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I must build a new shell, wear new costumes.

Anaïs Nin, from The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

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Humour me, I'm curious, was essentially what her eyes had told him. And now this fledgling captain stood before her and told her a story about a Spaniard named Cortés.

About blood money.

About cursed money.

The dangers of this island, they had talked about. And were would Eleanor Guthrie be today if she had ever given a shit about the curses that made the rounds among her crews? A sailor would sooner see misfortune in the particular crest of a wave than the freedom said wave beckoned; and perhaps knowing this was the edge she had: to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Eleanor leaned forward, her elbows on the heavy mahogany desk that separated her from her callers like a suit of armour in this place.

This place, of her father's making.

She had never felt so alive now that he was absent from it, and thus from her. She could breathe, for the first time in her life, more freely for it.

Never mind that her feet barely touched the ground if she sat the chair fully. It was easily remedied by sitting close to the edge, as she had developed a habit of doing. Back straight, skirts laid out about her – the endless depths of purposes she could pull from a layered dress, between hiding a purse, a dagger and now her youth.

Her youth: something shared, then, with Jack Sparrow, who styled himself Captain much more than she styled herself Queen.

"I've heard about you," she said in lieu of an answer to his implicit question. "Jack Sparrow, the captain who sails with a crew twice his age. Tell me, Captain, why do you come to me with needs of outfitting when the Pearl is in prime condition even now?" And, another thread of the web she had spun: "Did not the East India Trading Company take good care of her prize galleon?"

And, because she was who she was, and even if it burned in her like bile, she was Richard Guthrie's daughter: "How much gold are we talking about?"

“ It is? I hadn’t noticed. ” Perhaps giving the self-styled Queen of Nassau lip was a bold move, particularly for a captain as young and inexperienced as he was, one who needed allies and partners ( or so Hector was at great pains to tell him ), but Jack had faced down more powerful and scarier adversaries. She was a girl, not much younger than him, surely, lording over men much older than herself. Just as he lorded over a crew with an average age that was twice his own. Sailors were hardened men, but at least in the merchant service they had been contractually obligated to follow his orders. Pirates had no masters, no employers, no one to answer to but themselves. It was a learning curve.

Jack was a quick study. He’d been preparing for this moment his entire life, after all.

He recalled Rackham’s words, a wager made over drunken mirth that he really shouldn’t have been drawing on in this particular moment, and yet here he was all the same. Our esteemed Miss Guthrie offers better leads to captains who are in her good books. Charles happens to be one of those captains. Jack was not going to cross Charles Vane, but he was quite charming. Enough for the wager to be set. Enough for Miss Guthrie to spare him that second glance, her curiosity piqued.

He was spurred on by that look, a brief flash of gold in his smile as he sat up straighter in his seat. “ My first mate is pursuing a lead that would make all of us very rich indeed. ” Not that the gold was the primary motivator in Jack’s case, but the infamy gained by finding something that could not be found? The security it would give his captaincy, the respect it would grant him in the eyes of his men? Discomfort in the face of the stories told about the treasure aside, it was an opportunity that he could not dismiss so flippantly, not while he possessed the one object that, combined with some luck and guile on his part, would be capable of finding it.

Deft fingers, ever incapable of staying idle, drummed a faint beat against the arm of his chair. “ There’s a story about blood money paid to Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, to stop his slaughter of the Aztecs. The gold vanished, so many thought the tale just a myth, but we’ve learned that’s not the case. ” Any sane person would ask how or why, but Jack opted to keep that card closer to his chest for now. “ We have the means to find the gold; all I need is someone who can outfit us ready to sail and assist in the trade of this… unique treasure to reputable markets once we’ve returned. ”

@imbricare / cont.

