dream answers the door one beautiful September afternoon to a man so attractive he can barely keep it together long enough to get his sink fixed. Several weeks later, he runs into the same man in a lecture hall.

and oil for the light | 6,387 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: Matthew eyes him with blatant disrespect. "You're one of those," he says. "One of those monsterfucker people. Gets off on tentacles and shit." "Tentacles," Hob says, affronted. "There's never been any tentacles." "Have you asked?"

how longingly | 7,333 | cuubism / @cuubism

Summary: Hob's fingers slip a little higher, just under the sleeve of his coat. He is still wearing his coat, yes, why is that? He feels very warm. "Could find out?" "Are you suggesting I should find some man to bed me?" "Some man," Hob repeats, jaw working. His gaze is hovering somewhere around Dream's collar. "Some man who knows what he's doing, yeah."

I Wanna Hold Your Hand | 7,535 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: Hands are such a human thing, Hob thinks. To make, and shape, and create. The elegance of thumbs. Fashioned by thousands of years of slow and careful evolution for the sole purpose of holding. He wants to hold Dream. To rub their fingers together, that singularly human grasp, to push their palms flat, and their chests close, and he's not sure if he wants to hug his friend or cry on his shoulder, because he should have been there. He should have known.

with both hands | 8,596 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: Hob whistles, low and impressed, and makes one more turn to admire the extremely obvious handprint on his right arsecheek.

Licking the Spoon | 8,636 | Dira Sudis (dsudis) / @dsudis

Summary: "I have spoons in my flat," Hob added, feeling a little reckless with the surge of probably-unneeded adrenaline. "Loads of spoons." His friend raised his eyebrows at that, and jerked his hand away from the spoon on the table, but he didn't follow it by walking out, so Hob hadn't gone too far.

Ecdysis | 8,647 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: The manner in which an animal routinely casts off a part of its body (often, but not always, an outer layer or covering), either at specific times of the year, or at specific points in its life cycle. The door swings open, and Hob looks up, as automatic as a blink or a breath. He’s not expecting anything. It’s been three months and four days, six hours and thirty-nine minutes, and all he had been told was more than once a century. Dream is standing in the doorway. He looks like hell.

Relief | 8,753 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: "Your daydreams," Dream pronounces, standing there with his hands in his coat pockets, looking Hob's body up and down like it's a fascinating puzzle. "Are exceptionally loud." Oops.

Fell In Love With a Pisces Moon | 10,651 | LikeMmmCookies

Summary: Dream visits Hob 33 years late, but then he keeps coming back and Hob doesn't know exactly why. He finds Dream isn't the same man he once knew, but he's still in love all the same.

just find the feeling, pass it on | 10,784 | ThirtySixSaveFiles / @thirtysixsavefiles

Summary: There is a new temple in London. This is not so unusual. Dream has been…away, as his sister says, for over a century. Even had he not been, he does not map the Waking so thoroughly as to always see these things when they start. Places of love, of devotion, spring up from time to time. He leaves them be; they are not, generally speaking, his business. What is unusual is that this one is shaped like a pub, and it is very much his business. Dream contemplates The New Inn as he approaches.

Scenes from a University AU the Author Did Not Intend to Write | 10,880 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: Dream and Hob, throughout their time at university together, dancing around one another until something finally gives.

by the minute | 11,267 | issylra / @issylra

Summary: "Why don't you tell me your name?" "Hob." Quite possibly the worst fake name Dream has encountered thus far. There's another pause. "I mean. Not Hob." A punched out breath. "Fuck." "You don't know your name?" "Of course I know my name. But I'm not sure you're supposed to know my name."

Consummation | 11,462 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: Cōnsummāre, To perfect, to consummate. Cōnsūmere, To devour, to take wholly or completely. Turns out, shoving all of your repressed desires into a box lined with teeth will spectacularly backfire when eventually you have to open the box up again. Or, Hob Gadling demonstrates his ability to code switch and Dream goes off the rails a bit.

Saint Morpheus | 11,882 | landwriter / @landwriter

Summary: “Kneel,” said Dream. Hob knelt before him. Dream pressed his own thumb to his lips and wet it. He took Hob’s chin in the other hand and tilted his face up. “Some do this with ash. To acknowledge death. Mortality. It would not befit you,” he said, and smudged his wet thumb in a sign upon Hob’s forehead. “Now you wear my mark,” he said. “I have always worn your mark, my Lord,” said Hob. “Then remember you are mine and to me you shall return,” Dream said.

Wolf and I | 12,054 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: "Shuck," the beast says. "How quickly the memories of men fade! I am no paltry devil, little red. I am the son of the great wolf Night herself, first and foremost among stories! I am older than the seas and the forests! I am..." "Beautiful," Hob breathes. Hob Gadling, hunter for King Richard, is called to fell the wolf that has decimated the deer of Cannock Chase. He finds more than he bargained for waiting for him in the woods.

On sexual dimorphism in C. urophasianus | 13,177 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: "I must court you," Dream pronounces, and Hob drags his attention away from the flowers. Grimaces slightly. "You don't have to," he says. "This will only last a week or two, and then we can go back to being, you know. Normal boyfriends who aren't being driven insane by the urge to put every shiny object in the flat in the bloody bed with me."

Once Upon a Time | 14,055 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: Hob knows the point of storytime at the library is to give parents an hour’s break and maybe a chance to grab a coffee with some other parents at the library café and enjoy the company of other adults for a little while, but when the moment comes to leave Robyn, he can’t face it. Robyn’s all he has left in the world and he really doesn’t want a break, he wants to keep him in his bloody pocket always. But he needs time to be with other kids, away from his hovering wreck of a dad, and so Hob decides on a mature, reasonable solution. He hides behind one of the bookshelves. Which is why the first he ever knows of Dream is his voice.

Midnight in Bloom | 14,389 | CeruleanHeart

Summary: A peculiar species of flowers is spreading in the Dreaming, maddening its residents and threatening to overtake the realm. When Morpheus himself falls under their spell his only option is to confront all the desires for an old friend he’s had long buried within his heart before his own passion can consume him.

Bloodhound | 15,712 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: It's a square gem in an antique gold setting, real antique gold, with the sort of dullness to the metal that tells its age. There's nothing particularly ornate about it. The ruby itself is a simple cut – he’s not a jeweller, doesn’t know what to call it precisely, but it’s square-ish and bevelled at the edges – but it catches the light in such a way that it makes it seem like it has a thousand facets all across the surface of it. The rain creates a stippled effect, and even through two separate panes of glass Hob can see his reflection peering back at himself through the ruby’s deep face. £2500, says a placard set in front of it. Early 1900s RUBY pendant - real!!!

in the absence of memory | 16,089 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: A freak accident renders Hob unable to remember the beautiful man who strides into his hospital room and declares himself his husband. But oh, does he want to. He knows he's loved this man for centuries, that nothing could make him forget. The best he can do is tell him that, and wait. Meanwhile, Dream of the Endless experiences being Hob Gadling's beloved spouse, without any of their past hanging between them, and agonises over the realisation that Hob could have loved him if only he'd been better.

an allowance of pleasure | 16,860 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: Even a being as powerful as the Lord of Dreams may have things to learn. Even a human as insignificant as Hob Gadling may have things to teach. Luckily for Dream, Hob's supplies of tea, biscuits, and patience are bottomless.

New Stranger | 20,709 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: It’s been three months since Hob Gadling attended the funeral of his oldest friend when he walks into the basement café of a bookshop on Tottenham Court Road and sees him behind the counter.

Shelter | 23,345 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: 1924. Roderick Burgess' continued attempts to control Dream result in a shattered cage, eternal sleep, and one very human, very cold, very hungry, very naked, VERY angry Endless. Several days later, Captain Robert Gadling opens his front door, and said very human Endless falls into his arms.

The Knight of Cups | 25,720 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: Hob had fought Lucifer, as Dream’s champion, with his bare hands, rushing in where angels would fear to tread, heedless of anything but the desire to protect.

spilled ink and daffodils | 31,625 | issylra / @issylra

Summary: "I love your tattoos," Hob mimics, in an overly lovestruck tone of voice. He bats his eyelashes for good measure. "Do you have more? Can you show me? It's totally okay if you have to take off your clothes, by the way. I just want to appreciate the artistry." Dream fixes him with what is probably supposed to be a blank stare, but Hob can see the way he's biting back a smile. "Are you done?" "Painting for the day? Yes. Teasing you? No, probably not."

