#it was also fucking god awful

[bunglegaydogs]

in the middle of drawing dazai in the outfit i wore to church today xoxo dont know whether im drawing fem!dazai or just a fem dazai ^^

[sheerakk]

[thebibliosphere]

I'm watching Justice League: War, and I'm sorry, but Green Lantern shielding himself and Batman in a green ball of light while Superman proceeds to kick them around Metropolis like a dodgeball is so fucking funny.

Bruce just saw the inside of three buildings go past real quick because they got punched through them by Superman, and he's relying on Hal to keep him alive. A man who a mere few hours ago accused him of being a vampire then went off on him for not having any superpowers and whose ring Bruce managed to steal with a sleight-of-hand trick to make a petty point.

His control freak issues must be screaming.

[greencarnation]

I just found out that Israel has killed more of their own hostages than they have members of Hamas God help me I am going fucking insane

[sforzesco]

decimus wanted to wind cassius up a bit just to see how he would snap

uhhh. what else. you know!! caesar was collecting (and discarding) a new generation of romans, operating a new kind of roman imperium. political manipulation. "good" governance. conspiracies are forming in reply.

the collage art is all public domain/open access stuff from the met collections!

[thermodynamic-comedian]

daisy vs. elias is my favourite s3 scene because i enjoy both of them as fictional characters, and i disagree with both of them on a moral level. ceo vs. cop. daisy walks in and immediately calls him a weird little freak. elias immediately starts reading her like a book. she does not hesitate for a second to threaten him with police brutality. both of them are doing horrible things in this scene and i am so glad that they're doing them to each other

[daemon-in-my-head]

Minthara:

Also Minthara:

I just can't with her dialogues, like. She goes from slurs to tadpole sexting to incredibly raw. And then there's just these conversations. Which are just a bazillion times more painful when ya know what's actually going on. Sure rip my heart apart Larian, not like I need it anyway.

This hurts so much.

'You're broken, but I decided I will fix you.' - Minthara Baenre what the hell

Also just this. Just look at this. How the fuck am I meant to be normal about this.

I just can't. Like yeah they're all tragedies in their own right but Minthy and Durge take the absolute cake (pun unintended).

I'm so sorry I'll return to normal in... let's be real probably not until 2029 or perhaps never.

[lilithofpenandbook]

Seriously how can M*r*uders stans like random Slytherins (who tf are Evan Rosier, Pandora (is that Luna's mum and why tf is she Evan Rosier's twin in half of these), and I don't even want to discuss Regulus) and make them Actually Misunderstood Good People Who Were Forced Down That Path when at least one of them *coughreguluscough* was obsessed with Voldemort

And then turn around and make Snape an awful person?

[protectorsoftheearth]

The clearing was incredible throughout. But my God did the sound design at the end when the marching drums of the citadel and the brass and the metal of it all swelled make me giddy with horror and understanding.

[unluckyprime]

GOD YOU GUYS . WHAT AN EPISODE !!!!!

[softpastelqueer]

Regarding Twitter seeing the c*s word as a slur,

I’m sorry to everyone for using the hard s 😔 I’m listening and learning here. Some of my best friends are c*sgender, and as an ally to the c*shet community, I could never be a c*s phobe. I didn’t know I couldn’t say the hard s even when singing along to a song.

As a brunette, I understand oppression, so I vow to improve on learning more and uplifting c*s voices. I didn’t say it out of hate or to be offensive. It’s past time for me to shut up, listen and learn. I hope this can be a teachable moment for me. 😔

[taw-k]

Thor: haha, my brother's so forgetful

Thor: sometimes he even forgets how to breathe!

Loki: *having a panic attack*

Thor: don't worry he does this all the time

[doghartzy]

timmy nets the first sens goal of the season!

panthers @ senators | oct. 10, 2024

[acourtofquestions]

Kingdom of Ash Chapter 61

Chapter; Highlights (okay the entire chapter is a highlight)🤣

As requested @mysterylilycheeta I NEED TO SQUEAL IN WYVERN FANGIRL WITH YOU NOW CAUSE OH M GOODNESS THIS CHAPTER ON SO MANY LEVELS I JUST AHAKWIHUHFEJLZXBKEKA

Agony was a song in Lorcan's blood, his bones, his breath.

