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ladynestaarcheron · 4 years ago

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Fears All the Way Down - Chapter Six

ao3 - masterpost

Hey, babes! Here are our canon fixes for the week:

1. When Nesta was six, she met with a man who declared more or less immediately that she would forever be hopeless at playing an instrument or singing, but that she had a good ear for music. Bull.

2. Nesta is apparently so desperate for a friend that she gives the House life, but never really hangs out with the priestesses. Um. Okay? Sounds fake, but okay.

3. Both Gwyn and Emerie have never left their homes in Sangravah and Illyria, respectively, except for when the IC brings them to the library. Not exactly a fix, but something we will start to explore.

Enjoy!

---

Since Nesta's accomplished virtually nothing in her life, she expects her ideas of "new things" to try to be easy to come up with. But after an hour of brainstorming in bed that Thursday evening, she only has two things scribbled in the notebook Thalia gave her: Wear yellow and Learn to play the trumpet.

"Don't suppose you have a trumpet in here?" Nesta says to the House.

The House only pulls the curtains shut in answer.

"Bedtime," she agrees, shutting the notebook and placing it on her bedside table. "I think this one-per-day rule is a bit much, don't you? Especially considering these self-defense lessons. Do you think other girls will come?" Nesta doesn't always wait for an answer when talking to the House. It tends to interject as it pleases, generally by opening doors or magicking a cup of tea in front of her. "I think that Emerie girl would like to. From Illyria, I told you about her...oh, thank you," she adds, for the House has placed the novel Nesta started last night by her pillow. "Shall I read aloud, then?"

She does, until she falls asleep.

The next morning, she draws looks from the hood-less girls and slight double-takes from the veiled priestesses; no doubt courtesy of the bright yellow dress the House had pulled out of her wardrobe this morning. She ignores them, not stopping until she reaches Clotho's office. When she knocks, Thalia's voice calls for her to enter.

"Well!" Thalia says, smiling.

"I'm never wearing this color again. It washes me out." Ruins the detox and more regulated eating she's had this past month.

"I think you look lovely," she insists, and Clotho nods. "But that's certainly your prerogative. Is that the worst consequence?"

"Yes, yes," Nesta says impatiently, waving a hand. "It won't kill me to try new things. Lesson learned."

Thalia looks over at Clotho. Perhaps she can tell what the priestess looks like under her hood, or perhaps she talks to her mind-to-mind like Feyre and Rhysand do, but Nesta almost thinks they exchange a glance of some sort. Amused, perhaps?

"Can either of us help you with anything, Nesta?" Thalia asks pleasantly, and gestures for her to sit down.

"Maybe," Nesta says taking a seat. Her cheeks color slightly as she does; why is she bashful about this all of a sudden? Around Thalia and Clotho? "I...well, I've started some self-defense, you know."

"We know." They both did, had both asked her how it was going. "You're still enjoying it, aren't you?"

"I...I am-it's good for me." Enjoy is a strong word.

"You said it helps keep you focused," Thalia says. "Centered."

"Yes. It...makes me feel good." She doesn't normally struggle with her words so much, does she? Does she sound like an idiot to the two of them, or just to her own ears? No, Clotho and Thalia would never say that about her. Never even think it. It's only her who's like this, trapped in her own wretched mind, slave to something dark and horrible and become just as vile-

But no, that isn't true. It's not just her who feels that way. And that's why she's here.

"It makes me feel more in control," Nesta says finally. "Of my life and my body."

Thalia leans back, satisfied. Clotho doesn't move. Nesta wonders if they know, if they can guess at what just went on in her mind. Either way, they both wait for her to continue.

"And I thought," she says, pausing to draw breath, "that maybe some other girls might be interested. With...Cassian."

At this, Clotho does cock her head.

"We meet in the mornings. Not on Tuesdays and not over the weekend," she adds, just so they aren't sitting in silence.

After a few moments that feel ridiculously long, Thalia says, "I think that's a wonderful idea, Nesta."

For a brief, strange moment, something happens. Nesta breathes in as Thalia finishes her sentence-not in relief or any emotion in particular, just to breathe-and as she does so, something inside of her shifts. Un-constricts.

But it's gone just as soon as it arrives, and before Nesta has time to dwell upon it, one of Clotho's notes appears. For a select group of girls, perhaps.

"Yes, I think we have the same few in mind...Of course, Nesta, you're welcome to share this with all of the students, but just between Clotho and myself, I think we'll privately encourage four or five...yes, thank you for bringing this up to us, Nesta," Thalia says, finishing with another warm smile.

Don't go just yet, Nesta, please, Clotho writes as Thalia takes her leave. I wanted to ask you how you were doing.

"I'm well. Thank you."

I'm glad to hear these self-defense lessons have something to do with that...our own lectures and exercises too, I hope?

Nesta raises her head slightly as her cheeks tinge pink. "I-yes. I think so." Clotho waits, unmoving, until Nesta sighs and says, "I do like the lectures."

Wonderful. Which ones?

Nesta answers honestly, "All of them." It's...it's quite something, to learn things. Things she never knew, never imagined, from females who are so passionate about them. "And...I like the jewelery. I like working with my hands."

I'm so very happy to hear you're finding yourself here, Nesta, Clotho's pen writes out. Have you given any thought to a more permanent assignment?

"I...thought you were supposed to."

With your input, of course. We would never want you to do something you were uncomfortable with.

But Gwyn's not comfortable with Merrill, is she? "I don't know. There's not really anything wrong with any of the priestesses, I suppose." It's only when Clotho begins lightly shaking with amusement that Nesta realizes she probably shouldn't have said that. "That is...I like them." She does. Enough.

Well, I'm happy to hear that, too.

Nesta rises, rather abrupt. "I've got to sort books," she says, and doesn't wait for a proper goodbye before leaving.

---

The amount Nesta has improved after only a few short weeks of being in the library floors Cassian. Her weight gain, voluntarily asking him for self-defense lessons, her performance in said lessons, and she still manages to find time to ask if other girls can join. Not even touching upon the fact that she's said she doesn't feel so dependent on alcohol anymore.

It shows incredible strength of character, and it makes Cassian's heart swell so much that he almost doesn't care when he meets an unfamiliar, tipsy young male he realizes must be one of the rebels in Windhaven, glaring at him.

Almost.

"What are you doing outside of your camp, boy?" Boy, he says, because he is one. He's not yet participated in the Rite.

"Visiting family," the boy slurs. "Sir," he adds, mocking.

"Go home," he orders, trying to imitate Nesta when she's at her coldest.

Perhaps it works, because the boy blanches before sneering and turning away.

He has to tell Rhys they're getting more brazen. Normally Cassian wouldn't care at all what any of them say to him-or at least, say he doesn't care-but if these pricks are bringing Nesta into it, all bets are off. He's going to follow up on whoever that was and make sure he doesn't come back to this camp until this situation is under control. Until the threat on the throne, on Nesta's life, is vanquished.

Shaking himself, he pushes into Emerie's shop. "Good morning."

She looks up. "You're back. Hello," she adds.

He gives her a smile. "Who was that?"

Emerie does not return his expression. "My baby cousin, Bellius," she says, bitter. "But never mind him." Just like that, Emerie phases out of her ire and into a cool, detached expression. Just like Nesta, he thinks. Perhaps that was why they liked each other-if they liked each other. "What can I help you with?"

"Perhaps you can help me," he says. "Nesta-Lady Nesta-you met here a few weeks ago?"

"Yes," she says, careful. "I remember."

"Well," he says, unsure of how to introduce the subject. "She's...started taking some self-defense lessons. For exercise. With me."

Emerie looks unconvinced. "For exercise?"

"And she thought you might be interested in joining. And that you have some friends who might be interested, too."

Emerie's face doesn't betray anything. She studies him, and it's been about ten seconds before she says, "Did she?"

"Yes," he says, feeling only slightly like perhaps the two of them training together might not be good for him.

"Hm," she says. After another minute of her own quiet deliberation, she says, slowly, "I will attend one of these lessons...and then I will...consult with my friends."

"All right," Cassian says, thankful that it's over. "Someone will be along to pick you up Monday morning."

He doesn't dawdle too long in saying goodbye. He has a lot to cover before Monday-figure out the best way to introduce self-defense to very traumatized, potentially, females, and now he'll have Emerie, and Nesta. What kind of dynamic will that create?

But he's been a soldier his whole life. Surely he can handle a few young females.

Hopefully.

---

Nesta has taken to carrying around her notebook wherever she goes, just in case she gets an idea of some new thing she can try. A girl named Deridre approaches her and asks her what self-defense is like, and if it's at all like the meditative yoga they do with the priestess Agata, so she writes that down. She goes to one of Daphne's lectures for the first time and learns about resuscitation and scrawls the name of a method to stop choking that seems simple enough to learn. Gwyn sees her writing and says, "You know, your finger nails are shaped so nicely. How come you never paint them?" so she adds that to her list, too.

She finds, actually, that it's quite nice to carry the book around. It's nice to have an excuse to write with such a fine pen. It's been years since she has.

Her sisters visit her over the weekend at her invitation and they are thrilled by her new things.

"I could teach you to paint," Feyre suggests.

Nesta wants to reply that the idea is to attempt things that do not make her want to pitch herself off the veranda, but instead she says, "You already tried that."

"Right," she says, deflating.

"But," she says, oddly disturbed by this response, and grasping for something to say, "maybe we can...sculpt. Or something. One day."

Feyre brightens at this. "Whenever you have time," she says, happily.

"How's self-defense going, Nesta?" Elain asks, would-be casual.

Nesta rolls her eyes. "You've heard we're inviting other girls?"

"Oh, Nesta, I just think it's such a grand idea-"

"Everyone's really excited about it, honestly, they've been trying for something like this for so long-"

"And with the Illyrian girls, Cassian said-"

"We know it's not exactly a unit, but still so impressive-"

"And we hear you're doing really well!"

"Yes! Really well! Maybe I could join you one day, too," Feyre says, hopeful.

"I'd watch. Or, or maybe even try some!"

Nesta takes a sip of water. She forgets how much noise these two make, honestly. "I don't think it's as exciting as you've imagined," she says. "Sure, you can come one day. Maybe not while the other girls...I'm a bit nervous," she confesses, suddenly. "Clotho and Thalia wouldn't let if they thought it was a bad idea, but I don't know..." She looks out onto the rainy city. The House keeps the interior warm for her, but sometimes she thinks she can still feel the cold in her bones anyway. "I mean, I'm the only one who ever leaves the library, and it could go really wrong. Obviously, no one's going to force herself to do this, and they can just no, but-uh," she finishes on a stammer, as she turns back to look at her sisters.

For there are shining silver tears in Elain's eyes, and Feyre's face looks cracked.

What has she said? What horrible thing has she done?

"No, no," Feyre says hurriedly, reading her expression.

"Sorry, Nesta," Elain says, bringing her hands to wipe her eyes. "It's just...it's just so nice to see you like this...about something."

"Oh," Nesta says, eventually.

Her sisters leave in the evening, but the likeness of their faces in her mind do not. Their expressions, their...love.

Is she really so different now, she wonders all weekend. Is she so much better? She doesn't feel particularly much of anything.

If this is better, then what had she been before?

Monday morning rolls around quickly, and she is decked in the uniform the House has supplied her and finished with a light breakfast, waiting at the arena on the roof before the sun has even fully risen.

"Nervous too?" Cassian says from behind her as he neatly lands in.

"I suppose," she says, not turning around.

"How long have you been here?"

"Fifteen minutes."

He chuckles. "Maybe more nervous than I am. Well...shall we begin?"

"No one's here yet."

"So? We can start just the two of us." He shrugs out of his jacket. "Would put us at ease, at least, don't you think?"

Us, he says. Like they are the same. They get nervous by the same things and the same things calm them down and they do it all together.

"Yes," she says, clearly needing it.

The movements come easier than on Thursday. Each time she gets better, and it is, she will admit, a rare sort of feeling. To know that she is improving at something. To feel it in her blood and bones.

Cassian's instructions leave no room for worrying in her mind. When she slips out of his holds, breaks out of his grip, all she can think of are his body and hers, anticipation of his next move and victory when she gets it right, or disgruntlement when she is wrong. They move through the steps in sync, almost like the ballet she used to study, and she is so consumed with it that she does not notice until they are done that they have an audience.

Not a particularly big one. Gwyn, Deirdre, and Azriel has brought Emerie, but an audience nonetheless.

"All right," Cassian says. "So what Nesta and I just did is called the Grunge Hook." He launches through into an explanation of what it means and Nesta blinks as she realizes he must have known they all had arrived. Seen them, heard them.

Her cheeks go cold. She can never notice anything else when he's there. Certainly not as they were; touching, talking...

"So Emerie and Nesta, and, ah, Miss..."

"Gwyn," Gwyn says at the same time Deirdre says, "Deirdre."

"Right," Cassian says. "Well, you two pair up."

Emerie walks over to Nesta and they are ready faster than the other two. Nesta tenses. They have not yet been outside-perhaps this was a mistake-what will Gwyn think of her now? She won't sit next to her for lectures anymore, won't come help her put books away-

But it is only a moment, and then Gwyn turns to Cassian and says, "I guess we should have dressed differently."

"You can wear whatever you're comfortable with," he says. "And you don't have to do anything you don't want to, either."

So Deirdre keeps her hood secured on, but Gwyn shrugs her robe off entirely to reveal simple, like-colored dress. Perhaps she'd like leggings and a skirt like Nesta's, she thinks. If she decides to continue...if other girls decide to join...

Emerie's, surprisingly, not as good at the movements as Nesta is. Surprisingly because Nesta doesn't really think of herself as good at this, just better than before, and because, well, Emerie's Illyrian, and all the Illyrians Nesta knows...

"It's your wings," Azriel says, approaching. "They throw you off balance."

She droops. "So I can't. Because I'm clipped."

Nesta flinches-it's such an ugly word. But what to say?

Azriel answers before she can, his shadows clearing from his face. "Of course not," he says, patient. "Just hold yourself this way," and he shows her how to maneuver her wings.

Emerie seems as though her emotions sway easier than Nesta's, as she appears cheered up by this. "Let's try again," she says to Nesta.

And they do, but it is not like before, with Cassian. It is not as in sync, and she is not as focused. Over on the other side, under Cassian's watch, Gwyn and Deirdre are doing even worse.

When the hour is done, Deirdre hurries back down faster than she has moved throughout the whole lesson, and Gwyn shoots Nesta a small smile, and nods her head once at Azriel, before saying, "Good to see you again," and leaving. Emerie says, "Thanks for thinking of me," and perhaps sounds a bit more genuine, but she turns to ask Azriel to take her back right after, and then she is gone too.

"Brilliant," Nesta says aloud, miserable.

Cassian looks over at her, surprised. "What?"

"Are you kidding me? That was horrible."

Cassian laughs. "Are you kidding me? That was great!"

"Enough," she snaps, skin burning. "I don't need-"

"Woah," he says, raising his hands. "Woah. Seriously, Nesta, what's wrong?"

She clenches her hands into fists. "Stop mocking me."

"I'm not!" he protests, and his stupid eyes are wide and innocent and his stupid voice is confused and concerned when he says, "Come on, why are you upset?" so she has no choice but to answer.

"They hated it and they were bad."

Cassian laughs again. A real laugh this time, with his head tilting back, and the sound echoing in the mountains. Her heart lurches. She ignores it.

"They did not hate it," he says, eyes twinkling. "And they were not bad. They're novices. Not everyone's a born natural like you, with a perfectly paired partner in me," he teases, winking, almost as though good-natured.

"They couldn't get away fast enough." Deirdre didn't even take off her hood. So much for helping other females.

Cassian's grin falters. Shit. Had she said that out loud?

He moves closer to her. "Do you know how many clipped Illyrian females have agreed to come to anything remotely similar to this?"

"You know I don't," she snaps, but he doesn't rise to her bait.

"None," he says, calm. "Emerie is the first. Do you know how long Deirdre's been in here?"

"No," she says. Longer than Gwyn, but not more than that.

"Since before Amarantha took over."

Nesta winces. Over fifty years, at least, then.

"And she came...you convinced her to come."

"I didn't," she says. "Thalia-"

"She told me," he interrupts. "She told me you told her what it was like and she wanted to try it."

Nesta stills at this. "Well...what does it matter if she just tries it once?"

He laughs-again! Why does he laugh so often? "Aren't you doing that? Trying things once? Oh, no, I don't mean it in a bad way, Nes, don't look like that. I'm just saying...okay. So it's not for everyone. Maybe she tries it once and never does it again. But it's still worth a whole fucking lot that she tried. And that's because of you. And how do you know she's not going to try again, anyway? Because she left when the hour was up?"

Nesta reddens slightly.

"Fuck," he says, and this time it doesn't amuse her, his easy swearing. "I-shit. Nesta. I'm not trying to hurt your feelings."

She startles. "I-what?"

"I just mean..." He runs his fingers through his hair. "Look. You did a good thing. Whether or not they continue, you did a good thing. And I think they will, for the record. Emerie might not want to come every day, you know, she might not have time...but I think Gwyn liked it enough."

Nesta feels something inside of her flutter. "She did?"

Cassian nods. "Definitely." He looks at her for another moment, then shakes his head.

"What?" she asks, dreading the answer.

"Nothing," he says. "I just don't understand how you can't possibly be so proud of yourself. Especially today." He shrugs slightly, completely oblivious to what is happening inside of her. That feeling from Clotho's office. What is that?

But it is gone as soon as it arrives, just like last time. He says, "See you tomorrow, Nesta," and leaves. And then she does too.

---

Cassian, Nesta learns over the course of the next few weeks, is right.

Not about her, obviously. But about the females still being interested.

Gwyn's excited about it. "I didn't realize you were so good," she gushes.

Nesta huffs in amusement. "Hardly."

"Well, better than the rest of us!"

"Just a bit more practice," she says. And there is something about the lessons with Cassian...though they don't do as much together, though, anymore. Not with the others there now. She almost wishes that she had not invited everyone for each of the lessons...maybe one morning with him just to herself.

But that's-that's just absurd. He's hardly hers.

Deirdre finds her that Monday, too, and thanks her for convincing her to go. Nesta privately wonders what on earth it was she had said that worked, because the conversation barely stands out in her mind, but she tells Deirdre she's glad to hear she enjoyed it, anyway.

"I think Roslin and Ananke would like it too," she says. "Thalia told them it would be good for them, but they were too nervous. I'll try and convince them...I didn't realize how much fun it would be," she adds with a gentle laugh.

Fun?

"Oh," Nesta says. "Oh...well, good. I mean, good to hear. I hope they...join too."

And Cassian is right about Emerie as well. She does not come on Tuesday, but she does on Wednesday, and tells Nesta she thinks she can keep coming twice a week.

"And your friends?" she asks.

"They're interested," she tells her. "But I think I have to work a little harder at convincing them."

Nesta nods, not wanting to ask what they might have stopping them from coming. Whatever happened to Emerie's wings-whoever had clipped her-perhaps those females have someone like that in their lives.

It is on the second Wednesday that Emerie arrives that Nesta asks her if she'd like to stay a while longer. She'd already asked Azriel the day before if he could possibly take her back after lunch, and he'd agreed.

There was something odd about talking to Azriel, she noticed. Something about those shadows. Something about the way they-looked?-at her. Something...

