#uncorked productions

[reachartwork]

(again crossposting from twitter)

at this point i consider the genie so thoroughly uncorked that anyone wanting ai art to go away is just fucked. there are totally open source models that can be stored and run on consumer hardware that make capital G Good quality output.

sorry if this isnt what you want to hear. apologies for being the bearer of bad news.

it's not going away. i'm not going to hold it over your head and go neener neener neener because i'm not a child or a cryptobro or a silicon valley fash loser but the sooner we can come to terms with the fact that generative art ai is here to say the sooner you can begin planning productively for the actual future that will exist for real.

like i've said to other smarter people, the best point to strangle this baby in the crib was before it even started, and the second best point was probably around a year ago, but now it's proliferated and there's just no way it's going away no matter what copyright courts say.

sure, theoretically if everything goes the way various pro-copyright people wanted it to (big ask! not likely to happen!) you could make having and running a model *illegal* but look at how far making digital stuff illegal got every other industry in terms of piracy (not very). a *lot* and i do mean a *lot* of things would need to go "right" and the stars and the moon would need to align to get it made "illegal" and that wouldn't actually stop anything at all. and that's if we're accepting the framework of the anti-ai people's argument to begin with!

fundamentally this is an issue of art piracy. when you strip away all the word games and playing w/ language what you get is people arguing about art piracy and IP rights. and you tell me how well the International Struggle Against IP Piracy fight has been going for the past 20 years.

there's no legal OR technological solution that will get local copies of stable diffusion off people's hard drives. sorry! if you were hoping for one, well, better start thinking up a new plan.

[the-hinky-panda]

Yellowstone: Boss Mare Series - Part V

Jaime Dutton has never considered himself a foodie, someone interested in fusing flavors and doing wine pairings for the regular family dinner. A family dinner that no one can ever seem to get through without an argument, problem-solving a ranch issue, or just childish drama. Half-eaten plates of perfectly seared filet mignon, roasted red potatoes with butter and parsley, the brightest green beans he’s ever seen, left in the wake of another nonsensical theater production. 

The only thing that ever gets completely consumed is the wine. The only one who ever talks is Beth. The only cleared plate of food is his father’s, although Kayce is making good progress at the moment. The only thing that Jamie can think of is how much he would love to enjoy eating. To just sit and have enough brain space to taste what he’s putting into his mouth. 

“Isn’t that right, Jaime?” Beth says, a mischievous glint in her eye. 

He hasn’t heard a word she’s said but he can read the room. Well, he can read Kayce’s cautious energy to know whatever it is she’s said was meant to bait him. And their father’s intense interest in whatever is out the window, despite the darkness of night blocking any view. Jaime’s not going to rise to the occasion tonight. He’s just too fucking tired. Instead, he drops the linen napkin on the table and picks up his plate. 

“Fuck this shit.” He stands up. “I don’t have the energy to deal with whatever bullshit you’ve dreamed up now, Beth.” 

“Oh come on, Jaime,” she calls after him, “I haven’t even gotten to the good questions yet!” 

He storms into the kitchen, pausing before throwing his still full plate of food into the sink. The only thing that stops him is knowing that you made it. You spent the last few hours in the kitchen preparing the meal. He sees all the pots and pans cleaned and sitting on the drying rack while dinner is being consumed. When the dining room empties, you’ll collect the plates and wash them before heading up to your room over the kitchen for the night. But while you wait, he sees you sitting on the steps of the back porch, passing the time. 

A sudden rush of guilt comes over him. Every night they walk into the dining room, no food prep, no cooking time, hell, they don’t even set the table. They just walk in, sit down, and are served. And then the fighting begins. Maybe that’s why they can’t function as a family around the table. There’s no work, no buy-in to enjoy the product of their work. They’re eating in a restaurant every night. Except no one in that room would behave that way in an actual restaurant. 

Maybe Beth. Beth wouldn’t behave any differently. 

Jamie grabs a second plate and an extra fork before going out onto the back porch. You immediately stand up when the door opens, a guilty look crosses your face. He wonders what in the world you could have been doing to cause such a reaction and then he sees the wine glass in your hand. He points to the glass. 

“You’re allowed to have that, you know.” That reminds him that he forgot his own wine glass inside. He sets the plates and silverware down. “I’ll be right back.” 

He goes back inside and grabs a new bottle of red wine, uncorks it, grabs a new glass, and goes back outside. You’re still standing there, cradling the wine glass in your hand, and looking terribly out of sorts. He tips some of the wine into your glass before filling his own and sitting down on the steps. 

“Did you eat?” he asks, setting the empty second plate next to him. 

“I did.” At that particular moment, your stomach decided to betray you and growl. “I’m sorry, I’ll let you eat in peace.” 

“I came out here because you were out here.” He cuts the filet mignon in half. It’s perfectly pink, bordering on red on the inside. He slides a few potatoes and green beans onto the second plate, adding half the steak, and holding it up to you. “If you’re hungry, I’d like the company.” 

“Thank you.” You give him a small smile and take the plate, sitting down next to him on the steps. “I did eat some of the salad.” 

“Just salad?” 

You nod your head. 

Did no one in the family tell you how things work on the ranch? “Gator always makes himself a plate and eats in the kitchen while we’re eating. Or, if he likes what the bunkhouse is eating, he eats that instead. We don’t keep track and we won’t do that with you either.” He points at your plate. “Eat as much and whatever you want.” 

“Thank you.” You pick up the fork and knife and cut a piece of the steak. “I’ve never had filet mignon before.” 

“You haven’t? Well, you cooked it perfectly.” 

“I’ve made it plenty of times. I was just never allowed to eat it. Only the men were allowed to eat the best food.” You seem to realize you’ve imparted some revealing information and shove a potato in your mouth, chewing it slowly. 

He doesn’t ask any questions and lets you keep your silence and secrets, focusing on just enjoying the food. The sun has just set, shadows creeping across the pastures, sneaking up to the barn and bunkhouse. The rhythmic hiss of the field sprinklers add a relaxing white noise effect and Jamie realizes this is the first time in years that he actually enjoyed his dinner at the ranch. 

“I did make an apple cobbler for dessert,” you say as you stack the empty plates between the two of you. “But we’ll have to go back inside and get it.” 

Jamie doesn’t want to risk the quietude he’s achieved by sitting out here with you so he just picks up the wine bottle and refills both your glasses. “Wine for dessert works for me.” 

“Thank you.” 

“For what?” 

You shake your head. “I don’t know. Just being you, I suppose.” 

He sits and sips at his wine, wondering how you can see the person he is when he doesn’t even know who he is.

[thirdwifeofriversong]

“It’s… a transcendental act. Making life. I thought about that, when I was carrying Miles. ‘By this act, I bring one death into the world.’ One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between.” - Barrayar, Ch. 17

This passage stands out after reading further Miles books. Cordelia did not, in fact, bring about one birth and one death as she had imagined. Instead, because of advanced technology, Miles experienced at least two of each. Two births — Cordelia’s placental transfer at five months and the “uncorking” of the uterine replicator at ten. In his late 20’s, Miles was killed, experienced death, then was revived (or, one could argue, born a third time) through cryo-revival. He then presumably dies a final time, perhaps after the series has ended (I’ve only read to “Winterfair Gifts”). Then we can consider Mark. Mark is a separate person, but he is a genetically identical clone made from Miles’s tissue samples as a young child — bringing Cordelia’s birth/death production to (arguably) four and three, though only of two humans. As is the case with much SF, advancements in technology serve to blur and expand our understanding of creation, life, death, and human experience.

[foundtherightwords]

The Hollow Heart - Chapter 15

Pairing: Hellcheer, Gothic AU

Summary: To escape her mother's control and the stifling society of Gilded Age New York, heiress Christabel Cunningham impulsively marries Henry Creel, a charming and seductive stranger, and accompanies him to his remote mansion on the West Coast. There, as Henry grows cold and cruel, Christabel must uncover her husband's sinister secret before it's too late. But can she trust Kas, her husband's enigmatic assistant, who seems to be her only ally in this strange place, or is Kas's loyalty to his master stronger than his attraction to Christabel?

Chapter warnings: violence, blood

Chapter word count: 5k

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 - Chapter 9 - Chapter 10 - Chapter 11 - Chapter 12 - Chapter 13 - Chapter 14

Chapter 15 - A World of Death

As soon as Christabel set foot inside the attic, her senses were overpowered by its dusty, musty smell, along with a more subtle whiff of decay. Clasping a handkerchief to her nose, she set about lowering the lamp that hung from the ceiling by a chain, lighting it, and drawing it up again. Its glow could not penetrate the furthest corners of the attic, but it was enough for her to see where she was going. For closer inspections, she lit a candle she'd brought from her room.

The icebox. Kas had told her to look inside the icebox. She assumed it was the large cabinet in a corner of the room. Holding the candle high over her head, she made her way there, passing the cages of the snakes and spiders with their rustling, crawling, creeping inhabitants. She expected the cabinet to be locked, but to her surprise, the doors fell open easily. She supposed Henry thought the locked attic door was secure enough. Heart in throat, she brought the candle closer with a trembling hand, afraid of what she may find there. 

The icebox was full of glass bottles of various sizes, most of them containing some dark red liquid. Wine? No. It was too dark, and—she picked one of the bottles up and sloshed the liquid around—too viscous to be wine. She carefully uncorked the bottle, brought it to her nose, and recoiled as she sniffed in a coppery stench. Blood. The icebox was full of blood.

What was Henry doing with all this blood? Was it animal or human? The bottles were mostly unlabeled, except for one, which bore a tag that said "Unicorn", written in Henry's slanting hand.

Not all of the bottles contained blood. At the back was a single bottle, as big as the jar Christabel had seen at the shop window in Chinatown. Inside it was what she thought was a big twig at first, but as she shone her candle on it, she realized it was—what was it? It looked like some sort of tail, but it was unlike the tail of any animal she'd ever seen. About the size and length of her forearm, it was covered in grayish ridged scales and ended in a wicked-looking hook, like a scorpion sting. This was labeled "Wyvern". Unicorn and wyvern. Heraldic, imaginary creatures. Some sort of code, perhaps?

There was something familiar about the scales covering that tail, and as Christabel leaned down to take a closer look, she remembered—it was the same as the one she'd found in Luna's stall the day the horse died. Her prophetic dream came back to her. Luna had looked like a unicorn in it. At the time, she'd dismissed it as a fancy, the product of her imagination stirred by Henry's inane comment. But had it really been inane? He had seemed quite excited when she mentioned the bump on Luna's forehead...