Every step of the horse, every leap she made over body and debris, sent it ringing afresh. There was no end, no mercy from it. It was all he could do to keep in the saddle, to cling to consciousness.

To keep his arm around Elide.

She had come for him. Had found him, somehow, on this endless battlefield.

His name on her lips had been a summons he could never deny, even when death had held him so gently, nestled beneath all those he'd felled, I, and waited for his last breaths.

And now, charging toward that too-distant keep, so far behind the droves of soldiers and riders racing for the gates, he wondered if these minutes would be his last. Her last.

She had come for him.

Lorcan managed to glance toward the dam on their right. Toward the ruk rider signaling that it was only a matter of minutes until it unleashed hell over the plain.

He didn't know how it had become weakened. Didn't care.

Still Elide kept urging the horse onward, kept them on as straight a path toward the distant keep as possible.

No ruk would come to sweep them up. No, his luck had been spent in surviving this long, in her finding him. His power would do nothing against that water.

The farthest lines of panicked soldiers appeared, and Farasha charged past them.

Elide let out a sob, and he followed the line of her sight.

To the keep gate, still open.

"Faster, Farasha!" She didn't hide the raw terror in her voice, the desperation.

Once the dam broke, it would take less than a minute for the tidal wave to reach them.

She had come for him. She had found him.

The world went quiet. The pain in his body faded into nothing. Into something secondary.

Lorcan slid his other arm around Elide, bringing his mouth close to her ear as he said, "You have to let me go."

Each word was gravelly, his voice strained nearly to the point of uselessness.

Elide didn't shift her focus from the keep ahead. "No."

That gentle quiet flowed around him, clearing the fog of pain and battle. "You have to. You have to, Elide. I'm too heavy-and without my weight, you might make it to the keep in time."

"No." The salt of her tears filled his nose.

Lorcan brushed his mouth over her damp cheek, ignoring the roaring pain in his body. The horse galloped and galloped, as if she might outrace death itself.

"I love you," he whispered in Elide's ear. "I have loved you from the moment you picked up that axe to slay the ilken." Her tears flowed past him in the wind. "And I will be with you ..." His voice broke, but he made himself say the words, the truth in his heart. "I will be with you always."

He was not frightened of what would come for him once he tumbled off the horse. He was not frightened at all, if it meant her reaching the keep.

So Lorcan kissed Elide's cheek again, allowed himself to breathe in her scent one last time. "I love you," he repeated, and began to withdraw his arms from around her waist.

Elide slapped a hand onto his forearm. Dug in her nails, right into his skin, fierce as any ruk.

"No."

There were no tears in her voice. Nothing but solid, unwavering steel.

"No," she said again. The voice of the Lady of Perranth.

Lorcan tried to move his arm, but her grip would not be dislodged.

If he tumbled off the horse, she would go with him.

Together. They would either outrun this or die together.

"Elide-"

But Elide slammed her heels into the horse's sides.

Slammed her heels into the dark flank and screamed, "FLY, FARASHA." She cracked the reins. "FLY, FLY, FLY!"

And gods help her, that horse did.

As if the god that had crafted her filled the mare's lungs with his own breath, Farasha gave a surge of speed.

Faster than the wind. Faster than death.

Farasha cleared the first of the fleeing Darghan cavalry. Passed desperate horses and riders at an all-out gallop for the gates.

Her mighty heart did not falter, even when Lorcan knew it was raging to the point of bursting.

Less than a mile stood between them and the keep.

But a thunderous, groaning crack cleaved the world, echoing off the lake, the mountains.

There was nothing he could do, nothing that brave, unfaltering horse could do, as the dam ruptured.

Rowan made himself stand there, to watch the last moments of the Lady of Perranth and his former commander. It was all he could offer: witnessing their deaths, so he might tell the story to those he encountered. So they would not be forgotten.

