#you do realize that the people who donate to ao3 most likely are also donating to your cause(s)?

[daughterofhecata]

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[jediwizard]

It's crazy how Alice creates the most diverse but also relatable characters. There are characters of different sexual orientations, different races, genders, mental illnesses, family life and eating disorders. They're all so different??? but there's something that binds them all together. For example, I relate to Tao and his love for films but I also relate to Georgia with her loyalty to her friends, and I relate to Tori but I relate to Frances and her obsession to do well in school and not be a disappointment, but I relate to Lister but I... They're all different, but there's something so familiar about them and you can see similar traits in each of them in yourself. you're never just one character, but a perfect mix of a bunch of them. I feel like a collage or mosaic of my favourite characters. Not just the four of them, but all the characters, like Aled Last, Micheal Holden and Elle Argent.

Alice Oseman's characters radiate comfort and warmth. Her books give the same vibes as curling up in you're cozy messy bed after an exhausting day at school or work, buried under a mountain of blankets when it rains or snows outside. The months between September and February when the sun sets early and you get to wear extra layers of clothes like that oversized black hoodie to cover your face from the unfamiliar or jean jacket covered in fandom pins. Returning to your room filled with artifacts from your childhood, old middle-grade fantasy books you haven't touched in like four years but wouldn't sell or donate because they mean too much, book reports and DIY science projects from 3rd grade and that movie poster filled haven where you could leave the stresses of the real world behind.

All the lights are off, except for those fairy string lights above your bed. You're sipping a hot cup of tea or hot chocolate, rereading your old favourite books you loved as a teenager and watching that old favourite film that you've seen so many times that you can remember all the dialogue to, but you watch it anyway. Listening to that carefully curated 90s indie rock playlist from 2019 to drown out and forget the world outside. listening to artists like cavetown, girl in red, the 1975, Arctic monkeys, phoebe bridgers and the smiths. staying up wayyyy too late, the only light being the screen of your laptop or phone, reading fan fiction on AO3 while your whole family's asleep. That warmth and authenticity that you don't find much in modern media. The nostalgia. How she accurately portrays what actual teenagers are like, both the good and the bad. and every other feeling in between. confusion and the odd feelings of growing up, especially how characters like georgia and Nick never realized their sexualities until later (it can be nerve-wracking to figure something out), but also people who have known who they are since forever like frances and charlie. knowing yourself but also feeling like a complete stranger in your body. i don't know how, but even if you're reading it for the first time, @chronicintrovert books have the feeling of returning home.

[pictureinme]

Can we get Robert Fischer obsessed with a cam girl?

thank u so much for this idea omg ... i had so much fun w this !! also u have the honor of being my first fischer fic LOL

superstar

robert fischer x camgirl!reader word count: 1.2k tags: male masturbation, sex toys (vibrator), overstimulation, camming

(ao3)

Robert lets out a groan as he watches you through his monitor. You had just started streaming, still completely clothed, but he couldn’t resist how you teased at your hardening nipples through your top. Scantily clad, of course, you never were the type to dress modestly for these shows.

He had been watching you for about a month now, turning notifications on almost immediately. The way you would fit all these toys inside yourself with almost no difficulty, and yet still sound so authentic– Robert could be falling in love at this point. Don’t even get him started on your angelic face, he has never seen someone quite like you. If he had, he would’ve been married a long time ago.

“So many people already… and even some new faces!” You grin and begin to hike your pathetic excuse for a skirt up your thighs, revealing the tiniest of panties. “Of course, my favorite supporter is here too. Hi, fischbait!”

“Fuck…” Robert covers his mouth with his hand as his length twitches at you simply uttering his screen name. He knew it was unavoidable that you would notice him– every stream he would send you a minimum of 500 bucks. It didn’t matter if you did anal or anything out of the ordinary, Robert just loved seeing that look in your eyes when you hear that telltale notification sound.

Sometimes he would send messages along with the donations, telling you to buy a specific kind of toy or outfit. Most often, though, he was a silent supporter.

“I think you’re really gonna like what I have in store, you guys,” Robert watches as you move your panties to the side, revealing a vibrator already inside of you, “Whoever gives the biggest donation gets to control this little thing. How cute is that?”

He scrambles closer to his desk, making sure he heard that right. Messages flood in the chatbox:

come on, we all know who’s gonna control it

Just want to see you happy, pretty girl :)

do we even have a chance against that rich fuck lol

even if i control it for just one second, ill be so happy

Yeah, Robert heard you loud and clear. He knows no one will even come close to the amount he could donate, but he decided to keep it lower than what his dirty mind wanted. He watches as the donations pour in rapidly, only reaching a measly 300. Didn’t they realize you deserve so much more?

“Jesus, I always gotta step up to the plate, don’t I?” He chuckles to himself as he sends in his amount of cash, waiting for your reaction.

You’re already moaning halfheartedly due to the other donators’ actions, but your eyes widen in what seems like genuine shock when you see a notification you have never seen before:

fischbait donated 1,000 bucks!

“Holy fuck, thank you, f– ah!”

As soon as the control prompt showed up on his screen, Robert couldn’t resist making the vibe go to the highest setting, even if it was for just half a second. He bit his lip as he watched you recover from the sudden stimulation, your breathing ragged.

“Oh, thank you so much, fischbait,” you smile widely, opening your legs even further, “Treat me nicely, okay? Or don’t…”

Robert’s hand drops from his mouth to palm at his hardness. He wanted you to pay attention to him only, and he was finally gonna have that. He moves the vibrator’s settings to something more realistic and watches as you begin to grab at your chest.

“Feels so good, fuck," you pull down your top, revealing your tits to Robert– well, everyone, but he didn't want to think about that right now. "You're so good to me…"

"Yeah, just like that, (Y/N)," he takes his cock out from his increasingly uncomfortable slacks, quickly fisting it. "Show me your pretty tits, yeah…"

Robert waits for you to get comfortable with the speed he set, just to move it up by one. Your thighs tremble slightly, he could tell you were holding back. He sees you getting even wetter around the toy, glistening in the soft light of your room– it could be a studio, for all he knows. Robert's donations could certainly fund that. He acts like that idea didn't send a jolt through his body.

"Fuck, fuck," your head rolls back slightly, revealing your damp chest even further, "I think I'm gonna come already. God, don't stop!"

He couldn't care less that he was in his office and that his godforsaken secretary could walk in with some useless papers for him to sign at any given moment– he needed to make you come over and over again. Robert’s tip was leaking profusely, but his grip stopped him from doing anything prematurely. Maybe he wanted to be caught with his dick in his hand, what could anyone do about it?

Robert ups the setting again and watches you convulse around the tiny thing inside you. Uncontrollable moans and whimpers come out of his speakers at an embarrassing volume, but he’s only focused on keeping his pumps in time with your trembling. You babble nonsense as he brings the vibrations down somewhat, but not turning it off.

“Please, please, please… it’s so much!”

With his unoccupied hand, Robert quickly types into the chatbox:

Beg for me to stop if you want it so bad.

Your eyes glance at your own monitor, and you bite your lip before you respond, “Please, fischbait, don’t… don’t stop. Make me come again, okay? I want it so bad it hurts, please– fuck!”

He turns it to a pulsing setting, and you collapse back onto your plush duvet. Robert fists his length as you shake, the two of you practically moaning in sync. The wet sounds he was creating echo in his office as he chases his release, trying his best to time it with yours.

“I’m coming, God, I’m coming, please!”

Robert comes with a loud groan just as soon as you do, his release spilling all over his pristine desk. He continues to pump himself as you come down from your high, almost overstimulating himself to the point of incoherence.

You rise slowly from your bed, giggling tiredly, “Jesus fuck, thank you all so much for your… generous donations. I think I’m all tuckered out!”

He calmed his breathing only to hear your fucked out voice– which had him already preparing for another hard-on. “God, (Y/N)...”

“I’m gonna head out for the night,” you got closer to the camera, winking, “See you all next week, yeah?”

The camera clicks off, and he leans back in his chair, exhausted. Taking in the mess on his table, Robert realizes something. He never had a sense of clarity after orgasming with you, there were no regrets to be had. The things he’d do just to have you in his arms…

His reverie is interrupted by a ping! from his desktop, a message landed in his inbox.

today’s stream was perfect thanks to you, honey! you always treat me so well. i’d love to get to know you better ;)

Tonight was far from over.

[eleventeenthealbum]

seejanerot -> eleventeenthealbum

Tumblr got my ass for "harassment" (screen capped someone being racist). I'm Jewish. Eleventeen is an album by Daisy Chainsaw. I like it.

Nerd blog is @halfjewharlequinn

Anthro Blog is @religiousfurryism

I have a SECRET nsft blog that can be requested by mutuals.

Please don't try to sell me things in DMs, I cannot afford any unnecessary payments, I can only spread your work/donation posts.

READ THIS 👇

MAPS and "pro-para" types unwelcome. Incest lovers owe survivors everything they have. Fiction cannot cause abuse, but it can facilitate, normalize, romanticize, and eroticize it.

It happened to me. Please dni if you post sa based kinks I am very hyper vigilant and paranoid.

♥️ABOUT AND DNI BELOW♥️

DNI Radqueers/Terfs/swerfs/zionists we will not like each other. die.

"Purity culture" is very real and it's not the critique or discussion of sex or kink or fandom. It's the concept that the amount sex you have or who you do/don't have it with has an inherent implication on your personhood.

I'm a big big hater. I hate people who pay social media sites and I hate AO3. AO3 censored a mod for being Pro-palestine. They are simply pro Israel and pro CSEM, period.

Weebs are on thin ice.

I like bad horror stories, FMV, Furryism, Animal Crossing, comedy, comics (mostly transformers and DC but I also love vintage comics, Love and Rockets, things by Lynda Barry, and Archie Comics), and Twin Peaks. Formerly ran the blog @Jewishharleyquinn before they got me.

I'm interested in court cases and nature + natural history

I want to be a fairy. I want to be a mermaid. I want to be very small.

You can ask me to tag things🩷 I use (trigger) cw except for "flashing"

Tw: csa + grooming

You might see me speak a lot on abuse fetishism online + in fandom. I was groomed online by a woman through toxic fandom, "loli" and other CSEM anime/manga, and a very twisted version of feminism and sex positivity.

It went on from ages 13-17, meeting online when I was just 12. She involved me and her foster sister. I have had a few other sexually traumatic experiences (some happening in early childhood that she connected with me on), but that was by far the longest and most twisted.

I started talking about this more when I realized others had been hurt in very similar ways.

I'm a grooming, incestous abuse, and sa survivor, these things also upset me greatly. If I interact first I apologize, please just block me. I say this because of my own negative reactions.

[puppy-stevee]

If you’re still taking requests, can I ask for 8. sweater weather and either romantic steddie Or platonic stobin?

i wasn't expecting this thing to grow legs and run as far as it did. i'm sure i lost the original plot somewhere along the way. but i hope you like it! takes place after the events of spring break and is a companion piece to this. also now on ao3

Robin will admit she's a bit of a clothes thief. 80% of her closet now consists of every article of clothing she'd ever stolen from Steve's wardrobe.

Though, stealing is a strong word, she thinks. They're more like hand-me-downs, or "a charitable donation to the less fortunate, Steve. I won't get mad if you write it off your taxes, pinky promise."

Most of the clothes Steve doesn't even realize are gone until Robin wears it to work or a movie night. Just gives her a once over, an appreciative nod, and a "looks nice, Rob. Better on you than me." Which.

Okay.

