#so apologies all around

[blindmagdalena]

Eat Your Ego, Honey (CH4)

homelander x oc 18+  escort services, sex work, masturbation, voyeurism, stalking, Homelander in general. see ao3 link for detailed tags. chapter index. check out the playlist!

Homelander’s session was a disaster. Layla sits in the aftermath of it, still collecting herself a good twenty minutes after Homelander has departed. Perched on the couch, she buries her face in her hands and takes several deep breaths. Now that she’s alone, she can finally process everything that happened. She can feel the furious beat of her heart in her throat, and her legs ache. Shifting sideways, she leans down to slip off the shoes. In doing so, she catches a glimpse of her calves, where she can already see distinct hand-shaped bruises forming. Her stomach flips. Delicately, she traces the outline of blossoming purple along her skin.

He’s replaced the bruise on her neck that had only just faded.

With a sharp inhale, Layla stands up. She needs to change her clothes, and get herself out of this mindset. Tears well up in her eyes in the wake of her adrenaline fading, burning as she blinks them away. She’s hyper-aware of the feel of the bruises as she walks barefoot to her closet, slipping out of her dress with practiced ease. She hangs it up, and reaches for a linen sweater and a soft pair of pants.

Over and over, Layla replays the session in her mind as she dresses, pinpointing the moment everything changed. She’s established and enforced boundaries with him before, but never has his response to them been so visceral. Something different happened today, but try as she might, Layla can’t figure out what it was. There must have been an internal trigger. “I’m not like lots of people,” he had snarled. “Do you understand that? I’m a god, and I don’t need your fucking pity.”

She had tried to humanize him, to allow him space for this vulnerability, but today she’s learned that John is so lost to the mantle of Homelander, to the weight of his powers, that he is convinced he is above such things. It doesn’t matter that he wept against her. The second it was over, he wanted her to forget it ever happened. Layla can’t forget. Looking at the dress now, it’s still spotted wet with his tears. This doesn’t feel like a man in love with his delusions. This feels like a man trapped by them. Who told you that you have to be a god? Who won’t let you be a man?

That was the moment Layla knew she needed to see the suit stripped away. The bruises on her legs were unintended, that much she is certain of. It was as if with the flip of a switch, he went from present to wholly gone, not hearing a word she said. When he did come back to himself, he let go of her immediately, and apologized in a voice so small, she barely heard it. He wore his shame clearly, self-hatred wet in his eyes. She remembers bringing him into her arms before she could reconsider. Layla knows herself better than to think of that act of comfort as an entirely altruistic one. The truth of the matter is that she enjoys both his vulnerability and his unpredictability. More and more, taming a man like Homelander is proving to be a power trip like none other. One moment he’s utterly wrapped around her finger, and the next it’s as though she’s freefalling.

Homelander is rekindling a fire in Layla that she thought long since safely fed and satiated by her line of work, and she can't bring herself to smother the embers. Distantly, the logical side of her brain screams at her that this is madness. The dull ache in her calves calls for a restraining order, not a date. Homelander is a literal walking red flag; he wears it proudly as a cape. Yet Layla’s mind is left buzzing, drowning out that shrill cry of reason.

Lying down on the couch, she wonders what he’ll wear instead of the suit.

Layla spends most of the following week talking herself in and out of the date. Up until this point, she hasn’t needed to consider the scope of John as a whole, or her actual compatibility with him. He was a client, and all that mattered was that she treated him as such. Whoever they were in the world outside of that relationship didn’t matter. Suddenly, it could very much matter. He isn’t just John, he’s America’s Homelander. Her grandmother must be rolling in her urn. They were never a particularly patriotic family, to put it lightly. She calls Jason, who’s no help at all.

“If you want to go, then go. If you don’t want to go, don’t go.” He doesn’t know what to do with her mix of exasperation and stubbornness any more than she does. She knew even as she was speaking to him that she was being irrational. She feels like she’s going insane over the whole situation. A significant part of her agony is knowing that if she could just tell Jason who it was, the details of their relationship, or if he could see the faded bruises on her legs, she’s certain that he would tell her no, absolutely not. What she cannot figure out about herself is why she’s looking for someone else to tell her “no.” She’s lived her entire life on her own terms, but there’s something about Homelander that makes her question her capacity to make rational decisions. He’s enthralling even in her thoughts, and he’s slipping into her fantasies more and more each night.

