#then i'll be BACK BABY

[celestial--sapphic]

5th January, 1892

"I think that would be cheating, Pops. If I am honest.” Evelyn has to admit, giving a sideways look to her girlfriend who is half-stooping next to her in front of Professor Ronen's elaborate collection of butterflies. 

The Hufflepuff's gaze is focused specifically on one of the winged insects in the tallest glass chamber which sports a mix of vivid colours; rusted red hues on the main part of its delicate, paperthin wings, with black, soft daffodil yellow and an iridescent blue tingeing the edges with spots like blurred ink on wet parchment. Evelyn was never quite sure if the butterflies in question were still alive and enchanted to live inside the glass chambers indefinitely or if they are taxidermy charmed to flutter their wings at regular intervals through some exceptional reanimation spell. The Slytherin is equally never sure which version she prefers. 

"Cheating?" Poppy asks curiously, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear and tilting her head up slightly to look up at Evelyn from underneath those thick, long lashes that Evelyn never fails to find impossibly attractive. 

"Yes, well doesn't the book expect you to find them out and about in the real world?" Evelyn replies, gesturing absently in the direction of the butterflies and beyond.  

The book, in question, is a one of a set of three spotter guides she bought from Tomes and Scrolls for Poppy as a Christmas present; The Observer’s Guide to British Butterflies, The Observer’s Guide to British Flowers and Observer’s Guide to British Birds. The Hufflepuff absolutely loved them (nearly knocking Evelyn’s glass of mulled cider out of her hand when she pulled her into a hug after unwrapping them) and immediately got to work excitedly filling them in. It was less than three weeks since Christmas and she had already cheerfully ticked off a number of native Scottish birds and hardy flora that can survive the weather, like snowdrops and hellebores. However, given the unforgiving, biting winter weather in the Highlands Poppy had made limited (see: non-existent) progress on the butterflies edition, to her disappointment.   

Poppy hums. “I suppose you are right, it wouldn’t be completely honest. Truly, I would prefer to see the peacock butterfly in real life anyway. They must look so beautiful when they fly freely, imagine the colours…” She trails off, her gaze drifting back to the glass chambers and the regular beating of coloured wings. 

“I would hazard there are a fair few people who get frustrated with the rare ones and just end up going to the Natural History Museum to tick them off,” Evelyn muses, stepping closer into Poppy’s bubble of space, to look closer herself at the butterfly which had Poppy so enraptured. 

"The what?" 

“Natural History Museum.” Evelyn repeats, assuming Poppy hadn’t heard her. 

“The what, sorry?” Poppy asks again.  

“The Natural History Museum, in Kensington, in London?” 

Poppy turns her attention back to the taller girl and gives Evelyn a completely blank look and a small shake of her head.

“Is that… muggle?” The Hufflepuff asks curiously. Poppy having grown up completely in the wizarding world and Evelyn in the muggle world they had found plenty of things in the course of their relationship that one or the other didn’t know about. Poppy telling Evelyn she had never used the London Underground being one example that always springs to mind.    

“You've... you've never been to the Natural History Museum?" Evelyn couldn’t believe it. How had Poppy Sweeting not been to the Natural History Museum? Regardless if it was a muggle institution, she would have bet a Galleon the Hufflepuff's gran would have taken the her at some point, given their joint love of the natural world, magical and otherwise. 

Evelyn knew, at that moment, exactly what they were doing for Poppy’s 17th birthday next month.

[clairedaring]

If I could choose, I’d stop time right here. But in reality, it’s impossible. Both Tew and I, we have to keep living.

SPARE ME YOUR MERCY | 1.06

[canisalbus]

hello! i've written a short little machete fic, and i wanted to share it with you as thanks for all the incredible art and generous question-answering you've been doing these last few months. i hope that if you give it a look, you enjoy it. <3 keep up all your amazing work! archiveofourown [.] org / works / 50945128

✦ A Voi ✦

[vagueconfusion]

[awesome-shoes-with-wings]

The background humbled me as both an artist and a human.