By the Laws of Magic | 32,125 | Lenore

Summary: It’s 1959, and Hob Gadling is working at a London auction house, amazing his colleagues with his uncanny knowledge of art and artifacts from the 14th century on. When he gets the assignment to catalogue a family library at a place called Fawney Rig, he looks forward to a working vacation in the country. What he finds is a house with a preternatural chill where odd disturbances happen daily, an ornate carved door with a secret clearly hidden behind it, and visions of his mysterious stranger every time he turns around.

You're the One I Need | 39,086 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: "Uh-oh," Delirium says. Dream studies the car, the white smoke billowing out from beneath the bonnet, listening to the alarming clunking noise that the engine is making. On his hip, Orpheus, unusually solemn child that he is, gazes soulfully at the car. "Caw boken," he declares.

A Man of Good Fortune | 43,308 | softestpunk / @softest-punk

Summary: Captain Robert Gadling, a man with a fortune of a hundred and twenty thousand pounds in war prizes, needs a well-bred omega to fulfil his ambition of styling himself a gentleman. Dream d'Endless, a penniless divorced omega with an ancient name, requires an alpha to provide for his son, Orpheus. Their purely practical marriage seems like the best solution for everyone. If only either of them were inclined towards practicality.

grist for the mill | 56,226 | jamais_vu0

Summary: The rumor that Hob Gadling, the human who tricked Death herself into granting him immortality, has finally decided he's lived long enough and consented to die is sweeping through the supernatural community like wildfire. It even spreads to the Dreaming, where Dream handles it about as well as could be expected. It is, to say the least, a bit of a shock to Hob Gadling himself, who is still very much alive- and increasingly in need of rescue.

On Broken Wings | 57,191 | Konstadt / @blueberrymffn

Summary: Hob Gadling has seen the same man sitting still like a statue every day for a week and looking terribly upset, all he really wants is a peaceful lunch break but he can't bring himself to ignore someone in need - especially a very gorgeous someone who looks like they're on the verge of a breakdown. A chance meeting becomes far more, and gives Morpheus a means to heal.

The Uses of Adversity | 65,825 | MonstrousRegiment

Summary: What led Hob Gadling — at the time known as Robert Stranger, because he’d been in a permanent state of pettiness from 1889 to about 1904 and now he was stuck with it — to the dank, cold, and dark basement of the Burgess house on March of 1957 was not so much coincidence or fate as it was curiosity. Yeah. Cats isn’t the only thing it kills.

My Stranger, My Dream | 67,154 | SigniorBenedickofPadua / @signiorbenedickofpadua

Summary: Hob has been around death. Living in London throughout multiple plague outbreaks and fires, as well as making a living soldiering and dabbling in banditry, will do that to you. What he doesn't know is that Death has been around Hob as well. He has no idea that when his Stranger left him that night in 1389 after their first meeting, the woman who came up to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Good luck, friend,” was Death incarnate. Hob doesn’t know that he is one of few things in this world that has been Touched by Death and lived. Had he known this, he might not have been as confused as he is when his body slams into the floor of a dim, candle-lit cellar and he finds himself surrounded by hooded figures and a gold circle on the floor. That is all he manages to perceive before everything goes blurry and consciousness slips away from him again. Here in the Darkness.

Music When You Speak | 72,075 | The_KickIt_Domain / @ml-nolan

Summary: "I should have asked you earlier, but I don't suppose you'll still be in town tomorrow?" Hob says. "It'd be lovely to see you again." The man truly looks regretful as he says, "We won't." It was worth a shot. They hardly know each other. There's no reason for the sick film of disappointment settling over him. "Ah, well. I'm happy to have met you anyway," Hob says, subdued. "Are you doing anything right now?"

If I Please You | 112,103 | Moorishflower / @moorishflower

Summary: “I’ll guard you for a night,” Hob says, “and say I please you, you can either pay me for a day’s work, or keep me on ‘til you reach where you’re going.” “Do you know the way to Canterbury?” the lord asks, and Hob nods. “Oh, yes. It’s a few days’ ride, not more than three or four, by my memory.” “Then you shall have three days to please me, Robert Gadling.”

would you let me know?/ I could make some time if you wanted | 150,934 | BeatnikFreak / @beatnikfreakiswriting

Summary: Dr Hob Gadling's been assigned a new colleague to co-teach his second year class, Dr Dream Oneiros, who is both utterly beautiful and completely unable to act like, y'know, a human being. But Hob's nothing if not indefatigable, especially when faced with a fascinating man who probably needs to talk about his feelings more, and who listens to every stupid thing he says like it's the most profound poetry.

Master Reclist · Personal Masterlist · Blog Nav.

[cuubism]

Intemperate

alternatively titled, "consumed with lust for some fucking guy"

4300 words following the thought, "what would it be like to experience sexual attraction again after 100 years in a jar?"

Dreamling, E rated, post-2022 reunion, dom/sub vibes & daydreaming about bondage

--

Dream had never been a creature of the senses, but he did have senses. In the Dreaming, anything that smelled or tasted or sounded was merely part of his power, and therefore not really a subject of the senses as usually conceived. The Waking was a different matter, a cacophony of things outside of himself to experience.

But Dream never thought himself as driven by senses the way actual beings of the Waking were. His senses were an illusion, abstracted from physical reality, a way of bringing him closer to the living things his function was to serve but not really a part of him. So many senses were vague in dreams, after all, for they were products of the conscious mind and its understanding of the world. Not of the realm of dreams.

Dream was not driven by his senses. He was struggling to remember that at this moment.

“So I’ve been saving this one for a special occasion,” Hob was saying, as he poured from a bottle of syrah into two glasses, “and I know we’ve met a few times already, recently that is, but—” he finished off his pour, leaving the bottle to the side and slanting a bashful smile in Dream’s direction— “every time I see you still feels like a special occasion, to be honest. Anyway, you’ll have to let me know how it is.”

Dream took his glass in the hopes that the scent and taste of the wine might distract him from all the other senses currently bombarding him.

He had thought, for a time after his imprisonment, that he might have lost his senses entirely, become inured to the feelings of the Waking world. For one hundred and five years he had felt almost nothing in his cage: there had been no smell, no taste; all sounds were muffled other than the ones he made himself; he saw nothing but the inside of that basement, and the reflections of the glass. Even touch had atrophied when the only thing his skin felt for so, so long was cool, even glass.

He had nearly forgotten what it was like to be otherwise. But he was certain it had never been like this.

It was their first time meeting alone, upstairs in Hob’s kitchen rather than downstairs in the inn. And Dream was sitting altogether too close to him. They had taken seats at right angles to each other at the table, rather than across, and he was perpetually aware of Hob in his peripheral vision, of how their knees almost bumped under the table, of Hob’s forearm resting on the tabletop near his own. He was so close, had he ever felt so close?

The simple curve of Hob’s shoulder was catching like a knife under Dream’s ribcage. The angle of his jaw making a home in his throat, and the smile lines at the corners of his eyes landing somewhere in his vocal cords. The deft movement of his hands curling at the base of his skull, the scent of his cologne when he leaned close simmering low in his belly, the hum of his voice tickling up every inch of Dream’s skin. Grabbing hold of his breath.

“You’re quiet today,” observed Hob, sipping his wine. “More than usual, I mean. Everything alright in the Dreaming?”

Was it like this for humans all the time? Dream wondered. This heavy anticipation in his chest, the bodily attention verging on pain? He hadn’t known it was possible to be so intently aware of another person, but there it was, Hob Hob Hob in the pounding heart he didn’t need, a compulsion that wasn’t intellectual or even particularly romantic, but rather a strained desperation that could only be soothed by touch.

He had hardly touched anyone since his escape, and he had only touched Hob once, at their second meeting when he had told Hob where he’d been, and Hob had hugged him. Strong arms, solid chest, the tickle of hair against his ear, the resonance of life that hummed in Hob’s body. Dream had returned to the Dreaming afterwards and sat on the steps of his throne room for a very long time, palm pressed to his chest where their bodies had connected.

“I am fine,” he said now, and, because he was trying to be a better friend, added, “thank you.”

Not, he thought, with a tangle of chaos inside him, that it was really friendship that he was feeling now.

“Okay,” Hob said, with little conviction. “If you say so.”

Dream wanted to know what Hob would say about it. What he would say about it using his hands and his body and his skin. It was difficult to keep up any sort of conversation thinking like so. Hob was making him feel incredibly loud inside, and not the loudness of the Dreaming, of the dreamers, but a noise of his own making. A noise of his own longing.

He took another sip of his wine to steady himself, and found his hand was trembling.