But Emerie agrees, if a bit shyly, and she asks Gwyn if she'd like to take lunch with the two of them instead of in the priestesses' dining hall, and Nesta has her new thing for the day: hosting people for a meal.

They ogle everything openly, jaws dropping as the House pulls out chairs for them and food appears as Nesta requests it.

"Thank you," she says.

"You're...talking to the House?" Gwyn asks.

"Yes."

"Oh. Thank you," she adds.

"Thank you," Emerie says quickly.

The House likes them too. Nesta can tell. There's a bit more effort being made here today, she thinks, as she notes a fancy bouquet in the middle of the table and finer china than she normally uses. Nesta smiles to herself.

Nesta searches for something she can say, a safe topic that has nothing to do with self-defense, but Gwyn beats her to it. "So, how do you two know each other?" she asks.

"Nesta came to Illyria to scare some rebels who are trying to kill her," Emerie answers casually.

Gwyn jerks her head towards Nesta. "Really?"

"Not quite how I would have phrased it," Nesta says. "But true enough, I suppose."

"Why are they trying to kill you?" Gwyn says, eyes wide.

Wonderful. What a fantastic luncheon this is.

"They don't like me very much."

"They're scared of her," Emerie says. "And they want to overthrow the High Lord and High Lady." She turns to Nesta. "What do you think of that?"

Nesta raises an eyebrow as she cuts into her food. "Of killing my sister and Rhysand? Well, I've certainly thought of it myself, at times."

They both laugh. Nesta blinks. Then she smiles slightly.

"I have to assume I'm against them," she says. "But to be honest, I don't really understand any of the politics here. I'm...not very well-informed."

"Oh, neither am I," Gwyn says, shaking her head. "It's terrible. I mean, I've lived in this court all my life, and I'm so pitifully ignorant. It's ridiculous. I don't know the first thing about Illyria, like. Or even Velaris, really. And I have no excuse. I live in a library, for gods' sakes."

"I don't know of any books I'd recommend for you to learn about Illyria," Emerie says, thoughtful. "Not unless you read Illyrian, that is."

"See, I didn't even know there was an Illyrian until you just said that. Pathetic."

"Can you recommend other books?" Nesta says, latching on the chance to steer the conversation away from the history of the Night Court and into perhaps the only topic she might be able to contribute to.

"Oh, of course," Emerie says, pausing to swallow. "What do you like?"

"Romance," Nesta says, as Gwyn says, "Adventure."

"Ooh, The Knight Society. That's both. You can read that together."

Gwyn grins at Nesta. "Book club," she says. "What's it about?"

Emerie launches into a description of the book-the series, actually-and eventually, Nesta finds herself not looking for things to say, but rather just...talking. Not forced. Not desperate. Just a part of the conversation. Easy, flowing...fun, almost.

Funny, at least. Emerie is clutching her sides laughing as she describes the worst romance novel she ever read and Gwyn giggles, her hands covering her mouth, but Nesta says thoughtfully, "That's not such a horrible idea, though."

"You think-"

"No, no, the premise is atrocious, yes," she says. "But that exact scene...that has potential."

"Potential, right," Emerie says, laughing still.

"No, I mean it," she says, but she lets it go, lets the conversation drift naturally.

She is disappointed when Azriel comes to take Emerie back, but picked up by the fact that they all are. Emerie promises to make time to stay for lunch again, either Monday or Wednesday of next week.

"This was so lovely," Gwyn says to her, wistful, as they walk down to the library together. "So much nicer than in the dining hall.

"Really?" Nesta says before she can stop herself. "Well...I eat lunch every day. You can join...if you'd like."

Gwyn brightens. "I would!"

So after two weeks of lessons with other girls (Roslin and Ananke have joined, and Lorelei and Ilana, too, though the later doesn't participate so much as watch), and more random assignments from Clotho, and new things for Thalia, Nesta finally finds herself with a few hours of quiet after Friday evening's lecture has been canceled.

"Shall we read?" she says to the House.

Lights flicker in answer. Too many for the usual yes or no. This means Nesta has to follow.

"All right," she says, standing. "To the veranda?" she asks. But it's too cold out, so she hopes not.

Instead, the House leads her to a room she hasn't been in since her first stay, upon first exploration. She has had no need.

"Oh," she says at the door, softly.

The knob turns slightly, not fully opening. The House giving her the final decision.

But she doesn't want to hurt its feelings, so she opens the door.

The music room-a conservatory, it can be called-just by the sheer size of it-is grander than she remembers. She had opened the door and not even stepped inside, that first time. Just stood there, frozen, before snapping the door shut and hurrying away.

She takes a slow step in, but almost as though she is being walked by some other being, she takes another, and then another, and before she knows it, she is seated at the piano.

Ballroom grand. Enormous. Sleek and glossy and it would sound just perfect, she knows.

Lights flicker from behind. She turns and lets out a little laugh.

"Thanks," she says, shaking her head at the spotlight, "but I don't think I'm going to be learning the trumpet this evening."

The lights stop, as if the House is acquiescing.

The lights above her now flicker briefly. So will you play the piano, then?

Nesta inhales and exhales deeply. Slowly. Again. And again. The same way Cassian has her do after lessons.

There's really...there's really nothing stopping her. There's no reason not to. If she were to pick up her notebook and write down the reasons why she can't play right now, there wouldn't be any.

So why can't she do it?

She doesn't have an answer. So with another deep breath, Nesta closes her eyes and gently presses her thumb to middle C.

The sound is soft, and then that feeling, from with Thalia and Clotho, and Cassian, hits her again. But as she hits the second note, it does not fade away. It stays this time. So she plays.

#nessian #nessian fic #acosf fic #acotar fic #nesta archeron #whatever the hell am i supposed to tag this asssssss????????#anyway. i'm thrilled to be sharing this!!#cannot WAIT for next chapter also #because nesta had to go on a journey to get to her journey #because she was in such a bad place!!#but here she's like...she's been getting better but not good #and now she can start getting good you know??#so exciting #hope y'all enjoy<3 #oh and btw i don't about you but i'm turning 22 next friday when i post chapter seven #so in case you were looking for a sign to share what you think...this is it #😌#lol #but kind of for real

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eyepatchdate · 4 years ago

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I saw this bouncing around my dash and decided to fill it out myself for fun :) I decided to not double-list any games, and I tried to mix up the companies I used too so that the list would be more unique.

Long post, so I’m doing a readmore for my longwinded part lol.

(read more)

Favorite Game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords - I could talk about this game forever. How it tears apart the Star Wars universe from within, how it creates a compelling story while challenging the usual themes, etc. I could talk for ages about the characters and how their motivations slot in place, and how this game lends itself to interpretation and analysis alongside roleplay. It’s just a wonderful game, one I deeply love and will always love. It’s a game that isn’t afraid to have you talk to other characters for twenty or thirty minutes at a time and honestly I’m always riveted at every line. This game deserves the cult fanbase it has, but I think there’s a lot the fanbase misses in appreciating this game. (Note...gameplay is a little janky and a community made mod restores a lot content that was cut before shipping-the game wasn’t properly finished).

Best Story: Fallout New Vegas - It’s the setting that makes the story here, and all the moving pieces and factions alongside the main conflict really make this game stand out. There’s so many little pieces to find along the way in the world and the way the main quest splits based on who you want in power feels important--and you are choosing a future for this whole region.

Favorite Art Style: The Witness - This game is peacefully wonderful with its visuals. There are wonderful nature scenes and nests of wires and panels spreading in various parts of the island that are fascinating to look at. The environment is half of the gameplay in most areas, so it’s important to look around even though exploration is not really the gameplay. You find puzzles in the world, even in nature, and it’s fascinating. The colors are bright and beautiful. There is even a map in the middle of the island inside of a lake that helps you track your progress if you notice it (it isn’t like a normal ‘map’).

Favorite Soundtrack: Shin Megami Tensei IV - I love video game soundtracks, but SMTIV is something special. The music booms in ways that make you really understand the atmosphere of the world, and there’s a great mix of different kinds of tracks for different places. I love the tracks for the other worlds you enter, and the themes of the different routes are done so well. Some of the music draws from past SMT games, but the remixes done for this game really are stunning to me, and there’s so many fantastic original tracks.

Hardest Game: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - I love this game but I literally never touch it without a walkthrough, which is why it gets to be the hardest game on the list, despite being a point and click adventure game lol. Also just emotionally this game is challenging too, but I definitely mean this more in terms of getting a ‘perfect run’.

Funniest Game: The Stanley Parable - Trying to make this list has taught me that I don’t really play many ‘funny games’. I don’t know if a game where multiple endings demand that you kill yourself should count as a ‘funniest game’, but it is also a game where the narrator tells you to stare at a fern and memorize its features, so....it counts.

Game I Like that is Hated: RWBY Grimm Eclipse - I’ve been playing this game since it was in early access and have loved it the whole time. I find the gameplay soothing and fun, and I like playing the different characters. It’s a game I play to chill out and just enjoy some fun battle mechanics. It’s a fun game and I’ve spent over 100 hours in it, so I hope I like it, lol.

Game I Hate that is Liked: Nier Automata - Neither this game’s gameplay or story impress me, and the fact that you have to replay basically the same stuff from a more boring-to-play-character’s pov in order to SEE all of the plot is a huge damper on the experience. The story, to me, someone who engages with a lot of robot-focused fiction, is far from impressive or new, and it hardly engages with genre specifics at all, let alone in a new or interesting way. I view this game as ‘a story with robots in it’ rather than ‘a story about robots’, which, to me, is a detriment.

Underrated: Nevermind - This game is amazing and very unheard of--and when it is heard of, it has been marketed incorrectly. Nevermind seems like a horror game, and does market itself as one a bit, but it’s much more than that. It’s more about trauma, recovery, therapy, etc. This is a game that is so mindful about the topics it engages in that I am impressed by it every time. It’s heavy with symbolism and character, despite lacking conversations or other similar game mechanics. This is a lovely game that I really wish more people knew about-`p5-all of the patients are so interesting, and the focus on recovery and mental health is impressive.

Overrated: Fire Emblem - I sort of mean this as the series as a whole really. I have enjoyed the entries I have played somewhat, but I overall consider the series much less impressive than I was led to believe by others. The gameplay especially is not impressive to me in any regard, even though I sometimes do find myself enjoying it. The stories are alright, but many of them are weighed down by the gameplay and as a writer and person who likes to analyze writing, it’s very hard to do so when it isn’t able to fully exist under the chains the gameplay forces on it. There are ways to mix gameplay and story well, Fire Emblem has not really done that in any of the entries I’ve played. That being said, I don’t regret playing them, and I will occasionally replay, but I consider them mediocre games at best.

Best Voice Acting: Devil Survivor 2 - I love the voice acting in this game. I feel like all the characters are really suited to their voices, and it’s really easy for me to visualize their voices. They really bring the game to life and make both the dramatic and the funny scenes more enjoyable.

Worst Voice Acting: Jedi Knight Jedi Academy - I love this game, I really do, but some of the voice acting is janky. Some of it is okay too--I think Kyle Katarn’s voice actor does fine, and some of the others I like NOW but hated when I was a kid, but the male protagonist voice in this game is just awful. Which is bad when Jennifer Hale is the female voice actress lol. His performance is passable though unless you’re playing darksided--the darksided ending to the game lacks all punch when you’re playing the male protagonist.

Favorite Male: Battler Ushiromiya from Umineko no Naku Koro Ni - He’s the protagonist for most of the visual novels and I adore him utterly, especially once you move past episode 2. He’s a wonderful character who I care about deeply. I love his drive and how he fights--he’s someone who is easy to cheer for. He matures well throughout the series and his character development is just wonderful.

Favorite Female: Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4 - I really like how Naoto fits so well in the game, especially for being a final recruit--oftentimes the final recruit of Persona games (post 3) have a bit of a more difficult time feeling right with the group. Naoto works really well though, and I love her struggles and story as well. I think the difficulties she has concerning living as a woman in her field hit very deep to a problem that has existed for a very long time.

Favorite Protagonist: Connor of Daventry from King’s Quest 8 Mask of Eternity - I’m like, one of four fans of this character in the world, lol. KQ8 is not a very well liked game and it does have a lot of issues, both with age and with how much of a departure it is from the series prior to it. It’s strange to take a puzzle adventure game and make it a hybrid with what basically is a shooter, and it doesn’t really work. Add to that the fact that you spend most of your time in the game without anyone around to talk to and it leads to this really polarizing and weird experience. For me, Conner goes through what I would consider to be the ‘Ultimate Nightmare Scenario”. Everyone in the world is turned to stone except him (and he survived out of mere chance) and so now it’s up to him, practically alone, to save the entire world. There is no game lonelier than this. I adore him for his bravery in the face of it, and how he just picks up to do what must be done because someone should do it, and if no one else can, then he will. I also really love how he apologizes to people who are encased in stone while he takes money from their houses to help him on his journey. I really do think he went back after the game was over and gave everyone heaps of gold to pay them back with interest lol.

Favorite Village: Oakvale from Fable - The first Fable is the only one I really like, and it was one of the games I played when I was little, so the hometown in the game always meant a lot to me. I like how you grow up there and how your tragic backstory is there--and then how you get to return to the town years later after you’ve come into your own, and you can see it completely rebuilt. I like to spend a lot of my time in this town, just wandering around it and playing the minigames. Even though I have a house in every town, Oakvale is where my hero calls home.

Most Hated Character: Merril from Dragon Age 2 - I don’t really want to lay into how I feel about Merril, but what I will say is that it was suggested to me that I totally ignore her when playing, and I did so. I only met her for her quest, dropped her off in town, and literally never spoke to her or interacted for the rest of the game. I had a much better experience for it, honestly. She appeared after I made my choice in the end of the game, which felt weird since I hadn’t spoken to her in several ingame years, but other than that, the game was totally fine without her. I sort of just wish you could kill characters in DA2 the way you can in DAO, then I’d just do that, tbh. It doesn’t suit very many (or any) of the characters I rp in DA2 to keep her around or support her in any way.

First Game I Played: Mixed up Mother Goose Deluxe - I’m not actually sure if this is the FIRST game I’ve ever played or not, but it’s one of the first I played alone as a kid. I really loved it--this is probably what created my love for point and click adventures, and the game was very silly and fun.

Favorite Company: Bioware - I’ve always been a sucker for Bioware games, ever since Knights of the Old Republic 1 was my favorite childhood game. I love how they do stories and party members, and while I’m not a fan of all of their games, I really love what they’ve made and their style of storytelling and character driven plot. Even though sometimes their stories get cliche, I think the suit video games well and most of my early gaming was within their games.

Hated Company: EA - Bioware truly only started to go to shit after the EA acquisition, so I fucking hate EA. I know Bioware had issues before EA too, but I definitely don’t think EA has helped the situation whatsoever.

Depressing Game: The Beginner’s Guide - I relate to this game as a creator and a writer, and it affects me deeply because of the story it tells and the questions it raises. It makes me reflect on how I think of myself as a creator, and it reminds me of friendships I used to have.

Creepy Game: The Path - God, I love this game. It’s just aimlessly wandering around and finding symbolic scenery and watching your current character comment on it. Then, you go off to find your girl’s wolf, and each one is different and unique to her, and you watch it ‘kill’ her--and facing her wolf is the only way each girl can truly mature. Whenever you get to grandmother’s house, the camera switches to first person, and your eyes keep closing, so you can only see while clicking to move. It forces you to keep moving so that you can see, but since you are moving, you only get to see things somewhat vaguely. It’s got a great atmosphere, and I love the symbolic storytelling.

Happy Game: Eastshade - This game is so sweet. There’s some drama around to with many of the quests, but I like this as an rpg without combat, and I think this would be a really good kids game. There’s a lot to see and explore, and the game was made to be really pretty so that you want to paint several aspects of it. It’s really lovely to just wander around in this game and bike around the area, painting anything that suits your fancy. As long as you don’t finish the main quest, you’re free to wander, and materials do respawn, so you essentially can infinitely paint once you get far enough.

Favorite Ending: Virtue’s Last Reward - I love the questions this game asks and where the ending goes. It thematically ties together--the whole reason the game itself exists is to get the attention of a ‘higher being’--the player, essentially. I love how it plays with that concept, and even though the final game in the series doesn’t entirely pick this idea up where this game left it, standalone this game is stunning in how it comes together.

#shitpost #long post #this was fun to do #i made it so every answer was a different video game and i tried to mix up my companies as well #got 3 atlus games on here but mer #2 obsidon #llol #2 sierra too haha but still #beginner's guide and tsp were made by the same guy too but #STILL I LIMITED MYSELF OK #these answers aren't absolute because i was trying to have a good diverse list lol

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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How Ted Lasso Sneakily Crafted its Empire Strikes Back Season

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This article contains Ted Lasso spoilers through season 2 episode 8.

Perhaps you’ve heard, but Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso was the subject of some dreaded Discourse recently.

Since the Internet is infinite and we privileged few in the media have nothing but time, a handful of features came out weeks ago essentially questioning what Ted Lasso season 2 was even all about. Many of these features were well-written, well-argued, and fair, but when filtered through Twitter’s anti-nuance machine (i.e. Twitter itself), every feature boiled down to the same reductive take: Ted Lasso season 2 doesn’t have a conflict.

In some respects, this take was the inevitable reaction to the metanarrative surrounding Ted Lasso in the first place. Despite drawing its inspiration from a series of somewhat cynical NBC Sports Premier League commercials, the first season of Ted Lasso was all about the transformative power of kindness.

Or at least that’s what we critics declared it to be. And I don’t blame us. Awash in a flood of screeners about antiheroes, dystopias, and the end of the world, the simple kindness of Ted Lasso seemed revolutionary. They made a TV show about a guy who is…nice? They can do that? But the inherent goodness of its lead character was always Ted Lasso’s elevator pitch, not its thesis.

There’s been a darkness at the center of Ted Lasso since its very first moment, when an American man got on a flight to London in a doomed attempt to save his marriage. And, as season 2’s brilliant eighth episode rolls around, it’s become clear that that darkness is what the show has really been “about” this whole time.

Season 2 episode 8 “Man City” (the title is referring to AFC Richmond’s FA Cup match against opponent Manchester City but also stealthily reveals that this installment will be all about men and their respective traumas) is quite simply the best episode of Ted Lasso yet. It also might be the best episode of television this year. Near the episode’s end, right before AFC Richmond plays a crucial FA Cup match against the mighty Manchester City, coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) finally comes clean with his coaching staff. He’s been suffering from panic attacks of late. His assistant coaches hear him, accept him, and then head off to the pitch where Man City absolutely obliterates their team.

Man City destroys AFC Richmond. They annihilate them. Embarrass them. Stuff them into a locker and steal their lunch money. The final score is 4-0 but it might as well be 400-0. The coaching staff is rattled but the players are hit even harder. Richmond’s star striker and former Man City player Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) is forced to endure watching his scumbag father cheer for his hometown team from the Wembley Stadium stands at the expense of his son.

