#the shuffle wasnt shuffling

[enfleures]

tagged by the lovely @sabrinstudies (maybe literally 2 years ago) but i thought this might be fun

rules: set your entire music library to shuffle and report the first ten tracks that pop up, then tag ten people to do this!

1. all the good girls go to hell - billie eilish

2. wait for it - h.e.r.

3. location - khalid

4. idontwannabeyouanymore - billie eilish

5. we find love - daniel caesar

6. coaster - khalid

7. angels - khalid

8. ultralight beam - cub sport

9. pray - sam smith

10. little rowboat - daniel caesar

i tag: @luthiest @stuhde @shlrleystudies @ronanlynch @castudies @productivityrocks (if y’all wanna do this ofc) + anyone else who feels like it <3

[tripp-pants-sora]

Me: I dunno spotify I just feel real low

my spotify, infected with a virus that makes it constantly recommend electro swing: would some electro swing help

[try-set-me-on-fire]

Ok well i had the brief thought “what about an ER nurse Eddie au?” and then this popped fully formed into existence so fuck it Friday pt 2.. warnings for smoking and vague references to critically injured kids

“That doesn’t seem very healthy.”

Smoke curls up from the cigarette held loosely in Eddie’s hand. “It’s not, particularly.”

Buck’s hands are in his pockets as he strolls away from the glass doors out into the ambulance bay where Eddie is doing the mature, professional equivalent of playing hide and seek. He comes to a stop barely a foot or two away from where Eddie leans against grimy concrete. “Didn’t know you were a smoker.”

“I’m not,” Eddie sighs, “Particularly.” He looks over Buck’s face as he takes a drag, cataloging bruises and cuts. He hadn’t been the one to look him over before he was discharged, probably because he was out here avoiding having to do so. “Only when it’s- only after the bad shifts.” And only once a month, even if the bad shifts come again and again. He bought this pack in January, it’s stale as shit.

Buck’s eyes follow the smoke as it drifts skyward. “Rough one today?”

Eddie thinks he probably doesn’t have to explain to Buck that it’s sometimes better when a kid is dead on arrival so he doesn’t have to try his best to administer care he knows will be useless. He doesn’t have to explain a day where nothing goes right and he loses more people than he can save and he still has to walk away from someone’s parent or wife or sister, left behind forever in a waiting room on the worst day of their life, and go on to lose the next person too. Doesn’t have to explain why he’s out here, and not in there. “Mm. We’ve got this repeat customer, always hate to have him back.”

Buck’s eyes flick to his face before they settle somewhere around his elbow. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. He seems like a nice guy. I worry about him. He’s here too often.”

Buck doesn’t look up. “What was he in for this time?”

“Minor concussion. Bruising. Lacerations.” Eddie sucks cancer into his lungs. “Heard a house fell on him.” Exhales it into the night.

Buck does look up this time, eyes a darker blue out here in the shadows. “Part of a house. Just a staircase and the- like, the balcony, really.”

“Maybe he should stay away from those.”

“From houses?” Buck asks, half his mouth twitching into a smile.

Eddie rests his head on the wall behind him. “Guess that’s not really practical.”

“No.” Buck is quiet for a moment, one hand slipping out of his pocket and running through his hair. Eddie wonders what he looks like, when he’s not here. He’s more styled, sometimes, when things aren’t very bad. He wonders if he’s usually all gelled up and neat. Eddie kind of likes the loose curls. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Making your day worse.” Buck looks genuinely apologetic, and Eddie shakes his head.

“The guy made it out okay this time.” Buck is just close enough that Eddie can kick at his boot with his sensible orthopedic sneaker. “You didn’t even need stitches.”

“That’s good.” Eddie’s left foot is pressed along the inside of Buck’s right, and Buck is staring down at them. “His favorite nurse was on break. I would have missed you if someone else had to do them.”

Eddie laughs, just a few bursts of soundless oxygen. “You gotta find new ways to see me before something happens that I can’t fix.”

