#typos aren't real ESPECIALLY after 2 am

[lost-in-fandoms]

a few of those prompts that called to me:

creaky wooden gate, a pink-tiled shower, a dusty wine cellar

may or may not have squeezed all three in the same thing.

Max closes the gate behind him, making a mental note to oil it before winter hits, or they'll be stuck climbing over it once again because the hinges get stuck with the cold.

He brushes his hand along the leaves of all the plants he passes by, a silent greeting that gets reciprocated in gentle swaying, a particularly eager yellow flower bending forward to touch his cheek.

"Daniel?" he calls once he's inside the door, shrugging his coat off and abandoning it on the back of a chair.

The kitchen looks exactly as he left it, unwashed dishes in the sink, something bubbling on the stove, plants, books, scrolls and random ingredients piled on every available surface. He was not expecting Daniel to tidy any of it while he was at the market, they both had pretty much abandoned the idea of ever using their table to eat ever again, but that potion did need to be taken off the heat five minutes ago at least.

He sighs, clicking his tongue at the spoon tapping against a plate in the sink.

"Stop that," he scolds, "we're gonna get to you when we will."

At least the potion is still decent, just a little bit on the side of too purple. They'll still be able to use it, but they'll have to be careful about who they'll sell it to. No blondes.

"Daniel!" he calls again after covering the pot and moving it on the windowsill to cool, picking his bag back up and heading towards the stairs.

There's some rustling from upstairs, but no answer.

Max sighs again, knowing he'll need to put away the new ingredients before he can go check whatever Daniel is up to, avoiding the affectionate attack of the fiddle leaf fig plant trying to smack him in the face to open the door to the cellar.

Rows of glittering jars twinkle in the low light, and he sneezes as he sets his bag down on the table, starting to take down his purchases and sorting them in the different spaces, groaning every time he finds something out of place. He doesn't know why he bothers labeling everything when Daniel just puts stuff away wherever he wants to.

Wine included.

"The wine goes on the left," he grumbles aloud even if nobody is listening, unless those dead scorpions have gained back a second life.

His eyes feel irritated and his nose is runny by the time he's done and he can escape the cellar, adding a new note on his mental list to call George for that handy cleaning spell that neither him or Daniel ever successfully mastered.

"Daniel!"

Still no answer.

He washes his hands in the kitchen sink, still ignoring the annoyed dirty spoon, and then threads his way through the clutter on the stairs to reach the second floor.

It's much cleaner here, most of their work stuff relegated downstairs or in the garden, but the geraniums on the widow still wave at him cheerfully, pointing towards the slight ajar bathroom door.

Gossips, all of them.

"Daniel?"

He doesn't know what he's expecting. It could be anything, from Daniel experimenting with water lilies again, to a fully exploded bathtub, but when he pushes the door open all he sees is. Steam.

Daniel is standing under the water in their pink-tiled shower, eyes closed, hands suspended in midair.

Worry and fondness mix into Max's chest, more suffocating than the humid air, as he takes off his clothes and steps into the shower too.

Daniel doesn't move, doesn't give any indication he even noticed Max at all. Doesn't even flinch when Max reaches over to turn off the water, a cold gust of hair wafting in through the still open door.

"Daniel, hey," he murmurs, putting both hands on Daniel's damp cheeks, "come back."

Daniel's chest stutters on a breath, heartbeat rabbiting for a second, two, three, five, then his eyes snap open and he stumbles, knees suddenly weak, not sliding to the floor only thanks to Max's arms winding around his waist.

"You're back," he gasps, still blinking rapidly, wet eyelashes clumping together.

"It's been an hour," Max tells him, gently wiping his sopping hair back so it's not dripping into his eyes anymore.

Daniel frowns, looking down at his hands as if they would hold the answers his brain is currently denying him.

"I told you not to scry without me," Max says, helping him into a towel. "And you almost let the house burn down."

Daniel stills from where he had started to dry himself off, looking up at Max with a guilty expression.

"Shit, is it ruined?"

Max shakes his head, then grabs another towel for himself, shifting the conversation towards what he'd bought and seen at the market.

It's only later, when they're both in bed, the house creaking around them, that Max brings it up again.

"You were too far gone earlier. You shouldn't scry without an anchor."

He feels Daniel's sigh on his skin from where he's buried against his chest.

"I know," he says, nervous fingers drawing runes on Max's arm. "I didn't mean to, it just happened."