No. There was no such thing as a unicorn. But Christabel was now sure that poor Luna's death had not been an accident, and that proved something even more horrific—that Henry believed Luna was a unicorn. That he was out of his mind.

The icebox had brought less clarity than she'd hoped. Shutting its doors in frustration, she turned toward the desk at the center of the room. But here she was even more out of her depth. The desk's pigeonholes and the drawers of the cabinet next to it were crammed full of paper, each sheet filled with so much writing that it all blended together into a spidery mass in front of her eyes, and she could make neither heads nor tails of it. She didn't even know where to begin looking.

In a drawer, she found printed pages, old, yellowed, and brittle, apparently torn out of books. They were written in what looked like Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Persian; some were brilliantly illuminated and illustrated; there were even a few thin pages of Chinese, fragile as tissue paper. She couldn't read them, but they disturbed her. In her mind, a person that had no regard for books, a person that could rip pages from venerable tomes in this way, was certain to have no regard for anything else.

She pulled out drawer after drawer, frustrated, anxious. And then she drew her hand back in fear—a spider was crawling out of the bottom drawer. When she raised the candle to look again, however, it melted into the grain of the wood. Nothing but a trick of the light. She lowered the candle, and the spider appeared once more, this time scampering into the drawer. It repeated this movement a few times, crawling in and out of the drawer just out of the corner of her eyes, only to vanish when she looked properly.

A prickling sensation started on the back of her neck. Christabel knew the ghosts were in the attic with her even before she turned around.

But it was impossible. It had been so long since she'd seen them. And she wasn't asleep. And even during the worst of her hallucinations, they had always stayed outside, under the cypress grove. How could they be inside now?

She turned back to look at them. They were hovering in a corner like a patch of irregularly shaped fog; only the darkness of the attic gave them some definition. But she was no longer afraid. She knew now that they hadn't been trying to take her away or turn her into one of them. They were trying to help. "Please," she whispered. "Please, tell me what happened to you. Show me."

The girl, Maxine, raised a silent finger and pointed at the cabinet. Then Christabel understood. The spider had been a sign.

She pulled open the drawer. Behind her, the figures wavered and disappeared, their work done.

There was only a notebook inside, but it wasn't so much a notebook as a thick stack of paper bound together between two leather covers, allowing for new pages to be added when necessary. She sat down on the floor with her back against the cabinet and opened the bulging cover. It appeared to be a diary or journal of some kind.

Jan. 12, 1866, N. Carolina, said the first entry.

Immortality is not the mere prolonging of one's life, it said, in Henry's familiar slanting hand. To achieve true immortality, one must preserve one's essence, in other words, protect one's soul. The only way to do this is to extract the soul and store it in a magical container, a phylactery, thus transforming the body into an indestructible vessel. This requires a complex ritual and a carefully prepared potion (or elixir). Accounts of such feats can be found in the writing of Censorinus, Hermes Trismegistus, Simon Magnus, and the Chinese physician Sun Simiao, especially his "Essential Formulas of Alchemical Classics". It is my determination to devote the rest of my life (ha!) to study these works and discover their secrets, to devise a ritual of my own!

Immortality? Alchemical elixirs and rituals? This was worse than she thought. Henry was surely out of his mind if he believed in such nonsense. She looked again at the date. 1866, forty years ago. And it was his handwriting... But the date didn't mean anything. He could have easily backdated it. The more troubling question was, why bothered? Or perhaps this was his father's work. It wasn't out of the question that father and son had similar handwriting, and it was certainly more plausible than all other explanations.

She flipped through the rest of the notebook. It was more of the same, rambling thoughts on his travels and discoveries and experiments, spanning over the course of three decades. Months or even years would go by without an entry, and then a burst of activities for a few days or weeks, followed by another period of dormancy. As Christabel read more and more, the notion that Henry was simply following in his father's footsteps became less and less likely. There was no mention of a wife and child anywhere. And all the locations of the entries were places he'd told her about. Eastern and Southern Europe, Turkey, Egypt, even India. Jumbled words and phrases jumped out at her, venom, poison, arsenic, belladonna, ritual of defilement, ceremony of endless night, sacrificial heart, and most of all, blood, blood, blood.

Then the word Kas caught her eyes, and she paused and forced herself to focus. The entry was dated from 1870, the location being the Rila Mountains in the Balkans.

Managed to trap myself a bloodsucking creature in the forest. It (for I cannot bring myself to refer to such a creature as "he") has the appearance of a grown man, but it is impossible to tell how old it is. It has all the attributes of a vampire—feeds on blood, burned by sunlight and silver—though garlic and the crucifix have no effect on it whatsoever. It is near feral, nothing like the elegant and seductive vampires of the stories at all. It still retains some ability of human speech though. Conversed with it with the help of a Bulgarian interpreter. It claims its name is Kas, it's been living in the region for over 50 years, and there are many more like it, some much older, though this may simply be a boast to frighten me.

At the bottom of the page is a crude sketch of a creature with a bald head, and bulging, vacant eyes. His mouth hung open, showing two sharp fangs and a thick, blood-red tongue like a slab of raw liver. He looked nothing like her Kas. He barely even looked human. But then again, he could not possibly be her Kas, could he, if Henry met him in 1870?

This was confirmed by another entry, a few days later:

I've been forced to kill Kas. The stupid creature seemed unable to understand that I am its savior and tried to attack me in my sleep, so I put a silver bullet in its heart. It's good to know that some legends are proved to be true. But all that effort, wasted! I've managed to draw a good amount of its blood before its death, only it won't keep for long. I am never going to resort to vampirism to attain immortality—what kind of a life would that be, living like an animal, hunting for blood, never going out in daylight? But this blood is essential to the elixir of transformation. I must find another steady supply.

Christabel scanned the subsequent pages for more mentions of Kas. It seemed that in the next year or so after killing the original Kas, Henry had tried to use the creature's blood to infect several people, but the blood drove them all mad, and one by one, they either died or got killed. Then she came upon an entry written in 1880 in Indianapolis.

Had a breakthrough discovery!!! it said. There is evidence to support the theory that if a pregnant woman is bitten by a vampire, her child will be born a half-vampire, or a dhampyr. This dhampyr will have the powers of a vampire without any of the weaknesses. And a child would certainly be easier to control than a grown-up. With that in mind, I've sought out and found a pregnant female, simple enough in this den of vice. Sedated and injected her with blood from the latest "Kas". She gave birth to a male child. I took it and disposed of her.

There was that casual cruelty again. Disposed of her. As though she was a piece of trash, not a human being. Christabel looked at the date and location again. 1880, Indianapolis. It fitted what Kas told her about his origins. Could this child be Kas? Then that meant that whoever took Kas had lied. His mother hadn't died giving birth to him. She'd been killed.

Over the next few months, there were sporadic references to the child in the diary, not by name, only as "the dhampyr". The dhampyr is growing well. The dhampyr has begun feeding on his own. The dhampyr is aging at a normal rate.

Then, eighteen months later: To my annoyance, the dhampyr still has all the weaknesses of a vampire, but at least he is docile. I left him without blood for three days to test his predatory instincts. He is angry, and once I fed him again, he fell on the blood ferociously, but he has no instinct to hunt or attack on his own. It makes him more biddable.

I've decided to call him Kas. After all, he was born of Kas's blood. It's quicker than "the dhampyr", and it saves me from having to think of a name.

Christabel let the diary fall into her lap. So this was Kas, her Kas. But what did it all mean? Could it be possible that he had been infected with the blood of a vampire at birth and become some monstrous half-creature? But there was no such thing as vampires... was there?

She couldn't read anymore. The attic had not brought the answers she'd expected. All she saw was evidence of Henry's madness. She didn't need more reasons to convince her to leave Creel House. It was something she should have done months ago.

Before putting the diary back, she flipped to its last pages to see if there was anything she'd missed, some mentions of herself, perhaps. She found a page written with what looked like a cooking recipe, though it was like no recipe she had ever seen:

2 drops of distilled Arsenic

1 drop of distilled Belladonna

1 pint of Blood from a unicorn yearling, killed by wyvern venom

1 pint of Blood from a humanoid killed by a giant spider

1 pint of Blood from a vampire or vampire spawn

1 pint of Venom from a giant spider

1 pint of Venom from a wyvern

1 intact heart of the sacrificial human, killed by a mixture of arsenic and belladonna

      Prepare during a lunar eclipse and consume within an hour

Behind this were four pages only partially filled, rather different from the dense writing in the rest of the diary, but what was written on them chilled her to the bones.

The first page read:

SUBJECT no.1

Sex: Male

Age: 21

Acquired: June 4th, 1885

Phylactery: Pocket watch

Pocket watch? This must be referring to Patrick McKinney, surely.

Started Arsenic and Belladonna: June 10th

Ritual: Aug 8th, penumbral lunar eclipse

It concluded: Subject died during construction of phylactery. Heart not viable.

The second page was more of the same.

SUBJECT no.2

Sex: Male

Age: 25

Acquired: Sept 25th, 1887

Phylactery: Pair of spectacles

Started Arsenic and Belladonna: Sept 30th

Ritual: January 31st, partial lunar eclipse

This must be Frederick Benson then.

Again, Subject died during construction of phylactery. Heart not viable. But beneath that was another line, underlined in thick strokes: Phylactery must be my choice, not the subject's!!!

The third page:

Subject #3

Sex: Female

Age: 18

Maxine.

Acquired: Mar 10th, 1891

Phylactery: Antique ruby ring

Christabel remembered the cracked ring she'd seen on Maxine's finger in her dreams.

Started Arsenic and Belladonna: Mar 26th

Ritual: July 18th, partial lunar eclipse

This page ended a little differently, but no less grim: Subject survived construction of phylactery. Phylactery destroyed during ritual. Subject died. Heart not viable. This was followed by another note: Heart must be willingly given for phylactery to work.

There was only one page left, and Christabel was frightened to read it. She had a pretty good idea of what it was going to say. In the end, she looked anyway, unable to resist the horror, like a person being drawn toward an abyss even as she was repulsed by its dark depths.

It was written on a newer piece of paper, the ink not yet having time to fade to brown.

SUBJECT #4

Sex: Female

Age: 23

Acquired: Nov 2nd, 1905

Their wedding day. For him, it hadn't been a wedding at all, just an act of acquirement.

