#the one that looks like caustic lines

[sodacowboy]

:/

[hawnks]

Takami Keigo doesn't want to see you.

Of course, he's too well trained to say it in so many words, but when he 'forgets' his session this afternoon, you get the message.

Unfortunately for him, you're stubborn. You show up at his apartment in the dormitories, ring his bell until your fingers numb.

Only then does he crack open the door, just enough for you to catch his forbidding smile, a caustic gleam to his eyes. "What can I help you with, this fine evening?"

"You missed our appointment," you say pleasantly. "This is the third time."

"Oh, must have just slipped my mind," he says with a dismissive little wave. "I'll catch you next time."

The door slams in your face.

Being so curtly dismissed by a top ranking officer should probably send you into a panic, but the stats you pulled up for him after his no-show are even more concerning. This is quickly turning into an emergency, and unfortunately it's your job on the line if he succumbs to corruption.

Who would blame the second most powerful Sentinel alive, when there's a feckless guide as a scapegoat.

"I'm going to ring the bell again," you say, loudly.

After a moment of silence, you think he must not have heard you.

Then the door swings open. "Fine," he snaps.

You follow him to the living room, watch as he drops himself on the couch with a sigh, eyes squeezed shut.

You'd never known guiding to be this much of a chore for Sentinels. Most of your roster is rather clingy and covetous of your time. None of them has ever been late to an appointment with you.

"Well?" he prods. "Get on with it."

You hesitate. The tension he seems to be holding will make this a lot more difficult, strenuous for you both. "Do you maybe want to talk for a bit? Or I could put on some white noise."

He opens his eyes just enough to give you a cutting look. "No."

You surrender with a sigh, coming to sit next to him on the couch. Every Sentinel prefers contact a different way; some want you to hug them, pet their hair, a few have even asked you to kiss them, fuck them, though you've never fulfilled that type of request, your boundaries in this job too firm for it.

You want to ask him what would make this easier for him, but you're sure waiting any longer will only set him off. So, delicately, you take his hand.

The first draw is always the hardest, the corrupt energy being nullified by your own. Some outside force reaching in, invasive despite the relief.

Takami flinches.

You go slower, a soft steady ebb, pulling the poison from him in silken thread.

His hand relaxes in yours.

You reach deeper, welcoming the full flood between you, warmth and light suffusing you both. And it feels how it's supposed to -- natural.

When your watch chimes, signaling the sessions end, Takami blinks out of his stupor. He'd melted during the thirty minutes you worked on him, body curled toward yours, face falling onto your shoulder.

He pulls away swiftly, shocked by his own willingness to lean on you.

You rise, marking off the details of your appointment on your tablet. "I can come back tomorrow, to finish up. You haven't been guided in a long time, so I couldn't get it all in one session. Does 2pm work for you?"

He's not prepared for the question. "Um. Yeah?"

You mark that down as well, then see yourself out.

It takes three more sessions for you to fully clear the corrupted energy from his body. In his haze he admits to you the reason he's so standoffish to Guides, why he dodges his sessions with such fervor.

"It's never felt good. Always felt like I'm being held down, trapped. Made me feel antsy, nervous." He buries his face against your throat, inhaling deeply. You'd started off just holding his hand again, but now he hugs your entire arm against his chest, your fingers twined. "It's not like that with you."

"I'm glad, Mr. Takami," you return. "Please don't ignore my emails from now on."

As you make your notes, you ask him his availability for next month.

He blinks at you. "You're not coming back tomorrow?"

You check your calendar. You'd had to push back several of your regular appointments to make room for the past few days. "I'm booked solid for the next two weeks, at least."

You glance at him, taking in his appearance, his general well being. You reach a hand out to cup his cheek, urging him to meet your eyes. He startles, first, before leaning into your touch.

"You seem fine," you decide, pulling away, already heading for the door. "I'll contact you later about our next session."

He trails after you, linger at the precipice as you take the elevator back down to your floor.

...

He never ignores you emails, after that.

In fact, he sends many of his own. He gets your phone number, somehow. Some days he shows up with coffee, or snacks, sits with you on the couch while you eat.

He's always touching you during those times, brushing hair behind your ears or straightening your shirt collar. Mostly he just holds your hand, playing with your fingers or clutching it in his own lap.

You don't guide him during any of these impromptu visits, too weary from the rest of your overfull schedule -- but you've heard of this type of attachment from other Guides.

Sentinels tend to imprint on guides they have a decent connection with. Part survival instinct, part status seeking. A Sentinel without a guide is doomed. A Sentinel with a high match-rate is likely to be stronger than their peers.

But that's the thing about un-bonded Sentinels, they're always on the lookout for a better Guide, their perfect mate.

Takami is overly attached to you now, but it will pass.

...

Or so you thought.

You're sent out into the aftermath of a battle that rocks the city. Dozens of Sentinels pushed themselves to the breaking point, on the brink of corruption, about to turn into the very monsters they fight to suppress.

You spot Takami in the midst of the wreckage. Exhausted, but giving you a shakey smile when your eyes meet. He limps toward you, so glad to see you, so ready for the safety and warmth of your arms--

Someone calls your name. Urgent, an emergency. Another Sentinel with no one to take care of them.

You turn away from Takami, and you go.

He'd fought hard, but his body has grown used to the abuse over the years. He's in bad shape, but it's not life-threatening like some of the others you help today.

It's hours before you can see him.

Slumped on a curb, hands folded neatly in his lap. Like he's been waiting so patiently for you this whole time.

You come to your knees before him, letting him take your hands, draw you closer. "Why didn't you go to another Guide?"

Surely he could have found someone else, despite the chaos of the scene. If not you, one of the high ranking Guides, slotted exclusively for S-rank Sentinels.

He looks at you, trembling, confused. "I don't want another Guide."

When he asks if you'll hold him, you do. You take him in your arms, let his weight settle on you. Feel his warmth all around you, his breath against your shoulder.

"And I don't want you to guide anyone else," he murmurs.

You stroke his nape. "I know. I'm sorry. You'll find your Guide soon enough, and then you can have each other all to yourselves."

His grip tightens. He braces you against him -- instead of a heady tightness, you're constricted.

"I already found my Guide," he whispers into your throat.

Then he bites.

[yuesya]

The doors slide open suddenly and abruptly, clattering roughly against the wooden frame.

Zenin Jinichi whirls around at the unexpected intrusion, tensing. “Who–”

“Yo,” the young man standing in the doorway says. Zenin Toji, Jinichi’s little brother –and greatest headache. Who has the audacity to raise an eyebrow when he sees Jinichi, then snort dismissively and drawl, “Oh, you’re here, too? You can get lost now.”

… Any apprehension that Jinichi had felt at Toji’s unexpected appearance instantly vanishes. He can feel the vein pulsing in his temple.

“Show some respect, Toji,” he growls.

The irreverent young man rolls his eyes. “What? It’s not like you even–”

Surprisingly enough, however, Toji cuts himself off in the middle of his words. The pseudo-sorcerer glances backwards behind him, and Jinichi follows the line of the younger man’s gaze–

A woman?

Toji is tall, and well-built. Enough that his physical frame had been enough to completely hide the woman behind him from view. It’s clear that she’s not a clan woman. Her hair is short, cut in a style almost reminiscent of a man’s. She is not dressed in traditional attire, either. Nor does she conduct herself appropriately, tugging at Toji’s sleeve as she does… although Jinichi grudgingly supposes that he does appreciate her reining in his caustic younger brother.

“What are you here for?” Jinichi asks suspiciously.

“Not for you,” Toji rolls his eyes, and shoulders past Jinichi, dragging in the hapless woman behind him–

… No. Not hapless. Although it seems as if he’s dragging the woman along behind him, it’s clear that the hand wrapped around the woman’s wrist is careful, gentle.

But Zenin Toji, gentle?

Before Jinichi can think to stop him, Toji is already standing in front of the desk in the middle of the room. And behind that desk…

The white-haired young lady finally lifts her gaze and looks up from her work as Toji’s shadow falls across her. By all means, it should make for an intimidating image, but there’s no hint of fear or apprehension in her demeanor –only boredom, and perhaps a faint hint of irritation, although that does not change her placid expression.

Eighteen is young for a child to take over as the head of a clan –much less a female child– but there is no one who would dare look down upon her, the deadly sorcerer reigning as the twenty-seventh–

“Fushiguro Sumire,” Toji presents the woman he’d brought along with him with a grin. “I’m going to marry her.”

The woman blushes. Jinichi’s jaw drops open.

“T-Toji, you–!”

“And Sumire, this is Zenin Shiki,” Toji raises his voice to casually drown out Jinichi’s sputtering and complete the introductions. “My murderous clan head.”

[aveloka-draws]

Absolutely obsessed with your latest comic! It's incredible! I keep going back to look at all the little details up close. The shifts in expression. How Kallamar and Saleos looked like they were almost dancing at the start. Especially how Kallamar shook and clung to Saleos while applying pressure to the slash on his neck.

He didn't expect that! He didn't expect that at all! He should have expected that but he very clearly didn't and it scared him.

When the two of them were God and consort their relationship was one of devouring and being devoured. One was ready to take everything while the other was ready to give freely all that he was or ever would be. That was how their loved worked and the direction the devotion flowed.

I'm thinking that as a mortal perhaps Kallamar is very suddenly loving the way that mortals tend to do. Instead of consuming he wants to have and hold and protect and have those feelings returned to him. Here before Kallamar is a man (jellyfish) that he loved as a god for I'm guessing a relatively long time. He loves him still but in a different way than before. He also never saw the how deep and desperate Saleos' love and devotion for him was and still is. He's asked Saleos to sacrifice himself before and he did without question, but here he is all this time later and Saleos is ready to sacrifice himself all over again on the mere suggestion that it might help Kallamar.

A desperate love meets with the former god who suddenly wants to stop taking taking taking. He doesn't want to lose Saleos. What was normal and expected before is now a line that Kallamar can't find it in himself to cross.

Also! The bloody bandage! The bloody bandage! Of course Saleos would want to keep it! There is no way Kallamar has wrapped an injury for him before! He was just too big as a god to have that kind of dexterity for comparatively small bandages. I'm betting that he's probably wrapped his siblings injuries (especially if we're going with ichor being caustic to mortals) so he has experience with wrapping neck injuries specifically. From the way you've written him Kallamar seems like the type who would insist that the other person is doing the wrapping wrong and that he needs to do it correctly while the full reason is that he's scared and making sure that wound care is done to quell his own anxiety and make sure the other person is really alright. He's doing that for Saleos. Expressing a level of care that he hasn't been able to even if he wanted to before. Expressing a need for Saleos to live.

Both of them are looking at a man that they love and realizing that there's more to learn.

Kicking my feet while reading this yes yes yes

Thank u, so happy you liked it

[lightningidle]

A thought about Gerard’s scene in Episode 18, which is: Elody watches the conversation between Gerard and Rapunzel.

                                                    ——————

Princess Elody is a tactical motherfucker, so even when these cool young women approach her and say all the right things, things that make sense, she doesn’t fully buy in. Not at face value.

When they talk about princes, it’s somehow both completely flippant and with caustic derision — like these young men were props meant to move the plot along, sole owners of agency in stories that weren’t even titled after them. (Elody wonders about their treatment of the princes as the fairies’ deux es machina, wonders about how easy it is to “kill a lot of princes” as Snow White explains. And by their own logic, how likely is it, really, that the princes are cardboard cutouts if Cinderella is so sure her stepmother, not even royalty, has her own book?)

There’s evidence to the contrary of this in her story specifically, which she has no trouble recounting. There’s no way her prince was meant to pacify her into an idyllic life, because he’s a layabout! He’s unreliable! And sure, he’s charming and fun, yes, he tried to pull her away from the war table, but that wasn’t because of any scheming to get her to stay in line, it was just because he wanted attention. He’s frivolous, he’s not a monster, she says. She’s so passionate in her defense of Gerard’s personhood that she almost misses the shared look of the princesses, the glint in Rapunzel’s eye.

Let us show you, Rapunzel says, what a monster looks like.

The scrying ritual is completed quickly and without fuss. Rapunzel stares into a mirror that ripples like water, and then, on the other side, there he is. More froglike than he’s ever been.

