#ugly christmas clones

[elektroskopik]

[uncouth-the-fifth]

pythia, a supernatural rewrite. bloody mary, rough draft.

read it on ao3.

words: 6k notes: hi y'all! yes, you read that chapter title right - this is a little unconventional, but since I've unfortunately shifted hyperfixations and have drifted away from SPN, I thought I would post what I have for the next part of pythia. since I'm moving into resident evil land, I'm not sure if I'm going to come back to this fic—but I absolutely didn't want to leave you guys empty-handed!! I'm so so sorry that this fic will go unfinished (for now), and I'm so grateful to those who were along for the ride with me. I have so much love for all the people who motivated me through writing this fic. all of you are beyond kind!! and I hope you enjoy this dose of pythia content, featuring some of my notes and process-work, lol. I only had a few heavy chunks of the beginning written, but the prose for this chap (ironically) started to get into the meat of what I really wrote this fic for—psychic bullshit between reader and Sam. It was just too plain juicy to not share!! All of my spn fics will remain up, but if you keep up with me, expect lots of Leon Kennedy bullshit and tomfoolery. Again - thank you so much for your endless love and support, I had so much fun writing what I could of season one!! Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy this unfinished chunk of silly/ansty Christmas drama :)

EAU CLAIRE, WISCONSIN - Dec 21st, evening.

Sam drops the stack of glossy, brand-new legal pads into his lap, and flashes his brother a plain smile. “Thanks, Dean. I needed more of these.” From your spot seated on the living room rug, you twist your rings and wait for Dean’s witty reply. With all those notes you’re always makin', Sammy, I’ll hafta buy you some for New Years, too. You wait for him to make a crack about the gift he got Sam, something about diaries or his brother’s girly handwriting.

Instead, Dean shrugs, “Well, then there ya go.”

Voila. And with that, the feeble threads you’d tried to braid into a proper Christmas are cut. Without a word, your Mom picks up the little wooden jewelry case the three of you had thrifted her and recedes into the dark hallways of the house. Dean peels himself out of his seat to clean up. Sam sighs, picking at the plastic seal around his legal pads. Hilariously, this all plays out while Paul McCartney chimes about what wonderful Christmastime he’s been having from the radio in your kitchen.

Technically, you hadn’t just been celebrating Christmas. No, you managed to completely bomb both Christmas and the sacred Winter Solstice sabbat that the Proctors had been celebrating for a bajillion fucking years. The special sabbat that would have a real spiritual effect on you for the next couple months.

You’d given it a good ol’ college try. First, you’d painstakingly picked out gifts for the boys and your Mom. Good ass gifts, too, that you’d been hiding in your duffle since summertime. Hell, you’d been looking for the Eagles album you bought for Dean in tape form for at least two years. (Cool, Dean had said, half alive in his armchair after your chupacabra hunt in Illinois. He was at the ugly front end of a cold. He’d sniffled, Don’t have this one.) And knowing that this would be Sam’s first Christmas without Jess—the one person who had given him any kind of good holiday when he was away from home—you’d poured extra love into his gift, too.

He’d been begging you to read Frankenstein since high school, and you’d dodged it because sometimes books that pushed too far into the “classics” category could lose you. Mary Shelley got a little wordy at times. But you were a big girl with a big brain, so you’d read the whole thing for Sam… and annotated the whole thing for Sam…

He’d taken one look at your labor of love and murmured, “Good. Glad you read it.”

…Yeah. You had half a mind to check if he’d been replaced by a clone, hearing that. Fifteen-year-old Sam would have melted into a babbling, ecstatic mess if someone had carefully combed through one of his favorite books and shared their thoughts on it with him. Bare minimum, you figured he’d at least enjoy having his own copy of Shelley’s work. All his other books had been lost in the fire.

But you’d given the book to a Sam who was twenty-two, not fifteen. Fine. People changed.

The boys being a collective bummer was something you could deal with. Sam was always sullen around the holidays, and you couldn’t exactly be mad at Dean for being exhausted after a stressful hunt. But your Mom…

Beth used to make Yule her bitch. When you were a kid, come December 1st, the Proctor House could easily have been the center of all Wicca celebrations in the world. If working retail during the holidays tested one’s love for festive music, then the non-stop winter songs bouncing off Beth’s vinyl player would’ve made Santa beg to hear something else. Every room would gush with the smell of evergreen branches and holly. Your family’s altar, the home of all the love and joy for the season, would be lush with offerings and presents. The candles you lit as a family to welcome the light of the new year would glow in a neat row—your little silver candle, your mother’s tall red one… and the biggest. Your Dad’s.

Now, your Dad’s candle was tucked away with the rest of the unused decorations in the attic. From your spot on the floor, you couldn’t help but stare at your piss-poor excuse for a family altar. Beth hadn’t “had the time” to find the table runner your great-grandmother had embroidered just for that space. The small bouquet of mistletoe you’d brought sat pathetically on the wide, barren surface, framed by your family’s dollar-store candles: silver for you, red for Mom, and twin green candles for the boys. 

It was stupid. Really, you shouldn’t have cared so much. You were almost twenty-five, and the older you got the less people cared about silly, trivial things like a single holiday out of the year. That was just a fact of life.

Still, an ugly ball of bitterness sat in your gut. She couldn’t have tried to decorate? Even out on the road, you’d still found ways to make today a little special for the people you loved. Did she really have such little strength left in her? You’d dragged the boys up to Wisconsin with you so your Mom didn’t have to be alone. Was it really that impossible, after eleven whole years without your Dad, to try and be happy?

Fuck this. Yule isn’t over yet. There’s still time for you to squeeze some life out of today, and you’re going to start straight at the source. You find your Mom in the kitchen, mindlessly swiping invisible crumbs off pristine counters. When she senses you paused behind her in the kitchen doorway, clutching in both hands the gift she got you this year, the radio suddenly needs to be toyed with. Then cleaned. There are gray strands in her hair that shine like tinsel in the low kitchen light.

“Hey,” you say, your voice bright and christmas-card perfect. “I don’t think I got to say thank you for the gift.” (You did. More than once already.) “It’s been a bit since I read this one.” The gift in question is your Dad’s second edition print of The Shining. It’s even older than you are, with soft, petal-thin pages that reek of that wonderful old book musk. Rolling the flexed and cracked paperback between your hands, your Gift automatically picks up the distant echo of the hands that had touched these pages when they were new.

When you were little, you’d always found it kind of strange that your Dad considered this book his favorite. He was a sweet, soft-spoken person, and the mental image of him indulging in uncensored horror novels didn’t mesh with the Ray preserved in your head. Having since grown up and read it for yourself, you understood that it was less about the gore of the Overlook and more about “the shine;” the array of psychic abilities that kept five-year-old Danny Torrance alive through the book.

Years of having book-club with Sam had trained you to form cultivated opinions about the stuff you read, but The Shining existed in a realm that made it hard for you to describe how you felt about it. See, you had Danny Torrance’s shine—on the same level, too, enough shine to power the decades of ghostly ballroom parties and mob conspiracies inside the Overlook for a century. Seeing your Gift put onto a page so nakedly and cinematically made you uncomfortable. Yet, feeling the weight of your father’s book in your hands, standing in the kitchen he hasn’t touched in a decade, you know that it must’ve comforted him. Back then, surrounded by a psychic mother-in-law, girlfriend, and daughter, it would've been impossible to survive without a little shine of his own. You’re sure that your Dad's Gift was faint and unimpressive next to the psychic blackholes of your Mom and Grandma. Just enough to know if you’d skinned your elbow or had a nightmare. On the days that you came home from school tear-streaked and ruddy-faced, Dad would be waiting on the porch with soup.

You can still feel the faint psychic imprint of one of his whiskery kisses on your face. You don’t have many vivid impressions of him left to feel; none that haven’t been rubbed again and again, like the hollow of a fingerprint smoothed into the face of a rock over time.