“Whoa.” Hob grabbed hold of his wrist to steady him before he could drop the glass. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

Dream fixated on where their hands were connected, struck by the insane impulse to shake more so Hob would keep holding onto him. Dream had fallen headfirst many times—it was the only way he knew how to do it, in fact—but he could not now recall if it had ever been quite like this. Had he ever been so flung askew by someone’s mere proximity, made so insensate just by the desire to touch? He did not recall, but he did not think so, and he wondered again about his imprisonment, and how sunlight that one might normally turn one’s face towards with ease could be blinding when coming out of the darkness.

Hob realized belatedly what he had done, and let go of him with a guilty startle, and then Dream did drop his glass, ignoring how it cracked and spilled on the table as he lunged for Hob’s hand, catching it before he could pull away fully.

Hob stared at where they touched, utterly still. “I’ve never known you to get drunk,” he said. An out, perhaps, for Dream, if not a graceful one.

Dream gave in to impulse and brought Hob’s hand to his mouth, kissing his palm. The touch of skin was so bright, bright as the rush of power when the Dreaming was returned to him, loud as a billion dreamers’ minds filling him again where before there was silence. And Dream’s nonexistent blood was singing, or perhaps screaming.

“I am not,” he said, and looked up in time to see Hob’s eyes darken. Once such attention from Hob might have triggered the part of Dream that was prone to offense; now he wanted to do such unbecoming things as falling to his knees between Hob’s legs and biting the inside of his thigh through his jeans. Press his face between Hob’s legs and see if that alone would be enough to get him hard, if Hob would put his hands in his hair. To want such things was hardly new in Dream’s long existence but to feel it so strongly, like he was starving, like touching Hob might fix what felt perpetually broken inside of him, that was.

Intemperate. Out of control. Such feelings had never brought Dream anywhere good. But he was made of feelings.

“Dream…” murmured Hob, turning his hand to caress his cheek. Hob held Dream’s face in his palm, and he might as well have been touching every inch of his skin for how Dream felt it. Easy. Takeable. Had. Dream had always prided himself on being above it all, untouchable, but really he was weak for a kind touch and for wanting and for the burn of skin on skin, and he felt especially weak, right now, for Hob.

Hob might not mind such weakness, he thought. Unlike most, might not hold it like a blade above his neck.

Again, Dream let his compulsions pull him, trusted Hob, trusted his friend, to keep him bounded as he slid off his chair and onto his knees, Hob’s thighs bracketing his shoulders. Hob’s breath hitched, and Dream looked up, meeting his stunned gaze, dark in the low light of the kitchen.

Hob swallowed, the bob of his throat visible, and laid his hand on Dream’s cheek again.

Dream did not kneel. Dream had been forcibly put on his knees for one hundred years. Dream was on his knees now at Hob Gadling’s feet, and he wanted to be there, he wanted to trust Hob to touch him and let him touch, to hold carefully the rope he had furtively woven around Dream’s throat when he wasn’t paying attention. To hold him there, so he couldn’t get up until he was satisfied.

“What—” Dream started, and had to swallow, mouth dry, the acidity of the wine clinging to his throat. “What would you have done to me, if you had me the way you daydreamed, the day we first met?”

Dream had caught the scent of those daydreams, of course, and merely pushed them aside. He wondered, now, if Hob could have always affected him so, had he merely looked properly in that direction.

“What’s more important is what I want to do with you now,” Hob murmured, thumb ghosting across Dream’s lower lip. “Of course I wanted to have you when I first saw you. Of course I did. You were like nothing I’d ever seen. But that feeling is— it’s practically nothing compared to how I feel about you now, when I lo—” he swallowed, cutting himself off. Dream kept looking up at him, and Hob kept holding his face. “When I love you.”

Love. Dream did not know quite in what respect Hob meant it, but perhaps it was all, or perhaps it didn’t matter. Dream had never had a love where it didn’t matter.

Dream leaned his cheek against Hob’s inner thigh, as he had so wanted to, and Hob ran a hand through his hair, tugging lightly. Even through his jeans, Hob’s body was warm, his hand gentle, and Dream sighed, put at ease by the proximity. It should be alarming, to be so easily soothed. Threatening, to be touched. But it wasn’t. Dream only wanted to be closer, no matter what direction it careened their relationship in. Hob would not let it end badly, he thought. What a strange thing to feel sure of.

“I have not been with someone in a very long time,” he admitted. He was sure Hob could surmise this of the past century, but it had been much longer than that. “Locked away, I became so divorced from sensation that… I no longer know quite what it is I am feeling, I’m afraid.”

Hob scratched at his scalp, and Dream shivered. “All you have to know is how to tell me off if I do something you don’t like.” He huffed. “Not that you’ve ever been particularly shy about that.”

Dream smiled, a small thing, but it came easier than it had in a long time. “Perhaps I should have been.”

“Much as I do wish you hadn’t run out on me, I kind of like you as the stormy thing that you are,” Hob said. “I like my Stranger. Tell me off all you want, only stick around. Don’t leave.”

“I won’t leave,” Dream said. “I swear it.” He had no desire to, either. Not for quite a while.

“I get the sense that a swear from you means a lot.” Hob’s hand was still in his hair. It was bliss.

“Yes.”

Hob’s smile was warm and the tiniest bit possessive, and something in Dream that had been holding him up for a long time, that should have been proud and indignant and resisted being bound, thrilled at it instead, and wanted to bare its soft throat. Part of him wanted to punish Hob for his audacity in going along with this, wanted to punish himself for this most unbecoming behavior, but the part that had felt Hob’s daydreams and his forgiveness and now the touch of his hands had seized control and thrust him forward into the river of his own arousal. And Dream found himself enjoying the current so much that he no longer cared onto what rocks it might dash him.

Again, he thought: Hob would not let that happen.

“I’ll have to be careful not to abuse it then,” said Hob. And he let go of Dream’s hair, and Dream, unaware of how much that touch had been holding him up, swayed forward until his face was pressed to the juncture of Hob’s thigh, where he was growing hard under his jeans.

“I know that you would not,” he said. Hob had always let him go. Even when he didn’t want to.

“Up you get, then,” said Hob, and hauled him to his feet. Dream went easily, surprised into movement. “We’re not doing this here. You’ll kill your knees.”

“My body is not human,” Dream said.

“Still.”

They were face to face, now, and Hob’s expression was so soft for him, even with the heat building in his eyes. “You would take care of me?”

Hob rubbed up and down Dream’s arms. “I would. I would take care of you.”

Dream leaned in and kissed the corner of his lips, and then, caught by the hunger that latched under his ribcage, captured the rest of his mouth as well in a growling, starving kiss. All that heat and hunger filled him up and he followed it in a way he had not let himself for an eternity. He chased the lingering taste of wine from Hob’s mouth. Curled himself into the warmth there.

Hob kissed him back, tongue and teeth and the wanting of a hundred-plus years. His hands slid up over Dream’s shoulders to his neck, held lightly there, and with that hold he pulled Dream backwards through the kitchen, their lips connecting with less and less grace as they went.

“Better get somewhere more comfortable before I lose my wits entirely,” Hob said, between breaths. “I’m feeling less compassionate towards your knees by the second.”

Dream cared not where they were; he followed Hob blindly. Overcome by touch and taste and the sound of Hob’s breath and all things that were so so so loud after a century of silence. And it was perhaps because he was not aiding at all in their trajectory that they crashed into the wall by Hob’s bedroom door instead of making it over the threshold. Hob’s back hit the wall, and Dream hit his chest, catching himself just quickly enough that he only came nose-to-nose with Hob instead of smacking their foreheads together. Which would have been terribly undignified, not that Dream was feeling particularly inspired by dignity at the moment.

“Look at you,” Hob breathed, running his thumb under Dream’s eye. Then added, eloquently, “Fuck.”

Dream nipped at his throat, then sank again to his knees in one smooth motion, dragging his hands down Hob’s body as he went before letting them land in his own lap. He looked up at Hob, feeling spectacularly unclothed for all he was still wearing his jeans, shirt, socks even, but without his coat or his cloak or his shoes. Rare, for him to be so bare, since. Hob, too, was dressed casually, barefoot in his jeans and long sleeve Henley, and it made Dream feel on more equal footing. No attempt at pretenses.

Kneeling there felt like the right place to be, at that moment. Dream left that feeling to interrogate for later.

“This is really not a good look for me,” Hob said, breathing unevenly as he took Dream’s face in his hands again. “Get my oldest friend back and not only am I getting into your pants, but I’m not even doing it in a bed. It’s a bloody good look for you, though, fuck.”

“You like seeing me thus?” said Dream, as Hob nudged at his lips with his thumb. Dream opened his mouth, let Hob press his finger to his tongue.

“Yeah, of-bloody-course I do, Dream, you’re gorgeous like that. I only—” he bit the thought off halfway through, biting his lip so hard it turned white.

“Trust that I would not be here if I did not wish it so.”

