#they're so small and so trusting

[emilykaldwen]

abby and aegon's childhood <3 <3

Here is an excerpt from the original backstory that I do plan to post up! Please have 10 year old!Aegon and 8 year old!Abby

When Jace bested him in training, Mother grabbed his face, the flame of the Hightower a dragon’s breath as she bruised his jaw. 

“You must be better than him, Aegon. You cannot let him beat you. He is younger, and smaller, and you will be their king one day. Be better, Aegon!”

“There you are.”

Abrogail sounded both excited that she found him, and like she’d missed him. 

Aegon was lying beneath the table only in his thin shirt, feeling like he was going to combust, and when she appeared, he didn’t swipe away at the tears in his eyes. Abrogail and Helaena would never tease him, but he was grateful it was her and not his sister. Sometimes Helaena said things that frightened him and he didn’t want to feel frightened anymore. Abby never scared him, at least, not the way Helaena did and he couldn’t explain the strange, fearful sensation he felt sometimes. Aegon watched her crawl beneath the table, and she held out a broken, marchpane dragon. “I brought you this. I thought it would make you feel better.”

The taste of almonds and sweet rose burst on his tongue and he returned her slight smile before looking back up at the underside of the table. She was quiet beside him, and Aegon felt relieved she didn’t break the silence.

Content.

He startled when he felt her fingers against the warmth of his forehead, brushing away the wavy hair that’s grown longer than he liked, but he is a Targaryen and perhaps his father would like it more if he looked like Daemon, the way Aemond does. His sire had squinted at him one day, commenting on how much he looked like his grandfather Otto with a bitter betrayal in his mouth.

Mother had drawn him into her lap that night like she used to do before. They sat in front of her looking glass and she showed him how much they looked alike.

He felt a cool touch along one of the little spots on his jaw that hurt. “M’sorry, Aegon.”

He barely heard it; the icy hand stroking his face was too distracting. Something in her touch eased the heat inside him. Aegon turned and shifted until he was laying with his head in her lap. Her hair was long- red curls where Helaena’s were silver. He scrunched his face when some of it tickled against his face. Instead of stopping her, it made Abby laugh and brush him with her hair again.

“M’not your cat.” He thought of the kitten, nearly the size of a small dog already. Auntie Lessie said it was a big cat from the Westerlands, although not like a lion.

Abby shook her head and bit the head off another marchpane figure she’d produced. He scowled up at her and she rolled her eyes. “This one’s mine. I gave you yours.”

“It was broken.” He was indignant, but he realized when she laughed that he really wasn’t indignant at all.

“So’s this one.” She looked at him the way he’s seen Mother look at Ser Criston when he’s helped calm Daeron down. Aegon still wasn’t sure what that look was supposed to mean. He also wasn’t sure what it meant when Abrogail looked at him like that. With a sigh, she popped another broken piece of confection in his mouth to stop him from speaking. “There. Happy now?”

Aegon didn’t feel like he was burning anymore. 

He really wasn’t sure why.

[edorazzi]

Page 32 of my Miraculous Mentor AU comic A Matter of Trust! In which Felix summons the confidence to open up to someone else, and the Miraculous begin to find their balance! ☯️⚖️

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[starry-bi-sky]

Part SEVEN of "Clone Danny"

Red Robin, Danny recognizes, steps away from him as he sits up. "My name is Phantom," he signs, blinking the exhaustion out of his eyes. (From Red Robin's perspective, it looks like he has no eyes. There lacks his signature green glow.) "I'm not a gang member, just an out-of-town vigilante."

Red Robin frowns at him, an uncertain grip on the bō in his other hand. "Phantom?" He repeats, no lacking amount of suspicion in his voice. "How can I believe that?"

Right. Yeah, okay, that's fair. Danny shrugs at him, and slumps against the wall. "Google search?" He gestures, he's been out in the daytime before and he's seen the news articles about him.