Every time she convinces herself it’s a terrible idea spurred on by mindless infatuation, Layla picks up her phone. Every single time, she hesitates, and ultimately sets it back down. Tomorrow, she tells herself. I’ll sleep on it, and I’ll know by tomorrow. Soon enough, too many tomorrows have come and gone. It’s Friday evening, and Layla is in the back of a polished black car sent to her apartment. She’s out of time, and on her way to Vought International. It’s a chilly night, so she’s opted for a coat and pantyhose, but otherwise she’s dressed precisely the way Homelander last saw her. She drums her fingers on her thighs, once more wondering if and how he’ll uphold his end of the bargain. Layla leans closer to the window, peering up at Vought Tower. The top of the tower disappears into the haze of the night sky, too tall for her to see. She’s always considered all one hundred floors of the tower to be something of an eyesore, an out of place advertisement thrust into the skyline of the city. But up close she can at least admit it’s an impressive feat of architecture. Ugly all the same, but impressive.

The car pulls around a side road that curves into a courtyard, stopping at a security check. The headquarters of a multibillion dollar corporation hardly screamed date night romance, but John had been insistent it would offer them a spectacular view, and the privacy he required in order to meet her demands. He assured her that the food would be good, promising the best steak that New York has to offer. Once they make it through security, the drive up the courtyard is slow. The pace allows her to admire what little greenery they have tucked behind the building, which is admittedly more than she expected. The finely trimmed hedges and manicured flower beds are unfortunately broken up by gaudy bronze statues of Vought’s golden age heroes: imposing metallic faces with meticulously carved eyes that seem to follow her as she passes them, lit only by the harsh white spotlights below them. It gives the whole place an eerie, artificial atmosphere, particularly in the dark of the evening. It feels more like a graveyard than a garden.

However, much of that falls away when the car pulls up to the private entrance, and Layla sees a sleek silhouette cut out against the fluorescent hall lights. There stands Homelander not in his star-spangled usual, but in a well fitted suit. At first she thinks it black, but as he approaches the vehicle the light catches it in such a way that she realizes it’s a deep navy with black accents. The black bowtie at his neck reminds her of old Hollywood, a look that would have given even Cary Grant a run for his money. I’ll be damned, she thinks, smiling broadly. The car door swings open, and Homelander extends a rare ungloved hand to her. Slipping her hand into his, she allows him to effortlessly draw her up out of the vehicle. Though Homelander returns her smile, she can see the tension at the corners of his mouth. It reminds her of the tight way he’s been smiling for the cameras for the last several weeks, and not at all of their usual comfortable exchanges during sessions.

“You look very handsome,” she tells him, reaching up to smooth her fingers along one of the lapels of his jacket. He’s a good deal more slender than the supe suit makes him appear. His shoulders are less broad without the protruding pauldrons. His torso is ridiculously bulging. Still, he is by no means a slight man. Truth be told, she finds the figure he cuts in a formal suit far more appealing. His hair is also styled more softly, looser, as if no longer needing to compensate for the bulk of the suit. Where normally she would expect him to preen under the compliment, Homelander rolls his shoulders subtly, clearing his throat. She wonders how long it’s been since anyone new (or anyone at all) saw him in anything other than his Homelander suit.

He gives her hand a subtle squeeze, and suit or no suit, there is no doubt that the power that thrums in his body is wholly his. “Thank you,” he says, closing the car door behind her. He signals the driver off with a flick of his wrist. “And you look… radiant,” he says, regaining some of his usual composure once he’s able to shift the focus onto her. His smile thins slyly as he draws her nearer. “Looks like I’ll have to warm you up again,” he said, giving her jacket a playful little tug. “Surely it won’t be as cold inside,” Layla responds, glancing over to the double doorway. “We won’t be eating inside tonight. Still, you won’t be needing it,” he responds, slipping a hand beneath her coat, settling it on her hip. Even against the night air, the press of his hand is warm as ever. The heat of him seeping through the fabric of her dress.