Buck moves, taking the few steps necessary to lean against the wall beside him. Carefully, he takes the cigarette from Eddie’s hand, holds it between two of his own fingers, and takes a drag. Eddie watches it happen like he’s monitoring somebody’s pulse ox, and when Buck coughs he laughs again, louder this time. “Fuck,” Buck says, laughing too. “Thought that would be cooler than it was.”

“Smoking isn’t cool, firefighter Buckley,” Eddie says, taking the cigarette back and pulling from it again between smiling lips.

“Hm,” Buck says, grinning out into the night. Then he sighs, and rolls his head along the concrete to look at Eddie. “I think there’s nothing you can’t fix.”

They’re very close. “There’s lots I can’t fix.”

Buck shrugs like he disagrees. “I also think I’d like to find other ways to see you.”

Buck’s eyes are even more in shadow at this angle, and they’re the color of the lake back in El Paso that he and a bunch of kids went to after graduation, drunk off beer somebody’s cousin got for them, skinny dipping with breathless terrified delight under bright constellations. “Then ask me.”

Buck inhales as Eddie exhales. “What time’s your shift end?”

“5:30 AM. So, probably 6:15.”

Buck traces the two fingers he’d used to hold the cigarette down Eddie’s arm. “You wanna get breakfast with me?”

“Yes. I would.”

Buck smiles, and Eddie snubs out the cigarette on the wall between them. “I’ll meet you here?”

“Alright.” He takes a step forward, then a step to the right so he’s standing in front of Buck. “Two hours.”

“Uh huh.”

He should really get back inside. They’re understaffed, as always, and there are too many patients, as always, and not enough beds, as always. “See you then.” He doesn’t make any move to leave.

“See you then,” Buck almost whispers. He leans forward, and Eddie still doesn’t move, so he presses a tiny kiss to the corner of his mouth for just a moment. His lips are warm. Eddie hadn’t noticed it was cold outside.

Buck pulls back and leans against the wall again. Eddie smiles, puts a hand in his pocket, and walks back toward the doors.

[reapersmarch]

tell me lies, and i'll justify them look before you leap, orrr, what happens when it all comes tumbling out start here prev • next

a note from me to u: this is (very slightly) canon divergent in the sense that I wanted to write a very specific confrontation between ricardo and bel and even though I think placing it in the canon "legs broke" ending would have worked just as well, I think the stress would've killed him and would've just been... kinda depressing honestly, so. slight divergence of "they narrowly avoided the semitruck and now have to deal with the fact that bel told him he's entropy", so please be advised and enjoy!

There are no two ways about this, and no sense in mincing words: this fucking sucks.

And that doesn’t even really begin to cover it.

In fact, there probably aren’t enough words in the English, Welsh, or French languages for you to begin to describe what, exactly, you’re feeling here. Awkward. Tense. Edgy. Uncomfortable. But, none of those are enough, either. It’s more like… you’ve been in a dead sprint for so long, your lungs have finally given out, and you know that the only way this ends is in death.

No one to come save you, no way for you to crawl your broken body out of this one.

You condemn yourself to your fate, and stretch your neck across the block.

The executioner, this time, takes the shape of Ricardo’s side profile as he drags a hand down his mouth, turning over and over and over what you’ve just told him.

There’s a saying that you’ve always been particularly fond of—if you smell shit everywhere you walk, check the bottom of your shoe.

Or: you are the lowest common denominator. 

Your strength was never math—it was always science, a natural inclination towards it, which is ironic given how much math there is in astrophysics. You were only ever a casual observer, though; never really one to know the exact application of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, but you knew what they felt like. 

The first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; only changed. You suppose that’s true enough. It did hurt, when you fell from the heavens. It hurt when you felt your wings melt, the wax burning skin like molten glass as the ground rose to meet you, kiss you, embrace you like an old lover. When you felt everything in you shatter and shake, stain the concrete, rearrange at the molecular level until you were no longer you, it hurt.

So, maybe you can’t destroy energy. You can fundamentally change it, however. You can destroy a person—ah. But you’re not a person. You never were. Let’s try again.

