#yes it sucks. obviously. it fucking sucks.

[le-chevalier-au-lion]

the game lasts 14 hours: rosquez [e], part 1

Marc had been dreaming—yes, dreaming is a good word for it. One minute, he’d been upright on the bike, panting like a dog inside his sweat-damp helmet, Pecco half a heartbeat behind, the grandstands around Sepang a blur of color and heat-fuzzy people. The next, he thinks he’d been down, or dead.

Now there’s someone hammering on his door. Hard enough he can feel it pulse on his teeth, on the tips of his fingers that are cold and numb.

His eyes are gritty. Everything about his body moves a heartbeat too slow, unresponsive. It takes Marc a moment to drag himself upright, to convince his legs to move. Dead fits better, he is sure of it.

The pounding becomes deafening. Marc forces air into his lungs once, twice—and off he goes. He swings the door open, almost closes it again once he sees who’s there. He could be dreaming, still. Or very high on the good painkillers.

“Marc,” Valentino croaks.

He’s panicking—maybe. Probably. It’s there in his wide, watery eyes, in his hands, wobbly and clammy. He jitters, looms on Marc’s doorway shaking worse than an addict.

“You have to believe me,” Valentino spits once it becomes clear Marc won’t speak. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, his fingers tap on the wall. His mouth pulls to the side, like he sucked on something sour. “I’m in a time loop, it’s—”

“Alright,” Marc cuts him, “do you want to come in?”

Valentino blinks. His shoulders jump, grow stiff, and he sways a step back before he remembers himself.

“You always say that.”

There’s a strain in Valentino’s voice, a knot unswallowed. Marc wonders if he should bring that up, decides against it. It’s easier to move to the side, invite Valentino in wordlessly. He should ask how he got his room number, how he bribed the staff to let him come up.

Or not. It wouldn’t be that surprising.

Valentino stumbles like a baby deer, all long, uncooperative legs. Sweat prickles on his throat, on his forehead. His gray shirt is fucking soaked with it. He looks—it must be said—like shit.

“You look like shit,” Marc decides to inform him. It’s a little—mostly—because he can’t think of anything else to fill the silence. He never can.

“You always say that too,” he scoffs.

Offense is better than panic—Marc hates when people panic around him. And it makes Valentino suck in a breath, convulsive, short, and then another, one more after that, each one easier. The minutes tickle by until he collapses into a plush arm chair, a puppet with his strings cut, sleeplessness carved into the bags under his eyes, into the gray sallowness of his face.

Marc checks the clock on the wall, the aggressive, bleeding red of the numbers. 05:13 AM. It’s early, still, but he needs to go on a run, have breakfast with Álex, sit down with his crew to smooth out his tire choice. Five points between him and Pecco, he can’t afford to make a mistake.

He doesn’t have time for Valentino going on a full freak-out, and yet—

“You believe me.”

Marc sighs, gets around brewing himself a mug of coffee. Only one, he isn’t sure if Valentino should be taking any caffeine when he’s this close to a heart attack. It’d be funny, for this to be a loop where he dies so early, doesn’t learn anything from it.

“You don’t contradict senile people.” He’s smiling, a little, a sharp grin tucked on the corner of his mouth.

Ha ha, Valentino barks. He’s clinging to the armchair so hard the fake leather creaks under his bitten bloody nails. “You believe me. I know you do.”

It isn’t usually this difficult to not be an asshole before 7 in the morning.

Marc could be cruel—it’s not often he gets to catch Valentino wrong-footed, genuine. His anger is so mirror smooth, an opaque, enchanting thing. Few people can dig into him and make it hurt. He could be much kinder, too. Say something like you’re obviously afraid, it’s not the time to question anything, of course I’d help.

Not a good idea. There’s a timeline where Valentino punches him for that, he thinks.

Marc is also very tired of offering kindness to Valentino.

He swallows. “Let’s say I do.”

Valentino lets out this noise—like Marc stabbed him right between the ribs, right where it hurts. It’s the thing about him, one of the worst ones. Doesn’t he know that a good third of Marc’s life has been spent dealing with what he says? Rolling with those wild fairytales, bracing for the next hit.

It sticks to the roof of his mouth. I believe you believe that, soothing in the same twist where it’s mocking, an oystershell of the unkindness that Marc has been rehearsing once he stopped showing his soft underbelly.

“Is this the first time you’re coming to me?” He asks, raises an eyebrow.

“No.”

“Really?”

Valentino hums an unwilling assent, kisses his teeth. The sharp tsk sound is so familiar that Marc feels like he was plucked from his body, tossed ten, eleven years ago. The sense of vertigo has him braced against the narrow, non-descript counter, watching out for the trickle of coffee that will—maybe—ground him. He’s an optimist.

“Twenty-six,” he huffs out, scowls. It sounds like it was pried from him laboriously.