After the game, Jamie’s father, James (Kieran O’Brien), enters the locker room where he drunkenly accosts him for being a loser and demands that Jamie grant access to the Wembley Stadium pitch for him and his scumbag friends to run around on. When Jamie refuses, his father pushes him, so Jamie reflexively punches him right in the face. James is dragged out of the locker room by Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), leading a stunned and traumatized Jamie Tartt standing in the middle of the room, as if in a spotlight of pure pain, surrounded by teammates too afraid to even approach him. And then something amazing happens…

Here’s the dirty secret about television: there’s a lot of it. Due to the sheer number of TV shows released each year, even the best of them are destined to become little more than memories long-term. Sometimes all you can ask from multiple episodes and seasons of television is to provide you with one moment, one line, or one warm feeling to carry with you into the future. I don’t know how much I’ll remember from Ted Lasso 30-40 years from now when I’m immobile and reclined in my floating entertainment unit, Wall-E style. But I know I’ll at least remember the moment that Roy hugs Jamie.

The great Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) – a character so disconnected from his own emotions that some fans are convinced he’s CGI – embraces the one person in the world he is least likely to embrace. As Roy and Jamie wordlessly hug, it’s hard to tell which man is more shocked by the moment. Ultimately, however, it might be Ted Lasso himself who is hit hardest. Shortly after seeing Roy play father to the younger Jamie, Ted quickly exits the locker room and calls sports psychologist Dr. Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles) on his Apple TV+-apporved iPhone.

“My father killed himself when I was 16. That happened. To me and to my mom,” Ted says, weeping.

And that, my friends, is what Ted Lasso is all about. Pain. And dads. But mostly pain.

None of us can say that Ted Lasso didn’t warn us it was coming. To go back to the discourse of it all real quick – I don’t blame anyone for not picking up on the direction that this show was so clearly heading in. Ted Lasso is, first and foremost, a sitcom. The beauty of sitcoms is that you welcome them into your home to watch at your own pace and your own terms. If having Ted Lasso on in the background so you can occasionally see the handsome mustache man who smiles while you fold your laundry is the way you’ve chosen to engage with the show, then great! Just know that season 2 has been operating on a deeper level this whole time as well.

Let’s take things all the way back to the beginning – back to before season 2 even began. You’ve likely heard the old philosophical thought experiment “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well Jason Sudeikis’s interviews leading up the season 2 premiere beg an equally as interesting hypothetical “how many times can one man mention The Empire Strikes Back before someone notices??”

Sudeikis referred to Ted Lasso season 2 as the show’s “Empire Strikes Back” multiple times before the premiere including in his local Kansas City Star and his technically local USA Today. The show even explicitly mentions the second Star Wars film in this season’s first episode when Richmond general manager Higgins (Jeremy Swyft) tells Ted that his kids are watching the trilogy for the first time. Sudeikis (who co-created and produces the show) and showrunner Bill Lawrence clearly want us to take the idea that Ted Lasso season 2 is The Empire Strikes Back seriously. And why would that be?

Think of how ESB differs from its two Star Wars siblings in the original trilogy. This is the story that features arguably the series most iconic moment when Luke Skywalker discovers his dad is a dick on a literal universal level. It also has the only unambiguously downer ending of any original trilogy Star Wars film. Luke is thoroughly defeated in this installment. Having one’s hand chopped off by their father and barely escaping with their life is definitely the Star Wars version of a 4-0 defeat.

The Empire Strikes Back can safely be boiled down into two concepts:

Dads are complicated.

Everything sucks.

When viewed through those two conceptual prisms, so much of Ted Lasso season 2 begins to make more sense.

Episode 1 opens with the death of a dog and then leads into a classic Ted Lasso speech that could serve as this season’s mission statemetn. After recounting the story of how he cared for his sick neighbor’s dog, Ted concludes with: “It’s funny to think about the things in your life that can make you cry knowing that they existed then become the same thing that can make you cry knowing that they’re now gone. Those things come into our lives to help us get from one place to a better one.”

Things like…a father who you didn’t have nearly enough time with? Following episode 1 (and following just about every episode this season), Bill Lawrence took to Twitter to assuage viewers’ fears about a lack of central conflict this season. He had this to say about Ted’s big speech.

Look, Merrill. It was thought out, but the speech he gives after (Written by Jason himself – I loved it) is the core of the season, but we knew some people might bum out.

— Bill Lawrence (@VDOOZER) July 27, 2021

Sorry, truly. Ted’s speech after (which I love, but am obviously biased) is a big part of the season. But it sounds like you had a crappy thing happen recently.

— Bill Lawrence (@VDOOZER) July 28, 2021

It’s not. But Ted’s speech has big relevance. Stick around!

— Bill Lawrence (@VDOOZER) July 26, 2021

He also had this to say about dads.

Effin Dads, man. Love mine so, but he’s struggling a bit.

— Bill Lawrence (@VDOOZER) July 27, 2021

“Effin dads” and our complicated relationships with them are all over Ted Lasso season 2. In the very next episode, Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) tells Ted “You know, my father says that every time you’re on TV, he’s very happy that I’m here. That I’m in safe hands with you.”

Ted smiles at this bit of info but not as warmly as you might expect. Because to Ted, a dad isn’t a reassuring presence but rather someone you love who will just leave when you need him the most. That’s why he’s been trying to be the perfect father figure this whole time. That’s why he did something as extreme as leaving his family behind in Kansas while he heads off to London. If giving his wife space was the only way to preserve the family and remain a good dad, then he was going to give her a whole ocean of space.

Moreover, Ted hasn’t just been trying to serve as a father figure to his son this whole time but to everyone else as well. Sam’s comment to Ted reminds him that not everyone has a good dad, which encourages him to bring Jamie into the fold in the first place.

As time goes on, however, the stress of being the consummate father to everyone in his orbit begins to wear on Ted. Throughout the entirety of this season, Ted Lasso appears to be trying to be Ted Lasso just a bit too hard. His energy levels are too high. His jokes go on too long. The same life lessons that worked last year aren’t working this year. AFC Richmond opens with an embarrassing streak of draws before Jamie’s immense talents set things straight.

It all culminates in this season’s sixth episode when Ted has his second panic attack in as many years. This time it’s in public during an important game. The experience sends Ted running through the concourse of the stadium until he somehow ends up in the dark on Dr. Fieldstone’s couch, instinctively, like a wounded animal.

It’s certainly no coincidence that this panic attack occurs on the same day that Ted received a call from his son’s school asking him to pick him up, not realizing that he’s an ocean away. In that moment, Ted can’t help but remember what it’s like to be left behind by his own father and subconsciously wonder if he’s doing the same.

Though the shallow waters of Ted Lasso season 2 may have appeared consequence free for half its run, beneath the surface was a tidal wave of conflict. Just because the conflict wasn’t taking place between a happy-go-lucky football coach and a villainous owner doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

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Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is terrible at meeting deadlines but great at writing. According to him (and William Faulkner, from whom he borrows the quote), the only conflict worth writing about is that of the human heart with itself. That’s something that The Empire Strikes Back understood. And it’s something that Ted Lasso season 2 does as well.

The post How Ted Lasso Sneakily Crafted its Empire Strikes Back Season appeared first on Den of Geek.

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ts1989fanatic · 4 years ago

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Taylor Swift is the millennial Bruce Springsteen.

If there were any doubts about this, they should have been dispelled by her latest release: the haunting Folklore, which filters the exact kinds of story-songs Springsteen excels at through Swift’s modern, orchestral-pop aesthetic. The album has been one of the best-received of her career, but then, the response to essentially everything she’s produced since her 2010 album Speak Now has involved critics grudgingly being dragged toward having respect for her skills.

The overlaps between millennial Swift (30 and born in 1989) and baby boomer Springsteen (70 and born in 1949) — both of whom are among the best songwriters alive right now — are considerable beyond their songwriting prowess. But comparisons, by necessity, must start there.

Both musicians love songs about a kind of white Americana that’s never really existed but that the central characters of which feel compelled to chase anyway. They use those songs to tell stories about those people and the places they live. They’re terrifically good at wordplay. Both are fascinated by the ways that adolescence and memories of adolescence continue to have incredible power for adults. Both are amazing at crafting bridges that take already good songs to another level. And both write songs featuring fictional people whose lives are sketched in via tiny, intimate details that stand in for their whole selves.

For example: The opening lines to Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” (“The screen door slams / Mary’s dress waves / Like a vision she dances across the porch / as the radio plays”) tell you everything about that woman and the man observing her.

Similarly, the opening lines of Swift’s “All Too Well” (“I walked through the door with you, the air was cold / but something ‘bout it felt like home somehow and I / left my scarf there at your sister’s house / and you still got it in your drawer even now”) tell you everything about this doomed relationship and the nostalgia both people involved in it still feel, compressed into a tiny little stanza.

Springsteen released “Thunder Road” when he was 25; Swift released “All Too Well” when she was 22. Both songs continue to stand as touchstones for who the artists were at that point in their lives.

But leave this comparison aside for a moment. What’s most interesting about drawing this connection are the ways in which the overlap between Springsteen and Swift’s styles can tell us about how our culture treats art made by men versus art made by women — and art made by baby boomers versus art made by millennials.

Springsteen and Swift each entered the music industry as young wunderkinds with lots to prove. Springsteen’s first album — the loose and rambling Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. — was released when he was just 23. He had been playing in bands all around New Jersey for most of his teens, and signed a record deal with Columbia Records at 22.

He was expected to become an acoustic folk singer in the vein of Bob Dylan, at a time when the music industry was uniquely preoccupied with finding the “next” Bob Dylan. Springsteen quickly flaunted those expectations, assembling a group of musicians who would go on to be known as the E Street Band, in the name of creating a sound that captured a massive, orchestral blast of rock. Springsteen would finally perfect this sound on his third album, 1975’s Born to Run, and he’s been a global superstar ever since, even decades after reaching his pinnacle with 1984’s Born in the USA.

Swift’s rise was slightly more meteoric. She released her debut album, Taylor Swift, when she was just 16, and it featured songs that she had written as a freshman in high school. Swift broke into the industry via country music, and her country-ish second album, 2008’s Fearless, won her the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Just as Springsteen shirked folk in the name of rock, Swift’s sound quickly shifted away from the girl-with-a-guitar country archetype and more toward pop. By her fourth album, 2012’s Red, she had largely left country music behind.

(A fun game: If you line up Swift and Springsteen’s album releases roughly by how old they were when they recorded them, you’ll find surprisingly similar career trajectories. For instance, Born to Run and Swift’s 2014 album 1989 were released when their respective artists were 25. Both broke the artists through to even wider acclaim than they had before.)

Yet the two artists’ backgrounds are quite different, which may explain the different ways in which they’ve understood American political divides. Springsteen grew up in a blue-collar family in New Jersey, while Swift is the daughter of a former Merrill Lynch stockbroker who could afford to move the entire family to Nashville, Tennessee, when his daughter showed a talent for songwriting.

Springsteen’s songs have always reflected growing up in a world where poverty is just a lost paycheck away, even as he’s become incredibly rich. Swift has no such perspective. Her songs take place largely in a wistful world where money is rarely an object. And the artists came of age in very different political climates, too.

But the political divide has narrowed in recent years. Swift has taken a recent turn toward more political topics — particularly social justice issues involving the mistreatment of women and LGBTQ rights. That turn stems from her struggles to differentiate herself as an artist in an industry that routinely turns young, beautiful women into disposable products, wringing out of them a few years of hit singles and then tossing them aside. Her embrace of the ways her growing sense of (extremely white) feminism helped her attain more artistic control over her image has slowly but surely led to a greater understanding of the yawning disparities inherent to the US. She is more tapped into the ways that power is unequally distributed throughout American society and increasingly speaks out to that effect. (She’s still pretty lousy at confronting class issues, though.)

But even with all of their similarities as songwriters and increasing similarities as explicitly political artists — and even with all of the awards they have won and records they have sold — there’s still a knee-jerk insistence that Swift is either too self-obsessed or too much a creation of the music industry, while Springsteen went from being rock’s heir apparent to an elder statesman with only a few bumps along the way. And the reasons for that disparity go well beyond any artistic differences or similarities they might possess.

The most obvious difference between the reception of Springsteen and Swift is also the most obvious difference between the two of them as people: He is a man, and she is a woman.

Swift didn’t exactly discourage listeners from constantly parsing her lyrics to figure out which of her famous exes she was singing about early in her career; she even hid hints in her liner notes to help fans decode her clues. But the degree to which she was written off, for years, as a fundamentally unserious and self-involved artist reflects the ways in which domestic and romantic concerns are written off as unimportant when women talk about them.

By comparison, Springsteen has so many songs about teenage boys crushing on teenage girls, but few people try to figure out who he’s talking about when he mentions the almost mythical “Mary” in songs throughout his career. Perhaps it’s because he wasn’t dating famous people as a teenager, and perhaps because it’s sadly still too common to think a man singing about an adolescent crush has more artistic merit than a woman doing the same thing.

Even in the wake of Folklore’s release, many corners of the music-discussing internet insist upon talking about the album more in terms of Swift’s male collaborators — namely Aaron Dessner of The National and Justin Vernon (a.k.a. Bon Iver), both indie-rock royalty — than in terms of her own talents, even when, say, Dessner does a whole interview with Pitchfork talking extensively about Swift’s preternatural songwriting talents. The idea that Taylor Swift has somehow been “created” by someone is one that seems to persist, regardless of how much control she has over her own image.

But the ways in which people doubt Swift’s talent, or her control over her image, reflect larger questions about how baby boomers remade pop culture in their image versus how millennials continue to do.

Baby boomers were born into the era of radio’s dominance over American airwaves, and television entered their lives during their childhoods. The presence of these mass media influenced how much pop culture boomers could be exposed to, pushing into hyperdrive the artistic loop of influence becoming creation. American popular art exploded and proliferated as a result.

Whether that explosion led to the rise of rock and pop music or the invention of the cinematic blockbuster, baby boomers took the popular forms their parents adored and accelerated them toward something more raucous and purely entertaining.

The dominant new medium of millennials’ lives was the internet, which arrived when we were still very young. And a major element of internet culture is remix culture. From the earliest days of the “information superhighway,” jokes that mashed up disparate elements of pop culture — now we’d call them memes — were incredibly common, because the central idea of the internet has always been many people iterating on an idea rather than one person releasing that idea into the world.

Inherent to this kind of remixing is the idea of transforming something, often something disreputable, into something else. Thus, many of the greatest millennial artists work in forms that have previously been written off as unworthy — like, say, pop music — because the gatekeepers in those areas weren’t as likely to be aging baby boomers whose taste was ossifying. (This progression is not all that dissimilar from what the boomers did to the popular culture they were born into.)

Millennial artists grew up amid the splintering of the monoculture and, therefore, feel less of an obligation toward it than older generations might. When all you’ve known are niches, it’s better to try to find a niche that appeals to you and explore it as much as possible, then hope enough people come along for the ride.

Swift’s eagerness to collaborate with other artists who really excite her isn’t a uniquely millennial trait: Artists have been doing this since artists have existed. That she is only too happy to spread that credit around (even as her increasingly well-known “voice memos” that show her coming up with the central ideas behind her songs center her authorship first and foremost) is a testament to how millennial artists feel comfortable with both celebrating their influences and revealing how their art gets built, brick by brick, often thanks to the work of other people.

This is not to say that all baby boomer or millennial artists operate exactly the same way as Springsteen or Swift. Both artists write music that is equal parts heartbreaking and fun, evocative, and ephemeral. They’re constantly searching for their version of an America that does not exist, while not forgetting to make sure that we all have some fun in the one that does.

The impulse they share to tell stories about average Americans searching for meaning amid a crumbling world is a natural one for artists in the US. Yet Springsteen has so often been celebrated for doing just that, his rugged vision of a fading nation and talent for making national crises deeply personal treated as authentic and brilliant.

By comparison, Swift is often derided for how she digs into the ways personal apocalypses visit themselves onto the rest of reality, making her something like Springsteen’s inverse. The struggles she faces are deeply rooted in biases against women, the genre of music she operates in, and her generation. It’s worth reexamining the notions that drive this disparity in the two artists’ reception, if nothing else.

Perhaps we take Springsteen more seriously than Swift because he’s a man, or because all the great rockers of his generation have been venerated by time and nostalgia, or because his influences were men like Chuck Berry and Woody Guthrie instead of Shania Twain, Patsy Cline, and a litany of contemporary collaborators. But one of art’s great pleasures is finding the ways in which artists of different generations talk about the same topics across the span of years.

Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift craft their impeccable story-songs utilizing the tropes of very different musical genres. But they’re equally good at crafting songs built to both sing loudly on the freeway and accompany a flood of tears in the wake of some new heartache. Different as they might be, Springsteen and Swift are always talking about the same thing — all of the ways that every new day, no matter how promising, carries within it the potential to bring about the end of the world all over again. Until then, though, let’s sing about it.

ts1989fanatic all of that just to Tell us something swifties have known for years, the music industry is sexist and misogynistic DUH!!!

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kita-lavellan · 5 years ago

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Beyond The Veil Discord OC-Asks

We have an OC-Question-Time channel on our Beyond The Veil Discord, and I keep forgetting to Copy/Paste my answers from there to here, so I’m about to do a single large post! To those of you still waiting on answers from my Ask Box, I’ll get to them I promise ^_^

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Q. Why might someone dislike them? For kita -- From @rivainisomniari A. She's stubborn. She knows she's stubborn, but Kita doesn't often realise when she's crossing the line from stubborn to just being bull-headed. Nel, her sister, is often the one to call her on this behavior and force her to back down.

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Q. What Hogwarts House would they be in? -- From @rivainisomniari A. Kita would be a Ravenclaw

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Q. When bored, how do they pass time? For Kita -- From @rivainisomniari A. Running. Kita loves running. As a child she would spend hours running through the forests and wilds with Nel. She misses it while at Haven, but once they reach Skyhold she often runs around the battlements, people getting out of her way with the assumption she is rushing to speak to an advisor.

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Q. When publishing a book it is wise to make comparisons with well known published works, to help a publisher see your understanding of the market, and also to help them decide on the best way to market your manuscript. So, that thought in mind, whom can you compare (from other popular media) your OCs too? -- From @mrstethras A. Oh nice question!! Kita is a cross between Elsa from Frozen, Loki (Marvel) and someone I'd LIKE to be :D ... Ghilana Mahariel, my Warden, is a bit of a blend with Natasha Romanova (Black Widow from Marvel), and Rupunzel from Disney's Tangled... Malia Hawke is a Self Insert, but with a dash of Killian Jones from Once Upon A Time for some sassy Hawke-Sarcasm

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Q. What do they value most in others? -- From @noire-pandora A. Honesty! Kita would rather you outright tell her you don't want to speak about something than LIE about it.

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Q. Who is your inquisitor's best friend in the Inquisition? -- From @rivainisomniari A. Kita's favourite people are Dorian, Leliana and Varric. Dorian wormed his way into her heart very quickly by being so protective of her during the Redcliff mission. She found it amusing, but also sweet and endearing, and the whole mission was a fast-bonding experience for the pair. Watching Leliana be willing to die for her to, washed away the wariness and caution Kita had carried for the inquisition up until that point, but especially for Leli when the woman was so clear in telling her she would do it again, once they're back in their proper time. Varric was the first person, after her sister, to ask how SHE was, which made a soft spot for him, and honestly, who can't like Varric eventually?