You can destroy a thing. Push it to the brink of ruination, only to bring it back from that point and say, “See? You were fine. You were just fine.” Do that enough times, and eventually the thing breaks. Machines slow and rust, clothes get holes in them, regenes snap and bend and morph until they do what they’re supposed to. They break.

And then what? The energy changes. Sidestep dies, Entropy is born.

If the first law is the making, then the second law must be the unmaking.

It states that when energy changes from one form to another, entropy in a closed system increases.

Funny how that works out.

But that’s true, too.

When did you start tearing yourself apart? When he entered your life again? When you let him enter your life? When you handed him the scalpel and lay yourself down across the operating table, guided his hand to your chest and said, ‘cut here’?

There is a bitter edge to the very idea that he occupied so many of your thoughts, had you tearing yourself asunder every other night, but you could never tell if you took root in any of his. That the bliss of silence could just as quickly be replaced with the violence of static—you never knew just how violent static could be until you met him, that it was even capable of doing that kind of damage.

Anchors, as you are learning, can be used to sink as readily as they can to secure.

So. Yeah. It’s you. You’re the through line here. And so is he. And you’ve just confirmed that for him.

He was bound to figure it out eventually; you couldn’t hold it together long enough to keep the division separate. The lines of Sidestep and Entropy blurred into one another forever ago, when you decided to stop and do good, be good. You just couldn’t stop being Bel, even if you wanted to—and you desperately wanted to.

In your ardent need for affection, your unholy want for companionship, you lowered the drawbridge, and you took everyone in. You put the crown to his head, made him king of your domain, and couldn’t fathom how you were dethroned.

“Ricardo—”

“Don’t.”

He’s not done processing, it seems.

That’s fair. You might not’ve even foreseen this conversation, but he had an entirely different vision of how this would play out in his head.

(Not that you would know.

This is all just conjecture.)

The smoking wreckage of this barely functional car that you managed to veer into a back alley in an industrial zone is not where he pictured having it, for one. For two, he thought you were related to Hollow Ground, somehow.

Also kind of fair. You did have an uncanny resemblance to one another, one which you are not in a place currently to dissect, and he did spot you exiting his… lair, you guess.

You have a sneaking suspicion that neither of you expected to live through that encounter, and now that you have, it’s like holding on to a lit firecracker and waiting for it to blow your arm off.

“I’m sorry,” he lets you say. You’re not sure why. You don’t know what you’re even apologizing for, and it rings remarkably hollow when the ripple effect of your actions outweighs whatever guilt you could possibly be feeling. He does not acknowledge this though. He can’t even look at you right now.

You’re not sure if it’s better or worse that you told him the truth. Maybe letting him believe his conspiracy theory would have been the safer thing to do, but you have always laughed in the face of safety.

“I think,” he starts after an eon, “the part I hate about this the most is that I still love you.”

There it is, the axe. The blade right at your neck.

He told you this already. In his apartment when you let yourself be convinced to stay the night; let him talk you into his bed, let him hold you and tell you everything you’ve been wanting and waiting to hear, what you foolishly refused to see across all this time—the second time you’ve ever shared a bed. Quite possibly the last.

He told you he loved you, and the weight of that crushed you instantly.

It was fine when it was just you—burying yourself in years of regret, choking back every almost half-muttered declaration, and forcing yourself to be content with whatever you had going on. It wasn’t so much a problem when you were two ships passing in the night; everything you were experiencing was all self-inflicted. Sure, it was miserable. Sure, you thought it would be kinder to drive your car into the ocean. But you had a handle on it. Mostly. It was contained, even if you couldn’t keep it from showing in your face. Even if you couldn’t hide the way you still look for him first in a room, or the way your hand always manages to find his arm when you need it—a steadying point on the horizon.

It was contained. You never let it spill out of you in more than a trickle.

This, though.

Sitting there and being told it’s reciprocal, that he loved you—still loves you, somehow.

This is killing you.

He loves you, and you still can’t unstopper the bottle.

