#items of memory

[always-a-king-or-queen]

The ache will go away, eventually. 

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent. 

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea. 

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night. 

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered. 

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face. 

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be. 

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure. 

They seemed so lost. 

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.” 

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust. 

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning. 

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were. 

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult. 

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods. 

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day. 

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room. 

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word. 

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan. 

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.  

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces. 

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.  

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall. 

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing. 

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

[silverwhittlingknife]

dick vs. apartment organization, a story in three parts

new teen titans 10, new titans 65, nightwing: target

"i can't believe this place." "i thought you were moving." "you live like a slob."

everybody's a critic dsfsfdsf

[notxon]

the thief

[c2-eh]

Charles and Carlos answering questions ahead of the Monza GP // rayban via Instagram

[bigshotautos]

I really like your theory about Spamton basically haunting a mannequin after death. Have you ever touched upon the reaction from Jevil (or anyone, really) upon seeing the new Spamton? Especially considering Spamton isn't even aware he 'died'.

^ how i think jevil's first sight of Spamton would go. i love this ask. this is referring to some headcanons I made a while back, I'll link it here for the one post and the general ghost spamton theory is linked in that one as well. Going to elaborate on it more under the cut for those interested + more art.

In general I think that people from Spamton's past wouldn't really care if they notice at all, since he wasn't in the business of making close friends with anyone. With the Addisons, in my interpretation he had a "weird co-worker" relationship with them, and while Addisons in general treated each other like potential business competitors that they had to make-nice with, Spamton is especially easy to single out for being visibly and temperamentally different. His altered, current state is something they'd feel at least uncomfortable by, but many wouldn't have been too close with him to begin with for them to talk about it with him directly. Would get whispered about between each other for sure, like we saw with them talking about Spamton after the NEO fight. It moves him from the "disgraced guy I used to know" category to the "actually unpleasant to look at or think about" territory. This goes for Swatch, Queen, and Seam (less so), who seem to buy heavily into the Lightner and Darkner dynamic, with Spamton corrupting the Lightner's dream being a strong taboo against what it means to be a Darkner.

As for what Jevil thinks, Spamton during the NEO fight is both a beautiful and horrifying display. Jevil at this point hasn't seen him in years since his imprisonment, and in their time apart Jevil has grown to find novelty in the cage that everyone else besides him is in since he's created huge emotional distance between him and the reality he lives in. Seeing the fact that Spamton had corrupted an abandoned dream of a Lightner and was causing so much chaos to the established order of the world would be exhilarating, but at the same time seeing that Spamton had accomplished this and still had his strings visible (and changed to a marionette puppet with no symbolic agency), it'd be a painful confirmation of his worldview that even Spamton, who deep down he still cares for, could never have been free.

Jevil would think at first he'd just gone through some nebulous situation to change what he looks like, since ofc he himself has toy-like traits (arguable if that happened with Gasterfication or not), Seam is a plushie cat, and other Card Castle Darkners are based on toys, but feeling the lack of life combined with the symbolic body of Spamton would mean to him something bigger had went wrong. He wouldn't dare to bring it up in an empathetic way, stuck in his mindset that it doesn't matter, but it'd still hit a part of him he doesn't like to think still exists. It's something he gets over quickly, almost performatively going back to fucking with him and taking advantage of his fear for entertainment, but it didn't sit well at first.

To me, the fact Spamton "died" isn't really a huge deal, kind of like with the ghosts in Undertale where no one really cares they're just ghosts. They're just doing their thing. To me it'd be fine if neither of them find out what happened for certain, but it's something that adds Flavor to his character.

[uncanny-tranny]

To people of loved ones with poor memory:

It might be frustrating when they forget something (especially if it's important), but I can guarantee you that they are already beating themself up over having forgotten yet another thing. You don't need to rub that shame, embarrassment, and humiliation in deeper than it already is.

It is scary to forget things. It's humiliating to be told that the only reason we forget things is because we think nothing is important, that we're selfish and callous. Our brains are being pulled in every direction at the same time. It's impossible to keep track of this shit every picosecond of the day.