They're platonic soulmates. Best friends. Twin flames, even. Everybody knows this. They've both come out to the party and Steve is with Eddie exclusively now, so there's no romantic feelings between them whatsoever— excluding the brief moment of one sided attraction on Steve's end.

But.

Steve is still Steve.

He's still Steve Harrington.

His natural state is casual flirting even if he doesn't mean anything by it and Robin is 100% a hot blooded lesbian, but his easy compliments still manage to make her tummy flutter and her cheeks pink as she fights the smile trying to worm its way onto her face. The giggle (a fucking giggle) that bubbles from her throat is no help, either.

She chalks it up to never receiving a lot of compliments from people in her formative years.

Now that Steve's dating Eddie, though, their closets look like they've exploded together in a clash of brights and darks, leather and chains meeting polos and denim. Eddie would never spend his hard earned drug earnings on school spirit attire, but sometimes he'll be lounging around the trailer in some Hawkins High sports shirt. Steve wears Eddie's band shirts more often than not because of how comfy they are (he does this on purpose.)

So now when Robin raids Steve's closet, she gets Eddie's clothes too, which is what gets her into the current situation:

She doesn't even think about what she puts on that morning before rushing out the door so Steve will stop honking the fucking horn. It's 6:30am and she has elderly neighbors who need their beauty sleep, for Christ's sake.

(Mr. Cochran currently mowing his yard across the street doesn't share the same sentiments.)

She can tell something's wrong by the whispers that follow her down the hallway as she walks to her locker. She ignores it, though, chalks it up to another rumor about her and Steve making the rounds again.

It's not until lunch that the reason becomes apparent.

She sits beside Nancy at the Hellfire table. The boys aren't there yet so it gives them a chance to catch up and gossip a little, something Robin never thought she'd be interested in before becoming friends with Steve Harrington and Nancy Wheeler and learning that little miss reporter has stories on almost everyone of their classmates.

They're in the middle of Nancy telling her how Becky was caught in a janitor's closet making out with someone not her boyfriend, when—

"That my jacket, Buckley?"

Eddie's voice is suddenly right in her ear and he materializes out of nowhere, dragging a chair to the head of the table and turning it around to sit on it backwards. The guys follow suit and sit in their own chairs, flanking Eddie's left and right.

Robin frowns and lifts the collar like she's expecting to see Eddie's name stitched on the inside. "Uh, no? I think I'd notice if it were, Munson."

Eddie laughs as he pulls out his lunch that he won't admit Steve made for him. "I do think it is, little birdie."

Robin bristles a bit at the nickname. Eddie jerks his chin.

"Take a look at the back."

Robin glances around the table before hesitantly shrugging the jacket off. She balks at the very obvious image of the signature Hellfire Club devil, painted against a wall of white on the black denim.

"What the hell was this doing in Steve's closet?"

Eddie chokes on his sandwich.

Nancy's perfect eyebrows pull together. "Why were you looking through his closet?"

"Stealing his clothes, obviously."

"Why do you steal his clothes?" Gareth asks.

Robin throws her head back and groans. "I always take his clothes, haven't you noticed almost every shirt I wear is his? We're getting off topic, why did Steve put this in his closet?" She throws an accusing look at Eddie who shrugs.

"Why are you acting like my clothes being in my boyfriend's closet is some big conspiracy?" he shoots back.

Robin narrows her eyes. They stare each other down for a few seconds. She can hear that little whistle from all the western movies and she glares at Jeff to knock it off. Eventually, Robin concedes.

"Touché, Munson. Just don't be surprised when I start wearing your clothes, too. If it's in his closet it's fair game."

Eddie tilts his head in a bow. "As you wish, Lady Buckley."

She doesn't give the jacket back. Isn't sure if she wants to and Eddie doesn't mention even wanting it back. So she keeps it. Admires the little stitches on the front pocket and traces her fingers over the painted devil. There are pins she was somehow blind to, of bands she'd never heard of— except Metallica and Dio— and she curses her brain for being too curious for its own good.

A couple weeks pass and Robin casually mentions to Steve in passing that they should take a day trip down to Indy and hit up a few thrift shops and music stores. He doesn't question it, so they do, and she comes home with new tapes she wants to show Eddie and new clothes that she can call hers.

She doesn't give the jacket back. Instead it hangs on her closet door as she pulls on her own, decorated in various pins and patches she bought in the city and had her mom help her sew them on, over a black Blondie t-shirt.

She's even taken a chance with eyeliner and darker eye shadow that compliments her nails. Wears the chain necklaces she was wearing the day she got Steve as a best friend.

He's leaning against the car when she walks out of the house. He gives her that same once over and she can already feel the warmth spreading across her cheeks. She comes to a stop in front of him.

"It's a good look on you," he says gently as if he can sense her nervousness. He probably can. They share a brain cell, after all.

She lets out a sigh of relief and leans into his space. He just laughs and pulls her in to plant a kiss on the middle of her forehead.

"Does this mean you'll stop stealing my clothes?"

"Not a chance, dingus."

[weirdestbooks]

The Discovery of a Kindred Spirit (Wattpad | Ao3)

Skullyville, Oklahoma

March 23, 1847

Logically, Choctaw knew he was not alone in his suffering. There were thousands of other indigenous peoples in this land, from his family to his enemies, all of whom had been experiencing the disease, discrimination, and violence brought over by the new personifications from across the sea. 

Choctaw thought they were all the same kind of people, people who took what was not theirs. They could never have enough because they were still young and feared death. They were people who saw anything that wasn’t them as different and wrong.

They made far too many assumptions. It would probably get them killed.

It was not that Choctaw was claiming to be a perfect man. He knew he had done great wrongs before, and he wasn’t free from making assumptions either.

After all, he presumed all Europeans were like France and England.

He didn’t realize that one of them had been going through the same struggles he had.

Ireland was not an unfamiliar name to him. He had heard of him before, someone who was part of England’s empire. Someone who he presumed supported what England was doing, that he was a loyal and willing member of a plague on the world. After all, he had seen many people who claimed Irish blood hurt him and his people, including the bastard who forced him off his land, Andrew Jackson.

But what he was hearing now painted a different story. A story that reflected his own.

A story of an indigenous personification who was colonized by an English-speaking white Christian who couldn't care less about what you went through, who just wanted you gone and replaced with more of his people. A person who thought your very existence was a crime and saw the deaths of your people as a good thing.

A person who wanted your culture gone and for you to fade away as your people become theirs. A person who, even if they didn’t say it, even if they denied it, was wishing for your death.

Ireland’s story wasn't like England’s. It was like his own.

“We are providing aid,” Choctaw said as he approached William Armstrong, the man collecting the donations to help relieve Ireland’s suffering. A kind of suffering that Choctaw most certainly could say was worse than anyone thought. After all, no one ever seemed to think the pain he went through on that Trail of Death was as bad as he said. Although no white people ever seemed to believe what he said.

“I know we don’t have a lot…but—”

William cut Choctaw off, smiling, “I’m glad that the Christian faith remains strong in you Indians.”

“I’m not doing this because some of my people follow your faith. I’m doing this because it is the right thing to do, and aid is something that I wished I had when I was forced onto this territory when your president made me leave my home despite the treaties I had with America and your court telling your president not to.” Choctaw responded, his voice even as he made eye contact with William, who looked less happy.

He probably wanted Choctaw to claim that it was Christianity and the lessons from it that made him want to help, as no one ever seemed to think that he had kindness before the people who invaded his land and killed his people taught him and his people about their religion. They never seem to understand that it had always been a part of his culture to be generous. Even if his people were warriors, they were also kind and generous souls.

You didn’t have to be Christian to be that.

“I don’t think we need to discuss prior issues right now. You did say you were going to help, right? Why don’t I collect your people’s donations so we can both be on our way and not start silly arguments?” William said, almost talking down to me like Choctaw wasn’t centuries old.

Humans. Whether they were his people or not, Choctaw don’t think he would ever understand them.

Then again, he’s sure they felt the same about him and his kind. Although the humans from Europe always seemed to revere their countryhumans more than anyone Choctaw had ever met here, it was an odd phenomenon.

Suppressing his urge to lecture William, Choctaw passed over my people’s donation. It wasn’t a lot, barely a hundred seventy dollars, but it was all they could spare. He hoped that even with the small amount, it would be able to help Ireland if it was just a little.

A little bit of help is better than nothing, and doing nothing about what was happening to Ireland, after all, Choctaw has seen and been through…

Choctaw doesn’t think he would have been able to accept or forgive himself if he did that.

[raaorqtpbpdy]

I've Got Friends on the Other Side

For the Prompt: Reverse TRIO Danny as a magic occult goth - got into sleight-of-hand to spite his parents when they used to spout that ghosts were real but magic was bullshit. He started with card tricks and snowballed into becoming proficient in several types of true occult magic, as well as all the basic party trick stuff. He now uses tarot cards rather than playing cards, both to freak out the 'normies' and scare off the bullies, but also because the cards tend to tell him things in a roundabout way. What did the cards just tell him about Tucker? (from @deathcomes4u)

AO3 Link

[Warnings for occult practices]

Danny Fenton had never really fit in. It didn't help that his parents called themselves ghost hunters and drove around causing mayhem in their souped up RV. When he was little, Danny had thought that his parents work was fascinating, but apparently he hadn't been interested in ghosts "the right way" because he didn't care about their scientific mumbo jumbo. Instead, Danny had gone to the library and checked out books on the occult.

When his parents derisively told him that magic wasn't real, he'd been furious. How could they say that to him when they'd devoted their entire adult lives to the study of ghosts? A less spiteful kid might've felt disheartened and given up their interest, but Danny doubled down. He taught himself sleight-of-hand tricks, as well as more spiritual forms of occult magic.

In middle school, he'd switched from playing cards to tarot cards, both to freak out the normies and scare off the bullies, and learned to read the cards pretty damn well, if you asked him. He'd started to dress in black, to wear crystals and other jewelry, to trudge around in heavy, buckled combat boots. He developed a reputation as the school's freaky goth kid, and that suited him just fine. His only two friends, the only two people outside of his family who were brave enough to come near him, were a passionate ecology nerd and the tech-obsessed school loser, and that suited him fine too.

Sam and Tucker were far from the most popular kids in school, which made Danny somewhat protective of them. He did regular tarot readings for them, at least once a week, when he was alone in his room, to keep tabs on what was going on in their lives, especially things they wouldn't necessarily tell him about.

Danny lit a black candle on his bedside table and shuffled his tarot deck three times, one for each letter of Sam's name. He manipulated the deck to bring the Empress, the card which represented Sam, to the top, but it was an honest shuffle aside from that. One by one, he laid out the cards on his comforter in a Celtic Cross layout, to tell him what his friend was struggling with. The Empress laid upright in the middle, the nurturer, the one who cared and helped, just like Sam cared so much about animals and the environment and did everything in her power to protect them.

Seven of cups—Sam was dealing with temptation of some kind. Six of wands, six of cups, Death, ace of cups. She'd had some kind of victory, and been happy about it, until she realized that it would come at a sacrifice, and she changed her mind. Reversed seven of wands, ace of pentacles, reversed queen of wands, Justice. There was some kind of time limit, and she couldn't make up her mind. Ultimately she would settle on accepting the temptation, and that would be the right choice, even if it wasn't without consequence.

Considering the reading, Danny tried to decipher a deeper, or more specific meaning. A victory for Sam would be convincing her parents to donate more money to animal rights groups and eco-friendly causes. If Danny were to guess, he would say that her parents had offered her a deal. They'd donate to her charities, but only if she did something for them, possibly something that was against her principals, or possibly something she just didn't want to do.