Not because you don’t want to—you would love to. You have been shouting it with your actions for years, you have been howling it, without ever saying a single syllable of the sentence that is piercing through your skull, currently.

You can’t uncork this because the truth has to come out, and when the tell-all gossip column finally spreads the word straight from the devil’s mouth to his ears, he’ll hate you, and you’ll still love him.

“I don’t know what to say,” you tell him, because you don’t, and you can’t stop looking at him but he won’t look at you.

“Were you ever going to say anything?”

“Eventually,” you try to assure him. You can’t really assure him of anything, but you are baring as much of yourself as he’s willing to see. “It was always—I wanted to. Ricardo, I really, really wanted to, but—”

“You couldn’t.” He finishes for you.

You don’t have anything to add, so you purse your lips and fidget with your hands for a while. He doesn’t say anything else, still gazing out the window as though something fascinating will occur there.

“Ricardo, please, just… look at me. For a second. Please.”

He doesn’t.

You reactively reach for his hand, then stop yourself halfway, fingers curling in on themselves. You don’t deserve comfort. You have no right to ask for it.

You betrayed his trust.

You may as well let your head roll.

Your hands find the hem of your sweater and lift until the flesh of your abdomen is exposed, intricate lines of bright orange crisscrossing in every direction.

He finally looks, but you can’t anymore.

“This is why,” you state, as though it’ll answer everything—and in some ways, it does.

This is why: I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t be honest. I never let you in. I never asked for help. I tried to lock you out. I was afraid of you. I'm sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

Take your pick.

“After Heartbreak,” you drone, like you’ve numbed yourself to it, “I didn’t exactly have the best time.” Understatement of the century. “I’m sorry you mourned. I’m sorry you had a funeral, and that, in your eyes, I’m dying a second death currently, but I fucking had a good go of it, Ricardo. When they hauled me back to the Farm, they poked and prodded and so much worse. They fucking—please don’t look at me like that—they put me back together so they could split me apart again, and do whatever else they wanted, because it didn’t matter; I don’t exist. ‘Less than’—isn’t that what you said once?” He flinches.

“I didn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t matter what you meant.”

You let your sweater fall back into place.

“When I was there, they did everything within their power to keep me out.” Two fingers against the temple. “Went so far as to take something they knew had the potential to fuck them up worse than I ever could, they were that afraid of what I would do. You…” With thumb and forefinger, you rub at your eyelids, exhausted. You sort of wish you could gouge them out. “Sometimes, not being able to feel you is nice. It’s nice not hearing everything so loudly, knowing that I don’t have to try to shut you out because you can’t let me in. Knowing that I could relax because it’s just you—it’s Ricardo, it’s Charge, it’s just my shadow. But on my worst days, you fucking… you feel like them, Ric.”

You feel like you’re going to vomit.

“You feel just like them, and then my shadow isn’t comforting anymore, and suddenly, I’m afraid of the dark.”

You pivot before you’ll let him acknowledge any of that. You don’t want it acknowledged. You don’t want to know what he has to say about any of it. Maybe that’s selfish. You don’t care.

“So that’s why… Entropy. The only way I could see how to fix it was by becoming Entropy and giving the public something to rally around. Voice of the fucking people and all of that bullshit,” you chuckle in spite of yourself, dropping your head back against the seat. “Which meant that by default, I couldn’t tell you a thing. Even if you wanted to, there wasn’t a way you could help me that wouldn’t also make you a target,” you say, “and I couldn’t trust myself around you.”

That’s a fairly important distinction.

You didn’t trust him enough to reveal anything, this is true. The Rangers were staunchly in the adversary bucket given the nature of what they are. But you didn’t trust yourself around him.

You couldn’t trust that you wouldn’t unhinge that jaw and speak. You couldn’t trust that you would be able to control yourself.

You were right.

You threw yourself at him, hoping the landing would be softer this time, and it was worse.