The coffee machine beeps. Marc does the unwise thing and turns his back on Valentino, fiddles with the buttons. He will take it with sugar today. He fucking deserves a spoon or two, something sweet to soften the blows.

“I’m guessing I’m not exactly helpful.”

Marc feels a hand pressed between his shoulder blades, hot as a brand, that touch raking over his nerve endings even through the protection of a shirt. It’s proprietary, tugs on his guts like a fishhook. His insides might as well spill out, redredred and so overly honest it hurts. He flinches, remembers he shouldn’t have. His mouth twists, lips pressed together.

Everything suddenly aches.

“Are you ever,” Valentino breathes out because he never had a problem with being cruel.

It’s easier to hold on to that—it’s the gentleness that has Marc grinding his teeth, dull pulses of pain settling in his jaw.

He closes his eyes, then forces them open—you can’t run from a tricky corner, or from Valentino. “Any reason in particular you’re messi—”

“I’m not messing up with your weekend,” Valentino hisses. Time loop, right. Marc is still annoyed at being interrupted.

But his face is so close, Marc can spot each new wrinkle, the skin of his earlobe sagging under the weight of his earring, the patchy, half-shaved stubble on his oddly cadaveric cheeks. He forgets to not be charmed, forgets how abrasive Valentino can be.

“In my experience, you typically are,” he counters, mostly to be difficult.

Valentino’s face spasms. Marc counts down the seconds until he hardens, becomes a naked blade under sunlight. His expression crystalizes into his usual mask, except for his bottom lip wobbling, the manic glint in his horribly blue eyes.

“Allora, it’s always a fight with you.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

Marc curls his hand around his mug, sinks into the heat radiating against his palm. Valentino tightens his grip on his shirt, turns him around. He has to look up—if it’s through his lashes, well, it’s so very early, and he hasn’t taken his coffee yet, and he’s bleary and good as dead.

Neither of them speak.

It’s 05:28 AM, the clock cheerfully informs him. He needs to get going, or he won’t have time to go on his run.

Marc doesn’t move. Valentino keeps him boxed against the counter, gripping his arms. It’ll bruise. His bones creak under that hold, but it’s the closest to tethered he’s felt in a while. He lulls himself into that false security, knowing it’ll bite, knowing he’ll take the bite anyway.

“So why come to me?” He asks, once the silence grows boring, once it starts gnawing on his sanity.

Valentino lets out this laugh—a little hysterical, choked. “It’s not my first choice. Uccio tries to give me Alprazolam and Luca tells me to go back to bed.”

Marc hums, faux-commiserating. “It’s good advice, have you tried it?”

“Right?” He keeps laughing or making that noise that looks like a laugh and sounds like it’s tearing him apart stitch by stitch. Marc could try looking into it, divining the omens of his day on his spilled guts.

Or—

“What happens next?”

He wants to know what Valentino will say today—it’s his favorite part of any game they play, getting roped into those stories. Falling for Valentino’s deranged Cesar on death row charm.

This time, Valentino skips the charm. Marc wishes he weren’t so disappointed.

“You’re going to die.” He nods, yes and?

Valentino grows stiff, death-serious, mouth wrenched in a snarl that bares his sharp canines. The press of his fingers goes from settling to a permanent ache, right over the place where he broke and didn’t heal right. It’s good, the kind of pain Marc can sink into and enjoy, constant, so dear by now.

“You can’t not care. You believe me.”

He smiles—bland, strained around the edges. His face feels like clay. “There’s always tomorrow, no?”

It’s a joke. Almost one. Marc has barely spoken when he notices how flat it falls, how he misses the apex of comedic timing by a mile.

There’s barely enough time to set his coffee on the counter. Valentino crowds into him, or wrenches him closer. They’re chest to chest like this. Blurring into each other, Valentino’s thumb splayed over the longest scar on his arm, Marc panting hotly over his protruding collarbone.

“You just don’t—”

“Valentino,” he sighs.

Marc has—they’re both bleeding, the walls of his hotel room pressing into him grimy and suffocating like a slaughterhouse floor. It’s too much blood, too much history, too much. Marc has made him angry. The ugly anger. A knotted mess Valentino can’t smoke-and-mirrors his way through, that pours out of his flashing eyes, his grinding teeth, his hands digging into Marc like he’ll crack open his ribs.

He doesn’t remember how many times he’s seen it before. Not many. Valentino is pathologically non-confrontational, his smiles slick and meaningless right as he lines a shot. Maybe he’s losing his mind, fraying, shattering.;

And maybe Marc is losing his mind too. I got you, he thinks, triumphant—the poisonous, acrid triumph of racing even when his arm twists like it’s trying to kill him. He still can make Valentino lose his footing. No one else but him.