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Q. Is there any situation in which they would make a deal with a demon? -- From @noire-pandora A. Tough one! Kita has always been very connected to the Fade and the spirits within! She would probably barter and/or bargain with a spirit, because she is familiar with in her interactions with them, demons are still spirits but corrupted, so she would probably either avoid them or try to help them, especially after she learns more about spirits and the Fade from Solas throughout the Inquisition timeline.

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Q. Name one big flaw for your ocs? -- From @mrstethras A. Kita is slow to trust others, especially humans. She is aware that she distrusts people outside of her clan, but Kita doesn’t see it as a flaw, simply being cautious. Sometimes overly cautious, but she tries to balance her distrust with logic where she can. Ghilana's automatic response to someone showing any interest in her is to be abrasive, abrupt, and rude. She doesn't give people the benefit of the doubt, or chances, if they want her companionship they need to work at it and/or earn it. She comes across as a cold-hearted bitch, but if you persevere and crack that outershell she's a marshmallow. Malia's flaw is thinking she could have stopped or prevented anything and everything that goes wrong around her. Usually something Lydia has done, that she feels she could have predicted and avoided.

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Q. Do they have any family? -- From @rivainisomniari A. Kita has her sister, Nel (@mrstethras‘ Character) and their grandmother, Deshana, other than that, no. their father died when they were young, and their mother died during the War Table mission/attack on wycomb. Ghilana doesn't have any family that she knows of. Her father was killed by humans and city elves, and her mother wandered into the forest never to return when she was a baby. Ashalle raised her, and she considers the woman family, but she's not blood family. Malia has her older sister, @mrstethras‘ Hawke, Lydia. There's also her brother Carver and her sister Bethany, both of whom survive the trip to Kirkwall.

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Q. Are they close to their family? -- From @randomfallout4posts A. Kita is VERY close to Nel. She was fairly close to Deshana, but felt like she had to keep some of her magical talents hidden from the woman, because they weren't strictly "normal". Once she was able to be more free with herself with the Inquisition, and with Solas and Nel in particular away from the Clan, she began to feel less close to her grandmother and more judged for the ease with which she communed with spirits. Ghilana is not particularly close with her family. She struggles with the idea that Ashalle is not her "real" mother, and feels guilty for thinking like that. Tamlen was the closest thing she had to a 'real' family in her mind, and she had to abandon him, it took her a long time to begin to trust Briar and Alistair and instantly latched onto the first elf she saw with tattoo's (Zevran). He becomes her family, and as soon as the Darkspawn Threat is under control, she follows him to Antiva to kick his ass for being gone for so long. Malia... *sigh* She is SUPER close with Lydia, and despite being the younger of the two, she feels responsible for the other girl, especially since Lydia struggles with their father's death the most. Having no one older to share her magical talents with was difficult too and so Malia did her best to support and back up Lydia as much as she could. She struggled to connect with Carver, and they disagree on a lot of things, but they love each other despite it and they bond particularly closely during the battle of Ostagar, helping each other survive what was otherwise a slaughter of epic proportions. Malia adores Bethany, and coddles the younger girl, giving her anything and everything she can. She picked up pick-pocketing to buy Bethany birthday presents, and it's how she fond her way to learning a rogue's skill set. Malia does not get on with her mother, and often goes out of her way to annoy the woman so that Leandra will aim her vitriol at Malia instead of Lydia.

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Q. Where's their favourite place to be kissed? -- From @mrstethras A. Kita loves the tips of her ears being nibbled on, and the junction where neck becomes shoulder. Ghilana loves the back of her neck being kissed, especially once her hair grows out and Zev has to push it out of the way to reach it. Also kisses trailing down her spine. Malia ends up a shivering wreck if her hips and thighs get kissed, but also the palm of her hand while her eyes are locked with her lovers.

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Q. Your OC’s favourite pastimes when they're not gallivanting, murdering or hunting Dread Wolves? -- From @mrstethras A. For Kita; Running, Reading, and/or singing. Post Trespasser she's learning how to control using a god damned foci, and pretending to be dead, but that's an essay for another time Ghilana's favourite pastime used to be huntng... until she had to spend the whole blight hunting for their party since no one else knew how. How her favourite pastime is annoying Brair, and sitting quietly/stargazing, while Zev braids and/or plays with her hair. Malia's favourite pastime used to be pick pocketing the Templars and Chantry Sisters and redistributing the wealth amongst the citizens of Lothering. Once they reached Kirkwall, she enjoyed hanging out with her friends, and helping them with what they were doing, when she had time. Keeping the patients at Anders clinic entertained until he could see them. Helping Merrill go shopping. Helping Fenris rearrange the furniture in the mansion etc.

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Q. Name one regret of your OC’s? -- From @mrstethras A. Kita: Not going to Wycome herself and keeping her mother safe. Also, for not doing/saying/being enough so that Solas could feel he could trust her. Ghilana: Not insisting that she search for Tamlen. Ghilana regrets letting Duncan talk her into leaving with him immediately. Malia has lots of regrets, but the biggest one is that she didn't push Anders for more answers, when she knew the ingredients he'd collected were intrinsic components for an explosive.

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Q. Are they tall or short or somewhere in between? -- From @randomfallout4posts and @silvanils A. For a modern Elf, Kita is Tall. She's on the upper end of the height range for MALE elves at 5'8.... having said that, it's one of the first things that draws her attention about Solas, he's one of the only elves she's ever met taller than her, and he's taller than her by a fair margin. // Kita is tall for a modern elf. Tall for a MALE modern elf. Ghilana is small, around 5'1 and slight. She can, almost literally, hide behind a tree. It helps with her stealth abilities, and her speed, but it's why she focused mainly on a bow to keep a distance from stronger opponents. Zev fixes that, telling her she needs to know how to defend herself, and teacher her to dual weild daggers. // Ghilana is average for a female modern elf, but she comes across as looking smaller because she's slight as well. Malia is average, around 5'6/7. A little taller than her older sister, but not by much. // Malia is average for a human female.

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Q. Has Varric given them a nickname? If yes what is it and how did they get it? -- From @this-basic-mage A. Varric HAS given Kita a Nickname ^_^ It's Satina! She's a night owl, and so often wanders Skyhold late. Plus her whole colour's/aesthetics are blues and silvers.... Satina is, also, canonically the name of Thedas' moon. Malia finds it hilarious the Varric calls her sister simply "Hawke" and it annoys Lydia no end when he starts giving Malia the nickname "Copper". She's considered a bit of a "bad penny" by many, especially whenshe spends a lot of her time in Darktown, and is known to be a prolific pickpocket, but Varric also chose the name because of the burnished copper undertones to her otherwise dark brown hair.

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Q. Pick any god from greek/norse pantheons for your o.c to "be" -- From @rivainisomniari A. I'm not sure I know enough about mythology off the top of my head to say for most of them. Kita has some Loki in her, with her playfulness and love of wolves (even before the whole Fen'Harel reveal, she's always admired the Emerald Knights) Ghilana would be Athena, goddess of the hunt. Owls for nightime and stargazing, and the stealth aspects of her character etc. Not sure who Malia would be. Is there a mythological god or goddess of chaos and disaster OTHER than Loki?

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Q. Since the game has them: A tarot card for your o.cs. -- From @rivainisomniari A. After some research, I think Kita would be the High Priestess, meaning Intuitive, unconscious inner voice. Ghilana would be the Hierophant Reversed, meaning Rebellion, subversivness and new approaches. Malia would be the Tower, meaning sudden upheaval, broken pride, and disaster. Research Source: https://labyrinthos.co/blogs/tarot-card-meanings-list

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Q. What is it that drew y'all's OC’s to their LIs? -- From @bratwurstprophecy A. Tough one because it was me drawn to Solas before Kita was. I think it was the way Solas almost immediately told Cassandra that Kita couldn't have opened the breach. She read it as an elf defending an elf, a mage defending a mage, and it made her respect him very quickly. His opinions on the Dalish were painful but didn't surprise her. At the Keeper's first she's been to the meetings of the clans and knew how unwelcoming some of the other clans were towards outsiders, but it made her want to show him not all Dalish were like that... then she began talking magic and the fade and spirits with him, and a lot of his opinions on those aligned with what she'd always felt but had been told was wrong, and that was it, she was basically a goner. Ghilana was drawn to Zev, despite the fact he tried to kill her, because he was the first elf she'd seen since leaving her clan, and she figured he might be useful, help her hunt for the party (Ahahahhahaha). His warmth and easy going attitude though is what endeared him to her, he easily let her abrasiveness roll off him, and that was something she'd encountered only rarely and valued highly. Malia saw a lot of her sisters in Anders, a mage run ragged hiding from the Chantry, but still a kind soul wanting to help. She wanted to help him, to find a way to separate him from Justice so neither of them became corrupted in spite of their mutual good intentions. She can often seen the glimpses of the man he was before he merged with Justice, and while she loves him as he is, she wishes she could see more of the lighthearted and playful man he was before because it's those glimpses of gentle care and humor that draw her in like a moth to a flame.

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Q. What's your OC's favorite food? -- From @randomfallout4posts A. For Kita Lavellan, an Elfroot based stew her mother used to make, and Lemon flavored frilly cakes from Val Royeux For Malia Hawke , she never thought she's miss it, but a simple ferelden vegetable pie brings back happier memories of family meals with her siblings and both her parents in their cosy kitchen in Lothering. Ghilana Mahariel used to love roasted rabbit, but she hunted and cooked so many of them during the 5th blight she now can't stomach the sight of them. She loves exploring antivan spices, and the different flavors they can make when being mixed together in different combinations, and on different meats, so although it's not a "food", Antivan Spices would be her answer.

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Q. CAFFEINE. I must know what your ocs first reaction to coffee was. For inquisitors, their first taste was likely when Bull offers it in the Storm Coast, unless they came from noble roots and got lucky. -- From @lacrymosa-of-lavellan A. Kita firmly believes that coffee is a creation of the gods. Perhaps Ghilan'nain. It finally means she can stay awake long enough to get through the stacks of paperwork that Josephine keeps leaving on her desk, and still have enough energy to go and fall asleep read a book on Solas' couch. Ghilana doesn't drink it, unless Zevran serves it up with a metric tonne of sugar, and at least half the cup being made up of milk. Malia Hawke takes coffee as part of her regular morning ritual, but only if she makes it herself. Too many times has she picked up her sister, Lydia’s, coffee, only to splutter on the strong taste of whiskey or rum that's been added to it.

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Q. If you could use a song (or entire album if you like) to sum up one of your OCs in terms of personality and whatnot, or even just similar vibes, what would it be? -- From @bratwurstprophecy A. Kita Lavellan would get the Frozen 2 Soundtrack, but specifically "Into The Unknown" or "Show Yourself"

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Q. The most important oc / otp question: Who shares their thinmints and who tells the other to go heck off? -- From @lacrymosa-of-lavellan A. Kita would share, and Solas would not. We know he has a sweet tooth! Between Malia and Anders, I think both of them would share. They both know what it's like to go without, and how a little treat can bring someone's mood up. As for Ghilana, Zev would spoil her with all sorts of exotic foods and sweet treats, and Ghilana would not share them (even if he asked) ;-)

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Q. If your oc was in a modern time (or if they're brave as heck in da times) do they have any (non-vallaslin) tats or piercings, and if so, where? -- From @lacrymosa-of-lavellan A. Kita would not have a tattoo. Apart from the fact her mother really doesn't like them, Pre-Crestwood her Vallaslin are important and meaningful and she wouldn't want to take away from their importance by getting just 'another tattoo'. Post-Crestwood, when she knows that the Vallaslin were slave markings, she wouldn't want to be permanently marked in that way again. Ghilana does have other tattoo's besides her Vallaslin, all of which were done by Zevran. He has given her a vine that wraps around her ankle and curls up her leg with little symbols hanging from it, like charms, each charm marking an important event in their life together. Zev has also tattooed matching bands on their ring fingers, instead of wearing rings. Ghilana also has one ear pierced, to wear the earring Zev gave her during the 5th blight. It's the only piece of jewellery she regularly wears. Malia Hawke does not have any tattoo's or piercings. Her philosophy is that she does through enough pain without subjecting herself to more of it willingly.

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Q. Wood smoke or ocean breeze? -- From @lacrymosa-of-lavellan A. Kita hates the smell of the ocean. She got seasick on her way from the Freemarches to Ferelden, and the salt air always makes her feel a little queasy now. Woodsmoke on the other hand is food, and warmth and comfort and she misses the perfume of crackling pinewood. Ghilana has always loved woodsmoke smell, but when she travels with Zev and on her Grey Warden duties, she learns to love the smell of the ocean. Malia Hawke can take or leave woodsmoke. It's not terrible but after fleeing Lothering with the village burning behind her it has some difficult memories attached to the scent. Living in Kirkwall though, the fresh sea air waking her every morning was something she grew to love.

#Dragon Age #Dragon Age Origins #Dragon Age 2 #Dragon Age Inquisition #Dragon Age OC Asks #Beyond The Veil #Beyond The Veil Discord Server #Beyond The Veil OC Question Time #OC Question Time #OC Asks

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buttsonthebeach · 5 years ago

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Lost Horizon, Pt. 2

@scharoux is the sweetest and most patient soul for waiting so long for part two of this story - thank you, dear friend, for trusting me with Rhaella and her epic tale!

This long fic picks up almost directly where The Last Game last left off - with Rhaella pregnant and alone in a world where Solas has removed the Veil, despite her attempts to stop him.

My Ko-Fi || My Commissions

Part One of Lost Horizon can be found here

Other pieces about Rhaella I have written include:

1. All Things Green and Growing

2. The Long Road Back

3. The Turning of the Year

3. The Same Kind of Scar (contains explicit content)

4. World Without End (contains explicit content)

5. The Last Game Pt. 1, the Last Game Pt. 2, and the Last Game Pt. 3 (contains explicit content), and the Last Game Pt. 4

Pairing: Rhaella Lavellan x Solas, post-Trespasser

Rating: Teen for violence, references to sex

Warning: Directly referenced character death for a character from DAI, general references to death and destruction

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Merrill and Rhaella’s journey to Skyhold was slow. Isabela’s ship carried them swift and true - that part wasn’t the problem, even if the ship and all the crew seemed haunted, even if Rhaella could feel the absence of a woman she had never met as surely as she could feel the sea breeze - but once they were back on land, and traveling via horseback, her pregnancy proved a problem once more. She felt impossibly huge, her belly as big and round as the horse’s it seemed. Years of practice had made her a good rider, but the extra weight and the shift in her center of balance was even more pronounced now than it had been before, when she had ridden from Skyhold to Jader for her journey to Kirkwall.

The slow going meant she had plenty of time to take in how much had changed since that last journey, when she had been on her way to stop Solas. The burned out villages, and also the rapturous displays of light in the night sky - the dance of spirits thrilled to be free of the Veil. They rarely had to use a campfire for light, in fact. Wisps were drawn to them the way moths used to be. They frequently went to Rhaella’s belly after floating near her head and Merrill’s.

At least you’ll get beauty like this, little one.

Her magic surged towards each and every wisp when they came, but she tamped it down. Solas would know the feel of her magic, even across the distance, as surely as he would know the sound of her voice. They had not been pursued as far as they could tell, by people or by spirits, and she wanted to keep it that way. Merrill had known a draught to keep her from entering the Fade, which was their other means of concealment since they’d left.

“Poor Feynriel,” Merrill said the first time she brewed it. “I wonder what’s become of him in this world. If it makes more sense to him now, or less. Marethari made this for him while he was staying with the clan, and I learned it when we visited once. He was a Dreamer, so a draught like this didn’t always work for him, but it will be good enough for you and I. It feels like a different life to remember those times, when he was one of my biggest worries..”

“It does,” Rhaella said, even if she was only remembering a few weeks ago, when she’d been on this road going in the opposite direction, convinced she could stop the tide of Solas’s power from sweeping through and changing everything.

Sometimes on that long slow journey she lay there and was convinced the baby would never be born. She would be trapped like this forever, huge and waiting, adrift. She wondered how many other pregnant mothers lay awake in Thedas staring at the same moons and feeling the same way. They’d conceived their children in one world, and they would be born into an alien one.

Rhaella was grateful for Merrill’s training as a First, and her involvement in Kirkwall’s alienage since then. She still knew enough about pregnancy and babies to act as a midwife. She seemed less puzzled than the other midwife about the size of Rhaella’s belly, how it was bigger than they were expecting.

“Solas is not a small man,” she said with a shrug. “As long as you feel well, and you can still feel your little one wriggling about in there, I’m not worried.”

Solas is not a small man. The words sent a shiver of memory through Rhaella as she envisioned the days and nights that had led her to this moment. The size and weight of his body, how sheltered it made her feel, how whole. She pushed those thoughts away. She imagined, instead, a son that was as tall as him, who had only his kindness and not his narrowed vision, his pride. A son who reminded her of her own father.

I will love you no matter who you are, she promised anyway, feeling the child move.

The journey grew slower and more difficult as they climbed the mountain paths towards Skyhold. Rhaella struggled to lean far enough forward in the saddle to make her horse comfortable, so they had to walk the steepest parts of it. But, the feeling of being further from civilization, and the giddiness of having evaded Solas for nearly two weeks now, loosened their tongues a little, and Rhaella and Merrill were able to talk more freely. Merrill told stories of Hawke that she had not heard from Varric, and they shared their memories of growing up Dalish, compared notes on the Arlathvhens they had been to, speculated on whether or not they had ever met at one of them. It started to feel a little normal. Almost like Rhaella was back to being Inquisitor, and Merrill was one of her companions.

(It was probably a testament to how upside down things were now that Rhaella could think back to that time with fondness.)

Then they arrived at Skyhold, and all that warmth, all that strength she’d built, drained away.

It was not so much that the building was different. Its ancient stone was largely unchanged. It had weathered the creation of the Veil, after all. It was not even the scorch marks all over the courtyard, or the charred ruins of the stables.

It was the sound of the empty hospital tents flapping in the breeze. Of wooden shutters banging listlessly against stone walls.

It was the total, absolute emptiness of the place that had become her home.

The castle stood, but the people were gone, and the emptiness of that threatened to swallow her whole.

She should have been wise enough to expect this, to know that things would not be as she left them, that she would not return home to rally the people she’d left behind to some sort of unlikely victory. She had not heard from any of her forces in the weeks she’d been in Kirkwall. She’d hoped that was because Solas was intercepting their messages, that against all odds, there was still a home to come back to, a chance to set things right. Still, the blow of the silence struck her as true as any kick or punch ever had.

Then there was a high, hollow sound - a call, almost like that of a bird’s - but bigger, and then louder, like a trumpet, coming from the lower courtyard, and the sudden movement of a big brown blur -

“Thistle!” Rhaella called, and her hart galloped to her, drawing up short when he reached her, and then snuffling her with his warm, soft nose, whining again in his throat. She rested her forehead against his, breathed in the warm, woodsy smell of his hide. She scratched the place behind his ears that always made him stamp his feet with delight.

“Hello, friend,” Merrill said, approaching. “You’re a delight! I haven’t seen a hart like this in a long time.”

“He has been my constant companion for years now. I can’t even tell you how good it feels to see that he is okay.” Rhaella leaned her head against Thistle’s again and took another calming breath. She did not need to jump straight to despair. She had not even gone inside the keep yet. Who knew who else she would find, or what signs would be left behind - maybe everyone had moved somewhere else, or gone out into the world to help make a difference -

She wasn’t sure whether to feel reassured or afraid when the first arrow flew and landed at her feet.