“You’re right,” you hear yourself say, head lolling to the side to smile bitterly at him. “The worst part about all this is that I still love you; I can’t make myself stop. In seven years, I couldn’t make myself stop. It’s pretty stupid, actually, because I knew, deep down, that you were just like that. Ricardo Ortega, the flirt. The unfairly handsome, outrageously friendly Marshal Charge. You knew how to make someone feel like the most important person in the room. That was just you, but I couldn’t stop myself from falling for it. No one had ever looked at me the way that you did, and I—”

He kisses you.

He kisses you and kisses you and kisses you, like you’re the oasis in the desert and he hasn’t seen water in weeks. He kisses like a man starved, and you’re the last thing he’ll ever taste. He kisses like he loves you—still, despite—and it knocks the breath from you.

He pulls back enough your lips are just barely grazing, stroking his thumb along your neckline and pressing your foreheads together.

“—I just wanted to feel alive,” you finish. 

And you do. You feel more alive than you ever have in your thirty years, and now he’s looking at you the way he always did, seeing you, intent on you, and you realize—he has always looked at you this way. When his eyes fixed on you, they were waiting for you to notice. Even here, in this barely functional car in the back alley of some industrial zone, where you thought you were going to puke your innards out from the stress of this conversation.

The only thing you did vomit up was words, so that’s incredibly impressive for you. 

You were surprisingly calm about the whole thing. You don’t think you are physically aligned with your body at present, so this is probably the biggest contributing factor, but maybe that therapy session did you some good after all.

“You’re an idiot,” Ricardo tells you gently. “The biggest idiot I’ve ever met. The biggest, prettiest pain in the ass idiot to deal with.” And you laugh, even if you do feel yourself wanting to cry. “You still look like you, Bel, at the end of the day. This is just you on a really bad one.”

“The worst fucking day imaginable, really,” you manage, muffled against his shoulder.

“Yeah. But you’re still you, and that’s all I care about.”

[coriander-candlesticks]

I've felt like I should check in with Apollo the past few days and finally managed to clear enough space on my floor to feel alright with breaking out the tarot deck again so I did! Lit his candle, said as as formal a prayer as I could muster beforehand, asked Hermes to help with communication, the whole shebang. For further context: I've been wanting to ask Aphrodite something specific (also via tarot, it's the most grounding tool I've got) but I only have the one deck at the moment and, while I've used it to ask Hermes about things in tandem with Apollo, and Aphrodite introduced herself via it (with a card that also introduced Apollo), I wasn't sure if it would be cool for me to use it to ask her specifically something not in direct tandem with Apollo. I mentioned that in the prayer but also said that that might be a question for a different session, since trying to get an answer to that (on top of the general "hey how are we doing/do you have anything you want me to learn") might muddy my ability to understand the message.

Cue twelve cards falling out of my deck/poking out while I was shuffling. I usually pull ~3 cards on top of whatever falls out, but I ended up not feeling like it was needed. Seven of them fell out face-up, too.

Despite having some concerns about whether all of the cards were "supposed" to be pulled, it was pretty coherent! And covered quite a few things I've been thinking about recently, including sorting out anxiety vs a warning/displeasure, a follow-up of a card that was the focus of my last pull, and a reminder to look at outside/intellectual sources to combat the whatever-the-fuck-my-brain's-on. There were four cards that fell out face-up together in a pile: a card I associate with Apollo at the front and one associated with Artemis (the Moon) at the back, with cards related to unity & growth in the middle. I'd had a pretty bad experience attempting an offering to Artemis last month and have stepped back and avoided asking her for anything or specifically invoking her in prayers/offerings/etc. since (except for once when it involved a pregnant friend b/c it seemed odd and tbh a little disrespectful to ask Apollo for help and not her as well) because I took it as a sign that she didn't want me to work with her. I'm also aware, though, that that bad experience could have just been a meltdown/panic attack. Regardless of whether it was either of those two things, a "hey slow down" warning, or a combination, it was nice to have some clear reassurance & an official introduction. It's also significant, I think, that part of the Moon card's message is about not letting anxiety/"self-deception" (direct from the guide) cloud your intuition. I've been wanting to burn the candle I dedicated to her for a few days now- it's possible that was a sign from her as well.