Layla looks up at him, expression pinching incredulously. “It’s freezing out.” “Relax,” he purrs, closing the slight gap between them with a small step. “You trust me?” She hums with a purse of her lips, wrinkling her nose at him. “Tentatively. The ice is thin.” Homelander’s smile broadens. “Good enough for me.” With that, he scoops Layla up into his arms, startling a soft noise from her. Before she can ask what would necessitate him carrying her to dinner, her stomach flips the way it does when going down a hill in a car; a sudden shift in her gravity. Looking down, she sees the pavement she was just standing on, growing more and more distant, along with the flowerbeds and statues. Inhaling sharply, Layla grabs a tight hold of his jacket, the other arm curling around his neck. Her heart leaps in her chest, pumping a surge of adrenaline through her as the ground grows more distant, and the sickly thrill of danger climbs higher. “W-wait, hold on–”

“Relax,” Homelander says again, a laugh bubbling up beneath it. “I’m not gonna drop you, alright? I’m a professional. Just breathe,” he tells her, which she’s sure is easy for him to say. The higher they climb, the more the world below them looks surreal, like the most realistic toy city she’s ever seen. “Not long to floor eighty-eight.” “Eighty-eight?” Layla echoes incredulously, her heart skipping a beat. “Look at me,” Homelander murmurs, his voice warm in her ear. She turns sharper than she means to, staring up at him with wide eyes. Once again, unbalancing her helps him recover much of his confidence. He may not have a suit to scream superhero! but flying her to the top of a one hundred storey building is certainly one way to do it. “Atta girl, see? Safer than a plane,” he says, throwing in a little wink. He chuckles at that, and she feels as though he’s making another one of those jokes she’s not privy to.

“I would have been just as impressed if you had carried me up a hundred flights of stairs instead, you know,” Layla says, flexing her grip around his neck, her stomach flipping wildly. The ground is still fading away, and when she chances a glance up, she sees they still have a long way to go. Homelander is moving slowly enough that the breeze is gentle, but the air is only growing colder and thinner as they climb. Homelander scoffs a little laugh. “I don’t believe that.” Taking in a slow breath, Layla looks out across the city. While it had been dark on the ground, from here she can see the remnants of the sunset creeping across the edges of the horizon. Above the haze and light pollution, she can even make out stars twinkling in the night sky. Not even her high rise apartment allowed her enough altitude to stargaze in the city. It’s beautiful. A tapestry of rich blues and purples dotted with constellations stretching in every direction. She can’t remember the last time she really saw the sky.

“Okay,” she relents, resting her head on his chest, gaze lazily flitting over the star-dusted sky. “Maybe not as impressed.” He hums at that, his own stare focused solely on her, smirking his satisfaction. Layla looks up at him, and the way he waggles his brows at her makes her laugh. ”But you don’t need to look so pleased with yourself,” she says, tentatively releasing her grip on his jacket to poke the corner of his mouth, where that smirk of his sits proud. “I’m drifting freely above the finest city in the greatest country in the world, holding a beautiful woman in my arms. What’s not to be pleased about?” Homelander counters, leaning into her touch. Layla opens her palm to allow for the way he pushes into it, turning a playful little gesture into something more intimate, her hand cupped to the side of his face. His words would make her roll her eyes if he didn’t speak them with such earnestness. There is so much about him that would fall flatter than roadkill on paper, if it wasn’t for the specific kind of charisma he carries. It has captured her more than she cares to admit. When she expects to hear irony in his voice, oftentimes she is met with a sincerity that she rarely sees in men of his age and status.

The air has grown thin. Layla feels light and fuzzy in this moment, warm in his arms despite the chill of the night. Their breaths mingle visibly in the cold. The impulse to kiss him strikes her, and she follows it without a thought, her thumb stroking his cheek. The edges of his smirk soften against her lips as he kisses her back slowly, unhurried, but with no less passion. Just the way she taught him. What she had initially intended to be a brief press of her lips stretches into coaxing movements, deepening with each passing second. Layla pushes her hand up into his hair, cupping the back of his head, encouraging him with a pleased little noise. Homelander’s hand tightens at her waist, under her legs. Despite the fact he’s currently flying her nearly a hundred feet directly into the air, the eager way he follows her lead as she kisses him gives her a sense of control over him that eases the drumming of her heart.

