#this... well. yeah.

[daisychainsandbowties]

it's become commonplace for them, beatrice sitting astride ava's lap, arms draped over ava's shoulders, a book clutched loosely in her hands as she reads aloud. it's poetry, usually, slim volumes by oliver and vuong and siken and gibson and smith, the words slipping from her mouth with the pitter patter of summer rain, warm and all-encompassing.

ava always busies herself with her hands sliding beneath beatrice's shirt and her mouth on beatrice's neck, each touch shaped into oblation by the fervour of her devotion. there's restraint there, in the surety of hands that remain above the white-capped crests of beatrice's hip bones, below the blooming swell of her ribcage. it's an unspoken understanding, a silent promise. at our own pace. always, always at our own pace, now that we are free.

beatrice initiates the shift, having, in one of those moments she'd felt brave enough to venture into the queer bookshop across the city, stumbled across a particularly apposite poem. she recites it into ava's ear, chest clenched with that all-too-familiar melange of laughter and tears, emotion now too frequently spiralling beyond her ability to control it. whatever happens with us your body will haunt mine and your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out and your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you.

and ava acts the words out, fumbles beatrice's belt open, slides her hand between her legs. her other hand climbs the uneven ladder of beatrice's ribs, presses delicately against the scar tissue that marks where beatrice's breath had been gifted back into her body, and ava captures beatrice's exhalation in the hollow of her mouth as she slides a finger into her cunt

Language, to Beatrice, has always felt like a poorly-healed bone; a series of fracture points waiting for the right pressure to come apart again. She feels like an imposter inside it, trying to untangle her hands, her mouth, her hips from their signifiers - words like daughter, like duty. Words in restless orbit trying to stick to her skin.

She can’t think of what she’s thinking of when Ava’s finger glides through her wetness. Maybe she’s wondering at words, maybe she’s speechless in the face of these soft, mouth-made things and their ability to consume her. Why does it frighten her so much, to think of that motion? Fingers gathering the slick evidence of her desire, using it, and she’s already imagining what will happen to it after, where it might go.

She wants to flinch from the thought, but she can’t, because Ava’s hand is shifting down between her legs and god, she’s in every direction.

Ava’s fingers drumming on the tabletop, damp from her mouth, licking strawberry jam off her fingertips in the morning. Tangled in Bea’s, or drawing them over into her lap just to play, folding and unfolding each joint, tracing traceries of scars and asking after each one, like she wants to know where they live so she can visit.

She takes Bea’s startled exhalation into her mouth as she starts to fuck her, one finger sliding into her cunt, and it is astonishingly easy.

It’s as if Ava’s finger belongs there, moving slow, steady, ghosting around her entrance and then inside. There are moments that make language inadequate,Beatrice thinks but all the same she reaches, dangerously, for the half-remembered image of a page from the book in her hands. One line in a poem that goes ‘Spilled orange juice all over the table this morning. Sudden sunlight I couldn’t wipe away. My hands were daylight all through the night.’

There’s a palm pressed into her ribs, around scar tissue, and where’s the word for that gone? Pneumothorax, and the flutter of Ava’s hands after unearthing her chest, how they shook flecks of blood back down onto her. It didn’t happen like that, but Beatrice dreams of it anyway – of what I almost did to you.

She pulls away from Ava’s mouth as Ava pushes into her, further, and the poem was right; it’s as though she’s been waiting her whole life for this, hips rolling down onto Ava’s hand of their own accord.

Beatrice didn’t think her body could, would move without her permission, but it does.

There’s a gap between them - space given form by the bracket of their bodies - and Ava’s looking down inside it, watching the movement of her own hand as she fucks into Bea. The uncoordinated twitch of her hips in response. 

‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ Beatrice breathes, feels Ava pause, buried to the knuckle inside her. She looks up, away from her hand in Bea’s pants, the belt hanging open like a door. She pushes up – slow, easy – shifting only slightly in Bea’s cunt but enough to make her cry out a little. Not a shout but a short, plaintive noise.