This is an AU where Percy Jackson got to grow up with his Dad and brother, Triton, in a Mortal AU! Inspired by Mercy Upon Ourselves by hedgehodgy! Veeeery good fanfic, can't get enough of it, it's like an addiction at this point.

[void-of-unparalled-chaos]

Custody Battle (dpxdc prompt)

When Jason Todd died, he formed a ghost in the Ghost Zone. Danny Phantom, at this point a good few hundred years old, comes across this tiny, freshly dead ghostling that reminds him a bit too much of himself when he first died. Like any good adult ghost, Danny's core immediately latches onto Jason's as his Son, and bada bing bada boom! Jason now has a ghost dad!

When Jason is resurrected, Danny is in complete distress and immediately goes running across dimensions to figure out where the HELL his baby went. When he finally finds him, Jason is no longer a scrawny little thing but a gigantic brick house of a crime lord with his very own haunt. They grow up so fast!

Jason apparently also has a ton of siblings. It doesn't matter that they aren't ghosts, Danny has decided that he is now the father of all the batkids. Cool! The only problem is... Batman.

What proceeds is the world's weirdest passive-aggressive custody battle as the two compete for the title of Best Dad. The batkids can't decide if Danny and Bruce genuinely despise each other or if they just really, really need to fuck and get the tension over with. Either way, the kids are reaping the rewards.

[mnfrostofficial]

I'm wondering about games watched period, whether it's live or delayed. if multiple options apply, just pick whichever fits best. feel free to expand in tags, I'm curious!

[fromtheseventhhell]

I can tell I'm Arya-pilled to the max because I'll see other Arya stans talking about the questionable morality of her executing Daeron and I'm just like "That was so Lady of Winterfell-coded"

[echosong971]

Pandemonium

[tblsomedoodles]

Might I request a seer twins doodle? It's been a long time since we've seen the bois

oh yes! the bois!

Leo had a bad night so donnie's putting a Jupiter Jim movie on one of his computer screens while he works off a different one. : )

Thank you!

[elizabethrobertajones]

heeey they graphically updated the ARR world leaders with custom models (well. Nanamo has one too but she seems the same to my eyes and she seems like a normal lala when not wearing her full costume?)...

Aside from Raubahn and Merlwyb somehow being even hotter I have to shout out Kan-E's unicorn necklace's radical improvement :D

(unicorn way up so you also never unsee it)

Aymeric, Lyse and Hien remained low poly at the Alliance meeting, as did poor HW-style Thancred, who just dramatically collapsed in order to travel the rift into graphical fidelity...

Also very funny that earlier Asahai showed up with the old graphics, but Maxima was already boasting full new skin textures despite having of course a way more custom model than the completely character creator ready Hyur next to him... This is the exact right time in the game's history to be in late Stormblood to enjoy the roll out.

[sylenth-l]

Last moment catch

*concerned beeping x2*

[eikichi-supremacy]

If nothing else Koenma is a Kuwabara stan and I'm right there with him o7 (I need to write the kuwameshi fic that goes with this fr)

[vaguely-concerned]

Ever since watching The Wire for the first time, my brain has doggedly kept working away at the Especially the lies of it all, and specifically at how much the structure beneath the different stories Garak tells contributes to the overall meaning of what he’s trying to say. While the contradicting narratives of course expertly obscure the factual circumstances of his getting exiled, using them also allows him to tell aspects and facets of the emotional truth I don’t think he ever could have, if he’d simply told the actual story of what happened. (It’s very Varric-core of him honestly.)

The first story — the ‘oh, you think you know me?’ story — says I have done things that would sicken you if you knew any detail of it. It’s clearly meant to scare Bashir away so he’ll leave him to die shamefully in peace already lol. But it’s also one of his (probably much-needed lbr) little lessons to Julian that are so frequent in the beginning, given while Garak still has some hold on himself — “Don’t be so quick to forgive me if you don’t even know what I’ve done; what would you do if this really were the sum total of what I am?” (And Julian seems to surprise him by going ‘Well, exactly the same thing, because no matter who you are I am a doctor. But I sort of take your point.’)