Red's eyes narrow at him and Danny simply draws his knees up and faceplants into them, half-listening to Red's murmurs into his comm while also trying to get some extra-shut eye.

("Oracle, can you pull up anything on a vigilante named Phantom? The guy here is claiming to be one." Tim says.

"On it."

"Is this Phantom wearing a white mask?" Bruce asks, his voice gruff like an aftershock. "There's a vigilante who shares the same name, but he resides in Illinois."

"Is this guy from that Amity city you visited ages ago?" Says Tim, before shaking his head. "Don't answer that. Yes, he's wearing some freaky mask. I said it reminded me of Hood's helmet for a reason."

"I've got something," Oracle interrupts, "Bats' right. as usual. The Phantom of Amity Park, not much stuff of this guy but he's only been out for over a year. Apparently, his rogues' gallery consists of ghosts."

"Oh great.")

"Look tell the Batman that I'm sorry for trespassing on his turf," He signs irritably when Red Robin eventually starts talking to (re: interrogating) him again. "It's not like I want to be here."

"How did you get in Gotham anyways?" Red Robin questions, batman was on his way to help deal with the situation but Tim doubted he wouldn't get caught up on the way with dealing with petty crime. "Your turf is nearly a thousand miles away from here."

"Two words." Danny deadpans, "Teleport ghost." (Red Robin winces sympathetically.) "I'm keeping this bastard in the thermos for a month for this alone."

(Danny was ignoring the slow-choking anxiety growing in his lungs over how he was gonna get home. He never takes his phone when he goes out, the risk of breaking it was too high. He had no way of contacting anyone to get him home.)

(He swallows the growing lump in his throat, and buries the feeling in the back of his mind.)

"Thermos?"

Danny unclips his Fenton Phantom Thermos off from his belt loop and shows it to Red Robin. "My ghost-catching device," He says with one hand, tilting it carefully for Red to inspect. "I wish I could say I made it, but its a FentonWorks invention."

(He wasn't sure if it was a smart idea to say who it belonged to, but saying it wasn't his probably loosened up any tracks on him, right?)

"Do you work with these Fentons, then?" Red asks, and something dark and shadowy flickers from the corner of Danny's eye. He glances over, and sees nothing, and his hackles raise.

(Either that was Batman, or a ghost, or Danny's mind playing tricks on him. He couldn't feel his ghost sense building in his throat, so he decided it was either the latter of the former.)

Danny snorts, quiet and gruff. "No." He clips his thermos to his belt again, stifling a smile on his face. "The Fentons hate me actually, I prevent them from catching ghosts themselves. Their son gives me their tech."

He had a cover story, so he might as well stick with it, right?

Batman shows up at that moment, appearing atop the little roof where the door is, and giving Danny a heart attack when he speaks in his low, rumbly voice like thunder rolling in, "Why would they hate you for that?"

Danny shoots up to his feet with a startled yell in his throat, clutching his chest as he whirls around and looks up. He nearly runs into Red Robin, and signs a few choice swears at the Bat.

"wow you're scarier in person, asshole."

"you didn't answer my question."

"Of course I didn't, you scared me." and Danny takes a trembling step back when the Batman jumps down and lands on the roof in front of him. He's faced ghosts before, but somehow the living is always scarier.

"But, um, the reason is a bit.. complicated, I guess." He says, fingers beginning to shake as his adrenaline wears off. God is he tired. He wants to go home. "The Fentons are the local ghost hunters and local crazies. I don't know if I can call them mad scientists because they're harmless to the living."

"But they're extremely anti-ghost. I've heard from their son multiple times the very unethical things they would do to ghosts if they got their hands on one."

Danny 'talks' a little more before calling it quits, even telling Batman that he can't tell him more without putting his identity at risk.

Plus, its getting harder and harder to hide his bone-deep exhaustion and his growing fear of being stranded in the most dangerous city in America with no way home.