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requested by @theproblemoflyra

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[ NEEDED ]:     a letter that the writer wrote for the recipient after learning of their recent struggles in their personal life, and which contains uplifting words of encouragement, support and other things they feel they should hear to help them through. [ eleanor & maxima pls!! this is 100% inspired by that maxima & silver pen pals ask from lottie and your response because im still on the floor ]

letters / accepting / @imbricare

The letter arrives to name "Eleanor" If pressed, the servant that carried it to her room directly would tell her that it arrived with a lot of other shipments from the interior. That she had been order to deliver it directly for fear that the wine would be confiscated by Berringer. The name would not mean much. How could it, after all, while her memory was stark (which had allowed her to flourish in Nassau) there were quite a few self proclaimed merchants. Though not many that could afford the bottle of Italian wine that was presented atop her table.

Eleanor, I thought to add your last name, but could not pick between the devils you are caught between. "Rogers" for survival or "Guthrie" for nurture. Neither of them fit, so your name is all that remains. You once told me this town exists because of women like us. Fuck God and fuck Men. Would you believe me if I told you those words have stuck with me since? Not because I did not know or believed before but because of how special those times were. How rare of an opportunity we were presented with. It feels like it was in another life, and I find myself believing it was. Ever since the English ships landed on Nassau's shores, since the stories started pouring from the city about your new life: it is clear that you never returned. Given the times, it would be ill-advised to believe you were not the source that informed Rogers of my existence. Inexplicably, foolishly, however — I find myself doing so. Despite my best judgement and knowledge of what you must have had to do to carve this place for yourself. It is not something that many can comprehend or would be willing to understand, but not many women have kept their lives when forced into the same situation. It is hard for men to understand what sort of sacrifice that requires. You will find no judgment in this letter. I fear you have come to believe that you deserve this, that this is all you should, could strive for. It breaks my heart to think that you have been made to believe it: this lie that you should be so lucky to live with the leftovers Rogers or your father chose to leave behind and thank the heavens you still breathe. You need not force yourself into the image of women these men hold. To be satisfied to use these men's scraps to build a life, Eleanor. In the market, in three days time: I have arranged to help you slip away to Philadelphia with some help. No deals, no hidden terms, no strings attached. Trust never thrived between us but trust, at least, that your absence would be beneficial for us both and a great blow against England. From one survivor to the other: Let me help you, Eleanor. Please consider my offer, and take it.

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my favourite part about this scene is that there is absolutely no need for arthur to connect eames to the pasiv for him, eames has presumably worked in dream share for years and could probably do it with his eyes closed, meanwhile arthur has let ariadne who has zero experience do it herself so he can kneel over and flirt with his rival/friend/husband/ex

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Adrienne Rich, from Twenty-One Love Poems (VIII)

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watched inception again tonight and i'm so obsessed with the implied world this movie builds that we never actually get to see. dream sharing was invented for military training purposes but has since apparently moved into the mainstream enough that people use it to design architecture and commit crimes - do people who regularly engage in shared dreaming risk becoming desensitized to things like pain and violence and death because they experience it so much in the dream world? what are some of the other applications of shared dreaming? is it treated like virtual reality? is there, say, dream torture interrogation? dream-based entertainment, providing experiences reality can't? and then there's the implication that dream theft is common enough that high-level criminal organizations build themselves around it and people can receive training to allow their subconscious mind to defend itself (at least, if they're influential and/or wealthy enough). are dream crimes a recognized thing? is there such thing as dream laws? could you make a court case out of things that happened in a dream in the inception universe, or is it a legal loophole because if if happened in a dream it wasn't technically real (no matter how real it felt) and that's why people exploit it? also, regularly engaging with the dream world in favor of real life is shown to have the potential to be addictive and to affect your perception of reality, particularly whether your world and everyone in it is real or not. is this something that's widely recognized and can you get support for it? or is this kept quiet and/or stigmatized in order to promote progress and profit? i desperately need to see more of the world nolan created with this film because it's all just so fucking fascinating to think about

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Arthur frowns, nods his chin at the bottle of Maker’s Mark. “For that?” He scoffs, perfectly measured and calm, like they aren’t standing in his kitchen discussing the quality of the mid-shelf hooch he hides on the Useless Gifts shelf in his liquor cabinet. He probably got it from his brother-in-law who had a knack for gifting things that collected dust more often than brownie points. “Don’t worry about it.”