Merrill’s hand flung out instantly, as if to shield her, and Rhaella’s magic crackled beneath her skin, longing to cast a barrier. She had to actively work not to cast the barrier without the Veil in the way, and it made her grind her teeth. Her son kicked wildly in her stomach at the sensation of the caged magic.

“It’s okay,” Rhaella called out when the urge to cast her spell passed. She looked in the direction the arrow had come from - the old tavern. She started in that direction, brushing off Merrill’s arm. “It’s me, it’s Rhaella.”

Another arrow flew, this one passing over her shoulder, so close that Rhaella could hear the pitch-perfect whine as it cleaved the air by her ear. Thistle snorted and stamped behind her, spooked, and Merrill took her staff off her back. The third arrow struck the barrier that Merrill cast, splintering into a shower of wooden shards, but Rhaella had seen where it was headed. Straight for her head.

Then Rhaella saw her, in the upper window of the tavern, leaning out now, bow in hand. Sera.

“Sera!” She called, waving her arms, walking closer. Surely it was an accident. Surely Sera had not actually meant to aim for a killing blow. “Sera, it’s just me.”

“Yes,” Sera said, nocking another arrow, half-drawing back the string. She stepped out onto the roof of the tavern. Her skin was even paler than usual, but her eyes were rimmed as red as the plaidweave armor she wore. “Who the fuck do you think I have been waiting for?”

Rhaella’s heart sank.

“Sera -”

“They’re all dead!” Sera shouted, the tears coming now. “All of them! Every person that mattered to me is gone now. Every person who trusted you to lead us. They all paid the price, and for what? So you could get a good shag with a man who never really loved you? And you didn’t even have to see it, did you, oh high and mighty Inquisitor? No, you got to be somewhere far away when it all came crashing down, all the fire and magic and shite, all the screaming and the dying. But I didn’t get that. I had to be here. I had to see it happen. I had to watch and even when I shut my eyes I had to listen. D’you know what it sounded like when your precious Commander died?”

Cullen.

No, not Cullen.

He was many things - not all of them good - but Rhaella prayed in that moment to the gods she didn’t believe in that Sera was lying.

“D’you know what it was like for him when all that bloody magic came rushing back, after all those years he’d worked to stop taking that Maker forsaken lyrium? I bet you didn’t even think about it when you went rushing back to your arse-wiping Dread Wolf. About how he would fucking scream -”

“Stop!”

Rhaella was aware that Merrill had shouted the word, that Sera was still talking, but the sounds were distant, covered up by a roaring as real as the sound of an ocean storm, of an earthquake. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even think beyond the roaring sound. It was only the kicking and rolling of her child within her womb that brought her back to the surface.

“You don’t understand,” Merrill was saying. “Rhaella went to Kirkwall to stop him. She tried her best. She never stopped trying. She fought him until the very last moment, but there was nothing anyone could do. He was too strong for anyone but another of his own kind. And Rhaella didn’t stop there. She has been aiding the wounded ever since then, and once she had her first opportunity to flee from Solas, she did. How do you think she ended up here?”

“It doesn’t make a difference,” Sera said, and there was a sudden wave of magical heat rolling off of her, sparks at her fingertips. “Shite!”

She threw down her bow and Rhaella could see the trembling in her fingers. Sera had never wanted this, and now she was cursed with it. Magic.

Rhaella opened her mouth but no words came out. Her chest felt like it was caving in. Like all of Sera’s words had lodged there, true as arrows, true as morning sun.

“Please, believe us,” Merrill was pleading. “Neither of us wanted this. We’re trying to make our way in this world, the same as you.”

Sera shook her head once, viciously, and picked up her bow. She nocked the arrow again and started to draw it back. Rhaella realized that her hands were over her belly, feeling it warm and tight as a drum, but her magic was not seething inside her this time. She was making no real move to defend herself. Merrill grounded herself, started gathering the energy for a barrier. Then Sera lowered her bow.

“Get whatever supplies you need to get somewhere else. And then get gone.” Her eyes bored into Rhaella’s. “If I ever see you again, I will kill you.”

Then she disappeared back into the shadows of the tavern.

Rhaella felt rooted to the ground where she stood. Like she might never move from this spot again.

It was one thing to see the devastation of Kirkwall - a city that was not a part of her, another vein through which her own heart’s blood flowed - it was another to stand here in Skyhold and witness the magnitude of her failure. To hear those words of accusation dropped not from the mouth of a stranger but from a friend.

Cullen.

“Rhaella. Rhaella. Come on, love. I don’t think we want to stay here long.”

Merrill was using the same voice that Rhaella herself used to gentle Thistle when he was spooked. Her hands were on Rhaella’s shoulders, guiding. Their steps towards the keep were slow. Thistle whined, high and loud and mournful. Rhaella wondered what stories he would share of the day the Veil fell, if he could speak.

She tried not to study Skyhold as they walked through it. Tried not to see the blood or the winding patterns of lighting etched into wood and stone, the overturned tables, the shattered glasses. The kitchen was ripped apart but there was still food enough in the storeroom beyond it, and she and Merrill filled their packs with as much of it as they could reasonably carry. Rhaella felt the burden of her pregnancy all over again, how she would need more food than she ever had before on the road.

“Is there anything else you want to get?” Merrill asked when they were done there.

Rhaella nodded, and went wordlessly towards the long staircase that led to her chambers. Merrill did not follow. She was grateful for that.

Her chambers were exactly as she had left them. That was the most eerie part of all. She was not the same woman she was the last time she slept here. Her bedroom should have reflected that. But everything was in its place - each pillow on the bed, each paper on her desk. She picked up her field journal, which she’d left behind in her haste to get to Kirkwall. Then she saw the one thing that was out of place. A letter in an envelope, right in the center of her desk.

Rhaella

It was Cullen’s handwriting.

D’you know what it sounded like when your precious Commander died?

Rhaella tucked the letter quickly into her bag. She couldn’t read it. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Merrill had distributed everything they gathered between Thistle and their other two horses by the time Rhaella returned. After a brief discussion, they agreed that they would keep both horses, using one for supplies and if one of their other mounts got tired.

“So where do we go now?” Merrill asked, her eyes shifting towards the tavern and then back to Rhaella.

“The Emerald Graves,” Rhaella said. “It has plenty of resources, plenty of places to hide, and it isn’t terribly far from here.”

“I have always wanted to see them,” Merrill said. “All those tombs of the elves who came before us, who fought for our people.”

Rhaella half wondered if the tombs had broken open when the Veil fell - if those elves had stepped out to a brave new world where their people had both won and lost.

She cast one glance back at Skyhold as they rode through its gate. The towers and battlements she’d come to know as home. It was lost to her now, like so many things were. Another ghost of her own, standing stark and sad against the blue mountain sky.

She took a deep breath and rode on.

They rode until nightfall, back down the same road they’d taken up the mountain, until Rhaella’s lower back ached so badly that they could not continue. She warmed damp cloths on a stone over the fire that Merrill built and then had Merill place them where it ached. She’d never wished so desperately for a bed in her life as she did in that moment, lying there on her side on the nest of blankets they’d arranged, unable to curl up into a ball or lie on her stomach, anything to relieve the pain.

“Warn me if it gets more intense,” Merrill said. “Sometimes that’s how it goes for women - the start of labor, that is.”

Rhaella felt a surge of panic and joy alike. Would tonight be the night she met her son, the person that made all of this worth it? The reason she continued putting one foot in front of the other on this road that had no real destination yet. At least not one she could see or count on. But the pain in her back did subside eventually. There was a new chill in the air by that point, a wind coming down off the mountains that made them both shiver. Rhaella looked to the saddlebags they’d removed from their pack horse, hoping for another blanket - and spied something familiar sticking out of one of the ones Merrill had packed. Red and fur-lined.

Cullen’s cloak.

She rose, went to it, pulled it out, half-hoping she was wrong. She wasn’t. She’d have known it anywhere, and of course Merrill would not have. She’d just seen something warm that might help them on their journey, and not another dagger aimed directly at Rhaella’s heart.

Merrill was a few paces away, standing watch since they didn’t want to risk setting wards. Rhaella went to her bag and pulled out the letter she’d found on her desk, the tears already rising in her throat, the guilt already swimming in her stomach. She found a tree that she could sit against, looking away from Merrill, and eased herself to the ground, cloak and letter clutched in one hand.

She read.

Rhaella,

I am never going to see you again.

That's the worst part of this. It isn't the pain or the screaming or the uncertainty. It's knowing I will never see your face or hear your voice again.

My hand is shaking. I hope you can read this if you find it. When you find it. I refuse to believe that you did not survive this. You and the baby - you have to survive. I have to believe this was all worth something, and if the two of you are still out there, it was.

You are the most incredible woman I have ever known, Rhaella. Your quiet strength - I know it will see you through. I have watched you move mountains and I know you will move them again and again.

(I hope this all makes sense. I was never good at words, and my hand is shaking, and everything hurts -)

I wish I could be there to see you move those mountains. To see your baby. The baby I thought of as ours no matter what. I understand that what we had was never going to be real. I am at peace with that. I would have given you everything nonetheless, Rhaella. You and the baby deserved that and I would have been whatever you needed me to be. If - if this isn't the end - if I can withstand this - if we are both alive - I will still give you everything. Not because I want you to wake up one day and love me. But because you deserve that as my friend.

Whatever happens - when you find this - I want you to know that I believe in you. I wish I had words good enough to express it. I don't. I believe in you the same way I believe in the Maker and his Bride. Maybe that is the closest I can come to explaining it. I believe in you, and if anyone can stop Solas, it is you.

If I die today, I die with nothing but faith and devotion in my heart. It was how I always wanted to go, Rhaella. It's okay. I am at peace.

Yours always,

Cullen

She was crying before she finished the third paragraph, of course. Deep, wracking sobs that hollowed out her chest, carved up her ribs, scratched up her throat. They were animal sounds. She wasn't sure how long they went on. It seemed there was no beginning or end to her grief as she thought of everything Sera said, how she'd sacrificed everything for a man who never really loved or deserved her. Were they both right? Was that really the source of her weakness? Had there been some final part of her strength locked behind a door with Solas's name written on it, where she hid all the memories that were good? Had that been the strength she would have needed that day in Kirkwall?

Rhaella cried into the folds of Cullen's cloak, her mind a maze of questions with no answers, and grieved.

Solas generally prided himself on being the master of his emotions. Controlling them, subduing them, and, when all else failed, simply hiding them away.

He did not bother hiding his frustration when he returned from his fight with the Evanuris.

He came into his Kirkwall base of operations and threw down the helm he'd been wearing, reveling in the loud sound of metal striking wood as it hit the table. Maybe if he did that over and over again he could drown out the sound of his failure - of half of the Evanuris's forces escaping into eluvians and shattering them as they left. He'd wanted to pull them out, root and stem, to be done with all of this, to focus on what came next - rebuilding, helping those that remained find peace and meaning in the new world he'd made. Helping himself find peace with what he'd done. Finding time to mourn the friends he had lost (sacrificed).

Mending things with Rhaella.

"We have not been able to trace them yet," Abelas said, calm and even, but with a hesitance that Solas noted at once.

"What else?" He barked. He'd tried not to be the kind of Commander who yelled unless it was truly what the situation warranted. Then again, he'd tried a lot of things. And yet here he was again, with nothing but ash and loneliness to show for it.

"Rhaella and Merrill are gone."

Abelas said it swiftly and calmly, with the precision of a surgeon making his first cut.

Solas felt the air leave the room.

He felt his power leach into the vacuum it left behind.

Raw mana, undirected, uncontained, filling up every object and person around him, lighting up the room with a blue glow, filling it with a subtle roar. He felt his advisors shield themselves in barriers, as if he would attack them. Perhaps he would. (He would not.)

Solas took a breath and drew his mana back in.

“When?”

“Not long after you did as far as we can tell,” Abelas said. Another surgeon’s cut.

“Together.”

“Presumably, yes.”

“Where?”

“Unknown. We have not been able to track them via traditional or arcane means, though perhaps you will have greater success with the latter. You know Rhaella better than any of us, after all.”

For a moment, Solas considered letting her go. It would be kinder in the long run. He’d told her that once, when he was a stronger man. But he still had dried blood under his fingernails, the screams of the dying in his ears. He still had unfinished business, and people who would seek to hurt Rhaella and his child.

(The child, the child, the child, he could hardly bring himself to think the word at first but now it was ringing through his mind like a struck bell, an endless echo. He might not get to meet his child if he could not find her, and perhaps that was what he deserved -)

He had to find her to protect her. To tell her one last time that he was sorry. If she went her own way then - if they went their own way then - he would just have to find a way to endure.

Var lath vir suledin, she had said to him the day he took the Anchor and her arm. Perhaps that was when she was a stronger woman. Perhaps he had broken them both.

“We leave for Skyhold at dawn,” he said. He turned on his heel and left. He had enough control, enough composure, not to spill his tears before them. He waited until he was in Rhaella’s room, surrounded by the smell of her, to do that.

He would endure, he told himself over and over again. He would endure. He simply wasn’t sure what it would cost.

#beach writes #beach does commissions #scharoux #rhaella lavellan #rhaella x solas #lost horizon #character death #angst #...like all the angst

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normal-goatboy · 5 years ago

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Room to Talk

Pairing: Carver Hawke x Merrill Words: 1477 Rating: Teen (non-explicit sexual content)

They were meant to talk.

Merrill sits alone in a corner avoiding curious glances and clutching the letter like a receipt, solid proof that she hasn’t dreamed this up herself.

Her legs go numb when he walks in because he looks like him, like Carver, rather than the clanking wall of metal she saw at the Gallows. She thought of him sweating under all that armor and had a little laugh, but he pretended he didn’t see her and her heart sank like a stone. Then finally he wrote to her - to the Hanged Man, care of Varric - and her heart still felt like a stone, but a smooth black one at the bottom of a river.

He slides in across from her and it’s more mundane than it should be, sitting together the way they used to. But they never used to come here.

She decided to let him speak first; he seems to have made the same resolution so they stare at each other silent for a while before he clears his throat and says, “For a second I thought you didn’t come.”

That stings, and she says, “I’ve never left you waiting, have I?” Cold and smooth, like the bottom of a river.

“I… No,” he says, “you haven’t.”

She doesn’t reply, though some distant echo in her head tells her she’s being terribly rude. It isn’t rude, she decides. He’s come to talk so let him talk.

“I just- I don’t like how we left things. Before.”

She’s surprised he’s just come out with it.

“Oh?”

“Well… yes. I-“ he clears his throat. “Were you happy with it?”

“No,” she blurts, but she didn’t mean to let him have it so quickly. “You have something you’d like to say?”

He makes a frustrated sound and shifts in his seat. “But you understand the position I was in,” he says, and she knows now that they’re continuing an old conversation, rather than beginning a new one. “We both said some things we shouldn’t have, but-“

“So that’s why you wanted to talk to me,” Merrill says, familiar heat rising in her chest. “To have me tell you you’re forgiven and I was all wrong.”

“I wasn’t-“

“You’ve made your choice. You can’t have both. I know that better than you, trust me.”

He stares impassive for a moment before he says, “Maybe we should talk somewhere more…”

She nods and he pays for a room. They were meant to talk, but it ended up a bit louder than normal talking. Carver says Templars come here often, to the Rose - they don’t usually take rooms for discussion, she assumes.

“I didn’t want this,” he tells her as he paces along the windowless walls. It’s so dark in here; they’ve been at this for what feels like hours, saying the same things over and over. She’s forgotten what time of day it is. “I wanted to go with my sister - I wanted to join the Guard.“

“You had other choices. You wouldn’t listen.” She sits gripping the edge of the bed. He’s as far from her as the confines of the room will allow. There’s a scraping, pounding noise the room over that she nearly asked about before she realized what it was, and it’s beginning to bother her.

“What? Work on a fishing boat? In the mine? Work myself to death before I’m 30? Easy for you and Marian to talk like I’ve turned down riches to hunt mages, but you don’t know.”

“You think I don’t know anything, but I do. I’ve struggled the same as you.” She rises with that, her voice hard and hot like stone striking stone. He retreats the short distance he has left, his back hitting the wall. He’s quieter when he speaks next.

“I lost every other option. Everything I could have done. I’m asking you to believe that.”

Merrill must admit she doesn’t know anything about the sorts of work someone like Carver could do. To keep the roof over her own head, she mends and sells herbs, little odds and ends. Carver couldn’t do any of that, she supposes, and it wouldn’t go far enough for he and his mother both. He knows how to do washing and mending and all, but for some reason people don’t want to pay a boy to do that. It would be silly to suggest it.

“I could have joined the Guard,” he continues, “but Aveline killed my chance at it. Ask her, she’ll tell you.”

Aveline said he’s too arrogant for her to handle, too defiant for her to trust, and she sounded too much like the Keeper when she said it. “I haven’t spoken to Aveline since you left,” she says. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to. Not that Aveline has even noticed.

For just a moment a smile flickers in his eyes, a barely noticeable muscle twitch, but she would know it anywhere, in any light probably. She didn’t know how much she’d missed that.

“You don’t have to- I mean, not on my…” He’s flustered now, frowning again. “Merrill…” His voice softens and he looks suddenly so tired. She is too; it’s been hard to sleep. “I should have listened to you. I should have waited.”

Hawke returned from the Deep Roads a week and two days after Carver left. The nearness of it feels cruel, personal.

They were meant to talk, but the sob that escapes her throat, uncontrollably, makes it difficult. With his arms around her, one firm around her waist and the other hand holding the back of her head, she can let her knees give out, and she’s thankful for how steady he is even now.

He says, “I’m sorry,” into the top of her head.

She asks him after they’re lying down together, entangled in the borrowed bed, how it is, or rather she asks, “Is it terrible?”

“No, it’s not too bad. Not too different from being a soldier. Someone with a higher rank than you tells you where to go and what to do, and if you do it well they leave you alone.”

“Oh.”

That feeling again, like she is sinking and he’s staying in the same place. His chest is sweating where she’s pressed her forehead against it.

“I miss you,” he says.

She ignores the way her heart beats in her throat and between her legs. “You miss all of us, I’m sure.”

“No,” he says and laughs a little. “Just you. The rest of them are on their own.”

She’s going to cry again, and she doesn’t want to. She swallows it down and draws him in, finds his bare skin under his clothes, slides herself underneath his weight. This is what people use the rooms for here. At least they can say that.

Neither of them says anything; hard to because his mouth hardly leaves hers. After they’ve finished, she holds him there, pressed against her chest and between her legs, until there’s a layer of sweat that feels cold and awful when they try to pull away. They try to go back, but the moment’s passed and it feels sticky and clammy so they gather up their clothes from on the floor and tangled in the sheets.

And that’s the end of it, though it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t because she has more to say - not much, but a few words that mean a lot.

He puts his hands behind his back after he’s pulled on his shirt. “I don’t… get to leave on my own often.”

“I know,” she says, though she really has no idea how it works. “You’ll need to see your family.”

He shrugs in response, and she adds, “and it isn’t safe for you to see me.”

“I don’t care.”

She is not so naive to take that answer unquestioning, but she is fool enough not to ask any further. She crosses over to him, reaches up to touch his face and he bends to meet her, puts his hands over hers.