The roaring of the oncoming wave became deafening, even from miles away.

Still Elide and Lorcan raced, Farasha passing horse after horse after horse.

Even up here, would they escape the wave's reach? Rowan dared to survey the battlements, to assess if he needed to get the others, needed to get Aelin, to higher ground.

But Aelin was not at his side.

She was not on the battlement at all.

Rowan's heart halted. Simply stopped beating as a ruddy-brown ruk dropped from the skies, spearing for the center of the plain.

Arcas, Borte's ruk. A golden-haired woman dangling from his talons.

Aelin. Aelin was—

Arcas neared the earth, talons splaying.

Aelin hit the ground, rolling, rolling, until she uncoiled to her feet.

Right in the path of that wave.

"Oh gods," Fenrys breathed, seeing her, too.

They all saw her.

The queen on the plain.

The endless wall of water surging for her.

The keep stones began shuddering. Rowan threw out a hand to brace himself, fear like nothing he had known ripping through him as Aelin lifted her arms above her head.

A pillar of fire shot up around her, lifting her hair with it.

The wave roared and roared for her, for the army behind her.

The shaking in the keep was not from the wave.

It was not from that wall of water at all.

Cracks formed in the earth, splintering across it. Spiderwebbing from Aelin.

"The hot springs," Chaol breathed. "The valley floor is full of veins into the earth itself."

Into the burning heart of the world.

The keep shook, more violently this time.

The pillar of fire sucked back into Aelin.

She held out a hand before her, her fist closed.

As if it would halt the wave in its tracks.

He knew then. Either as her mate or carranam, he knew.

"Three months," Rowan breathed.

The others stilled.

"Three months," he said again, his knees wobbling. "She's been making the descent into her power for three months."

Every day she had been with Maeve, bound in iron, she had gone deeper. And she had not tapped too far into that power since they'd freed her because she had kept making the plunge.

To gather up the full might of her magic.

Not for the Lock, not for Erawan.

But for Maeve's death blow.

A few weeks of descent had taken her powers to devastating levels. Three months of it

…

Holy gods. Holy rutting gods.

And when her fire hit the wall of water now towering over her, when they collided —

"GET DOWN!" Rowan bellowed, over the screaming waters. "GET DOWN NOW!"

His companions dropped to the stones, any within earshot doing the same.

Rowan plummeted into his power. Plummeted into it fast and hard, ripping out any remaining shred of magic.

Elide and Lorcan were still too far from the gates. Thousands of soldiers were still too far from the gates as the wave crested above them.

As Aelin opened her hand toward it.

Fire erupted.

Cobalt fire. The raging soul of a flame.

A tidal wave of it.

Taller than the raging waters, it blasted from her, flaring wide.

The wave slammed into it. And where water met a wall of fire, where a thousand years of confinement met three months of it, the world exploded.

Blistering steam, capable of melting flesh from bone, shot across the plain.

With a roar, Rowan threw all that remained of his magic toward the onslaught of steam, a wall of wind that shoved it toward the lake, the mountains.

Still the waters came, breaking against the flames that did not so much as yield an inch.

Maeve's death blow. Spent here, to save the army that might mean Terrasen's salvation. To spare the lives on the plain.

Rowan gritted his teeth, panting against his fraying power. A burnout lurked, deadly close.

The raging wave threw itself over and over and over into the wall of flame.

Rowan didn't see if Elide and Lorcan made it into the keep. If the other soldiers and riders on the plain stopped to gape.

Princess Hasar said, rising beside him, "That power is no blessing."

"Tell that to your soldiers," Fenrys snarled, standing, too.

"I did not mean it that way," Hasar snipped, and awe was indeed stark on her face.

Rowan leaned against the battlements, panting hard as he fought to keep the lethal steam from flowing toward the army. As he cooled and sent it whisking away.

Solid hands slid under his arms, and then Fenrys and Gavriel were there, propping him up between them.

A minute passed. Then another.