But it’s Eames, isn’t it, and whatever slippery ground they’re on – You show me yours, I’ll show you mine – cracks under Arthur’s offhandedness, a trait he’s all too aware doesn’t earn him a lot of favors but that’s served him in good stead in other ways over the years. You don’t keep yourself alive by caring too much, or too deeply, or too quickly. 

(Even if the fact remains that he does, he does, he does.)

He watches Eames the way he always does: eyes pinched at the corners, that look that perpetually hovers between disaffected and all business, like Eames is a bullet point entry on a list that Arthur hasn’t figured out yet how to prioritize. 

What’s the square root of a business problem that has somehow gotten personal? He doesn’t know and that makes him uncomfortable as fuck because he never lets things become personal. Not since Mal, anyway. 

“I wasn’t stateside when I got the baptism.” The baptism alone takes him back, that slang of the early days for what it felt like: that cold dive under, the world rocking in and out of motion and back in again. It’s different these days, Arthur finds, even though he struggled to describe it to Ariadne when she asked: Like the river comes up to meet you instead of the other way around was the best he could manage, and then a couple hours later, Yusuf had driven a van down a bridge and they all woke up submerged and drowning and none of it had mattered anyway, like it never did, not in the thick of things.

Shit, he has been on sabbatical for too long, hasn’t he?

He files away the knowledge of six years of sobriety and he vaguely has to wonder if Eames wasn’t so out of it that he didn’t realize Arthur was right there, yesterday, when his medic buddy had finally set to work.

“Hold him down, yeah?” “Why don’t you wait for the sedative to kick in?” “What? The amount of sedatives he’d need to be fully out of it, I’d need him in an OR and hooked up to the big shit.” “Wait, he’s gonna feel this?” “Nah, he’s out enough for most of it. Just a little, maybe.”

Every childhood contains a lesson about doctors saying This will hurt just a little, and Arthur’s had been no different – so he grit his teeth and rolled up his sleeves and got on with it, and after that, Brownlow hadn’t been a man of many words, hadn’t hung around longer than it took to down a coffee while it was still steaming hot, and get into an Uber to take him back to Newark. By that time, Eames was already sleeping the sleep of the dead (not quite) and Arthur had his apartment back to himself, with the uncanny knowledge that his snarky British co-worker was currently occupying the room his ten-year-old nephew usually stayed in. 

“Kandahar,” he says, finally, and if there’s a trace of surprise in his voice it’s because he really thought Eames would have known. The fact that the Army contracted Mal for Operation Dreamshare wasn’t a secret between them, who had made up Mal’s core team for the years to come – the precious few that were left to her – and Arthur had always assumed that the fact Eames didn’t ask was either down to him already knowing or him not caring. Not that anything changed, really. “So yeah, I know what it was like at the start. To be honest, I…” 

Arthur reconsiders. He reaches into the drawer to his left, finds a pack of Tylenol between DayQuil and antacids, and drops it on the counter in front of Eames. His eyebrow quirks. “Knock yourself out,” he adds mid-sentence. “I’ve mostly stuck with routine jobs since inception.” That’s a white lie: Yeah, he dabbles in the scene here and there, comes in for recommendations and the occasional on-site support gig, but he hasn’t gone under since, either. 

The opportunity hasn’t presented itself is on the tip of his tongue but that wouldn’t even be white lie anymore, that’d just be a blatant lie. Truth is, he hasn’t trusted himself enough to-

To not end up like Cobb? To not end up like Eames, with that monkey on his back for the rest of his life?

“Haven’t dreamed since, actually,” it slips out the same moment Eames says Thanks and Arthur blinks, whether in surprise about himself or about Eames, he doesn’t know. Alright. He clears his throat. “Want something to eat?”