“You’re a prince, friends are probably pretty expendable, right? How many friends have you really had, other than Elody?”

Now hold on, Elody wants to say, that’s goading him. That’s not fair. Cinderella puts a firm hand on her shoulder and shakes her head no, to stay quiet, to wait it out. Elody bites her tongue and waits for Gerard to prove one of them right.

“Your friends seem to really value you as a person. I’m sure it’s a comfort to know that they’re not just sort of putting up with you because you’ll tag along and swing your sword, prove a little bit useful.”

Gerard has snowball fights with his friends. He has friends? He has a dedicated workout buddy? She’s not sure he’s ever been dedicated to anything, except for gossip... or her. Now that she thinks about it, he has always been unquestionably devoted to her, hasn’t he?

“I have seen some titanic feats of strength from my companions the Beast, Cinderella, Snow White. Truly impressive acts of heroism.

I do not think I have seen any of my sisters strain more greatly than the Princess Elody to find something kind to say about you.”

Elody does open her mouth to speak this time, which turns out to be a huge mistake when a writhing mass of knotted hair wraps around the lower half of her face. Not to constrict, only to silence. A pit forms in her stomach at the thought that Rapunzel might not be lying, that in trying to defend Gerard she only condemned the worst of him.

“Yes... I don’t... I don’t doubt that.”

Her heart breaks for the second time.

“But I haven't seen the Princess Elody in a while, and I think it's telling that I'm seeing you in this lake and not her or any of the other princesses. I think you’re... manipulating people, or not telling them the full truth.”

Her eyes dart to the other princesses. Snow White’s expression remains unchanged, though Cinderella’s darkens slightly. When Rapunzel speaks again, it does not escape Elody’s notice that she doesn’t acknowledge what Gerard pointed out; she deflects. Elody is getting angrier, now, tugging at the hair around her jaw, hardly even hearing the next bit until a third voice speaks up, says the Princess Elody cares for you deeply.

“Not quite the same thing.”

“It's not, but seeing as the last thing she saw of me was me running away after I had already done that, I’m grateful that she still cares for me at all.”

The hair gathering around her tenses. Elody was brought here to see that, when Gerard thought nobody else could hear, he would prove himself to be just an agent of the fairies, or an empty vessel, or a selfish monster. What she’s seeing is none of those things. But she’s also not seeing the man she knew as her husband: he’s grown and changed, almost become someone else entirely. She wants to call out to Gerard. She wants to get to know him all over again.

“Gerard,” Rapunzel hisses, “what do you think the odds are that it got into Elody's head that the virtuous thing to do was to fall in love with a cold and slimy frog, and that every kindness she has paid you in your life has been a testament to her charity, rather than anything about you that would bring her joy?”

Elody freezes.

“I don't know that I can answer that.”

“It doesn’t seem very fair to Elody that you can’t.” 

“... I agree.”

The image in the mirror of the man who will never be a man again ripples and vanishes. Elody’s hands have fallen away from the hair around her face, which is convenient, as she finds herself suddenly holding a book. The hair recedes, and she doesn’t register what it is Rapunzel is saying to try and placate her, because the book in her hands is a slim volume, bound in her favorite shade of green and embossed in golden ink.

On the front is the title — The Princess Elody.

[spasmsofthought]

you fell hard, I thought good riddance (j.s. x reader)

An angsty thing inspired by “Best” by Gracie Abrams. (I wrote this at work cause I had the free time and couldn’t help myself.) Let me know what you think! (Probably some inaccuracies, especially if you squint - my step-dad may have done a career in the Navy, but I did and will not lol.) Wrote this all at once, so please have grace for any spelling or grammar mistakes. xo 

Next

https://open.spotify.com/track/5HO2RD12vZ5NcIdAULo43M?si=0ce82485daa44829

+++

Jake knows what he did. 

While not at the forefront of his mind, it weighs on the deepest part of his consciousness and he’s reminded of what he did in what feels like the most random moments. 

When he’s swallowing the last drops of beer in the bottle that’s pressed to his mouth. Or when he’s standing on the beach as the waves are softly rolling against the shore and it’s quiet. Or when he ends up on the couch watching crappy television at 3 a.m. because his flashbacks are keeping him awake and the moment his eyes close, he feels like he’s startled awake because a brightly-colored ad is flashing on the TV screen. 

He sees you every once and a while, he thinks. Whether it’s when he’s tipsy at The Hard Deck and sees someone turn the corner who looks just enough like you from the back. Someone can laugh just the right way down the hall when he’s in the office at work and he has to do a double-take to make sure it’s not you that’s laughing. 

He’s never actually, though, confronted with your physical presence until he finds himself at a joint military exercise in European waters and you are on the same carrier. He’s walking into the cafeteria after a morning of training exercises and immediately zeroes in on you. Once he’s aware of you, he can’t look away. 

It takes a moment for your senses to catch on. (To be fair, the cafeteria is not really known to be an oasis of peace. It’s loud and busy. You’re sitting with friends anyhow.) Your eyes flit to the area where he’s making his way in and he can tell the moment your mind makes sense of what you’re seeing. You glance at him for one long moment, and then you turn towards your friends and stay that way until you all leave. The only thing that has changed about your demeanor is the frown that settles on your expression throughout the rest of your meal. 

He thinks you look even better now than you did back then. 

He thinks he took you by surprise. That you’ve gotten so used to not seeing him around on your deployments and where you’re stationed that you didn’t think you would need to brace yourself on this go around. 

Jake knows what he did and he feels terrible. He didn’t then, but he does now.

Seeing you in actual flesh and blood makes him remember. 

He remembers your utter devotion during your brief time together. 

He remembers that the first time he approached you, he made you laugh. The kind of laughter that leaves a person gasping for air and makes their eyes water. You fell hook, line, and sinker. He remembers the way you would try to make time and space for him whenever you could, despite how busy you were trying to progress in your career. He remembers how he didn’t do the same. 

He remembers that on your off days, you would come over and stay the nights. He remembers the smell of you when you would climb into bed next to him after showering. And when he couldn’t sleep, when his mind was churning and taking him back to things he just wanted to forget, you would sit next to him on the couch at 3 a.m. as he turned the television on. When he closed his eyes, he knows you were the one to turn to TV screen off so he didn’t wake up. He remembers how you would kiss him: sweet and complete and open, always moving in step with him. 

He remembers how wholehearted you were when you were with him. Giving your whole self, all the time. 

Even when he would say sharp, caustic words that would make tears form in your eyes, even when he shut his bedroom door so he wouldn’t feel responsible for making you cry, you stayed. 

He remembers the way you stayed. 

And he remembers how his half-hearted attempts, quarter-hearted attempts really, to draw you back in eventually ran you dry. You were willing to do so much, and he wasn’t really willing to do anything. He was young, but he knows that’s not an excuse now. 

He remembers the light in your eyes changing. He remembers the way you stopped coming over. He remembers the way you didn’t have the courage to tell him you wanted to leave. 

He remembers that you held onto him until the bitter end. 

He knows you won’t talk to him. Every time you see him on the carrier, you make a point to avoid him or walk the other way. He knows you probably resent him (there’s a reason he can’t find you on any social media platforms). He understands why you don’t seem to want anything to do with him. 

So, he investigates. He does what he knows how to do best: he talks and charms and weasels his way through the crowds of people on the carrier. Making his way from one group to another, day and night, Jake gleans for information and eventually finds what he needs. He knows your bunkmate’s name now (and their shift and their position, and even where they like to hang out and what time they prefer to go to the gym). 

You may never read it, he knows. You may can it or tear it up and throw it out into the ocean. You may even wait until you can set it on fire and watch it burn. 

But he knows he has to try. 

So when he finds your bunkmate, he hands them a piece of paper and tells them it’s for you. It’s small and doesn’t take up much room. Your bunkmate only nods, a look of confusion passing over their face. He says it’s important that it be delivered to you. Those are his only instructions. 

If he had the opportunity to talk to you in person, he might have the chance to elongate. To say more, be more. But he might not ever get the chance to do that, so he’s going to take what he can get. 

You pass your bunkmate between shifts: you’re just getting back for some sleep, and they’re heading out. They say there’s a piece of paper you need to read on your pillow. Hand-delivered, they say the instructions were. No follow-up is required. You wait until they leave. Until you’re left alone. 

You open up the folded-up piece of paper. 

This is what it says: 

I’m sorry. You deserved better. 

[mehiwilldoitlater]

"Ah, there you are! I thought I would never find you!"

The mech stared at you for a brief moment, then scufted a little and kept up with his painting session.

"Did not Ratchet tell you to stop coming into my quarter?"

"Nope! He told me specifically to come every now and then to remind you about your lack of social activity!"

"He's the one who's talking here..."

Despite his attempt to get rid of your presence, Sunstreaker never actually succeeded in it. In some way, he started to think that you enjoyed pestering him—maybe a small revenge from the doctor.

He kept ignoring your presence until he understood where you were putting your organic hands.

"Please stop touching my painting."

"I'm not going to ruin them. You're good at it, you know! Like really good!"

"Pff, like a human, you could even get what I do with that."

"Wanna bet?"

He met his annoyed glare with your challenger one. He didn't need to bet; he knew that a sophisticated mind like his was superior to a simple one like yours! He didn't even want to partake in that silly thing; maybe ignoring you would finally do the trick. He kept it up even after you started to analyze one of the bunches—a composition of lines of different colors—and put it into a strange wave.

"Okay, this one is...chaos, I get it."

"Woooow, Sherlock, nice guess..."

"But I see some order in it. With the color. If it were made with a bunch of colors, I would have stopped at chaos, but I can see that there's a pattern here. You used different shades of red, right? They don't follow some logic themselves, so they can be mistakenly confused with the same shade, but the white and black help to see the differences."

He stopped drawing but refused to watch you, only opting to try to process your rumbling.

"The black line and the white ones don't follow a real one; they look like doodles, but the red ones follow a wave, like an actual movement. There's this blueish tones here and there; they look like...OOOH OHOHOH, it's your brother!"

He finally looked at you, shocked. 

"It-it's...no, it's-"

"Of course it is! Sideswipe behavior always looks quite caustic on its own, but you sense the logic in it! You found an order! And on the red line are his own unique traits? His personality??? Awww, that's so sweet! You must care so much for him!"

He couldn't process the right words; he didn't have any! Which was a surprise; he always had bad remarks, something pitty to say, and now there you were, waltzing around and just leaving him out of words.

You finally decided to leave the painting alone, facing the machine, now in pure confusion.

"Well, as always, I must remind you about Rtachet, Yada Yada Yada, and OH, tomorrow me and Bluestreak are going out; if you want, just call! You know where he sleeps, all right?"

And so you left, like nothing happened. You left him alone in his own thoughts, and he grabbed his brush so harshly that he must have left the sign. He started to torture the canvas on which he was currently working.

"Stupid human, stupid artistic sensibility, stupid psychoanalysis session!"

He stopped passing the brush and started to use it as a knife.

"You can't just come here and be this nice! I don't want you to be nice with me; I don't want you around at all."

He changed colors several times in a row.

"Who needs a human that is this nice and kind?! Who needs a stupid, fleshy person who just cares so much for me?! I don't need you to care for me! They even act like I like them!"

He kept pressing the brush.

"Like they can just come and hang around with everyone! If they like everyone, then why bother with me?! I can't stand it! I-...."

Despite the mess of colors, it was nice. A good view. They looked like flowers—so many colorful flowers. The colors were bright—not too hard, but bright. He held the canvas, realizing that he painted it thinking of you.

And in the center, a bright yellow one stood among the others, screaming, Pick me.

"FRAG IT!"

He threw away the canvas, trying to convince himself that that thing was just his imagination and that there was nothing but a bunch of colors and curves.

And, while conversing with himself, he glanced at the small communication device, thinking about your small trip with Bluestreak tomorrow.

//////////////

@hey-name-arya-name-ar @malewife-overlord @ladyofnegativity

i did it

[whomstsnek]

Happy Hades II!