“You’re going to die,” Valentino repeats, takes a step away from Marc like he’s scalding. He starts pacing, a caged thing, a Russian doll of nervous ticks. “It’s going to be—it’s going to be fucking terrible. It’s going to hurt. Why isn’t that enough for you?”

Marc looks—briefly—heavenward. Valentino scoffs.

And that’s it. Another one.

“How many times have you gone over today?” He asks, hopeful and hating himself for that hope.

Valentino smirks—like he has a knife tucked between his lips, joylessly, scraped raw. “Once or twice. It’s not like you ever take it seriously.”

The sound of the door slamming closed echoes in his chest. Marc tries to breathe, fails. Has to bend over the counter, the cold marble a blessing against his overheated skin. The chilly shock hoists back to his own body, but the nausea remains, a mouthful of thorns and bile he can’t swallow.

He wishes that Valentino would answer once—just once—how long he’s been on a time loop.

But he can’t linger too long on that. Marc has to go out now, go on a run, have breakfast with Álex, talk with his crew about his tires, die on T5 of lap 12.

Ater sixty-two runs, he’s pretty damn good at it.

[travellingtribble]

after much consideration I've come to the conclusion that no Nandermo is better than dead Nandermo.

It might be the Supernatural 15×18 "Despair" 6 November 2020 Election Putin Day trauma speaking, but still.

[utilitycaster]

Ok I'm probably going to regret reinventing 17th century European religious philosophy here but:

Ludinus's issue with the gods as stated to Imogen and Fearne (and I will state right now that we know he was lying or deliberately misleading at points in that conversation so I don't exactly take him at his word, but let's assume he does mean this) is that they did not prevent the Calamity. I have the following questions.

Does he have any loyalty/feelings about the Titans given that they would have killed all the people in the era of the Schism, ie, the gods averted that Calamity? My guess is no, which means that whole avenue of discussing the Titans was something of a dead end.

How should Calamity have been averted? The Prime Deities during the Age of Arcanum largely let people do what they wanted, which is what led to one of those mortals releasing the Betrayer Gods. Should the gods have struck down Vespin Chloras before he actually did anything, Minority Report style? Can the gods even predict based on the actions of a single individual or small group, because my guess is they can't, particularly since within the current stream of gameplay they absolutely cannot [ie, the reason the Changebringer can't tell FCG to stay or run is because Matt Mercer is the Changebringer and he doesn't know how people will roll; you do need to consider the medium here]. But if they could: so you think they should strike down mortals on the basis of thoughtcrimes? Or control them? In that case, why is Aeor a problem? There's a lot you can argue is justified once you permit the gods to override free will and kill people over mere potential for catastrophe.

On that note, Laerryn both was an unwitting architect of the Calamity (shorted on energy and then killed the Tree of Names, which served as a core planar defense system) but also averted the worst of it. Did the lives she saved by preventing the rise of Rau'shan and Ka'Mort outweigh the lives she took by destroying the Tree of Names? How should the gods have reacted?

Should, perhaps, the gods have all sealed themselves away earlier - perhaps post-Schism? If so, then the issue isn't the Divine Gate, now is it? Should the gods intervene or not intervene? Should they remove themselves or no? It feels like the issue isn't that they distanced themselves so that they can do less in the world, particularly if you wish to kill them, but that you really want to fucking kill them and they made that somewhat more difficult.

How do we know the gods (for example) didn't save Laudna? She was hanged and she's still alive; Morri would probably count this as saving her and I don't see the same desire to wipe out all Archfey. [real talk I find most discussion of Laudna specifically to be...incomprehensibly ignorant in its refusal to acknowledge that everything about it is player agency related, whether it's the story that the cast played out for Vox Machina or the decisions Marisha specifically made in creating the character, ie, do you think Matt should have said "well you can't play a Hollow One because that would mean the gods didn't save you" not to mention the fact that again, we are playing this within a game system where the existence Deus Ex Machina would in fact fucking suck ass; but even setting aside those reasons why this argument is stupid, it's still stupid. It's like a layer cake of stupid.] Again: do you want more intervention or less? Killing them guarantees less.

I'm assuming the problem with the Calamity is the vast loss of life, in which case, what's the math on how many people have been killed by the Vanguard or Imperium in the pursuit of unleashing Predathos? How many more will die?

If the release of Predathos doesn't result in the immediate demise of all the gods, and the Divine Gate is down, why isn't this a recipe for Calamity 2? What was the motivation for killing the gods again?

Should we kill mortal diviners who do not do all within their power to stop terrible things that may come to pass? If the issue is that some people have power without working for it, why haven't we killed all the sorcerers?

Should we be listening to a single word from someone who consumes random fey to live longer, and that's just the start of the CVS receipt of atrocities?