Arthur’s expression barely flickered. Eames wasn’t sure if that was flattering or insulting.

The guilt made his palms sweat. It didn’t matter how firmly he told himself that this was sensible, actually; that he was choosing the right option, and that he was doing it for the right reasons, his internal monitor was blaring, so loudly that it felt like a pounding in his head. Or maybe his head was actually pounding; it was hard to tell. Probably both; he still felt dehydrated, and he helped himself to a second bottle of water and poured the hot water into the tea, grimacing. A stove kettle. Liptons. Well, it was better than a microwave, and the sugar would help more than anything. The ritual, too, the pouring and letting it steep, and the smell of the steam coming off the top as the water darkened, reminding him of his mother and how she never took milk with anything. Ruins the flavour, she’d say, even when drinking instant coffee. His lips were cracked and dry and he was thinking of his mother. Jesus Christ.

It wasn’t that he didn’t drink. God, he drank. But this tasted different to him; it tasted of temptation and panic. He focused on his breathing as he sat back at the counter, keeping it slow and steady, sipping at the tea too soon so he burned his tongue; the sensation helped ground him. He nodded at Arthur in thanks and uncapped the bottle, barely taking in the expensive weight of the glass and the slender, elegant label, sloshing a healthy measure into his cup. He might’ve offered it to Arthur as a half-joke, but he was feeling a little too fragile to acknowledge the whiskey more than he had to, so he just screwed the cap back on one handed and pushed it away. It made a satisfying swish on the countertop. This time when he took a sip, it burned in a different way, and he closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingertips, exhaling heavily. It would help, he told himself. It would help more than telling Arthur he was heading off, spending five minutes rifling through his drawers, and walking to the nearest park to spend whatever cash he found on a handful of oxy and a hotel room.

At Arthur’s question his head shot up. He regretted it instantly; pain burst in front of his eyelids, like the worst hangover in the world. The kitchen lights were too bright and everything felt too sharp, Arthur’s face most of all; too beautiful, really, the lines too clean. But his words were perfect; they cut through the haze, and made Eames laugh. That was all Arthur: seeking knowledge above all things. He was probably seeking to fill in a blank, a empty category in his little filing cabinet in his mind named Eames: Weaknesses; subsection - substances. God, but it felt good to be direct. It felt good to be honest. Eames finished the tea, though it was too warm, really, to drink so fast, and pulled the heavy glass bottle back towards himself, giving up on all pretence. His eyebrow flickered as he uncapped it and poured another helping into the bottom of his cup. “I’ll pay you back,” he said, meaning: for the Bourbon. For the bed. For the surgery and the vomiting and whatever the hell else you had to do to keep me alive these past few days. But mostly for the Bourbon.

After the second measure, Eames felt steadier. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then wiped his forehead and grimaced at the cold sweat there. “Honestly, it never hit me that way. Not as an addiction, anyway. I’d been on other shit before dreamsharing even came into it - it was everywhere in Musayyib, you know, and the shit they gave me for this,” he gestured to his thigh, where the bullet had been dug out in more sanitary conditions than Arthur’s house, but still left a deep depression in the skin like a thumb print, “was something else.” He whistled long and slow. “Mate. I’d give up - fuck, what, six years of sobriety? - for some of that stuff right this second.” He waved the bottle of Bourbon, as if to say, this is enough, and his expression turned serious again. “No, the somnacin was - well, you know what it was like at the start, and I bet you guys had better stuff over here than we did. When it was at its most addictive, right at the beginning, when they had Cobb building cellars and handcuffs, we weren’t having pleasant dreams; all any of us wanted was to wake up again. So I was lucky, in that sense.” When he grinned it came back in a rush of memory, the taste of blood etched around his teeth. “Now? Well.” He poured again, then capped the bottle, a deliberate gesture, enough. The pain was fading; the light hurt his eyes less. “I don’t use it enough to know. This was my first time under since…”

Eames stopped himself. Somehow, even here, saying the word inception felt too risky. Instead he tried to roll his injured shoulder back to loosen the tendons and stifled a groan, but the whiskey had relaxed him enough that he was able to move it, little by little. He imagined his joints grinding together and giving off sparks. The word came unbidden, no space between thinking and speaking: “thanks.”