Excited for the game to come out (hopefully) soon, + I saw a YouTube video of some of my fav artists making their own "Godsonas", so I thought I'd make my own lil deity :3

This is less of a sona than it is an OC, but either way here they are! I envision them as either a god of rot and decay, or blight and pestilence, undecided which. I think maybe they're a random encounter rather than an Olympian/boon? Like randomly in chambers (after you've taken so much damage maybe?) they'll appear. Beat them in a fight, like a miniboss, and they'll grant you a boon or some other reward. I think they'd have a debuff along the lines of "Caustic touch" or something that poisons the enemy and does small amounts of damage over a period of time, and/or slightly weakens them.

Personality-wise I think they're very odd and creepy, and are particularly obsessed with the health and wellbeing of mortals, especially their lack there of. I see them as very one track minded, always looking to spread their diseases as war and wide as possible. Interacting with/killing Zagreus (or Melinoe, if they were to appear in HII) would be fascinating for them, as no other god would be susceptible to mortal diseases.

If you survive the miniboss encounter I think their voice line would be something like "One of these days, I'll eat you alive, just...wait...." or "All good things must come to an end, one day or another. I'll be seeing you, godling...". Alternatively if you lose the voice line might be something like "Wither away, little godling! Not even you can escape my grasp..." or "You were made to rot, to waste away, it was only a matter of time..."

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #38 – Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Didion is one of those canonical authors I always feel like I should already have read at some point (isn’t that what high school English class was supposed to be for). Of course this was a very vague feeling, and not attached to a single scrap of actual information about her and her work beyond the general time period and cultural milieu – so I grabbed this from the library and started it entirely blind (partially my own fault for skipping the introduction by a different and much worse author tbf). Fascinating book, artistically successful and emotionally affective, but not one I’m able to say I really found enjoyable, or even necessarily beautiful (it’s no Giovanni’s Room, to compare another bit of canonical latter-20th century high literature).

The book follows Maria Wyeth, an (increasingly former) actress in 1960s Hollywood, through her slow decline from up and coming starlet and wife of a prestigious young director to an enforced retirement as an isolated upscale sanitarium/hospital resort. Which is hardly a spoiler – the book starts at the end and jumps through the timeline freely, and in any case the whole thing feels telegraphed to the point of inevitability. Maria’s life in LA is contrasted with how she grew up in a tiny desert town in Nevada, so small it at some point stopped existing, and in the process more or less gives you the narrative of her life.

Which is as close to a plot as the book has, really. Maria and her internal monologue are the near-sole focus, and her view of the outside world and what’s happening around her basically always says more about her than the world. Watching Maria’s life falls apart really is watching a car crash in slow motion – you’re never really surprised at any point, but the shearing metal and flesh are hard to look away from.

The book’s very much capital-l Literature, here meaning that the style and prose is at least half the reason to read the book. The story’s told through short vignettes (I’m not sure a singe chapter was more than ten pages, whereas the vast majority were two or three) and the deliberate, generous use of white space, both figurative and literal. Maria is pretty relentless in her self-deception and lack of self-awareness, and in any case is quiet elusive and vague with descriptions of people and events – reading between the lines is quite necessary. This overall really does work for me - the imagery is vivid and memorable, and Maria’s head is a compelling and believable place to be.

It’s also just intolerable. I have no particular issue with deeply unsympathetic, tragically unselfaware, or wince-inducingly self-destructive characters, but Maria sure is all three of those to a degree I rarely see. More than that, she is just profoundly passive. It is, for me at least, far easier to be invested in operatic delusion and hubris leading to ruination than a just resolutely thoughtless and pettily cruel person letting her life rot around her. Which is a failure of literary empathy on my part, probably, but did make this a somewhat frustrating book to read. You’re left want to scream at Maria to just do something (anything!) that she isn’t led to by people around her like an ornery goat to water.

This is probably exacerbated by the supporting cast. Who are all very much portrayed as hopeless, clueless gamblers and unprincipled, hypocritical Hollywood decadents,, absolutely – but despite that, keep trying to reach out and offer her lifelines or support. Which is mostly surprising because she might literally not say a single kind word to another human being in the entire book, is relentlessly caustic in her internal monologue, and sure isn’t doing favours or advancing the career of anybody. The real tension of the book ends up not being whether or not she’ll destroy her life and more how long before everyone around her just lets her.

It’s a blisteringly cynical novel overall, really – both in its portrayal of individual characters and of society as a whole. I joked while reading it that it felt like American Psycho without a Patrick Bateman, and while that’s a bit too far – everyone’s still very recognizably human, most of whom do care about at least a few things besides status symbols and dick measuring contests – but the portrayals of Hollywood and Wall Street certainly feel like they rhyme.

Though the implicit politics of that cynicism do feel do feel very different here. Very possibly because the back cover called it something like ‘a blistering satire of the excesses of the ‘60s’ (paraphrasing from memory), but the book definitely ended up feeling very (socially) conservative, full of worries about broken families and marriages of convenience and just generally decadence. The whole plot where Maria gets a motel-room abortion to deal with the consequences of her affair which almost kills her, sends her spiralling into months of total, life-ruining depression, and destroys her relationship with both her husband and her paramour feels like something you’d only see coming out today in explicit pro-life propaganda, for example; certainly it’s a trope I’ve seen complained about more than (until now) I’ve ever actually seen done. The fact that Maria’s foremost redeeming feature is always her love for and desire to be with her (disabled and permanently hospitalized for vague reasons), and that the climax of the book is a suicide directly caused by infidelity, also. None of which should exactly be surprising, really – a book almost as old as my parents has dated opinions on social issues! - but for some reason I always expect canonical authors to have been free-wheeling libertines and bohemians.

Speaking of being written nearly sixty years ago – the time capsule quality of this book is positively fascinating. Which I say whenever I read something from before the millennium, but still – the ‘60s are still so profoundly mythologized I do love the chance to see anything written about them at the time, if only for ‘the past as a foreign country’ tourism reasons. The Hollywood of exploration, drug abuse, meaningless sex, vicious gossip and every combination of the above feels like it could almost be written about today, right up until the point where an easy divorce means finding an amenable judge and finding a witness to corroborate the husband’s admission of wanton emotional abuse (which becomes a stark reminder of how horrifying even a historical five minutes ago was when you consider what happens if you can’t meet any of those conditions). The illegal abortions, the utterly casual homophobia, the auteur theory being a hot new thing, the cult of the open road. It all adds up to an interesting effect.

Speaking of the cult of the open road – Maria’s only real sense of peace, happiness and self-control in the entire book is when she’s spending all day cruising the highway at dangerous speeds just for the sake of it, without itinerary or destination. No real coherent point to make, just that there’s something truly and incredibly American about that? The descriptions of the Nevada desert and highways, too.

But yeah, an expertly written novel that’s positively lovely in places (the opening monologue is near-sublime, for example), but not one that really awed or oved me the way some other literature has.

[glow-worms-are-believers]

The batfam meet Jarro

Ok so this isn't dp x dc but I just needed to share this coz I made myself laugh a lot with this.

So a little context, Jarro is an alien "Star Conqueror" that was veryyy briefly made robin in Justice League Vol 4 #10. He was grown, named and adopted by Batman. Jarro even calls him dad (it's really cute):

Anyway, I'm pretty sure he's never mentioned again after that.

So yeah, with that in mind I had the crack idea of the batfam meeting Jarro and just being really jealous (while everyone around them is just: "That... is a literal starfish")

So a few lines I've got:

“Of course, dad!” Jarro says.

Jason jolts at that. Once upon a time, he used to call B that. He'd been the only one to do so. Not anymore.

Damian: I am the only blood heir.

Jarro: He was with me my whole childhood. He litteraly grew me in a jar. He named me.

“His bio father was a villain,” steph says caustically. ���A global one, too. But get this, his dad flipped sides in the end and sacrificed his own life.”

Harper stays silent and Steph sighs.

“It just. It makes you think. What do you think I would’ve been like if my dad had been more like Starro?”

“More like the giant starfish from space?”

“Yeah.”

Roy: He looks like Patrick from Spongebob?

Jason: Oh, I see how it is. Fine! If you like Jarro so much maybe you should hang out with him, then. How about you join B to play catch with him while you’re at it?

Roy: He- he doesn’t even have opposable thumbs.

Jason: Urgh. That just mean B probably has the glove custom-made.

Cassie: He is the size of my literal palm.

Tim: I know! He’s pocket-sized. I bet B loves being able to carry him around.”

Cassie: Um

Tim: He rides on B’s shoulder! His fucking shoulder, Cassie! 

Cassie: Do. Do you want B to carry you on his shoulder?

Tim: That is so not the point! And B has the gall to say he doesn’t have favourites.

“Good at hiding.” Cass observes. “Small.”

“He’s- he’s a starfish, Cass.”

She nods gravely. “No tells.” Then her brow furrow. “Can read minds. Better than reading body.” She hunches a bit. “Better than me.”

“It’s just I thought I was the only one with powers, you know?” Duke starts. “Not that I don’t like him or anything. It’s just. That was my thing you know? Or like, it used to be.”

Claire just looks at him blankly.

Dick sighs as he looks up to the ceiling, his head laying on Starfire’s lap.

“It’s just.” Dick halts, hesitant and his voice quieter than usual. “I thought I was the pretty one.”

(Ok, I'm done)

[burst-of-iridescent]

Zuko is peaceful when he sleeps. 

Katara doesn’t get many opportunities to see him like this so she takes her chance now, tracing the line of his jaw, the pall of his eyelashes against his cheekbones, the way the skin turns from ivory to rusted crimson just beyond the bridge of his nose. The early morning light softens the harsh edges of his scar, the furrow of his eyebrows; he is more a child now than he has ever been, ensconced in her arms. 

She can stay here a little while longer, Katara decides, can let herself have this before the duties of a lifetime of war draw her away once more. Besides, she can’t bear to wake Zuko when he looks like this, content and undisturbed as he rarely is in life. He must be more tired than she thought, to sleep so far past the sunrise that calls to the fire in his blood. 

The first rays of dawn wreathe his hair like Agni himself has come to crown him, the golden prince who reclaimed his kingdom, and he looks so very young suddenly that her entire being aches with the need to protect, to love, to pour in through his skin all that he’s ever lost so no hurt can ever touch him again. 

He’ll wake any moment now, she knows. Blink at her with those sleep-dazed golden eyes and give her that lopsided half-smile that’s tender and disbelieving all at once, like he still can’t quite believe any of this is real. 

(She hates herself for that, hates the girl of misplaced rage and caustic grief who pushed him away, hates that he always flinched like he expected a mortal blow. She’ll spend a lifetime in penance.) 

But that’s okay, she thinks. Everything is okay now, because she has a lifetime to change that, to love him, to live. They have time, so much time that she doesn’t quite know what to do with all of it, but they’ll figure it out together. 

Katara curls closer to Zuko, looping her arms around his neck and waist, and closes her eyes. 

He’s still warm, the way he was when she first hugged him with the sunset at her back and the waves beneath her feet. Still warm, still burning, still here.

Her brilliant, beautiful firebender.

A hand settles on her shoulder. 

“Katara?” 

The word comes to her across a great distance, as though Sokka is still back in the South Pole instead of right beside her. Or maybe she’s the one who’s far away, gone somewhere he cannot follow. 

She blinks, and watches the final, fading trail of the comet recede into the blue, blue horizon. Blue for new beginnings, blue for peace, blue for the crack of Azula’s lightning. 

“Katara,” Sokka says again, and now there’s something terrible in his voice, something she’s heard only once, almost seven years ago. “Please.” 

At Zuko’s side, his uncle weeps. He’s bent to press his forehead to Zuko’s hand, murmuring words of guilt and love and sorrow.

There’s no need, she wants to say. Can’t you see? He’s right here.

She brushes the hair off Zuko’s face and gently kisses his scarred cheek.

“Katara.” There is no joking Sugar Queen, no teasing in Toph’s trembling voice. “You have to let him go.” 

Katara shakes her head mutely, and curls her body around his.They’re partners, her and Zuko – them against the Southern Raiders, against Azula, against the world. 

She’ll always have his back. 

(Later, they’ll tell the stories of how the last Southern waterbender held the crown prince’s body through the night. Later, they’ll whisper about how she had to be dragged kicking and screaming from his side, how every bit of water in the courtyard rose to cover the fallen prince with a shield of ice, how they had to knock her unconscious to keep her from flooding the palace.)

