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my dear friend just looked up from the hat she's crocheting for a very large spherical rock we found in the river and said, in a slightly haunted tone that revealed this was the first time she was having this thought, "i should make something for my cousin's real human baby"

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You know the old proverb. If you have a shirt thats good. Wear it everyday till you die

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“Oh, yes,” snaps Barcus, “I’ve missed this. I’ve missed sitting in feculent pits with you, watching you mutter to yourself.”

“Unless you have something useful to say,” says Wulbren, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “which would be nothing short of a miracle—”

"—get out? Yes, you'd like that, wouldn't you? No one left to question your runepowder treason and plot?" In shaking hands, Barcus crumples the maps of the Steel Watch foundry. He's not been this furious since he was last upside-down. "'Ours is not to reason why, as long as all the Gondians die?'"

"That fucking Harper," snarls Wulbren, "has you rhyming in couplets."

If someone accused Silk to his face of rhyming in couplets, he'd—well, Barcus doesn't know what the man would do. Make that face of his, most likely, then get on with saving the city.

And the city, Barcus has found since he returned, is certainly in need of saving. From Gortash’s smug smirk plastered on every wall from the portworks to the Wide. From the earthquakes shaking down shingles in Whitkeep. From the pernicious wastrels throwing refuse at refugees. Possibly, he thinks in a nigh-traitorous passion, from—

"I don't have time for this." Wulbren snatches the maps. Most of their conversations end like this, now. "Go help Nagel with the munitions."

He can't bellow like Wulbren. His voice comes out trembling instead, reedy with rage, ridiculous. "I'm not one of your rare-do-wells."

"Then why are you here?" For a moment Wulbren’s face, frustrated nearly to the point of fear, looks almost as Barcus remembers it. Then the new scar twists. "Bumbling around where no one wants you?”

Well. He bumbles out. In the workshop no one looks at him; he nudges past Nim and Ridda, smiling in apology, his ears ringing like a bomb’s gone off. Ridda’s voice follows him, half-hearted, up the cliffside shaft. If he turns he’ll see in the poor thing’s eyes, rubbed raw since Philomeen, what she thinks she understands. Fiddle-faddle. What he needs is a breath of fresh air and a fortifying smoke to counteract it. A moment’s respite, that’s all, to—regroup, to—

Hogi’s voice echoes from the watchpost. "Harper’s here!"

Of course he is. Barcus chokes back a laugh, unscrews his face, leans on what passes for a wall in the Ironhands’ hole. Base of operations, Wulbren calls it. It's like they're still children playing in the mines, pretending that pebbles are gems.

He touches the weight beneath his shirt. Wulbren's amulet. He hadn't wanted it back.

An ill-omened wraith of a shape, incongruous in grubbily bright busker’s motley, flits up the shaft on a whirl of sea air and loose stones. Harper nonsense. The man could just climb the ladder.

"There you are," Barcus says with asperity, craning his head up. "We expected you yesterday—gah!" He recoils. "Put a poultice on that. Or at least try to look cheerful."

Pique ripples in the wreckage of Silk's face. "I should sing tirra-lirra like the lark?"

Whatever he's done to himself has gotten worse. His eyes are depthless, alien. The inkstain suffusing his strained face has stretched out tendrils, like an infection, that spider purple-black in every vein. He’d had a weary comeliness, before, typical of his sort: minstrels, that is. No-good gadabouts. Barcus had once seen him smile—a brief, embarrassed tic at the Sharran, who’d made some joke—and, with a schoolboy start, had spilled a twist of smokepowder.

"Does it hurt?” Silly question, he thinks with a pang, and amends it. “Much?"

“Not much.” Silk looks surprised to be asked. He steps forward on empty air. The curls someone hacked short with a knife drift about his face, briefly weightless, then settle again. “Barcus, we’ve found a way into the foundry. Tell Wulbren to hold off.”

Wulbren would storm the foundry out of spite. Barcus almost laughs. “You do it. He’ll”—he clears his throat, eyes stinging, and perseveres—“he’ll listen to you.”

He’s endured worse silences. The other man’s eyes, soft and subterranean, are a different matter entirely.

“And—please,” he says through the tightness in his throat. To look away would be tantamount to a confession of—something. He swallows and jerks up his chin. “Speak to the Gondians. They deserve a chance to plead their—what are you,” he snaps, abruptly tired of looking up, “a dirigible?”

He tugs Silk down by the shirt. They nearly knock foreheads. Every pebble in the shaft skitters, leaps, trembles in the air a heartbeat longer than it should; another quake, Barcus supposes with a peculiar quiver, staring the man in the face as the small stones patter down. Strange that it should happen just then.

“We will,” says his Harper after a pause. He averts his ruined face with wry courtesy. The lines tremble at the corners of his mouth, threatening some expression that Barcus has never seen. “Speak to them. I'll go myself."

Something in Barcus cracks. He stares, stricken. In the duergar quarry, cursing and chafing in his chains, he’d struck one stubborn stone a hundred times; the next blow had shorn it clean in two, down the secret grain.

“Yes,” he says, his voice and firmness breaking on the word. “Well—of course you will, you—I”—in a fluttering agony of indecision, he straightens the other man’s collar—“ha—”

Silk gives him a startled look. “Barcus—”

Never mind what either of them deserve. He seizes the man’s horrid face and kisses him hard on the mouth.

* * *

“Well,” says Shadowheart, sweetly succinct, when their messenger drops from the Rivington eaves in a flurry of frightened doves. She peers again at what he’s thinking—she really hadn’t meant to, the first time—then dances her mind from his exasperated reach. “Tirra-lirra, lally-oh?”

“Bloody Sharran snoop,” Silk pronounces in his direst baritone, bustling by with a fiercer face than usual. He jams on his tatty busker’s cap. Shadowheart catches up, laughing, as she’d once been taught, in silence; a few loose cobbles skip after them, too, down the shimmering street.

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That is not what i googled

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being poly with no bitches is a little funny

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bring me the black materia cloud

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just had a livestream where I was making music. I asked for a character and setting and someone said “sephiroth CONSTIPATED shitting in kyoto”

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For real???

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how are people complaining abt the longevity of glossier you reve i sprayed a bit of the tester on my wrist and HALF A WEEK AND TWO SHOWERS LATER im still getting whiffs of it

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baby cat

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because i'm with you in the dark with your heart as my mark which shall guide you the way

THROUGH THE WAVESSSSSSSSSS

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deltarune weird route crackfic where noelle, horrified, tells kris to tell her it didn't happen, it didn't snow, but kris forgets the past tense of snow and the soul ends up having them say "it snew" and then the colors return to normal instantly and noelle's like "what" and the soul's options are "what" and "what" and either option you pick the snowgrave route is aborted

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i had a friend who was a knife

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someone say a yuri ship . first one u think of