As far as the deck-use question...the first card that fell out was the Empress (face-up, reversed). My initial thought was that it was a "no", but I decided to look at the meaning in case it wasn't that which was. probably a bad idea. It freaked me out a bit because I couldn't figure out what it was referring to. I ended up using my alphabet oracle tiles for a makeshift yes/no system after finishing with all the other cards and got clear confirmation that my instinct was, in fact, correct.

All in all it was really cool?? By far the most cards I've had in one pill iirc, and a good lesson in identifying how my intuition works.

[daretobeking]

dead on the floor. i love when characters dance. tr dancing. the different ways they dance in duos and trios and as a group and on their own. do you understand me do you get it

little pieces of themselves that they can never stomp out or box away. how you dance.

[shinzoku]

Thinking about how in 2019 I saw a doctor because I couldn't breathe and they told me I was fat. So I started trying to work on it but after camping I went to urgent care because I quite literally couldn't breathe. Of course I made an appointment with the doctor and they kept telling me I'm fat so I went to an asthma specialist later and had to be put on steroid inhalers for almost a year because my lungs were so shredded and destroyed. Then in 2021 I saw the doctor because my ear was clogged and they did the water tube treatment thing but she had looked at me with such disgust and disdain while doing it I thought I did something wrong. Now my ear doctor that I had to seek out specially because they said my ear problems are because I'm fat(?) and had allergies (and then they tried to sell me an mlm allergy cure all) said that the bad ear cleaning possibly led to a 3 year long raging ear infection I thought was allergies this whole time. And now I might have permanent hearing loss in my ear.

Needless to say I stopped going there ages ago but man... they were pretty alright up until about 2020.

[fortheturnstiles]

tagged by @charlestrask to shuffle my on repeat playlist & post some songs for ppl to vote on their favorite :-) yippee

i will tag .. @northcountrymaid @hoppkorv @chicken-delight @mellotronmkll 😁🫶🏻

[ooglywooglies]

toad from the other day

i know we are supposed to hate them bc pest but hes just a toad, normal toad, not his fault hes here he doesnt know where he is

[metaphors-and-cats]

i think taylor should add spelling is fun back into me! and make a separate me! (Unfun Version) for the haters

[eir-parade]

i literally never like openly talk about my ideas and thoughts about things because im always scared but im biting the mfing bullet her and posting this because i just really wanna get this out here before i get too silly

anyways parade's silly lil pjsk unit shuffle au

getoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyhead

[klutzytomb]

this is horribly self ingulgent but I need to share the fact that she has a playlist

[laulo821]

introducing coração :]

[kissingarthurclaus]

OH FUCK I JUST REALIZED THIS SONG IS ABOUT BREA AND REX 😭😭😭

BRO LIKE...I never realized how Brea and Rex coded it is!! Especially in their later years going into the Rebels/ROTJ era!! I can also see this as being Rex fantasizing, but one day when the universe is finally at peace and they can well and truly be together they just. Do that. Spend every day together enjoying the fact that they get to be by each other's side.

Not to mention that Rex is a clone, it was always expected that they would die in battle. The very IDEA of growing old at all was not a luxury they could waste precious energy on, let alone with someone you LOVE 🥺🥺🥺 but that's what he gets! He gets to watch his children grow up, he gets to see wrinkles and grey hairs appear on his body, he gets to REST. And I'm sure he never really stops feeling at least some guilt about it, knowing he's older than so many of his brothers ever got the chance to be, but with Brea and his family he can still learn to accept it and be happy...

I think it was always true that Brea would outlive Rex...by a long shot, even. It's not either of their fault. Jedi tend to be pretty long-lived, and he only had half a life to begin with until they finally stopped his rapid-aging gene and he was able to live out the rest of it normally. I feel like this is Rex comforting her nearing the end, letting her know that he has no regrets about any of it and that the only thing he needs is her by his side

[lainpsx]

[autistic-shaiapouf]

Turning up rat wars while I shower and realizing that this probably makes my neighbors think I'm about to kill myself 😭