Layla falls so deeply into the kiss that she nearly misses the gentle jostle of their landing. When she opens her eyes, she’s met with a row of hanging lights, dangling prettily from a white fabric tent set up over a patio. It’s upheld by sturdy wooden beams, with a single dining table between them. Truth be told, it’s far from what Layla had expected. The singular square table is rather small, making for a much more intimate setting than she had anticipated. “It’s warm,” she says, more thinking aloud than speaking to Homelander, who hums approvingly. “State of the art outdoor conditioning. Four regulators, one in each corner. They circulate warm air, and keep the cold out. Something about creating pressure,” he says dismissively, setting Layla down on her feet. Placing his hands on her shoulders and giving a slight squeeze, he asks slyly, “May I take your coat?”

Smiling over her shoulder at him, Layla lifts her hands to unbutton her jacket, allowing him to slide it off her arms. She feels the tips of his fingers graze her bare arms, his own hands pleasantly ungloved. “Thank you,” she says, watching him fold the garment over his forearm. He offers her his other arm, and she takes it for the walk to the table. “You’re quite the romantic, aren’t you?” She asks, taking note of the bouquet of roses set at the table, and the smattering of tealights lit all around it. Instead of being set across the table from each other, the chairs were set opposite one another at the same corner. Homelander looks pleased at that, following her eye to the table setting. “Ahh, well, maybe a little.” In addition to the flowers, there are two dishes sitting under silver cloches, though only one of the two is paired with a glass of red wine, the bottle not far away. She sits down, and Homelander drapes her coat on the back of her chair, sliding it in under her. He moves to take the seat next to her, unbuttoning the bottom of his jacket as he sits.

“Hope it’s all to your liking. Prepared fresh from the kitchens,” he says, reaching out to the silver cloche set over her plate. Lifting it off, he reveals a gorgeously plated beef filet. It’s sat atop potato puree and asparagus, with what looks to be roasted fennel on top. Layla can smell the butter and thyme immediately. She smiles, closing her eyes as she inhales it. “Smells incredible,” she says, unfolding the cloth napkin to place on her lap. She had assumed as much when he had inquired about her preference between well done, medium and rare, but this was an admittedly more delicate presentation than she expected. “You don’t drink?” She asks, reaching for the wine glass next to her plate. “No, no. Not for me. Never really acquired the taste for it. Plus, it, uhh, doesn’t do much for me. I’d have to drink the whole winery for a good buzz,” Homelander explains, absently rubbing his hands up and down his thighs. When was the last time he wore a pair of pants that weren’t made of padded material with an NIJ protection level? “Touché,” Layla responds, bringing the glass to her lips. She inhales first, and then takes a sip. It’s delicious, rich and subtly fruity, but not enough to overpower the meal. Glancing at the bottle, she recognizes the label: it’s a vintage Saint Émilion, easily worth a couple hundred dollars. She gives an approving hum. “More for me, I suppose,” she says playfully, setting the glass down. “All yours,” he agrees. His smile is gradually becoming less tight, though his posture is not. He’s sitting straight with his hands on his thighs, nervous in a way she hasn’t seen him before. “Not trying to get me drunk, are you?” She asks, quirking her brow.

He huffs a laugh, leaning back in his chair, seemingly eased by the banter. “You an easy drunk?” “Not in the least. It’ll take more than one bottle,” she shoots back, smiling as she takes a sip. “Well, there’s plenty more where that came from,” he says, interlacing his hands in his lap. 