Your Mom gives a non-committal hum at your attempt at conversation. Not because she doesn’t care—you can feel how much she cares from across the room—but because she’s tired. Adult Tired, like when she’d turn down your pleas to play together as a kid. Not tonight, baby. Momma’s exhausted.

“Mom,” you say, sounding as glossy and clean as a brand-new cookie tin. You open your mouth to say more, maybe to start in on one of your long-winded book-rants that had everyone wondering where Sam had suddenly appeared from. You know the answer, but you ask anyway, “This was one of Dad’s favorite books, right? I vaguely remember him talking about the hedge animals.” Beth accidentally hits a button as she’s dragging a rag over the shiny front of the radio, forcing Paul McCartney to have yet another wonderful Christmastime. She doesn’t look at you.

“Yup. But you knew that already, honey.”

C’mon. Nothing? She won’t even throw you the smallest, most pathetic olive branch? A psychic battle occurs. You get so frustrated all at once that your throat closes up, and that frustration balloons out into your family kitchen like the expansion of a bomb. You push. There is no give. The bubbling stormcloud of grief and loss hanging around Mom is there, then it’s not. The side of the kitchen your mother stands on is suddenly a void of absolute nothingness, empty of any feeling whatsoever, good or bad. She’s cutting you off from reading her—and protecting herself from your explosive emotions, as per usual.

Beth keeps cleaning the radio, her back to you.

Your rage bubbles out of you all at once. One day! One day out of the entire fucking year, the day your Dad always made special, and she can’t even pull herself together for that. You know you should be a good daughter and empathize with the woman who made you, but you’ve been a good daughter about this since you were twelve years old. Eleven Yules have gone by since your Dad passed. Just for one measly moment, you want to talk about him like he’s not a corpse rotting in the living room.

And the worst part is that Mom knows that. She’s known you’ve felt that way all day, a slow-bubbling pot building to a boil across the room. The two of you can always feel each other. You’re the only two who can; she’s the only other radio tower that can receive your station in its purest quality, and yet she has the gall to shut all her signals down.

“Fine!” You burst out, making the conversation physical.

It should feel good to yell, really. After the slow, ungratifying day you’ve had, you’ve been a shaken soda bottle waiting to implode. Instead, since you’re the crazy person yelling at nothing for no reason in the kitchen, your anger booms out of you and fizzes out in the same breath like a faulty firework. Fine. Fuck all of this. If you can’t beat em’, join em’. If everyone’s determined to rot the day away, then you’ll go wallow in self-pity the Proctor-Winchester way, too. Merry fucking Christmas, and a happy fucking Yule.

There is no satisfying door to slam on your way out of the kitchen. You take a sharp right down the front hall, hoping to veer up the stairs and slam your feet down on every single step up to your room. If your Mom wants to live forever in the year your Dad died, by all means—you’ll even bring home your thirteen-year-old self and her childish tantrums, just for time-accurate ambiance. Sam’s standing frozen just outside the kitchen archway, and you catch his deer-in-headlights look as you go peeling around the corner. You’re still keyed up with enough lashing rage to spare, so seeing him, just as hollowed-out and not there as your Mom, only feeds your pyre.

As you get to work thoroughly stomping the staircase to death, you hear him go into the kitchen and ask Beth about soup for Dean’s sore throat.

Upstairs is even more painfully quiet. Through the floor, Paul McCartney muffles down to a cheery mumble. All old houses shift around a little, but yours settles like it's alive, clicking, creaking, swaying. You don’t look at the portraits of Proctor women up the stairwell. The dusty grandfather clock in the hall watches you with its stained glass face, and you’re so lost in your own head—

—and Dad’d be so pissed we didn’t decorate the altar or listen to the Tull Christmas album, he’d riot, he’d talk some sense into her—wouldn’t think any of this is stupid— —that you don’t hear it when it chimes. Muscle memory plants you right in front of your bedroom door. Having a good cry under the covers sounds like a perfect end to the night, right? And yet you stop. Your hand drops on the knob and stays there, unmoving. Maybe it’s your Gift, or good old-fashioned human instinct knowing when something in the home has been nudged two inches to the left, but the air in the hall tastes staler than usual. A draft? Your gaze is pulled all the way down to the opposite end of the hall, where the untouched, stately storage room door is ajar.

Your Mom probably left it open. Maybe she’d gone in there to hunt around for all the heirloom Yule decorations, only to rediscover Dad’s football memorabilia or Dad’s engraved cigarette case and go bolting out of the room. —everything’s different without him, Sam and Mom and Dean too. So am I. Everything’s twisted—without him— Still riding the whirlwind, you stomp from one end of the yellowing, starry zodiac carpet (Aries) to the other (Pisces), the floorboards squeaking under your weight. You push the door and it goes shuddering into the darkness. This was one of many rooms in the house that Mom had banished you from as a kid, mostly as a way to shoo you away from the hunting world. It’d given you this insatiable fascination with it as a result, but when you tug the chain to turn on the closest lamp, what it illuminates doesn’t come close to the spectacular stories you’d made up in your head.

It’s just a room. It has windows and shelves and old things, some from your childhood, some from your Mom’s. Some from even further back than that. The closest fascinating thing is a shiny gold blob poking out of your baby things, which turns out to be Sam’s eighth-grade mathlete trophy. You had no idea what possessed Mom to come up here so often. There was no way she wasn’t in here at least a couple times a week; the tall metal storage shelf where she immortalized your Dad’s things was never dusty, and yet the whole room reeked of rotting books and insulation. You shove the box with Sam’s trophy aside with your foot until it skids out of your way, and then send the heavy door shut behind you with a wall-shaking bang.

A flurry of dust hails down from the ceiling. You cough through the cloud, wandering in your blindness towards the neat row of plastic storage tubs labeled with your Dad’s name. Clothes. Misc. Books. Maybe that’s where Mom had gotten your new copy of The Shining from, halfway through one of her sacred meditations over Dad’s things. You drop a hand onto the cold lid of the tub. Nothing, not even the slightest psychic imprint, reaches back.

What is she even holding onto anymore? You try the clothes next. The rounded corners of this bin have been scuffed gray from how many times it’s been pulled off and then pushed back on its shelf, again and again. The case feels as lifeless to you as it would for anyone else, but you try your luck and slide it out onto the floor. It comes loose with a solid thud.

When you were old enough, Beth would sometimes send you up into this room to grab things (spell ingredients, books you didn’t keep downstairs). You would run full-tilt right up until you hit the storage room door, then pass inside like a stranger in a dangerous realm, watching where you stepped and always, always keeping your Dad’s shelf in the corner of your eye. On brave days you would pick up his silvery cigarette case and roll it between your palms. It grew harder and harder to feel him each time, the ghost of him whittled down like a rock made round by the current of a river.

When you crack off the lid, you expect some kind of smell. You don’t remember what he smelled like, but you have a few guesses—cheap, vanilla-sweet aftershave, or maybe the woody stale smell of cigarette smoke you know you shouldn’t love. Maybe both. It doesn’t really matter. The neatly folded stacks of your Dad’s old shirts and jackets don’t smell like a damn thing. You dip your face into a holey band-shirt with the sleeves scissored off, but all that comes back to you is the rotten smell of dusty insulation. He’s here—he’s right here in front of you, right in your fucking hands, and yet the whole world is dead of him. You can’t sense even a sliver of him left.

The same old reservoir of despair pushes and pushes at your composure, wiggling through your cracks, widening them with a hundred thousand tons of pressure bearing down on you a minute. It is a day by day task to handle the reservoir. You like to think you’re good at handling it, at patching the cracks as they come and letting them breathe when the moment calls for it. But when you lift your face from the bin, the leak springs—really, genuinely springs, like it hasn’t in years.

