Hey, this is really awkward, but I saw you mention on my post that you have another chapter of burning like embers and it's so so good! I've been meaning to write a comment on it for months but, you know, life. I am absolutely obsessedddddd with the concept you're exploring and this is me humbly begging for you to drop the new chapter. I can't stop thinking about it.
Okay. 💗🥺💗
Chapters: 4/?
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Israel Hands, Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands, Israel Hands/Lucius Spriggs
Characters: Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Stede Bonnet, Israel Hands, Lucius Spriggs, Roach (Our Flag Means Death), Fang (Our Flag Means Death), Ivan (Our Flag Means Death), Jim Jimenez
Additional Tags: Enemies to Lovers, or friends to lovers to enemies to lovers in the case of GentleBeard, Dubious Consent, Fake/Pretend Relationship, (sort of?), like does it count if absolutely everyone KNOWS it’s fake?, But they don’t know we know, basically that one friends episode but muppet style, they’re playing relationship chicken, Quote: We've got a fuckery on our hands! (Our Flag Means Death), Canon-typical disregard of physics, and human biology, Blackbeard | Edward Teach Needs a Hug, and a nap
Series: Part 25 of Our Flag Means Death Works
Summary:
Edward Teach is tired.
Tired of being Blackbeard, tired of piracy, tired of fighting (and fucking) with his first mate, and so very tired of Stede fucking Bonnet chasing him around the Caribbean, trying to win his forgiveness.
But he can't see a way out... (except maybe death; he hasn't tried dying yet...)
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Lately I've been thinking of an old favourite teacher, who for most of the Seventies lived in the woods I'd later grow up in. He wrote a long essay about the place, focusing on his friendship with the Indigenous caretaker who introduced him to the land and that caretaker's father, who stewarded the woods for decades mentoring/at the employ of the senator who gave this place US government legal protection. I found this decades-old essay after impulse-Googling my teacher's name early this year, around the time I had a serious, abrupt fracturing of my health/political+sexual selves and lost my mind a lil bit. One of those v straightforward ancestor offering you a Helping Hand moments! And thank fuck for the timing – I needed an anchor in the place where I grew up, and a mentor who I absolutely trusted had my back.
Back home atm so today I followed the brook along to the fork my teacher describes in a story where he first happens across the house in the woods he’d rent and stay in most of his thirties. The bridge that his teacher the caretaker built out of three carefully selected fallen red oaks one full moon evening has been replaced with shale and concrete. The house was still there, occupied, and the brook sounded just like he said. Nearly every class, he'd read aloud or tell us a story – about the woods, his SNCC days, Indigenous and African history, poetry, memorable shit that meant I could hear his deep voice exactly in ambling pace with the water. Ankle-deep with tiny fish investigating my bare feet, I thought about the man who taught my teacher from when he was a year or two older than me now. I hadn't been planning to speak to him, didn't want to have it taken as any kind of ask, but it felt weird not to say thanks so I did. I sank my feet into the mica-glint sand and tried to pay attention.
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anyway, uhhh time travel au steve finally getting to look at hopper and daring to keep looking when the man meets his eyes; it no longer feels forbidden even though now there’s a weight to the way they look each other. hopper’s death is in the room with them. his death a little more impactful now that it’s in this world, too
“what is it?” hopper asks, and his voice is gruff but steve’s learning that that’s just the way he sounds now. not softened yet, not smoothed around the edges on the journey to get his woman and to care for his daughter. the gravel in his voice is a bit like the pieces of his heart coming out with every word he speaks and steve wonders if he really is hurting all this time. but he knows he is. grief does that to you. sudden, insurmountable grief.
and he wonders, too, if, given time, his voice will sound like that as well. if it will get gravelly from lack of use so that all the pieces of his heart remain lodged in his lungs keeping him from breathing and making themselves known every time he tries to speak, to talk about it.
“steve?”
“nothing,” he says, snapping back into the moment, curling in a little on himself even though the cabin is so warm he wants to cry about it all the time now. “just…”
hopper waits. lets him look. that patience is new. a little unsettling, too.
he wants to hug him. it’s completely irrational, they’re not like that, they don’t care about each other like that or pretend like they’re some kind of family where you can just go ask for a hug, or offer one; or… but he died. and now he’s back. and steve wants to cry about that all the time, too, and—
he swallows. “nothing.”
a hum is his only response, the sound not as gravelly as before, almost melodious as it lingers between them. his body feels like it’s about to burst, and his chest is constructing, and he really wants… he really wants that hug. or just to go sit beside him and lean into him. feel that proof of life. tell him he’s glad, apologise again for his words. i wish you’d stayed dead.
the urge gets worse, and he imagines getting up and asking for a hug. he imagines hopper getting out of his dusty old armchair and closing the distance, pulling him into his arms because he sees how fucked up steve is and isn't scared of it.
he doesn’t. he won’t. and the impossibility of it leaves him tearing at the seams.
@spookednsaucy you say such real things
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Fellow Prisoner Li, Part 6: Bloodbender (Positive)
Read from the beginning || Previous
“When the moon rises,” Hama spoke softly, as they guarded the door of the inn.
Katara eyed the sky above the trees. Evening was coming, but the sun would still be up when Tui fully rose. But it wasn’t night that gave them power: it was the moon. The moon, which wasn’t quite full anymore.
“You’re stronger than I ever was,” her waterbending master said, squeezing her wrist. “And we have to try.”
Fire Nation imprisonment was what they were bound for, if they didn’t try now. Katara had already stared into that fate, and broken its last survivors free.
She stretched out her fingers, slowly. Watched the Fire Nation princess, impatiently pacing across the clearing.
She’d do more than try.