Later, Sokka will not meet her eyes when she wakes. 

Katara goes where he tells her to, in the days that come after. Follows him to a garden of white silk and ash, to the shaky beginnings of a new world, to a ship that carries her across the element that failed her. 

She stands on deck and watches the long-hated land of her childhood fade into the distance until it is nothing more than a faint speck on the endless expanse of the sea. She thinks of a smoke-singed courtyard, the beat of a ruined heart; thinks of a beautiful boy lit in lightning and the sobbing girl he died to save and the story that died with him, forever unfinished, forever frozen.

“It’’ll be okay,” Sokka tells her gently, when a faintly familiar land of ice and snow forms in the distance. “Let’s go home.”  

(She doesn’t, though. Not really. Not ever.

She never goes home again.) 

[mostlydeadallday]

Lost Kin | Chapter XXXIX | What Must Be Done

Fandom: Hollow Knight Rating:��Mature Characters: Hornet, Pure Vessel | Hollow Knight, Quirrel Category: Gen Content Warnings: gore, body horror, panic attacks, dissociation, vomiting, flashbacks, referenced abuse, referenced self-harm, child death AO3: Lost Kin | Chapter XXXIX | What Must Be Done First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Chronological Notes: Hornet and Quirrel address the remaining infection.

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Hornet held her sibling’s hand until they stopped trembling and the awful rasping in their throat died away. Until they could see her again, the void in their eyes no longer twisting frantically, loosening enough to follow as she moved.

Panicking them just before she began work on their wounds was the last thing she had wanted. But it had happened, regardless—the strain of being asked to use the new signs piling atop the stress of being moved, tied down, and anticipating what she was about to do. Quirrel’s proximity had likely not helped them admit something they likely would have struggled with even had she been alone with them.

She finished checking the anchors fastened to the floor along her sibling’s side, wider points of silk glowing bright where they met the stone at regular intervals like the cables of a bridge.

They would hold, she hoped. It was a precaution she wished she did not have to take, but despite Hollow stating that they would communicate with her, she refused to trust in that alone.

Her pulse was quick, quick, feathering in her throat, and she kept her gaze on her hands so that she would not have to look at them laid out flat on the floor, limbs stretched out and tied down, their every breath pulling the silk-lines taut.

She had to do this, she had to, she had to—

“Hornet?”

Without raising her gaze from where her hands had frozen beside Hollow’s hip, she answered. “Get the tools.”

He did as she asked, with a murmured “One moment,” to Hollow as he left their side. She heard him rearranging things on the tray he had found and cleaned, the soft clink of metal on metal doing nothing for her fraying nerves.

She had made this harder on herself.

She hadn’t meant to. She had intended, this morning, to bind herself firmly into that cold, distant mood she could put on like a second shell, piece by piece, like one of the Five readying for battle.

That had not happened. She’d crawled out of that nightmare already wounded, with her shell already pierced, and seeing Hollow safe, alive, craning their head to peer at her as she stepped into the room, had finished her. She hadn’t been able to stop herself going to them, touching them, holding them, to be sure that they were real. A hideous relief had taken hold of her—relief that they were unharmed, hideous because that would soon no longer be true.

She could not deny that it had felt like, if they could, they would have reached out to hold her, too.

Quirrel reappeared, setting down the tray and pushing back the mattresses so that they would have more room. His hands were wrapped in a thin layer of her silk, a precaution he’d requested after she mentioned that, being fully mortal, he would not share her resistance to the caustic effects of void and infection.

Hornet laid her hand on Hollow’s again. Her claws were dwarfed by theirs, and her heart lurched when they shifted their thumb to touch her fingertips, brushing her chitin with the cool roughness of the pads set into their shell.

She looked up into their face, into the eyes of someone she had denied the existence of for so long, and saw acceptance. The acceptance she could not give herself: that there were things that must be done, painful and inexplicable though those things might be, and that they would obey her in spite of it.

No, she wanted to hiss, and stop it, stop it, I don’t want this, I don’t deserve it.

But she would not—not if it brought them peace, not if it helped them endure what she needed to do.

Choked with her own refusal, she couldn’t say any of the thousand things that crowded her throat, things she’d already tried, in one way or another, to convince them of. I’m sorry had already been said, and she did not know how many more ways she could find to say it. Hold on passed between them, silently, in the grip of her hand over theirs. And hidden somewhere deep, in a recess of her heart she had almost forgotten, frail and small and afraid but unsilenced, was—

I love you.

Was it folly, to admit to loving someone she had only just met? That she had no tie to, other than the cursed blood that bound them as kin? Someone so damaged, so broken, that she did not even know who they were? Someone she did not know if she could save?

It did no good to deny it. If that was folly, then she was the kingdom’s greatest fool.

She stood.

Her legs were unsteady still. They had been since she stumbled out of the kitchen, half-convinced that she would find Hollow dead and gutted on the floor in front of her. There was a cruelty to the way they lay there now, as if in deliberate echo of her nightmare, but she held to the sound of their breathing, the faint motion beneath their mask, to tether herself to reality.

She’d placed them on their back, with cushions to prop up their torso and neck, keeping their horns at a low angle off the floor. The blankets would insulate from the chill of the flagstones, although she did not know if that needed to be done—would they prefer to feel the cold, if the infection was still keeping their body from returning to its normal temperature? At least it would protect their shell from scratches if they struggled.

This would not be comfortable, not for any of them, but she’d done what she could.

As an afterthought, she spun one last web between their horns, thinner than the rest, anchoring their head to the floor—though with enough slack that they could move if need be. This one, she did not trust to hold, but it might give her enough time to move if they attempted to bite.

With one hand still on their horn, she spoke again. They likely already knew this, but she could not help drawing the boundaries once more.

“This may take some time. Quirrel is here only to assist me; he will not touch your wounds himself. Unless you are moving to sign to me, please—lie very still. I know it will hurt, and I… I must ask you to endure it.” She tightened her grip on their mask, pressing her fingers round its curves. “Do you understand?”

Their claw lifted, tapped out two faint beats on the stone. Yes.

No more reason to delay. Nothing left to do but what she had been dreading.

She moved to kneel at their left side, on a folded towel that Quirrel had placed within reach of the basin of water, the stack of rags, the tray of shining tools. Her head was swimming. The words stuck in her throat felt almost literal; something was swelling there nearly large enough to stop her breath, and when she pulled out the pouch of herbs from beneath her cloak, her hands were shaking.

Quirrel moved to sit beside her. Somehow without looking at him she knew the expression he’d be making—all hunched shoulders and lowered antennae, interest and concern that she couldn’t take right now. She pinched a dose of herbs between her claws and tipped her head back, shredding the leaves with her fangs and teeth until the bitter-sharp taste filled her mouth.

Better. Slightly. It gave her another thing to focus on, at least. She passed the pouch back to Quirrel. “I may need you to give me more of that.”

He answered with a brief word that she didn’t hear. Her mask seemed full of a deadly hum, like the warning buzz of the Hive, making her voice too close and his too far away.

She beckoned the lantern over, and when he brought it to Hollow’s side and shone the harsh light on their shoulder, she bent down to inspect the work she had done so far.

It was, plainly speaking, an ugly mess. But not a mess she could solely blame herself for. A few sharp edges of shell plate on their back and chest still protruded out into nothing, left behind as muscle and bone dissolved away beneath them. The sunken pit between was a twisted knot of scarring—some of it swollen, perhaps inflamed, though it was difficult to tell with their flesh so dark and their blood the same color as their skin.

It was difficult to tell anything. Especially with the empty blister sacs hanging in clusters on their withered shoulder, deforming the outline of their body into something barely recognizable.

She lifted one to peel it away, working her fingers under the ragged edge and loosening it, trying to pull as little as she could on the still-living flesh beneath. Flesh that was soft and pliable, springing back when she pressed against it, deeply exposed and unprotected in a way she dearly hoped her own body never would be.

 The empty pustule detached with only a little trouble, leaving her holding something that hung slack from her fingers like a limp, puckered seed-pod—something she did not look at too long before dropping it in the rusty bin procured for that purpose.

She breathed deeply for a moment, the tension still not abating, though her hands had steadied. Hollow hadn’t moved, shifting not an inch in their bonds, but then, she had not really hurt them. Not yet.

The second empty sac came away cleanly, and the third. With every one disposed of, she moved closer to the active infection, closer to the light-filled blisters crowding out through their skin.

Caught in the dread of it, fresh nausea roiling in her gut, she pulled too hard. The fourth tore free.

She felt it rip, felt the weak resistance of the still-healing scar give out. Her hands went cold. Void oozed up, welling from the ragged wound, tracking down through the snarled maze of their scars and onto the sheet. It spread as it fell, like blots of ink.

She forgot to breathe.

A warm, dripping rag was pressed into her hands. Her claws squeezed it automatically, wringing clean water down over her knees. Her own inhale sounded loud inside her mask.

Right. Right. Mustn’t fall apart yet. She had only just begun.

She took Quirrel’s unspoken suggestion, clamping the rag to the wound until it stopped seeping—surprisingly quickly. Their shoulder had bled very little the first time. The infection must have cut off the supply of void to the area, causing what remained to wither and shrink, acid and heat searing them down to the marrow.

“Sorry, sorry,” she heard herself whisper. Hollow did not respond. Didn’t even twitch as she patted the stump clean again, wincing every time she passed over a snarl of scar tissue or a hidden knob of bone.

Their strength was holding. That was good—it was, no matter that the lack of reaction made her want to ask if they were all right, if they could hear her at all.

She managed not to tear open any more wounds as she removed the rest, leaving their shoulder a slightly less horrific mess than it had been. Less misshapen, less grotesque, less like the dead husks she saw lying in the streets, corpses worn down and drained of life twice over.

And—more their own. All that remained was theirs, both what was still intact and the results of their body’s attempts to retake what belonged to it. With a muted sense of relief, she dropped the last deflated sac into the bucket, resisting the urge to wash her hands—the infection had not even touched her yet, and already her shell was crawling.

Quirrel cleared his throat as he took the void-stained rag from her. “I think you should remove the rest as we go. It may cause more bleeding than we want, but… the injuries will close with soul-healing, correct?” At her nod, he went on. “Then that would be best. It will save us having to return and finish later—and what’s left may be harder to reach once the infection recedes.”

“All right,” she breathed, and took a scalpel from the tray—fine, thin, with a sharp tip, weighing heavy in her fingers.

Exhaling shakily, she turned and picked up a hollow shell bowl, another thing Quirrel had discovered while raiding the cabinets, and set its edge beneath the rim of a half-filled blister. Then she pressed the tip of the scalpel in, just above the puckered flesh beneath.

The swollen surface dimpled slightly, then gave, spilling open all at once like the gut of a butchered animal, and a sludgy stream of rot gushed into her bowl.

Hornet tried not to breathe. The sweet, flowery reek of it surrounded her, pressing against her mask, into her lungs.

Hold the bowl steady. Hold the knife steady.

Widen the cut, deepen the gash. Watch the god-light seethe and steam.

Don’t think. Don’t think.

Quirrel was holding out a clean cloth when she turned to ask for one, taking the full bowl from her and emptying the contents into the waste. She kept pressure on the cut until he gave the bowl back. Then she set her hand on the sagging blister, resisting the urge to jerk back from the heat against her palm, and pushed.

It dislodged a fresh gush of yellow and two half-formed clots, one after the other, threatening to slosh over the side of the bowl. Hornet bit down on nothing, jaws aching, and pushed again, watching the stream of ichor wane. Until the blister was flattened under her hand, until the thin fluid that she pressed from the cut ran only black.

Quirrel had the scalpel in hand when she turned to reach for it.

Rather than pull at something that was not ready to come free, she felt along its base before she cut. Guessing at where the damage began, at the point where it became no longer their own. At where the light had forced its way out, swelling and stretching within their own skin until the damage was too great to heal and their body rejected it.

She guessed wrong.

Void welled freely beneath her knife. Dark, wet, shining; she shuddered, the inside of her mask still ringing with the screams of pain from her nightmares. She stripped the excised flesh away, fumbling for another rag to press to the wound, and held both hands against it, arms nearly weak enough to give way.