Next time he saw her, Danny would advise her to take the deal. Supporting vital causes to save the Earth would be worth whatever he parents wanted in return.

Satisfied, Danny made a note in his journal about the reading, returned the cards to his deck and shuffled again. Six times, he shuffled, once for each letter of Tucker's name, and he brought the king of pentacles to the top. His hands grew painfully cold as he did so. The candle on his beside flickered as if blown by a strong wind, but his window was closed. Whatever was bothering Tucker must be drastic to have such an effect while he shuffled.

Once more, Danny laid the cards in a Celtic Cross on his bed. Tucker's card, the king of pentacles represented intellectual prominence and ambition, both things that Tucker had in spades. The next card Danny laid down was the Wheel of Fortune, which told Danny that something pretty wild must have happened in Tucker's life, something filled with uncertainty, risk, and shock. Something Tucker definitely would've mentioned to him, but he hadn't for some reason. Danny's confusion doubled when he flipped the next card. The Magician, reversed.

The Magician was the card that represented Danny, it represented superstition and skepticism, unconventional methods, and magic. Different tarot readers read reversed cards various ways. Some believed that a reversed card indicated that the meaning of the card was also reversed, other believed that it indicated a delay, an increase or decrease in energy, or that whatever the card indicated was internal, rather than external, or vice-versa.

Danny used a more free-form style, judging the meaning of a reverse card on a case-by-case basis. However, in his experience, an upright Magician represented himself, and a reversed Magician represented his family. Whatever Tucker's problem was, Danny's family had something to do with it.

Danny's fingers physically ached from the cold so much that he dropped the next card. Death landed, reversed, in the next position on the cross. The position indicated the recent past. Death was a card that Danny rarely had to take literally, since it normally represented a different kind of loss or sacrifice, but the reversed position in this atmosphere clearly indicated an increased energy, so he could only assume that someone really had died, and Danny's parents had something to do with it. Or perhaps... could it have something to do with a ghost, his parents' work?

Danny swallowed and flipped the next cards, the two of swords and Judgement completed the cross. Tucker was at a crossroads and faced with a decision he couldn't make, or a decision he didn't know how to make, or a decision that would make itself if he didn't choose soon enough. Perhaps it was out of his hands, and Tucker was just being dragged along for the ride.

Reversed page of swords, ace of pentacles, The Tower, The Chariot. Whatever Tucker's problem was, it was something his friends could help him with, but he wasn't going to them because he was overthinking, probably panicking, possibly even afraid. The Tower was never good, and especially not in the position that represented the subject of the reading's fears. It represented failure, destruction, danger.

Tucker must've really been going through it, but the Chariot, at least, indicated a happy ending. It was triumph, victory over adversity. Everything would turn out okay, but Tucker had to make it through the trenches first.

Once all the cards were down, Danny tried to glean some more specifics from the reading, but it was foggy, as if it was shrouded in a mourning veil.

On Friday, after school, Tucker had been supposed to meet Danny at Fenton Works. Danny had to help a teacher with something, so he told his friend to go on ahead. He'd expected Tucker to be there already when he got home, but he didn't show. Was that because of this... issue that Tucker was apparently dealing with? Danny sighed in frustration and blew out his candle, watching the smoke curl up into the air in agitated spirals.

Tucker had some serious spiritual unrest going on, and Danny was just gonna have to ask him about it directly.

When Danny got to school, Tucker was nowhere to be seen. Sam was waiting for him by the steps, though, so he figured he'd talk to her first.

"So what kind of deal did your parents offer you?" he asked her. "What do they want in exchange for funding your environmental causes."

"Did... did I tell you about that?" she asked, more to herself than to Danny. "How do you know about that?"

"What did they ask for?" he asked again, ignoring her question. She should've been used to this kind of thing by now. It wasn't his fault he kept surprising her.

"They want to parade me around at upscale galas and crap," she said. "In formal wear. To schmooze pretentious investors and CEOs of companies that pollute the Earth more in a day than the average person does in ten years. But they said as long as I do, they'll give me a monthly donation allowance of five thousand dollars, which is pocket change for them, but it can do a lot of good in the right hands."

"You should do it," Danny advised. "It won't be fun or anything, but ultimately the rewards a worth wearing a gown, don't you think?" Sam sighed.

"You're right," she said. "I think I was always going to accept in the end, but... I guess I just needed someone else to say it. So thanks."

"You're welcome," he said, offering her a rare smile. "Good luck with the galas and crap." She snorted, and shook her head.

"I can't believe I'm gonna agree to this."

"Hey, have you seen Tucker around anywhere?" he asked her.

"I haven't," she said. "Come to think of it, I didn't see him all weekend, either."

"Well if you see him, let me know. We really need to talk to him."

"We?"

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure he needs both of us right now."

Tucker came to school right as the first bell rang, so there wasn't time to talk, but Danny and Sam conspired to corner him during lunch, and corner him they did. The three of them were alone behind the cafeteria, so they could speak freely.

"What happened last Friday after school?" Danny demanded. "Did someone die? Did it have something to do with my parents and ghosts?" Sam looked at him, aghast, and Tucker just shook his head resolutely.

"How do you do that?" he asked under his breath.

"We can help you," Danny said. "So stop overthinking, and freaking out, and just talk to us, alright?"

"Wait, what?" Sam asked, utterly lost. "Who died? What's going on?"

"I did," Tucker said quietly after a moment. "I went to your place to meet up with you, like we planned, but you were late. I got bored, and I heard you parents complaining about an experiment of theirs not working, a portal, so I went down to the lab to check it out."

"The portal works, though," Danny recalled. His parents had been over the moon.

"It didn't at first. I went inside it, and touched something, I don't know what," Tucker said. "It turned on while I was inside and... you can't imagine how painful it was. When I came out, the portal was on, and I looked like..." A fizzling white light rolled across Tucker's body like his skin was dissolving into glow-stick fluid right before their eyes. "This."

When the light faded, Tucker stood before them in a white jumpsuit. It looked like one of Danny's black Fenton Jumpsuits with the colors inverted. His normally dark hair was also white, as were the frames of his glasses. His freckles, usually invisible against his dark skin unless you looked really closely, glowed faintly, and his eyes were a luminous green, like the flame of a copper sulfate candle.

"You died," Danny said, finally understanding everything. "You're half ghost now." He gasped in realization. "The two of swords! The crossroads! You were cut in two; you live two lives, oh, duh!"

"What?" Tucker asked, while Sam just looked between the two of them in shock.

"Don't worry Tucker," Danny said. "I know this is stressful, and your struggling, and probably contemplating your own mortality, but in the long term, everything will be alright. This will eventually turn out to be a good thing, I promise."

"Uh... I can't make promises like that," Sam said, her brain catching up to the situation enough to finally speak up. "But I can promise that Danny and I will be there for you. We'll help you in any way we can."

"Absolutely," Danny agreed.

"You guys!" Luminous tears trickled from Tucker's eyes, and he sniffed once before pulling both his friends into a tight hug. "I can't believe I even thought of keeping this a secret from you. You guys are the best!"

"Yeah yeah," Danny grumbled. "We know. You can let me go now."

"Sorry." Tucker quickly released Danny from the hug and let the goth boy adjust his fishnet sleeves. "I forgot you don't like hugs."

"I guess I can forgive you," Danny said lightly. "Just this once."

[mcalhenwrites]

Today is going so weird, and I want to celebrate half of it and cry about the other half. Things are either magnificent or terrible. The magnificent parts are all generally writing-related! One is that I got messaged from a friend that he bought my book! (THANK YOU IF YOU SEE THIS!)

Which, yesterday was funny? I overheard my roommate talking to someone in a chat about my book, so that might result in another sale...? Whoever it was, they seemed interested! (I couldn't hear their half, but they certainly kept asking questions my roommate had to answer, and I kept yelling into the room from the kitchen, "THE BOOK HAS A BLURB!") (Speaking of blurbs, the person who is a baker at the other location of the company I work for is a friend of my roommate's and that's how I heard about the job and ended up getting it, but she has heard my blurb and was interested in buying the book. Now we can't tell her the title/author bc it likely would be discovered by everyone I work with after that, and while I think my boss would not care if I wrote fic and erotica tbh, it's gonna be awkward when my coworkers find out all my goddamn interests and kinks. Most embarrassingly, it might be revealed I'm a massive KH fan... :P ) Anyhow. I also got another sub on Patreon, THANK YOU! And I realized just now I have 3 comments in my inbox on AO3. <3 So uh. Anyway, I checked my bank account before hitting the grocery store this morning, to see where I stand financially/how much to spend. (I need to also transfer some money out of checking and into my savings, like the royalty payments and a kofi donation.) I saw I had pending transactions, and I checked it, expecting it to be just my single work-related direct deposit. Only there was an extra amount of money - way more money - in a second transaction from my workplace. What? So I text my boss. At the grocery store, I find out that my boss tried to text me about covering today (someone at the other store is sick). Only I didn't get that text in the group chat! Weird. Anyway, it did get covered by someone else, but I'm on standby for tomorrow in the afternoon, will find out more later on if I need to cover. So I spend my morning scrambling to communicate rides, though my boss can pick me up if need be it sounds like. (May take her up on that if I go in tomorrow, and I got someone to pick me up Saturday too.) Then I find out why the weird pay thing... it is another employee's paycheck, gone into my account by accident. And since it's pretty much "my money"... it will now be counted as being paid ahead and taken out of future paychecks. So I had to make sure to budget for the next approximate 6 weeks until I start getting paid again. (With any hope, I'll have a few extra hours to add, and by the time the paycheck after next rolls around, I might actually have some money to add. Even if it is only a little.) It's just very stressful with my health right now, being what it is. I feel panicked at all times, I'm barely writing... I was supposed to start working on THC and Rascal to publish in the future, but now that just seems kind of like... a project for another month or year, at the rate things are going. I miss having time to do things. And while people might lecture me that I only work weekends and then some, the fact is that I'm spending a lot of days just recovering from my health. For all the posturing people do online about disabilities, they tend to not show that when they actually DEAL with disabilities. I'm lucky to have a few friends online and off who do understand, but so many people just go, "Well, as much as I talk about how stupid capitalism and the status quo are, and I care about disabilities and equality, you have no choice we all deal with this pull up them bootstraps!" Not worded that way, but too many people aren't very kind when confronted with a situation where they have to put their moral grandstanding to the test. :/ (Though a huge thank you to the ones who DO understand what I'm dealing with and who have been super kind about it.) Edit: Well, add "Patreon temporarily restricted my account until I verified my identity" to the fuckery of today. It is sorted, but uh. I didn't need that shit. WHAT IS MY FUCKING LUCK HONESTLY

[formsofcontinuity]

chapters 1, 2, and 3 (or, all earlier chaps on AO3)

chapter 4: calling birds

Lena wakes up the morning of Wednesday, December 28th with two hundred and twenty-seven new Twitter followers and over three thousand mentions. There’s also a 2am text from Kara, just Good night, Lena <3, which does nothing to explain Lena’s sudden surge in social media popularity but does serve to warm her cheeks for a minute or two. She's a fool. A simple good night, and it has her blushing like a schoolgirl.