* * *
“A spirit,” the princess repeated, pinching the bridge of her nose. “That kidnaps people. Every full moon.”
“Yes, princess,” one of the guards said. They’d just come from the town.
“Then find me his bones, if you must, but find him,” the princess snapped. She had no patience for this.
Katara would have as much patience as she needed. Just like Hama, in that prison.
Just like the moon, as it sang to her blood. Soon.
* * *
Soon.
* * *
“Princess, we found—”
“There was a cave, we’ve got more people seeing to the rest—”
“Bring him here,” the princess said, belying her own demand by stalking closer to the soldier who was carrying a limp form. Azula’s back was to the inn. The attention of the other soldiers was on the newcomers, and what they carried.
Now.
Azula stopped mid-stride. Jerked, like someone had pulled her strings taut. It took a moment for the soldiers to notice that something was wrong. Took them longer, to identify the source.
Katara didn’t need to stand to do this. She sat on the steps of the inn, and crooked her fingers, and made the princess spin towards her in a pirouette human muscles were not made for.
“Good,” Hama whispered, into her ear.
“You’re going to order them to let us go,” Katara said. “Or this will be the last thing you feel.”
It… looked horrible. Worse than when Hama had her practice, during the full moon, on the chicken-pig that was to be their dinner. They’d butchered it afterwards, and the master had shown her the way the blood vessels had burst and muscles torn where the soft flesh had twisted too hard against bone. Slow movements, Hama had said. Smooth. Like hanging a rag to drip, not like wringing it out.
Unless you want them down, she’d added, and turned her knife away from anatomy and towards making them a stew. Then as fast as you can.
The princess jerked in her hold, as much as she was able. Her torso was free, the soft organs and lungs and heart left alone. Her head, as well. Katara held her by arms and legs, as she’d been taught.
Don’t try for the head unless you want them dead. The brain has a lot of water.
“You dare,” the princess spat.
Katara looked at her. For the first time, she was not at all afraid of the Fire Nation.
“Order them,” she repeated.
“Princess—” said a solider. One of many who were uneasily shifting into stances ready for attack.
“Stand down,” the princess barked. “Let them leave. Kill them if they kill me.”
Katara stayed sitting on the steps, her fingers cramping, meeting the princess’ gaze with her own as Sokka worked to free Appa from the net. As Hama helped the elders into the saddle, one by one. As Sokka politely—Excuse me, I’ll just be taking that, thanks for the find—reclaimed Li.
She couldn’t see their firebender breathing, from here. But she could feel the blood in his veins. She could feel it all around, in every enemy and every friend, pounding against her head. Her fingers twitched involuntarily. The princess grit her teeth against a gasp.
“I’ll just be taking this, too,” Sokka said, scooping the princess up in the same bridal carry he’d just used for Li. “You can tell your Fire Lord to expect our ransom letter.”
“Sokka,” Katara said, between teeth clenched with strain. She couldn’t tell him I can’t do this much longer, because she didn’t know what would happen if the soldiers or princess heard. But she couldn’t, it was… it was too much, and everywhere, and she wasn’t sure for how much longer it would just be the princess.
Pulling water from plants had been easier. She hadn’t cared which ones had wilted.
“Katara,” Sokka said. “It’s free royal hostage.”
The princess went in the saddle. Hama helped Katara up, too. And then they were in the air, and—and she could let go. Relax. Let the only pulse she felt be her own.
She’d done it.
She was crying, and Hama was hugging her, and another elder on her other side was too, and the moon was high above them white and brilliant and she’d done it.
“You’re so strong,” Hama said, holding her tight. “Such a master you’ll make. You’ll never have anything to fear, my child. It’s the world that will fear you. Our beautiful, brave southern bloodbender.”
The princess sat in the back of the cramped saddle, rubbing slowly at her arms. She was watching Katara. Katara couldn’t read her expression, through the tears. And to be honest? She didn’t really care.
She’d done it, she’d done it, and she could have done so much worse.
If the princess didn’t recognize mercy when she saw it, it was only because she was still alive to disagree.
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Fandom: Star Wars, Prequel Trilogy, Jedi Apprentice Series, The Wrath of Darth Maul, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars Legends: Tales of the Jedi
Chapter: 27/?
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Xanatos, Qui-Gon JInn & Feemor, Feemor & Bruck Chun, Xanatos & Qui-Gon Jinn
Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Xanatos, Qui-Gon Jinn, Feemor, Bruck Chun, Bant Eerin, Tahl, Quinlan Vos, Ahsoka Tano, Orykan Tamarik, Cay Qel-Droma
Additional Tags: Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Angst, Fluff, Liberal Use of the Force, Found Family, Secret Identity, Yoda's Disaster Lineage, Redemption, Psychological Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Slavery, Minor Character Death, Graphic Death, Body Horror, Force Ghosts, Minor OCs, BAMF Obi-Wan Kenobi
Summary:
“Young Bant Eerin is having…difficulties.”
Feemor frowns. “Master, we have no way of knowing what she is truly seeing. It could be past, present or future— and we do not even know if the future she sees will come to pass.”
Even so, Bant’s visions are troubling, full of shadow and violence. At the centre of it all is one person. Sometimes man. Sometimes boy. Sometimes something else entirely. But it is always Kenobi, there is no denying that. His essence is the same, no matter how it twists and warps and crumbles.
“If we could only find him—” Qui-Gon interrupts himself, gaze far-off. “In another life, maybe, he could have been my- my padawan, but now…”
Feemor worries for his former Master. And for this strange youngling he's never even met, and likely never will.
--
In which Obi-Wan acts in the only way he knows how after a lifetime of regret and self-sacrifice.
But the thing with that is this: Obi-Wan has thought himself to be alone for far, far too long. And he is not the only player on the field.
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