Ava leans up, gentle, to kiss her, and Beatrice realises she’s still holding onto the book only in the moment that she lets it falls back onto the pillow. Her hands find Ava’s jaw, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing, at all, but she rolls her hips forward and she finds this mouth she’s been seeking and waiting for and wanting, so badly she almost died from it.

Thumb up under her shirt – Ava’s thumb – rubbing that crescent of scar tissue. Fervent, and this is a language, too. It’s Ava’s hand reaching up further, until her elbow hooks at the hem of Bea’s shirt, pulling it up and away from the flexing of her stomach muscles. She’s fucking herself on Ava’s finger now, feeling Ava huff – not in frustration but out of need – as she finds the back of Bea’s neck. Her fingers now splashed over her shoulder to hide the comet tails of freckles.

‘Bea,’ she sighs, breaking the kiss just long enough to speak. Breathless sound, tipping high at every jolt of Bea’s hips, her slick spread onto the heel of Ava’s palm where she’s grinding down against it. She smiles, and this is what they have in common – honesty.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing either.’

Recitation. This has been her lifeline, her life, the feeling of her faith in the braidedness of syllable into sound into meaning into motion. She used to pray under her breath, by rote, before, when cleaning knives in the leaky light of the armoury. How blood gets in everything, how it goes everywhere, and the prayers slipping out of her into silence. But now she’s home, and there’s no evil in the world. Just light, taking different shapes.

Soon it all slips into fragments, words hurrying through her on the way to somewhere. Ava, whispering to her as she slides a second finger into her cunt, her free hand pushing Bea’s shirt up more and more, until she’s helping her to duck out of it, casting it onto the bed behind her. Not the floor, because she knows who the shirt belongs to.

Ava kissing her on her collarbone, fingers slipping out to their tips and plunging back into her, taking up a steady rhythm. Her mouth in the softness under Bea’s jaw as their movement finds tandem, and all the world can be simplified like an equation. Into Ava’s mouth, kisses scattered along her jaw until they find the corner of her mouth. Ava’s fingers, fucking into her.

Now, in the glow of the bedside lamp, she holds Ava by the absence of the scars she said once lay across her back. In Switzerland, she remembers Ava sitting on their tiny couch, doing the sudoku in the local newspaper. So much slipped out of her then, unguarded, almost unbidden.

‘They were probably totally fucked up – the scars, I mean.’

I never got to see them, but there were places where people paused, holding me at an angle to reach my back with a washcloth. There was this… catch in their words, like a question.’ 

‘You’re not a question, to me.’ Beatrice said this sleepily, trying to pretend that she found it natural, the way Ava pulled her stockinged feet up onto her lap when she collapsed onto the couch next to her.

She never elaborated on it then, wondered if Ava knew that underneath her response there was another, too honest for daylight, too scalding for her tongue.

So she takes Ava’s nipple into her mouth, humming the discarded edges of sentences into that softness, feeling it change with the pressure of her tongue before breaking away. Ava, smoothing the tears from her eyes as her other hand tries to match the frantic pace of Bea’s hips, as she clenches around her, as another cry – louder, and as honest as anything she’s ever said -  falls from her mouth.

Her voice unravelling. Language, her anchor, falling into needy whimpers as she lowers her head, surrendering to the heat pressed against her, wrapped around her, inside her. Thinking of a poem she read while standing in a bookstore, surrounded by motes of dust, by sunlight. Ava’s voice wafting through the shelves and the words rummaging around behind her lungs for a place to live.

‘if love is a hole wide enough to be God’s mouth, let me plunge into that holy dark and forget the colour of light.

love, stay in me until our bodies forget what divides us, until your hands are my hands and your blood is my blood and your name is my name.’

[mediocre-megs]

honestly more media should portray the anti aging industry as horrific and decidedly unhuman. it IS body horror it IS grotesque it DOES go against nature*. it WILL kill you. yes.