Max purses his lips, frowning, but decides to keep his worries for himself. He knows Daniel is aware of how dangerous it can be, to accidentally lose himself outside his body like that, and it's not worth it to talk about it right now, not when the night is deep and the moon is thin.

"It's almost time to redo the protective spells," it's what he says instead, reminded by the runes Daniel is still tracing on his skin. He will worry less if he knows that Daniel's soul is as safe as possible, even if they will still have to figure out why this accidental scrying has been happening.

"Add it to your list," Daniel tells him around a yawn.

Max adds it to his list.

[dea-certe]

Thanks Ship, especially for the part about tags. And I kind of want to expand on that. Bloggers aren't getting paid to blog (at least not on Tumblr, so far as I know, considering I've seen many larger blogs have to ask for donations for things like medications and escaping abusive households). A lot of them have full time jobs, a lot of them are working long hours and a lot of them are doing most of the their blogging on mobile. I don't know about you all, but my blogging is done pretty 100% on mobile, while at work, or in the car at a stop light, or eating, or doing other things. Literally the only things I've posted from not my phone in the last 2 years have been my transcripts for podcasts with links to sources. And like......I have to set that time aside to do that, specifically, because time is something I dont have a lot of. I forget to tag shit constantly because I'm just swiping up to the bubbles to reblog it real quick. I've probably got a few thousand posts on here with ridiculous typos because I was making them while completing calls at work.

So when you ask "how hard is it to tag something" you've got to keep in mind exactly how snide it comes across. How hard is it to remember every single tag request you get when running a blog with thousands of followers? I dont know, how hard do you think it is to remember 30+ trigger warnings, plus spoiler warnings for every show and book and movie and video game out there while you're reblogging a few things at a red light?

I've been asked to tag things before. I've got less than a 1000 followers and I've been asked to tag 3 things for triggers. I've accidentally spoiled a book series and probably more than a few shows and movies before (but I superficially remember the book spoiler because it was recent and I felt bad about it). I always tell people who ask me to tag triggers that I will try, but if its necessary for them, they're better off unfollowing because I am not going to be able to remember and execute that at 100%. Ive got adhd, anxiety, am a single parent working 40+ hrs a week with a 2 hr round trip commute, and I will not remember it all the time. I will try. But I won't.

So don't sit there and say "it literally costs nothing to do that" and "it literally costs no effort at all" because it fucking does. It takes time to tag that they may not have while they scroll and fast reblog on a bathroom break at work. It takes effort to remember all the trigger requests they have and to sort through the whole post to make sure that none of the requests are in there. And if you're dealing with nuerodivergencies that make memorizing a long list of triggers (because its never just one person who asks when you get to the thousands of followers) more difficult, it takes a lot more effort than you would think. So maybe, before you ask those kinds of questions, you should think about how it comes across to those of us who have memory issues or time constraints. Because if I was the kind of person you are acting like here, @rjalker , I could easily use those careless words to make you out to be the villian. And you're not.

So it just goes to further illustrate Ship's points above. You've got to use critical thinking and maybe take a few minutes to check on the context of the post (via tags on the original or via looking at the blog around the time the original post was made to see the context) before you jump to the conclusion that the person you're talking about is a bad person who excuses heinous crimes. After all, I'm willing to bet you were being careless just then and not intentionally bigoted towards people who aren't neurotypical. And I'm willing to bet that you didn't mean it to come across as rude and dismissive as it did. So we can all take a step back and realize that hey, OPs got a point. Privilege and social environments leave way too many blind spots for people to never say anything insensitive. And you can't react to those kind of blind spots with full on attack mode or people will get rude and defensive right back. You've got to point it out in a polite "hey you maybe didn't see how what you said was rude to someone with adhd and/or memory problems, but it is and here's how" kind of way.

I hope this makes it easier to understand the original point. Otherwise, I wasted 20 minutes that were supposed to be used getting my word count for today.

this is gonna be controversial (lol), but y’all gotta remember blogs aren’t celebrities with their own PR teams.

if you find something a blogger said insensitive, it probably is! privilege & social environment leave way too many blindspots for that to never happen. and it’s super okay to alert people to their blindspots! but do so with the awareness that those not used to having their speech policed by strangers may respond with baffled defensiveness if you come at them aggressively.

and when that happens, whipping out the “you’re not the man I thought I married” speech, and giving yourself permission to go into full cuss-out beast mode is like………………unproductive and kinda mean-spirited