“Ar lath ma, vhenan,” she says to him, and he knows what that means, but not the same way she does. He doesn’t feel it in the same place, because she didn’t use the words he’s used to. Sometime she will, but not tonight.

He squeezes her tight, tight, the way she had to convince him to when he worried he would hurt her, convince him she was solid enough. “I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

It sounds like a promise, the way he says it, and she wants to believe it so she does. If she has him, the rest doesn’t feel so daunting. The cobbled street outside is still warm from the sun, though it’s long gone down. She lets it flow beneath her feet on the way back home.

#bahh #da2 fanfic #carver hawke x merrill #carver x merrill #carvermerrill #carver hawke #merrill #okay i tried to edit the tags on mobile and just completely fucked it up #so here i'm reposting #read my fic #cool cause now i'm putting in a lil content thingy at the top

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jellydishes · 6 years ago

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so i saw this post recently about what sort of gods characters from critical role would be, and i couldn’t resist turning that around for dragon age two

Hawke’s worshippers have schismed again and again and again, to the point that no one can even agree on their diety’s gender, let alone temperament. when you strip away the disagreements and the endless discord, however, you get to the heart of this polarizing deity: hawke is a deity for the lost, in all their forms. those who have lost homes and lovers and parents and siblings, as much as for those who have lost their way. those who are afraid and uncertain and don’t want to -can’t be- strong all the time. hawke is rarely depicted as a person, far more often with symbols - an interwoven, stark heraldry. a length of cloth, tattered and red as blood. a messy smear of blood, replicated by their worshippers across the nose. hawke is strength and protection when you have no one else. hawke is a hand, offered when you can’t stand up on your own. how many times can one person do this? “at least once more,” says a whisper in your ear

Bethany is a goddess that is hard for many to understand. those people only hear her hymns devoted to hope and kindness and think she is but one more goddess of the hearth and home, easily dismissed. they would be wrong. bethany is worshipped by warriors just as often as she is the abused and forgotten. because beneath the smiles and open hands she is often depicted with, is a core built of heat and determination and a relentless desire to protect what is yours. one does not cancel out the other. bethany’s worshippers know that she is not asking them to forgive and forget, she is asking them to keep going when all you want to do is to give up. put one foot in front of the other and nurture that last bit of hope you have for one more day

Carver is, like his twin, a difficult god for many to parse, easily dismissed as a war god, a god worshipped by those who refuse to follow society’s rules. and they would be missing the truth of him. carver is a god those who want -need- to pave their own path. he is worshipped by transgender people, by those who have no family by choice or by fate and who create their own future. by those who refuse to be defined by someone else. the angry, but also the joyful. offerings to carver are a coin from your first wages at a job no one trusted you to get, let alone keep. a moment from your gender euphoria. a messy drawing by the child you never expected to have. carver is trust in yourself, when no one else has it for you

Aveline is primarily a goddess worshipped by guards and soldiers, but a not insignificant amount of prayers are offered to her by orphans and widows. it is Known that aveline lost and lost and lost in the days before her ascension. she can be a distant god, hard to understand or even love, but she is a constant. when the world was forged, aveline was there, and so shall she remain. aveline is strength and self-reliance and memories held close to your chest because it is no one’s to take before you are ready. images of aveline are often left clasped between the hands of the dead, so that they would always have someone’s hand in theirs

Varric’s stories often depict him as smiling and confident, a twinkle in his eyes and a crossbow bolt between his fingers. he is a god of artists and storytellers, but more than that, varric is a god of memory. it is Known that in life, varric committed his loves into words so that they would last, would live even when he knew they wouldn’t. he is also turned to when loved ones struggle with pain and addiction and alcoholism or any one of a number of coping mechanisms that once helped but now only hurt and hurt and hurt them and others - he does not judge them or you, and instead is a steady, comforting presence when you feel most alone in a cold world which seems to have left you behind. varric is a god for those who turn their pain on its head, who transform it into light and color and laughter. varric is smiles, and the spaces between them

Fenris was initially worshipped as a god of war, but over time that shifted so that now he is known as a god of death and rebirth. the death he represents is often not a physical one, so much as a moment of growth. of deliberately choosing to release the grip your past has upon your present. even if it is hard, and you cannot let it go without leaving claw marks where you wish to hold and remember and understand. because by lingering in a place where discomfort has become comfortable, you cannot grow. your past will remain a part of you, as scars do, but you can turn your eyes to look ahead to the rebirth awaiting you. a spiritual rebirth, of a private meaning. his followers are as much the abused and the enslaved and the survivors as they are the grieving, and all are welcome

Anders is infamously known as a polarizing god, one most well known for the wars his followers seem to end up embroiled in, in one way or another. but that is a very simplistic view of him and those who follow him, and a narrow-minded one. anders was initially worshipped as a nurturing god devoted to healing and sacrifice, but over time the sacrificial part of his domain expanded to be that most focused on. this sacrifice is often interpreted by those who misunderstand him by pointing to deaths and discord caused in his name and cite him as a reason to bear down on his worshippers - those who worship him, however, almost to a person, cite that sacrifice as a personal one. of giving up personal comfort and safety and happiness for the greater good. of painting yourself as the monster so that those you wish to protect from harm will be spared. those who remain from his earliest days of worship still remember his symbols of a scarf and a cat and small, patched pillow, symbols of warmth given and warmth treasured in dark times

Merrill is, first and foremost, a goddess for those who refuse to give in to the darkness of time and assimilation. worshipped primarily by those from cultures who have been attacked from all sides in all the ways a culture can while still surviving. merrill is a proud goddess, an angry goddess, but neither of those are negatives. she is also a joyful one, rejoicing with her worshippers when they rediscover a piece of their culture, or simply celebrating in it. when you wear jewelry or clothing from your culture or take pride in your lineage or make your foodstuffs, you are singing with her. merrill is a refusal to turn away from the hard task of keeping what is yours when beset on all sides, she is keeping your head high and eyes bright, your soul shining because doing otherwise is no alternative at all

Isabela began her life as a goddess as one devoted purely to the sea, but as many of her fellows did, her domain shifted to that of a protector of women. transgender woman and neurodivergent women and disabled women and women of color and abused women all raise their hands to her, and she gives hers back. isabela is cold fury at those who dare bring harm to or degrade her sisters just as she is a warm pair of arms to hold you up when you are alone in a cold world. she understands what it is to have your choices taken from you, and what it is to hide the vulnerability in your heart when that is the only means available to you to protect yourself. isabela is the soft, warm voice beside you whispering to allow yourself to trust when it can be the most terrifying thing in the world. isabela is the hand guiding your fist to the sky when you see your sisters trodden upon. “not today,” comes isabela's rising call. “not anymore.”

Sebastian is a god with two faces. in one of his forms, he is a god of love and pleasure, of taking joy in the present because the future is not certain and certainly not a promise, a god for those who are afraid and find comfort in the warmth of others. this side of sebastian does not judge those who take pleasure in the flesh or in modifying their bodies or in turning away from the roles expected of you, because he knows what it is to refuse a call. sebastian in this face is independence and planting your feet upon the ground. “this is me,” sebastian tells the world before you. “the words i choose define me, not yours.”

Sebastian's other face is a god of change. he often has feasts devoted to him at the turning of the seasons (especially autumn), but he is just as easily found in choosing to live by a self-ordained set of rules when your old way of life no longer satisfies. a god who, when faced with loss, redefined what loss means as well as what remains. when faced with restrictions and pain imposed by others, his worshippers find meaning in what remains. asexuals and the chase also turn to him, knowing the choices he himself made in his mortal life, and he welcomes them. sebastian is a god of dichotomies, but those stark differences do not mean that either side of him does not have meaning - on the contrary, both sides are made that much more meaningful by the contrast and how they inform the other. this side of sebastian is also about defining yourself. “you make take my home and my family and everything i thought was true about myself,” sebastian tells all those arrayed before you, “but you cannot take away the heart of me. that determination that drives me forward. i was here before you, and i will be here after you are gone.”

Tallis is a goddess of extremes, just as known for laughter with a smile that is all teeth as she is wandering hands that reach for your belt or your throat instead of your hip. she is all anger and stubbornness and a refusal to give into the dark. a goddess for those who look upon the sand presented to them by the world and score, not a line, but a canyon deep within it. cross this line at your peril, tallis tells your enemies. you may have come for people that are not mine, who may not ever know my name or even be grateful, but that doesn't matter. “not one step more,” she roars into the wind, her hand beside yours, just waiting for you to clasp it. she is the hard choice made because it must be, because no one else will

#sometimes i write things #occasionally i write things #hawke #Bethany Hawke #Carver Hawke #aveline vallen #varric tethras #merrill #fenris #anders #isabela #sebastian vael #tallis #long post #whoops lol

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jawsandbones · 6 years ago

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Atrophy

An inhale. The following silence is the breath held, the space between heart beats. The veil shudders. It tears as easily as lace, and it’s an exhale, a sigh, a knife through a silk dress. A slice. Only a slice. It is enough. It is for this singular reason that he and so many others stand on the field. Someone else is fighting the battle to keep it from being collapsed completely.

Demons spill forth from the crack. Pushing and shoving at each other, desperate to slip through. They heave and scream, race towards those who seek to bar their way. Fenris turns the sword in his hands. Over the years, he’s begun to find it heavier. Perhaps it’s because he has no more reason to fight. Still, he has been called, and so here he stands. Merrill behind him, Isabela beside him. Aveline, Donnic, a handful of guards from Kirkwall. Varric strays nearer to the Inquisitor, helps them fight that other battle. Anders tends to the wounded. Sebastian leads Starkhaven’s armies.

The first line holds. Arrows arc overhead, and the spells follow. He turns the sword in his hands. The air grows thick with the subtle scent of lingering lightning, the storm on the horizon, spread by staff. It’s fouled by the stench of demons, the creeping sense of death. The first line breaks. He turns the sword in his hands. Fenris and Aveline look at each other for a moment. Then Aveline is rallying, shields being raised, the guard advancing. Isabela turns her daggers in her hands, slips through the guards, and takes care of the demons that break through their formation. Fenris keeps to the edges, guards Merrill, as they ensure the demons cannot overwhelm them.

Arrows are still firing into the tear. A ceaseless rain, a growing wall of ash that dusts the ground. They come as quickly as they can kill. A soldier runs screaming past him, obscured by raging flame, brushing at flames of his own. Fear screeches, pierces through all else, spiders running rampant by its feet. Hunger devours. Pride flaunts. Lust laughs while Despair weeps. Then there are the things they have never quite seen before. Twisted amalgamations, aberrations of form. Abominations of the Fade’s own kind, a broken mirror of their own realm.

He’s been in wars before. The seething heat of Seheron, with danger lurking in the jungle. The magisters spells behind him, the Qunari’s own strange magic before him. He doesn’t focus on that. He can’t allow himself to get lost in the chaos. Instead, on the sword, the claw, before him. One after the other. The first line is scattered, overrun. The same is about to happen to the second. Fenris has lost sight of Aveline, Isabela. Merrill is at least close behind him, sweat running down her brow, squeezing every last drop of power from her veins.

The ground beneath them has been churned by footsteps, made mud by spilled blood. He slides in it, struggles to keep his footing. Breathing ragged as he marches steadily forward, piercing metal through the wraith. Dust crumbles, falls as though snow. The stories never speak of true war. He steps over bodies, cannot step over others. Shields underfoot, swords left where their wielder fell. It’s never glorious. All they can do is hold, and hope it’s enough.

Merrill is pulled away, goes to reinforce one of the last remaining formations. Fenris finds himself near the tear itself, and it screams into every lyrium scar. The nearness of the Fade, the foulness of the tear. Pin pricks in every vein, goosebumps over flesh. He turns the sword in his hands. Planting his feet, striking at the demons which approach. The rest is a cacophony of screams, of metal, crying and shouting. What remains of the Inquisition forces are attempting to rally, pull them all together. Scattered, fighting their own individual battles, the reason for their being here slipping away. There is no cause, no meaning. Only survival.

Something, someone, else walks onto the field, free from the Fade. Its arms outstretched, eyes opening to the sun for the first time in years. Palms upwards, breathing in all that Thedas has to offer. She is shaped by bruise and wound. A staff, woven into the length of her, broken through her shoulder, become one with her. Armor warped and melted, a twisted second skin. Talons, in the clawed curvature of her hands, wings, dark and beating, bloody at her back. Tears, as though fire, have marked and marred her skin. Ashes about her eyes, the charred embers of sorrow and grief. Her eyes remain the brightest blue. Just as Fenris remembers them.

An inhale. The following silence is the breath held, the space between heart beats. He shudders. He thinks he might tear, as easily as lace, and she exhales, a smile spreading across her face. A smile. Only a smile. It is enough. Enough to know her, to know that it is her. It is for this singular reason that he walks forward. The fighting continues all around him, but he is no longer part of that battle.

She exhales, smiles, sharpened teeth in her mouth. Head tilted upwards, she drinks in every last drop of sunshine, the wings at her back outstretched in pleasure. Walking forward without care, and her attention is only brought back to the battlefield by an arrow that clatters against her barrier. With a sweeping gesture, she sends the soldiers in her way flying. Her magic is still every bit as potent as it was before she was lost. Every bit, and even more so, now. She crushes them in their armor, pins them to the ground with a force unseen. They gasp for air in that thin layer of mud, the ocean made by their fallen brethren.

Fenris grapples with Hunger, its hand burning around his arm as it screams out its pain. Lyrium markings ignite, and he reaches through it, casts it into nothing. Something of Pride stands in his way. He races forward, through its legs, dodging the claw that reaches towards him. She keeps a wide berth around herself, no soldier able to draw near. That should be warning enough. Still. He continues on towards her, unable to help himself. Drawn towards her, as he’s always been. Drowning in her, as he’s always done.

“Hawke,” he calls out, and there’s an ache in it. Cracking at the center, breaking in the word. Raw desperation in each step, in the way he reaches out to her. “Hawke,” and he hates the way it sounds, a damning whisper that betrays the feeling in every stitch of him. She doesn’t turn towards him, not until he’s too close.

Her talons are bloodied, as is all the rest of her. Her lips are cracked and dry, and her tears have long dried up. He thinks he might see her, in that blue, but her eyes are empty, void of all she once was. There is no white left in them, only all-consuming pitch. He should never have let her go. He should never have let her go alone. He should have been with her, when she fell. He should have been with her, when she stayed behind. He should have been with her, stood here, together. Instead, he approaches with a sword in his hand, and she without any recognition of him.

“It’s me,” he says as Hawke regards this lone figure with something close to disdain. “Don’t you know me? Your - Fenris. Marian, it’s me.” He turns the sword in his hands. A gesture, and he’s knocked to the ground. He gasps for breath, lungs unable to hold it, as he tries to pick himself up. The next time she does it, he’s ready. Lyrium markings glow against the mud as he darts forward, closes the distance between them. Short and steady footsteps, and he leaps upwards, swings downwards. She catches his sword in her talons.

There’s such fury in her face, at being disturbed. This is a Hawke with only one purpose. Freedom. There had been such peace on her face when she emerged from the Fade. A goal, long awaited, finally fulfilled. Now this army wants to take that freedom away from her. Fenris included. Of course she fights. Other talons outstretched, wrenching towards him. He slips the sword from her grasp, blocks her blow. Blackened blood sizzles in the mud below them. A fine coat of ash coats almost everything here, and their footprints linger.

Her wings expand, beat, and propel her forward. A scent of ozone, growing magic. He dashes back as the lightning webs between each finger, striking down where he once stood. A force, again, breathlessly moving around it, and she is attempting to swat away the fly. “Marian. Do not make me do this,” Fenris says, “I do not want to fight you!” He wishes she would say something, anything, but he fears he might not recognize her voice.

The staff embedded in her stays lifeless and dull. He knows that armor. He used to help her stitch it up when it tore. How many times had he sat with her while she repaired her belt? How many times had he stood beside her when she wore it? She would hold the staff in her hands, from one to the other, look at him and smile. Now, she scowls, and Fenris points his sword at her. She gives him no mercy, and so, he can’t afford to give her any either.

“We can go home. The estate is just as you left it,” he says, “I changed nothing. I kept it for you.” Heavy, on his left leg, dashing forward, around her. She screams as he sliced through wings, those fragile bones breaking easily, tar slick feathers falling to the ground. She whirls with fire in her palms, and he moves. Not fast enough. It sears on the calf of his leg, and he hisses pain.

“I bought more books for us. I hoped we would read them together. There is so much you have missed. So much I wish to tell you,” he says. All he can tell her instead are these meaningless words, and hope she understands the sound of his voice. “Mr. Barks is waiting for you at home. He has grown attached to me, but I could not bring him here.” Another slice forward, the crack of lightning. He turns the sword in his hands. “The others are here, somewhere. You would be disappointed to know that we drifted, when you disappeared.”

“None of us wanted to, of course. I do not believe we knew what to do with your disappearance,” he says. Such empty things, shouted at each other. The want to go and find her. The impossibility of crossing into the Fade. The upcoming war, the fight that stole all their attention. He raises his sword, one hand holding the blade, as she attempts to push it down towards him. His feed slide in the mud. Straining, to keep the metal away from his face. Sweat, down his brow and down his back, the ache of exhaustion in every muscle.

He had lost his reason for fighting. Now, here she stands.

“We can fix this,” he says, “Someone will know what to do. Anders, or perhaps Merrill. One of the Inquisition. Marian, you can come home with me.” Pushing forward, and he manages to drive her back, for the moment. His shoulders rise and fall with quick and heavy breath, painful in a parched throat, fire in his lungs.

“Come back to me,” he says. She presses palms against the side of her head, screams out her pain. It echoes in this space they occupy together, echoes in him. Then she is reaching forward. She is on him faster than he can catch. Raising his sword, and she keeps it in her talons. Her other talons sink into his shoulder, and he throws back his head and yells out in pain. The tears are dried on her face. Blackened and charred, burned from the core of her. All but for the blue. He’s always loved her eyes.

They kept the window open, most days. The curtain swaying softly in the breeze, listening to the song of the birds perched on Kirkwall’s rooftops. Distant hymns from the Chantry, the closer drift of conversation as people walked through the streets. Sun filtering through, gently so, moving with the curtains. Laying on the bed together, facing each other. Hands clasped together as they talked in quiet voices, words meant only for the other to hear. Her smile, her laughter. His own answering smile, her forehead pressed against his.

The lyrium’s reflection glows in the mud. A look of surprise, on her face, mouth falling open. She looks down, to see his hand through the chest of her, wrapped around the heart of her. From it, to him, and her head tilts. Long dark hair, moves to the side, and she studies him so intently. His eyes are so green. She’s always loved his eyes. “…Fenris?” He breaks, at the sound of it. Her voice. So clearly her. There’s such confusion in her face, blood on her lips. Recognition in her eyes. Pulling his hand free, and she is sinking to her knees. He sinks with her. Catching her in his arms, cradling her against him.

“No, Hawke, no, no, no.” His head whirls as he looks around, hoping to find someone who could save her, anyone. The field is mostly empty, the fighting moved far from them. There’s a silence that emanates from the tear. It swallows them up in it, a pressure that refuses to abate. She’s gasping for breath, and does not look away from him. Some wheezing death rattle, and his sword lies abandoned. “No, I’m sorry, Marian, please,” he’s saying, as he holds her. His hand against her cheek, brushing away stray strands of hair. His touch trembles. Her head rolls against his chest. “Please, please, please.”