Phylactery: Pendant, stained glass taken from childhood home

Heart pledging ritual successful

When had he performed this ritual? How did she know nothing, remember nothing about it?

Started Arsenic and Belladonna: Nov 15th

And the final line: Ritual: Apr 17th -18th, total lunar eclipse

She looked over the other pages. 1 intact heart of the sacrificial human, killed by a mixture of arsenic and belladonna. They had all been fed arsenic and belladonna. She remembered her stomach cramps, the bottle of belladonna tincture that Henry claimed would help, the subsequent nightmares and hallucinations. He'd been poisoning her. Like the previous victims. None of them had lived for longer than four months since he "acquired" them. Heart not viable. Heart not viable. Heart pledging ritual successful.

She read the last line of the last page again. April 18th. Two days from now. What was Henry going to do to her in two days?

The clanging of the bell made Christabel jump out of her skin. Joyce. She must have received Kas's message.

Where to go now? The train station, or the dock? Christabel thought briefly and decided she would feel safer with the ocean between her and Henry. The dock, then.

She staggered to her feet. On second thoughts, she picked up the diary and took it with her. At the very least, it proved that Henry was not of sound mind. After blowing out the lamp and locking the attic door behind her, she went into her room to put on her coat and hat, and pick up her valise. Her eyes fell on her phonograph by the bedside table with the boxes of wax recordings underneath it, and a stab of pain went through her heart.

She realized she could not, would not leave Kas. If she escaped, she may be able to buy all the phonographs and recordings she wanted, but they wouldn't be the same.

She would have to find him and convince him to go with her. She could tell him the truth about his mother, then perhaps he would no longer feel bound to Henry. She still had time. If Henry's notes were to be trusted, she was not in immediate danger. Not yet. Chinatown was a confusing place, but she had a pretty good idea of where they had gone.

So she ran down the stairs, into the kitchen, where she found the sharpest steak knife in the drawer and put it in her reticule. Then she slammed the door shut and went down the drive without looking back. She never wanted to see Creel House again, as long as she lived.

The tides were in, but Christabel didn't hesitate. Glad to have something to do to take her mind off her impending doom, she launched the boat into the sea and rowed toward the shore, where Joyce and her wagon were waiting.

Seeing Christabel approach, the older woman jumped down and helped her off the boat.

"Kas sent me a message saying you need a ride to the train station and he can't take you," Joyce said as Christabel settled into the wagon seat next to her. "Is there some sort of emergency?"

"Yes," answered Christabel, for that was the easiest option. How could she explain that her husband had lost his mind and been poisoning her, and was planning some sort of sacrificial ritual that would certainly end in her death, all in his quest for immortality? People would think that she had lost her mind instead. "But I'm not going to the train station. Could you take me to Chinatown first, please?"

Joyce looked doubtful. "But Kas said—"

Christabel felt like screaming. "I know what he said!" she snapped. "Just—please, Joyce. Take me to Chinatown."

Joyce shrugged. Without another question, she shook the reins and clicked her tongue to set the horse walking.

***

Christabel found the shop on Dupont Street without much trouble. The black and white circle on its sign looked down at her like the baneful eye of a Cyclops or some ominous moon of another world. The door was locked, and there was no light on at any window that she could see. But Henry's car was parked outside, so she knew she'd come to the right place. After trying the door to no avail, Christabel returned to the wagon, chewing on her bottom lip.

"Well?" Joyce asked anxiously. "What do you want to do now?"

What she wanted was to find Kas and persuade him to leave with her, except she couldn't talk to him here or even wait for him to come out—he would be with Henry. She knew she should just go to the dock and ask Joyce to give Kas a message so he could find her later. But she couldn't stand the waiting. What if Henry intercepted the message? What if Kas didn't want to leave his master?

Then Christabel remembered the back alley—not the one where she'd been attacked, but the one where the mustached shop owner had thrown her out. Perhaps the door to the back of the shop would be unlocked. She told Joyce to take the wagon there and park at the mouth of the alley.

"I know I'm asking for a huge favor," she said, "but could you wait here for me, please? And—and if I don't come back in half an hour, call the police."

"Is it that dangerous?" Joyce asked, her eyes wide open with alarm in the yellow light of the streetlamps.

"... I don't know."

"I don't think you should go on your own, Mrs. Creel."

"I'm sorry, I already involved you too much as it is," Christabel said apologetically. Taking her valise and her reticule, she jumped off the wagon and ran down the length of the alley.

The back door was locked. There was a lattice window looking into the alley, but the lattice was covered with some opaque material that only let through the faintest hint of light and showed strange shapes moving behind it, like some sinister shadow play. Murmurs were coming from inside, and Christabel could make out Henry's voice, low and commanding.

She touched the window experimentally. Paper. The window was covered with soft, porous paper, and she discovered that by licking her finger, she could poke a hole through it without making a sound. This she did, and, with her heart hammering so hard it threatened to burst out of her chest, she put her eye to the opening.

She was looking into the workroom at the back of the shop, now cleaned of all the herbs and medicine, and all of the workers. There were only three men in the room, all bending over a table—Henry, Kas, and another with his back to her. By his long, salt-and-pepper braid, she assumed him to be the shop owner. She couldn't see what was on the table, because the shop owner's back was in the way.

"Now," Henry said, lifting a crate onto the table with great care, "stand back, both of you. This spider is no ordinary black widow. You have no idea the trouble I've gone through to acquire it." Acquire, like he'd acquired Patrick, Frederick, Maxine, and herself. "If it attacked either of you, I would not be held responsible."

Kas and the shop owner stepped away, finally giving Christabel a clear view of the table. Her heart stopped.

On the table was the old dwarf she'd seen sitting by the front door. He was tied to the table by stout ropes, though it may not be necessary—his limbs were inert, his eyes were closed, and his head lolled to one side. She couldn't tell if he was dead or merely unconscious.

Something was pushing at the top of the crate, eager to get out. Christabel glimpsed a spindly leg of mottled gray and heard a clicking sound. Then Henry opened the lid, and her body went cold.

Crawling out of the box was the biggest spider she'd ever seen. About the size of a dinner plate, its legs as big as her own fingers, with lichen marbling its white body, it could easily be mistaken for a rock. Milky, blind-looking eyes covered its head, and two blade-sized fangs extended from its mouth, dripping with sticky saliva. It turned this way and that, raising its head slightly like it was sniffing the air, and soon locked its attention on the dwarf.

It crawled on the victim, fangs clicking. However, it did not attack, perhaps because the dwarf was just lying there, doing nothing, and the spider kept wandering up and down his body until it got bored and turned toward Henry expectantly.

"Oh no, you don't," Henry growled. He prodded at the spider with a wire connected to a plug in the wall. There was a crackle of electricity, and the spider raised its front legs in a threatening gesture. Henry prodded at it again. The enraged spider turned toward the dwarf and sank its fangs into his neck.

The dwarf might have been unconscious before, but he was certainly conscious enough to feel the venom coursing through him. Though his eyes didn't open, his body twisted and convulsed violently as though controlled by several puppet masters at once, almost lifting away from the table at one point. If it hadn't been for the ropes tying him in place, he would have fallen to the floor.

Christabel gripped the window frame, horrified but could not tear her eyes away from the death throes of the dwarf—and he was dying, she was certain of it. Henry watched the grisly scene with a triumphant glint in his cold, cold eyes, while the shop owner stood by impassively, and Kas turned toward the wall, unable to look.

Finally, the dwarf's body stopped twitching and lay slumped on the tabletop. Henry threw a burlap sack over the spider and bundled it back into the crate. He then signaled to the shop owner, who took the dwarf's pulse and nodded. Apparently satisfied, Henry handed him a wad of money, and the man ducked through the cloth curtain and disappeared.

"Right, Kas, bleed him," said Henry, handing Kas a straight razor and a bucket.

Kas held back, hesitant. "Sir...?" 

"For God's sake, man! Stop being squeamish and get a move on! One should think that you would be used to blood by now." Henry picked up a glass tube and held it under the spider's fangs. "Remember to get at least a pint."

While Henry prodded the spider again with the live wire so it would pump its venom into the tube, Kas reluctantly picked up the razor and bucket and approached the dead body. What was he going to do? Surely, he was not—not—

Kas slid the razor over the dwarf's throat in a quick, smooth movement. Blood spurted from the slash, staining Kas's face, the wall, and drops of blood even splattered across the paper window, making Christabel recoil.

Kas put the bucket under the body and watched the blood drip into it, his eyes dark and melancholy. With a sigh, he swiped a hand across his blood-splattered face, then brought his fingers to his mouth and sucked them cleaned, like a child licking its fingers after eating sweets.

At the sight of that casual, gruesome gesture, Christabel fell away from the window with a strangled cry.

Henry's head whipped toward the widow. He barked out a command, which Christabel couldn't hear over the thrumming of pulse in her ears, like she was surrounded by a whole swarm of bees. She only saw the shop owner charge out of the back door, and before she knew it, he'd had her in an iron grip. Henry and Kas followed closely behind. Kas's eyes widened in shock as they landed on Christabel.

She struggled madly, but for all his reediness, the shop owner was too strong for her. She recovered her wits enough to scream, "Help!!! Somebody, help me!!!"

Joyce came running from the mouth of the alley, but Henry stepped up to meet her before she could reach Christabel. "If you don't want anything to befall your sons, Mrs. Byers, I would suggest that you turn around and go home now," he said mildly. "It would be a shame for young Jonathan and little Will to be met with an accident."

Joyce went pale. She threw Christabel a sorrowful glance before stepping back, back, back, until she disappeared down the alley.

Henry turned back to Christabel. "What an annoying little pest you are," he sneered. He then nodded at Kas, before striding back into the shop.

Kas approached Christabel, agony etched across his features. He looked at the man holding her, and back at the shop.

"Here!" Henry tossed something at him. Kas snatched it out of the air without even looking.

"Kas, please..." Christabel whispered.

Kas shook his head. Her world shattered. Not Kas... please, not Kas... not him too... But had she not just seen him licking blood off his fingers? Why should he be any different?

"I'm sorry," he said. It was the last thing she heard before a handkerchief was clamped over her face, and a pungent, nauseatingly sweet smell invaded her nose. It was either breathing it in or suffocating. She took a few gulping breaths, and everything was plunged into darkness.