The second story — the letting the orphans go story — says I have failed to smother my soul in its cradle when it was required of me, and I regret that more than anything I’ve done. To my ears this is the one most shot through with active self-loathing too, which is interesting. He’s officially lost the control he’s been clinging to and it’s about to get ugly. His TL;DR is ‘Sentiment is the greatest weakness of all’, even all the way back here. (Which is the one lesson Julian steadfastly refuses to learn, which I think in turn does some serious rearrangement of Garak’s soul over the course of the show haha. Get uno reversed into the process of loving and being loved without shame asshole.)  This is also where he builds up to admitting to having any sort of need for companionship or closeness at all and — so much worse — that Julian’s role in his life actually has fulfilled some of that need, and he’s DRIPPING with defensive venom over it b/c well I get it Garak vulnerability is scary it can take a person like that. 

(I also feel there’s something honest and forbidden in ‘Suddenly the whole exercise seemed utterly meaningless’. I suspect ‘actually… why the fuck are we even doing this???’ is not a welcome sentiment in an Obsidian Order water cooler environment, no matter what you’re saying it about lmao. The very first seeds of him deconstructing the things he’s been taught about Cardassia and his work might be hinted at here, though they of course take a looong time to come to any real fruition.)   

The third story — the ‘Elim was my best friend’ story — says hey, remember that thing you said once, about how sometimes, you have to be loyal to yourself before you can be loyal to anything else? Well. guess what. I couldn’t even be that lmao. It also furthers that thread of being divided from yourself, split, that having ‘Elim’ as a separate person around in all versions of the story brings in. He’s in control of himself again, but he essentially hands his life and soul over to Julian to decide what should be done with them. 

I’ve done horrible things and it finally caught up with me, I’m getting what I deserve → I let sentiment master me and the fact that I’m too weak to do what’s needed of me shames me more than the evil I’ve done → I fucked up. I betrayed myself and everything I held to, all for nothing, and I have no one to blame for it but myself. But it’s very nice that you’re here anyway, Doctor. (Wow. I didn’t realize quite how isolated and lonely that last one was before right now. The way Tain has shaped him really has just… locked him completely into himself, huh.) We can also see a movement through from a completely professional context in the first story, to an intensely interpersonal and internal context in the last one — even his fake stories spiral in towards intimacy, which I think is what he longs for here even if he can’t quite like. Touch that without the stories as a buffer yet, it’s clearly like touching a hot stove for him to interact with it too directly. 

And you know what I find incredibly interesting the whole way through? Even on his deathbed, where he’s dying from the thing Tain had put in his head, he’s protecting Tain. He puts all the blame for where he is on himself (‘My future was limitless, until I threw it away’), even if he has to employ a strange twisty logic where he’s split himself into two to do it. Don’t get me wrong, Garak has done horrific things all on his own haha, but it’s notable that he almost isolates Tain from that. ‘Tain was the Obsidian Order. Not even the Central Command dared challenge him. And I was his right hand.’ Tain in Garak’s stories is this infallible implacable weirdly distant figure, even now. Indeed, as will make a lot of sense with the revelations further down the line, more than anything it seems the gaze of an abused child desperate for recognition looking up at an idealized (if not in any way nurturing) parent.‘He was retired at that point; he couldn't protect me’, Garak says, as if what he’d need protection from in the first place isn’t Tain himself lmao, as if Tain had no active part in any of this. He never lets blame touch Tain at all. At this stage he would rather consider himself a broken flawed tool than accept that the hands that have wrought and wielded him have ever had any fault in them. AND in the middle of it all, with plausible deniability, on death’s door and knocking meekly to be let in before he must finish the mortifying ordeal of being known and test the even more daunting possibility of being loved, Garak at the same time manages to drop the breadcrumb trail of clues to make it possible for Julian to find Tain if he so chooses and gets in the ‘sons of Tain’ thing too for future dramatic irony purposes. Truly he is the Michelangelo of lying. Every falsehood a multifaceted masterpiece. Elim ‘achieving a state of intertextuality in real life is possible if you work hard and believe in yourself’ Garak. I love him so much. 