It takes a little digging, Lena still propped in bed in soft pajamas under an even softer duvet, but eventually she finds the source, a tweet from Kara's official publicity account, timestamped 2:17am:

@therealsupergirl: Always happy to serve the people of NC ofc, but have you checked out what @lenaluthor is doing lately @LLFoundation #lenaluthorfoundation? Low-cost water purifiers? High efficiency solar power generators? Safe plastics recycling? She's the real MVP--show her some love! 💙♻️❤️

What follows is a collection of some of the kindest tweets she's ever had directed towards her, most from complete strangers. Sure, there's a wayward screed or two, but of the few dozen she reads before she looks at the time and realizes she has to get up so she can be ready for an 8am Zoom call with a coalition of East Coast investors, eager to donate prior to the New Year for the tax write-off, the vast majority are complementary.

@piratelifeforme: Wow! I spent all morning reading about what @LLFoundation is up to and I had NO IDEA. Do yourself a favor and check it out, then get on board this train. Superheroes are one thing, but humans have the power to help fix this mess we made, too.

@greenplanetnow: yes @therealsupergirl, you're right! The #lenaluthorfoundation cleaned up a massive water contamination issue in my town after months of unanswered calls to the gov. They did it without asking for a cent, but almost no one reported on it. Not all heroes wear capes. 🙏🏾

@drclimatewatch: As one of the scientists following @lenaluthor 's work, I can verify: her Foundation's charter and her team's innovations truly can revolutionize environmental science. We've wasted too much time on petty rumors when we should be supporting her as a brilliant engineer.

Even Sam has retweeted Kara's message, absent her usual snark.

@samarias: Damn straight, @therealsupergirl! @lenaluthor is not only the smartest woman on the planet, but also a great boss and a true friend who will go to hell and back to do the right thing no matter what people think of her.

The investors on the 8am call are more generous than Lena expected, having thoroughly read her Foundation's report and expressing genuine excitement over the work she's doing. They don't mention Supergirl's tweet, but Lena knows it influenced their level of enthusiasm.

Daniel, her Foundation's head of publicity, calls at 9:30, barreling past Lena’s apologies to assure her that he's thrilled to trade in a couple of his vacation days to help navigate this sudden windfall.  After that, she migrates from her home office to the Foundation office and spends the next few hours on the phone with department heads and her research team strategizing ways to capitalize on the good press wrought by Kara's tweet. By noon, Daniel has fielded calls from twenty-six news outlets, local, national and international, and issued a press release thanking Supergirl for her generous endorsement and directing interested parties to the Foundation's robust website, white papers, and quarterly reports. 

"Want me to help craft your personal response?" Lena's social media manager, Rochelle, is on the phone now. Lena's name is trending, for a good reason for the first time in forever, and she's long since stopped trying to keep track of her mentions. 

"Pardon?"

Rochelle had been typing in the background of their call, but now the clacking pauses. "I had your Foundation account respond several hours ago, but I imagine you want to respond personally, too. Right?"

Oh. Of course, Lena wants to respond personally, but none of the things she's thinking are fit for public consumption. She's pretty sure a declaration of love would shift the conversation in counterproductive ways, for example. Same with asking Kara via tweet about last night's kiss. And then there are the things she wants to say but can't put into words. A wellspring of gratitude. Overwhelming affection. Anxiety about living up to Kara's public declaration of support. Confusion over Kara's decision to tweet that support to the world and to call on her followers to do the same.

"Thanks, Rochelle. Everything you're doing is great. I've been swamped, but I absolutely plan to respond. I think I can manage to come up with something on my own. Is there anything else? I have another call."

"All good, Ms. Luthor. Let me know if you change your mind."

It's a lie. There's no other call, but she needs a moment to think. She needs to talk to Kara. Not tweet at her, just talk. 

Almost immediately, she loses her nerve, the possibilities of all the directions their conversation could go swirling in her mind. Texting seems like a safe compromise, although she bungles it pretty much out of the gate.

Sorry I didn’t message before now. I’m being besieged with tweets for some reason.... 

The reply is immediate. Oh no. Are you mad? 🥺 I just wanted everyone to know how awesome you are. And I wanted you to hear it from them, too, since you never believe me when I say it. 

Lena is not very good at this–gratitude or friendship or whatever social minefield this is that Kara is clearly so much better at navigating. The idea that Kara could possibly think she’d be mad for something so sweet hurts her heart. 

Not mad at all! Sorry. That text was supposed to be – What? Coy? Flirtatious? Funny? It was clearly none of those things; she lands on – thankful. I was just so surprised.

A good surprise?

A lovely surprise, yes.

<3

Lena allows herself a few minutes, then, just to sit and text her best friend, without worrying too much about everything else. She tells her about waking up to the Twitter mentions, about the new investments, about how Daniel and Rochelle were so excited they both offered independently to defer part of their vacation time to help her wrangle media requests and publicity. She doesn't tell her how warm the messages from thousands of people made her feel, that those completely unknown to her might be affected by what she’s done, for good this time, that other people might actually have cause to like and respect her. 

In the end, she settles for a Streetcar Named Desire joke.

I have never depended on the kindness of strangers, Kara.

Kara doesn’t miss a beat. You don’t strike me as a Blanche anyway. Did it feel good, this one time?

Leave it to Kara to cut to the chase. 

It did. Thank you.

My pleasure. 

Lena’s phone beeps. Daniel needs her to talk to some new potential investors in a half hour and has sent along their portfolio. 

I have to go. I’m so sorry.

It's ok. I know you're busy.

Thanks to you, even more so than usual. 😂

Haha. I didn’t think that one through, did I? 

I don’t mind, Kara. I’m thrilled the Foundation is making a difference. 

I mind! When are you going to find time for me if you’re mobbed by all your other adoring fans? 

Lena looks hard at her phone. All your other adoring fans. She could go for teasing deflection or affectionate sincerity in her response, and vacillates for a moment between the two. 

You know you're my favorite. I should have time after tomorrow’s press conference? Coffee? 

I’d love that. 

Before Lena turns to the files Daniel sent, she pulls up Twitter on her computer, and quickly fires off a response before she can talk herself out of it, posting it, with only a hint of trepidation, for all the world to see. 

@lenaluthor:  Thank you all. I want nothing more than to work together to save our planet. It's ours, aliens and humans alike. And Supergirl? I couldn't ask for a better ally or partner, one who challenges and encourages me. Not a day goes by I'm not grateful for you, @therealsupergirl

[konoa-t]

was surfing the wooooorld wiiiide weeeeebbbbb and i think i found the posts you saw that got you nervous about ao3. rest assured, i wouldn't worry about them. while their intentions are good, a lot of them are made by self-proclaimed hatebloggers that create discourse for fun and i would not trust. in good faith.

uhhhh i typed up a post on this but then i realized i was too coward to post it so. i am SO sorry for what i am about to paste here.

"i recently realized that the recent ao3 donation drive marked the return of a whole bunch of discourse. i usually wouldn't say anything about it, especially since this has been a thing for years, but i noticed that one of my mutuals was confused about the subject and thus decided to type up a little something, especially since a few of the people i've seen saying ao3 should die are hyper-purist hatebloggers that create discourse for fun and harass genuinely confused anons that come their way.

you are not a bad person for having an ao3 account or supporting ao3. for starters, nobody is making any money off you simply reading or posting fic.

as for donations, they're relatively public about what they do with the money they earn, and it's not going to anything particularly bad. there's always the possibility that you don't personally agree with them making a donation drive right now or don't want to support their policies, which is fair. you can always choose not to donate. that doesn't mean you should harass people who did donate to this mostly inoffensive thing, or worse, people that didn't even donate and simply enjoy reading/writing fanfiction on the site.

yeah, there's a bunch of really nasty stuff on there that probably shouldn't be. it's really bad. but i don't think moderation is as easy as you're making it out to be. for starters, do you realize how incredibly small the team moderating this site is? how overwhelmed these incredibly puny servers would be by something like this? and that's not even addressing the fact that morality in fiction is completely subjective. i personally have things i consider right and wrong, but my "right and wrong" probably differ from yours. reaching a consensus on what is "right and wrong" on ao3 is basically impossible, even with what the most fervent of ao3 haters envision as "perfect" moderation. that's not to say that something shouldn't be done about the genuine moderation problems the site has, but this simply isn't it. it's ok not to agree with some of the things the site does and it's ok to hate some of the works on it. but it's not great to claim that people who support ao3 are horrible and automatically support horrible content."

Hey thanks for this! /pos

I don't know why people are so keen on creating problems. It's one thing to warn others about unsavory material (and to discourage users from engaging with it), but it's a whole other thing to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say the site, as well as every user on it, is problematic. Moral crusades are NOT the answer. Also I didn't think that there was anything inherently bad with Ao3, which is why it confused me so much. I just thought it was a cool place to post fanfics tbh. Glad to see it's not something to worry about!

[halfmouse]

Hello all! Welcome to my main blog! I’m Halfmouse, at least here on Tumblr.

If you’re new to Tumblr, please follow these instructions for my “person check” system:

If I can’t tell you’re a person, I will block you.

EDIT DUE TO THE RECENT INFLUX OF DONATION REQUEST MESSAGES AND DUE TO PERSONAL FINANCIAL CIRCUMSTANCES: I realize there are a lot of people who really do need help in this world, and if you are one of them, I hope you get what you need. With that said, I have recently gotten a lot of messages asking for donations, and so far, most of them exhibit “red flags” that I have learned to look for. But, unfortunately, I struggle financially, so even if a legitimate request were to come my way, I would not be able to help. As much as it pains me to say this, if you have a legitimate fundraiser, please look to someone else. (I also realize most donation requests in messages are not real, but I feel the need to say this, because I know if I don’t, and an actual donation request for a real fundraiser comes my way, I am going to feel horrible about having to turn them away. I mean, I’ll still feel horrible about not being able to help, but at least the initial warning that I can’t help is out there.) All this to say, to all the people out there who really are trying to pay their bills/get housing/get out of a war-torn area/etc., I wish you good luck and I hope things get better but that’s most of what I can do, and for my lack of extra money, I apologize. And scammers: pound sand, stop trying to take advantage of people who want to help people in need, and stop taking advantage of horrific situations that real people really go through on a daily basis.

My main blog has many things on it. The biggest focus here, by far, is Chuck E. Cheese. I kinda figure most of you have at least a passing understanding of Chuck E. Cheese, but for those not in the know, you will be thoroughly educated if you come here. (For any Aussies who may or may not be here: he was called Charlie Cheese when there were locations in Australia, so, like…don’t worry.)

I have sideblogs! For Sonic the Hedgehog, I have @sideblogforsonic . For serious stuff, I have @serioussideblog . And for songs, I have @sideblogforsongs . I also have a sideblog where I post sparkly, colorful, bright, aesthetic, and LGBTQIA+-themed pictures/GIFs/videos called @sideblogforsparkles .

I do my best to keep my little corner of the internet safe and friendly. I expect the same from you. I’m not saying you should be perfect. I am not perfect. But if you are repeatedly going around saying and doing horrible things and not responding to people (me or others) who are letting you know that you’re doing something wrong, guess what? I’m going to block you.

Standards I hold myself and others to:

- Don’t be a jerk. No bigotry of any kind, no bullying, no harassment, and if we fight, we fight fairly and minimally.

- Tag things appropriately on any website with a tagging system so people can find what they want and weed out what they don’t want.

- Try to make the world a better place, not worse.

- No generative AI art, voices (without permission), or writing, no reposting art without permission or credit, no art theft, no writing theft. (AI voices generated with consent are okay.)

- When it comes to important, serious matters, it’s important to know some basic facts before taking action. For example, I don’t tolerate climate change denial, antivaxxers, or people treating any real-life crisis like they would a work of fiction.