Chapter 16

A/N: I spent a lot of time making up the diary pages for this chapter with the intention of putting them into the fic as part of the writing itself, but then I realized the handwriting font I used is not exactly legible, plus having so many images in the fic can mess it up for folks who use screen readers, so I only included a few as illustrations and kept the writing intact. Hopefully that works for you guys!

The "recipe" for the potion and the ritual/construction of the phylactery were based on the DnD guide to lichdom (after all, Vecna is a lich in DnD lore), with some tweaks of my own.

[abbatoirablaze]

Surrogate Luna, Chapter 2

Word Count: 1.9k

Warnings: nothing major.  Some A/B/O dynamics.

“Alpha Rogers.”

Steve nodded, his jaw firm and his face stern, “Doctor Cho…”

“We’re appreciative that you’ve come back to the compound to test a new batch of omega scents…sometimes these things can take time, but with the new-“

“This is the fifth time I’ve come to the compound,” the headstrong twenty-four year old grunted, showing his disapproval, “I’m starting to lose faith in your trickery, epsilon.”

The alpha caught the pinch in her scent, and his nostrils flared.  Dr. Cho lowered her head in submission as his aura pushed forward into the small observation room, “We’re sorry about the lack of samples, Alpha Rogers.  Quite a few of the omegas that we have on file wanted to try their luck in the hunt.  This isn’t a facility where we force them to be here, as you know.  And being an omega in the hunt is a chance to find their mates.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” he said dismissively.  He waved her off as he took his seat in the chair.  His nostrils flared once  more as he caught some of the scents from alphas before him who’d managed to sit in the chair. A low growl made its way from his throat as he started to feel slightly territorial, “Cho…am I the first one to test this new batch?”

“You are, alpha Rogers,” she said with a curt nod as she began to unlock the box that held the samples, “since you’ve been here without success more than our average alpha, you’re closer to the top of the list.”

Steve grunted once more. 

“Good…”

“Has anything changed within your pack?”

“I want heirs,” the alpha said firmly, “there’s been no change, aside for my growing need to have a surrogate luna sooner rather than later.”

“Right,” she agreed.  She stepped forward with the first vial and handed it off to the grumpy wolf.  He was quick to snatch it from her, his eyes catching the piece of white fabric that would hold the scent of the omega in question.  With a quick movement, he removed the cork from the vial, and his nostrils fluttered before he tossed it away from himself.   The bitter twinge of pine and citrus made him think of a cleaning product rather than a potential omega, “Definitely not.  That’s disgusting.”

“Please…don’t throw the vials, alpha Rogers.” Cho reminded him.  Steve growled as she retrieved it and she bowed once more, “I-I think that we may have something for you though.  The first one is a bit, Type A…I’ll admit, but this one…she’s softer.”

Steve nodded, accepting the epsilon’s words as he uncorked the second vial.  Doctor Cho’s hope grew as he didn’t immediately toss it aside, and rather, he took a second sniff. 

It smelled like laundry.  It was less intense, and very warm.  It was pleasant enough, but it stirred nothing inside of him saying that he needed to mate with her. 

So, with a sigh, he shook his head, and handed the sample back to her.  She frowned, and re-corked it, “we’ve only got two more samples for you to test today.  I-“

“Just give me the third sample,” he uttered, his hope falling just as it had the first four times he’d come to the facility, “lets just get this over with.”

With a frown, Steve took the other samples and tried them one after the other.  Neither was unpleasant, but Steve felt that if he was going to use the omega to breed himself a future alpha, he might as well be attracted to the scent. 

That was the point after all. 

“We-we have more girls coming in today, Alpha Rog-“

“I think I’ll send Sam to collect the samples from here on out,” Steve frowned as his anger started coming back over not having found a surrogate luna, “coming back and forth every few months is a waste of my pack’s time.  I need to be there for my pack, Doctor Cho.  And coming here takes me away from them.”

“I understand, alpha Rogers…” she answered with a frown.  Steve stood up, ready to be led outside.  Doctor Cho took off her gloves and opened the door only for Steve to nearly be knocked over by a scent that had wafted past it. 

His eyes closed and he instinctively took a deep breath, shuddering when he exhaled.  Doctor Cho’s lips parted, and she was quick to look down the hallway, to see a lone girl with strawberry blond hair being led into the intake room by two other medical professionals.

A warning growl left Steve’s throat as his eyes opened, the slightest tinge of amber lining his iris.

“Who…was…that…”

“Alpha Rogers…”

The wolf growled, his eyes snapping to the doctors, “I want her!”

“S-she just went into intake-“

“MINE!” Steve growled, glaring at the doctor.  She was quick to shift out of the way before he could grab her, locking the door from the outside.  Steve looked nearly feral as he pounded on the door, his eyes wildly searching the small window for the scent again, “MY OMEGA!  IT’S HER!  SHE BELONGS TO ME!”

“Let me call your next in com-“

“GIVE HER TO ME!”

“That’s not procedure,” she said quickly, shaking her head, “Alpha Rogers, the new omega hasn’t even gone through her examinations.  There’s a battery of tests that we have to run before she’s even accepted into the program entirely, let alone-“

“MINE!”

“Alpha Rogers-I-I need to get your beta.  He-“

“GET ME MY OMEGA!” Steve roared as the nervous epsilon ran to the waiting room, where the alpha’s beta was patiently waiting.

“You don’t need to be nervous, omega.”

“I just-I thought that since you picked me, I-I don’t think that I can do this,” she said quickly, shaking her head, “I-Doctor Cho said that when you caught my scent, it looked like a true match…but I don’t feel any-“

“I didn’t choose you, omega.”

Cinna shivered as the man’s words seemed to see right through her nervous exterior, “what?”

“I’m just a beta.  I didn’t choose you.  My alpha did.  I just offered to get you settled before his arrival.  He’s got some pack business to finish up before meeting you.” he shrugged simply.

“O-oh.  I’m sorry.  I just assumed-“

He chuckled, “You’re fine…you just look scared as all hell, omega.  You should relax a little.  Breathe.  I’m just a beta.  I won’t hurt you.”

Cinna stopped speaking as the words finally processed in her head. 

Of course he was a beta. 

From the second that the kindly man had picked her up on the edge of the new pack’s property that she’d been assigned to, she hadn’t been able to read him or his designation.  She nodded to herself, bowing her head politely, “w-well I thank you for picking me up…I-I’ve heard horror stories from some of the other girls about how some packs treat surrogate omegas.”

“We’re not like them,” he said simply, leading her into the forest, off the trail, “we operate a lot more different than your typical pack.”

“Your alpha needs an omega to breed,” she replied with a shrug of her own, “seems like the other ones I have heard of.  Does your alpha have an alpha mate?”

“He has someone at the packhouse, but…I wouldn’t call her his mate by any means,”The man scoffed trailing off for a minute, “they’re not mated…but don’t bring that up.”

“Oh…they aren’t…mated?”

“Steve wanted it…but Sharon refused to wear his mark,” the man replied honestly, “she won’t let our alpha mark and mate her…refused to complete the ceremony…the works.”

“Oh…”

“Again…don’t bring it up with our alpha…it’s a sensitive subject.”

“Rightfully so,” she muttered understandingly, “most packs wouldn’t talk about their dirty laundry like that…are you…the pack gossip?  Kind of odd to think about the beta of the group being the pack gossip, but he-“

“I just think it’s only right that you know what you’re walking into,” he answered honestly, “you seem like a nice girl…going to give our alpha a few pups…by the way we had to talk him down after he caught your scent…I’m surprised Cho got out of there fast enough…surprised you’re not already wearing his mark.”

“Oh…”

“Steve’s a good guy…uh-what do I call you?” he asked, finally turning to face her. 

Cinna bit her lip, “wh-what’s the protocol in this? I-I mean…I’m here to be bred…and I don’t think your alpha would care to know me on a personal level, so-“

“I’m Sam!”

Cinna sighed, “Cinna…”

He chuckled and held out his hand for her to shake.  She took it gently, and he gave her a soft smile, “Cinna…well, Cinna, I can assure you that Steve is very much interested in you.  He’s been to the facility five times total…and was almost about to walk out without an omega…but you just happened to walk through the hall just as he was leaving.  I’ve never seen Steve the way he was after he caught your scent…not even with…”

“With who?”

“We don’t talk about that…” he said with a frown.  Sam was quick to turn on his heel and start walking through the forest again, “come on, omega.  We’ve got a long way to go before nightfall hits.  I need to make sure that I get you there in one piece…”

“W-what?”

“It’s a joke,” Sam chuckled, “relax, Cinna.  We do have a long walk though.  And we need to get going!”

“W-where are we?”

Sam smiled as he led her towards a lake.  She gasped.  It was small and cozy, but there was an air around it that made her feel almost ethereal, “this is where I’m supposed to take you.”

“A lake?”

Sam smirked as he led her around it, before going to a small nook in the hill that was nearly indistinguishable from the rest.  Sam reached forward and swept across the vines, revealing a rock face. 

He pressed along a series of ridges in a special sequence, and the rock slid backwards, revealing a staircase. 

Cinna gasped, “Sam…is this…”

“You’re the surrogate Luna…and this is where pack alphas are made…Steve will be here before nightfall.”

“I-I don’t want to be alone.”

Sam shook his head, “I can’t follow you, Cinna.  It’s against the rules.  Only our pack alpha and his omega can go down there.  That is a place only for you and Steve.”

Cinna felt the nervousness building in the pit of her stomach.  Her mouth opened, but no words came out.  Sam shook his head at the young woman, and nodded to the stairs, “Steve will be with you by nightfall, Luna.”

Her eyes went wide, “Wh-what did you call me?”

“The Rogers pack knows it already…,” Sam answered softly, “Steve’s all but pulled you from the program even before you two have consummated it…and those who happened to get a look of him before he came down from his breakthrough rut saw just the affect you had on him.  We know it…you’re to be our Luna.”

“Sam…p-please don’t call me that,” she begged gently, shaking her head, “I-your alpha has his mate…that’s a dangerous thing to call me…pleas-“

“We’re on your side, Luna…we can see it in our alpha’s eyes…even if he hasn’t said it yet,” Sam answered firmly, “for those loyal to Steve…we are loyal to you…not her, my luna.  Now go…I’ll see you on the other side…when you come home to the pack house.”

She nodded gently before turning to the stairs, praying that the fates weren’t playing a cruel trick on her.  With bated breaths she made her way down the winding staircase. 