Hob softened. “I know. I’m just reeling a bit. Fuck.”

“Your mouth gets filthier as you get emotional,” Dream observed, gratified that he was able to make Hob so.

“Yup, ‘fraid it’s my first—” he jumped as Dream pressed him to the wall by his hips, took the button on his jeans in his teeth and pulled it open— “first— fuck— language. Anything respectable’s from later, if it was ever there at all. Sorry for the filth, Your Majesty.”

Everything in Dream jumped to hear Hob call him thus even as he was on his knees. “I don’t mind.” He pulled Hob’s zipper down, too, salivating as it revealed the heaviness of Hob’s arousal, still cradled in his briefs. “I know by now what kind of man I am taking as my lover.”

He meant this in many ways at once and he hoped Hob understood.

Hob cupped himself through his underwear. “Can I…?”

Dream nodded. In fact, he wished very much that Hob would. Whatever he was thinking. Anything.

Hob pulled himself out, and then Dream was faced with his cock and— he had never actually been in this position before. He could summon the experience, of course—Dream contained all memories of intimacy, all wet dreams, all fantasies—but that was not the same as feeling the rush of pained arousal happening to him, the need to open his mouth consuming his body. The newness made it all the more startling and intense, but for the first time since regaining his freedom Dream leaned into newness, into intensity—and pressed his lips to Hob’s cock.

Instantly, another kaleidoscope of sensation: heat and sweat and pressure as Hob gasped and jerked forward involuntarily, nudging the head of his cock properly into Dream’s mouth— and then there was the heaviness of him on Dream’s tongue and Hob’s hand going to his hair, and Dream wrapped his hands around the strong muscles of Hob’s thighs to balance and it was all very, very much. A noise loud enough to banish the quiet of the basement that he still sometimes heard, echoing within him.

“Alright, love?” Hob asked, petting his face, and Dream hummed an assent, and took him deeper. Straining in his own pants, enjoying the play between his own arousal and Hob’s. Enjoying hanging there with no relief because it made everything prickle louder on his skin. He took Hob deep, then pulled off again, taking a breath that was more for Hob’s benefit than his own.

“I am,” he said, voice already with a rough edge to it, “I think, very well indeed.”

Hob laughed. “God, you. You have no idea what I want to do to you. Or, maybe you do, what with your—”

“I can sense dreams, not all thoughts, as such,” Dream said. He imagined the noise if he heard every passing thought of every being around him. “That would be maddening.”

“Dreams already sounds maddening, you mad thing.”

“It is true that I have rarely been accused of sanity or reason,” Dream admitted, and Hob laughed, head tipping back against the wall.

“Nor I, apparently. I cannot believe I interrupted you sucking my dick to have this discussion. Curiosity really does kill.”

“Curiosity has kept you alive, Hob Gadling,” said Dream, pressing his lips again to Hob’s cock. “And I am grateful for it.”

He took Hob in his mouth again, humming at the taste and weight of him, and Hob swore above him. What would you do to me? Dream wondered. Given the liberty?

As if he had heard the question, Hob started rambling, eyes falling shut. “You have no idea how pretty you look like that, on your knees. I don’t take it lightly. I don’t. I know you’re a king, I know you’re— and you make me mad, you make me want more, how could I possibly be given more than this? But you know me. One day, if you’ll have it, I’ll tie you up properly. And I know, okay? I know, you’ll have to trust me. If you really want to be on your knees. You make me want awful things. Beautiful things. Fuck—”

This last bit came as Dream took him deep enough to bump against the back of his throat, possessed by the image Hob had spun, and Hob let out a strangled gasp as Dream swallowed convulsively around him, nearly choking on it.

“Dream, I—”

Dream knew he would come, and leaned into the sensation. Bitter spend flooded his mouth, spilled down his throat and over his lips, and as he rode through Hob’s orgasm with him he let Hob’s daydreams bump up against him. Images of Dream on his knees again, naked this time, rope wound around him in intricate patterns, holding him there. Hob’s hands on the knots. Bound by kind hands rather than those that meant him harm, held in place to rend nothing from him but pleasure. And steadiness. Captured from the rough currents of himself.

He moaned as he let Hob’s spent cock slip from his mouth, shivered once and then again, out of control as Hob’s imaginings and his physical sensations and Dream’s own arousal battered at him. Hob fell to his knees before him, said “Dream,” with so much broken longing in it—haven’t you had me already? Dream thought, aren’t you having me?—and kissed him, hands cradling his face. Dream felt he must be vibrating at the pitch of the universe itself, so elemental was his wanting, and Hob gave him what he wanted. Of course he did.

He lowered Dream to the floor, cradling the back of his head, braced himself over Dream with their chests pressed together. His weight should have been oppressive, but wasn’t. It merely held him in place, easy and steady.

Their gazes met. “You would—” Dream’s voice was rough— “bind me? Gently? Hob Gadling?”

“Only so,” said Hob, eyes dark, cheeks still flushed, and Dream shivered again. “But right now, I just want to make you feel good. Okay?”

“Yes,” Dream breathed.

Hob braced himself on one arm and reached between them, undoing the button on Dream’s jeans with some difficulty. Dream should have made his clothing vanish to make it easier for him, but found that he wanted Hob to do it for him, to work for it, and to take care of him.

Hob’s hand wrapped around his prick, and Dream startled. Hob’s grip was warm and deft and Dream was very close to the edge already, and then Hob kissed him. Tender and hot, like he had been waiting to do this for a very long time. Waiting, always waiting for Dream.

He bit down on Hob’s lip as he came, clutching at his shoulders for steadiness, feeling rushing through him to the point of pain, to the point of whiteout. Far too much released all at once. All the sensation he had craved, blinding as the noontime sun.

Hob worked him through it as he shook, and gradually came back to himself. Everything was pleasantly staticky then, and Hob's weight was grounding as he let himself sink fully onto Dream, blanketing his body on the floor. And then Hob kissed him again, gentle and sweet. This was a lot of kisses for a being who had not been kissed in a millennium, and Dream whined, overwhelmed, winding a hand in Hob’s hair like he could perhaps manage to keep him there.

“There's a good love," Hob was murmuring into his cheek. "You’re so needy, aren’t you? I love it.”

Dream of a century ago had bristled at the mere implication that he needed anything, but Dream of today, pinned under Hob’s weight, was forced to concede that he did. Was forced to admit that he liked when Hob called him such, because Hob always qualified it with and I want to give it to you. And he realized that Hob had done so then, too, only Dream had been too blind to see it.

Still trembling with the aftershocks of pleasure, he curled a leg around Hob’s hip, drawing him closer, and Hob chuckled as he complied. “I’m regretting the floor,” he admitted. “Your poor knees.”

“I reiterate that I am not human,” said Dream, “and am not bound by human bodily limitations.”

“Oh, but you could be,” Hob crooned, stroking a hand up and down Dream’s side under his shirt, “couldn’t you?”

A smile tugged at Dream’s lips. “Hob Gadling, do you wish to see me colored by your lovemaking?”

Hob sucked a mark on his neck. “Maybe.”

Dream shifted his form just slightly to let the skin there bruise.

Hob sighed. “God, you’re a marvel.”

“Careful,” Dream cautioned, as the words caught somewhere within him that he hadn't known was lacking. “A man might feast on such compliments.”

“Feast, then. You’re too skinny by far.”

“I thought I was pleasing to you.”

“Oh, you are.” Hob gathered him up in his arms, rolled them so that Dream was on top and no longer pressed into the hard floor. “You are, darling.”

Darling.

The mania that had possessed Dream had subsided, but he found himself still hyper-focused on Hob’s arms around him, the smell of his sweat when Dream pressed his face into his throat, the warm rumble of his voice. So much missing sensation. He did not know how to reel all of the parts of himself that had spilled out back in, but perhaps if it was only here, that was okay. He could stay unspooled across the floor, unwound and directionless, wrapped around Hob's hands, until he was forced again by his responsibilities to go.

He wormed his way further into Hob's arms and said, “I think I would like to stay for a while, if that is alright.”

Hob pressed a smile into his hair. “Love, I would be terribly sad if you didn’t.”

[tarotfairy0919]

✧—⊹ ˖🥟⊹ ˖—✧Health meanings in tarot - Major Arcana edition✧—⊹ ˖🥟⊹ ˖—✧

©tarotfairy0919 - all rights reserved. do not copy, translate, alter or repost my work.

Please REBLOG if you find this information useful! ༄˖°🪐.ೃ࿔*

Health can be a complex and multifaceted issue, involving physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. Tarot, on the other hand, is a tool that can be used for guidance, insight, and self-reflection.