Hollow’s side shifted beneath the pressure, and she almost let go, resolve faltering, until she heard a long, deliberate scrape of air through their throat. They inhaled, deeply, and exhaled again, each measure precise, each respiration held and released beat for beat.

A pang of nausea twisted her gut. She recognized this. This was exactly what she remembered, exactly what they had done the first time under her knife, down to the very rhythm of each breath.

She did not look over toward Quirrel’s soft exclamation, did not look at her sibling’s face as they did their best to endure this. She looked at her hands again, black claws twisted into blackening cloth. At the movement, up and down, as her sibling took another long, intentional breath.

The feeling swirling in her chest was no longer dread, or anger, or anything in between—anything but hate. She hated that they had learned to do this, and she hated imagining why. She hated what the world had done to them—what the goddess and her father and she herself had taught them to expect.

That their life would never be their own. That they would always be suffering for someone else’s cause. That they would never have a choice. Always bound, by one chain or another, and always, always, hurting.

Dwelling on this would not help. It would not help. She had to go on.

She shook herself, roughly, ignoring Quirrel’s questioning look, and loosened her grip, peeling back the corner of the cloth to check the bleeding. The gash was not deep, but this lower point on their shoulder—past the worst of the scarring—was better supplied with void than the rest.

She would have given them soul to heal, but she did not wish to waste their strength unless it was necessary. Asking them to heal could break their concentration, sending them into a spiral that would be harder than ever to interrupt. Nor could she forget that giving them soul was tantamount to handing them a weapon. She had to take more care with Quirrel nearby; any one of the dozens of spells Hollow knew could easily kill him, if they panicked badly enough to try.

They had not done so yet. And it seemed unfair to assume the worst, when they were trying so hard, trying to do everything she asked of them. Even when they broke that pattern, it was only ever to protect, not to harm.

She did trust them, as much as she could. She did—but trust was as useless as geo, and she would give them all she had, but she did not have much.

Instead, she kept applying pressure to the wound, checking it occasionally as she waited for the bleeding to slow, and switched hands when the chill of the soaked bandage made her joints begin to ache. Quirrel offered her a second to place as a buffer over the first, though the flow had nearly clotted by then. She gave it an extra minute or so after lifting her hands away, watching to be sure the fragile scab would hold, before she moved on.

With the next, she took greater care. Watching, forcing herself closer, forcing her mind to focus on each detail. With every wary cut she made, with every halting press against the bloated thing, she imagined her own skin parting, her own blood welling, acid sizzling against her own shell, leaving pocks and craters even after she wiped it away.

The tools felt hot in her hands. Hollow’s breathing had changed the moment the knife touched them again—inhales becoming quick, shallow, as if they were barely holding their mask above water and any reckless motion would send them under.

She wished that they would stop. Every tiny sip of air, every crackle in their throat, was a reminder that they were hurting, that she was hurting them, and the measured, stifled movement making it easier for her to work only added to the pain.

She almost wanted to snarl at them, to snap them out of it—

Careful. Careful. The anger simmering in her was destructive, she knew; she could not let it boil over.

A long, careful slice, right at the seam where the blister emerged from their body. A press of her palm over a rag over the wound, to hold back the void that bubbled up. A tense silence while the wound clotted. This time she allowed Hollow three full breaths and half of a fourth, waiting until they had filled their lungs before she bent down to her work again.

The remaining sacs on their shoulder, the ones that had refilled after her first attempt, were easier. Less pressure—the infection had receded from this area—and once drained, they came away without much bleeding.

She handed the bowl back to Quirrel to be emptied, laying another bandage down to sop up a weak trickle of yellow from the last flattened blister.

He touched her. Just two fingers on her shoulder, brief, but she jumped, and before she’d fully turned to hiss at him he was already apologizing. “Sorry, I—sorry. Slipped my mind.” He laughed shakily, not meeting her eye. “I just—I need a moment to empty this.”

The waste bucket. It was nearly full already, sloshing unpleasantly as he lifted it, and she averted her eyes, unable to avoid the waft of metallic, putrid sweetness that followed as he moved. Like blood, like nectar, and at the same time like neither. Like the rot hidden at the core of a thing. Like corpses piled to burn, piling higher, higher, higher—

She swallowed a lump that burned all the way down her throat. Her whole body pulsed with remembered dread, with the constant live-wire terror running just under her shell. It had been an age since the height of the infection, since there were bodies still to burn, or anyone living left to burn them.

But that smell—it was inescapable. Like the dread. Like the slow-motion certainty that there was nothing she could do, that her entire world was dissolving, day by day, before her eyes.

Your mind is your own.

Her mind was, still, her own. By some miracle. By some protection from the divine in her heritage, some useless trick to ensure she remained sane to witness the chaos. Something her father had evidently been unable to extend to his so-called Pure Vessel, whose downfall he’d acknowledged only by disappearing, along with his entire court and the palace she had once wished she could tear down stone by stone.

Leaving her with a crumbling kingdom. Leaving Hollow to burn, and burn, and burn—

Breathe. She had to breathe, had to stay here, stay now. For them.

The air, when she took a tentative gulp of it, did not reek. It was cool and clean and still. Those terrible days were long behind her. She was—no longer as alone as she once was. Her sibling was here, freed from their bonds, far from unharmed but also far more alive than she ever expected. And Quirrel—

Quirrel was kneeling beside her again, murmuring something that sounded concerned. All her fingers were buzzing; when she looked back down at them, her claws were sunk in the cloth she’d been using, clenching hard enough to tear.

She opened her fists. Flexed them, coaxing the feeling back.

Over her shoulder, quiet and level, she said, “I think I need more of those herbs now.”

He obliged, passing her the pouch, and waited until she had bowed her head to swallow—painfully—before he said, “You’re doing very well.”

She scoffed.

“Truly,” he hastened to add, before she could argue. “And you too, my friend.”

Hollow did not reply—could not, with the options she’d given them—but, as she watched, their head tilted. Questioning. Barely enough to be noticeable, except that she had been waiting, breath held, for any sign from them. And this…

This was the first reaction they had truly shown since she began.

She reached to touch them, one shaking hand smoothing over the shell at the base of their shoulder, where no nail or burn wounds marred it. “You are,” she whispered, and meant it. “I’m sorry, I’m—it must hurt, but—”

She wished she could tell them it was almost over.

The void was swirling softly when she met their eye, in a pattern she did not know how to interpret. Perhaps if she had seen the signs, had listened to her buried instincts sooner, she would know what it meant. The best she could do now was offer them what she herself would want, if she were in their place.

“All of the cysts on your shoulder are removed,” she explained. “The bleeding has stopped. The next step is to drain the infection in your chest.”

That would be the truly delicate work. The first few single blisters were clearly visible, following the lower curve of their pectoral plate. But farther on, they were grouped in clusters, crowding together, protruding like a clutch of eggs from the fractured cavity carved out by their own nail.

Self-inflicted, she heard Quirrel’s words echoing, and shook the memory away before it could paralyze her.

Perhaps she was accomplishing what they could not. Perhaps, in some way, they had been trying to rid their body of this plague, by the only method allowed to them.

Gods. How deep would she need to go to remove them all?

She could do this. She could.

She had to.

Hornet slid her hand from their shell and clenched her jaw, holding onto the bitter taste in her mouth. “Syringe, please.”

Quirrel placed it in her hand, a heavy, shining thing with a thick barrel and a long, slender needle. He had tested it while she was readying her other supplies, ensuring that it did not leak. Rather than cutting into the difficult-to-reach cysts and risking the infection draining back into their body cavity, he’d suggested she use this to draw the fluid out, until the entire growth could be removed safely.

In theory, this had sounded simple.

In practice, the first time she pierced the skin of one of the bright, angry blisters in their chest, it sprayed molten light down her front, flinging an arc of infection across her mask and arm in a string of golden droplets that immediately began to burn.

She couldn’t help the sound that she made: a visceral, stuttering hiss. Hollow had not flinched at the sting of the needle but they did flinch now—a spasm jerked their chest tight as they attempted to lift their head, quickly halted by the silk round their horns.

Before they could panic and struggle, Hornet wrestled her voice and her own momentary panic under control, though the edge of a growl still crept through. “It’s fine, everything is—fine. Please lie still.”

It was not fine. Her heart was thumping hard, the heat of the infection seeping through the collar of her replacement cloak and dripping down her mask, pouring down Hollow’s side from where their motion had torn the opening wider. Dropping the syringe with a clatter, she snatched up a rag and pressed it close to soak up the fluid before it could reach their shoulder and scorch the exposed skin even further.

There was more, too much more. “Bowl,” she snapped, and then it was in her hand. She wedged it under a lip of warped shell, damming off the other routes for the infection to flow with her handful of cloth.

Hollow’s breathing pattern had broken for an instant, but they were back to it now, as rigid as if they’d never left it, though each breath warped and wavered like heat waves in the air. She couldn’t take the time to think about it, between emptying the bowl and sopping up the stray runnels as the flow dwindled.

This blister was in danger of collapsing into the space it had carved out between their chest-plates, and she very much did not want to have to dig it back out—but the only things in her hands were not helpful for this. She dropped the rag, then held out her hand to Quirrel. “Forceps.”

A pause. “Which kind?”

She whipped around and saw his hand hovering over the three options on the tray. “The kind that grab things,” she hissed, snatching up the closest one.

Snagging the blister with the tool, she fumbled for the scalpel until Quirrel pushed it wordlessly into her hand. She stretched out the soft, swollen thing as much as she could, reached into the gap and, holding her breath, sliced it free.

Packing a damp, folded rag into the space worked to slow the bleeding, but she could see that she’d need to ask them to heal soon. The farther she went, the deeper she’d have to reach to cut the drained cysts out, and soon there would be no easy way to apply pressure. And the sooner they did heal, the less she would have to worry about any of the previous injuries breaking open if they struggled.

They’d not given any indication that they would. In fact, they’d given very little indication of anything. Even with her observing more closely, almost nothing betrayed their pain, the occasional quick tremor in their throat muffled and subtle, easily missed. But—if she took time to notice—she could feel the tension in their body, each plate tightened and tucked close, corded muscle showing in their ruined shoulder and at the front of their neck, where their scales faded away into skin.

The lump pressed on the back of her throat again, the urge to gag taking her by surprise. The sickening stench of the infection was not helping, wafting up in hot, sweet waves and lingering on her mask from the cooling splatter.

She couldn’t release pressure on the wound yet, so she turned her face aside, tucking her chin over her shoulder and breathing air that was a touch cleaner. Enough—it was enough.

Quirrel made an offended noise when he saw her face. Before she could protest, he had dipped a clean cloth in the basin and was wiping the filth from her mask. His touch was brisk but gentle, the rag smelled of nothing but soap, and his sharp mandible-click of distaste brought her back to when her nursemaids would clean hemolymph from her jaws, while she’d still been growing into them and had been far messier about her meals.

He folded the rag over itself to dab at the spots on her arm, too, and she let him, still trying to breathe, to push away the dizziness.

“Perhaps it would work better at a different angle,” he suggested. “Or try drawing back slightly on the plunger when you breach the surface.”

She nodded, unable to speak yet. She tried letting Hollow’s steady breathing lull her, shifting with them as their chest rose and fell in the longer pattern they allowed themselves.

Had they learned this from undergoing their father’s experiments? He had made references to a laboratory, deeper in the Palace than she had ever gone. Had he made and remade them using the same process as the kingsmoulds and all his other inventions? How long had it taken to perfect them? How long?

She could imagine Hollow lying there, under the bright lights and the god-king’s scrutiny, while he wove seals through their shell with mind and soul and scalpel. She could imagine them trying to deaden the pain, draw their mind away, focus on something other than the welling void beneath his touch. Trying, in some way, to exert control over something, anything, of their own body, when every other impulse was caught and ground down to dust.

Anger simmered and steamed in her stomach again. No, no—she had to shove it back, push it down. She would not make Hollow think she was angry at them—she would not.

Exhaling faintly, she turned to face her task again, lifting the rag out away from the wound and checking that a clot had formed. She could move on to the next one, now—and then the next, and the next.