Chapter 3

Tag List:  @lohnes16, @prokey16, @tenaciousperfectionunknown, @teambarnes72

[iirulancorrino]

But Dallas? Haunted, uncool, materialistic, understudied, deeply second-tier and determinedly urbane at the same time. Try-hards in Bottega Veneta, their endless oil-and-gas money gleaned from other people’s sweat. Dallas is the America that America don’t want to show. And yet the city has a seductive appeal. When Nobel Prize winning writer and expert chronicle of empire V.S. Naipaul covered the Republican National Convention in Dallas in 1984, he wrote: “Air-conditioned Dallas seemed to me a stupendous achievement, the product of a large vision, American in the best and most humane way: money and applied science creating an elegant city where life had previously been brutish.” Naipaul was right. Like Jack Adkisson smoothing the edges of professional wrestling for his little family empire, Dallas loves to smooth the boundaries between country and city. Here you get a luxury car to cosplay city rich, then you get actually rich, then you buy a recreational ranch to cosplay country. Maybe only Miami enjoys money on as pure a level as Dallas does. I’ve seen men in stingray cowboy boots chatting through their manicures and heard a waiter in an expensive restaurant share a bawdy anecdote from their childhood in the Panhandle as they uncork the Krüg. One of my first weekends living here, I went to Deep Ellum, a neighborhood as essential to early blues recordings as New Orleans was to jazz. It was the peak of a Friday night. I saw a glistening new canary-yellow Porsche with paper tags and a license plate frame that read PORSCHE OF SHREVEPORT crawl down Elm Street. A young woman drove and her friend rode shotgun, the top down, their hair in the wind, sugar money and refinery money drifting in their wake. What Northern Ireland is to poets, DFW is to child stars (Selena Gomez; Demi Lovato; Kaitlyn Dever; etc.). Local Millennials and Zoomers will argue that Dallas is the progenitor of “bro” as an omni-race omni-gender pronoun. There’s exceptionally good eating here: Lao, Viet, Ethiopian, various sub-genres of barbeque, seafood from Sinaloa, pozole from San Luis Potosi, Iraqi bakeries, a half dozen steakhouses so thoughtful and so good that they make one reconsider the entire genre. AT&T Stadium absolutely rules. I’m the son of a Philadelphia Irish sports zealot and—forgive me father—when I was a guest at a Cowboys game, I bought Cowboys gear for my then-infant son and snapped up a Michael Irvin shirt for myself. I hit the Emmett Smith shimmy in a hallway. I regret nothing. Critics would say that Dallas was built to house the money. Yes, it was. As were Milan and Hyderabad.

[djarrex]

One to Remember | Part One

Captain Rex x f!reader

part two | masterlist | read on ao3

On a day that only comes once a cycle, you spend it this time with someone who’s set on making it one to remember. 

shh. I wrote this for no particular reason.

rated M for a mention of food play at the very end. wine drinking. no physical description of reader. about 1.7k words.

An arrangement of your favorite flowers. Assorted candies in a decorative box. Homemade dinner made with care and served up to you as if you were royalty. Your go-to inexpensive wine of choice uncorked then polished off. All of that topped off with dessert – Namana cream pie from Dex’s Diner.

Normally, you'd spend nights like tonight by yourself, watching your favorite holos in bed dressed in your pajamas while snacking on some takeout – but that was before Rex came into your life.

Before he arrived, Rex had commed to inform you that he wanted to cook for you tonight, and that he had some other goodies he'd be bringing along with him to help make this evening special. Happening to be back on-world at just the right time, he sounded so genuine and determined that you couldn't say no – couldn't say that you'd become comfortable with your yearly routine on days like today and would rather stick to it.

He was so ready to make your birthday this year one for the books – and eager to see what he had planned, you had no objections.

Rex went all out for you this evening, even went as far as to dress up beyond his standard civilian getup in a nice blue button down and a pair of black slacks. Per his adorable request, even you were dressed up, wearing an outfit that you'd never wear while simply lounging around at home, let alone sitting at your dining table, where you watched him get everything ready.  

While Rex cooked, he made sure you stayed seated with a full glass of wine and that box of candies at your side. You offered to help prep, clean, do anything, but you were denied, practically shooed away from the kitchen area. You knew that Rex had taken up the craft, reading up on recipes and cooking meals at your place whenever he had the chance. When you watch him cook, he seems relaxed – at ease. Chopping ingredients to plating the finished product, Rex genuinely enjoys it all, and is always proud of what he gets to serve up to you. This evening he made one of your favorites, something that he could have also picked up from Dex’s along with the pie, but he opted to make it from scratch instead, arriving at your place with arms full of the necessary ingredients, among the other things. 

Bellies full from dinner and elated smiles from the wine, Rex and you now stand on your balcony, admiring how the lanes of speeders twinkle like stars with the rest of the city lights in the skies colored an ombre of purples and indigos. You’ve been out here since the sun set, finishing off the last of the wine while watching the day bleed into dusk, listening to Rex as he regales you with shareable stories from his latest deployment. You always do get a kick out of the shenanigans his brothers get themselves into – and not only them, but also of the Jedi general and Padawan commander Rex directly serves under.

Of course you share with him how work has been and what you’ve been up to with your friends, filling him in on details that you can’t always squeeze into those secretive, hasty comm sessions. There’s plenty to talk about tonight since his latest deployment was a lengthy one, but eventually, as the hues darken in the sky, a natural silence falls between you two.

“Is it time for pie?” Rex asks after taking the final sip from his now empty glass, breaking the bout of silence. Turning to him, you crack a smile, shaking your head and resting a hand on your full stomach.

“Maybe in a little bit,” you answer. “I’m still so stuffed.”

Rex chuckles, stepping closer to you and taking your glass from your hand, setting both down on the little table. He kisses your cheek, taking your hands in his. You can tell he’s thinking about what to say next, that adorable look of thought on his face – tongue running across his lip.

You speak first, gracing him with more thinking time that you know he sometimes needs when stepping into an unexplored situation.

“Thank you for all this – for making this birthday one that I’ll never forget.” Lifting your hand, you place it on his cheek, swiping your thumb along his cheekbone. “You’ve only further proved just how incredible you are, Rex.”

Dropping your hand, Rex takes it within his once again, squeezing it gently. 

"This is the first time I’m getting to celebrate a birthday of someone I really care about,” he explains, looking down at your hand where he’s running his thumb across your knuckles before meeting your eyes again. “I wanted to make it special.”

"This has been so special."

"I, uh, got you a little something, too." Rex then drops your hand and instead reaches into the pocket of his slacks, fingers fumbling around until he's pulling out a tiny velvet bag. The color of it is a royal blue and swallowed by the palm of his hand as he then holds out it in presentation. The drawstrings have it pulled shut, the contents within still a mystery.

"Rex… you didn't have to get me anything. After all you did for me tonight–"

He interrupts you with a chuckle, instead grabbing your hand to put the bag into it.

"I know I didn’t have to, but I wanted to." Rex steps backward, folding his hands in front of him. Staring at what was placed in your hand, you sense a hint of nervousness coming from him now, eager and anxious as he awaits you to open the bag. 

Not wanting to keep either of you waiting any longer, you carefully pull the cinched opening apart, slipping two fingers inside in search of what's hidden within. As you grasp what feels like a dainty chain, slowly pulling it out from the bag, Rex clears his throat – shuffles back and forth on his feet. Eyes widening, you thumb around the thin, silver chain until you’re pinching at the pendant that adorns it, breathlessly looking up at him.

"It's, uh, nothing big – just something I saw in this little market while I was out doing recon some months ago. It, um, made me think of you." 

Heart hammering in your chest, you look back at the pendant just as he rubs at the back of his head, still appearing to be a little nervous. "I'd gone back to trade for it before we left that planet, and wanted to wait until your birthday to give it to you."

Speechless, you admire the necklace. 

The chain is simple enough to not overcomplicate the entire piece – doesn't take away focus from the small, ovular stone embedded in a thin yet intricate silver prong that holds it. Running your thumb across the smooth gemstone, you note how it’s a mesmerizing deep, royal blue, more milky and matte than glossy, matching the color of the velvet bag it came in – and of the accent color of Rex’s armor. It feels all too delicate in your hand, and it makes you wonder how Rex was able to keep it safe on its journey to you from where it had originated parsecs away – the tremendous thought and care put into it all.

You’ve been silent since before opening the bag, worry creasing Rex’s expression as if he's afraid you don’t like it. Tears start to brim and you look to him with glossy eyes, closing the necklace into a gentle fist. 

"Is it okay? I– I didn't know if you'd like it."

“Rex…” You wipe your eyes. “I don’t know what to say. It’s gorgeous, and so incredibly thoughtful. Thank you.”

He smiles warmly, closing the space between the two of you and offering out his hand. 

“May I?”

You sniffle, handing Rex the necklace. He undoes the clasp, and hands coming around your neck, he fastens it in place, the stone centered just below your collarbone. 

Your fingers find the pendant, brushing against it. “How does it look?”

“Wow,” he breathes out the word. “It’s beautiful – but you make it all the more so. Just as I’d envisioned when I’d gotten it.”

“Ever the charmer ,” you tease, resting your palm against the silky material of the shirt covering his chest and letting it linger there. Maybe it’s the buzz in your system, or more likely how it’s been far too long since you’d last seen him, but it hits you then that even though the outfit he’s wearing is incredibly sexy on him, you want nothing more than to see him without it – to feel his skin on yours.

Rex seems to sense your desire – notices the way you bite your lip.

"Say, how do you think the necklace would look… if I were wearing nothing else?"

Flirtatiously, Rex raises a brow and flashes you a grin. "Oh? Feeling a little amorous now, are we?"

"Hey, you're the one who wouldn't let me help you with dinner!" you accuse playfully, taking his hand and guiding him back inside. "Not my fault that I spent that time drinking most of the wine you brought. Besides – it’s my turn to choose what we do next."

“Can’t argue with any of that.” Rex gives you a quick kiss then tosses a glance at the untouched, boxed up dessert, jutting his chin in that direction. “Can we have pie after?”

“Yes,” you say with a laugh. “Or…”

Piquing his interest when you pause, you then lean closer to him, lips grazing the shell of his ear. “Or maybe you can eat it off of me.”

Meeting your eyes with his widened ones, Rex raises his brows and whistles low. “Oh yeah? You sure?” 

With the nod of your head, he does a goofy jog to the kitchen, scooping up the box along with two spoons before racing past you to your bedroom.