When it comes to health readings in tarot, it is important to approach the cards with a sense of openness and curiosity. The cards can provide perspective on your current health situation, potential obstacles or challenges, and possible paths forward.

It is essential to remember that tarot readings are not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. If you have concerns about your health, it is always best to consult with a qualified healthcare provider.

🩺Fool~ Unexpected health events such as accidents and pregnancies. Diseases that are out of our control.

🩺Magician ~ An over-active mind, watch for illnesses with thinking, communication, learning difficulties, memory problems.

🩺High Priestess ~ Health issues involving hormonal imbalances. This card rules women, the uterus, ovaries, and breasts.

🩺The Empress ~ If poorly aspected it denotes laziness, sexual transmitted diseases, and stress from making poor lifestyle choices.

🩺The Emperor ~ Sports injuries, war injuries, injuries inflicted in anger, sharp objects harming us, isolation, injuries involving animals. Problems with head and face, blood and muscles.

🩺The Hierophant ~ Nutritional deficiencies, lack of emotional support, inadequate medical advice. On a positive note, a strong immune system that resists illnesses.

🩺The Lovers ~ Health issues of the skin, eyesight and hearing. Issues with any part of the body that comes in pair, such as eyes, ears, arms, legs, lungs, kidneys.

🩺The Chariot ~ Health issues related to genetics, mouth, womb and breasts. Ailments specific to women and pertaining to motherhood.

🩺Strength ~ Issues with overwork, exhaustion, unhealthy lifestyle and habits, and intimacy issues. Problems with the heart, circulation, spine, vitality, and ribs.

🩺The Hermit ~ Problems with the intestines, lower stomach, gallbladder, and spleen.

🩺Wheel of Fortune ~ This card governs the liver and its functions. Toxic build-up in the liver can cause skin eruptions, low vitality, poor eyesight, and allergies.

🩺Justice ~ Ruled by Libra it governs organs in our core: lower back, kidneys, adrenals, ovaries and inner ear.

🩺The Hanged Man ~ This card rules drugs of all kinds and suggests issues with drug addicts, drug poisoning, over-medication or lack of medication. It also suggests sleep disorders, asphyxiation, hypnosis, memory problems, insanity, nervous breakdowns, delusions.

🩺Death ~ It rules groin and elimination organs, it suggests problems with the genitals, anus, colon, gonads, prostate, bladder, urethra, pubic bone, and hernias.

🩺Temperance ~ This card rules anything hot, fast and intense, it suggests a sudden onset of fevers, burns and intemperate behaviour gone too far. Temperance rules exotic places indicating infections from a foreign land or person.

🩺The Devil ~ Issues with teeth, bones, joints and knees. Devil also suggests old age, colds, rheumatism, arthritis, aging skin, broken bones and chronic conditions.

🩺The Tower ~ This card suggests a sudden onset of symptoms, complications, infections, accidents and confrontations. Be aware of your blood pressure.

🩺The Star ~ Issues with ankles, legs, blood circulation, spasmodic complaints, nervous system.

🩺The Moon ~ Issues with mental health, alcohol, drugs, malnutrition, disorder of the lymph system, sleep issues, hidden diseases.

🩺The Sun ~ Sun burn, sun stroke, eyesight problems, skin cancers, vitamin D deficiency, heart disease, depression.

🩺Judgement ~ Issues with man-made polluting, toxins, nuclear power, and waste.

🩺The World ~ Melancholy about aging and issues with aging. Stress from government agencies. Burdens and stress from carrying the world's problems on your shoulders.

ʕ•ᴥ•ʔﾉ♡ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔﾉ♡oopsie you already reached the end ʕ•ᴥ•ʔﾉ♡ʕ•ᴥ•ʔﾉ♡

[monratarot]

Health indicators in tarot - Major Arcana meaning

Please like and reblog if you find this information useful! 🌸🎀💕

//don’t claim it as your own and/or repost it on other platforms//

ꕥFool~ Unexpected health events such as accidents and pregnancies. Diseases that are out of our control.

ꕥMagician ~ An over-active mind, watch for illnesses with thinking, communication, learning difficulties, memory problems.

ꕥHigh Priestess ~ Health issues involving hormonal imbalances. This card rules women, the uterus, ovaries, and breasts.

ꕥThe Empress ~ If poorly aspected it denotes laziness, sexual transmitted diseases, and stress from making poor lifestyle choices.

ꕥThe Emperor ~ Sports injuries, war injuries, injuries inflicted in anger, sharp objects harming us, isolation, injuries involving animals. Problems with head and face, blood and muscles.

ꕥThe Hierophant ~ Nutritional deficiencies, lack of emotional support, inadequate medical advice. On a positive note, a strong immune system that resists illnesses.

ꕥThe Lovers ~ Health issues of the skin, eyesight and hearing. Issues with any part of the body that comes in pair, such as eyes, ears, arms, legs, lungs, kidneys.

ꕥThe Chariot ~ Health issues related to genetics, mouth, womb and breasts. Ailments specific to women and pertaining to motherhood.

ꕥStrength ~ Issues with overwork, exhaustion, unhealthy lifestyle and habits and intimacy issues. Problems with heart, circulation, spine, vitality and ribs.

ꕥThe Hermit ~ Problems with the intestines, lower stomach, gallbladder, and spleen.

ꕥWheel of Fortune ~ This card governs the liver and its functions. Toxic build-up in the liver that can cause skin eruptions, low vitality, poor eyesight and allergies.

ꕥJustice ~ Ruled by Libra it governs organs in our core: lower back, kidneys, adrenals, ovaries and inner ear.

ꕥThe Hanged Man ~ This card rules drugs of all kinds and suggests issues with drug addicts, drug poisoning, over-medication or lack of medication. It also suggests sleep disorders, asphyxiation, hypnosis, memory problems, insanity, nervous breakdowns, delusions.

ꕥDeath ~ It rules groin and elimination organs, it suggests problems with the genitals, anus, colon, gonads, prostate, bladder, urethra, pubic bone, and hernias.

ꕥTemperance ~ This card rules anything hot, fast and intense, it suggests a sudden onset of fevers, burns and intemperate behaviour gone too far. Temperance rules exotic places indicating infections from a foreign land or person.

ꕥThe Devil ~ Issues with teeth, bones, joints and knees. Devil also suggests old age, colds, rheumatism, arthritis, aging skin, broken bones and chronic conditions.

ꕥThe Tower ~ This card suggests a sudden onset of symptoms, complications, infections, accidents and confrontations. Be aware of your blood pressure.

ꕥThe Star ~ Issues with ankles, legs, blood circulation, spasmodic complaints, nervous system.

ꕥThe Moon ~ Issues with mental health, alcohol, drugs, malnutrition, disorder of the lymph system, sleep issues, hidden diseases.

ꕥThe Sun ~ Sun burn, sun stroke, eyesight problems, skin cancers, vitamin D deficiency, heart disease, depression.

ꕥJudgement ~ Issues with man-made polluting, toxins, nuclear power, and waste.

ꕥThe World ~ Melancholy about aging and issues with aging. Stress from government agencies. Burdens and stress from carrying the worlds problems on your shoulder.

[topazadine]

The Ultimate Guide to The Eirenic Verses

"Poesy wrote the first word." "Amen, amen, amen."

Centuries ago, the goddess Poesy gave her people, the Bremish, the gift of High Poetry: the ability to turn words into actions, whether that is raising mountains from raw earth or spreading pestilence in the land. Societies developed on either side of the Rimuk Mountains, sworn to perpetual strife.

This is the story of Breme and Sina, two countries whose histories are paradoxically separate and intertwined, as seen through the eyes of their inhabitants. The Eirenic Verses offers a glimpse into the world of Eirenen: a planet both like and unlike our own, where literary prowess can be transmuted into military might.