"I would love to tell you more, believe me I'm dying to." Danny signs, shaky sarcasm dripping from his fingers. His hands are visibly trembling and he's withholding a slowly growing panic attack. "But I would like nothing more than to figure out a way to get home."

"Do you have no one to contact?"

"Sort of. But only one of them could probably come get me and get me back to Amity by sunrise. And I have no phone."

That one person being Ellie.

=====

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 4.5 (Dani interlude) Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 7.5 (Dan Interlude) Part 8

Taglist: @the-navistar-carol @thought-u-said-dragon-queen @gin2212 @youracearocroatneighbour @luckybyrdrobyn @deeplyconfusedbear @epilepticnerd @beautifulmomenttodrawblank @sara0055 @blusunkhild @letmesayfuxk (?) @latheevening226 @tkiesai @rosedasy @meira-3919

[samanthamulder]

THE X-FILES (1993-2018)

SEASON FOUR — The truth will save you, Scully. I think it'll save both of us.

[2700k-moogie]

Milk ref sheet done yaHOOOOOOOOOOO lookit my big beautiful baby they filled with joy and happiness

[governmentmandatedryujinstan420]

meme dump sorry if you haven't noticed but yes it's almost all ishaan no i' not insane i'm just posting more of discord memes here now, yes there will be more, and no i won't apologize for spontaneous uploads bc this site wiped 8 paragraphs when i tried to click the EDIT BUTTON. more when i FEEL LIKE TOUCHING THE SITE WITHOUT FEAR OF THE WIPE.

[bumblingbabooshka]

My baby's just fine. She knows all of her rhymes. [Patreon]

[mintaikk]

LMAO THE OFFICIAL INSTA MAKING A RED FLAGS AND GREEN FLAGS GAME FOR THE VEES

[enough-spider-noir-stuff]

*slaps noir and hobie* this bad bitch can fit so many issues

[viillette]

it's so crazy how few historical fiction novels are like sharon kay penman's. the way that they're built out of the skeleton of the historical record seems so obvious, but there's so few people who are actually willing to commit to it in the way that she did. it seems like so often that's just a starting point which gets reformed to fit a coherent narrative, but she makes no real attempt to do that. there's themes and foils and patterns, but first and foremost it is a reconstruction. you can't really know what someone who lived that long ago was like, only what they did, and you can feel how she takes these isolated, dramatic events and builds a whole life around them. the books are nothing more than an answer to the question 'what might someone have been like, what could the history between these people have been, to possibly explain something like this?' the ability to string together a handful of facts and events from medieval chronicles to create people that feel so real, and psychology and relationships that develop so naturally that these distant, seemingly impenetrable choices suddenly feel so immediate and clear is just beyond belief. you know this probably wasn't actually how things happened, but it doesn't matter because it was something like this. the particulars are less important the crushing awareness that at one point all of this made sense. there was a time when all of this was right now. the world is unrecognizable and exactly the same. that's something which sounds very simple but is incredibly difficult to accomplish.

you come to know these people so well, their loves and hatreds and ambitions and failures, and those things are rarely resolved in the end. you know them from the time that they're children, you watch each one of them die, and none of it means anything in particular except that they were a human being. things which seem like they must be building to some tragic fallout end in anticlimax. things which seem utterly inconsequential in the moment manifest again decades later in cataclysmic disaster. and then you see it all play out again from the beginning with their children, and their children's children. all these uncanny echoes, this endlessly unfolding palimpsest of lives, each laid over the triumphs and mistakes of those who came before. i've never read anything so epic with so much mastery over the micro and macro levels of history. it's the minute, seemingly inconsequential everyday details, which build into a lifetime, which builds into generation of lives, which builds into the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires. it's the merciless endlessly turning wheel of fortune that replays the same songs in different keys again and again for all time. a person is both an individual with free will, and the prisoner of their blood and circumstances. somehow everything has infinite weight, is tied to everything that has come before and will come after, is the culmination of someone's entire existence—their pains and joys and fears and hopes—and yet is simultaneously completely meaningless, just one more victim of fate in an endless procession of lives and choices. the whole impotent tragedy of humanity is laid out in front of you and it's so repulsive and beautiful. it's deep love and unfathomable, senseless horror briefly and miraculously reverberating in a vacuum, an absurd aberration fading into silence.