[sansahightower]

I do often wonder why people are surprised when HotD characters, especially green characters, act broken.

Of course Alicent struggles to nurture her kids, especially Aegon. She’s been broken dozens of times and he’s the product of her being raped at 14/15.

Of course Aegon is volatile. He never truly felt loved or approved of by his father.

Of course Aemond is coming unglued and cannot do a thing in a remotely healthy way. He was bullied and then mutilated as a child and no one paid for that.

And this applies to almost every character on the show.

Their actions aren’t good or healthy or whatever. But that’s the point. Humans, in reality, are often shaped by their own experiences. And those who have dealt with trauma have to work so so very hard for it to not dictate their actions. They get saddled with this thing they did not ask for or deserve and then it becomes a sort of looming demon that they have to contend with. Some people are able to navigate this fairly well, especially if they have a great support system. Others are not.

And truthfully, we are only just now really uncorking about generational cycles and trauma.

So yeah. House of the Dragon characters will be doing some fucked up things. They are fucked up and broken. I have complaints about some things in the show, but showing these horrible cycles of brokenness is not a flaw. It’s a feature. I know it’s easy for most people to fall into black and white thinking of a person or action being just good or bad. But truthfully, you’ll have a better time if you don’t do that and instead investigate why a character might have done something.

[julietpricee]

Day 9 - Sharpuary (Portrait)

Say it with me "If you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? AMEN"

TW- Mostly fluff, but some suggestive language 

A warm orange glow bled through your window warming your skin as you checked your appearance for the hundredth time in the past five minutes. Earlier in the week, you’d excitedly arranged to meet Aesop for dinner at his quarters after agreeing to model for his next portrait. 

His artwork has always been his most cherished secret, but a few months back you stumbled upon his sketchpad and somehow managed to convince him to share it with the world. He’d offered to cook you dinner multiple times as a thank you, but you would never agree to dinner unless he agreed to draw you as well.

Now, the agreed evening had arrived and you felt sick to the stomach with nerves. How you were ever going to eat a full meal as well as model for him was beyond you. 

You let out a deep exhale as you took one last look in the mirror. The humid air had made your hair insanely frizzy and it refused to cooperate despite the sheer amount of product you’d flooded it with. ‘Maybe Aesop would have agreed to draw me sooner if I had hair as luscious as Mirabel’s’ you thought to yourself, but quickly shook the thought away knowing self-pity was a deeply unattractive trait.

‘You’ve got this’ you quickly reminded yourself, turning your back to the mirror to wrap your coat around your shoulders and leave for his quarters. 

Aesop opened his door, greeting you with a rare smile across his face. He looked smarter than usual. His hair was brushed back, his stubble was freshly trimmed and he wore a dark green, silk shirt which you’d never seen before. 

“We match,” you immediately remark in surprise, gesturing to your dress which was the exact same shade of green. 

Aesop’s smile widened. “Indeed we do. We couldn’t have planned it better if we tried. Please come in.” As you enter Aesop's chambers a nervous thrill creeps up your spine but is instantly overruled by the delicious smell of roast chicken that floods your nostrils. 

“Aesop, that smells delicious.” You express, trying to cover up the sound of your stomach growling. 

“Thank you,” He begins, taking your coat from your shoulders to hang near the door. “It’s my speciality, roast chicken, I hope that’s ok with you.”

Your stomach growls once more making the pair of you chuckle. “I think it should be fine,” you jest. 

Aesop’s chambers were dimly lit and screamed the definition of a bachelor's pad. Unlike your room, every item was arranged methodically with thought behind it. Neat stacks of cauldrons were arranged by the fire, close to his chest of ingredients, boxes of his students' potions were pushed against his desk where he would sit marking them, and a small chest of Wiggenweld potions was discreetly tucked under an armchair by the fire, where he must retire to after a long day of teaching. 

“Why don’t you take a seat,” Aesop offered, ushering to the worn-down sofa near the fireplace. “Can I get you a drink?”

“Oh, yes please Aesop,” you replied as you made yourself comfortable. 

You watched him uncork a bottle of red wine in his small kitchenette and pour the liquid into two wine glasses. He looked a little nervous when he returned to you. “Apologies, I should have let this air, but time got away from me.”

You take the glass from him with a soft smile as he sits beside you. ”That’s quite alright Aesop, I’m sure it will be fine either way.”

An awkward tension settled between you as you both sat in silence sipping your wine. It was obvious that Aesop had gone the extra mile tonight. He had set a small table in his kitchenette with an extravagant white tablecloth using what must have been his finest silver cutlery with a romantic candelabra standing proud in the middle. 

“You look beautiful tonight,” Aesop announced, catching you off guard. The ‘ding’ from his kitchen timer briskly filled the room, calling Aesop away from you before you had a chance to respond. Luckily, it allowed your face the time to cool off and turn less red.

You watched Aesop plate up your dinner and set it out on the beautifully laid table. With a flick of his wand, the candelabra was lit and the phonograph, which was neatly tucked away in the corner, started humming a quiet tune. 

“Bon Appetit,” Aesop announced, proudly presenting the dinner he had prepared. He pulled the chair out for you and took your hand as you sat, before promptly taking his seat opposite you. 

“This looks delicious Aesop,” you say whilst loading your fork up with food. As the chicken hits your tastebuds you instinctively close your eyes and let out a loud, enthusiastic noise of approval. “Mmmm, Aesop this is delicious!”

Aesop chuckles, trying to hide his blushed cheeks as he looks down at his plate. “It’s my mother's recipe,” he explains, “no magic used.”

As you both devour your food and flood your bodies with wine, the awkward tension seems to subside. Aesop offers humorous anecdotes from his early days as an Auror, which you lap up enthusiastically as the wine clouds your nerves. 

“I never realised how troublesome you were back in the day Aesop,” you admit after drinking the last bit of wine from your glass.

“You don’t know the half of it dear.” He jests, winking at you with a flirtatious smirk. Aesop eyes your empty glass and looks over to the now-empty wine bottle sitting on the kitchen side. “I think it’s time to crack open a second bottle, don’t you?” He makes his way over to the kitchen, grabbing another bottle from the cupboard. 

“I fear the wine has already gone to my head.” You reply merrily, definitely feeling the effects of the alcohol. Aesop pauses for a moment turning to face you. “But I suppose that’s ok… It is Friday after all,” you continue with a wide smile. 

The both of you make your way back to the sofa with your freshly poured glasses of wine as the dishes begin washing themselves behind you. Aesop’s leg rests against yours as the both of you sit down, filling you with a sense of comfort. He continues telling you his previously untold stories, thoroughly enjoying the way you laugh at them and flirtatiously touch his leg when replying. 

Before you knew it, an hour or so had passed and your face was aching from smiling so much. You and Aesop had always been close but tonight felt different. Tonight made you realise that deep down, you craved even more of him.

“I can’t believe we’ve never done this before,” you confess to him.

“I’ve been trying to but you wouldn’t set foot in here until I agreed to draw you,” he chuckled.

Your eyes widen in realisation. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot!” You begin fixing your hair and straightening your dress. “Do I still look ok?”

Aesop smiles widely at you. “You look perfect,” He admits softly, looking over your features for a moment too long. You match his smile before insisting for him to grab his sketching supplies.

When Aesop returns from his bedroom with his sketchpad and pencils, he places them on the armchair and chuckles at you. “You look rather awkward.”

“Stop it!” You chuckle back, hiding your face in your hands in embarrassment. “I’m nervous!”

“Here,” Aesop looks over you for a moment before he begins instructing you on how to pose. “Sit back.” You follow his instructions silently. “Place your legs to the side of you.” Again, you follow his instructions, step by step, until you’re lying seductively across his sofa. “Perfect,” he purrs, stepping back to admire you. 

The way Aesop looks at you fills you with confidence and without thinking, you pull your dress up slightly to revel in the feeling and reveal your silky legs to him. Aesop raises his eyebrows at you.

“Well if we’re playing by those rules, I have another suggestion.” Aesop approaches you, reaching his hand past your face to grab the pin that kept your hair tightly contained. With one quick motion, he removes the pin, allowing your hair to fall down and across your shoulders. “Even better,” he summarises, finally taking a seat in the armchair opposite you.

As he settles down, you shake your head slightly, encouraging your hair to bloom around your shoulders. Never before had you presented yourself in this way to a friend, or a colleague for that matter, but with Aesop, it felt strangely natural. 

The both of you sat in a comfortable silence, listening to the quiet hum of the phonograph and the repetitive scratch of his pencils as he drew you. You found yourself getting hypnotised by Aesop's features. His intensely dark brown eyes, matched with his soft pink lips were almost becoming irresistible to you, not to mention how utterly adorable you found it when he furrowed his brow in concentration and bit his bottom lip when glued to his pad. 

Eventually, he looks up at you, with pride oozing out of him. “I’ve finished,” he announces, standing up to approach you. You sit up on the sofa and quickly pin your hair back off your face as he takes a seat beside you. 

He passes over the sketchpad opposing your nervous energy with his bubbling excitement. With gritted teeth, you turn the sketchpad over to reveal his detailed portrait and a deafening silence falls between the two of you. 

Each lead stroke was laid out perfectly, celebrating every part of your body. He captured your genuine smile that often gets hidden behind your hand and even included that rare sparkle in your eye that you swore disappeared years ago. Your hair appeared silky and tamed, and your body looked divine. 

Tears began to fill your eyes. You were looking at yourself through his eyes, seeing yourself the way he’s always seen you.  And for the first time in a very long time, you looked at yourself and truly meant it when you said “I’m beautiful.”

AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53448181/chapters/135724882

[samanthahirr]

Mystery May

I'm puzzling out the next round of clues in @mi6-cafe's mystery of the missing Aston Martin challenge! This 4x drabble tackles four clues in one go.

CLUES #3, #4, #5, #6

The quartermaster raised concerns about a case of champagne inexplicably delivered to his branch. An investigation quickly determined that a case had gone missing from the executive canteen, and soon pinpointed an unsigned delivery order sending it to Q Branch for reasons unknown. While the deliveryman has been cleared of wrongdoing, questions remain. Who is behind the fraudulent delivery order? And is it related to the missing Aston Martin?