About the Author

Main Characters

Cerie Korviridi

Uileac Korviridi (additional details)

Orrinir Relickim

Haniya Aina

Ono Kagan

Mordrek Willets

Societies and Major Locations

Breme

Breme Overview High Poetry Major Locations in Breme

Sina

Sina Overview Royal Family Major Locations in Sina

Additional Societies

The Eirenic Verses Series

Part One: 9 Years Yearning

Uileac Korviridi, student at the Bremish War Academy, expects to focus on his studies and protect his little sister - not fall in love with Orrinir Relickim, the hotheaded infantryman who can't seem to leave him alone. Subgenre: Gay coming of age romance Main Character: Uileac Korviridi Status: Live on Amazon

Part Two: Pride Before a Fall

Orrinir Relickim's horse, Bannain, was a wedding present from his husband, Uileac Korviridi. The intemperate animal nearly ends his marriage, too. One swift kick to the ribs turns into a journey through magical medicine and the human heart, as he comes to better understand the man he swore to love. Subgenre: Cozy romance Main Character: Orrinir Relickim Status: Revisisions Concepts and themes discussion Sneak preview

Part Three: Funeral of Hopes

Uileac Korviridi's husband, Orrinir Relickim, speaks little of his past. Vague mentions of an unhappy childhood before becoming a Future Boy at the War Academy are more than enough for Uileac; he has his own demons, after all. This changes when Orrinir receives word that his alcoholic, abusive father is dying - and refuses to reconcile. Subgenre: Family drama Main Character: Uileac Korviridi Status: Completed, revisions Sneak preview here

Part Four: What Is Cannot Be Unwritten

Mordrek Willets loves murder, mules, and women - not necessarily in that order. He's the first Sinan Intelligence Services officer to sneak across the forboding Rimuk Mountains and learn more about the Bremish High Poets, a secretive cabal of women tasked with protecting the beleagured country from his own. This mission takes more out of him than he ever could have expected. His pride. His loyalty. His heart. Subgenre: Dark adventure Main Character: Mordrek Willets Status: Completed, revisions

Part Five: Absent All Light

Cerie Korviridi has trained for over a decade to complete the Sigillum: the ritual that will make her a fully-fledged High Poet. In the aftershocks of the brutal ceremony, she finds that her brother-in-law, infantryman Orrinir Relickim, has been taken hostage by the enemy - and that the army is refusing to send help. Her brother, Uileac, refuses to leave his husband behind enemy lines and recruits her help, making them both traitors to the Bremish government. Subgenre: Adventure Main Characters: Cerie Korviridi, Orrinir Relickim Status: In progress

Part Six: Poesy

Cerie has spent her entire life learning High Poetry, a rare skill that assists her impoverished nation in countering endless warfare. Worshipping the goddess of poets is all she has ever known – that and her hatred for the enemy. Her worst nightmare comes true when she is kidnapped by her nation’s eternal rival, a queendom seeking High Poetry to colonize her homeland. Subgenre: Adventure Main Character: Cerie Korviridi Status: Completed, in revisions

Part Seven: Shadow and Sword (tentative title)

Haniya Aina has accepted the sea change that has come to her life: disowned by her mother, the Queen of Sina, and living in exile with her lover. What she never expected was for her new countrymen to despise her - and for her murderous brother to send a stream of assassins her way. Alongside her partner, Cerie Korviridi, and her new family, she finds herself battling more pressing threats than losing her princess status. Subgenre: Adventure Main Character: Haniya Aina Status: Not started

Part Eight: Perseity

After ending the endless war, Cerie Korviridi expects to never see Sina again - except its former symbol, Haniya Aina, the disgraced Princess of the Sinan Royal Family. However, the disowned daughter is embroiled against her will in Sinan domestic politics when her mad brother, Daiski, seizes the throne. Both women must decide how far they'll go for a country that hates them - and what it means for their love. Subgenre: Adventure Main Characters: Cerie Korviridi, Haniya Aina Status: First draft completed

Part Nine: The Sorrow of the Bells (tentative title)

Cerie Korviridi and Haniya Aina knew the Sinan public would not accept their relationship easily. Not only is a royal family member marrying a member of the enemy nation, but another woman, no less. Cerie and Haniya's friends and family must protect them from all comers, whether a poisoned chalice or a knife in the dark. Subgenre: Suspense Main Characters: Cerie Korviridi, Haniya Aina Status: Not started

Part 10: Plexity

A civil war to end all others. High Poets working on behalf of their former enemies, soldiers revising their loyalties to reflect a new age. Above it all, questions of how far love can really go to save a relationship - whether that is within people, deities, or countries as a whole. Subgenre: Adventure Main Characters: Cerie Korviridi, Haniya Aina, Orrinir Relickim Status: Not started

Additional Pages/Memes

Writer Questionnaire

Writer Questionnaire (part two)

MCs on Social Media

Writing Exercises: Mordrek's Bedroom

OC Questionnaire: Uileac and Orrinir

OC Fun Facts Tag

OC Deep Dive (Uileac, Orrinir, and Cerie)

Horses of The Eirenic Verses

Horses in The Eirenic Verses

Animals in The Eirenic Verses

Character music preferences

[radical-revolution]

“Do not allow yourself to become impervious and blasé regarding the Dharma;

do not lead yourself astray.

Let the profound Dharma sink into your mind. Now that you have obtained this excellent life, so hard to find, now that you have the freedom to practice the teachings, don’t waste your time."

***

"Be constant amid the ebb and flow

of happiness and suffering.

Be friendly and even with others.

Unguarded, intemperate chatter

will put you in their power;

excessive silence may leave them unclear

as to what you mean.

So keep a middle course:

don’t swagger with self-confidence,

but don’t be a doormat either.

Don’t run after gossip

without examining the truth of it.

People who know how to keep

their mouths shut are rare.

So don’t chatter about your wishes

and intentions; keep them to yourself.

And whether you are speaking to an enemy,

an acquaintance or a friend,

never break a confidence."

***

"Take your stand on the ultimate practice

of the heart essence —

samsara and nirvana

are the display of awareness.

Without distraction, without meditation,

in a state of natural relaxation,

constantly remain in the pure,

all-penetrating nakedness of ultimate reality."

~ Dudjom Rinpoche

from Counsels from My Heart

…🙏🏻

[mahayanapilgrim]

"Do not allow yourself to become impervious and blasé regarding the Dharma; do not lead yourself astray.

Let the profound Dharma sink into your mind. Now that you have obtained this excellent life, so hard to find, now that you have the freedom to practice the teachings, don't waste your time."

***

"Be constant amid the ebb and flow of happiness and suffering.

Be friendly and even with others.

Unguarded, intemperate chatter will put you in their power;

excessive silence may leave them unclear as to what you mean.

So keep a middle course:

don't swagger with self-confidence, but don't be a doormat either.

Don't run after gossip

without examining the truth of it.

People who know how to keep their mouths shut are rare.

So don't chatter about your wishes and intentions; keep them to yourself.

And whether you are speaking to an enemy, never buinta condered,

***

"Take your stand on the ultimate practice of the heart essence - samsara and nirvana

are the display of awareness.

Without distraction, without meditation, in a state of natural relaxation, constantly remain in the pure, all-penetrating nakedness of ultimate reality."

[015friends]

just wanted to say that your fic our intemperate hearts broke me (good) and now i will never be the same

thank you

(is it crass to ask for a sequel?)

oh thanks!!! i probably wont be writing a sequel soon, if at all, but this is nice to hear!!

[aliveandfullofjoy]

Review: Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992)

(I haven't posted a review on Tumblr in a hot minute -- I've been keeping those to Letterboxd -- but I tried to get a few words out about this movie and wanted to share here as well. I love it a lot. Those are always hard to write about for me. This is embarrassing. Thanks for reading. Or not! Consider watching Unforgiven if you haven't!)

"It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have."

Unforgiven is just one of those movies for me. It hits me like a bolt of lightning every time I watch it. I first watched it when I was in high school, when I was first getting into movies by way of poring over Oscar history. I didn't think of myself as a westerns guy at the time -- I'm honestly not even sure how many I'd seen by that point -- but Unforgiven almost immediately made me fall in love with the genre as a whole. It was a little bit like discovering my first Stephen Sondheim musical: "Oh, that's what this can be?"

Admittedly, I've been way less rabid about consuming westerns than I have been with musical theatre (and I'm certainly not a Clint Eastwood megafan). Still, it's a genre I find endlessly fascinating, and it's almost entirely because of how deeply literary they often feel. More than any other genre, individual characters in westerns seem to represent so much more than just themselves. I'm sure there's a great thesis to be written about the ideologies represented in Unforgiven in just the characters of William Munny and Little Bill Daggett alone, to say nothing of Ned Logan or the Schofield Kid or Strawberry Alice or English Bob or W. W. Beauchamp or Delilah.

(My God, what a cast of characters. What a script.)

And then there's the beautiful prologue and epilogue, perfectly bookending the film -- the cruelty, the loss, the violence -- with a bittersweet sense of poetry. Maybe cinema was invented so Eastwood could match Jack N. Green's cinematography with David Webb Peoples' words and accompany them with an aching guitar (the gorgeous "Claudia's Theme," which Eastwood wrote himself). All I have to do is think about the final words of the epilogue, to visualize Mrs. Ansonia Feathers visiting her daughter's grave, and I feel my eyes begin to well up.

I think that love story is what keeps me coming back to Unforgiven. We never see Munny's wife, just like we never see Munny before his marriage, that "man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition." To us, he's just a widower -- an aging man with a surprising gentleness who can barely take care of his hogs. Eastwood, it should be said, gives a gorgeous performance.

