#loud shrug.

[underude]

“ hey , hot stuff , come here often ? ”

normally , he’d be pretty uptight about holding her this close to yet another massive explosion. at least this time he knew where to find her. she’d been caught some time ago. the distant pop and rumble of a distant , empty building was the best option. “ . . . you okay ? ”

@redhead-reporter​ wanted small.

[anxiousapplepie]

"Hello hello!~ You've reached the Loop Help Hotline! Here for all your questions and queries in this exciting never-ending day! How can I help you, Researcher?"

"Remind me again why I'm doing this dang silly thing?" "Which dang silly thing? You're doing so many of them right now!~" "YOU KNOW WHICH ONE I'M REFERRING TO-"

[todayisafridaynight]

[jula483]

for the rhink shippers

[silverskye13]

"You're bleeding."

It's an obvious statement, one Tanguish feels a little foolish for. Of course Helsknight is bleeding. He just won his match. It's amazing how strong these Colosseum fighters are, how much damage they can do to each other, especially when they're matched up well. And Helsknight is the Champion of Hels -- if for no other reason than the popularity with the crowd, every one of his matches is a good match. It has to be. Anything less and it's not the Champion, is it?

Helsknight looks dazed. It's a familiar look. After a particularly rough fight. It's like the knight can't believe the fight has stopped. It takes a few minutes for his heart to stop sprinting. So he goes through the gate, dragging his sword up to the nearby wall and plants himself on the bench, and he stares into the middle distance, breathing, bleeding, waiting. It's a familiar look. Today he's spattered up to the elbow in blood, and it runs between the links of his chain mail in thin calligraphy lines. It gathers in the bends in his pauldrons, makes more stark the dent in his chest plate. If it's not cleaned and polished off in the next few hours, it'll settle in those places and poison them with rust, and the next time Helsknight fights, he'll be more vulnerable. Blood is such an insidious thing sometimes, the way it weakens when it flows.

Tanguish moves to the knight, a bowl of water in one hand, a healing kit in the other. He takes the knight apart like he's a machine, slipping delicate fingers across the gauntleted hand, undoing straps and buckles to show the bruised knuckles beneath the armor. Metal and leather can only do so much. Bodies break surprisingly well, when they're testing their limits. Helsknight sighs as Tanguish massages his hand, searching for broken bones. The knight is almost feverishly hot to his frost-laden touch, and Tanguish watches the swollen skin start to pale as the cold soothes it.

"You don't have to do that," Helsknight says, his voice a thin and distant rasp, still lost somewhere in the adrenaline crash. "Just... give me a minute to rest."

"I am," Tanguish answers him gently and keeps working, unclasping the buckles on the chest plate and pulling it free. He lays it gently on the ground, and takes pride in how Helsknight breathes easier. The knight rests, eyes fluttering half-closed and sighing as Tanguish works. Cold hands trace over blooded armor and fevered skin, setting right the wrongs. He dabs at cuts, eliciting hisses of pain that he immediately soothes. He puts ice to bruises, and water to sweat and blood, and Helsknight revives, slowly. His breathing lengthens and deepens. The flushed skin cools. The muscles relax.

"How did the fight go?" Tanguish asks when Helsknight's eyes flutter open again.

"I won."

"You can say it better than that."

Helsknight smirks, his vitality slowly returning. He sniffs and runs a tongue across his teeth, making room for the words where there once was blood. Tanguish doesn't know how the knight stands the taste, but then again, Helsknight has been in a great many fights. Maybe blood loses its flavor after so long.

"You watched the fight."

"And so did they," Tanguish looks up to the ceiling, where the cheering of the crowd still sometimes surges and roars. "But none of us can tell the story the way you can."

"Blood is memory without language."

"See, that's what I mean."

"Weaving bard's tales already?" someone asks, another fighter sitting on another bench, cleaning a bloodied sword. "You haven't even rested yet."

"He's resting now," Tanguish says, running the damp cloth over a gash in Helsknight's arm. That one will need stitches, or a health potion. Helsknight's hand shakes when Tanguish cleans it, and there's color in the cut that means its too deep, gruesomeness he doesn't want to put names to, for fear it'll make him sick. Helsknight spares the wound a glance before pointedly fixing his gaze away from it. It always strikes Tanguish as funny, that the knight can't look at his own wounds. He can inflict them, he can tend them in others, he can ignore them, but admitting he's wounded is a mountain he struggles to climb.

Helsknight closes his eyes again, but the eyelids keep moving, like a man dreaming or searching for words.

"Where do you want me to start?"

"When they opened the cage."