The wave began to lower. Still the fire burned.

Rowan's head pounded, his mouth going dry.

Time slipped from him. A coppery tang filled his mouth.

The wave lowered farther, raging waters quieting. Then roaring turned to lapping, rapids into eddies.

Until the wall of flame began to lower, too. Tracking the waters down and down and down. Letting them seep into the cracks of the earth.

Rowan's knees buckled, but he held on to his magic long enough for the steam to lessen.

For it, too, to be calmed.

It filled the plain, turning the world into drifting mist. Blocking the view of the queen in its center.

Then silence. Utter silence.

Fire flickered through the mist, blue turning to gold and red. A muted, throbbing glow.

Rowan spat blood onto the battlement stones, his breath like shards of glass in his throat.

The glowing flames shrank, steam rippling past. Until there was only a slim pillar of fire, veiled in the mist-shrouded plain.

Not a pillar of fire.

But Aelin.

Glowing white-hot. As if she had given herself so wholly to the flame that she had become fire herself.

The Fire-Bringer someone whispered down the battlements.

The mist rippled and billowed, casting her into nothing but a glowing effigy.

The silence turned reverent.

A gentle wind from the north swept down. The veil of mist pulled back, and there she was.

She glowed from within. Glowed golden, tendrils of her hair floating on a phantom wind.

"Mala's Heir," Yrene breathed.

Down on the plain, Elide and Lorcan had halted.

The wind pushed away more of the drifting mist, clearing the land beyond Aelin.

And where that mighty, lethal wave had loomed, where death had charged toward them, nothing remained at all.

For three months, she had sung to the darkness and the flame, and they had sung back.

For three months, she had burrowed so deep inside her power that she had plundered undiscovered depths. While Maeve and Cairn had worked on her, she had delved. Never letting them know what she mined, what she gathered to her, day by day by day.

A death blow. One to wipe a dark queen from the earth forever.

She'd kept that power coiled in herself even after she'd been freed from the irons. Had struggled to keep it down these weeks, the strain enormous. Some days, it had been easier to barely speak. Some days, swaggering arrogance had been her key to ignoring it.

Yet when she had seen that wave, when she had seen Elide and Lorcan choosing death together, when she had seen the army that might save Terrasen, she'd known. She'd felt the fire sleeping under this city, and knew they had come here for a reason.

She had come here for this reason.

A river still flowed from the dam, harmless and small, wending toward the lake.

Nothing more.

Aelin lifted a glowing hand before her as blessed, cooling emptiness filled her at last.

Slowly, starting from her fingertips, the glow faded.

As if she were forged anew, forged back into her body.

Back into Aelin.

Clarity, sharp and crystal clear, filled its wake. As if she could see again, breathe again.

Inch by inch, the golden glow faded into skin and bone. Into a woman once more.

Already, a white-tailed hawk launched skyward.

But as the last of the glow faded, disappearing out through her toes, Aelin fell to her knees.

Fell to her knees in the utter silence of the world, and curled onto her side.

She had the vague sense of strong, familiar arms scooping her up. Of being carried onto a broad feathery back, still in those arms.

Of soaring through the skies, the last of the mist rippling away into the afternoon sun.

And then sweet darkness.

[inwiste]

saw a post about hashirama potentially having ocular albinism based on his first appearance having light eyes like tobirama... i got carried away

“You overdid yourself again.” 

He anticipates the touch before it arrives. Tobirama’s fingers are cool where they find his temples, fanning out to rest gently on the crown of his head. His eyes remain shut, body relaxing of its own accord. 

“You need to wear the glasses, anija.” There’s a sharp edge to Tobirama’s tone, clear dichotomy to his brother’s careful maneuvering, to the way Hashirama’s head settles in his lap. To the fingers that come to his head once more, working in small circles. “At least in the compound. The mokuton can compensate for a lot, but it can’t help you read.”

They’ve had this conversation a thousand times. He’ll learn, eventually. He’ll try to, at least.