*this is NOT anti-hrt or anti-vax or anything of the sort. i love criticisms of the anti aging industry + sci-fi/horror. i also love trans people and vaccines and medicine and science. i also don’t care if you personally have botox. this was a shitpost i made while high and 2/3 of the way through the substance (2024). terfs dni. cheers.

[blueskittlesart]

read that post blacked out and woke up with this on my computer. crazy. stay safe out there everyone

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[liquidstar]

If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)

At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.

Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.

[eydilily]

small victories ^^

[jicklet]

This is the little Ekko/Jinx moment that's been sticking with me:

Because on first watch, I expected this was going to be something negative. Ekko trying to defend why he'd been so hostile to Powder. 'You're not the kind of person who helps... because you destroy things,' or something to that effect.

But no.

oh

What a way to look at Jinx?? Even with everything she's done... He looks at this well-adjusted, 'ideal' Powder, and still thinks she's missing something that his Jinx has. The Powder that he knew was so determined to make something that mattered... it's a Powder who's content to play second-fiddle to the people around her, a Powder that settles that feels off to him.

And that ties into why he can't stay here. Our Ekko isn't the kind of person who settles either.

[happyheidi]

by Molly Buford

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Hey now, Let her cook!

[kibumkim]

Funniest possible response when asked if ur product can cause lead poisoning.

[quixoticprince]

Remember how Miss Pauling said she'd spent her whole life to help the administrator....

She didn't even know what she was helping with, but she wanted to be by her side, until she learned how deeply personal and self destructive the whole thing was... and in the end there never was going to be a 'place' set for her :^(

I'm so sorry Flo 😭

[theshadowrealmitself]

I like to think that Vulcans who come to understand that Humans just can’t try to process emotions the same way as them, it’s just healthiest to let it out in harmless ways, decide that venting and stuff should be taken just as seriously as Vulcan’s meditation time, and will encourage the Humans around them to complain about what’s upsetting them

People who are used to aloof Vulcans who avoid Humans at all cost running into one comforting a Human

“-and then they said my cheesecake was subpar, and they didn’t even bring a dish!!!”

“The purpose of this event was that every participant brings a food item of sorts, correct?”

“Yeah!!”

“And they did not follow this rule while insulting dishes that were brought?”

“Mostly just my dish but yeah >:(“

“How illogical”

“That’s what I’m saying!!!”

[britneyshakespeare]

I'm curious about people's levels of familiarity; I intend no judgment or elitism and it's absolutely fine not to be a completionist, btw. I didn't think I would've intended to have read them all at age 25; it just sort of happened that after I passed the halfway point in the middle of 2023, I came out of a reading slump and was motivated to finish. Fwiw I consider myself a hobbyist (I am not involved in academia or professional theater) but I realize that that label is usually attributed to people with less experience.

I also have always loved seeing other bloggers' Shakespeare polls where they put certain plays or characters up against each other, but I'm often left wondering if it's really a 'fair' fight all the time if you're putting up something like Hamlet or Twelfth Night against one of the more obscure works, like the Winter's Tale. It's not a grave affront to vote in those polls if you don't know every play, but I am curious about it.

Please reblog for exposure if you vote; I would appreciate it a lot. Also feel free to elaborate on your own Shakespeare journey in tags, comments, reblogs, because I love to hear about other people's personal relationships to literature.

[amamamumumumu]

This has been a most worthwhile evening 🍽

[stars-obsession-pit]

“Mom, why do you think ghosts are intrinsically evil?”

“It’s what the science says, of course!”

“No, I mean like, what were the studies? What did they actually observe”

“Ohh, I get what you mean, Danny! Well across all reputable reports of encounters with the ghosts strong enough to matter, they’ve always attacked first and never responded to attempts at communication! There’s no reason for them to do that if they’re not evil!”

“Huh…”

…

Danny, learning about Ghost Speak and how humans can’t understand it: hmm.

Danny, learning that ghosts greet each other and bond by fighting: hmmm.

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

Yeah, I don't know about you, Fidds, but I'd fold at this 🙏

Previous!!

Next!!

First!!