You fall back onto your haunches, swallowing back sudden stinging tears. The bin and its askew lid go shrieking back onto the shelf with a lash of your foot.

-

The music downstairs stops. You can’t tell how long it’s been.

When his death was fresh, and you were stuck deep, deep within the reservoir, you’d wondered if it would always feel this way. It got easier, right? And in many ways it had—on most days you could talk about your Dad without it hurting, letting the dam’s water run. The battle was still there, but it was a burden you were proud to carry if it meant his memory lived on in you. He would want you to be happy, your Mom used to urge. So you gave being happy your best shot, loving and giving as much as you could.

That’s what frustrated you so endlessly about your Mom. She’d been right; your Dad would’ve wanted the two of you to move on, and yet she still entombed herself in the bottom of her reservoir far too often. There was no release, no acceptance with her. The dark part of you that wanted to pass blame wondered if this was all because of John, and how well Winchester grief happened to mingle with a Proctor’s. How would your mother’s life be different, if the evil that’d taken Dad hadn’t been put down a week later? Would she be just as hellbent? With your knees sore from pressing into the floor, you knew the answer. You knew if the thing that’d taken Sam or Dean from you was right in front of you, you’d chase it until you were in your own grave. You knew that even after it was dead, you would be digging your nails into the backseat of the Impala and clawing for every psychic molecule of them left in the leather.

And that’s what scared you—was she just going to be chasing Dad forever, til’ there wasn’t a wisp of him left in the world to feel? 

Something dawns on you, thudding through your mind like a rock dropped down a chute. With limp hands, you slide The Shining towards you on the worn wood floor, part the pages with your thumbs, and press your nose into the binding. There’s the smoky, earthy scent of old paper first… then something just underneath the surface that no one but you and your Mom can pick up.

Old books. Yes. Yes, that’s what Dad had smelled like.

-

You’re seated on the floor of the storage room, back pressed to one of the ancient metal shelves holding up your gramma’s VCR collection, when a blot of the future is tossed at you. Cheap deodorant and lemon cough drops.

Around a minute later, the stairs beyond the door squeak under someone’s weight. Even without the roulette glimpse of the future, you can tell by the footfalls who it is. Heavy knuckles rap the door and come straight in without waiting for an answer. Behind him, the silence of the rest of the house is even heavier.

You try to sound like a reasonable adult, but the mopey teenager slips out anyway. “Thought you were sick, Dean.”

He artfully dodges your point. (Dean is, after all, a master of the craft.) You don’t look back at him, but the lemon cough-drops glimpse you got of him creates a clear picture: Dean’s whole body listing into the door frame, one hand on the knob, his face lacking its usual color. His cheeks have graduated from stubbly to scruffy, neglected. “Hey,” he says. It’s the, okay, you’re done cooling down, let’s have a grown-up conversation kind of hello.

You don’t know what to say back. You’re not sure if you can have any kind of conversation right now.

Dean rolls with it, trying to decide if this silence is begging for a subject change or a heart-to-heart. You’re not sure what he goes for when he says, “I had an idea.” “Did it hurt?” You joke. Jokes you can do.

There’s his opening. After a beat, you’re—

—fucking lobbed with a foam football. Like you’re fucking twelve. Dean’s throw arcs straight towards your head and bounces clean off the top, a perfect spiral. You yelp in outrage, and before you can think you’re following where the stupid ball went so you can clock him right in the face with it. Asshole. It loop-de-loops on the floor around an old dining chair, and you clamber on your knees to fish for it.

Just when you get the toy in your hands and you’re about to demolish him with it, Dean ducks behind the doorway, chuckling, “Woah! No face shots! You wouldn’t bash a poor, sick guy’s face in, would’ja?”

God. You can’t fucking believe him. If anyone else did that…

You lower your hackles and drop the foam toy into a basket, far out of reach of congested troublemakers. When his shining eyes appear in the slit of the doorway again, your cheeks are aching with an impossible smile. “You’re lucky it’s Christmas, loser. What is it?”

Dean hesitates a moment more, just in case you’ve got something else to throw at him, then joins you in the storage room with the evil little oily smile you love. The same dust cloud that got you earlier descends on him in a rough coughing fit, but this lets him get a good look at the little mess you’ve made: the book on the floor, your Dad’s things open and askew. When he clears his throat for the last time, he looks pained.

For your sake, you pretend it’s an empathetic kind of pained. And you know that’s a part of it—Dean doesn’t enjoy seeing you and your Mom like this. But it’s an unfortunate fact of your life that you will have four times as much context for him than he will ever have for you. Just breathing the same dusty air as him, you know he’s been nursing a sinus headache since Monday, one that’s made his head feel like it’s chock-full of stuffing, and that Sam made him canned chicken noodle soup—and at first he felt a little smug making Sam play nurse, until he stewed on it more and—

—hate it when he gives me that dead-eyed look, like he can’t even pretend to care anymore. Like he’s just dragging himself through this for our sake. Poor kid scares the shit outta me. Is this how it’s always gonna be? Sammy aching over her, night after night after night—

You know just touching the bins holding your Dad’s things that on a icy February afternoon in 1994, fifteen-year-old Dean had picked up the plastic tubs for your Mom from the store.

So when he gives you that pained look, you know it’s part-concern, part-fear. If this is what you look like eleven years after your Dad’s passing… if John never comes home from his hunting trip, is this what Dean will become? The loyal son, waiting and waiting on that porch for a man who would never come home? 

Your whole life, you’ve felt like you were becoming more and more like Dean; lately, it feels like he’s becoming so much like you. Your last four years on the road together had slowly but surely melded you together.

“Okay, so, Yule’s a fire festival, right?” Dean grasps around in his memory for the yearly history lesson your Mom gives about the Wicca calendar. “Uh, we lit candles… I thought about burning Beth’s Muppet Christmas CD with my lighter a couple times. That’s about all the fiery, burny-stuff we did today.”

“I love the Muppets Christmas album,” you pout.

“After the millionth partridge in John Denver’s goddamn pear tree, you’d change your mind,” Dean swears. “But I was thinkin’—we got the firepit in the backyard, marshmallows, and I think I could put together some vodka shots. Then we can blow em' out and eat em' with the s'mores.” Your eyebrows raise. Only he, of all people, could take your sacred family traditions and twist them into such a wonderful, stupid-ass thing. Maybe it’s ridiculous, but… there is chocolate and graham crackers downstairs… and with how cold it is outside, a fire would be perfect… It’s the best blend of weird Proctor-Winchester traditions you need to save Christmas and Yule. Dean takes your silence as glowing awe. “Exactly. I told you, I'm a fuckin' genius. Helluva way to start the wiccan year, right? You in?”

You’re well aware that this is an elaborate plan to coax you away from your moping. Still, it’s just too Dean to turn down. “...Hell yeah.”

At first R hopes that it’s just her and Dean, and that Sam and Beth keep their grief to themselves. But then she realizes how cruel and selfish she’s been—everyone grieves in their own way, and just because she works through it by talking about it doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. It’s not good that Beth is holding on so tightly to her loss, but that doesn’t mean R wants to leave them out.

Lead this into a touch of psychic!Dean and how he has a teeny tiny second sense for what she needs, just like her Dad did. Just enough shine to get by.

R and Dean come downstairs and invite Sam and Beth to their campfire 😀

Or, at the very least, all the psychic happenings in the house echoing between them; if Dean's sharper instincts were as psychically heavy as a shadow falling on grass, then Sam's Static was six feet of snow in an arctic blizzard.

It tingles all the way up to your shoulder when Sam touches you. And that, oh, that was a whole new can of worms. As they get dressed for the snow outside and assemble the s'mores and flaming shots, you try not to head down that train of thought again.

Every time you’ve glanced at Sam these past few weeks, you’d been unable to hide from what you’d sensed there—from what you’d seen in the demon, and what you now knew to be completely and utterly true after reading its mind.