I love everything about this movie, even the parts that make me feel queasy. I love the Munny/Ned dynamic (Morgan Freeman is great in his short screen time). I love how vile of a bad guy Little Bill is (Gene Hackman's second Oscar was well-earned). I love getting heady about it and thinking about it as a deconstruction and an elegy for the westerns of Eastwood's youth. I even love how almost fatalistic the film gets near the end ("I'll see you in Hell." "Yeah.").

But it's the entirely offscreen love story that lingers with me. On this watch, the following exchange Munny has with Delilah, the brutalized sex worker at the center of Unforgiven's conflict, caught me completely off-guard and made me start crying almost immediately. Munny's wife, a woman we never meet, is a symbol of hope and redemption in a vicious world. Their love for one another is the heart of the film.

"Is she back in Kansas?" "Yeah, she's watching over my young ones."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Gail Godwin is one of our finest writers. Godwin's latest book "Getting to Know Death," will be published this month by Bloomsbury U.S..

This excerpt appears in Harper's Magazine.

>>>>>

DARK KNIGHTS OF THE SOUL

I have been close to people who one day found themselves in the desperate place and didn’t make it out.

I remember struggling to write a letter to a young man whose father had just hanged himself. The father had been the builder of our house. He was charming and talented and proud of his son. I wrote these things to the son and then came the point in the letter where I was supposed to write something hopeful for the future. All I could think of to convey was No, you’ll never get over it, but the time will come when you will be glad you can’t get over it because the loved one remains alive in your heart as you continue to engage with the who and the why of him.

Two people in my family didn’t make it out of their desperate place: my father and my brother.

Though I had seen my father only twice when I was a child, I sent him an invitation to my high school graduation. Mother said not to expect him to show up, but he did. He, his new wife, and his brother drove from Smithfield, North Carolina, to Portsmouth, Virginia, for the ceremony. In the early-summer weeks that followed, we wrote letters to each other. He had elegant handwriting and prose to match. He wrote that he would like more than anything to get to know me better. Could I—would it be possible for me to spend a few weeks with them at the beach this summer? I was in my first desperate place at that time and decided to tell him about it—though not all of it. I ended up going to the beach and returning with them to Smithfield and entering Peace College in the fall, paid for by my father.

My father had been doing some personal bookkeeping of his own. At the age of fifty, he had at last achieved a measure of stability. Finally, after thirty years of intemperate living, he had managed to stop drinking, had married a new widow in town with a prosperous brother-in-law, and was manager of sales at the brother-in-law’s car dealership. My father confided to me during the weeks we spent at his brother-in-law’s beach cottage that he regretted not having made more of himself. “You mustn’t let it happen to you,” he said. “Nobody is prepared for how quickly time passes, and you don’t want to be one of those people who wakes up in the late afternoon with nothing to show for it.” But later, in a radiant moment while we were lying on the beach working on our tans, he told me that I had come along at just the right time, and if he continued to win his battle against depression and alcohol, and if automobile sales continued like this, well, the future didn’t look so hopeless after all.

As we lay side by side, congratulating ourselves for finding each other, I had no idea that old disappointments were biding their time, stealthily building like waves, which in less than three years would drown him.

One winter afternoon when I was a junior at Chapel Hill, he phoned his brother at his office. “Just felt like saying hello, old son,” he said. “Son” was what the brothers called each other. After he hung up, he lay down on the floor of his bedroom in Smithfield and shot himself in the head.

Losing ground. Was that the thing that ultimately killed him? In his twenties, he began losing jobs, losing status, but always got back on his feet. A charming, handsome man, he did not need to keep a steady job as long as his mother was alive. And after her death, there would be other admirers waiting in line for whom his looks and charm were enough. By the time he met my mother, he was an alcoholic. After that came the mental disorders, given different psychiatric names as the years went by.

When they were driving back to Smithfield after my high school graduation, he came with a raging toothache. They found a dentist along the road who pulled the tooth. But the pain continued, and when they got home, the dentist told him it had been the wrong tooth. “I should have known,” he would finish this story, laughing. “I should have known when we drove into the parking lot and his shingle read: doctor payne.” He still had the charm but the looks were going.

This is from a June 16, 2018, New York Times op-ed, “What Kept Me from Killing Myself,” by the Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers. “Throughout that summer and into the fall . . . just below the surface of my semiconsciousness, was the constant thought: Maybe I won’t wake up this time.” Powers continues:

I doubt much needs to be said about the kind of despair that would make such an idea a source of comfort, despair that came not from accepting that things were as bad as they were going to get but, worse, that they might go on like that forever. The next step felt both logical and inevitable.

This sounds along the lines of what my twenty-eight-year-old brother might have been thinking in the hours that led up to his death.

In the last week of his life, Tommy was working on a long poem. He left behind two drafts. He titled one “Why Not Just Leave It Alone?” and the other “Why Change the World?” One line is the same in both drafts: “My pride is broken since my lover’s gone.” Both drafts end with the same image of the poet being laid to rest in his wooden home, “With my trooper hat on my chest bone.”

It was October 2, 1983. What happened, what we know happened, as opposed to all that we can never know, was that on the Sunday afternoon after Mother’s birthday, Tommy ironed a shirt at his parents’ house, where he had been living with his three-year-old son. He told Mother he was going over to see J., the woman he loved, a nurse who also had a three-year-old son. They had planned to marry; they had even made out a budget. Then J. suddenly broke it off. Tommy told Mother he was going over to ask J. to reconsider. “I’m going to settle it one way or another before the afternoon is out,” he said, and drove off alone.

COUPLE FOUND SHOT was the headline in the newspaper the next morning.

The day before, on Mother’s birthday, I knew Tommy was unhappy. But Tommy was always unhappy. He “felt things more than most” was the family euphemism for his troubled nature. He most took to heart the family’s fractures as well as the world’s. Drawing you in with his shy, closemouthed smile, he would offer his latest tale of woe. But always, always in his stories, there had been a quality of suspense, of entertainment. He starred in them as the knight-errant, complete with pratfalls and setbacks, but a knight-errant who picked himself up, dusted himself off, and set out on his next mission. Tommy was a modern Samaritan who carried a first-aid kit and a blue emergency beacon in his car in case he came across an accident.

We were in the kitchen and he told me the story of J. suddenly breaking up with him. But this time something was different. I was not, as usual, deriving the usual listener’s satisfaction from his story. Many years later, when remembering that kitchen scene, I realized what had spooked me about it: Not only was there not a trace of the shy, closemouthed smile, there was no knight-errant starring in my brother’s story. The tone was new: one of bafflement and resignation. There was no sense of any future missions. There was no tug of suspense. It was like a story that had already ended.

Tommy would be sixty-three now. He was born the same summer that my father drove from Smithfield to Glen Burnie, Maryland, and rescued me from my desperate place. If on that October afternoon twenty-eight years later there had not been a pistol handy in the glove compartment of J.’s car, would Tommy have remarried somebody else and raised his son and reconciled himself to a fallen world, as long as he had a firstaid kit and a job that gave him the satisfaction that he was rescuing people from injustice?

But now I do hear his voice, the old Tommy voice, just as it was in life, chiding me as he defends the position of his beloved National Rifle Association with its singsong refrain: “Gail, guns don’t kill people. People do.” I continue to engage with the who and why of my father and my brother.

During my life, I have found myself in the desperate place four times. But that first time, at age eighteen, was by far the worst.

Summer 1955 in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Everybody seemed to have a future but me. I had received a letter from Mother Winters, my mentor from ninth grade. She congratulated me on being salutatorian, asked about my plans for college, and brought me news of some of my classmates. “Pat has won the four-year Angier Duke scholarship to Duke, Carolyn will be going to Radcliffe, Stuart and Lee to St. Mary’s in Raleigh . . . ” Here I stopped reading and felt . . . what? A dry mouth, a pang in the chest, a sense of going down, of losing myself. All I knew to do was mark my position.

My position. At the time, I couldn’t hold all of it in my mind. If I had tried, I might have despaired, or lashed out and hurt myself or somebody else. I had so little experience to draw from and there was no escape.

Since my early teens, I had been building my life on false premises. I was creating a persona that was more extroverted than I really was. She pretended to more confidence and security than I felt. I became a pro at embellishing and editing my history. When I entered a new school, I “went out” for things I was good at that would bring me attention. The school paper, the drama club, painting posters and scenery, entering competitions—and, of course, getting high grades. I dated lots of boys, made it a point to be cagey and hard to get until each got fed up and moved on, usually just as I had begun to appreciate him.