People like to conceptualize memory issues as a matter of lesser intelligence, that we're too stupid to even remember [minor detail]. I've noticed, though, that all of our brain power is kept toward other things - keeping ourselves alive, remembering a different thing, trying to regulate emotions or other disorders. Nobody seems to care that our workload is at least twice that of the "average" person's, I guess because they often don't directly notice it, or it doesn't directly affect them?

It's fine to be upset about the situation. You can't help that reaction, but you do not have to be cruel to people with memory issues, no matter the cause of it. Whatever they forgot might have been important to you, but there may be other things in that person's life that required their brainpower.

[miralyk]

murphy’s tag feels a bit empty rn, so have some out of context pokemon nuzlocke au doodles from discord lmao

[basslinegrave]

me being sad when other ppls snm aus are sad and when max suffers somehow but then my au's max is just

[hotbellepepaz]

quik bakery au doodle lol

[virfujiwara]

He doesn't drink blood btw

[vivi-the-sky-kid]

Psst

Ya wanna know my technique for getting around 17.5 candles a day without going Everywhere?

Geyser -> Brook Candle Cake and Light Farm -> Grandma -> Sunset Turtle

Then just do:

Whatever realm has the treasure candles for the day

Basic Vault (focus on the candle cakes)

Village of Dreams and Hermit Valley cakes

And then maybe the bouquets from Performance, the cake in Wind Paths, and then the cake in Starlight Desert (since the path to it is right next to the one in Wind Paths)

Super fast and doesn't take too much effort aside from getting to the timed events on time and dealing with Vault

[orofeaiel]

Crab Memorial Shrine

[greenleaf4stuff]

Jumping off from this post about Adar's fighting with Elrond at the end of s2e7, because I had some exchanges in the replies about Adar's sword and wanted to elaborate:

(picture credit: Middle-Earth Weapons for a New Age forming deadly characters, a great article that has some interesting bits about Adar's sword too - also notice the 'wavy' handle in the left pic for example!)

Sadly, we see don't see Adar use his sword very much in the series - even him stabbing Arondir is not explicitly shown. It would have been so cool to see him use it in battle. First of all to see the skill with the blade he has built up over the centuries, and how he wields such a big weapon, but also in contrast to Sauron.

Sauron gets the sword at the end of episode 8 - he immediately fights with it, seems to wield/master it easily, and uses it very successfully in his battle against Galadriel. He even uses the sword in combination with Morgoth's crown!

Questions I am asking myself:

Would Adar have looked like he needed effort to swing that sword? Would he have been slow/heavy with it but very powerful, or graceful and quick like Sauron? What kind of fighting style would he have favored, how would it have compared to Sauron’s? Would there have been similarities or differences in their styles (practical vs graceful)? What could those have told us sth about their shared past (one seeing the other train/being trained, did the sword once belong to Sauron or was it always Adar's)?

This would have not only been very cool to look at, but - as I mentioned in the replies to the other post - help in character building; it would say a lot about their respective physical strength if Adar had a harder time swinging it than Sauron for example, or if Adar used very precise, practical movements to show it is all about survival for him vs Sauron 'playing with his food'.

I felt it aspect was sadly underused in that regard – I am not even sure the sword has a name atm. (I suppose, in a sense, it's fitting when compared to its owner - we as viewers never find out Adar's original name either, so the owner of the sword and the blade itself being 'nameless' kinda makes sense?) (It is still kinda feels unsatisfying though.)

I only hope we find out more about the sword, even if it will feel like a mockery when Sauron keeps and uses it, but I’d love it if the series dove into its history, name, and origins more.

(thx guys for encouraging me to post this and the talks in the replies of the other post btw <3)

[sp00pypumpkins]

I am finally better from being sick a few days ago B] and finished the ref for Zero in the sweet home AU by @asamary (sorry for the tag)

Now I can freely do silly lil comics about it HAHA

[bunniworms]

Billtober day 4 - Blind Eye

If you ever die, what will your memories start looking like?

[sysig]

Stick figure skeletons (Patreon)