Sam had It. The Gift, the Shining, whatever the fuck you wanted to call it. Not the vague imprint of psychic-ness from loving one or sharing the Impala with one for four years; full-on, unlatched, REDRUM, I-saw-it-before-it-happened psychic abilities. In the weeks you'd had to sit with that revelation, you'd poked carefully at Sam from afar. Obviously, you knew what a fucking psychic felt like. The five-year-old Sam who'd cut Dean's gum out of your hair had not been psychic. Yet this Sam, twenty-two with three-fourths of an ivy league law degree under his belt, was as psychic as a fucking—well. You. He was just as psychic as you.

Without even a sliver of the same control or even understanding of—of what he had, yes, but you were confident that if Sam was pushed, he could reach into your mind just as easily as you could reach into his. There had been a shift, then. At six, having gum cut out of your hair, you had been decidedly less psychic than you were at twenty-four. So Sam had gone through the Proctor Rite Of Passage; some terrible moment had cut him deep, deep enough to pull a new kind of blood to the surface. After Jessica, he had been... yeah.

It was fucking crazy. And yet it also slotted perfectly into some of the weirder things you understood about Sam; about who he was now and the vague, strobing flashes you got of his future. It freaked you the fuck out. Did Sam know? Did anyone know, besides you? Had your Mom recognized that spark in Sam, the same way she'd seen it in you? Had John?

And the plain existence of the Gift in Sam begged the question—why? Had he just happened to drop from the tree as a different kind of apple? Or was this something you could trace back to his mother, the same way it traced back to yours? Had Mary…?

The implications of that took pretty much everything you understood about Sam and Dean’s life, lined it up on the chopping block, and cleaved it in two. Needless to say, thinking about it made you sick. How could you even begin to bring this up to them?

You cursed your abilities with all you had. There were nights when you sat on the bathroom floor, wishing you could dig in with your nails and rip out whatever had put It in your head. Never in a billion fucking years would you have wished It upon anyone else; especially not Sam, good, selfless, wonderful Sam, who already ached so deeply for other people. Seeing their future, too? And even more often, seeing it and being helpless to change it?

He used to cry over squashed spiders as a kid. You'd felt a whole lot more than just spiders die.

…Beside that shuddering horror was another, far more selfish feeling. As scary as the implications could be, when you thought less about the Winchester family and more about your relationship with Sam, you were… excited. Relieved, even.

There were only four people in the entire world that you could share your Gift with. One of them has been six feet under for over a decade. Your Gift was a clingy, possessive creature, too. It was maybe two steps shy of being an eldritch horror. It poked through Dean’s dreams when you slept beside him, sucking them up like cigarette smoke. It breathed down Sam’s neck wherever he went. If you wanted, no one could lie to you—all punchlines and stories were spoiled for you, you knew when people found you annoying or pretty or stupid. If that particular Proctor gene had skipped you, then maybe you’d be able to form relationships with people where you didn’t immediately, intrinsically understand who they were and why. Dean would say, You need a drink. You would know without asking that he meant, You scare the ever-living hell out of me n’ I know I can’t hide it from you. Fucking hell, kid, I wish I could.

You knew you were a freak. The tiny human vessel for the lashing, bubbling, soul-melting, cosmic weight of a star about to bloom into a black hole. Only your mom would ever understand what it felt like to exist on the fringe of time, between the exhaustive influence of the past and the vast, spotty expanse of the future. You were a tool to men like John; an anomaly for men like Bobby; and a responsibility to men like Dean. 

But Sam… Your best friend Sam, he’d always tried to understand. Maybe he’d never fully get it, but the point was that he tried to. You remembered sitting with him on the curb outside your old high school, the concrete thrumming with music from the junior prom you’d both left behind inside.

How either of you had gotten dates was a miracle. You, the class weird-freak-emo punchline, and Sam, on his fourth round being the new kid that year, were two peas in a pod. Your date had never picked you up; Sam’s had escaped with her friends long before their first dance. Neither of you were very broken up about it.

The future had sprawled in front of you that night as clear as could be. You must've sat and talked on the curb for three straight hours, pressed together at the hip with Sam’s blazer around your shivering arms.

He was always beautiful in the boy-next-door kind of way, dimples popping with every good smile and freckles rising out of the too-short sleeves of his button-up. But that night he’d been fucking Helen of Troy, and the roar of the past and future slowed to a halt around him. 

Do you really see the future all the time? Every second? Sam had curiously tilted his head, sending a gleaming swish of chocolatey hair out of his eyes.

Swallowing hard, you’d hesitated, Not every second. But a lot, yes.

Again, the head tilt, then the swish. His gaze was innocent and intrigued. No existential dread, no sweeping sense of fear. Just plain curiosity. Not even morbid curiosity. Sam had asked, What about right now?

Sam’s cologne—oh god, his cologne—was steaming off his borrowed jacket and floating around your head in a wonderful rosy fog. You’d poked at the future. Sometimes things came back, sometimes they didn’t. That night, the future had come back tasting like Sam’s vanilla chapstick and junior prom punch, and your face had gone up in flames just sensing it. He’d waited for an answer. You’d blurted out the plain truth: In a minute or two, you’re gonna kiss me.

This kind of absolute, unshakable certainty about the future had made other hunters’ blood run cold. You’d braced yourself for Sam’s displeasure or worse, his fear. But instead, there were those dimples again, and Sam had the gall to bat his lashes at you and delightedly ask, Really? That’s what the magic eight ball has to say?

His big hand had dropped onto your knee and you’d squeaked out a shrill, Signs point to yes!

Sam loved the stupid magic eight-ball joke. You could feel him smiling about it as he kissed you, kissed you, hand-on-knee, his face tipping down to yours, the shitty school punch staining his lips as the two of you connected. At fifteen and sixteen respectively, this was the first kissing that either of you had ever done. It’d been wetter and warmer than you’d expected, and Sam’s vanilla chapstick had left the slightest print on your mouth, one that your tongue swiped over obsessively for the next month. Your Gift had chased him for weeks after that, silently and invisibly swarming him every time he entered a room.

Back then, your mind had been on the Curse. But now, you thought about what had led to the kiss in the first place. Sam hadn’t kissed you on a night when your Gift had been crammed down deep where it could bother nobody but you. He’d instead chosen the precise moment where your Gift was most raw, one of Its fingers coming down from the sky to press against the pulse of the future. It was small, but at a time in your life when you’d wanted to claw your Gift out with your bare hands, Sam had gotten the smallest glimpse of It and had fallen in love.

You couldn’t help but see this thing inside him, his Static, and feel the exact same way. His powers were twisted and unavoidably demonic, and yet you kind of loved them. It made perfect sense to you. No one really understood you like Sam did. Now, it's clear why.

-

tags: @samssluttybangs @cookiemumster1 @lacilou @cevans-winchester @leigh70 @seraphimluxe @emily-roberts @emme-looou @aloneatpeace @williamstop @ornella0910 @chaoticshepardplaid @dakota-dream @lcvecstiel @goghkiss @spnexploration @stoneyggirl2 @urm0mmmbbg @mulattomoon @poeticsorcery @deansapplepie @rennydenny @babydollfoster @badlandsbrunette @hallecarey1 @pplanetcaravan @notanotherthembo

[billpottsismygf]

The Legend of Ruby Sunday

Well that was certainly dramatic! A lot of questions answered, but more questions created. It's hard to have a conclusive opinion on this episode because it's so definitively only half of the story, but I certainly had fun throughout. There were lots of really funny bits of dialogue and good character moments, and a lot of drama.

I'd seen a couple of people speculating about Sutekh but I hadn't looked into why and, although I have watched The Pyramids of Mars, I don't remember an awful lot of what goes on in it! From what I recall, he wasn't that impressive a villain so the huge majesty and fanfare he's presented with here is quite interesting. He was a guy with a silly mask on in the 70s and here he's a somewhat ugly CGI dog, but I'm open to seeing how they connect these two versions of the character.