“Careful, I can become quite an expensive date,” she says slyly, cutting herself a bite of the filet. Clearly he was one to splurge. “And an even more expensive fuck,” Homelander adds without missing a beat, his tone a touch lower. The two of them sit in a dense silence while Layla chews her bite, taken aback. Homelander takes in her expression, and as he does, she can see the gears turning in his head. Some of that tension creeps back into the line of his shoulders as he realizes he may have spoken something that should have been kept a thought. He sits up straight. “Which… is to say–” he begins, trying to recover, but stops himself when Layla starts to laugh. “It’s okay,” she says, finishing her glass in a final sip. “You’re right. I’m a very expensive fuck,” she says, licking her lips. His gaze drops to her lips, following the movement with the precision of a stalking predator. He swallows visibly, eventually smiling in return. “That’s the lifestyle I chose for myself. You’re doing well in keeping up,” she says, giving her empty glass a pointed little tap. He takes the hint and picks up the bottle to refill her glass. “Why did you choose it?” He asks, setting the bottle back down. “Your lifestyle. Your… occupation.”

An inevitable question, but one that remains no less complicated to answer, regardless of how many times it comes up.

Layla gives a contemplative hum. “I’m good at it,” she says, absently running her fingers up and down the stem of her glass. “Better than I ever was in an office. Happier, too. I work when I want, I charge what I want, and I love who I want.” Homelander makes a skeptical little noise. “You don’t love those other guys, though.” Other guys. He’s specific about that, she notes. She decides not to address it for now, nor the fact that not all of her clients are even ‘guys.’ Layla takes a slow breath, and then a sip of her drink, formulating her answer. “I started escorting because I knew I would meet people like me. People who felt incapable of finding intimate connection the way everyone around them did.” She may not be drunk, but the wine has certainly helped loosen her lips. ”I have total control of who can enjoy my time, my affection, for how long, and in exchange they show me the parts of themselves they don’t want the world to see. There is true intimacy in that.” She tilts her head slightly, gauging his response. He, after all, is one such person. His posture has changed completely: he’s leaning in now, with his forearm braced on the table. She continues, “Just because it’s paid for doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I build relationships with the people I want to build relationships with.” “Don’t you think that’s dangerous?” He asks, a lilt to his voice that Layla has difficulty parsing. “Selling people on the idea that you really do love them?” “I don’t say these things to my clients. You’re my date,” she counters, taking a bite of her meal. He straightens up slightly at that, as if he’s been praised. “But no, I don’t. I do my job, and I do it well. I take precautions.”

“Precautions,” Homelander echoes. “Because it’s dangerous.” “You’re not going to tell me anything about my profession I don’t already know,” she says, amused. “I’ve been doing this for years.” “What do your parents think of it?” Layla considers him a moment. “They died when I was young,” she says. No sense in dragging that out any more than it needs to be. “My grandparents raised me, but they passed, oh… About eleven years ago.”

“How did they die?” He asks immediately, brows slightly furrowed.

She could almost laugh. While on the one hand it’s a tactless approach, it’s also refreshing. Oftentimes, that answer means a handful of empty condolences for a bunch of people the person never knew, people who died decades ago, and Layla comforting them through the discomfort associated with death and grief. Homelander didn’t even blink.

“My grandparents passed peacefully within a year of each other,” she says, swirling her wine. “She went first, and I think he just… didn’t want to be here without her,” she says, pursing her lips slightly. “My parents, on the other hand, they had a–let’s say it was a flare for the dramatic,” she says, her smile turning a little wry. “They were junkies.” Homelander’s brows lift. “Drugs?” “No, no. They were addicts, but it wasn’t for drugs. They were adrenaline junkies. It’s how they met. Skydiving,” she says, finishing off her second glass. This time, Homelander refills it without prompt. The gesture makes her smile, and she tips her glass in thanks. “They slowed down for a bit after they had me, but not for long. Eventually they started performing for crowds. You know, stunts. Motorcycles, jumps, demolition derbies. Whatever thrilled them.” “So, what… Blew up in a freak accident?” He asks, shifting to rest his hand on his thigh. This time, Layla does laugh. There’s something liberating about his irreverence. He’s not treating the subject with the kid gloves that everyone else does, and it’s clear he doesn’t expect her to, either. “More or less. They planned this… insane jump. Fitted my dad’s Pontiac with a homemade rocket. They were supposed to clear a jump over a building set for demolition, but the rocket malfunctioned. It didn’t engage until they were nearly off the ramp, and ended up just… flying them straight into the side of the building.” Looking over at Homelander, Layla cocks her head. She half expects him to laugh, crack a joke or make some reference, but he’s just watching her. She sips her drink. “You tell that story pretty straight,” he says at last. She gives a small shrug. “It’s been a long time.” He nods, tapping his middle finger on the table. “Real Thelma and Louise of them.” There it is, Layla muses. “I never knew two people more in love than my parents. They were happiest when they were risking their lives together. Can’t think of a more fitting way for two people to go out,” she says, and though she means it, even she can hear the emptiness sinking into the tone of her voice. She takes a long final drink from her wine, setting the empty glass aside. “How old were you?” He asks. He moves to refill her glass, but she lifts a hand to stop him, shaking her head subtly. He sets the bottle back down. “Twelve.” She chooses not to elaborate, despite the flood of memories that come with the answer. Homelander hums. “Really took after ‘em, huh?” Layla blinks, immediately disarmed. “I–excuse me?”

