#terminal case of brainworms rn

[quietwingsinthesky]

⛑️and/or 🛏️ for any terrible blonde boy in the roster rn <3

you know me. i can’t resist a little (probably inaccurate) first aid.

The only thing that saved him, the Doctor is painfully aware, was that Lucy Saxton had never held a gun in her life. If not for that, there would have been nothing for the Doctor to do, but beg the Master to regenerate. There’s another life skimming along the one he’s living, so close he can almost taste the helpless grief, but it was already unreachable by the time the bullet lodged itself in the Master’s shoulder instead and when the Doctor finally dragged him (unwilling but injured to the point where his resistance didn’t mean much) into the TARDIS to take care of it, that other possibility was fading away like morning mist and his borrowed loss with it.

Here, the Master is alive, and breathing, and bleeding. He’s snapping at the Doctor like a wounded animal, teeth and all, until the Doctor makes him sit and bow over a table. The Master’s knuckles are white as bone as he grips his hands together. The Doctor touches his bare shoulder, feeling the heat of his life through the latex gloves he’d hastily put on, the slickness of blood coating his fingers. The Master flinches, once from his touch and a second time when the movement jars the bullet trapped between muscle and bone.

“If you’re going to torture me, hurry up and get started,” he says, though the Doctor can hear his gritted teeth.

He hovers his hand over the wound for a moment. Pressing down would mean agony. If the bullet had splintered after impact, it would drive each shard of it deeper.

No one would deserve it more after the last year.

The Master makes another noise, a sharp breath sucked in through his teeth. It rattles through his body. He’s sweating, a sheen across the back of his neck and soaking his hair.

The Doctor holds him steady.

“I’m going to take it out,” he tells the Master. It’s practically instinct at this point to reach out telepathically to calm him down. Even species who don’t have a lick of telepathic ability can still receive a signal or two, even unaware. The Master, by contrast, is very aware of what the Doctor’s doing, and he’s the first one to fight being reassured. “I’m going to help you,” the Doctor persists, just as stubbornly.

He places a hand on the back of the Master’s neck. It slips until he tightens his grip.

“Stay,” the Doctor orders.

For once, the Master listens. He does it with teeth bared and every muscle in his body tensed, but he listens.

The Doctor examines the torn hole in his shoulder. Until he regenerates, if he regenerates, it will scar and ache. Gingerly, the Doctor picks up a sterile pair of tweezers and sets to work removing caved-in flesh and shards of the bullet. The Master twitches under him each time he feels something get dragged out of him, and the Doctor suppresses the urge to tell him that he’s safe now.

[tls12lessthan3]

hi victor how are ya. my mutuals reading orv rn and it's got me thinking. for me the moment where i went from "loving the novel" to "terminally unwell about the novel" was kim dokja destroying the absolute throne. do you have a similar moment where you realized you would have permanent brainworms

hi nic! i would say definitely the moment that made me realise i was going to be obsessed with orv for a while was the 41st shin yoosoung fight. i read the part where it seemed like shin yoosoung was going to join their party and i remember feeling really annoyed i thought it was overly cliche and i couldnt think of a way they could handle the power imbalance between her and the party that wouldnt make me roll my eyes out of my skull. i actually thought 'eh i'll probably drop this soon' but then paul the dokkaebi came in and fucked everything up because 'the constellations' (the readers) don't like this ending and id noticed the connection between the two within the narrative before but it was the first time it really got shoved in your face i feel and it really felt like a gut punch to me. it gave me a sense of responsibility for what happened to the characters and really made me feel like i was in the book with them which immediately locked me the fuck in and it became all i could think about. it was such a good moment of storytelling for me.

BUT i would also say a moment that looking back engaged me a lot more than i thought at the time was during the subway station arc when jung heewon wants to kill the men taking advantage of the women due to the uneven food supply and kim dokja tells her that that will not solve the women's issue of food insecurity. it was an immediately much more nuanced approach to what i think you could fairly call a depiction of survival sex work than id ever seen in this type of novel before. i feel as though its typically depicted as a much more black and white kill-the-bad-guys-and-save-the-girl issue which reflects real life attitudes that if we just get rid of the guys accessing sex workers services they wouldnt have to sell them anymore. and orv does more or less eventually take that approach but that acknowledgement of 'no, the best way is to provide everyone with enough food they don't have to sell any services for it at all' was still there, yknow? like to be clear i do not think this is a good depiction of survival sex work or even necessarily an all that purposeful one but it is a case where it is approached with more nuance than i expected and i found that very interesting. while it wasn't as strong of a 'holy shit' moment as during the 41st shin yoosoung arc its definitely one of those moments that kept me reading up to it