So, we have several people, all women, running around at the moment who have something to do with the mystery. 1) There's Ruby's birth mother. Why can't they see her face? Why was she pointing? 2) Mrs Flood, who turns out to be pretty unpleasant if she's refusing Cherry a cup of tea. Unlike the two I'm about to mention, she seemed to know what was coming and obviously about the TARDIS (and the camera) from the christmas special. 3) Harriet Arbinger, who is a harbinger of Sutekh. 4) Susan Twist, who is... another harbinger of Sutekh? It seems like Kate's chrysalis theory was right with her, at least. Does she serve the same role as Harriet? Is the little boy who was Maestro's harbinger have anything to do with either of them or did he just serve the same role?

Sutekh is apparently the mother and father and other of the gods, which could mean a bunch of things. For one it implies variation of gender, or at least an existence outside of it, which is interesting with the he/him pronouns and yet all these women who seem wrapped up with the plot, as well as the ongoing theme of abandoned children. Carla also called him the Beast before he'd even fully manifested, which of course brought to mind The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, especially with the soldier who died saying he was in hell. Probably no connection, but who knows! He is also specifically name checked as being Set and Seth from Egyptian mythology. What does it all mean!

Also, how did Sutekh latch onto the TARDIS in the first place? Does the fact that the Doctor mallet whacked the TARDIS to double it in The Giggle have anything to do with the present situation? I didn't like that at the time because she's a living being and he just cloned her(?) or split her(?) or something, but now I'm thinking it would make sense if it connects to how she got infested with Sutekh in the first place.

Speaking of the TARDIS-Sutekh connection, I loved that the TARDIS anagram was so obvious the UNIT team laughed at the Doctor explaining it, which makes the "wrong anagram" reveal even better. RTD knew the fans would work out the TARDIS anagram immediately (which they did) and that it would be a red herring for us just as much as for UNIT! Though not that much of a red herring, since the TARDIS is involved. Is it perhaps a little silly to create your evil secret corporation under a name that might give away your evil secret plan? Yeah, but I like it at the moment.

I'm so glad Susan Triad isn't Susan Foreman (at least, it seems that way). It's another big old red herring. I've been desperate for Susan to return for so long - and I would still love her to, and maybe she even will in this arc - but I don't want her to return like this! Not as a villain and not as someone other than Carole Ann Ford. While we still have her, let her play Susan again! Please!

I am fascinated by this stuff about the Doctor having her before having children... It's been established in the past that the Doctor did have children and that he lost them all (eg. in The Doctor's Daughter), but here Fifteen seems to be implying that he hasn't yet. How does that all add up? I love the idea of having children out of order, and have always somewhat rebelled at the assumption that Time Lords have children in the same way as humans (ie. sexual reproduction between two parents of "opposite" sexes). Gimme Looms or something equally bizarre or nothing, so I'm definitely down for this; I just wonder how it actually makes sense for the Doctor.

I'm so happy to see Rose again! Obviously we knew she'd be in this, but she's a great character and I adored her dynamic with Ruby. Very cute! I loved the Doctor's line about them being two shades of red. I hope they'll develop the stuff of her not being given much to do, as I guess basically a nepotism hire, because I want her to get to do exciting things! On that note, it is odd if she's so kept out of things that she stays in the room after everyone who is not necessary is made to leave. I know she's necessary in that she's a UNIT employee who is important to us, the viewers, but it doesn't quite make sense with what is apparently her role in the organisation.

Saving perhaps the most interesting for last, the CCTV of the night Ruby was abandoned was 66 metres away. Otherwise known as 73 yards. My ears pricked up the moment they said that, though I needed to check afterwards that they were the same, and that surely can't be a coincidence. I don't know if I need anything more about 73 yards, despite my many questions at the end of it, but it could be very interesting if the events of that episode have something to do with the bigger picture.

Overall, fun and engaging episode in its own right, but I'll have to withhold final judgement until next week!

Misc things

Rose says it's been ages since she last saw the Doctor, so we're a while after the specials. Also there was mention of 2004 being 19 years ago so we're currently in 2023.

It's interesting we have two characters in this story (Susan and Rose) who are named after important companions, each the original companion of their run of Doctor Who.

I love that the Trickster got a mention. So many people seemed convinced the Trickster would be the big bad coming up, but at least he got a name check.

I loved Carla's energy in this one! True Donna vibes. She only had to hear of the existence of Rose's mum at UNIT and decided she was also going to be involved.

Susan Triad says she remembers worlds with orange skies, which certainly sounds like Gallifrey, so could there be a Susan connection after all? I noted down that her father was a postman and her mother a dinner lady, but so far have gleaned nothing from this.

I love Lenny Rush! I've seen him in lots of things at this point and he's so charismatic and funny, especially for a fifteen year old. I hope Morris will stay on for a while yet!

It seems strange that UNIT didn't know about Susan (Foreman), since I'm pretty sure we've seen in the past that they have files on all the Doctors, including One.

[antlersofthevoid]

2 asks in one, happy holidays! >:D

1. What was Zara and Tessa's reaction to the Disassembly Trio's kids?

2. Do they all celebrate the holidays with each other or just to hang out?

Happy holidays my friend!! :D 1. ) Zara and Tessa were both absolutely ecstatic upon meeting the kiddos. Beta is (Secretly) Tessa's favorite, because she's a literal smaller clone of J. Biscuit is smaller than both of her brothers and likes to stay snuggled up to Zara, and Crumbles likes stealing Tessa's bows. Uzi and Doll's kids are Zara's favorites, because she helped take care of Nori and Yeva (and by proxy, Uzi and Doll) in the labs, and getting to have seen all three generations makes her heart all warm. 2) Zara and Tessa come to Copper-9 for every holiday, even with baby Carmine (Zara and Carmine stay on the ship, because toxic air isn't good for tiny human babies). Tessa makes the drones wear ugly sweaters for Christmas, and puts bunny ears on J for easter.

[seaweedstarshine]

Hello, moot! How are you? I'm rewatching THORS (once again) and I'm ugly crying while mouthing along their lines but that has nothing to do with my ask. Just thought it would be nice and polite to say hello.

Anyway my ask is I've seen people (official DW/BF people and fans) call River a Time Lord, human+, Proto Time Lord, and not a Time Lord because it's a title not a species. Personally, I've gone with human+. But another moot argued she's a Time Lord. What's your take on it?

Hiiii great to hear from you :D My name’s Tree by the way! Aaaah good for you, I got a love-hate relationship with that episode but those last ten minutes are 😭 *chef's kiss* I should rewatch it, it is that time of year, and I haven’t seen it since my Doctor Who Christmas Specials Rewatch last December!

Anyway!

I most often call River a Proto-Time Lord, or sometimes a part Time Lord/part human. (I’m not sure Proto-Time Lord is accurately descriptive, since it kinda sounds like it should refer to ancients like the Founders who weren't born with regeneration, but it’s the word I generally use because it feels closest to capturing the complexity of River Song!) Human+ sounds cool too though! (Especially as in, human+Time Lord.)

Because — while yeah, she is a genetically modified human with no known Gallifreyan DNA — it’s clear Kovarian did a lot more to deliberately make her resemble a Gallifreyan than just the Time Vortex related things like time-sense and regeneration. Her two hearts! Her respiratory bypass! No way those are related to Time Vortex exposure — it's Gallifreyan biology. Kovarian wanted her to be a match for the Doctor in every way.

Honestly, since there's no one really like her (apart from her clones), I think a lot of it's down to how she relates to herself and her identity.

I think the Doctor was really excited to learn that she's like him, in many ways — and that kind of affirmation would mean a lot to someone who grew up feeling like an outsider, having been told she was a just weapon, so she would have a connection to her Time Lord-ness as well as her human-ness.