Is there a point where one's deeply held beliefs due to one's own personal trauma become invalidated due to one's actions as a result of that trauma? If so, why is the limit for Orym "is okay with killing people who are trying, directly, to kill you (which, frankly, isn't even a trauma response, that's just called not wanting to die, which I highly recommend as a personal philosophy), and gets upset when people defend those knowingly collaborating with his family's murderers" and the limit for Vanguard generals "family abandonment/just. buckets of murder of innocents./child soldier recruitment in multiple different contexts/eating fey as biohacking/destroying an entire city and the surrounding forest for hundreds of years (ongoing)/imperialism in multiple different contexts/I was going to make a gallows humor joke about how while neither exist in-world they've violated the Geneva Convention AND the IRB for testing on human subjects multiple times over but actually those both are in fact written in a lot of the same blood/probably some others that I'm forgetting"

[rotisseries]

my favorite thing about mha has got to be how you can't tell if the writers are aware or not that the setting is in fact a corrupt police state

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[lithi]

Was trying to like. Imagine how a step-mother Penelope/step-daughter Athanasia AU would work. Claude would either never know about Penelope’s affair (or at least does not suspect about the pregnancy. Somehow) or would be so blinded by grief after Diana’s death that he would just pathetically accept Penelope back.

Obviously she could not pass Jennette as Claude’s so ..?? She would probably huh. Keep her as her forever dirty little secret or eventual pawn to use (maybe she is passed off as countess rosalia’s daughter?).

Her relationship with Athanasia would depend a lot on whether Athy is still reincarnated or not but I guess Penelope would either roll with Claude’s mistreatment of her (and probably have him disinherit her because she is, after all, his low-born bastard) or play the kind step-mother for politics (and the rest would also depend on whether or not they do have children together later on. maybe Anastasius using her as his black magic baby machine fucked her body up). Just imagine. The drama

Anyways this is what inspired the brainworms lol

[scentedinksandwhackedseals]

random idea: in the tags, type every letter in alphabetical order, one at a time and put the tags that come up

[widowshill]

not to be like "angelique did nothing wrong" but i think angelique has a hell of a lot more compelling motivations for her actions than barnabas ever did.

[mrfunnyinthebank]

Where Is My Mind by The Pixies is a fucking insane song choice for a wrestling entrance. i thought my ears were fucking deceiving me when i heard the first note hit during a promo. and then the guy who comes out is ORANGE CASSIDY??

[frogaroundandfindout]

Dick holds a meeting about the titans performance against the Hive. Kory argues that he’s reprimanding them like military but doesn’t want her to act like a soldier. Dick says she had no right to kill Adeline and Kory says they don’t know what it’s like to suffer like she has.

Garth mentions getting back to his wife and dick makes a dig about marriages of convenience. Kory throws a starbolt at dick for it, but he dodges.

Victor compares their behavior to Gar and Terra’s back in the day and Gar gets upset and says it’s like he doesn’t even know Vic anymore. Victor quits the titans but dick says he can’t because he made a deal with the JLA to keep Vic out of STAR labs by having the titans watch over him. Vic grabs dick by the neck until flash and Donna hold him back. Dick explains this was major reason for him starting the titans again and Vic walks away with a final dig aimed at dick starting the titans so they could stop him from becoming like Bruce.

Flash tries to leave and dick orders jesse to stop him. Dick tells him that they all have questions about him and that he doesn’t need to come back from the JLA meeting.

Dick asks the rest of the titans if they can afford to commit to the team and they all leave citing various excuses. Dick is left alone with the jr members argent, damage, and Jesse.

Titans #13

[wdcmaxy]

just because liam is with her doesnt mean he shares the same values. i bet youre the kind of person who thinks people with different politics cant be friends or treat each other with kindness

were you dropped on your head as a baby? if you are in love with some dumb cunt who doesn't believe in science and supports a felon who thinks anyone who's not a cis white man should die, you share their values. full stop.

[youngerfrankenstein]

Alpha Trion: SENTINEL PRIME IS A BITCH ASS LIAR!

The main four: *Horrified gasp*

Orion:

[snekdood]

me and my gma were talking about how we both feel like we have the opposite of SAD bc for me personally i get more energy and get happier and want to be outside more in cold, cloudy, rainy, snowy, etc. weather and feel drained and tired in the hot ass summer. she thinks its her inner irish longing for cloudy days lol

[minakoaiinos]

Twitter getting obsessed with conspiracy theories about where redacted is makes me feel so fucking terrible when there is so much worse going on that people are literally begging you to pay attention to but instead you want to focus on scenarios you made up in your head and play true crime detective

[destieldisaster]

Never reblogging that stupid gold potato again. In other news, anyone wanna hire me?

[uncaught-coolfish]

unpopular opinion the Maya models don’t look bad at all. But at the same time the only ones that look good to me are the ones in darker clothing, with darker skin, etc etc because YOU CANT TELL THERES NO FUCKING TEXTURING!!!!!!!!!