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CHANEIL KULAR by Barnaby Boulton

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Chaneil Kular in 'Accused' (2023), Directed by Philip Barantini

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immobiliter​:

@imbricare sent a meme: “You realize if we played by the rules right now we’d be in Quidditch practice?“ / harry for jackson

       “ Yeah, yeah, I know this is way more important, it’s just… ” What if they got caught? Jackson didn’t like Umbridge as much as the next student, didn’t agree with the way she was running the school in Dumbledore’s absence and agreed with Harry that, if the Defence against the Dark Arts curriculum was just gonna be reading dull textbooks until the end of term, then they had to take matters into their own hands to learn how to defend themselves. But all the sneaking around, planting ruses and conspiring with the rest of the Gryffindor quidditch team to cover up their tracks as they gathered in small groups in the Room of Requirement… it was fucking stressful. “ What happens when she finds out? It’ll all come crashing down around us one of these days, Harry. These things always do. ”

These things always do. Yeah, Harry wanted to say, tell me about it. 

After almost getting burnt, cursed, poisoned and tortured to death over the span of four years of school (not counting the times he almost got his head bitten off by an unwitting teacher-turned-werewolf, his soul sucked out by a Dementor, his bones broken by a demented Bludger, half the school going full mob mentality on him because he could speak to snakes… what did he forget?) … maybe that was why he could only shrug off Jackson’s concerns with a sideways grin. “Look, mate, we’ve got a bulletproof plan – if you know what I mean,” he added that, realising that he couldn’t remember if Jackson would have any knowledge of the Muggle world and its idioms. “It’s solid is what I mean. Hermione devised the thing with the coins herself and you know she’s brilliant when it comes to this stuff. And fi we get caught,” his smile suddenly turned grim, “at least we’ll have got more Defence Against the Dark Arts practice in a few weeks than we’ve had all year.” 

@imbricare sent a meme: “You realize if we played by the rules right now we’d be in Quidditch practice?" / harry for jackson

       “ Yeah, yeah, I know this is way more important, it's just... ” What if they got caught? Jackson didn't like Umbridge as much as the next student, didn't agree with the way she was running the school in Dumbledore's absence and agreed with Harry that, if the Defence against the Dark Arts curriculum was just gonna be reading dull textbooks until the end of term, then they had to take matters into their own hands to learn how to defend themselves. But all the sneaking around, planting ruses and conspiring with the rest of the Gryffindor quidditch team to cover up their tracks as they gathered in small groups in the Room of Requirement... it was fucking stressful. “ What happens when she finds out? It'll all come crashing down around us one of these days, Harry. These things always do. ”

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immobiliter​:

You would say that. There was a long pause, Camina shaking her head a little as she averted her gaze. “ You say that even after what happen to Filip? ”

“Especially after what happened to Filip,” and the fact that she smiled said more than a thousand words – the fact that she could smile and mean it, no strings attached, no tip-of-the-iceberg curtain call behind which she could bury a thousand and one concerns that eddied round her brain, nonstop. “He did a brave thing, severing his ties with his father. A brave and scary thing, and I couldn’t be prouder of him for it.”

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immobiliter​:

The right way. Flint’s lip curled, the phrase echoing loudly in his skull. Were he not disgusted by such a sequence of words to begin with, he might have repeated it again back to Aubrey in that slightly dismayed, slightly outraged way that he had stared him down a moment ago over the word treason. By specifying right, he had enforced a binary opposite: that the route that Flint had gone down, the choices he had made in the face of the circumstances he himself — nobody else — had been presented with, were wrong.