Quirrel’s advice worked, though it was still a demanding, messy process—a careful slide of the needle into the cyst, a measured pull of the plunger, a breathless wait as the glass tube filled with glistening yellow. Each one required multiple rounds to empty, and she had to switch between drawing out the fluid and stopping up the opening as she handed the syringe back to be drained into the waste bucket.

When the sac deflated enough that there was too little for the needle to draw, she pressed the remainder of it out with the back of the knife, then cut the entire thing free.

The horror of it dimmed in the repetition.

Pierce. Draw. Scrape. Cut.

Her back cramped from bending over her work. Her wrists and hands ached with tension, with the burning light that dripped from the soaked rags, with the void that beaded ice-cold on her claws.

Quirrel offered her another set of forceps, longer. Another dose of herbs that she gladly accepted.

Through it all, Hollow was motionless. Even as she worked inward, reaching deeper, cold metal sliding between the plates and into muscle and skin. They barely breathed while blade or needle touched them, seeming to sense when she needed their stillness the most. It was a horrible sort of synergy—an unspoken effort, born of long practice, to disturb her as little as possible, to maintain that iron grip on their control.

She shouldn’t wish for them to react. She shouldn’t want to see them wince, or feel them flinch away from her hands. She should not hope the pain would prove too much for them to hide.

But it was agony, not knowing whether they would stop her. Not knowing if they were approaching their limit. It was agony to keep going, to force the same motions from her hands again and again, imagining the pain mounting with each wound.

It was agony, and she could not do it for long.

Despite her best efforts, she came loose from herself again. She sensed it happen, sensed the cord tethering her presence snap. It felt almost as it did when she was dreaming, watching her hands move from above her own head. The same motions as before.

Pierce. Draw. Scrape.

But when she reached for the knife again, the cricket did not hand it to her.

Hornet blinked, shifting her jaw out of its tight clench to demand what she needed.

The look on his face stopped her. He shook his head, glanced across her outstretched arm.

At Hollow. At the way their claws had begun to scrape at the blanket. At the barest strain in their back, a struggle not to arch against the ropes.

One claw quivered above the floor, rigid, as if they were resisting the urge to use it.

“Oh.” The sound came out barely more than a whisper. She sat forward, lifting the pressure on the rag she was holding. The tension in their neck and shoulders had gone taut enough to snap. Even their heel-spurs were digging in and ripping ragged gaps in the blanket beneath them, leaving pale scratches on the stone.

She—she had missed it. She had been too far away to see.

Before she could speak, before she could even begin to reassure them, they moved, gasping one rattling breath that abruptly broke the pattern, and tapped the stone once.

Twice.

Three times.

“I hear you,” she said, removing her hands from them entirely. “I hear you.”

They gasped. Again. Faster. And again, sucking at the air through open mouth and vents both, beginning to tremble enough to set the silk across their body vibrating along with them. They were falling apart, and she—

It was all she could do to keep from following.

Her head was light, as knotted up and empty as her stomach. What should she do? What could she do?  She had known—she had known that asking them to do this would terrify them, but any plans she might have made had escaped from her head like lumaflies from a shattered glass.

She clenched her fists on her knees and tried to breathe while Hollow spiraled farther and farther into panic, their throat closing far enough that each gasp shrilled, tight and harsh.

“It’s all right.”

Both of them jumped at the voice, soft as it was.

Quirrel. Intervening. Trying to soothe them, when she could not—and any defiant thought Hornet had had about doing this without him died in an instant.

He did not reach to touch them, either one of them, but his hands, too, were balled into fists. “Stay calm,” he said, just loud enough to be heard over Hollow’s distressed wheezing. “Please, stay calm, my friend. It’s all right. Breathe. It will pass.”

Hollow shuddered. Hot tears began to prick at Hornet’s eyes. She knew who this was for, which one of them he was calling friend, but it didn’t matter: some foolish, desperate part of her was clinging to his words as if they were for her.

Useless. Useless. She was just sitting there, doing nothing while they were sinking into terror in front of her. Afraid, in pain, having been forced to the point of asking for the one thing that frightened them the most.

Stop.

Any attempt she made at reassurance would be thin, shaky—but they deserved for her to at least try.

Her fangs felt horribly clumsy as she parted them to speak. “It’s all right, Hollow, it’s—” Tears choked her words back, and she had to swallow and try again. “I-I—you’ve done what I asked. I asked you to—to tell me, when it hurts too much. And you did. You did well.”

This prompted a broken cough, perhaps an attempt at bringing themselves back under control, an attempt that rapidly gave way to a soundless, fluttering whine, a not-cry so despairing that she had to shut her eyes on a flash of white, on an image of the Palace walls racing by as their screams set the halls ringing.

“Please,” she found herself whispering, claws pricking into her knees as she fought to make the world stop whirling. “It’s all right. Please. Please stop.”

She was begging, pleading with someone she was not even sure could hear her. Their eyes were wide open, but the void was moving in sickening twists and jerks, erratic and unfocused. She leaned back, inhaling deeply, though it felt like breathing through honey. Something greedy grasped at her, dragging all her limbs down—a helplessness and despair that wanted to suck her under and never let her up again—

The string of soul vessels tapped against her chest. No. No, she was not helpless. She had this. She had the means to make their pain stop. She could allow them to heal.

If they were able.

They flinched when she touched them, the thready hiss of their breath breaking in two. Murmuring something vaguely like reassurance, words she didn’t even hear leaving her own throat, she pressed her hand to the silk-rune on their other shoulder, opening the conduit slowly, only a trickle at first.

Hollow jerked again at the influx of soul into their reservoirs. She tried to meet their gaze, to appear steadier than she felt.

“It’s all right.” Repeating herself, repeating Quirrel’s words, too, but it was the only thing she could think of. “It’s all right. Breathe. Please just—breathe.”

 Her sibling appeared to try, forcing a deeper breath into their lungs—wheezing all the same in spite of it, but she nodded encouragingly, acknowledging their effort. “There. Good. Keep—keep breathing. You haven’t—I am not upset, I just—”

No, she didn’t have an explanation, not one that they could hear now. She settled for repeating what she had said already, feeding them soul drop by drop, until she could feel that they would have enough to complete a healing spell. She did not miss the way the whistle in their lungs diminished and the shaking in their limbs steadied some; an effect of the soul, or of her attempts to ground them?

“Hollow.” It was an effort to coax her voice not to shake. “Can you heal?”

They twitched. Nothing more. No response, not even in sign—when she looked, their hand was bent stiffly under, straining against the silk at their wrist.

Still terrified. Still so afraid of the consequences of expressing their pain, of asking for the reprieve they had needed.

Cold dread crawled through her. If they were afraid enough to lose control… they could, perhaps, be afraid enough to lash out.

“Step back,” she whispered to Quirrel. She heard him rise and drop something on the tray, take two quick steps. Then, after a pause, a third.

It would have to be enough. There was not much farther he could go, unless she asked him to leave the room. He had enough distance now to give him an advantage—he was quick, and she still hoped that the precautions would not be necessary.

“Hollow, heal for me,” she said again, and watched their throat spasm as they choked back another sob. Watched their hand flex, claws scraping tighter, silk creaking as they pulled against it. Wanting to hide, as they’d done before? To curl their hand close, as if it hurt them—or even to scratch their own shell open, in remorse at having asked for mercy?

Nothing she said could fix this. She had already tried—she’d tried everything she knew. If they could not heal—

If they couldn’t, she’d have to go on anyway. With her sibling in pain, more every moment, mounting with every wound she lanced. Without knowing whether the next cut she made, or the next, or the next, would be what made them lose their grip entirely, striking out at her in mindless instinct.

She couldn’t. She couldn’t put them through that again. Not knowing what she knew now. Not knowing what might come after.

The gashes in their shell—the nail-wounds in their chest—

Self-inflicted—

A flicker in her vision. Bright white, sketching spell-lines in the air. Only for an instant—then gone again, leaving a prickling afterimage.

Hollow’s shoulders went slack on the cushions, their breathing falling back to that jagged double rhythm. Void still seeped from the last emptied sac, still shone slickly on the seams where she’d cut the others away.

That had been their healing spell. She’d recognized it—but they had let their focus slip before it could finish. Something she had never seen them do, something she herself had not done since childhood. It was a waste of soul, a waste of focus. Letting go of a spell before it completed—aside from aborting a casting for one’s own safety—was the first thing she had been taught to avoid.

It was the sort of thing a beginner might do. Someone untrained. Inexperienced.

Another spell blinked out in her memory.

I know what you are.

Soul shining, faint and desperate, interrupted by a slash of her needle.

I know what you’d try to do.

Hollow sobbed again, an ugly, ragged sound, and she came back to herself, all at once.

They were spiraling. The flash of memory had distracted her—and her stunned silence had gone on too long.

“No,” she whispered, fumbling for—for anything, any way to save this from disaster. “No, I—”

A pause, while she took hold of herself, dragged herself free, scraped up the last of her strength. The warmth and solace in her voice when she spoke again was not hers. It could not be, no matter how she tried; it was her mother’s, it was Midwife’s, it was every drop of comfort she could wring out of her faded memory. “It’s all right. I—I know. I know you can. Please… please try.”

Quirrel was silent, tense, behind her, as she reached forward again to transfer more soul.

This time, she kept her hand on them, touching lightly, speaking softly, offering the only comfort she could. Coaxing them to claw their way back, breath by breath, until they regained enough control to try again.

She felt tingling in her bones, the chill flash of spent soul, as they failed.

Little shoulders hunched, cloak trembling as they shook with effort.

Soul-runes dancing over soft shell—then a surge of savage triumph as the spell vanished, incomplete.

Her own voice, cold, distant.

“I can’t allow it.”

Shit.

Not now. Not now.

It was—

The other vessel. The one now trapped in the temple. They had done this—

In combat with her.

Combat. It was unjust to call it that. There was no honor there, no respect, no glory. Only blood. Only fear.

Only slaughter.

Nothing she hadn’t done before. Nothing she would not have to do again.

Or so she’d thought.

Her heart beat faster, thumping in her mask, her throat. She was beginning to shake again, a terrible cold swelling in her chest.

They could not know. She could not let them see, they needed—Hollow needed her—

She had nearly killed them—

Her own voice reached her hearing, distant and calm, as if it belonged to another.

“You can heal. You can.” She could not feel the sound leaving her throat. She could not feel the breath leaving her lungs. “Breathe. Try again.”

They were listening. They were, though their chest still heaved and their claws still clenched, though their eyes still writhed with fear.

Please, she begged, without knowing how to say it. Without knowing if she could.

When she opened the conduit and let her soul spill over, they seemed to steady. Seemed to pull together, again, somehow. They looked her in the eyes as she spoke praise she could not hear, as she stroked their shell with a hand too numb to feel it.

Please.

Pale sparks pricked the air. A low hum built beneath her skin, like a net of threads pulling taut. Light began to lick along the jagged edges of their wounds, tracing every cut in brilliant white.

Hollow stopped breathing. Their horns arched back. Plates bunched at their abdomen, muscle tensing beneath, knees coming up against the ropes at the shuddering strain. Hornet had just enough sense left to shut her eyes before the arc of the spell closed in around them, white light flashing murky blue-gray through her eyelids.

When they relaxed, they did so completely, only a small quiver still rattling through them as they fell fully back onto the cushions in relief.

They’d done it.

They’d healed.

She—she hadn’t thought—

Hornet blinked. Stared down at Hollow, at her hand on their stomach, rising and falling as their breathing slowed. Watched the shift of light across their shell, the subtle ripple of their scars.

She should be relieved.

Why wasn’t she?

She turned her hand over. It moved when she bade it to. So there was no reason for her to feel that she was not in control, that something foreign had hold of her. She had almost expected to see silk threading from her joints like strings.

Her throat ached all the way down to her guts. There was pressure building, building, in her lungs.

But she would not cry. She would not scream. It seemed like an easy decision, effortless. She would not buckle, grip her horns with her hands, wail and sob until she lost the voice to speak. She could not let it out now, and so she would not.

She knew this. She recognized it. It was worse than before. Bad enough that she could not stop it. Bad enough that the sharp twinge of her fangs grinding was as distant as a dying spark.