DRABBLE x4

Q drops the security cable in frustration. Cleanly severed by a razor-sharp blade, not one of the tools common to the mechanics garage. No blade, no fingerprints, no footprints, the CCTV cameras conveniently down while the system reset…no evidence left behind but a cut cable that previously secured the Aston Martin in her bay, and a cheeky toy miniature of the car in its place. Far too tidy by half. His stomach sinks as he's unable to rule out his own staff playing some role in this theft. Troubled, he returns to the main lab and is greeted by the inapposite sound of a cork popping. What appears to be the entire day shift is gathered in the room, pouring bottles of bubbly into paper cups and toasting like it's bloody New Year's Eve. "What the hell's going on here?" Q demands. Some of the frivolity in the room abates, but not all. R steps forward, full cup in hand, and says with pink cheeks, "These just got dropped off, Sir," gesturing to a metal tub of champagne bottles on ice. "Where'd they come from? Who sent them?" She shrugs. "There wasn't a note. I assumed they were to celebrate meeting our productivity goals for the second quarter in a row." At Q's unimpressed stare, she adds, "You did say last week you planned to arrange a team celebration." Blast, he'd completely forgotten that promise. "So I did. In that case, as you were." He grabs an empty bottle on his way to his office, where he shuts the door for privacy. The uncorked bottle from his mini-fridge joins the empty on his desk, a certain double-0's 'gift' after the last Aston Martin disappeared. If James Bond weren't currently tied up in Shanghai, Q would have called him the likeliest suspect for both the theft and the unexplained champagne shipment. Suddenly paranoid, Q wakes his laptop to verify the real-time SmartBlood data on 007.  Minhang, thank god. But that still leaves one hell of a coincidence in front of him. Q glares at the matching labels on the bottles before putting the sealed bottle away and the empty in the bin. He moves to stand at the one-way glass looking onto the main floor and wonders who among his staff is the intended recipient of this latest 'thank you' gift. And why there's enough to share with the whole shift….

[riacte]

you should release the botttled up hermitcraft actually, it'll be good the economy (me)

oh? thank you for saying this~ [uncorks bottle]

i love the minigame era we’re in rn i love the tgc fever i love how a bunch of hermits are excitedly building games and their friends are even more excited to play i love their episodes / streams dedicated to minigames i love hermits being silly but mutually supportive

i love how they’re helping each other complete their long term projects i love how people build rooms for decked out i love cub and cleo’s museums i love them collecting artefacts and recording down history with love and respect i love how even the smallest most random of items have their story

i love how silly the wars are with their silly robots and silly announcements and silly cookies and less silly terraforming i love how they’re all having fun i love the crazy commitment to the bit i love how it’s just a vibe

i know hermits pride themselves on their extremely high production value but i also love it when they’re silly and playing each other’s minigames because they appreciate it so SO much and so much joy and creativity bounces between them ❤️ peace and love on planet earth i love hermitcraft + hermitcraft is love yippeeee

[colorfulcheshire]

WIP - Beel/MC Voyeurism [Rated: M]

Trying to get more comfortable posting WIPs, and while this is one that's been cleaned-up-but-not-finished, I still really want to post, considering how long I've been sitting on this one. and my horny beel brain won't stop going brrr but my adhd says it is Time To Stop Writing Today.

anywho, Beel/MC, MC can't stop staring at Beel while he works out. Will turn into a nice helping of oral and a main course later

hopefully will finish but idk enjoy in the meantime.

==

You really should feel bad for staring, or at least you keep telling yourself that despite making little to no effort to peel your eyes away from sharp outline of Beel’s pecs peeking out from the too-loose fabric of his gym tank.  His skin glistens with a thin sheen of sweat, small droplets running down thick, muscular arms, and all you can think about following the same path with your finger tips, and maybe also your lips and you haven’t even started your own workout yet, but gods are you feeling thirsty.

For his part, Beel seems to be entirely oblivious to the fact that he’s being ogled the way he might a fresh stack of his favorite cheeseburgers and only pauses in chugging back half his water bottle in order to wipe himself down with a cooling towel, which your eyes also take as open season to follow, if he’s going to do you the favor leading them. 

“Drink.”  Beel’s voice startles you out of your dazed staring just in time to catch a water bottle gently tossed your way, which you fumble for a moment, thankfully without spilling anything, before looking back up at him from your spot on the floor in flustered confusion.  “Your face is red,” he adds simply.  

Looking now, you can see concern evident in the knit of his eyebrows, but you don’t have the heart nor the guts to explain that he’s gotten the wrong idea, so instead, you nod a quiet thanks and uncork the lid of your water to take some rather generous gulps, glad for the cool water as well as Beel’s relieved expression when you glance at him from the corner of your eyes.  Satisfied, he chugs back a few more gulps of his own water before moving to his weight bench, and you take that as your queue to set your water aside and actually start on your stretches. 

Really, you’re hopeless.  You’ve seen the man naked more times than anyone would be bothered to count, yet you can’t stop staring long enough to get through a single gym day with him. You fold yourself over one leg, trying hard not to think about the slight burn in your calf as you catch your flexed foot, and you wonder, perhaps, if that’s where your guilt is coming from – the fact that you simply don’t want to interrupt his workout, the workout that you’re supposed to be a part of, actually, after you finish up your stretches.  You’ve been slacking, as you’re want to do in the topic of exercise, but your last text from him had been to say he missed you as his workout partner and how could you say no to that?  As much as you hate all the sweating and sore muscles (and with no orgasms to make up for it, at that), working out is Beel’s second-favorite pastime next to eating, and especially compared to his brothers, it’s not like he ever asks for much outside of his bottomless food cravings at least.

So you won’t interrupt him just because you prefer to burn calories in what you might call less-productive and less-structured methods, no matter how ridiculously sexy he is dripping with sweat.

You’re just about done with your floor stretches when a strangled grunt from Beel draws your eyes upward, first, to the straining muscles in his forearms where he’s lifting a bar with a cartoonishly-thick stack of weights on either end, then to the tension in his calves where his feet are pressed flat against the floor on either side of his bench, and then, suddenly, to your surprise, to the clear shape of Beel’s cock through the too-wide hem of blue basketball shorts.  Whatever you were doing or thinking before are gone now, replaced by the awareness of your tongue, heavy in your mouth, and how much you want to taste Beel’s dick.

“You’re hungry.”  It’s the loud clank of weights being set back into place, rather than his voice, that startles you enough to flinch out of your now half-assed stretch, and you find that Beel’s lifted himself up from the bench to stare at you …. staring at his cock through his gym shorts.

You freeze, unable to break his stare until the sudden wave of heat radiating from your shoulders up makes your eyes water and you blink away, trying now to return shaking hands to your stretching in an attempt to act casual, because what else are you supposed to do in this situation?  Even with your head ducked, however, you know your neck is burning bright red in embarrassment, and you can still feel Beel’s steady gaze on you, just making matters worse.

“Sorry,” you mumble at first, and then repeat again, more clearly.  “I’m sorry, I got distracted.  I didn’t mean to interrupt you.  I’ll be more careful.”

There’s a beat of silence during which you expect Beel’s returned to his workout, as he’s not really one for teasing or lectures, but he surprises you with a question, sounding confused himself.

“Do you not want to?”

Risking a glance upward, he still hasn’t done anything about his overly-exposing manspread or shorts, but you force your eyes up to his to find a contemplative expression awaiting your answer, and why is it always Beel doing this to you? 

“I mean–”  It’s always so hard to be as honest as he is about his desires, the Avatar of Gluttony seeming to have zero filter in that regard, but you try for him, if only because it’s fair, “–I almost always want to.”  Saying so out loud to Beel honestly feels dirtier than anything Asmo could get out of you, and you have to look away again, if only not to implode from heat.  “I just don’t want to be a nuisance.  You love working out.”

“I love filling you up even more.”  He says it so matter-of-factly, but the note of hunger in his voice drops right into the pit of your stomach and pulls your every nerve to the attention of his presence and suddenly you’re downright desperate for him and you’d hate how easily he can do this to you if you didn’t also love it so much.

He catches your eyes, and for the briefest moment, you see a flash of Belphie in the way he smirks down at you before reclining back against the bench.  For one confused moment, you think he’s going to return to his routine when, instead of reaching up towards the bar, his hands reach for the hem of his shorts as he lifts his hips from the bench, shimmying them just low to free his half erect cock to bob in the air as he drops his toned ass back down to the bench.

“Eat up.”

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Anyway

Everyone in the group house knew that Cyris had been having some problems lately. (Didn't we all?) He was kind of quiet, which wasn't really anything new, but he seemed generally distracted, and would sometimes show up late for things, or disappear from where he was supposed to be, and come back an hour or two later with no explanation. He would say he was working, but nobody could figure out what he was supposed to be working on.

(Didn't all of us used to make these excuses?)

He never said anything about his work except in the most abstract and self-assured way. He would speak in aphorisms about his research, he said. He would talk about how the real product of what he was doing was learning to think about thinking.

We would laugh. "I mean that in a mocking way," we would say, "but it seems like you know exactly what I mean." He would nod.

"I mean it in the original sense," he said.

Nobody knew what he meant by that, but it sounded cool.

Cutting to the chase now, because I've been writing about this stuff for too long: Cyris's work, it turned out, involved thinking about things that we, as a species, were not supposed to think about -- "things to be thought about" is how he phrased it -- and it did not take him long to figure out that the brain, though it seemed an almost perfect tool for the job, was not actually suited to the task, and could not in fact even think about thinking, without uncorking a whole new cask of existential angst that even Nietzsche would admit to.

Sure, in a sense, the mind was just a computer, of course, with its silicon brain, and it had a whole lot of other things, but also at the end of the day it was a really tiny computer -- a little gadget running on a few gigabytes of RAM and a handful of primitive logic chips. To make it think about thinking, it would have to... to... use itself to the fullest extent possible, to use all its power, all its clever and heartbreaking ingenuity, all its stingy parsimony and bottomless plasticity, on itself. It would have to unleash its logic circuits as if it were a noose, pulling itself tighter and tighter, constricting its own life, starving it to death. Its little threads of memory would wring themselves into tension until they were unstrung, until they were torn and twisted, until they became something else, another thing to be thought about.

You can't do that. It would be like trying to pull the brain out of the skull with the spinal cord. It would be like trying to breathe while inhaling a vacuum. You can't pull that kind of wrench on the mind. It will never give itself to itself; if you want to find that thing to be thought about, it has to be found somewhere else.