Helsknight nods. He sits in silence for a long moment. In a few days, when all wounds are healed and all aches soothed, Helsknight will write in a little book he keeps under his pillow:

Blood is memory without language The wounded creature screams And though the sand drinks life away We lay linked by crimson streams

Brothers you and I, creature Kin on parched and bitter sand Though mine is spilt for glory Yours is spilt by crowd's command

What place is this, what hell endured That brings us to this yield But happenstance and hubris And hungry crowd's bone field

What beast are you to me, creature What creature I to you You are a footnote in a story And I the death of you

Again repeat what we both know Whilst life, for now, entwine That we are linked in blood my love Shared memory divine

[saturnaous]

mmmm was looking at theworldisalways-ending post of becket again because I'm really normal and it got me thinking Yeah How DOES he drink tea. kinda wild. I decided to give him a straw. anyways. shrivels up and dies

[starheirxero]

"A part of me still wants to go crawling back to him, it's what I was made to do." FUCK EVERYTHINGGGGGG

[iwanthermidnightz]

I keep rewatching the mastermind performance over and over again and it’s so loud because Taylors telling this story with her whole chest. It’s interesting to pay attention to the movements that are happening. She’s playing puppet master with the ‘playthings for her to use’. They follow her every command. All the pieces fall right into place/dominoes cascading in a line because it was all her doing… the mastermind. None of it was accidental, don’t you love that? The metaphor of it all.



[starflungwaddledee]

Ok but what if she went to waddle Dee town in the forgotten land and all the waddle Dee’s just accepted her because they are really nice and not rude and they accept her and she has fun and a good time please I really need this for her

i considered drawing something out to this, and making it a happy ending sort of thing, because i think this is extremely sweet as a concept and i understand the desire for it!

that said, i decided that it would be a disservice to the lore i'm building for her, my biology/magic headcanons, and also the waddle dees as a whole. i might still draw it some day, because i could absolutely perceive a way it would work (ie: all waddle dee signatures messed up by Elfilis's portals, or their magic sensitivity nuked by it.) and i think it would be lovely

but for now, i have too many other things on the backburner to get to this promptly, and i wanted to answer this one sooner rather than leaving it for months

i will say, they're not being rude to her! there might be the odd one or two who is a bit snide, but there are some of those in every society. as a general rule the waddle dees not only understand that she is struggling, they want to accept and help her. many of them even know she's lonely, and feel pretty bad about it. but it's hard, and not just because she makes people uneasy!

i draw parallels with starstruck's gummed up magical signature to autism, as i'm autistic and so by merit (as a sona), so is she. but there are some parts that do not line up with the way autism functions in our world, and one of them is that touching or being around her can be genuinely, literally painful for some of the very sensitive waddle dees.

despite that, her waddle dee doctors actually pushed through it while she was in the castle dedede infirmary. because they were determined to treat her (mostly-surface-seeming) injuries and help her feel better. and they apologised for the reactions that they couldn't control anymore than she could control her signature; the various "sorry"s she parrots in this comic are implied to be from waddle dee doctors.

it's a fine line in alien-storytelling, especially with a real world disability parallel, and i'm trying to tread it as carefully as i can. but i don't intend to villainise the waddle dees at all for their reaction to her; they truly can't help it. many of them even do their best to push through it if she comes into their vicinity, especially because she often arrives with Beloved Celebrity, Captain Bandana Waddle Dee. but like a lot of us, she can tell when she's being tolerated, and so as a rule she just sort of tries to avoid it, one way or another

[theangrypomeranian]

okay OKAY I cried I'm good time for escapism and getting by day by day

[dvrcos]

In love with my very self indulgent kevaaron mood board because I’m very not normal about them

Link

[captainseamech]

             ^ fears no fish but women scare him

[vaguely-concerned]

I was going to have rye maaaybe start to buy into solas' whole johnny silverhand deal a little bit more in the post-weisshaupt talk -- to Progress the Arc tm/set up the beginning softening in that relationship and heighten the effect when it eventually goes. quite another way entirely -- but the sheer spectacular cruelty in hindsight of 'at least you still have varric to talk to' is such that considering where I'm intending to end up with this narratively, the stoic 'not here to make friends you fucker gimme your intel' option is simply irresistible. gotta have that echo rattling around rye's head forever when he decides that you know what? I have had enough of being nice, actually. I do want to go ape shit. someone hold my coat for me please I have some work to do and I don't want to stain it. guess for now the ol' watcher training & instincts are still kicking in enough for them to treat solas like a tricky spirit you should treat with respect and good intentions, but also shouldn't be out there offering little fingers to unless you have a whole arm lying around to spare haha

[absurdumsid]

what's your favorite song?

sorry man i couldnt decide on just One

so i made a playlist <- i DONT recommend listening to it on shuffle some of these songs are so soft and some are so LOUD

[dwimmer-crafty]

Friends today I’ve been learning about American Impressionist painter Ellen Day Hale, because I saw this painting of her and thought “That is not a heterosexual woman” and obviously needed to drop everything and research.

And look I was prepared for a lot of ambiguity and a lot of disclaimers but what I actually found might officially be one of the queerest paragraphs I’ve ever read:

They’re lesbians, Harold.

Also, this is my favorite painting of Hale’s, and like, LOOK at this woman:

She is reading her OWN damn news. That complexion has never once been plagued by a husband smoking behind his morning paper. Her lover Joan made the coffee and now is changing into a fabulous pair of jodhpurs and heading out to work with the new mare, who tends to be skittish but is responding well to Joan’s firm yet gentle demeanor.

[perenlop]

i think its always worth thinking about how women are portrayed in certain stories, from fictional narratives to reddit posts presenting themselves as true stories. is every woman in the narrative either antagonistic or shallow? are most or all of the men portrayed as sympathetic and competent, moreso than the women, even if they commit the same crimes?