Hey, if you find me breaking my own rules, let me know! If you have any solid advice for how to be a better person, let me know! If you find misinformation on any of my posts, let me know! I am open to reasonable corrections, advice, constructive criticism, ideas, and other feedback!

A few more important tidbits about me:

- I am autistic and dyscalculic.

- I write fanfics on AO3! You should check them out! https://archiveofourown.org/users/Im_Here_Reaching_Far_Across

- I’m a sex-repulsed asexual.

- I’m heteroromantic, but the only boy I am interested in right now is this guy:

[lostyetfinding]

Labels

Park Jimin knows who he is and who he is going to be. He runs a little comfy bookstore and dances in his free time. He keeps his life as organized as he can manage. One night Kim Taehyung enters his life, leaving Jimin with a few more life-altering thoughts than he would care to admit. “So you don’t have to pick between cats and dogs?” He mumbles, loud enough he knows Taehyung can hear him but is still quiet. Suddenly Jimin’s bookstore is full of laughter, deep and loud and rumbling but so cheerful, “No Jimin! You don’t have to choose between cats and dogs!" “Whoa.”

you can read on ao3 here or below!

Park Jimin knows who he is. He is a bisexual, 25 year old man. He is also demisexual. He is a dancer at night and the owner of a small bookstore at day. He is a cat person, not a dog person (because you have to pick one). He was a libra, which means he is a social person according to any website (he is). Park Jimin is a top when he gets his mind in the gutter.

Jimin has always known who he was, every single thing he could think of describing himself by, he did. It helps him with his anxiety most of the time, knowing who he is, every single part of himself. It makes him smile to think about it while he is dredging through the accounting forms for the week.

Late on a Sunday night is a slow time, always, but Jimin likes his bookstore open as late as possible. Plus, being in the bookstore this late at night allows him to keep up to date with all the legal documents.

Jimin loves his little bookstore. He keeps it smelling like vanilla and peppermint, home. For some people a bookstore can be home, a place where the rest of the world can be at your fingertips. It's a small store but that doesn't make it any less to some of his favorite customers. If Jimin didn't worry about allergies there would be a cat to go along with the beige walls and white bookcases. Maybe the cat would sleep on the 3 couches that were donated to him, or the beanbags that he managed to get for sale. He sighs and looks back at the forms he still has to get through.

Ding!

Jimin lifts his head up and sees a relatively tall man shake off his hair, water droplets going everywhere. The man turns, when he notices Jimin, a smile takes over his face and his mouth starts to move but Jimin can’t hear anything. Oh right, headphones.

“Sorry, I forgot I had my headphones in,” Jimin says as soon as he pulls them out, letting them drop onto the desk with a small thud.

Mystery man just chuckles, “It’s okay, I do that sometimes too, I was just trying to apologize for coming in so late and dripping water all over your store.” Which is very true because as he stands there all the water collects in a small puddle on the welcome mat.

“No it’s fine, I didn’t even realize it was raining, I can grab a towel from the back for you if you want,” Jimin rushes to get off his stool and go to the closet of extra clothes and basic necessities he keeps for when he forgets to go home. It’s in the back where most people won’t see it

“You really don’t have to-” The man starts to say but before he can finish Jimin has a towel for him, “Thank you, sorry again.”

“No it’s fine, I have a coffee machine over in that corner if you want something to warm yourself up with, let me just put all my papers away first,” Jimin nods in the direction of his coffee pot he never really uses unless he has hot chocolate packets or is dying of sleep deprivation. He looks up from the desk as he tries to put all his papers in some kind of order, not wanting to look unorganized, and he finally lets himself look at the man who entered his shop. He has dark brown hair and a nice sharp v-shaped jawline.

“So hi I guess,” Mystery man says as he ruffles his hair with the towel, trying to get it dry. Jimin thinks dry hair is important because have you ever seen a kdrama? Everyone gets sick from wet hair!

“Hello! I’m Park Jimin, welcome to my bookstore,” He says as brightly as he dares. I mean it’s 11pm on a Sunday night, if he put his all into anything people would worry he was some kind of serial killer. Jimin also makes sure to measure how big he lets his smile get, he makes sure to keep it from merging his eyelids with his cheeks.

The man doesn’t seem scared though, instead his mouth reforms the boxy smile that Jimin wants to stare at forever, “Right, names are a thing, well in that case I am Kim Taehyung. Nice to meet you, Jimin.” Taehyung puts his hand out for a handshake, so Jimin does that same. It's polite.

Jimin gives a smile back, once again making sure to not be too enthusiastic because of the time of night, “You can stay until the rain stops.” And just like that both of their gazes shift from each other to the water hitting the window. The mention of the weather triggered a lot of different thoughts for Jimin. First, what if Taehyung didn’t want to stay? The man in question didn't seem to be fidgeting. Which led to the question, what if Jimin made him uncomfortable? Again Jimin checks if Taehyung is doing anything strange, he notices that Taehyun twirls a ring on his index finger. What could he do to fix that?

“Jimin?” Taehyung calls out and Jimin realizes he did it again. He got lost in his thoughts and ignored Taehyung.

Jimin mentally slaps himself before he responds, “Sorry, I was just thinking. Can you repeat whatever it was I missed?”

“Sure! I was asking if you were sure I could wait for the rain to stop, the forecast shows it holding up for a while,” Taehyung seems to not mind the fact that Jimin missed anything, although he is still twirling the ring.

“I promise I don’t mind, if you need to stay the night I have a few couches in the back and I was probably going to end up crashing on one anyways,” Jimin says as he moves back to his unorganized mess of papers next to the cash register. He hears footsteps come closer to him so he assumes Taehyung followed him, “Make yourself at home, I just have to get a few of these forms filled out before I can call it quits for the night.”

“If you are okay with it, I am gonna grab a book,” Taehyung doesn’t form the sentence in any sort of question manner nor does his voice do that lift everyone has at the end of a question. But Jimin knows it is still a question nonetheless. So he looks up and gives the other man a nod. Taehyung moves to the bookshelves and starts running his hands over the spines of the books, he heads straight for the fantasy section of the store.

Jimin puts in one of his headphones, so if Taehyung needs to say anything he will hear it, and looks back at the tax form he had to finish. Forms suck. Owning a bookstore is fun. Owning a bookstore means forms. Good outweighs the bad, right? The bookstore falls into a silence except for the rain and soft sound of Eric Nam coming out of Jimin’s headphones. Taehyung has curled himself up on the blue couch in the corner with a book, Jimin can’t see the title from his desk. He does notice that Taehyung has continued to twirl his ring but slowly now.

After he trudges through 2 more tax forms, Jimin lets out a sigh and shoves the unfinished documents into their drawer. A forever overflowing drawer. He moves the ones he filled out over to the edge of his desk so he doesn’t forget to mail them out by Tuesday morning. He turns to look at the man he didn’t know a half hour ago. Jimin, being himself, starts to wonder who the man is. What he does for a living. Heck, Jimin would be happy knowing what book he is reading so intently.

“I can feel you staring,” Taehyung doesn’t look up at Jimin. If he did he would see the little man with his eyes wide open like a deer caught in headlights. Jimin didn’t know what to do, “Jimin?” Taehyung did look up this time, luckily Jimin had enough time to school his features and get rid of the shock.

“S-sorry I was just wondering what book you picked,” Jimin’s voice sounded small. Jimin’s voice never sounds small, not with strangers at least. Jimin has to be comfortable to be anything less than perfect.

Taehyung, again, doesn’t seem to mind the weird antics of the shorter man, “It’s called Splintered, an Alice in Wonderland spinoff.”

“I forgot I had that here, it isn’t super popular cause the author doesn’t have a big name yet, do you like it so far?” Jimin walks closer to where Taehyung is sitting as he talks.

Taehyung sees him coming closer and makes sure there is room for Jimin to sit down next to him, “I do. I have a secret love for wonderland.”

Why?” Is all Jimin can do as he sits down. Understanding what people like to read is like understanding people.

“Well in wonderland everything is just however it is, there is no need for explanations and no one ever asks. It's a form of fantastical that no one even dares to question or categorize because why would you?” Taeyung seems passionate about his explanation, his face becoming more animated and his hand that isn’t holding the book gesturing to match the excitement.

Jimin doesn’t notice his mouth moving into a crescent until it has already happened and his sight was slightly narrowed from his eye smile, “Sounds like you read a lot about wonderland!”

“Wouldn’t it be amazing?” Taehyung asks, it’s not a question Jimin completely understands.

“What would be amazing?”

“If we could do the same, stop asking for explanations for how things are, stop trying to label every facet of our lives. I mean think about it, people hate other people for being ‘gay’ because ‘straight’ is normal, but what if neither existed. What if you just fall in love and what genitalia someone has doesn’t change who you are? I feel like that's the solution to most problems,” Taehyung stares at nothing, but he is smiling. Taehyung has this look on his face that Jimin thinks means happiness and peace, to him it looks like Tae might be daydreaming.

“Really? But those labels are a part of who people are,” Jimin can’t help but be hesitant to agree with Taehyung even though the idea seems to make Taehyung happy. Park Jimin has always known who he is. Without all his labels would he really know who he is?

Taehyung hears the tone of Jimin’s voice and puts the book down, turning to face the smaller man completely, “Jimin who are you?”

This shocks Jimin, but he knows the answer, always has, so he answers with ease, “I am the owner of a small bookstore, I’m a 25 year old bisexual and demisexual who tops, I am a libra, and I am a cat person. I also love superhero stories so my favorite book genre is sci-fi.”

“Why put yourself in that box?”

“What do you mean? There is no box,” Jimin is confused. Does Taehyung mean being out, because he is out, has been for a long time.

Taehyung runs his hand through his hair, “I mean you can be anything but you are giving yourself all these labels that create this person, do you ever feel like you struggle to be him?”

“Taehyung who are you?” Jimin asks. He doesn’t want to admit to this man that he sometimes feels trapped.

Taehyung just shrugs and leans back, “I don’t know, it changes, somedays I am adventurous, somedays I feel like sitting alone. I have been everything and nothing and I can’t wait to see who I am tomorrow. Why label it? Why box myself in?”

Jimin just stares. He stares at this man who walked into his bookstore because of the rain. A man who says he doesn’t know who he is, that he doesn’t want to. Jimin stares. And he takes a deep breath. Letting it all sink in.

“So you don’t have to pick between cats and dogs?” He mumbles, loud enough he knows Taehyung can hear him but still quiet.

Suddenly Jimin’s book store is full of laughter, deep and loud and rumbling but so cheerful, “No Jimin! You don’t have to choose between cats and dogs.”

“Whoa.”

“Is that the only life altering thing?” Jimin doesn’t have to look at Taehyung to know he is smiling when he talks.

“Yes! Do you know how hard it is to choose between the two? It’s impossible” Jimin throws himself across the light green couch that is next to the one Taehyung is on.

He hears Taehyung get up but Jimin doesn’t move until he hears Taehyung talk, “Well look at that, the rain stopped, thanks for a wonderful evening Jimin. I’ll be back Friday night to buy the book and hopefully take you on a date.”

And just like the whirlwind of a man entered his peaceful bookstore, he left. Jimin didn’t know what to expect from him or what to expect from the date he now has. Oh well.

find the rest of my works here!

[robininthelabyrinth]

@craic-specialist said Listen, my craving for demonic cultivation bamf Qiren is ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥 

And they were right.