He rocks back and forth, with her in his arms. He’s found her, at last. His Hawke. His Marian. Someone else is fighting another battle, and another. It doesn’t matter. Not to him. He has her. He’ll stay with her. She won’t be alone when she leaves, this time.

#fenris #hawke #fenhawke #dragon age #fenris x hawke #fenris x f!hawke #f!fenhawke #f!hawris #f!hawke #fenris x femhawke #dragon age 2 #da2 #dragon age inquisition #dai #post dragon age inquisition #da4 speculation #major character death #writing #mine

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authorellenmint · 6 years ago

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Snowy Embrace

Trapped by a blizzard Fenris finds himself having to share a hotel room with Hawke. How can Fenris keep his crush to himself? A modern setting for DA.

With a wide stretch, Hawke pivoted his neck back and forth and sighed, “Maker, is it really that late? Sleep sounds good. Shit, ain’t you been up since 5?”

“Four,” Fenris answered.

Hawke killed the tv and underhand tossed the remote at the dresser. It skidded a touch but landed right where it began. Rubbing his hands over his cheeks, Hawke muttered, “Shoulda told me to shut that thing off so you could get some sleep. You have to be exhausted.”

He was when he stepped out of work reeking of fry oil and sweat. Traveling for two hours in a broken-down truck seemed a waste of his time and a greater drain on what few reserves Fenris’ had. Then he spotted Hawke grinning from the front seat and telling him to hop in. Two hours alone with the busy man was a better shot of adrenaline than any coffee shop could manage. He hadn’t anticipated those two hours turning into twelve.

Without a care, Hawke wrenched off his plaid shirt. Even in the unforgiving fluorescent light beaming on him, Hawke’s skin glowed. The raw power flowed from bicep to tricep, across pectorals and even rumbled in his abs. Fenris should have anticipated the tufts of black fur decorating Hawke’s chest. The line down his flat stomach was so thick it looked like it was drawn on by marker pointing towards his crotch.

When the sound of a zipper drawing straight down filled the air, Fenris’ icy sheen burned red. He whipped his head away, unable to watch Hawke strip down to his underwear. Boxers, briefs, or the hybrid? Izzy liked to play that game, often with Merrill lost as to what they were doing. Fenris assumed he’d never learn the answer and now, with the temptation a head-turn away, he was terrified to look.

Focusing on himself, Fenris reached under his hoodie’s wrists and undid the button on a cuff. As he laid the first down on the table, Hawke exclaimed, “No way. Those come off?”

Fenris turned from the spikes of stainless steel on leather to find Hawke’s lower half eclipsed by the bed. He breathed a sigh of relief, when the damn fool rose from whatever squat exercise he was performing. Despite his protestations and orders to them, Fenris’ eyes copied the fastest picture it could of the man’s hips hidden below a thin sheet of cotton. His thighs were in even more stark relief than Fenris thought possible, flexing against the taut legs of the underwear. And, if he closed his eyes, he could see the bulge amplifying the curves below.

“You thought I slept in them?” Fenris coughed out, struggling to come up with a reason why he couldn’t stare in awe at the nearly naked man in his hotel room.

“I figured you were born with them. Or cursed with ‘em.”

With a chuckle at the thought, Fenris added his other cuff to the first. He reached to tug off his charcoal-black hoodie and paused. While he didn’t despise his body, it wasn’t the envy of a gym rat’s the way Hawke’s was. The legs were certainly scrawnier, as were his arms. There was no chance he could stand Hawke’s crystal blue gaze wrinkling to disgust if he stared at Fenris’ ropey form.

Hawke read Fenris abandoning his plans to disrobe and asked, “Are you gonna sleep in that?”

Shrugging, Fenris muttered as an excuse, “The sweater’s comfortable enough, especially in this frigid room.”

“I’m more concerned about those jeans plastered to your legs. Won’t they cut off circulation or something important?”

Fenris gulped, his eyes casting down the black skinny jeans suckered to him. While at home he’d certainly shrug them off, as his hand brushed against the belt, Fenris thumbed the reason he couldn’t strip down. He’d rather Hawke laugh at his chicken legs than get even a glimpse of Fenris’ excited state.

“It’s fine,” Fenris snarled, scrabbling at the far end of his bed.

READ THE REST

#fenris #hawke #fenris x hawke #da 2 #dragon age 2 #modern au #mm

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gloves94 · 7 years ago

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La Vie En Rose [Bruce Banner] 7

Ms. Merrill St. Paul’s Perspective

“Come on guys. We are so close to finding it.”

I encouraged as I attempted to read over the many numbers, curves and colorful waves that filled all the computer screens in the lab.

As hard as I tried to focus there was no use in finding any resolution in these unknown symbols and signs.

“Please?” I asked turning to face Banner and Stark. My eyes glowed an intense baby pink. Both scientists sat in separate lab seats across the lab with both of their eyes shut tight. I was upset at the fact that they both already knew all the tricks I had under my sleeve.

Their mood: Bored

“Nope, not happening,” Tony said with a small frown on his face. Both of his arms and legs crossed in a pretentious matter.

“I dare you to look Stark, I dare you,” Banner said as he simply shook his head. I sighed exhaustedly. Irked at my own failure.

“Come on!” I persisted. “The faster we do this, the faster that I can get out of here and return to my fabulous life,”

“Oh, yeah? And us?” challenged Stark.

“Well you can go back to your average, mediocre one,” I laughed wholeheartedly.

‘And I can actually make way with that gem myself…’

“What’s the rush?” Bruce asked as he finally opened his eyes to look at me with all seriousness.

“Don’t tell me that with the liberty of being able to be wherever you want, you’d still choose to be stuck in this place?”

He simply shrugged.

“Please?” I batted my eyelashes with a bright smile. I noticed that his cheeks reddened and he snapped his eyes away.

Feeling uncomfortable by the growing tension Stark interrupted.

“Don’t you think it’s odd? That Fury is keeping information from us?” Tony asked with a wary look.

“I do,” I confessed as I distracted myself by playing with the massive stone on my ring finger. “The difference is that I simply don’t care.”

Speaking of the devil… It was then that Nick Fury walked in and stood shocked at the realization that we weren’t working on Loki’s scepter.

“What are you doing, Mr. Stark?” Fury said angrily leering with his one visible wide eye.

“Uh...kind of been wondering the same thing about you,” Tony responded rising to his feet.

”You're supposed to be locating the Tesseract.” Fury kept his breakneck tone as he glared at the two scientists.

His mood living up to his name: furious

“We are. The model's locked and we're sweeping for the signature now. When we get a hit, we'll have the location within half a mile,” Bruce explained.

“And you'll get your cube back, no muss, no fuss,” Tony suddenly turned a monitor so that the rest of the room could see. A collection of secret files from SHIELD was on display.

‘PHASE 2’ the text read in bold, bright letters.

“What is Phase 2?” Stark pressed.

Bruce and I looked a Tony shocked. I did not see this one coming. Fury was speechless. He was about to open his mouth when suddenly Captain America came storming into the lab. He stepped in and suddenly dropped an assault rifle on the table causing a loud bang. I could feel the tension in the room; everyone’s mood was on edge. I had to step out soon.

His mood: Livid

“Phase 2 of the SHIELD uses the cube to make weapons,” Steve explained with a frown on his face. “Sorry, the computer was moving a little slow.” He said to Stark.

Fury stammered, “Rogers, we gathered everything related to the Tesseract. This does not mean we're...”

“I’m sorry, Nick,” Tony didn’t even allow him to finish. He tilted the massive, transparent screen towards him, which showed his plans involving the weapons. “What were you lying?” He added sarcastically proving him wrong.

Steve was emotionally destroyed. I could feel his faith faltering.

“I was wrong, director. The world hasn't changed a bit.”

Just then Natasha Romanoff and Thor walked into the lab. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic. There were too many tense emotions in such a small enclosed space. I suddenly felt as if I was back in the slums of India. I couldn't breath. I reached for my temples clenching my suddenly growing headache. Natasha’s anger wasn’t helping either. She glared at Bruce and I.

“You wanna think about removing yourself from this environment, doctor? Miss St. Paul?”

“I was in Calcutta. I was pretty well removed.” Bruce said after unamused laughter left his lips.

“Loki’s manipulating you-“ Natasha approached us as she spoke to Banner. The glare in her eyes made it clear that she was not to be questioned again.

“And you've been doing what exactly?” Banner retorted.

Both of my nails were buried into the closed palms of my hands.

The argument continued. More emotions became mixed into the equation.

Shock, confusion, disagreement, so much anger...

Everyone was talking over everyone. All of these prideful people’s egos kept on rubbing off against each other. I knew that shit was going to hit the fan soon.

I zoned out for a moment and clenched my eyes shut tightly.

“You speak of control, yet you court chaos,” I heard Thor say sternly.

“It's his M.O., isn't it? I mean, what are we, a team? No, no, no. We're a chemical mixture that makes chaos. We're... we're a time-bomb.” Bruce added.

A time bomb… I felt the blood draw from my palms.

“You need to step away,” Fury warned. As he raised his defenses. His eyes bounced towards me as if beginning to take control of the situation.

“No,” my voice suddenly came out in a growl. I could feel it.

“You need to step away!” I snapped groggily.

All eyes turned to me. In my hand, I held the glowing scepter tightly. My palms stained with crimson, eyes glowing with a matching hue of red and a black halos.

“Don’t look directly at her eyes!” The Black Widow warned.

“Put the scepter down…” Steve said carefully looking down at the floor avoiding eye contact. I saw Nick and Natasha reaching the their weapons, their fingers twitching.

I looked down and realized that I was holding onto Loki’s scepter tightly.

“Agent Romanoff, would you escort Dr. Banner back to his…” Nick Fury began carefully not removing his eyes from the Doctor's.

“To where? My room is rented remember?” the other spat just as angry.

Suddenly all the computers began beeping wildly.

“Is that the Tesseract?” Thor commented as he approached one of the screens carefully. Everyone tiptoed around the room almost edging around the furniture and myself. My grip on the scepter only tightened as it glowed more vibrantly.

“That Tesseract and scepter belong in Asgard, no human is a match for them,” Thor explained with his head hanging low as well as he avoided eye contact as well.

Well too bad for him I’m getting out of here, and I’m taking this damn scepter with me so all of this rubbish can be over.

“Oh, my God!” Bruce suddenly exclaimed. That could not be good…

My eyes instantly snapped back to a fearful pale yellow, and I briefly snapped back to reality. Fear now filling the room. My headache not as strong as before.

The room ignited with flames. The helicarrier shook violently as a massive explosion in the lab blew the seven of us into different directions. I could only feel the sharp glass that cut my arms and face as I was violently tossed up against the wall. For a moment I lost the scepter, but I managed to quickly compose myself and grasped it for dear life. The glowing alert lights that now illuminated the room were not helping the ambiance.

Stark and Steve sprinted out of the room ready for action. Fury shook his head still shaken from the explosion.

“Hill?!” He shouted over an intercom he was wearing. It was then that he turned to me. His eye widened as he saw me with the magical artifact. He made the mistake of getting lost in my eyes.

They glowed a shade of sickening pale yellow, almost like a snake. With a yelp, he collapsed back in the floor paralyzed with fear. Feeling just as intimidated myself I struggled to my feet and ran out of the room unsure of where I was headed. Halfway down the hallway, I realized something… The only reason why I was here-

“Wait- Where’s Bruce?” I halted taking a moment to take a sharp breath.

SHIELD agents rushed passed me and didn’t seem to notice me standing struck in the middle of a hallway under the blaring red lights. Suddenly the roaring of a monstrous creature of size resounded the rooms of the helicarrier.

“Oh, no…”

We were all fucked if I:

A) Didn’t find a way out of here it would be my death sentence.

B) Didn’t control Bruce like I am supposed to do, I probably won’t get out of this ship alive.

I followed the animalist growling. I rushed down several flights of stairs, alleys, and corridors. I realized that no one was stopping me until I tripped on a loose wire and finally saw my reflection on a broken glass on the floor. I had changed. My eyes remained the same, but my face and clothing were the ones of a SHIELD agent. Which one? I did not remember; I blended in perfectly. Had the scepter been disguised into a large screwdriver?

What the fuck had just happened.

A loud snarling and the sound of crashing and electric wires being shredded forced me to continue pushing. I finally arrived at a garage, which turned out to be aircraft port. If I didn’t find Bruce, I would just have to get on one of these and fly out by myself. Workers were rushing around in fear; I could feel it flooding the room completely. It was overwhelming and put my nerves on edge-

BOOM! CRASH!

The walls suddenly opened and Thor and the Hulk rolled across the floor. Chaos was unleashed as every single person ran the hell out for his or her lives. Thor looked at the magnificent beast. I felt my heart stop. This monster was almost twice as tall as Thor. With bulging muscles which resembled bowling balls that made it seemed like he could squeeze me with his thumb. A look of pure rage on its vibrant green eyes. His face features were still Bruce’s, but it was no longer Dr. Banner. I choked on my breath unable to speak or even think. My disguise wore off. The magical scepter still by my side. Thor stood up and looked at me surprised.

“Get out of here!” he shouted his voice straining.

The Hulk took a step forward and growled as he clenched both of his fists. There was no way that a Nordic god could take on whatever this was.

Bravely, Thor took a swing and actually hit him, but it did not do much. He swung his massive fist and Thor successfully held it up.

“We are not your enemies Banner! Banner! Try to think!” Thor pleaded. His muscles were straining as he held the gigantic arm that must have weighed more than a ton above his head.

“He’s beyond reason!” I breathed taking two slight steps backward.

The Hulk snarled, and with his other hand, he punched Thor in the face sending him flying away and to crash into some machinery. I could feel his uncontrollable anger, his rage. This creature, whatever it was, it still held human emotions.

Fighting wouldn’t do any good. It was only making him angrier.

“Hey!” I mustered up all the courage that I had standing my ground.

“Merrill of Saint Paul! No!” Thor said as he jumped to his feet.

“Remember me, big guy?” I continued.

The Hulk roared, and sprint towards me infuriated. Perhaps, I hadn’t thought this through. I stood my ground and opened my eyes wide they flashed the most vibrant shade of pink that I could muster. The monster didn’t even halt. He punched me hard, and my weak body went flying back against a computer screen system smashing it in half. An alarm went off. I held onto my side tightly gasping for breath. My entire body ached.

Had I broken something?

“WARNING: AIR CARRIER OPEN. WARNING: AIR CARRIER OPEN”

I looked back and felt the chilling gust of wind toss my hair up and momentary blind me. The jet that I was planning on making away with suddenly slid down the ramp and fell out into the vast wilderness below us. I abruptly heard a low whistling sound. Thor had summoned his hammer and continued fighting the Hulk.

Impulsively thinking I jumped to my feet. Once again Thor had been slammed into some vehicles, he reached for his lips and realized that he was actually bleeding.

“Hey!” I shouted once again as I gathered a large piece of concrete in my hand. I tossed the rock over at the Hulk, and it hit him in the back of his head.

“Shrek! Hey! I’m talking to you!”

He was even angrier than before. I could sense it. I sprinted towards the open air as he charged towards me. I must have lost my mind. He leaped towards me. I ducked and rolled to the side. Before I even turned back the opening where I was standing on toppled backward making me trip. I slid down and managed to retain my balance as I kneeled before the edge. The depth of the fall nauseated and gave me vertigo. The Hulk was gripping on to the edge of the opening, and it was bending down. If I didn’t get off soon, the door was going to break, and I was going to fall out with it.

“Thor!” I shouted in panic as I attempted to crawl back. He was there in the split of a second. We both exchanged a look of fear as we looked back at the Hulk gripping to the edges of the helicarrier as if his life depended on it. We both knew what was next.

“Will Bruce be alright?” I asked with worried eyes.

“There’s only one way to find out-“ Thor said raising up his hammer.

Without any hesitation. Thor slammed his mighty god hammer on the Hulk’s hands. He roared in pain, and his palm flinched open and dropped to the side. The opening door shook violently. With the same audacity, he slammed his other hand. I saw the morose look on the creature’s face.

This was not Bruce.

The impact of the hammer on the helicarrier door made it fall off. I was in the air. A scream caught in my throat. I didn’t even realize that Thor had held onto my torso and had used the force of his Mjölnir to pull us upwards back into the air carrier.

We both stood still for a moment. My heart was hammering in my throat. I took in a deep breath and leaned my weight on my knees as I heaved. The scepter still disguised on my opposite hand Both of my knees were violently shaking. I looked back at green abyss before us.

Phew, that had been close…

Precipitously, the air carrier suddenly shook again, more violently than the first time. Another explosion.

I couldn’t even muster a scream by the time I realized that I was toppling down the air. I saw a flash of red and realized that Thor had leaped after me. His hammer pulsated him to stray further than where I was free falling. I was blinded by the force of the wind and defeated by the loud sound of the fall.

“Use the scepter!” I heard his rough voice shrieking over in the distance. “Use the scepter!”

I felt the air filling my lungs. It took me a moment to hold the scepter before me. "How do I use this?!" my shouts were heard by deaf ears.

“Save me!” I shouted to the scepter.

Nothing happened. The ground was coming closer. My hair violently tossed around my face.

“Work you stupid thing work! What the hell does this even do?!” I shrieked.

I couldn’t think, I couldn’t feel anything I knew that I was going to die. And I couldn’t believe that Bruce had been my downfall…

From all the people.

The one I had actually grown to care for…

I could see a type of peninsula forming below, beneath the clouds. The crystal clear waters and the green of a jungle. It was approaching it was coming faster and faster.

“AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!” The scream that had been building up inside of me erupted in a violent high pitch.

I braced for my death.

FIRST: Chapter 1 PREV: Chapter 6 NEXT: Chapter 8

#avengers #the avengers #the hulk #hulk #bruce #banner #oc #bruce x oc #brucexoc #mark ruffalo #mark #ruffalo #fan fic #fanfiction #age of ultron #infinity war

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yasaoart · 8 years ago

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Here’s an illustration of my Dalish elf Yasao Mahariel that means quite a bit to me, it‘s called “Departure” and shows her as she leaves her clan for good to become a Grey Warden.

If you’re interesed, I attached an excerpt of my Dragon Age: Origins fanfiction below, the very one this drawing is based on.

The night felt short and morning came far too quickly. Still, ere the first beam of sunlight could grace the land, Yasao rose. She dressed, buckling on her armor with great care and when she finally reached for her weapons, she cast her former home a last glance.

What little trinkets she had gathered in the past twenty-three years of her life, she was leaving them all behind. She knew there was no place for baubles like this on a battlefield – all she needed and took with her, were her bow and arrows, as well as her sword and her shield. The only exception was the Keeper’s ring and her mother’s amulet, these she would cherish forever – and they’d always remind her of her Dalish roots.

At last, she left her aravel, finding herself amazed that even at this early hour, the whole clan was waiting for her... They assembled to see her off – and this deeply touched her heart. Many wished her a safe journey, some handed her useful items for the way, supplies, potions and the like, and others expressed the hope to see her again some day, when the Blight was over. And even Merrill, off all people, muttered a few encouraging words to her, giving her a little smile.