if it's not obvious these books have made me cry like 10 different times

[ruvviks]

what is the event/main cause that made roksana cut her mom off?

now this is interesting to talk about because it would be a very gradual process spanning over many many years but it would all come to explode during the events of the broker, despite that fic focusing on vitali; the events of that fic affect his whole family even though it doesn't elaborate much on the effects on his siblings. i initially had several chapters dedicated to roksana but had to cut it short and put it all in one chapter only but when i go for the rewrite i'm putting all of the initial ideas back because it's IMPORTANT. she and vitali are so similar in so many ways but also not at the same time. anyway ok yes here we go

so for roksana specifically she's kind of been a background character in the family ever since she was young. you'd think that after two other kids her parents would know how to parent her correctly but instead they just kind of let her do her thing and she got away with everything, which was nice in a way because it gave her freedom within the house itself but outside of that there was just nothing there for her. with the whole world to her disposal but nobody there with her to help her or keep her company through it all life just got suffocating to her in a way :(

she felt trapped in her family and her brothers always got the spotlight (mostly negative attention, since mainly their mother nadya was always just angry at vitali and after vitali left home daniil just kind of became her new therapist; but roksana did not really pay attention to this, all she saw was her brothers getting attention and not her), so roksana ended up fitting herself into all the boxes her parents wanted her to be in just to get some attention from them and get the love that she deserved. she was the family's poster child, but at the same time this whole role was an act of her, acting the way people expected her to act to get some respect and it was actively chipping away at her psyche, it stopped her from actually growing up and becoming her own person if that makes sense?? her personality was just fabricated specifically for her parents. but that's not who she was or wanted to be. but she knew nothing else

roksana and her father matvey have always had a very professional relationship. he was always busy with work and didn't do a lot of parenting so roksana came to see him more as a guy who lived under the same roof as her rather than her father; in the broker this escalates with matvey seeking revenge against vitali and roksana getting dragged into it and becoming a messenger girl in it all, but by then she's entirely neutral towards her father so there's not even bad blood between them when she stops talking to him; he's just a stranger to her. this is what much later allows her to hesitantly come back after vitali and matvey have made amends to try and build up that relationship again

roksana and her mother nadya however are a different story. the main difference is that roksana always hoped that nadya would understand; that she would understand the position roksana was in and understand her anger and her misery and her sorrows and regrets and that she would try to make it easier for her, give her some relief from the burdens she had to carry. but nadya refused to listen to roksana and refused to take her seriously (much like how she had always treated vitali; important to note that vitali is a trans man and to nadya he was still "her daughter"), not allowing her to show any sort of weakness because she herself had by then long killed her own weaknesses within herself and she expected roksana to do the same

and nadya got what she wanted. roksana grew up a cold and bitter woman, she let her anger win (contrasting vitali who after all this time STILL chooses kindness; if the roles for him and roksana had been reversed, though, he would have turned out the same as her, but the contrast and parallels between vitali and roksana is a story for another time) and she knows it's nadya's fault and she HATES her mother for it. she hates what nadya turned her into and she hates that she never got a normal childhood and she wants nothing more than to get out of there. this is why she vanishes from night city after her appearance in the broker fic, and why initially it is entirely unclear if she'll ever come back