That was the outside of things. At home, other dramas were playing out. We were not free people. Our embattled breadwinner, who was angry much of the time, sometimes knocked one of us to the floor for challenging him. There was no money for us except what he doled out and no going anywhere he didn’t drive us. As I entered my teens, the bread winner, who was only twelve years older than me, often spoke of how he “loved” me. His voice trembled. At night I would wake to find him kneeling in the dark beside my bed, his hand taking liberties.

My mother had shed her former confident self. As a child, I knew a mother who arrived home on the 10:00 pm bus after her wartime job on the newspaper, a woman who taught college and on weekends typed up love stories that earned one hundred dollars apiece. This powerless woman seemed more like someone I was visiting in prison. Only I was in prison with her. She suffered because there was no money to send me to college. She made phone calls to a private college in Baltimore to see if I could go as a day student. The registrar said a partial scholarship might be arranged, given my academic record, but where was the rest of the money to come from? There was no “rest of the money,” my stepfather reminded us, as though we were dim-witted. He suggested I take a year off and find a job, “maybe in sales work,” and save up for college next year. He added magnanimously that I could continue to live under his roof for the time being without paying rent.

That’s the way the ground lay that June 1955 morning in Glen Burnie, when the girl sat cross-legged on her bed, the letter from her old teacher clutched in her fist. “Pat to Duke, Carolyn to Radcliffe, Stuart and Lee to St. Mary’s.”

This is my life, but I may not get to do what I want in it.

I can’t see a way out of this.

Things will not necessarily get better.

In my novel Unfinished Desires, about life at a girls’ school, two old nuns are being driven back to their retirement home from a doctor’s visit, and one says to the other, “There was a sentence this morning in that Prayer for Holy Women: ‘In our weakness Your power reaches perfection.’ What do you think it means, Sister Paula?” Sister Paula thinks for a minute and then replies, “I think it means you have to admit you can’t save yourself before you’re fully available to God.”

That morning in Glen Burnie, God was undergoing some very slippery changes in my psyche. He had ceased being the attentive Heavenly Father who was always aware of me. All I could be certain of that long-ago summer morning was that I could not save myself.

But something else did, something already embedded in the tissue of my particular circumstances: the earthly father who had been the absent father. In a mood of defiant resignation, I decided to send him an invitation to my graduation. Of course he wouldn’t come.

But he did come. And when we were lying beside each other on the beach, he said, “When I opened your invitation, after I got over being pleasantly surprised, I thought to myself, Well, this is one thing I did that came to fruition. And then, after we began to write letters to each other, it struck me that I might be the rescuer you needed.”

Art Work: "When Day Touches Night," a painting by Michael Ho, whose work was on view last month with Gallery Vacancy at the art fair Independent New York.

(Follies of God)

[the-writer-ofthe-fandoms]

Silent Cosmos (Edward Cullen) (Series Masterlist)

"On foot

I had to cross the solar system

before I found the first thread of my red dress.

I sense myself already.

Somewhere in space hangs my heart,

shaking in the void, from it stream sparks

into other intemperate hearts."

--Edith Södergran, 'On Foot I Had to Cross the Solar System'

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

[the12thnightproject]

I don't know if you would do this, but can you make a fanfic of Kennyo x Shingen?

Hi Anon -

Sorry to take so long to get back to this. I don't explicitly ask for fic prompts, because I'm a little nervous that I'll get one that will stump me. I don't discourage it either (with the caveat that they might sometimes, as you probably just noticed, take me a while to do). As for your ask... it came at a time when I was already wondering a little more about the Shingen & Kennyo friendship, and I realized that it was something I wanted to write about. I kept putting it off though, because what I wanted to do was explore it in a series of letters that took place over ten years... and the thought of the project started to get out of hand. I decided to at least make a start on it, and I will probably write and post more of these when I have the time.

On the other side of the cut, is Part One of "Dear Friend." Shingen & Kennyo, Friendship; no trigger warnings needed, about 1000 words.

Ishiyama Hongan-ji, 1568

Letter slipped under the door of Takeda Shingen…

Dear Noviate,

Welcome to Hogan-ji, I am, as I would be with any noviate, pleased that you wish to study and meditate within our walls. From the questions you posed during yesterday’s study session, I sense that you possess a keen intellect that only wants focus.

However, last evening, as I returned from a mission of mercy, I happened to pass by the door to your personal chamber. The noise that I heard did not appear to be related at all to religious practice.

Sincerely,

Kennyo

Letter slipped under the door of Abbott Kennyo

Dear Kennyo,

There are many forms of religious practice. I encountered an example of heavenly beauty that wanted further study. I however, endeavor to keep the noise down. I apologize for disturbing you.

Sincerely,

Takeda Shingen

P.S. Just before I slid this under your door, I heard a noise… several noises, coming from your chamber that also do not appear to be related at all to religious study.

Letter slipped under the door of Takeda Shingen…

Dear Noviate,

Although I hesitate to humor your rather ill-timed joke, you are welcome to visit and determine the origin of the sound yourself.

In fact, I wish you would do so.

Promptly.

Kennyo

Letter slipped under the door of Abbott Kennyo

Dear Friend,

I am not certain what I expected to find when you bid me enter your room, however, I can say without hesitation, that it was not the Abbott of Hongan-ji caring for a litter of newborn kittens. My friend, your heart is too kind for this world, and I worry that at some point in the future, the inhabitants will be responsible for bruising it.

However, today is not that day, and I apologize in advance for not attending today’s study circle. I am to a mission of my own.

Takeda Shingen,

PS, motherhood suits you.

Letter slipped under the door of Takeda Shingen…

Dear Intemperate Friend,

Dare I ask where you procured the goat’s milk from?

Kennyo

Letter slipped under the door of Abbott Kennyo

Dear Friend,

You are better off not knowing.

That said, I have also procured a few bottles of excellent sake, and would welcome your companionship in drinking them.

Takeda Shingen

PS Of course, the kittens are welcome as well, however, I believe they should stick to milk.

Letter slipped under the door of Takeda Shingen…

Dear Friend,

Thank you for the invitation. I must decline, as you are here to study. Thank you for the invitation. I welcome the opportunity to drink and study with you, as underneath your rather frivolous exterior, you have a fine mind, worthy of cultivation.

Kennyo

Letter slipped under the door of Abbott Kennyo

Dear Kennyo,

Thank you for the discussion, as well as the offering of fresh peaches last evening. You were correct that they did indeed go well with sake. And, no, I do not know who or what might be stealing from the temple’s peach groves, but it is telling that you are more concerned with whether they have gotten enough to eat, than the act of the theft itself.

As for your ideas, I agree with you that the role of the religious leader is not only to foster study, but also to become a boon to the community. In the province of Kai, I would certainly welcome the assistance of monks in building schools and libraries, and I suspect many daimyo would agree.

Many but not all.

Your premonition that a storm may be coming… one does not need the talents of a yokoi accept this as truth.

Shingen

Letter slipped under the door of Takeda Shingen…

Dear Friend,

I have found the peach thief. As I suspected, it was a very young boy, an orphan. He has nowhere else to go, and while he may be too young for study and religious practice, I believe he will be safer growing up in the temple than anywhere else. Though of course he is too young to choose a life of religious contemplation, we can give him the tools to make an informed decision when he is of age.

Friend, while I thought we were beyond the point of me chiding you for your carnal distractions, I was disappointed not to see you in today’s study session. You are not required to live a celibate life, but I do hope you are not wasting the opportunity to achieve religious enlightenment.

Kennyo

PS,  Your cough is sounding serious again. Have you visited a healer?

Letter delivered to Kennyo at Ishiyama Hongan-ji by messenger…

Dear Friend,

I apologize for leaving the temple in such a hurry. If I had time my choice, I would still be there, looking forward to our next discussion. However, I have come to the realization that must take upon more responsibility for Kai, for my lands, to defend them from the coming storms, both natural and manmade.

Once again the Midai and Kamanashi rivers flooded after the spring rains, finding solutions for this yearly disaster has become one of the more pressing issues that I hope to solve while I am able.

To add injury to the situation, the Dragon of Echigo is threatening my land, and I suspect that soon the Devil King will rise in the East. I have heard he has set his sights on Ishiyama.

Be careful my friend.

Shingen

PS When we last spoke, you asked if something was wrong. I am… touched by your concern. It is nothing that I wish to discuss in a letter.

Historical Note: If my google research is correct, and it... might not be, Shingen & Kennyo were actually brothers-in-law, because their wives were sisters. You can throw Yoshimoto into that in-law situation too - his wife was Shingen's sister. The things you learn when you research.

Thanks again for the ask, Anon... when I do more of this series, I will tag it #dearfriend so look for that tag.