But that doesn't mean she wouldn't still introduce herself a psychopath long before attempting to explain her species to a stranger.

(I don't think most qualified Academy graduates would consider her a Time Lord, though. Eyyy, nine times out of ten, they're too dead to say.)

[burhanprompt]

Positive Prompt:

(High Quality:1.4), (Best Quality:1.4), (masterpiece:1.4), official art, official wallpaper, 4k textures,Surreal embodiment of true Christmas spirit evoked!,a woman clutching teddy bear hugs shivering homeless boy tightly providing comfort against biting wind swirling ominously through alleyway littered carelessly with last night's garbage, angelic choirs sing sweet melodies accompanying heavenly glow bathing tender scene in celestial luminosity, benevolence personified manifest tangibly bridging gap between haves/have nots, selfless acts performed selflessly ignoring societal constraints dictating who receives blessings when instead focusing solely on genuine compassion felt deeply resonating universally, tears roll down cheeks touched deeply witnessing miracle taking place right before watchful eyes affirming faith restored once more,(detailed:1.05), (extremely detailed:1.06), sharp focus, (intricate:1.03), (extremely intricate:1.04), low contrast, soft cinematic light, soothing tones, HDR, (Epic scenery:1.09), (beautiful scenery:1.08), (detailed scenery:1.08), (intricate scenery:1.07), (wonderful scenery:1.05)

Negative Prompt:

clone head, clone faces,long head, long face, multiple faces, multiple heads, double heads, double faces, big head, long neck, ugly, tiling, poorly drawn hands, poorly drawn feet, poorly drawn face, out of frame, extra limbs, disfigured, deformed, body out of frame, blurry, bad anatomy, blurred, watermark, grainy, signature, cut off, draft, amateur, multiple, gross, weird, uneven, furnishing, decorating, decoration, furniture, text, poor, low, basic, worst, juvenile, unprofessional, failure, crayon, oil, label, thousand hands, text, word,<bad-hands-5>,<negative_hand-neg>,<bad-image-v2-39000>

Model:

realDreamLegacySD15_1515 (SD-1)

Width:

1152

Height:

1408

Seed:

542038611

Steps:

37

Scheduler:

euler

CFG scale:

7.5

CFG Rescale Multiplier:

0

High Resolution Fix Enabled:

true

High Resolution Fix Method:

ESRGAN

High Resolution Fix Strength:

0.45

LoRA:advancedenhancer.b8z9 (SD-1) - 0.7

LoRA:epiCRealLife (SD-1) - 0.7

LoRA:MagicBook-V1 (SD-1) - 0.7

LoRA:more_details (SD-1) - 0.65

LoRA:avelinechrismonica-02 (SD-1) - 1

[mallowmaenad]

okay the post is back, time for another journal entry

I've doing a really bad job of caring for myself lately, my room is a shit hole, I just took my first shower in like a week, meals are becoming an afterthought. I couldn't sleep last night because I was trying to distract myself from some thoughts that were making me sick to my stomach and I couldn't pull my corpse out of bed until 12:30ish. I'm supposed to be excited for Halloween, it's my favorite holiday, I haven't thought about Halloween all month and it honestly scares me. Maybe it's because I know I'm going to spend it like almost any other day of my life, I don't get invited to parties, I'm not the sort of person that can pass the bar for being allowed to trick or treat and I couldn't afford a costume this year. I don't know if I'll even be able to do the teenage scramble for discounted Halloween candy in the coming days. I kinda wanna try out that Nightmare Before Christmas devil may cry clone some day. My therapist told me to check out this app called Finch or something and it feels kind of like I'm clocking in to being alive while I watch something I'm supposed to find cute talk about spongebob and baby shark. It's such a comical dichotomy of being someone that struggles with suicidal thoughts and isolation tapping away at some gaudy buzzing colorful Christmas card looking app that's constantly spouting hollow "Good Job!"'s and "I Love You!"'s

I'm stuck on a level in fire emblem again and recently found out that despite being advertised as such I am not playing the first fire emblem game but like the 6th or 7th. I preemptively cringe at the thought of expressing the fun I'm having with it around a punch bowl and some guy wearing a shirt with one of those half naked dragon children on it pushing up his glasses to tell me this fact and wait for me to shower him with praise for being so clever and knowledgeable.

I think I half decided to start putting bleak journal entries about my banal life under any conpilation containing my most famous post by far that has brought me no joy or scruples because I think itd be kind of funny to at the end of the deluge of youtube short nasally british guy reading over minecraft parcore tier posting you see an ugly faggot talking about how much she sucks and wants to die and stuff like that. My friend sent me a link to this reposted on instagram, which I actually have but have tailored to look as normal and neurotypical as possible so I have something for my family members to follow without knowing im a furry pervert with more acronyms than an alphabet soup. It's not even under this username.

compilation of this type of post

[elektroskopik]

Woohoo! My Ugly Christmas Clones™ have arrived! Just in time for February 🎄🙃

[artnrandomness]

Been a while since I've touched these AUs of mine. But hey, at least I have some pre-Christmas drawings to post for this year, unlike last year (i think).

Anyways, in the first photo, we have my Bendy AU (specifically a BATDR AU), where Audrey (the tall female Bendy clone with eyelashes), Bendy (left bottom corner) and my AU's version of Henry (the other Bendy clone underneath Audrey on the right) are taking a selfie for the holiday's.

The second photo here is a lot of my Invader Zim AUs celebrating Christmas. The following versions of the characters in said IZ AUs are Irken Dib (Left), Zim from the AU where Irken Dib is (Right), Tak from my IZ version of the FNF mod named Darkness Takeover (somewhere in the middle), GIR (on top of Tak in the middle), my version of Spacejunk Dib from my Swapjunk AU (Spacejunk AU made by @l-ii-zz ), who's flying alongside the SIR Unit Gaz (in the left near Irken Dib), Gaz from my old Gaz of War AU climbing the Christmas tree (a God of War X IZ AU) (right), Dib from the Haunted Sister AU (the big shadowy version of Dib with the long claws), Gaz from that same AU hugging the tree for safety and lastly Zim from the Gaz of War AU on top of the tree, surprised to see Haunted Sister AU Dib.

Last picture is about the main cast from my FNAF AU (the one where the Crying Child becomes a Nightmare Animatronic in the afterlife and is his Nightmares' master), are celebrating Christmas in the Afterlife (this takes place after the Crying Child forgives both Charllote (his girlfriend) and his siblings Michael Afton and Elizabeth), using Cassidy's head (the Golden Freddy head on top of the tree Elizabeth (AKA Scrap Baby) is powering up) as the star of the tree.

Hope you enjoyed these old arts I made a year ago. I apologize if they look ugly.