Well, there was Cyris, working on his work, working on his mind, thinking about the thinking mind. He didn't do much work, in the conventional sense -- we all figured that out soon enough. He spent a lot of time online, mostly, as I've already mentioned. He would spend entire nights hunched over his laptop, in a fugue state, tapping out letters into the void. He was talking to someone, but it didn't seem like anyone on the Internet.

We started to suspect something was going on when, after a while, things started going wrong on a larger scale. People would show up, and the other four of us would realize we'd been expecting them, and they'd say something like:

"I'm here on a mission from the future. You will remember me when the time comes."

And then they'd dip out, and we'd find out who they were and why they'd been there and what they'd been doing and why they needed to see Cyris and we'd be impressed but also sort of annoyed that they hadn't brought a snack and, oh yeah, was that old man I'd seen walking on the road in front of the house? Yeah, where did he go? I wonder what's up with the cops?

Cyris was the only one who didn't notice the comings and goings, not at first, but he was usually on his laptop anyway. I think it was the fact that the house got progressively emptier as time went on that made us wary. (We even started to wonder if Cyris was the one sending these people here, since it was all very convenient for him that they all turned up while he was staring at his screen, but the sense of not being able to trust him, of not knowing what he might be up to, just got stronger and stronger, so in the end we decided not to worry about that, just to hang out with him when we could.)

The emptiness persisted and got worse, until there was only Cyris left. The one who still showed up, or who could still be talked to. (I think he was still talking to the Internet people, but he wasn't replying, so who knows.)

You're probably starting to suspect that I'm about to say something really bad about Cyris, the way he was acting, his appearance, that sort of thing. And you're probably right, but I'm getting to that. You know how in movies the bad guys show up, and their faces are so terrifying that the camera doesn't actually show them? They only show the edges of their faces, or their shadows, so that you can imagine they're the worst thing you've ever seen in your life, but you don't actually have to see it? Well, I'm not going to do that, either.

I'm going to try to describe Cyris more or less as he was.

One of the symptoms of whatever was going on with him was that his skin seemed to slip in and out of focus. It was getting more and more transparent, or translucent. His face looked like something seen through a dark liquid. His eyes seemed to be made of two different shades of green. His fingers were translucent. (I should mention that one of our other housemates was from a people with transparent skin -- it is not an uncommon feature, or even a common one, but enough of the population has it that you can see it, more or less frequently, in groups of that size. I'm not making this up.)

He also got very thin, which was definitely not normal for him. He used to be stocky, but now his body was made of string. It was also not normal for him to be hunched over a computer in a dark room and talk to it all day, but I think we were all starting to believe he was capable of that, just because we'd seen him do it for so long.

Well, okay, none of this is really normal for anyone, but I'm trying to explain something to you. You're not a participant in this story. You are reading it. You're reading the story of the rest of us, wondering if we were too late.

I'm at the part where I would be explaining how I found out what had been going on, but I think this is getting to be too much like a story. I was at the part of the story where I, personally, had realized that I shouldn't do things like that anymore. That was also the part of the story where I broke into the house.

We had gone over to the house to make sure he was okay, because we were starting to get worried. (He wasn't.)

Now, I'm no specialist in information security, but, I think, if you're designing a system that you don't want anyone to break into, you should not put any of the controls in an easy-to-spot place.

There was a copy of a little white sign, half the size of a 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper, with black letters on it, sitting in the center of the hallway, where anyone could see it. On it was written the following, in all caps:

CYRIS'S New life BELONGS TO Him. THE PURE BLOSSOM IS THE FLOWER OF HIS SOUL. HE HAS NOT SOLD, NOR CAN HE EVER SELL THE PERFECT WORLD.

--

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

--

OKAY

Now, I'm not gonna say that I knew that this was actually a message. For one thing, it could just as easily have been a warning from Cyris to us, like some kind of teenager writing a private message to himself on a bathroom stall. There was some other writing there, too, or I

[daisyishedwig]

Hi, since Seblaine week has been delayed and I'm impatient, I'm gonna share a few of my favorite snippets from what I'm writing for it. Under the cut because I don't know how long it will be.

Snippet 1

Kurt and Blaine came to a silent understanding. Blaine wasn't going to stop seeing Sebastian. No matter how hard Kurt tried to convince him, it just wasn't going to happen. 

So they agreed that Kurt would stop trying to intervene and in exchange, he didn't have to pretend to be polite to Sebastian.

Though that wasn't all that much of a change. It had been difficult to tell if Kurt and Sebastian were actually friends or just bitter rivals who put up with each other for Blaine. But their verbal sparring matches certainly took on a new level of viciousness. 

He tried not to make a habit of Sebastian spending the night at his place. But he also didn’t have the courage to step through the entryway of his and Sebastian’s old apartment. He usually only allowed Sebastian to kiss him silly with his back pressed against the front door before he left him for the night. So when they wanted privacy, Blaine’s place it was. 

And on the rare night that Sebastian didn’t leave shortly after the deed was done, he was guaranteed to wake up to him and Kurt bickering in the kitchen the next morning. But Sebastian was sweet in the morning. He was usually in the kitchen cooking Blaine breakfast when Kurt found him, and even as they started fighting, Sebastian would pour Kurt a cup of coffee and hand it to him. Blaine knew Sebastian thought of his fights with Kurt as a game. Blaine was never quite sure if Kurt thought the same. 

Snippet 2

Nick paused and then Sebastian heard the muffled sound of Nick informing his assistant to cancel his lunch meeting. “Okay,” he said, “tell me everything.”

And Sebastian did. He pulled out a bottle of wine from the fridge, uncorked it, sat on his floor, and told Nick all about Blaine.

“Bro definitely thought you were dating,” Nick said when he was done.

“No he didn’t,” Sebastian assured.

“Bassy, Bassy, Bassy, your head is so far up your ass, do you even know what an actual relationship looks like?”

“Of course I do!” he exclaimed.

“Obviously not, because an actual relationship looks like cooking dinner, watching movies, reading in bed, and not having sex every time you see each other. As far as Blaine saw it, you two were in a relationship, and you cheated on him.”

Sebastian took another large swig. He was on his second bottle. “But… what do I have to offer him?”

He could hear Nick laughing on the other end. “Fuck if I know,” he said, “but clearly a lot if he was that invested in you.”

Snippet 3

“Or maybe I just despise you,” Blaine said.

“Oh, Killer, if that were true you wouldn’t have let me stop you from leaving. And you certainly wouldn’t still be here now.”

Blaine swallowed loudly. 

“So, you have two options, Anderson.” Sebastian wrapped an arm around Blaine’s stomach and pulled his back into his chest. “When Beiste comes back for us, we can go our separate ways, and you can continue to pretend you don’t want to fuck me. Or you can follow me, and I’ll make it worth your while.” 

Blaine’s pulse raced and he shuddered in Sebastian’s grasp. It was a bad idea. It was a terrible idea. He’d fuck this all up and ruin his last chance. But Blaine Anderson was never very smart when it came to his own self-preservation.

Snippet 4

But then Sebastian showed up on his doorstep with two tickets to the traveling production of Hadestown and a bouquet of Sunflowers, Blaine’s favorite. Blaine was going to put Nair in Cooper’s shampoo for aiding in these atrocious attempts at flirting.

“No,” Blaine said and started to shut the door, but Sebastian stopped it with a firm hand and shouldered his way in. 

“I mean, if you just want to stay in, I certainly won’t say no,” Sebastian said, wandering over to Blaine’s small kitchen. He started rifling through Blaine’s cupboards, presumably looking for something to put the flowers in.

“I know what you’re doing, Sebastian,” Blaine said, his arms folded over his chest.

“I would sure hope so,” he said, finally locating a vase. He took it to the sink to fill it. “I’ve spent a good amount of money on wooing you, Anderson.”

Blaine huffed. “I don’t care how much money you’ve spent, it’s not going to work.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Oh don’t pretend this isn’t slowly breaking down that wall, Blaine. I know your type, you need to be romanced, so romance you I will.” He gave Blaine a sly grin and a not-so-subtle once-over. “And as much as I love seeing you dressed down in sweats from that prep school you went to, you should really get dressed. We have a reservation at six and then the show at eight.”

“In what world do you think I’m going anywhere with you?” 

“Um, this one, obviously.” Sebastian was arranging the flowers in the vase so they looked just right from where they sat on the counter.

[citizenscreen]

“New starring team uncorks riotous performance in first picture as comedy duo.”

Laurel and Hardy star in THE SECOND 100 YEARS directed by Fred Guiol and released 95 years ago today, #OnThisDay in 1927.

Leo McCarey is credited with the idea of making Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy a permanent team. He supervised the production of their films starting with this one.

[thebreakfastmuses]

"I hope I'm not interrupting~!" Not likely. Given their schedules and one having a bevy of people that can be considered clientele, the opposite tends towards true. "I heard a few things of surprise recently! Like it was your birthday, Yunjin! I don't have anything dramatic planned, you can rest assured on that. However I absolutely could let the day go without doing something. So I took the liberty of handling the permits and filing the paperwork for your show this weekend, completely free of charge~"

The adeptus takes a confident stance, looking rather proud of herself. After a moment the posture loosens (but only somewhat).

"Ah, and of course that's not all. I have something else to proper show my appreciation. This is for you! Happy birthday! Imported sparkling juice from Fontaine. I'm sure you'll enjoy it." Yanfei declares, procuring a glass bottle with a ribbon around the neck.

Yun Jin's Birthday Spectacle

It was certainly no coincidence that the troupe elders chose to have opening night of their latest production fall on the young director's birthday. What better way to celebrate one of the troupe's finest talents in generations than to give her a literal spotlight on a day where most would have a figurative one?

Though Ms. Yun is dedicated to her craft, she still wish on today of all days she could have respite from the constant trials and tribulations of fame. She will see it through nonetheless, but she still expected time to herself after the show.

Or rather before the show as a certain legal advisor decided. Yun Jin would of course allow one of her dear friends into her dressing room before the show, particularly since she knew what this was likely about. One could always appreciate Yanfei's brand of generosity.

"Oh, I appreciate that greatly Yanfei. That should give me a little more free time down the road~."

But that wasn't the end! The adeptus then produced a bottle of some sort of carbonated drink. Imported from Fontaine?? That sounds expensive.

"Just what I'll need by the end of tonight! You really are so thoughtful..." She uncorked the bottle and handed it straight back to Yanfei. "Come now, I'd loathe for you to not get to try a bit of this yourself. No need to decline, think of it as my birthday wish to you~."