Nocturne in D Minor - ao3

(series: Variations on WWX & LQR in Assorted Keys)

“It’s up to you,” Lan Qiren said to his brother, who he hadn’t spoken to in years – not since Lan Wangji had gotten old enough to pay his respects without assistance. “You don’t have to do it; it is not something I would force anyone into, not in a million years. But I will be doing it, and I can’t help them both by myself. I need you.”

Qingheng-jun stared off into the distance, his eyes blank and vacant.

“We’ll die,” he finally said.

“Probably,” Lan Qiren said, because it was true. “I would even say that it is more likely than not. But…they’re your sons. Your legacy.”

That made his brother finally shift his attention to him. Lan Qiren wasn’t sure if it was the appeal to the connection they had, the fact that Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji were the only things his brother had left of his wife, or merely the appeal to his vanity, the thought of what he would leave behind in the world – he who had been so promising and so praised and yet accomplished so little, all through the consequences of his own decisions.

Still, it didn’t matter to Lan Qiren why his brother agreed to do it, only that he would do it. Lan Qiren wouldn’t, couldn’t, force a decision of this magnitude, but that didn’t mean he didn’t believe wholeheartedly that it was the right thing to do.

The only thing to do.

“How would you accomplish it?” his brother finally asked, and Lan Qiren couldn’t help but exhale in shaky relief, the fear that had been consuming him finally given vent – he’d agreed, then. He’d do it.

His brother had finally, finally, at the end of all things, lived up to Lan Qiren’s expectations.

“There was a promising medical paper presented in one of the discussion conferences,” he said, deciding to omit the fact that the author of the paper was a Wen, and a young woman, and that he hadn’t even asked her to do it as of yet. They could deal with that after they dealt with the more immediate problem. “It raised the suggestion that a golden core could be transferrable from one individual to another, particularly if the donor and recipient both cultivated in a similar tradition – it was a throwaway reference only, but having reviewed the evidence I believe it is possible, especially if the donation is given voluntarily.”

He also omitted to mention that such a donation could only be done with someone of exceptionally strong cultivation, as no one else would be able to endure the agony necessary to persist, awake and focused, through the entire lengthy surgical process. There was no need to mention the obvious.

“Wholly untested, then.”

“Of course it’s untested,” Lan Qiren snapped. “Who in their right minds would agree to donate their golden core, of which any person can only have the one in their lifetime, in any circumstances but the most dire? My nephews, your sons, are lying in some rotten hut in the middle of the woods, comatose and unaware – and I was the one to put them in that state myself, all so that they don’t wake up in time to realize that their golden cores, their futures, have been destroyed. I want them to wake to a world where that isn’t the case.”

“Even if we do what you suggest,” his brother said, “the world they wake into will be one where the sect they would have inherited has already been destroyed.”

“You cannot say that our sect has been destroyed as long as it has people to continue it,” Lan Qiren disagreed. “If they are restored, our sect lives on…it’s not just their futures at stake here. It’s all of ours – you, me, our ancestors, everything that was put to flame and sword by the Wen sect.”

The attack on the Cloud Recesses hadn’t been a warning the way it had been when the Jiang sect was burned, their sect leader and his wife gravely injured, both heir and head disciple captured and brought to the Nightless City while the daughter had fled with their sect treasures. No, the Jiang had been able to start rebuilding despite that, and that meant that the Wen had learned their lesson. The attack on the Cloud Recesses had been comprehensive, complete; it had been a deliberate extermination aimed at eradicating their entire way of life. If Lan Qiren hadn’t learned from the lesson of the Jiang sect and, in secret rebellion against his own sect elders who insisted that there was no danger, sent away many of their junior generation into hiding along with the contents of their library, they would have nothing left.

But it was all for nothing if Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji didn’t make it. If they lost their cores or died, that spelled the end of the main family line of their sect. Sure, a cousin could take over, one that shared their surname, and they could keep up the traditions Lan Qiren had so painstakingly preserved, but it still wouldn’t be the same.

In the face of that…

In the face of that, what use was a golden core to Lan Qiren, who was unmarried and likely to remain that way for the rest of his life, or to Qingheng-jun, who would never again remarry? They had both put everything they had, all their hopes and dreams and future, onto the children that Lan Qiren had raised on his brother’s behalf. They had given them everything. What was one more thing next to that?

It was only…

“Is it really worth it?” Qingheng-jun asked. “Our lives for theirs – that I could agree to, and readily, too. But to give our lives, our cultivation, for just the possibility of success…I’m not sure about that.”

Lan Qiren put his hands behind his back to hide how they were clenched into tight fists, the knuckles white. He had only one golden core to give. If his brother didn’t agree, he would have to pick which of his nephews would wake up whole, and which one crippled.

He would have to pick.

“Please, xiongzhang,” he breathed. He couldn’t force his brother to do anything he didn’t want to do. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t, and anyway it would be pointless. He’d never before swayed his brother’s decisions on anything, not once in his life. But he still had to ask. “Please.”

A long moment of silence.

An eternity.

And then –

“All right,” Qingheng-jun finally said. “All right. Let’s do it before they wake.”

-

“The Lan sect is doing remarkably well, all things considered – Zewu-jun and Hanguang-jun are among the most impressive generals in the Sunshot Campaign, even with the disadvantage of having to revive their sect from having lost almost everything. They don’t call them the Twin Jades for nothing!”

“No, to be sure, the way they’ve carried on in the face of such tragedy is impressive. After the massacre at the Cloud Recesses, with such heavy losses…”

“Mm, indeed. I heard that they fled along with their father and uncle, carrying with them the most sacred of their sect books – of course they were undoubtedly doing most of the work there. I heard their father died of the injuries he’d incurred before they ever woke, and their uncle was in a similarly terrible state.”

“Teacher Lan? Oh, it’s so sad, what happened with him…”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the Wen sect was chasing them down, of course. I heard he sacrificed himself to distract the pursuers from his nephews to ensure their escape, knowing that in his injured capacity he would only act as a burden slowing them down, and Wen Chao was so angry at missing his chance at the Twin Jades that he threw him into the Burial Mounds!”

“No! That’s terrible!”

“Now, fellow cultivator, I don’t know if that’s true – I heard that Teacher Lan was seen in the Lan sect camp as recently as half a month ago. How could he be there if he got thrown into a place as vile as the Burial Mounds…? You shouldn’t spread rumors.”

“Who are you to talk about rumors?! You’re the one talking about terrible curses, corpses rising to fight in battle, and other such atrocities…”

“Those aren’t rumors, I saw them with my own eyes! Fierce corpses, vicious, murderous, seething with resentful energy. And they weren’t fighting just anyone, they were fighting the Wen sect only – someone was controlling them.”

“Are you suggesting that there’s, what, some sort of demonic cultivator out there supporting the Lan sect? Ridiculous.”

“No, I’ve heard it too! I’ve heard that they play a phantom guqin, the tones of it echoing in the night. They say that this demonic cultivator acts as the blackened shadow of the regular sect, and no one knows who it really is – they keep themselves back, hiding in the dark like an assassin, and heavily cloak themselves whenever they need to go out onto the battlefield…”

“Now that’s ridiculous. Whoever heard of a demonic cultivator trying to hide what they’re doing? Aren’t they all arrogant and self-centered, reckless, unbearably bloodthirsty?”

“Not this one, apparently…”

“Well, demonic cultivator or not, as long as they’re killing strictly Wen-dogs, what do I care? The sooner we bring down the sun, the better. Best of luck to them, that’s what I say!”

“I’ll drink to that!”

-

“Wait,” Wei Wuxian said, goggling at Jin Guangshan and not caring one bit that he was being incredibly rude by interrupting the other man’s announcement, nor the fact that he was implicitly challenging Jin Guangshan on his own home territory, being as virtually the entire cultivation world had returned to Lanling City for the feasting following the Phoenix Mountain hunt. “Wait, wait, I’m sorry, are you trying to tell me that you think Teacher Lan – and just to make sure we’re being precise here, we’re talking about rule-abiding, rigid, stubborn, boring old nerd Lan Qiren, the one who used to lecture me all the time about even thinking about something unorthodox – is the Lan sect’s secret demonic cultivator?!”

Everyone acknowledged by now that they had one, of course.

It was impossible not to, even though the demonic cultivator had started out in a very limited, one might even say surprisingly restrained, fashion, restricting themselves to only doing things in defense of the Lan sect’s back line – and then eventually their front line, but still largely in a defensive posture, and almost exclusively using corpses of unknown antiquity. It wasn’t until later, when things had gotten more desperate, that they’d started being more aggressive, using the corpses as offensive weapons, resurrecting the fallen soldiers of the Wen sect against their own friends and allies…it was clear that they tried whenever possible to remain scrupulous about not using their own people, not just Lan but anyone on their side in the Sunshot Campaign, but it was also equally clear that demonic cultivation was an imprecise art, and sometimes they couldn’t help it.

Wei Wuxian had been crazily curious to meet this demonic cultivator more or less from the very first moment he’d heard of him.

Everyone knew the Lan sect was associated with them and that meant they of course knew who it was – if nothing else, the Lan sect’s strict practice of taking time to play soul-calming melodies and other songs of liberation following any incident of demonic cultivation use had made that clear, though it had also helped reduce the criticisms of the practice – and yet Lan Wangji, no matter how close he and Wei Wuxian had gotten during the war, still refused to say.

Though…Wei Wuxian supposed he understood why, if the demonic cultivator was in fact Lan Qiren.

That would, however, require the demonic cultivator to be Lan Qiren.

“Putting that aside,” Nie Mingjue said, frowning severely even as the rest of them gawked, “what’s this nonsense about him suddenly and for no reason killing your sect disciples and kidnapping the remaining Wen sect members?”

“It’s not nonsense,” Jin Guangshan said. “It’s true. There are witnesses.”

“The only part that’s nonsense is the suggestion that he would do so without a reason,” Nie Mingjue said impatiently. “This is Teacher Lan we’re talking about!”

Wei Wuxian couldn’t help but nod in agreement.

He wasn’t the only one in the hall nodding, either.

“Anyway, even if Teacher Lan really were to turn to murder, he wouldn’t have left witnesses,” Jiang Cheng added, wrinkling his nose. “Be thorough in all that you do, do not be haughty or complacent. Do you know how many times I had to redo my homework before he accepted it? And you’re expecting me to believe, what, that he’d be sloppy about it or something? Teacher Lan? I can’t believe it.”

Even more nods around the room, especially fervent among the younger generation that had attended Lan Qiren’s classes.

Jin Guangshan scowled, having clearly expected a bit more deference to his explanation.

“This is easily solved,” he said testily. “Is it not one of the Lan sect rules not to lie? I put to Zewu-jun and Hanguang-jun – is your uncle a demonic cultivator or not?!”

Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji exchanged glances.

Wei Wuxian’s eyebrows shot up. No way…

“Shufu has always sought to act in a moral and upright manner, no matter the cultivation path he uses,” Lan Wangji said, his voice flat, and the room exploded into whispers. “A path that he has only chosen due to what happened during the course of the war, when our ability was at its least and our desperation its greatest, and which he strongly advises others against under any normal circumstances.”

Lan Qiren is a demonic cultivator, Wei Wuxian marveled, and then promptly got annoyed: And Lan Zhan didn’t tell me?! I had so many ideas I wanted to pass along and converse about! It’s unfair!

“I concur with Wangji,” Lan Xichen said. “I believe in my shufu’s wisdom and restraint. If he took the Wen sect remnants unexpectedly and by force, I am certain he had a good reason for his actions. We will pursue this matter…”

“You will do no such thing,” Jin Guangshan thundered, cutting him off, and Lan Xichen looked taken aback by the unexpected rudeness. “The culprit is your kin and your senior, and everyone knows how the Lan sect honor their elders. How can we trust that you will impose justice in a fair and equitable fashion?”