He looks surprised by her surprise. “I mean… C’mon. Sure, you’re not strapping rockets to your car or throwing yourself out of planes, but you’re not working a desk job, either. You said it yourself. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know,” he says, echoing her word for word. “You work a dangerous job, and you like it.” She can say with confidence that the last thing she expected to happen tonight was for him to start psychoanalyzing her. She huffs an incredulous little laugh, suddenly wishing she hadn’t stopped him from refilling her glass.

“That’s not the same thing,” she dismisses, smiling despite the nagging unease it dredges up somewhere in the back of her mind. “Besides, you’re hardly one to talk about occupational hazards. What made you choose to become a hero?” It’s not her most skillful conversational redirect, but she’s also three glasses deep in a very good wine. “I didn’t,” he answers plainly, his demeanor shifting alongside the direction of the conversation. Layla’s smile falters. “What?” “I didn’t choose it,” he says, voice duller yet. “It was chosen for me. I mean, c’mon. What else was I gonna be? A desk jockey? Hahah, nope.” He sucks a pitchy noise through his teeth. “Like Jesus on the cross… It was written in stone,” he says, tapping his fingers on a roll atop the table. “But do you like it?” She leans towards him, brows pinched. “Being a hero. Do you like it?” He pulls a strange face, looking as if no one’s ever asked him that before. He clears his throat, visibly uncomfortable with the direction her question threatens to take them. “What’s not to like? America loves me.” The words sound stale from his mouth. Layla can’t fault him for them, though. She’s seen glimpses of how important Homelander is to John’s identity, seen firsthand the way praise and adoration can undo him behind closed doors. It comes as no surprise that it’s something he needs to believe. It makes something in her ache for him. Layla shifts closer yet, and gently settles her hand atop his on the table, bringing the percussive tapping of his fingers to a halt. He looks at her sharply, though the set of his gaze softens. His eyes look wider, more vulnerable. Perhaps he forgot he was without his gloves, or he just wasn’t expecting the contact. Either way, it brings him back to her. She squeezes his hand. “It’s okay,” she says, her thumb stroking back and forth. “It’s okay. It’s just us. You don’t need to do that.” You don’t need to pretend. Homelander now wears the kind of surprise Layla might expect to see if she’d slapped him. He stares with his lips parted, a thought half-formed on them. He lifts his other hand over hers, fingertips brushing along the back of her hand, skating up to her wrist, light as a feather as he holds her gaze. Then next thing Layla knows, his grip on her wrist tightens and he’s pulling her body up against his. With a gentle effortlessness that only his strength could allow for, he brings them both to their feet, his other hand moving to the small of her back. The sudden rise is disorienting, but the kiss is so warm and fervent that she can’t help the little moan that escapes her. He takes the opportunity to slip his tongue between her lips, letting go of her wrist in favor of cupping both sides of her face. He always kisses her with such urgency, holding tight, like she may disappear if he doesn’t.

It feels incredible to match his pace, to kiss him as hungrily as he kisses her without the nagging call to slow him down, to maintain his expectations. She falls into it without reserve, free of the rigid pretense of their sessions. She can’t blame it on the wine, she’s been thinking about this for weeks. He pushes his hands further back into her hair, still kissing her like he expects her to stop him at any second, desperate to taste what he can before it’s gone. 