Fenarel struggled with himself, he hated to see her leave. This was the last chance to tell her how he felt, but when Yasao suddenly gave him a hug, he was utterly surprised. “Be safe, my friend.” She whispered tenderly and the young hunter blushed deeply. “You...You too.” He only managed to utter speechlessly, before his childhood-friend turned to Marethari, to bid her farewell as well. “Da’len... The clan will always carry you in their hearts. Remember us too, always.” She spoke kindly and the huntress nodded. “I will, Keeper. I won’t forget you.” She replied and finally stepped towards Duncan.

Together with him, she walked up a steep path, but before she left for good, she cast one last look over her shoulder. Yasao swallowed, fighting with her tears for the very first time in her life. No... She wouldn’t forget them. Her clan... Her family. But then, she walked onwards, following the Grey Warden in silence.

With this, her life began anew – this was her destiny. She was to become a Grey Warden and though she had yet to learn what this really meant, she swore to embrace her fate, without the slightest doubt. Come what may... She was going to fight – for the sake of her clan and all of Ferelden.

#dragon age #dragon age origins #da:o #da:origins #dragon age fanfiction #fanfiction #dalish origin #dalish elf #warden mahariel #yasao mahariel #yasao #Dalish Warden #departure #Black and White #ink drawing #finished art

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pandamothium · 8 years ago

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“Steel yourself Solas, have no mercy for you will receive none”

Disclaimer: So yeah, this isn’t in anyway a well written fic with perspectives and dialogues etc.. this is just basically a word vomit that I put together just to get the idea across (its full of errors and is poorly edited so yeah commas…commas everywhere). I guess its just like a description of what happened with a few pieces of dialogue and explanation but all in all this is some sloppy writing *shrugs* Also I kind of suck with some DA lore so yeah. At one point I was going to actually write a decent fic for this scene and story line but alas I just couldn’t get it done so here’s whatever this is…

After the disbandment of the Inquisition, many remained to form a smaller sect under protection of Divine Victoria tasked with stopping Fen’Harel at all cost.

Era’len, desperately wanting to redeem Solas is coming to realization that such a notion maybe be impossible. The Inquisition has not relented against Fen’Harel’s forces and there are constant clashes as they chase the Dread Wolf and his agents from ancient temples to forgotten vales trying to be the first to claim the ancient Eluvians. But the Great Betrayer stands at an advantage, he knows where they are for the most part.

It has been nearly year since the Exalted Council concluded and despite losing the Anchor, its effects remain and are slowly killing the former Inquisitor. The anchor had granted her the power to bend and manipulate the Veil yet such power was not intended for mortals. It was a parasite, leeching off of her body in the time it was a part of it. Such effects were unknown to Solas and the Inquisitor but in the months after losing it, they began to surface. She was dying, growing weaker, losing her connection with the Fade more and more as time passed.

Healers from across Thedas were summoned by order of the Divine but to no avail, the anchor had become a part of her and in losing it, her body could not make up what it had lost. It was a sickness and as she grew weaker, Era’len began to fear that she would fail in stopping her past-lover’s grim plans.

Yet there remained one hope, one that Era’len had been avoiding, a name chanted by the whispers. She could feel her, she was a part of her, much like the anchor, like a parasite. Era’len could feel the ancient being clinging to existence tethered* to the world by the Well of Sorrows, Mythal. Like a memory lying just beyond her mind’s reach, Era’len knew she was there. And it would take nothing more than for Era’len to speak her name to draw her forth.

But Era’len waited, patient to see if the evanuris would grow tired of waiting and take claim, but she never did. Mythal remained silent until one day when Era’len steeled her resolve to strike a bargain.

…….

Solas had miscalculated, he was dumbfounded to find the Eluvian of the Brecillian Forest was gone. He paced the empty chamber in anger at the wasted effort and danger he had place both he and his agents in to claim the Eluvian that should have been here.

Of course he had heard of the Dalish warriors whom had fallen to the Eluvian’s blight. He was confident in his abilities to cleanse the mirror, but he could have never known that it had been taken (by our lovely little daisy, Merrill) and in frustration he withdrew his forces.

Yet as they exited the overgrown temple, they discovered that they were surrounded. From all directions Inquisition soldiers poured out from the trees and undergrowth yet they did not attack.

Among the soldiers Solas noted several familiar faces: Cassandra, the Iron bull, the Chargers and Blackwall. Their gazes bore into him. Betrayal and anger reflected on their faces and they stood prepared for what was to come.

Solas braced himself for battle and his agents did the same only to be halted when the enemy forces parted to allow a figure to step out into the clearing between them.

Solas’s breath hitched at the sight before him and the air teemed with a familiar magic that made his legs weak.

Era’len stood in the clearing, sharp gaze boring into his as he stared in horror at what was to unfold.

“Vhenan…” he choked

“No” she interrupts, but her voice is not what he remembered. Not the voice that haunted his dreams. Its twisted and carries another behind it, one he knew well but he wasn’t given time to respond, “Your heart has already withered Solas.” (Here she says it to mean Pride and not really as his name)

……..

This was the final stand, there were no more chances, if she could not deter him here she would end it all. She had come to accept this, she had cut out her heart and bore her fangs. She had to, for everyone she knew and loved were in danger of his intentions.

Her body would not survive much longer, the power she had gained from Mythal came with a price, she knew that she had but one chance and she would not waste it.

“Grant me the power to stop him… help me Mythal… help me save him…help me save this world.”

……..

“Please, vhenan you must understand… this world… is wrong… it was never supposed to be this way. Let me fix my mistake… you don’t understand all that was lost.”

“No, it is you that doesn’t not understand. You are blind Solas (Pride). You are unable to see that you stand to make the same mistake. You would destroy this world, everything … just to make the world right…as you say it should be. You treat us like a nightmare as if we are just a wrong to be corrected. “

“But it is you who are wrong, the People have survived. The People have struggled, suffered and fought for ages, and yet you disregard us as idiot children who fail to know the truth. You see us and warped creatures from elves of Arthalan…. Tell me Solas when you tear down the Veil… how will you face your kind… the Evanuris… how will to stop them from enslaving the People once more?”

“The past is GONE, there is no turning back. There is no way to fix what you have done and still you refuse to believe that this is the reality you have created. Instead of fighting for our future, you want to take it away to reclaim the past and I….will not let that happen… I will not let you destroy us…. I will stop you… even if that mean the death of us both.”

“Both?” he barely managed to speak, taking a step back as Era’len stepped forward, “Yes, this body… is broken… dead… its only purpose now is to stand against you who would end this world. And once my purpose is fulfilled, we will perish and the Evanuris will be no more.”

“Now I say this again… Stop this Solas, abandon your dreams of Arlathan and fight to forge new ones… for the elves of today… for my people. It is too late for me but there is so much good in this world, there is so much you can do for them. Do not repeat your mistakes.”

But it was futile, his eyes burned with anger. “No vhenan, I can save you! I can save our people, I can make everything right! Please, please don’t do this…”

The air in the clearing seemed to grow thin as both his agents and Inquisition soldiers readied themselves for battle. The deep breath before the plunge. All eyes were trained on her figure, waiting for her to signal the attack.

From across the clearing Solas could see the faint glimmer as tears fell from her chin, and his eyes burned as he fought back his own.

“Vhenan… Era’len…pleas..” his breath cut short as she drew her staff, her stance stiffened and he felt his heart shatter as he drew his weapon.

“Steel yourself Solas, have no mercy for you will receive none” and with a snarl she lunged at the Great Betrayer.

….

The clearing erupted into chaos, Fen’Harel’s agents and Inquisition soldiers littered the forest floor as the two armies clashed. Yet the greatest spectacle was the beastly forms of the former Inquisitor and the Dread Wolf.

They slashed and gouged with deadly claws and the sounds of snapping jaws cracked like thunder as they fought. Trees and boulders were crushed underfoot as the giant beasts tore at each other’s throats.

…..

It seemed liked hours.

Hours of bloodshed and death and as the two armies began to dwindle, it seemed that Fen’Harel’s agents were outnumbering and overwhelming the Inquisitor’s soldiers by using the ancient trees and nature magic to their advantage.

When suddenly there was a grueling howl, unlike any beast or man could make, a gargled choking sound that halted with a sharp snap.

It was over.

The great wolf fell limp in Era’len’s jaws and crumpled to the ground with a heavy thud. The clearing echoed with screams of anguish and triumph but they were drowned out by the heart-wrenching wail of the Inquisitor. In a storm of smoke and flame her dragonesque form broke away like an illusion and she was left standing over his body.

She fell to her knees, her expression distant and pained, his blood stinging her tongue. It was done and she remained at his side as the stragglers from his army disappeared in retreat now that their leader had fallen.

But it was not over, a thick aura hung in the clearing, swirling round like the eye of a storm. It was time to uphold her bargain.

Inquisition solders searched desperately through the fog like substance calling for her. She could hear Cassandra and the Chargers yet they sounded distant as she stared blankly at the still form before her.

A familiar voice echoed from behind.

“I have kept my promise…”

Era’len nodded and leaned forward to press her lips softly to his which had already began to grow cold, “As have I.”

Moments later the aura dissipated revealing nothing but blood and ash.

* my headcanon is that the well is what kept Mythal alive, think HP horcrux but not really, her ‘essence” or spirit is bound or “tethered” to the well thus any who drink are bound to her in some way but she cant just commandeer the body/spirit of anyone who drank from the well. she must be welcomed/accepted/summoned by said person

@eveninglottie This is that idea I talked with you about a lllloooooonnngg time ago (like july 2016 lol) I swear I tried writing it but got sidetracked with school, life and creative blocks, but I actually managed to write a LITTLE of it gggaahhhhh even if it is MONTHS late T-T thank you talking it out with me back then ^^

#dragon age #solavellan #solas #character death #Era'len Lavellan #post-tresspasser #shit writing #my writing #ammoonart #plus i never finished the picture or comic for this *shrug intensifies*#tw death mention

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homestuck-good · 8 years ago

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Coming Home - Lin X Reader

Prompt: Uh... None. I'm still new to this whole thing.

Warnings: Like, two curse words. Lin curses a lot in his interviews, so he curses here, too. Summary: You and Lin have grown distant over the years, leading to unfortunate feelings of loneliness. After returning to New York for a job interview, an unexpected encounter leads to a surprising reconciliation. Word count: 1,900 (Wow. 0.o) Notes: This is my first posted fic, so I really hope you all like it! Please give any and all feedback, I would appreciate it very much! I know @secretschuylersister said that what she got to read was good, so I hope the rest of it lives up to her expectations!

OH GOSH I AM SO NOT READY TO POST THIS

HERE WE GO

The window's view flashed by faster than your eyes could follow, mixing into a blur of pictures and scenes of local life. Huge buildings towered on the horizon, nearing closer every time you looked up. A deep breath in. A deep breath out. There were few things you had experienced more nerve-wracking than this particular train ride back to your hometown. Even with a very promising job on the line, (y/n) was reluctant to travel home. She'd eventually end up running into an old family friend or schoolmate, which wasn't all that nerve-wracking. What made this journey anxiety-inducing was the prospect of meeting him.

You hadn't seen him in over a decade, and conversation had obviously not been much of a priority to him since you left. The two of you had been best friends at one point, and you still had no idea what happened between you.

Oh yeah, fame and fortune happened.

You and Lin had grown up in the same neighborhood, and your parents were close friends. It was inevitable that the two of you would be forced to spend time with each other, no matter how much both of you resisted. After nearly a year of the two of you avoiding one another, a mutual love of theatre brought you into a careful friendship. From there, the relationship blossomed. The two of you had spent every moment possible together, reenacting scenes from Rent or singing a very out-of-tune rendition of Wicked. You would trust Lin with your life, and he would trust you with his. Of course, while Lin fell deeper into camaraderie, you had fallen deeper into love. Despite your best efforts to suppress it, a fluttering and delicate crush began to take root in your mind, until all you thought about was his goofy smile and stunningly kind words. Your years of schooling past by quickly, lost in a blur of tests and exams. The end of Senior year arrived faster than either of you could ever imagine.

Much to your dismay, Lin was going to Wesleyan, a liberal arts university in Connecticut. You, however, had been accepted to Phillip Merrill, a journalism school in Maryland. You would be far from your best friend and your hometown, leaving you feeling alone and helpless. Lin, of course, promised that he would talk with you whenever possible, updating you on the nature of his life. You pledged to do the same.

First semester went smoothly. Constant conversation, and good grades. Eventually, 'whenever possible' turned into 'whenever convenient'. You talked less and less, seeing as both of you were drowning in heaping piles of schoolwork. That never deterred your friendship. Lin's creative genius never ceased to astound you in every way. He would share ideas with you when he could, looking for your approval before he deemed the idea worth acting on.

It made you feel good, to know that you were still an important part of his life.

Slowly but surely, your small role in his world diminished until you were nothing but a fond reminder of childhood that was off in some other part of the country. Your unrequited feelings began to flicker out as well, but you still smiled every time you saw his name in the news.

He was in the news quite often, after all.

In The Heights, a work of genius, had finally made its way onto Broadway. Journalism jobs were few and far between, so when the opportunity to write an eight-page cover story on a hit Broadway musical popped up, you took it without second thought.

That second thought, however, probably would have been that you would have to interview a certain Lin-Manuel Miranda to get the story done.

Shaking yourself out of reminiscence, you looked up to find the dreary view quickly changing to the busy hubbub of a train station. Gathering the bag you had packed for your week's stay, you merged into the crowd streaming outside. A cacophony of sounds hit your ears almost immediately, but you knew from experience it was nothing compared to what awaited you in the streets of New York. You took another deep breath in. Out. Although nighttime was fast approaching and you had an early morning ahead, muscle memory guided your feet to your favorite hole-in-the-wall.

It was a little book shop that had survived on you and Lin's purchases alone for a few years, and the owner greeted you warmly when you stepped into the familiar room. You returned the welcome with a kind smile and a hug, telling him that you were back home for a week on a business endeavor.

The two of you talked for a bit, discussing books and catching up on a decade of missed conversation. He was talking animatedly about a recent encounter with a rather rude customer when the bell that signaled a new arrival chimed. You turned around, ready to greet this stranger with a smile and a firm handshake. You were instead faced with a scenario you hadn't been prepared to struggle through until tomorrow.

A disheveled and sleep-deprived Lin stood in the doorway, staring at you in shock.

The owner, who's name was Luis, called for Lin to shut the still-swinging door. He did so with robotic movements, face still frozen in a mask of surprise. Time seemed to freeze. You had trouble drawing in a breath deep enough to merit proper brain function, which wasn't very helpful in this current situation.

Scenes of your childhood began to play through your mind, memories of Lin rushing forward with a fresh wave of pain. Seeing his face reopened a wound you weren't ready to address yet. You drew in a deep, very shaky breath.

Luis, bless his soul, was able to detect the tension and scurried safely into a back room to escape the awkward conversation that would inevitably take place. You, however, did not have that luxury. Deciding to break the enveloping silence, you offered a very unsure-sounding "Hi."

Lin was still in a state of shock. "Hey." His eyes began to shift around the room, looking at everything but you.

"So," you began. "Ready for your interview tomorrow?"

He laughed and loosened up considerably. It took him only a few seconds before he stiffened up once again. "How did you know about that? It's going to be for a small magazine, and it's not anything..." He trailed off, finally understanding that you were the interviewer. You surmised he had forgotten that you had gone to get a degree in journalism. You assumed he had forgotten a lot of things since you left, actually.

The awkward atmosphere having made its return, Lin started averting his eyes again. You sighed in frustration, clearly fed up with his dancing on eggshells.

"Look. We stopped talking. I get it. You were too busy with fame and fortune to talk to an old friend. That's alright." You sounded bitter and resentful, despite the thousands of times you had imagined this exact encounter. Another breath and you had enough emotional integrity to continue without crying. "Let's just get this over with, okay? I'll pretend I'm the interviewer, you're being interviewed, and we don't know each other. It'll be fine."

You didn't know if you were assuring yourself or Lin, but it wasn't working. You muttered another "Yeah, It'll be fine..." underneath your breath, even when you were clearly not fine. When you looked back at him, he was slack-jawed and open-mouthed. You had tears in your eyes. "Look, I'm sorry. Taking this job was stupid. I'll go back and have them send someone else. Tell Luis I said bye." You nearly jogged to get past Lin and out of the store, tears threatening to spill onto your cheeks. It took less than a moment for him to spring into action, and before you knew it warm arms were holding you back from the door, clutching you close.

You cried. Hard.

He wrapped his arms around you in a tight hug, holding you despite your efforts to get away. You finally gave in, leaving tear stains on his shirt. Lin held you even closer, rubbing your upper back in a gesture of comfort. It wasn't very comforting. When you looked at his face again, he smiled. You began to profusely apologize and tried to dislodge yourself from his arms. He, thankfully, held on. Quieting your apologies, he almost giggled.

Lin. Giggled. He giggled.

You, probably more out of delirium than hilarity, began to giggle too. He erupted into a full-blown laugh, making you giggle even harder. You might have even snorted once or twice. He quieted and stared at you with adoration.

"God (y/n), you really thought that was why I stopped talking to you? Did you really think you would ever become unimportant to me?" You nodded sheepishly, temporarily assured that a lack of three years correspondence was nothing more than a mishap. He put his hand to his forehead, mumbling a string of curses under his breath. The only one you heard clearly was "I can't believe I'm actually gonna say this out loud..." Which didn't sound very reassuring at the moment. He sighed and looked at you, still smiling.

"Look, (y/n). I have fallen hopelessly in love with my best friend. She is funny, smart, kind, and beautiful in each and every way. I put off talking to her for three long years because I was so fucking afraid that she'll reject me. I'm still really fucking afraid of that." Lin shook his head, losing his smile. "Shit. Just, forget that. I'll, uh, leave now..."

You didn't think. You probably should have. The last thought running through your mind was 'Screw it.', or something along those lines. Then again, most of your decisions have ended with a defeated 'Screw it.'

Instinct caused you to tug on his arm, pulling him back around to face you. It was probably recklessness that made you grab his face and pull him in for a kiss.

He stood in shock, unable to move. You continued nonetheless, confident now that you were sure of his feelings. Lin's hands quickly found their way into your hair, pulling you closer to him.

This was nice. Unexpected, nonetheless, but nice.

After a minute of this wonderful experience, the two of you were forced to part because of humanity's unfortunate need for oxygen. Right now, you needed him. Lin was still in shock, breathless despite the kiss's chasteness. You laughed. So did he. It felt like you were teenagers again, laughing off a blunder in class with books and show tunes. It felt good. So, so good. So, so right. The two of you migrated to your favorite chairs in the corner of the store, comfortably sitting in your childhood thrones. Grinning like an idiot, you posed a very important question.

"So, ready for your interview yet?"

"Definitely. That is if you'll be there to see me?" Lin responded playfully, knowing very well that the two of you would probably arrive at the meeting place together, coffees in hand.

"Hm, that depends. I'll have to rearrange my schedule, but I'll see what I can do." Awkwardness long gone, the two of you engaged in comforting banter. Of course, you each snuck a few kisses in between sentences, but that's beside the point.

It felt good to be home.

#how do i make words word??? Guys?? Help???? Am i official hamiltrash yet or nah

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