It was easy, too, to swallow down the ache in her throat. To force air into her lungs. To forget her fears, screaming in the back of her head. To bury them. She had done this, over and over, throughout the long years, until it became almost instinct, as practiced a motion as sheathing her needle or reeling in her silk.

Until she felt nothing, or as close to nothing as she could.

It seemed to take a long time, and yet only a moment.

Hollow was calm enough now to continue. She saw herself check her anchors, one by one, plucking the threads that bound her sibling down—and then check their wounds, methodically, testing each new scar to be sure that it had sealed over.

Nausea churned below her shell again, somehow easy to ignore. She did not ask for the herbs.

Quirrel had drawn closer, a quiet, motionless presence at her elbow. Perhaps he could feel it, too, the way that the world had withdrawn from her.

When she spoke, it was far-off, like a voice half-remembered.

“May I continue?”

The tap of their claw against the stone was clear, though.

Yes.

Without turning, without thinking, she spoke. “Lantern.”

He lifted it, high, shining it down on Hollow’s shell. The blister she had half-drained before stopping, larger than the others, was still blocking a large part of one opening, taking up the sunken space next to their sternum. These at the center were the only pocket left; she had drained and disposed of the rest.

The room was quiet, too quiet. Every sound she made seemed unnaturally sharp: the click of the forceps, the soft pop of punctured skin, the angry sizzle of the acid as it bubbled to the surface.

She drained and cut and staunched the bleeding, her motions nearly mechanical. This was the last surface blister to remove. The only light showing now was the glimmer at the center, partially obscured by the arc of their chest-plates, deep enough within their body that her shelling knife could never have reached it all.

She held out her hand for the syringe, and Quirrel supplied it with the hand not holding the lantern. He craned forward to see and an intake of air hissed between his jaws. “Hornet—”

“I know.” She did not need the distraction. The next blister was fully inside their body. She would have to reach into the hole in their chest, first with a needle, then with a blade.

“Be very still,” she murmured, and knew that Hollow heard her.

They were holding their breath as she lowered the needle and eased it in.

The first one went just like the others—painstaking and slow, drawing out the light from the places it shone through the cracks. Pressing a wad of fabric in against the bubbling gap, plugging it with a scrap of rag clamped between the tines of the forceps, as it was too deep for her fingers to reach. Waiting, hand outstretched, as Quirrel emptied and wiped down the syringe, until he handed it back to her.

One more draw, she thought. One more.

She discarded the fabric, reaching in with the forceps to hold the thing steady. Hollow held their breath again, and she could not stop to think about how still they were, how every sign of life went utterly out of them in an instant.

The syringe only filled halfway, sputtering, and she drew it back, trading it for the scalpel as she leaned over them, resting her wrist on their chest to keep it steady.

This cyst was anchored somewhere in the pectoral muscle, below the edge of their broadest plate, and she held her own breath as she reached in to cut it free.

Just another cut. Just another blister.

A tremor seized her hands as she lifted the thing out by its edge, dangling from the end of the forceps. Quirrel took the entire thing from her, his hand warm and steady around hers as he pried her fingers free of the looped handles. He was still holding the lantern, working one-handed to provide her with her tools when she needed them, and he took longer than usual to switch out for the other pair, so she leaned forward to inspect the wounds in the bluish, swaying light.

With the first interior sac removed, there were more visible beneath it, but she could count them, now—two, three, four, all clustered on the left side, around and above a dark, veiny mass as large as her doubled fists.

A thing that she stared at stupidly for a split second before she saw that it was moving.

Beating.

Slower than the pulse beneath her own skin, clenching and relaxing in a distinctive, unrelenting motion. Black on black in the murky cavern of their body, visible only by the hateful light cast in dawning golds and oranges around it.

Their—she was staring at—

Hornet went cold. All over, in an instant, sickening plunge. And then feverish heat rolled over her, too much, too fast, a wave of it closing over her shell.

That was their heart.

The air in the room fell away. Blood throbbed in her head, writhed in her throat, filling her whole world with her battering pulse.

She should have taken the herbs.

A convulsive retch lurched up her throat. She pressed her hands over her mouth, claws scraping against bone. Could not quite stifle what escaped: a hoarse, wrenching sound, half growl, half groan. Another followed it, a spasm that clenched her whole body tight. She was—she was going to—

She flung herself away, scrambling backward over the mattresses without a shred of her usual grace.

The blankets tangled with her legs, her knees, entrapping her. One hand caught her, slamming into the stone. The jolt rocked up her shoulder, and the pain made her retch again, venom beginning to drip and scald, hissing out onto the stone and scorching holes in the sheets she had dragged with her.

Clutching her mask, fingers wrapped around one horn in a death-grip, she heaved helplessly, eyes straining open, staring at the spots of light dancing between her and the room. Her fangs and jaws spread wide, cramping. Her claws ached where she dug scratches in the flagstone.

Screaming in her head. In the halls. In her head. In her dreams.

Dreams of waking up and feeling something wrong inside her.

Of pressing hand to shell and finding a pulse of heat not her own.

Dreams of breaking light in her reflection’s eyes, of standing helpless while molten gold ran down the cavern walls, pooling, pouring, suffocating, an endless sea of foreign rage.

And—

Dreams of black, black—liquid, shuddering black. Spilling from her veins in place of gleaming blue. Draining from her shell, her warmth drunk down by a sapping cold no life-heat could quench. Eyes opening in the dark, dozens of them, blazing white and pitiless.

Void pooling in her footsteps. Dripping from her elbows. Pulsing from each fracture of a crushed mask, from the stump of a severed limb, from a gaping, caved-in chest as she wrenched her needle free—

Killer.

Killer.

Kinslayer.

One life. She had spared one and could not dare to think herself forgiven. As desperately as she grasped at it, as much as every action she took was an effort to absolve herself, she knew it would never be enough.

Every pulse of Hollow’s heart, each time it beat beneath their shell, was in mockery of all the others she had bled dry.

They lay so still, so lifeless, like every other body she had buried—like every other vessel she had killed—

She choked back a last, shuddering retch and loosened her grip on her horn, dropping her hand to the floor to brace herself. It took longer than it should have to fold her fangs back into place, her mouthparts fumbling as waves of nausea wracked her. Her eyes burned, burned, burned.

At least she had not had to bite herself to make it stop.

Black. Black ichor on her hands. Gushing down their shell as they lay there, bound, silent. Black blood, dripping down the knife in her dreams.

She had to look. She had to look back at them, to see the damage. But she couldn’t—not now. Not yet—

“Hornet?”

Something clattered on the floor. Quirrel—what was he doing? She hunched her shoulders, clamping down on her fangs to keep them from flashing out. A surge of anger—and the rasping wetness in her throat—lent a guttural hiss to her words, a sound her mother would have been proud to hear if Hornet had managed it as a spiderling. “Wait a moment.”

“You may not have a moment.”

What—

That fear in his voice was not fear of her.

She turned, cold dread already closing round her limbs, and saw Hollow—

Hollow. With a hole in their chest and void staining their shell, with an entire web’s worth of silk tying them down, was fighting to sit up. Their elbow was wedged halfway underneath them, tarsals braced into the gaps in the flagstones, horns hauled awkwardly back by the taut length of rope.

The rope’s anchor flickered. Dimmed. Down their side, along their arm, each soul-light wavered, one after another, the vessel’s strength taxing them to their limit.

A single string snapped. Then a second.

“Stop,” she gasped, and scrambled back toward them. “Stop!”

They did as she ordered. Instantly. Remaining in their contorted pose, though their arm was already beginning to quiver.

No. No, it was not only that. They were signing, frantically, hand twisted hard against the restraints to turn it palm-up, fingers opening and closing at their side.

The sign for hurt.

Something was wrong. Something—she’d hurt them, somehow, worse now, perhaps the ropes were hurting them, how—

It did not matter. “I’m sorry,” she choked out, and snatched the first tool within reach of her hand—a set of shears—to slice the cords. “I’m sorry, I—I’m so sorry—”

The first cord parted. Hollow’s head came up, silk streaming from their horns like ribbons, and—

Pushed against her. Urgently, yet carefully, firm presses of their muzzle to her shell, across her chest, her arms, her face, where she’d frozen with her mouth half open. They nosed at the shape of her under her cloak, quick whuffs of cold air stirring the fabric as they searched for something.

She gulped a breath, holding herself still, the shears half-forgotten in her hand. Again, another breath, not quite a sob, but entirely too close. Hollow was shaking, obviously in pain—their breath hitched with each inhale, their claws jerking every time they moved. But they did not stop until, having fulfilled some unseen objective, they leaned back, relaxing into their bonds, staring at her intently.

Not knowing what else to do, she cut more threads, releasing their hand, their elbow, their shoulder. Her breathing was still not under control, coming in quick gasps between spasms of tension that clamped round her throat like a vise. She checked their wounds, once, twice, skirting around the hole in their chest, refusing to even glance inside.

It was the same. Everything was the same, except that another scar had torn open in their shoulder, and then stopped bleeding almost immediately. She reached up to take their pulse, laying her hands along their throat to feel them breathe, to reassure herself that their black heart still beat.

Black, it was black, she knew now, and it shone in the light like a chunk of obsidian—

“What—” she breathed, then had to stop. Had to wrestle down the numb, senseless sobs that wanted to emerge, the instinct to shatter into pieces in relief, to let out everything that was hammering at her insides. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

They looked at her, again, with that whirling darkness in their gaze. The dense shadow that she had once thought unknowable, an enigma, a blackened night so absolute that dawn would never come to it.

But they had reached out to her. They had chosen her, chosen to make themselves known, though it defied everything they were.

In two motions, Hollow signed their answer.

Hornet. Hurt.

○

Taglist: @botslayer9000 @moss-tombstone @slimeshade Send an ask or reply to this post to be added to (or removed from) the taglist!

[alicelioncourt]

makeup

It's not that Shadowheart didn't like her current makeup, but at some point she wanted to make small changes and experiments: to make her cheeks a little brighter or her eyes even darker to emphasize their depth and see how she would look in a different look. After so many days of their journey, some things simply became boring. Except Gale's cooking. It was always on top.

Under the cover of darkness, while the fire quietly crackled the burning branches with such a pleasant crunch, Shadowheart decided to create a little magic and see what would happen.

The Cleric took with her into the tent everything that could be useful to her in order to paint herself a new face. She specifically chose the dark time of day so that no one would disturb her, and she would not disturb anyone with her suspicious rustling in the darkness of the night.

Thoughts occasionally crept into her head: what if it turns out ugly? She would not want to appear in a bad light in front of her companions. She was afraid that the reaction would be almost the same when they found out who Astarion really was. At the very least, she will definitely receive a caustic comment from Lae'zel.

Armed with a mirror and natural materials, Shadowheart began her experiments. The embers left over from the fire were used as eye makeup. She lined the lower eyelid with a thin line, then made several streaks and lines underneath. In the candlelight and darkness, her eyes began to look as if she had been crying and all her makeup had smeared.

An attempt to correct this mistake also did not lead to anything good: the red berries, in a desire to highlight her cheeks and make them brighter, looked as if she had gotten into paint. The juice of the berries flowed down the fingers, turning them red. It was as if she had torn someone apart with her bare hands.

Tonight was definitely not her night. And even though the wound on her hand did not hurt, she felt that the goddess Shar was punishing her a little differently.

To really finish this off, Shadowheart also painted her lips with berry juice.

“At least I look good with red lips…” she thought, looking in the mirror again. “But I look like a clown. Next time I'll try to do things differently. I don't like how it turned out."

Despite the reflection in the mirror, it was still her.

Sometimes changes are not so necessary. Walking quietly closer to the river so as not to wake anyone, Shadowheart quickly washed away this makeup and, with a refreshed face without makeup, returned to sleep by the fire.

"Good morning, Shadowheart. Oh… A little unusual, but I hasten to note that you still look just as beautiful,” Gale was the first to meet her. "I hope you got enough sleep today…"

“It’s okay,” she answered him and headed back to the tent to apply a new makeup that was more familiar to her facial features.

“Breakfast will be ready soon…” the wizard reminded her, just in case.

The Cleric of Shar examined her reflection in the mirror when she finished applying eyeliner. It was definitely much better this way. Not too bright, more restrained, but beautiful. Now she could forget about applying makeup at least for a couple of days. There was no point in reapplying her makeup every morning. The maximum she could afford was to touch up her makeup early in the morning if everything was really bad.