He moves against her with such a force, it causes her back to arch, head tipping all the way back. He takes one hand from her hair to slip around her waist instead, bringing her body back against his. She puts her own hands on his shoulders, gripping him tight and pulling him in turn. He makes sweet, starved noises against her lips when she slips her hand up into his hair, cupping the back of his head. Homelander is the first to pull away, though he doesn’t go far. He kisses the corner of her mouth, her jaw, down the line of her throat. He moves his hands to her hips to hold her steady while he takes full advantage of the plunging neckline of the dress he chose for her. “Come home with me,” he says between kisses, voice thin, ravenous. Her heart skips a beat. Say no. “Yes.” Chapter Five.

[egophiliac]

should've just let Vil be the one to fly, it would've gone SO much easier. 😔

also HEY how are everyone else's pulls going, because I have had the most RIDICULOUS luck, seriously, halloween magic is 100% real

[pidgydraws]

💋 first aid 💋

[qiu-yan]

gonna be real here boss when it comes to the ancestral hall scene i am 100% on jiang cheng's side

[corpsentry]

pick your battles

[lcs-scar]

PLEAS PLEAS PLLEEEEAASSSS

Can you draw some pete content?? 🙌🙌🙏🙏🙏🙇🙇🙇

THAK YOU IF ITS YES

sure!!

[karalovesallthegirls]

Also have another “first words spoken to you are on your skin” soulmate AU idea where Kara is a journalist assigned to shadow the controversial CEO of L-Corp for the day. It’s a big deal for her to get this assignment, so of course she trips the second she’s near the other woman and tries awkwardly to redeem herself.

The CEO stares at her almost in shock, and then says nothing. At all. Ever, for the entire day.

Kara spends hours following Lena Luthor around trying to fill the silence, but no amount of questions get her to talk. Lena almost seems to be running away at some points - like she’s trying to lose her? - and the few times she’s managed to catch her actually talking to someone she goes silent the second she sees Kara.

She asks around if Miss Luthor is usually like this and everyone looks at her like she’s crazy. Apparently she’s the only one who gets the silent treatment. By the end of her first day shadowing she’s walking away with half a page of observations and not a single quote. Miss Grant is going to kill her.

But that’s okay. It’s fine, this isn’t over. She has four days of shadowing ahead of her and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t finish this with a quote from the woman herself. It’s only a matter of time.

[non-un-topo]

To the next adventure...

Image description and details under cut

I.D.

[A drawing of Nicky, Joe, Quynh, and Andy from The Old Guard. They are all in profile, walking in a straight line facing the sun. They are dressed in medieval clothing and armour, and each carry their own weapons and bags. Nicky has his sword, a crossbow, a quiver of bolts, a dagger at his belt and another strapped to his ankle. Joe is holding his sword, a bag, and a coin purse. Quynh's bow is over her back, and her quiver is at her hip. Two daggers are strapped to her belt, one of them matching Nicky's. Andy is holding her axe, two bags, and a dagger. They each have serene expressions and closed eyes, as if they're not in a hurry. In the background, the seasons change from winter to spring, summer, fall. There is an old tree behind them, and its branches change with the seasons.]

[drolta]

Dubai trio + text posts

[cappucosmic]

I think that once it's all said and done, Shi Qingxuan probably feels melancholic when looking at the ocean.

[starry-bi-sky]

mmmmmm read a disciple shen yuan/shizun luo binghe fanfic about two days ago where the first chapter was the Immortal Conference arc, and SQQ was the one who had to be pushed into the abyss (he was still the villain) except Luo Binghe was refusing and was like, lowkey losing his mind about SQQ being so close to the edge. SQQ ended up having to be the one to fall in himself because of the system's punishment system. The rest of the fic is leading up to that moment. But like, MMM i've been obsessively thinking about that first chapter for DAYS ever since.

now i've been in svsss for a grand total of *checks watch* a week. but god obsessed with that. I want to write/read a fic where disciple SQQ goes a little nuts down there. Like keep all of the things that make SQQ, SQQ, but just. Throw in a little bit more trauma in there. A little bit of a mental break. Let him go a little nuts as a treat. Just a tad unhinged. I wanna see him go, just a little, "god fuck it, i've tried so hard to change this shitty story's outcome and it feels like everything i've done has been for nothing. I'm going to die in this world no matter what I do, I've been doomed from the start, so might as well die the way I want to." and he just, breaks a little! Under all the stress.