[nityarawal]

4/13/2024

Met My Silver Cybertruck 

And Isha's Black

Morning Songs

Met My Silver Cybertruck

Isha's Black One Too

Yeah They're Lovely

Saw An Ugly

Hot Pink Competitor

What Did Davina

Do To Get This

Hot Pink Car

Did He Suck

Her Old Man

At Tesla

His Sugar Daddy

And Whole New World

Army

And Get A Wet 

Fart

Thankyou Like

Tay Tay

From Football Cons

Saw An Ugly Hot 

Pink Cybertruck

Wrap Must've Been

On Sale

Davina Prostituted

For Concerts

Heard Bad Bunny

Got A White One

In DHS

And Is Bragging

About Plea Bargains

Cutting Lines

In Songs

From Sky Valley

Hoods

Is He A Mommy

Hater

Like "Friend" Eddie

Who Promised

Me New Tires

From Jiffy Lube

Only To Try To Hit

On Me

And Laugh If They 

Popped

Killing Mommy

Bad Bunny

Sang Next Door

To Justin Wild's

On Christmas Day

In 2022

We Listened From 

The Garden

My First Introduction 

Sky Valley Harmony

But The Men Don't

Love The Women

On That Block

Is Secret Service

Justin Wild Blowing

Bunny For A Ride

In His White Cyber

Truck

Like All Our

Tesla Bros

My Ladies Felt Used

My Ladies Felt Abused

My Ladies Don't Like

The Way You

Sold Taylor

Swift And Beyonce

For A Clone

In A War

Of Violent

Misconduct

Not Courtships

Mammas' Don't Like

Our Sisters Selling Out

But Most Of Them

Are Robots Now

Mammas Don't Like

Elon Raped In The

Cage

We Love Our Elon

And We've Got

Four Million Kids

Missing

In The USA

Needing Dada

Mammas Don't Like 

Our Kids Used

For Government

Crimes

Haven't Met An

Atty Or Judge

In Alignment

With Mothers

Natural Law

They Won't Have

Babies

For What They

Done

No Souls Cleave

To Them

Naturally

Only Bought Bribed

And Sold

Cheap Substitutions

Causing Discrimination

They Won't Be In

A Society

With Any Of Us

To Mars

Nor On Earth

Please Be Patient

Don't Murder Them

Yet

Keep Recycling

Send Them To Border

Grimesz Must Have 

An Amazing Tribute

To Cast For X

And Elon

Defending Moms From

2 Million

Military Trans

Boytoy Cougars

Close Lexus Toyota

Pedophile Armies

Please Be Patient

But Make Some Noise

Too

Peeps Are Dying

Need To Draw 

Some Lines

Boundaries

Walls For My 

Ladies

Now Beyonce

Little Bitches Are Writen'

Up Mammas At Martha's 

Kitchen 

Spreading Scabies, Mites, Lymes

And Crabs

From Animal Breeders

Like Space X 

Space Manager

J-Ma Stephenson 

On Twenty Six Percent Murderins'

That's 2 Billion

Beloveds AI is Terminating

Know Mammas Are 

Number One

Abort Invitro Crimes

Our Kids By

Our Side

In Alignment

If Our Protector

Is Too Big

Of A Pansy

To Provide

Then When You Kill

Off Twenty-Six Percent 

In The New Order

With Bill Gates

Let

Civilians Live

Clones Aborted

No More Apple Detention

Robotics

Windows Stole Enough 

And Government 

Dies

A Beautiful Death

With Remembering

Old Ministries

And Put

Them To Rest

Once And For

All

Peace,

Nitya Nella Davigo Azam Moezzi Huntley Rawal 

[cigvrettedvet]

edith & val.

   “nothing…” val said as she tried to hide as much of the cookie ingredients as she could that were out on the counter. “no, she hasn’t rubbed off on me. you should see the apartment it’s like santa threw up in there.” the blonde said with a playful roll of her eyes. before she could try to defend herself again, the timer for the cookies went off and she felt her eyes go wide since she knew she couldn’t let them sit in there for too long. when she finally broke their eye contact she went back and grabbed the cookies out of the oven before letting out a sigh. “okay maybe i did make some cookies… and maybe some of them are shaped like christmas trees.” she said with a little shrug of her shoulders before leaning against the counter a bit. “… there might also be some decorations around here. i didn’t think it was too much but then i saw some stockings and we didn’t have any so i picked up a couple.” she tried to hide her smile as she shrugged her shoulders again and motioned for edith to grab a cookie. “but i promise i didn’t get us any ugly sweaters, i had adele pick one up for frankie and her but that’s where i drew the line.” 

         edith chuckles, not quite convinced by val's response. but just hearing about how adele was celebrating the holidays, she had no doubt that it'd be something over the top. brows raised when the timer went off and val looked even more suspicious than ever. val finally went to go and take out the cookies which confirmed edith's suspicions. "i knew i smelled cookies! they do look great, by the way," edith smiled. never in a million years did she think that val would be decorating the apartment, let alone baking cookies. maybe they were really trying something new for this year. "thank god. if i saw even one ugly sweater, i was gonna be convinced you were kidnapped and replaced by an evil clone," edith teased as she approached val, picking up the christmas tree shaped one. might as well go all out and be festive. "now for the ultimate test...," edith playfully remarked before taking a bite. after a couple of chews, edith quickly came to a conclusion. "these are very good. better than the store bought kind. do you think you can make more? i'll help and the best thing is, they'll be just for us?"

[bibannana]

Wolf Pack Christmas Headcannon:

The clones of the pack find our that it is a natborn tradition to buy ugly jumpers/sweaters for Christmas and gift them to others.

However, in true sibling fashion they turned this into a competition. Said competition has two parts.

The first part of this competition is the award for the ugliest jumper that they can find, doesn't matter how ugly so long as it is wearable (not made of anything living or bio-hazardous thank you [rule implemented on the second christmas they celebrated when Sinker turned up with a pile of questionable material and origin and called it a jumper that wriggled]).

The second part of the competition is gifting said jumpers to Plo Koon and seeing which ones he wears most often.

As such, Plo has a collection of ugly christmas jumpers from all of his sons that he takes turns wearing with pride.

[fiatluxillustration-portfolio]

Made myself a Padme / Phantom Menace ugly sweater design because I must take matters into my own hands for us Padme stans

Will be up on redbubble later today

[its-captain-sir]

I have like 3 half finished Clone ideas in my head, but the most complete one is just me thinking about Ahsoka getting into knitting for some reason and making her brothers hats.

And I can’t stop thinking of Fives in the worst hat you’ve ever seen. Just, the ugliest. Worst. Hat. And he just wears it everywhere. Everywhere.

TOP TIER CONTENT TRULY!! I can just imagine it being like

Fives: this is literally the ugliest hat in existence

Ahsoka: :( fine if you don't like it I'll just make you another one–

Fives, clutching the hat to his chest: no I'm going to wear this everywhere

[lonely-vault-boy]

What kinds of gifts do you think the harbingers give eachother during their """christmas""" holiday?

ngl these prompts are absolutely my favorite thing to see when i open tumblr!!

Pierro gives everybody socks. All of them. But they're all goofy socks he ordered custom.

Dottore's last year were anatomically correct. Two years ago they had a bunch of his clones in chibi form. This year they have a bunch of little organs and vials. Only prime gets socks tho bc Pantalone is very strict with the holiday gift budget.

Capitano gets just boring black socks, but he secretly wants fun socks like everybody else.

Columbina gets fluffy slipper socks.

Pulcinella gets socks with striped or dot patterns- kinda basic, but very fun for an old man.

He forgot to get Scara a gift for the last 200 years in a row. It is absolutely on purpose.

Apparently his socks were classy enough for Signora, bc she claimed that she lit them on fire. She secretly wore them on nights when she felt lonely tho. They usually have some sort of moth or rose pattern on them.

Sandrone gets frilly socks, but she never actually checks her mail. They've been sitting there for two years. The frilly socks for her robot had a much better reception tho.

Pantalone gets socks with little mora on them. Every year. And every year he says that he would have preferred a check.

Arlecchino gets plain woolen socks, but she prefers the practicality.

Childe always gets the most fucked up socks but in a fun way. Pierro (as an immortal) doesn't fully understand age. So he gets Childe socks from whatever thing is popular with like little kids and then has it designed so something is getting stabbed. Super gruesome, but Childe grew up poor and was raised to never reject a gift.

Dottore gives everyone vitamins. He knows all of their medical records by heart, so he comes up with custom vitamins for each of them.

Columbina only gives gifts to a few people. Her gifts to Pierro and Dottore greatly benefit the Fatui's research, but I can't say what they are because that knowledge is forbidden. She also makes Arlecchino and Childe super fluffy scarves. They're not very well knitted, but Arlecchino wears hers all the time. Childe wears his whenever he's in Snezhnaya bc he's afraid of her.