I think all of this is why “I forgive you. For whatever it is you did,” works so well, because it too works on a structural level. It’s such a deceptively multilayered response — it has the syntax of a joke, in a way, and it is kind of funny even under the circumstances, but delivered with such earnest warmth and fondness. It’s both recognition and acceptance (forgiveness!). It’s saying ‘I finally understand enough of what you’re trying to tell me beneath and through all that, in whatever way you’re capable of, I see you’ and ‘my answer hasn’t changed (bitch)’. The forgiveness Julian offers here is complete — on principle, and out of personal feeling and empathy (only one of which Garak deigns to respond to during the second story, where he calls it ‘smug Federation sympathy’, placing it more completely on the principle side than it probably is. ‘Dude you’re my friend please don’t just lie down and die in a completely avoidable way on me, who else is going to not only tolerate but actually gleefully enjoy me being annoying as fuck over lunch’ seems to be the subtext that’s a lot harder to acknowledge and invite in for both of them. And yet Tain seems perfectly clear on the fact that Julian is Garak’s friend, which, y’know. Must be fun living with the knowledge that Tain has eyes everywhere looming over you every day haha guess you’d just have to tune that out.) 

Most of all — ’Don’t give up on me now, Doctor’... and he didn’t! He didn’t. Augh. Ow.

[puppetmaster13u]

I was looking at Klarion's design,

And started comparing it to Vlad's ghost form. Corpse pale (sometimes blue tinted)? Yep. Horn-hair? Yep. Red eyes? Yep. Cat? Yep. Eyeliner? Also yep. Suit? What do you know. Fire? Yeeep.

So anyway, what I'm saying is Klarion as de-aged Vlad raised by the chaos-lovers that is the Dannys & the rest of the team.

[archangeldyke-all]

How would Sevika react to her baby being born? Like listening to reader scream curse words at her as she pushes and Sevikas smiling cause she’s never heard her sweet wife say such words.

Then when the baby is finally born they look just like Sevika and she can’t help but stare in amazement and love. Kissing reader all over her face and saying words of affirmation

HAHAHAHHA

men and minors dni

she's never been more in love with you than she is in this exact moment, with you sweating through a paper hospital gown, screaming bloody murder, and clawing through the skin on her hand as you push your daughter out into the world.

sure, she just witnessed you shit yourself and you look like you're mid-exorcism. sure, she nearly passed out when she took a peek between your legs and saw your cunt stretched and bleeding. but you're the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.

"what the fuck are you smiling at you smug motherfucker?!" you snarl as another contraction wracks your body. she grins, ducking down to kiss your sweating temple, and if you had any more strength in you you'd smack the smile right off her face.

"you're amazing." she says with wonder, a sparkle in her eye. "you're the sexiest, strongest, most powerful woman i've ever met. i'm so in love with you." she says adoringly.

"you're never, ever touching me again, you piece of shit!" you growl. sevika just laughs and nods.

"whatever you want, baby." she says, still smiling.

"i fucking hate you!" you scream as you push through your contraction.

"i love you more than i've ever loved anything." she replies.

"i can't believe you did this to me!"

before she can reply with an annoyingly soothing response, the doctor gasps from between your legs. "ten centimeters!"

you whine, tears racing down your cheeks at the horrible searing tearing feeling between your legs.

"it's time to push, baby." she whispers soothingly.

"stop fucking talking to me!" you growl. sevika laughs, kissing you again, then she crawls into the hospital bed behind you to hold you from behind, both of your hands in hers, her legs enveloping your torso, your back against her chest, just like you practiced in your classes.