He still retains the traits that makes shen yuan, shen yuan, like his overwhelming kindness. But he's just! yk. A little less patient. Paranoid. Jumpy. Colder. A little more aloof and closed off. A little more Shen Jiu. He's no asshole child abuser, but he was a Number One Hater in his past life and he's leaning into that old habit a little more now.

(On a totally coincidental not-at-all related note, there's not enough SJ-and-SY-are-the-same-people fics out there that i've found. This is totally unrelated...)

The Endless Abyss turns the mind into an over-sharpened blade, and SQQ is both fascinated and perhaps a little excited to explore a place that doesn't have a lot of info on it in the mortal realm, but still terrified out of his mind. And he's no Luo Binghe, he doesn't have the sheer brute strength and power to just bulldoze his way through, so he has to be a lot more sneaky and cunning if he wants to survive.

The fic itself role-swapped LBH and SQQ so that SQQ was the half-demon (which lowkey fucks) and LBH the human, but I'm equally-if-not-more obsessed with the idea that LBH remains the half-heavenly demon and SQQ the human. If only because I keep thinking about SQQ befriending some demons (particularly and specifically a group of succubi) and they grow very attached to this Human Cultivator so through magic plot stuff they create some kind of seal/illusion/talisman that makes SQQ appear as a demon because a human cultivator in the endless abyss may as well be the equivalent of putting a giant neon target on your back.

And iirc Shen Jiu was taught demonic cultivation by that one guy(?? i've only been here a week so im not caught up in ALL of the lore yet) so that could totally happen here.

(On the other end of the realms, poor Shizun Luo Binghe is just. losing his fucking mind over losing his most precious and beloved disciple. About .5 seconds from burning down the peaks himself. somebody sedate him.)

The Endless Abyss sucks and SQQ is having a really terrible time and can feel himself going lowkey mad, but also holy shit look at all this WORLD-BUILDING. look at all this flora and fauna, and oh if he had the equipment for it he'd be writing all of this down. ALL OF IT. He was kinda-sorta-already planning on never leaving the Abyss as some sort of fucked up self-exile and self-preservation thing, but now he might? actually just?? never leave if he can help it, like he lowkey likes it down here.

anyways the next time anyone ever sees SQQ again he's got hair so long its almost touching the ground and he's either in rags and half-feral or he's been completely dolled up by his adoptive succubi sisters and still about three seconds from biting anyone who tries to touch him. (he's also lowkey trying to book it back down to the abyss even if he has desperately missed all of his friends and shizun)

[phonification]

ive been thinking about taco and balloon forming a little alliance post s1/ pre s2 where they'd (begrudgingly) work together planning on how to break into hotel OJ to steal stuff to take back to their makeshift camp like food, blankets, pillows, etc,,, anything that could be useful to them

[egophiliac]

do skully have pokemon?

Pumpkaboo is the obvious one, but y'know, sometimes the obvious one is the right one! (we'll say SUPER SIZE Pumpkaboo, just for fun. big pumpkin for big skeleton boy.) and another person actually also suggested Greavard, which I somehow hadn't considered, but feels so perfect that I feel like I should have. dangit.

(they can also have little Nightmare Suit costumes :D)

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[iristial]

The fact that Shouma hid his heritage out of fear of being ostracized and hated on for being the same 'monster' as the ones partaking in human trafficking and drug dealing, because everyone he's met up until now gets terrified at the sight of him so it feeds into his poor self-image and insecurities, and Hanto's reaction basically 'proved' that Shouma was right to think no one would love him for who he was no matter where he goes...I'm gonna be sick

[critter-covenant]

"ooooh thank you! Thank you! Thank you!!!"

They'd be good friends I like to thinmk