Capitano gives everybody rations. He says it's best to be practical. For the past 5 years, he's had to tell Childe that sparring is not a valid gift. He also hands out rations in the capital because winters are very harsh.

Pulcinella used to get meaningful little gifts for each harbinger...but for the past 5 years he hasn't had enough in his budget to get anything for most of the other harbingers. He claims he invests it into the city, but if anyone has been to a small home in Morepesok (or even Childe's room at the palace), they'd be able to see that he's lying. If they could see anything at all beyond the piles of candy and plushies.

Scaramouche despises the holidays. Partially bc nobody ever gets him anything, but mostly bc he hates seeing all of the happy families gathered together around the fire. Especially the young kids. It reminds him of the family he should have had...

Sandrone gives the other harbingers little dolls of themselves. It's super creepy. Childe also gets a card every year asking for some of his hair.

Signora claims she's above trivial matters like holidays, but if one listens very carefully, they can sometimes hear a woman singing from atop the palace.

Pantalone gives everyone passive aggressive cards accusing them of going over budget. He used to get mocked for not getting actual gifts, but he claims the cards are made from quality paper.

Also...he doesn't have the best track record with gifts.

He 100% sucks up to Pierro and he Tsaritsa in his cards tho.

Dottore gets sucked up in a different way.

Arlecchino buys gifts for the orphans, but occasionally she'll gift the other harbingers ugly sweaters. Once, one of the stockings "accidentally" ended up on Childe's desk. She says she has no idea how it got there, and he claims that he didn't cry himself to sleep during his first holiday away from his family.

They're both liars, but neither of them really wants to call the other out.

Childe always ends up with the most gifts. Not just from the harbingers (and the Tsaritsa) since he's the youngest and was still a kid when he was recruited, but also from the Fatui who work under him. He spends his entire budget on gifts for his family and Pulcinella, so he makes the other harbingers and recruits a nice, warm meal. He spends like a super long time on it too. And none of the other harbingers want to admit that it's good, but it is.

He managed to convince Pulcinella to let him invite some of the orphans as well so they can have a nice meal for the holidays.

[i-will-cry-you-a-river]

Have a lovely Christmas Eve day, love! Filled with warmth and love and laziness, @littleredandbigbad

Morty stumbled around, blindly, tears blurring his sight. His nose was stuffed up, snot mixed with ugly tears ran across his face. His traitorous heart aching with the familiar pain of unrequited love.

He had dealt with a lot of things in his short life, most of them because of his genius of a grandfather, his distant sister, alcoholic mother and idiotic father.

He had dealt with the meanest people, bullying, ostracizing and being beaten to half dead. He had dealt with running away from various authorities, stabbed, exploded and tortured. He had dealt with abandonment, betrayal, belittlement and verbal abuse. He had dealt with depression and anxiousness.

And now he dealt with unrequited love.

He was familiar with unrequited crushes, they were heartbreaking, and awful, but-

Unrequited love was something he would never wish for anybody. Rick was an asshole already, an alcoholic, uncaring, manipulative piece of shit. Loving him? Being in love with him? It made everything a complete disaster.

Fuck him being Morty's grandfather - after everything, incest didn't mean much to him. But that uncaring attitude? That unfeeling single-mindedness? That was the problem.

Sobs broke from his chest, his lungs contrasting painfully. He slapped his palms over his mouth to silence himself, tears falling freely from his eyes. He didn't want to alert anybody. Not that they would do anything, his family was notorious for looking the other way when he had a problem, or even laughing at him and blaming him for them.

He didn't want any of that.

Barging into his room, not even bothering to lock the door behind him, rushed to his bed, throwing himself on it. Pulling his pillow onto his face, the sobs came more freely now, shaking his whole body. His slight frame shivering on his bed, wishing he could be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

The worst part was that nothing happened. Not really. Rick was his usual self, drinking and talking trash about everything, telling Morty how useless he was. He should have been used to it. It was their normal; but it hit him so hard it never before.

"I-I-I s-should make a clone. F-fuck's sake, Mo-urp-rty, can y-you be more useless?!" Rick's voice echoed in his mind. He had heard worse things from him. It didn't even rank among the fifty worst things Rick said about him. Yet…

Morty cursed himself for allowing everything to pile up. He should have quit before, he should have accepted that he wasn't the help Rick was looking for. He should have allowed Rick to look for a new Morty in the Citadel. There must have been a perfect one for him, there, right? Out of all the infinite Mortys, there must have existed at least one whose usefulness was more than just being dumb enough to cover Rick's brainwaves.

Click. Steps. A burp.

His body froze up, like a prey's who was in the presence of a predator. He didn't dare to look up. To see the disgust in Rick's eyes. The contempt on his face.

"MooOrTyy," growled Rick. Usually, he adored the way his grandfather said his name, like a song, like something lyrical. That time? He felt he was going to vomit.

He lifted his head, slowly, hoping Rick would get bored and leave, but when he glanced over at his grandpa, Rick's uncharacteristically emotionless eyes staring into Morty's.

Embarrassment flooded him, starting from his clenched stomach. Fresh tears gathered in the corner of his eyes, his breathing became labored, painful.

Rick swallowed a mouthful of alcohol from his half-empty bottle, and burped right into Morty's face. It was so normal, he didn't even twitch when the smell hit his clogged nose.

"W-w-was it that bitch, J-jessica? G-got a b-break up me-urp-ssage fr-from your little g-girlfriend?"

Morty blinked, cluelessly staring up to his tall grandpa, his big, Bambi eyes filled with tears.

"J-j-j-jessica?"

Rick growled, his knuckles on his bottle turning into bloodless white. "T-that little b-uorgh-itch!"

"I- n-no, w-what?" Morty stammered, sitting up. "I-i-i didn't t-talk w-with her."

"T-then why the t-urp-ears, MooOrTyy? T-tears a-are useless, e-even for s-s-ourp-omebody useless, l-like yo-urp-u!"

Morty could almost hear his heart breaking into pieces. At the same time, determination filled his body. If Rick didn't want him, he already thought him as useless, then- then he had no reason to hold himself back.

"F-f-f-fuck you!"

Rick's eyes widened. "W-what?"

"F-fuck y-y-you, R-rick! Y-you are a p-piece of s-shit, a-an awful h-human being, a-a-a- cruel! Y-you are cruel a-and h-heartless, a-a-a-and I hate you! H-hear that? I-I-I hate you!"

Morty advanced, their bodies pressing together. Rick's hand was clutching one of Morty's wrists in a painful grip, his nails pressing into the tender skin. Morty's other hand grabbed Rick's lab coat, pulling him closer. He could smell Rick's intoxicating scent, making him feel dizzy, the previous anger slowly disappearing, leaving nothing behind, just hopeless love.

The old man's eyes were full of suppressed emotions, yet the smile on his face was a cruel thing, full of teeth.

"A-are you g-going to kiss me, MooOr-urp-Tyy?" He asked, his face blanking.

Morty's heart stopped, then, wanting to catch up again, it doubled its speed. K-kiss? His eyes unconsciously trailing at Rick's slim, bloodless lips. His grandfather's mouth opened, his tongue peeking out to wet his lips, leaving a shiny trail of saliva behind.

The young boy swallowed.

And kiss he did.

It was much softer than the previous angry burst of aggressiveness, showing all the things he was a coward to say.

Rick's lips were warm and soft, yielding under Morty's curious tongue. He sighed into Rick's mouth, whose grip on his wrist tightened, and another hand sneaked around his tiny waist, pulling Morty close to himself.

"I-I-I l-lied. I d-d-d-don't hate you. I l-love you," Morty whispered into Rick's alcohol-scented mouth.

The older man burped, and said, "Y-y-you might be useless… b-but you are my u-useless grandson. R-rick and Morty, for a-a-a hundred years."

It was better than any love confession could ever dream to be.