so basically to summarize, nadya robbed roksana of her childhood and her softness and her ability to become her own person by forcing her to be the poster child of the family, and in classic dobrynin family fashion roksana tends to take grudges to her grave, so i don't really see her forgiving her mother for it any time soon. add to that the fact she sees nadya as the cause the entire family started crumbling apart in the first place (whether or not this is true is at this point very hard to tell because like, how far can you trace something like this back and who can be held responsible for what etc etc, but especially taking into consideration she never respected vitali's identity which is what drove him away from home, then did not allow him to reconnect which is what got him into arasaka, and THEN pushed matvey to get revenge after vitali indirectly got them fired at said corporation, and all of THAT is what drove daniil away from home and what caused roksana to change so drastically i'd say it's safe to say she is one of the bigger players in it all LMAO) AND doesn't feel comfortable around her anymore after her affair with ravager (nadya did that while still being married to matvey; they're divorced now), and there you go. mother privileges have been revoked

that being said, roksana does wish things were different. she stuck around for much longer than her brothers did almost in an attempt to fix things?? which again parallels vitali with how he also ends up trying to fix things in the broker fic but basically both of them fail and that's why roksana ends up leaving, she doesn't see the point in staying anymore because there's nothing there for her anymore :(

she does eventually come back to reconnect with vitali (most of their past beef was caused by twisted perspectives of the other's life at home as a child + daniil's rancid behavior bringing out the worst in both of them) and matvey (what i said earlier about them being strangers; no bad blood so an attempt can be made), but nadya has been cut off entirely and so has daniil for roksana because of how similar he is in his behavior to their mother, i talked a bit more about that here

this got very long i am so sorry i am positively insane about this family and all the dynamics. basically the tl;dr is that nadya gets worst mother of the year award forever and always

[katyahina]

(Sorry I needed this meme to be posted separated from an ask)

[lulubeanie]

Psychonauts dream.. Compton was there and hanging out with Ford :]

[parvuls]

ocean's 11 au where jack is danny and shitty is rusty and bitty is linus; shitty finds out their mark is dating jack's ex-wife camilla and is unhappy with jack for putting the job at risk to get her back (and for not telling him that he's still in love with her). he's reasonably doubtful when jack claims the job has nothing to do with that.

except jack is telling the truth, and when the team finds out it really complicates his truly inept attempts to flirt with their newest recruit.

[scarletiswailing347]

saw a vampbo and got inspo for my banquet au lol

this is meant to be platonic but i cant really blame anyone for seeing it as romantic considering *gestures* yknow

btw grian's reply isn't just exaggeration, vampires in this world...lowkey work like viruses lol, i mean it's not an exact comparison obviously but it's pretty close

grian is an endian which is different from enderians in that it's specifically the species of those bitches from the end credits. he was originally gonna be a watcher but my story changed too much for it to make sense since, from what i know of the watchers, they're a lot more active than the creatures in my story -- hence i made the endians which are more like observers rather than watchers

the thing about endians is that, as passive as they are, they are extremely powerful and can one hit kill most creatures including vampires

now here's where the virus-like qualities of the vampires in this universe come into play, vampires are pretty much entirely powerless against endians...unless they suck their blood -- this is cause, once vampires suck a creatures blood, they rapidly develop defenses against that creature and, to some extent, other creatures of that species as well, making it theoretically possible for them to become completely unkillable against a specific species

of course they're gonna have to be careful how much blood they drink at a time cause if a vampire is too weak to handle an endian's blood they'll just die from lifeforce poisoning essentially lol, but endians have a lot of lifeforce in them so they only really need a little anyway to be satiated

the fact that endians have a lot of lifeforce make them very attractive to vampires and what stops most vampires from pursuing them is the fact that they'll most likely just get killed trying to do so (being powerful doesnt necessarily mean having a lot of, if any, lifeforce btw)

grian has been burned this way before when a certain vampire betrayed his trust and used his massively increased resistance against him and pretty much any other endian he encountered, luckily he didn't reach the point of full immunity and was killed once enough endians banded together to kill him

this incident caused an even bigger rift among vampires and endians and a lot of endians p much became kill-on-sight when it comes to vampires, grian also got banished for "being foolish enough to ever trust a vampire to such an extent"

so yeah grian letting mumbo suck his blood is a Pretty Big DealTM

[bumblingbabooshka]

Live Fast & Prosper