“I saw everything, darling.” Astarion teased her about her nightly experiments. "Next time, go to me if you want to look stunning."

“And this tells me a person who rehearses his phrases before saying them to someone,” she pricked him slightly skeptically in response, which caused the indignation of the vampire spawn. Of course, a little joke won’t ruin their relationship, but it will at least put him in his place a little. The offer is still tempting - she will think about actually turning to him.

In the meantime, a hot breakfast and a long journey awaited her. The artifact will not take itself into the Baldur's Gate.

[mastermindmp3]

Well, we've finally reached it. The song that made me first start crying on my initial TTPD listen.

There's so much to this song, so much about how we use up and discard the women who make culture. Clara Bow is about the women who get held up as touchstones posthumously / very late into their careers. Swift has stated that she pulled from actual examples used about her, but I can think of so many more that could've been pulled in board rooms.

You look like Gwen Stefani, you look like Brittney Spears, you look like a Spice Girl. I can think of so, so many examples, beyond the ones who are listed in Clara Bow. We, as in the public consciousness, forget the women who shaped the imagery we love. Billie Holiday shaped jazz and pop, Anna May Wong as a pivotal film actress in Hollywood's earliest days, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe for rock and roll. For a very long time, any plus size woman trying to get into music was compared to Adele, and now it's Lizzo.

Young women, especially those in the media industry, are constantly, constantly inundated with women we are supposed to be like, but not entirely. We're supposed to be the better version of them, damned with faint praise. A line that has, in hindsight, stuck out to me was "You look like Stevie Nicks in '75, the hair and lips," because... Why '75?

Obviously, part of it is for the rhyme scheme. But the song is told entirely in quotes, something someone said. Swift looks like Stevie Nicks in '75, because she looks like Stevie when she was young, when she was "new," when she was dazzling.

That's not to say that Stevie Nicks isn't a powerhouse now. She still performs, still writes. She performed this year! In 2024! And yet, she will forever be frozen in '75, when she was with Fleetwood Mac and was releasing their self-titled album, in the throes of writing Rumorus. ( side note: please read the history of Rumours writing process. )

It's an endless cycle: women's ideas are taken, consumed by the public, and when only the bones remain, they're used to compare.

"Promise to be dazzling" is the ending line of the chorus - and it's both a beautiful, poignant reminder that the women listed in the song have captured audience's hearts and minds, and a threat. Promise us that you'll be dazzling, you'll forever be sixteen, forever hold up these ideals and stay the exact same.

I think Swift said it best herself, "There's this thing people say about celebrities, that they're frozen at the age they got famous." The demand is: promise to remain the newest thing, and we will always love you.

The truth is that, well, it's not possible. The promise is designed to not be kept. When public opinion turns on these women, it's to detract from their legacy of art.

Getting older is not a curse, it's a gift. We have so many public figures who didn't get that gift, who are frozen at 18, at 22, at 27. And yet, the societal demand is that women stay young, women can only be beautiful, can only be successful if they are young.

A couple of other songwriting notes.

"Did you know you'd be picked, like a rose?" Another question from imaginary men in meetings; did you know, you would be picked to be the new great thing? Did you know, that you too will begin to wilt under the pressure?

I love the repeats of "I'm not trying to exaggerate, but I think I might die if it happened to me / I might die if I made it." Because it relates back to that idea of how caustic fame is. How everyone around the Narrator (very much Swift, in this case) can see how she's being affected by it, and are indirectly praising her for being so strong. Neverminding that this entire album is a statement, a saying of "fame has drained me so, please let me off this pedestal."

But, didn't you know? "[You're] flesh and blood amongst war machines / You're the new god we're worshiping."

That final verse - You look like Taylor Swift, in this light, we're loving it. You've got edge, she never did. The future's bright, dazzling. Her delivery of the lines is soft, but the intent is clear. It doesn't actually matter who the imaginary board director is addressing - it doesn't matter which of the new generation of pop artists look, sound, act, are like Taylor Swift.

What matters, I think, is the warning. Don't let them do this to you. Do not let them tell you that youth is all you have, do not let them make you follow the mold of women before you, that you may only ever be bejeweled right now.

The future, too, is dazzling.

[elvisabutler]

#15 Fluff prompt with army! Elvis where you know he’s been seeing other girls and you just met him but he actually really adores you/makes time for you. Kinda took inspiration from the Anita phone call where he’s nagging her about calling, this is different, he wants her to visit and call.

called ya, didn't i?

fandom: elvis presley | elvis ( 2022 ) rating: t for some implications but again pretty tame pairing: elvis presley x female plus sized reader word count: 1249 warnings: mentions of elvis and his ladies' man ways. mentions of the reader deciding men are trash. minor insecurity on the reader's part, nothing too woe is me, more practical than anything else. reader is of age ( i mention her daddy so it needs to be said. ). author’s note: thank you for this anon! this was adorable and after the- smut army elvis prompt i got i discovered he's actually quite fun to write. hope you enjoy this! this is done for my 1k gala, based on fluff line “just call me whenever you like.” y'all know the drill, real elvis or austin elvis works fine for this despite the moodboard.

If there's one thing, and one thing only that your parents have taught you, it's not to be stupid around boys. It's to know that most boys are stupid and don't have your best interests at heart, instead they have their own interests at heart and are slaves to their own desires. Army boys- be it the ones you've grown up with on bases in various places or the ones who've been shipped off to fight in wars or to just be a peacekeeping force- are ten times worse. Something about the fact that they know they can be shipped away at any time makes them practically caustic with other people's feelings and hearts. No, you know better than to fall for an army boy.

Or at least, perhaps you you did. You thought you knew better and then Elvis Presley came strolling into your life and you- oh, you feel that God has to be mocking you. He has to be mocking you because there's no way Elvis Presley would show interest in you. You're confident enough in your figure, it errs a little too much in the rotund direction for some but you like it just fine. Figure that whoever you want to be with would do the same, tell you how much they enjoy the plushness of your stomach and of your various parts. You know the type Elvis goes for, however, and you- oh you- are most definitely not it.

Yet, here was Elvis sending you letters and finding out your phone number from other people because you're so charming every time he talks to you. He never gets to talk for long, someone always pulling him every which way but it's fine, you think. It's fine because he's got all those other girls, the nice refined girls who look good in the papers and even the ones that just look good, even if no one but you and half the base know about them. No, it's better this way, better that you don't call him and you just leave him be to the other girls. Leave him to charm them like he kind of charmed you.

Except Elvis keeps making time for you. He keeps pushing aside whatever girl he has on his arm at any given function to come and say hello to you. It's not unwelcome but it's strange, it's strange to see Elvis Presley making time for you. It's even stranger still that one night he asks you on a date. A date your mind tells you that you should accept, you shouldn't accept because he's going to inevitably toss you aside like you just watched him toss the other girls aside. It's a date you do accept though, one that's filled with dancing a little silly till the slow songs start and he's twirling you as if it's the most natural thing in the world. It's a date filled with so much joy you almost forget it has to end until Elvis is on your doorstep placing a chaste kiss to your cheek.

"Gonna let me take ya out tomorrow night?" He murmurs, his hands against you cheeks, his thumbs rubbing them slightly. "Please, darlin'."

You agree and your life becomes a whirlwind of dates and phone calls and Elvis getting sent to Paris where you know he's got another girl so you don't call. You don't call for over a week until Elvis calls first. Your instinct is to remain sweet and charming because even if he's got another girl probably in the next room over but you can't help the way you pout just a little.

"Why are you calling me? Don't you have a pretty French girl to kiss and spend your time with?" The hurt seeps into your tone despite everything. You knew better and yet- yet you thought maybe this was different. "I didn't call you for a reason, 'Vis."

There's a silence on the other end of the phone call before you hear a muffled curse before he groans. "Baby, I ain't got any French gal. I got you, but no French gal looking to be mine." He pauses. "Ya really think I ain't- Baby I'm mad as hell ya ain't here wit' me. Why would I- That's why ya haven't been callin' me? Ya think I got someone else?"

It's your turn to be quiet on your end of the line as you listen to his breathing and hear a slight huff of a laugh leave him before you answer. "Well what am I supposed to think? I know how you are and how girls are and how I'm cute and pretty but not your-"

He cuts you off. "Not what I go for? Darlin'- now I want ya t'listen. I jus' call me whenever ya like. I wanna hear ya voice, wanna hear 'bout ya day. Wanna get to know ya real well. Thought I made that pretty clear 'fore we went to Paris but I'm guessin' I didn't now."

"Oh Elvis." Those are the only two words that cross your mind at the admission and you're struck by a faint rush of embarrasment that you had read the situation so wrong, that you had allowed your judgment to be a little clouded when it came to him just because he was Elvis and just because he was a boy in the Army. It makes your heart twist a little before you finally gain up the courage to speak again. "You really mean it? You aren't teasing, are you? I know you do that too and I don't think I could handle you doing that to me. It'd be real mean."

"Baby. My mama'd- God rest her soul- she'd ask God to smite me if I lied about this. No lyin' I want to get to know ya better 'fore my tour's over. 'Fore they send me back home. If I get to know ya and we like- we enjoy each other more, ya can come home wit' me. Already want ya to visit me more often. Wanna see ya. Hear ya."

A laugh leaves you, a soft little thing that Elvis thinks is something a little bird might sing before you speak. "I- Okay. Alright. I'll- I'll call tomorrow night, how about that? Because I got to sleep, Elvis. And we'll talk and I'll see if my daddy can help me see you."

You can hear the relief and the smile in Elvis's voice when he answers you. "You better. And- I know you're a good girl, I do, but I wanna kiss ya on the lips sometime soon. Can we-"

"Maybe. Play- Play your cards right, Elvis. I'm not so easily swayed you know." You answer is a little cheeky and earns a loud bellowing laugh from him in response.

"Best answer I'll get from ya. Alright." He pauses and hears someone yelling for him before he curses yet again. "Listen. You 'member. Tomorrow night. Gonna be right by the phone waitin' for ya."

He has to hang up before he gets confirmation from you. But the phone call he gets the next night and the night after that and the one after that might just be enough of one. Enough of one to take you on another date when he sees you and one that ends with a proper kiss. And perhaps it's just maybe enough of a confirmation to talk about taking you back to Memphis with him.

[honestlyvan]

Re: previous reblog -- I do also think that what with how caustic and full of people just looking to be haters for fun almost every community on the web currently is, there's a bad habit of taking posts that contain love and hate side-by-side as just haterdom.

Like, ultimately it's a personal preference that I wish people would separate their sauces a little better, but I also recognise that for a lot of people, the path of least resistance into talking about their feelings and wants is through comparison and contrast. For example "I don't understand why Ship A/B is so popular because the merits of Ship B/C appeal to me more" does not rise to the level of haterdom for me -- as a shipper of A/B I would probably be annoyed at getting blasted just so someone else can create air for themselves to be a lover of something else, but the value of them doing that to then go on to talk about the thing they love still matters.

The nature of social media is that arguments generate engagement. As someone who has for years had a rule of not reblogging posts where the only value is in an addition by someone ripping the OP a new one, just as a matter of discourse hygiene, has served me well, but most people don't blog as mental exercise and don't overthink these things to the same degree as I do. Diligence about not guilt-tripping and checking your firing lines are, if not advanced techniques, rhetorical techniques nonetheless. Freeform informal writing the way I'm doing right now is still a craft that requires training, and the worse people's skills are at it, the lower you gotta set the floor to give them a chance to get better.

Like, I can't ask anyone to look at someone shitting on a thing they like while trying to praise something else in the same breath and tell them "the solution here is to ignore the hater-y shit they said and engage only with the positive, and wait for them to reveal if they really do just wanna be a hater", but that's my strategy. I don't seek out saltparties with strangers, (EDIT: or rather, I taught myself to stop doing that, because it never lead to anything good) I look for what we have in common that we both like, and maybe once we're good they're inducted into the exclusive club of Van's Group Chat (For Being A Bitch About Things).

The way to stop forming social connection through shared resentment is to stop engaging people through resentment. Everyone has something beautiful and true to say.