"i'm gonna marry you once this is all over." she says in your ear as you catch your breath from your last contraction. you barely get thirty seconds between the waves of pain, but you manage to bark out a laugh at this.

"we're already married." you say. sevika continues to kiss your head and neck.

"so we'll renew our vows." she says. "and our baby can be there. she'll be the officiant." she says. you laugh again, and it quickly turns into a moan of pain.

"i'm divorcing you for this." you cry out. sevika laughs and kisses your head.

"i'll win you back." she says. you elbow her as you sit forward for your next push, getting a little satisfaction at the little grunt of pain she lets out.

"i can see the head!" the doctor says. you scream and sevika gasps, and then--

the sweetest, tiniest little cries you've ever heard start up between your legs. you gasp, and sevika gasps, and the doctor rises from between your legs with a slimy, blood covered, wrinkly lump of flesh flailing in her arms.

"a beautiful, healthy baby girl." she says, grinning as she walks the baby over to the head of the bed for you to gawk at.

at the sight of her scrunched up sobbing face, all the pain in your body seemingly disappears. an entirely new type of tears well up in your eyes, and you almost tackle the doctor when she turns away with the baby in her arms. it's only sevika's hold on you that keeps you in place, her voice in your ear gently reminding you that they gotta clean the baby first.

"you wanna cut the cord, mama?" the doctor asks, looking over her shoulder at sevika a she and the nurses quickly wipe up your crying baby. sevika chokes on a sob from behind you and nods, pressing a solid kiss against your head before scrambling out of bed to stand beside the group of medical professionals, shakily snipping the umbilical cord, officially separating your baby from your body.

when she's all clean sevika holds cradles your daughter into her arms, gasping down at her crying little face as you deliver the placenta and the doctors clean you up.

nothing hurts anymore. they quickly hook you up to a steady stream of morphine, and the hormones flooding your body make time all floaty and make you all spacey.

one minute, there's a gaggle of nurses surrounding you, the next, it's just sevika, standing beside your hospital bed, cooing down at your daughter.

she gently makes her way back in bed with you, placing your little girl in your arms, hooking her chin over your shoulder as you both grin down at your crying little girl.

"holy shit." you whisper. sevika giggles from behind you.

"she's gorgeous."

"she looks like a raisin." you whisper. sevika bursts into laughter, pressing endless kisses to your face.

you burst into tears, and sevika coos behind you, squeezing you to her chest.

"she's so perfect." you cry. "it's our baby sev. our daughter." you cry.

your baby girl's calmed down now, seemingly recognizing your voice, her little eyes blinking up into space. you know she can't see yet, but it seems like she's looking right up at her moms.

"oh fuck." you cry. "she looks just like you." you say through tears. sevika's sniffling behind you, seeming to realize the same thing.

she does look just like sevika. even though she's only a few minutes old, and her face is so itty bitty-- she's got sevika's eyes. and sevika's nose. and sevika's lips. and two or three wisps of sevika's ebony hair decorate her head.

"shit, this is no fair. i'm the one who carried her for nine months and she comes out lookin' like your clone!" you cry. sevika chuckles behind you, reaching down to gently press one of her fingers against your baby's palm.

"just means she's gonna have your personality, babe." she says. "another sweetheart."

you giggle, leaning back against your wife.

both of you laugh as your daughter grunts and smacks her free hand against sevika's wrist.

"no way, she's all you. she came out swinging and everything." you say through laughs.

sevika snorts and kisses your head.

"i love you so much." she whispers. you sigh, turning your neck to press your lips against hers.

"i love you too." you say.

"you're not gonna divorce me?" she asks, laughing against your lips. you smile.

"no, i guess not. she's worth all the pain." you say, looking back down at your daughter. sevika smiles against your head.

"welcome to the world, little fucker." sevika whispers.

in your arms, your daughter coos.

taglist!

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