Who was to define what was right and what was wrong? The laws enacted by Parliament and Whitehall, designed to enforce order and maintain its subjects under the rigid shackles that made civilisation thrive? The Admiralty, who had so overwhelmingly decided that James’ actions were shameful on account of the damage that they could have done, publicly, to the institution? God himself, on whose moral authority men were so quick to judge one another? Flint would not deny that many of his actions since leaving London for the West Indies could be deemed violent, and callous, and cruel, but he was a monster made from a far more insidious beast, one ignorant of its own monstrous behaviours and habits.

There had been no right, no proper way to respond to what had happened to Thomas. There had only been his way, which was to seek to tear the structures that turned a blind eye to that injustice — in many cases, had actively approved of it — down for good.

Aubrey spoke again, but this time spoke an instruction. Flint’s expression scarcely changed, but perhaps respect for him as a fellow naval officer, or even affection on account of their once friendship, stayed Flint from another outburst. He stared at his companion, stony-faced and with an anger still simmering away beneath the surface, but after a long moment of contemplating the other man’s request — the risk he was taking from simply talking to him — he obliged. 

Flint glanced behind him at the table and chairs and sat down, but he didn’t say a word. He remained there silently, waiting. For a reason to let his trigger-temper explode again. To let the man speak, if nothing else. Reluctant though he might have been to admit it, Flint was curious to hear what Aubrey had to say.

“Good man,” murmured Jack in a low voice, but soon realised the conundrum he now found himself in: James McGraw before him in the flesh, at last, and all of a sudden the tidings he had come to bring felt heavier than they had all the journey. And so, rather than pull up a chair himself, Jack turned from the desk to the window, allowing himself to be lured momentarily away.

The ambience of Nassau came together in a cacophony of voices, music, laughter – the song of the streets, a questionable harmony if ever there was one. Like all things deep-rooted and spontaneous alike, there was method to the madness, Jack supposed; and though he doubted very much to hear any patriotic songs here, in the heart of unruly New Providence Island. His own crew had taken a liking to singing a song or two while they were at work on deck; and a hundred years from now, there would be nary a crew among the Royal Navy that wouldn’t turn a capstan to the sound of Spanish Ladies. Nassau was raucous, yes, but the voices that carried to the upstairs window behind which two British naval officers – one former, one current – convened … they were not so different from the voices Jack had left behind on the Sophie, anchored in the waters off Eleuthera to the north. The former British base in the West Indies cut a sorry sight these days, lying as abandoned as it had for the past decades, ever since its settlers started trickling back to Bermuda, and took all of their trade with them. It had left a hole to fill that Nassau devoured only too willingly, reigning supreme with an absolute trade monopoly in the Bahamas. 

Down in the streets, someone played a fiddle. It turned Jack’s mind to last night’s concert, a sorry and tension-filled affair. Stephen, bless his soul, had made no secret of the fact that he heartily disapproved of Jack’s plan to slip ashore with the man everyone now knew as Captain Flint. Not even Killick, his devil of a steward, had thrown that much of a tantrum, but Jack supposed such was Stephen’s prerogative … how ironic, then, that it was also Stephen who had inspired Jack’s plan in the first place. 

And it was Stephen he had in mind when he turned back around to face Flint. Only he could not think of him as Flint, not even here, not even now – perhaps especially not now, with what he was about to say.

“I shan’t spin you a long yarn, I don’t have the patience for it any more than you, I reckon. You will remember that I sail with Dr Maturin; he has an acquaintance working at Bedlam. It was recently brought to my attention that certain rumours about a suicide … might not be as well-founded as initially believed.” 

He wasn’t a man to beat about the bush; but neither was he a man to storm blindly into a battle. At least not when he had left his sea legs on board his ship.

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Muse vs Mun

tagged: @anakhronus (ty!)

tagging: @swordoaths (éomer or tauriel!!), @immobiliter (i wanna see camina or varric plz), @eamesfm, @batteredoptimist, @gentlejack

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camina drummer saying 'i love you'