Lan Xichen looked offended now, and rightfully he should be – Nie Mingjue certainly looked almost apoplectic on his behalf – but Wei Wuxian could see a fair number of heads nodding in the crowd. The Lan sect was known for its devotion to justice, that was true, but this was the sect leader’s uncle, who had very nearly sacrificed his life for them during the war. Even if Lan Qiren really had committed a crime, how could Lan Xichen of all people bear to hold him responsible for it? To do so would be to be unfilial, to fail to do so unjust – he was in a really tough position. He’d look bad no matter what way he picked.

That was probably what Jin Guangshan intended, actually.

Wei Wuxian elbowed Jiang Cheng, getting his attention, and whispered furiously into his ear.

A moment later, Jiang Cheng loudly cleared his throat and stepped forward. “This is easily solved,” he said, letting his voice carry. He’d really grown into the role of sect leader over the course of the war, ever since his parents had been forced to resign from the battlefield on account of their injuries. “Teacher Lan is famous for being thoughtful and proper in his conduct, as well as eloquent in his words – if there is an explanation to be had, surely he would be able to provide it. Why don’t we all go to wherever he has gone and ask to hear that explanation?”

Jin Guangshan didn’t like that, Wei Wuxian could tell from his expression, but there wasn’t anything for it – the momentum was with them, with Lan Xichen immediately agreeing, saying that his uncle would undoubtedly welcome being examined by his peers in the cultivation world, and Nie Mingjue adding his own (very loud) voice in support of the idea. All the others in the hall were also nodding and talking along, and the overarching tone was that of curiosity, mixed with a little bit of scandalized amusement, but not rage.

“Thank you for your assistance,” Lan Wangji said, appearing at Wei Wuxian’s side. Wei Wuxian had no idea how he’d even had the attention to spare to notice what Wei Wuxian had done.

“Think nothing of it, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian said, then nudged him a bit with his elbow. “Just tell me you passed on some of my better ideas to your uncle during the war, will you? Even if you didn’t, haha, I would still like to flatter myself…I still want to talk to him about it, you know. Some of the melodies he uses are so interesting!”

“You are likely the only one who takes such a circumspect opinion of my uncle’s practice, for which I thank you, but I would recommend once again against too much enthusiasm for the subject,” Lan Wangji said, voice heavy. “Demonic cultivation is a disfavored path for a reason, and though my uncle has sought whenever possible to minimize the effects on the temperament and the negative consequences, it is difficult.”

“Why does he do it, then?” Wei Wuxian asked, genuinely curious, and was surprised by the expression of genuine pain that passed over Lan Wangji’s features. “Lan Zhan?”

“He doesn’t have a choice,” Lan Wangji admitted quietly, his voice so soft that Wei Wuxian could barely hear it. “He sacrificed his orthodoxy for my brother and I, yet the injuries he incurred, whether there or – or later – are quite dire. He is not so young as we are; without some form of cultivation, any form, he will more than likely die. And the war…”

“I understand,” Wei Wuxian said. They’d come so close to losing Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan – he’d never gotten on with Yu Ziyuan, the two of them always butting heads, but they’d fought side by side against the Wen sect. The thought of something happening to her still made him see red; he couldn’t even imagine how it must be for Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen, who had always been close to their uncle, who had raised them all on his own, and then sacrificed himself to save them, being tortured and thrown into the Burial Mounds…no, it was all quite clear to Wei Wuxian what happened. Better demonic cultivation than nothing, that was to be sure, and Lan Qiren really had been absolutely invaluable during the war. Without him, the Lan sect might have perished. “And the Wen sect remnants? Any idea why he took them?”

“I do not know. But I trust my shufu.”

“Oh, certainly. I’m sure Teacher Lan has a good explanation,” Wei Wuxian said confidently. “We just need to hear it.”

-

“Thank you for taking the time to seek me out,” Lan Qiren said to the ravening mob currently being held immobilized at the bottom of the Burial Mounds. Technically they had come to listen to him, as the quick and frantic secret letters he’d received from his nephews, Nie Mingjue, and Jiang Cheng had all said, but someone had clearly been inciting them on the way, and they’d been all but ready to lay siege by the time they’d actually gotten here.

He was choosing to ignore that.

“While I have your attention,” he said, “and before we get to the question of the disposition of the Wen sect remnants, I was hoping to take a few moments to dispel a few unsubstantiated myths regarding the use of resentful energy and of my particular brand of demonic cultivation in general.”

They were staring at him.

Good.

“Now,” he said, and gestured for Wen Ning to unfurl the large scroll he’d prepared in advance. There were several, but Wen Ning had enthusiastically agreed to hold them up in sequence for him. “I’ve put together a presentation. If you’ll please pay attention to the board…”

Somewhere in the audience, he thought he could hear Wei Wuxian laughing.

-

“I don’t know what the rest of you were expecting, but this is completely what I expected,” Wei Wuxian said gleefully. “I told you he was a nerd!”

“Please desist from referring to me that way,” Lan Qiren said censoriously. “Immediately, if you please.”

“Oh, can’t you lighten up?” Wei Wuxian complained, absently looping an arm over Lan Wangji’s shoulders. “We’re celebrating a glorious victory today! You got absolved, Jin Guangshan’s face got dragged into the mud, Wen Ning – who’s great, by the way, I can’t believe I nearly forgot that we became friends back in the Nightless City – Wen Ning and his family are in a safe place now…now can we talk about how you’ve gotten demonic cultivation to work the way you have?”

“I don’t think you can call anyone else a nerd,” Jiang Cheng commented, rolling his eyes. “You’ve been loudly calling for an academic conference on the subject since you first heard about it.”

“Well, yeah, but still…”

“Probably for the best it wasn’t Wei-xiong that figured it out first,” Nie Huaisang opined. “I mean, just think about how that would have gone, it’d have been terrible!”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”

“A fascinating exploration of the importance of tone in presentation,” the newly dubbed Jin Guangyao murmured. He’d only been invited to the victory party on account of his sworn brotherhood with Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen, but he seemed somewhat relieved to be there – probably grateful to be anywhere but back at home where Jin Guangshan was no doubt raging over his failure to turn the cultivation world against the Lan.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Wei Wuxian complained. “What’s wrong with me being a demonic cultivator? I’m brilliant, charismatic…���

“Arrogant, reckless, and used to suffering no real consequences to your actions,” Nie Mingjue put in, voice dry, and there were nods all around. “You don’t know how to back down, and that would make people fear you.”

“Whereas no one fears shufu,” Lan Xichen agreed, nodding, and then blinked when everyone in the room gave him looks. “What?”

“Everyone’s afraid of Teacher Lan,” Jiang Cheng said. “Just, you know, not…afraid afraid. You know?”

Everyone except Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji nodded. Lan Qiren looked long-suffering about it.

“It’s a good point, though,” Nie Huaisang said. “Teacher Lan is famous for his good conduct, but also there’s his manner: he thinks about everything he says before he says it, he rarely deviates from a monotone, and even when he gets really angry, and I mean really angry, he just gets red in the face and can’t actually verbalize anything. It’s really hard to think of him as someone who’s going to kill you, rather than someone who will…I don’t know…be disappointed in you.”

“Thank you,” Lan Qiren said. “I…think?”

Wei Wuxian huffed. “Well, putting that aside,” he said. “Can we talk about it? Jiang Cheng’s not wrong about me wanting an academic conference. Can we do that next discussion conference instead of a hunt? Phoenix Mountain was great and all, but, you know…”

“We live in interesting times,” Nie Mingjue declared, rolling his eyes good-naturedly, and raised his cup. “A toast!”

-

“Shufu,” Lan Wangji said. His hand was at his stomach, hovering lightly over his dantian. “Do you ever…regret?”

“Not once,” Lan Qiren said. He’d known he wouldn’t be able to keep the truth from his nephews forever. “Not for a single heartbeat. Your father and I knew what we were risking, what we were doing, what it might mean for us, and we made our choice with open eyes. I regret nothing.”

He paused.

“Though perhaps I slightly regret the headaches I’m going to have once you marry Wei Wuxian in and there will be nowhere left where I will be able to retreat to in order to avoid his endless pestering…”

[olderthannetfic]

(1/2) I'm one of the people who kinda panicked with the ao3 thing recently (I never made posts but did think the worse of the situation). I couldn't help feel this way as this was the first I've realized the importance of the ao3 elections (I used to ignore it back then since I can't vote). Also, it feels like antis are everywhere and in every fandom and even on ao3 but since they can't do much there, it feels safe and then something feels like it was going to threaten that. Maybe this Tiffany

--

(2/2) can't make big changes if she did get elected but as someone else pointed out, if one anti could get into an important position within ao3, who knows how many others will try to do the same. It was scary to think that maybe they'd one day find a way to ruin this one great thing, too. Everywhere else we'd be dealing with antis and big corporations who could ruin things but ao3 is by fans who understand other fans and I don't want even that taken away. I think maybe others felt the same way.

The thing is... AO3 needs money to operate, and while it has a ton of fics, part of what makes it attractive is that it's in current use. Those both require fans to like AO3 on an ongoing basis. If everyone abandoned it tomorrow, it would die.

If people with boring fics and pro-censorship agendas took it over, the people who do the actual work and donate the actual money could just start over somewhere else.

Sure, nobody wants to start over, and I don't think it will come to that anyway. I just think you should keep in mind that OTW is a community made up of people. Someone winning an election isn't going to change the anti-censorship stance of most of the people who actually make AO3 exist and function.

[batmanego]

"At worst it's shipping a serial murder with the father of his victim" yeah that's why it's FUN, they're both fucked in the head and only deserve each other! Bruce knows exactly what he's doing and the drama if/when resurrected Jason finds out has such delicious "lost focus and had a consensual workplace relationship" vibes but with EXPLOSIONS

maybe it's my bubble of fellow "lives have been wrecked by infedelity" fanfic writers but i don't know anyone who actually sees it as healthy or anything but either one-sided or big cheating-on-his-mission-for-Justice vibes. Batman doesn't deserve a healthy relationship because he's ruined his loved ones lives. So he's stuck with the creepy stalker that's obsessed with him. I know like 3 other writers w this viewpoint, not every ship is all UWU, sometimes toxic ships are fun. It's not flattening Bruce, it's adding complexity and inner turmoil, but it also assumes you're working with a view of Bruce most of the fandom doesn't share because everyone loves Batdad, idk. Just tossing in my 2 cents.

I also wrote a whole thing creating Jeannie as a fully fleshed character outside of "Mrs. Napier" so don't say it's something about erasing women, maybe on some subconscious level that I need to work on, but I do try to counter it with fleshing out other female characters. I enjoy Talia & Selina but Bruce is fundamentally a fucked up guy and he rlly only deserves a fucked up ship. Idk.