“You could always read the reports to me,” he murmurs. The throbbing ache rattles his skull. His jaw is still locked up, mouth hardly moving. His tongue sticks in his mouth, dry as it is. He can’t remember where his tea went. He knows there was tea—the taste has withered on his tongue but he can still catch a trace of it when he swallows, pain pulsing in time with the contraction. “You’re concise. Know what’s important and what isn’t.” 

Tobirama’s hands drift downwards, pulling him up a fraction before taking the base of his skull into steady hands, pressing pads of fingers into the nape of his neck. 

“I have my own work to do.” It’s not an outright refusal. “I don’t enjoy wearing them either, but I make the concession regardless to minimize situations like these, anija.”

They don’t go away entirely, though. The brain is too complex, chakra pathways too delicate to risk the potential damage that could arise from trying to alleviate the pain. They must live with the days that must be spent in the dark, where his brother can hardly rise on hands and knees before retching, where food and water are a poison to Hashirama’s stomach. It’s hardly behavior fitting of a clan head and clan heir, but things progressed beneath his father’s leadership. The work still got done. Their people were still kept safe.

Hashirama opens his eyes for a brief moment, wincing at the dull, stabbing pain that infects his eyes and spreads out to the sockets. His brother’s face is blurry even from the short distance spanning between them, tattoos standing sharp against pale skin. Closes them just as quick.

The clench of his jaw lessens a fraction, stiff muscles uncoiling. He sighs heavily when Tobirama’s thumbs push firmly against the base of his skull. His breathing deepens. Time slips past him, mind drifting into a twilight zone. He can feel his brother’s hands still rubbing circles into his head, throbbing roots slowly being pulled from his skull. 

“You didn’t have to do this,” he slurs sleepily, tongue grown heavy in his mouth. He doesn’t move, though. He’s resting fully against Tobirama now, into the embrace that holds his head so slightly aloft. “I would have gone to the healers if it got any worse.” 

His brother huffs, chakra taking on an indignant tone. A smile finds his lips. He’s never been able to lie to his brother. Not successfully, at least. 

“If only such a thing were true,” Tobirama says. “Someone has to make sure you don’t end up bedridden. I should leave you to the mercy of Izumi the next time this happens.” 

He won’t, they both know. Such an admission will never slip past his brother’s tongue. Such truths are laid bare between them regardless. 

Perhaps once he would have felt guilty for demanding so much of his brother’s time. The mokuton is enough on the battlefield. It’s enough for traversing the pathways of the compound, it’s enough for the floor of their home. The earth is forgiving. Papers are not. 

Something still sticks in his throat when Tobirama pulls free entirely, dragging him from his reverie. He listens to Tobirama pull the shutters closed. To the soft footsteps that bring him close once more, fabric rustling as he sinks to his knees.

“You should rest, anija.” Tobirama’s voice is soft. The ache has lessened to a dull throb. Exhaustion clings to him, even though there are several hours still standing between them and sunset. 

Knuckles brush his cheek before he feels Tobirama’s hand settle against his forehead. His hand has chilled further, free hand stroking his cheek as Hashirama sighs. 

He grabs Tobirama’s hand as it parts from his skin, thumb tracing the raised flesh on the knuckle of his index finger. A particularly bad scrape during a spar had split the skin. They were children at the time but the scar has remained strong on his skin. 

“Stay until I fall asleep?” 

There is no childish tilt to his tone but he feels the trepidation regardless. Feels the memories of a ten year old boy sink into his skin. Of smaller hands rubbing relief into his skull, soothing cyclical pain. It had become clockwork at a point, he remembers. Before he had gained better control of the mokuton. Before he was able to lessen the burden on failing eyes. He feels them well up in his throat, already beginning to fester on his tongue as he waits for an answer beyond the stiffening of Tobirama’s body behind his head. 

He smiles at the huff that answers him—a small thing. Little more than the lifting of the corners of his lips.

“Where else would I go?”

[lesbianmaxevans]

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN 2024 ⤷ Day 4: Sofia Wylie as Agatha in The School for Good and Evil (2022)