Thanks for reading this or skimming and deleting it idk im mostly shouting to the void

i went back and forth on whether or not i wanted to respond to this jokingly or seriously or even at all, considering theres So Many Other Things I Could Do With My Limited Time On This Earth, but honestly you as a person seem infuriating in a very specific, Jerking Off On The Page Never Read A Comic Donated To AO3 Harry Potter Fan-type way and im sort of diametrically opposed to you because of this so i will formulate a "brief" response.

putting it out there first and foremost: i really don't care all that much because i'm an adult and i have other fucking shit to do, but comics is an industry that i am both passionate about and want to work in, so i think i'm granted a little bit of bitching about misinterpretation of characters, considering i want to Actually Write Them For A Living at some point.

for starters i notice that you changed what i said about joker from sexual predator to serial murderer. hmmmmmm. could it be that that is a line you realize shouldn't be crossed?

that aside, the reason i bring up jason ties into why your approach (an approach shared by many) to bruce wayne is fundamentally flawed. bruce wayne is a man who had nobody, and then gradually accumulated a network of strong support systems that are more important to him than anything else. i mean that. really, from a character standpoint, bruce died in that alleyway with martha and thomas - everything from there until meeting dick was him going through the motions. living death. but dick changed things! it gave him a person to care about! it gave him responsibilities outside himself! it forced him to be a caretaker! albeit, in the early years, he wasn't a very good one, but he did try.

and we can see that attitude continued in his relationship to jason - when jason dies, bruce changes. i've talked before about how death in the family changed not just batman, but batman comics tonally and thematically, but jason's death really marked a point where bruce closed himself off from people again. all of this reinforces the fact that for bruce, he is fundamentally a man that claims to work alone while actually being surrounded by friends and family.

to bruce, compassion is key. compassion in EVERYTHING. with your family and with your criminals.

you want drama between bruce and jason? their story is already rife with it. literally just read under the red hood and you'll see, nothing there needs to change or have Drama inserted.

also, this comic is really funny and antithetical to your They Belong Together point because bruce explicitly says he fucking hates the joker so much.

and man, i dont even know where to start with this paragraph, it's just so goddamn funny. hey. you know you sound insane, right? you know that? you know you're shooting yourself in the foot? i didn't say a goddamn thing about erasing women. you said that. that's an issue you recognized in yourself. it's not one i won't say is there - i could go on for hours about the discarding of canon female love interests (canonically bisexual female love interests in the case of selina and canonically love interests who are both woc! hmmmm) out of misogyny, but i won't because it seems like you've kinda got that front covered.

and, again, cause i can't say this enough: bruce's friends and family are the most important thing to him and he will always prioritize them. he loves them.

just as an afterthought, framing bruce as "fundamentally fucked up" is kind of weird to do. i mean, i have my problems with framing any hero as "what if they were evil, actually" (the least of which being that i think it's pretty fuckin boring) but this post does a pretty good job of summing up "is bruce wayne really a good guy?" (the answer is yes)

anyway, you want to ship bruce with a sexual abuser who murdered his son and ruined his life? i can't stop you. but i do urge you to think critically about the character decisions you're making there and step outside of your fanfiction echo chamber and into the wonderful world of comics for once. if you need recommendations on where to start for good bruce characterization, i've got plenty.

ps. you want bruce to kiss one of his villains? harvey dent's right there. xoxoxo ferris

[whumpster-fire]

#a lotta people do identify him with cockade haha#lots of great ideas here#tatmr#is actually a gold mine if you are willing to break it up for parts#(😈)#houseboat and i once brainstormed a tatmr rewrite#where d10 arrives on the island fugitive-hunting and everyone closes ranks to protect oliver#... without realizing that d10 has actually been sent to find b.r.'s missing e2#which is awkward because even the sodor engines don't know that's thomas#there are so many good romps you can do with a d10#also please consider that d10 came to sodor once as a b.r. bloodhound#but after withdrawal the fat controller saves him#... but d10 is unable to comprehend his change in status#'piss off i'm here to drag your STEAMIES to the SCRAPYARD heheheh mwahaha'#'you're only here because we MADE A PATH for you because i BOUGHT you (dumbass)'#'... heh-heh?'#op if you haven't read the 'rust and soot' series on ao3 yet you really oughtta#ttte diesel 10#ttte headcanon#ttte analysis

I definitely like the idea of him being D.00810 and being referred to as "10" for short, but if he's going by a number and not his name it's plausible that he was renumbered as well. Maybe he's just the tenth engine in the B.R. Bloodhound program, in which case who knows what his original identity was.

I actually wouldn't mind Lady as the target of Diesel 10's first visit, but, like, as an actual engine and not a goddess. Maybe she was supposed to be marked for preservation by another heritage railway but due to a "clerical error" (fun fact: one of the preserved Class 42's was apparently only saved because a different diesel was purchased for preservation but then cut up by mistake so B.R. offered one of the Warships in its place. Imagine the survivor guilt!) she had to be smuggled out of the scrapyard that hadn't gotten the memo, and Diesel 10 went after her and attacked her. Or he could be part of the origin story of one of the other possible not-mentioned-in-the-books late arrival steam engines.

Diesel 10 comes to Sodor as a bloodhound once but is saved by TFC after his withdrawl, yes! But I feel like he'd have to show at least some sign of redeeming qualities first, because otherwise in the early 1970s there were still steam engines that the yards hadn't gotten around to scrapping, and a lot of early-generation diesels being with drawn, that I can't see even Sir Charles choosing an engine that actively wanted to murder everyone on the NWR over one of the many engines that didn't.

I really like the idea of Boco being the one to talk Diesel 10 into accepting the NWR's help, since D5701 went down such a similar path and Boco wasn't able to save him.

I have read Rust and Soot. And also @hazel-of-sodor 's 'Day of Vengeance,' which inspired this post, and I just realized I've had an open reblog tab of that open for like a week and forgot to actually reblog it.

Also: the most hilarious cherry on the cake of "Passive-Aggressive TFC2 annoying the hell out of B.R." would have to be if Diesel 10 got sent to Sodor under "fail one more time and you're next for the torch" orders (with them having every intention of scrapping him soon even if he succeeds), and then he disappears for several months... until the next time a natural disaster hits Sodor, when photos of Diesel 10 helping clean up debris end up on the news, and the NWR makes a big public announcement thanking the mainland management for graciously donating them a free specialized trackside maintenance engine since they were withdrawing the class anyway, and talking about how helpful he is.

And the scumbag in charge of the "let's assign engines to do nothing but hunt down escaped withdrawn engines because we've lost control of our employees so badly that half the crews and signalmen are openly helping steam engines escape" program can't say a goddamn thing, because trackside maintenance is exactly the cover story they used to avoid admitting Diesel 10's real purpose to the public, who would be furious, and Sir Topham Hatt knows this and has blackmail material, and also the engine who was specially modified for the express purpose of stopping engines from running away to heritage lines has run away to a heritage line. So now that scumbag's project is a laughingstock.

That may be the point when B.R. completely gives up on trying to stop TFC from "un-withdrawing" engines out of Barry Scrapyard and similar locales, which they were previously able to at least somewhat curb on the grounds of "You don't get to spend our budget purchasing new locomotives without approval instead of asking for us to transfer them," but now it's like not even the scrapyards give a fuck, they're pretty sure Hatt has been donating out of his own pocket to help non-BR heritage lines and museums buy engines, and it's become clear that the only way to trick him into accepting a 'modern' engine is by declaring it nonstandard/obsolete.

Having Diesel 10 Thoughts

Certain recent incidents have made me reconsider and think actually given how Diesel 10 basically has basically an excavator arm I can see why everyone's intimidated by him.

Also I looked up his class and, holy shit I didn't realize that he was a fucking diesel-hydraulic. And also:

Added to this were practical problems modernising the D800s: because of the scaled-down bodyshell there was very little room inside for extra equipment. It was, for example, physically impossible to accommodate a compressor as well as an exhauster, so the locomotives were unable to haul newer designs of air-braked coaching stock. It also proved impractical to equip them with electric train heating (ETH) equipment for similar reasons, so they retained unreliable steam heat boilers to the end of their lives.

They couldn't even fit an air compressor in this class. What the hell did they do to fit this gigantic fucking hydraulic arm into him?

Each locomotive was powered by two Maybach 1035 hp (D800–802) or 1135 hp (D803–829, D831–832 and D866–870) MD650 engines coupled to Mekydro hydraulic transmissions.

Oh, god. Okay now I want to see a "realistic" Diesel 10 design where (a) the arm retracts to fit within the loading gauge, and (b) his front engine and other equipment like the steam heat boiler has visibly been completely removed to make room for "Pinchy."

Also these were passenger engines? So it seems unlikely that the claw would've been installed for maintenance of way work or whatever like I originally suspected, which probably means that Diesel 10 was employed by British Rail to hunt down and catch runaways like Oliver, and might have been given that claw for the express purpose of quickly tearing down improvised barricades like the one Oliver's crew used to hide him in a quarry siding in 'Escape', and of course for directly attacking and damaging them before dragging them to the scrapyard.

So, uhh, this raises the possibility that someone at BR just yoinked an arrogant young passenger engine off the express service he was running and gutted him, totally destroying his ability to do what he was originally designed for to turn him into a weapon.

(Also, like, some of the diesels in the series seem to just have names and not numbers or have nicknames they've "earned" by being nuisances, e.g. Spamcan and D.0261, Bear before joining the NWR, but every single one of the Class 42s was named. Did they, like, take his original name away as, like, a ritual severing of his ties to his identity? Obviously his number's different unless he was D.00810 / Cockade)

And then, just a few years after steam was finally abolished on BR lines, they declared his class, and his entire type of transmission, non-standard and they met the same fate as the steam engines he helped catch. Holy shit like I saw stuff about the early-generation BR diesels not having very long service lives but I did not fully process that the 28s, 42s, and Hymeks were withdrawn after only like 10 years, jesus christ.

Uhh, I guess that'd explain why he ended up on Sodor then? Did they immediately start getting rid of engines like Diesel 10 once they outlived their usefulness, or did they start sending him after other diesels and he got wise to the fact that his days were numbered?

Okay I have a horrible dark AU idea for how this went down since Magic Railroad's basically a Shining Time Station movie and doesn't quite fit the rest of T&F canon. Diesel 10 got sent to Sodor once to retrieve a "stolen" steam engine - possibly Oliver - and managed to terrorize and intimidate the NWR's residents while searching for the fugitive for a while because the law was very nominally on his side, until he fucked up and did something that let TFC kick him off the island even though he was there on official British Rail business (as opposed to the other diesels who kept getting booted off because they were on lease to help the NWR and were there at TFC's pleasure). Possibly something like attacking and damaging an NWR engine acquired through completely legal means, or even threatening / hurting / almost killing one of the human employees.

And then a few years later, he came back and one of the following happened:

Idea 1: Diesel 10 went rogue and came to Sodor with a massive grudge against steam engines because now it wasn't just his job, it was personal because so many preservationists had fought so hard against him to save their 'precious steamies,' and in his warped mind he believed that nobody was even trying to save diesels. When he got word that his class were being withdrawn he went straight to the biggest 'heritage' railway in the country determined to take as many steam engines down with him as he could. And possibly got blocked in a siding / shoved into some trap points / derailers and left to think about his actions.

Idea 2: Diesel 10 had more or less the same mindset, but he didn't go rogue, he was sent to Sodor to collect Boco or Bear! Because whoever was giving him orders at BR had the same idea and thought that TFC had only accepted any diesels reluctantly and no one on the NWR was going to actually fight for some obsolete nonstandard diesels. And they were horribly wrong.

Idea 3: Some dumb motherfucker on British Rail didn't check their paperwork and tried to send Diesel 10 after a fellow Warship without knowing what class he was, and he lost his nerve after his would-be victim recognized him, and finally got that there were no "winners" in a world where engines were nothing more than expendable tools. Long story short he ends up a fugitive himself, and possibly dragging one of the other Warships to Sodor with him. Or failing to do so.