ink-splotch

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after a lifetime of hearing about aragorn but not reading the books or watching the movies, genuinely nothing could have prepared me for his actual introduction. the hobbits picked this man out of a dumpster. he is a textbook softspoken angst prince and he is covered in dirt and he probably smells so bad. he’s the coolest man alive and is so casual about it. his number one skill is Knowing Where They Are and his number two skill is Having A Horrible Destiny That Torments Him. tolkien got it in one i’m afraid aragorn son of arathorn you are the guy of all time

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i used to have nothing and then

"Clint,” she said. 

His grip was bruising at her wrist. Every pound of her dangled from that one connection-- her aching ribs, the old wound in her thigh, her comfy boots, Tony’s gadget, the braid she’d grown out for five years. It all hung there--all of her--in this chill alien wind, while Clint stared at her down the long taut line of his own outstretched arm. 

“Clint,” Natasha said. “You’ve got to let me go.” 

Every inch of her was cold. The planet’s gravity pulled every part of her downward. Her wrist, where Clint was clutching at her, bruising her, holding tight, his palm sweaty and strained-- it was the only warm place on her whole tired body. 

“Clint,” she said, and he let her go. 

-

Natalia Romanoff was born to a man named Ivan and his wife, Alena. She was seven pounds and six ounces of screaming red rage, hungry and cold, quickly swaddled. They loved her. 

They were hungry when the men came knocking at the door. They had hungry sons, hungry daughters, but they loved her. The men came with bread, with meat and firewood. The men promised Natalia would never be hungry, never cold. She would be a great service to the state.

Natasha did not know her father’s name until a dead man said it on a cliff on an alien world. She never knew her mother’s. 

-

Natasha didn't feel herself hit ground-- she just was, all of a sudden, standing. Shallow water lapped at her toes, glinting gold in the dim light. She could hear nothing but her own harsh breathing.

“Why are you here?” 

The voice echoed all around her. Natasha turned slowly, knees bent, hands open, but she still couldn't see anyone. 

“We need the soul stone,” she said slowly. “Is this a test? Is this part of the-- trial?” 

“Why?” The voice came from everywhere. Natasha moved one boot through the shallow water at her feet, watching the ripples spread. The horizonline was low and endless, the light strange and golden. Her thigh still hurt, an old wound, close to the bone. 

Cold water sank through her boots. She said, “To save our world.” 

“Why you?” 

“Because someone has to.” 

The voice considered her. Light glinted off the ripples of water. “All power comes at a cost,” it said finally. “But you know that, don’t you?” 

Natasha's hand closed on one of her knives, and the water swallowed her whole. 

-

Natasha Romanoff was born in a cold, SHIELD office, among grey walls and a weaponized lack of personality. The intake form asked for her name. The tip of her ballpoint hesitated on the paper. 

Natasha is the diminutive form of Natalia. She wasn’t sure why she wrote it down, but she did. 

-

When Natasha hit ground, she slammed to her knees on cement. 

“Fuck,” she said into the sudden silence. 

Moonlight slanted through the windows, which were high and narrow, too small and out of reach even for the dozen nimble girls sleeping cuffed to their beds around her. 

Natasha rose slowly to her feet. Her joints creaked. Her own sleeping face twisted, two feet from her. 

“A cost,” said the voice. 

Another girl was sitting up on her bunk, this one dark haired, dark eyed, thirteen. She had a trio of pimples on her forehead. “A cost,” she said again. “A life.” 

Natasha took a step to the left, moving out of range of both girls. They could reach much farther than a stranger might guess, but she wasn’t a stranger. “Lise,” she said. 

Lise reached under her pillow with her free hand. Natasha flinched back, but it wasn’t a knife. It was just a crust of old brown bread. Some of the girls had saved up their daily bread, day after day. They had traded it. They had taken it. They had given it away. Natasha had not. 

Natasha glanced at her own sleeping face again. This didn’t feel like time travel-- which was something she could say now, wasn't that fun.  “What is this, a test? A riddle?” 

Lise brightened. “You always were the best at tests, weren’t you? Or better than me, the day it mattered.” 

Natasha didn’t move. Moonlight dripped through the windows. Little girls breathed softly under thin covers. 

“Oh, I’m not angry,” Lise said. 

“You’re not Lise, either,” said Natasha. 

“I’m not angry,” Lise said. She broke off a bit of bread and reached out. “It takes a life. All power comes at a cost. All survival.” 

“You were angry,” said Natasha. 

“You don’t remember. They took so much of you-- years and thoughts and afternoons. You don’t remember that night, that test. The other girls had to tell you what happened.” 

“You were angry,” said Natasha. “I hope you were angry.” Lise looked back at her, drowning in moonlight, her hand outstretched. The pimples on her forehead were red and raised. Lila Barton had gotten her first pimple five years and six months ago, and sulkily reread the whole Chrestomanci series in protest of puberty. Natasha swallowed and said, “I hope you were furious.” 

Lise reached out. “For you,” she said. Natasha shook her head. She stepped back and the darkness grabbed her ankle and yanked her down. 

Read More (Ao3)

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Hello! I just wondering if I can translate your works. I had read your HarryPotrer fanfics ( boy with scar series) at Ao3 and I found it is so lovely and touched. I actually cried a bit 🥲 Since I loved your fic, I'd like to translate it into Korean (my mother language) and share my experiences with other people..!! So I am asking if it is OK that I translate some of your fics and post it on Korean website. Please feel free to let me know!

Absolutely! Please link to my fic or my blog from your translation, and thanks so much for taking the time and effort <3 I love translations

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Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

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pacific rim fucks severely for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that it opens with "the lizard aliens are unionizing so we built robots running on the power of love to fight them you got all that right" and before you have time to really process that concept bam gunshot body on the floor and the movie goes "now consider the vast power of grief in this setup" it never really stops considering

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225! C:

Oh you lucky duck, you get Second Star to the Left! A story about an astronaut on a distant planet, the comms director taking care of her, a little robot, and the continued horror of capitalism. It's so good, and it's also short and complete, go listen!

Send me a number between 1 and 307 and I will recommend an audio drama!

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so who’s obsessed with arcane y’all

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I keep thinking about all of the disabled activists and people before me who stranded themselves on the 4th floor of buildings for weeks and crawled up stairs and fought with airline staff and schools and doctors and refused to stop existing in the face of injustice and bigotry no matter how big and scary and hopeless it seemed. Every time I get angry and scared the protests that lead to the creation of the ADA pop up again and remind me that disabled people are so much fucking stronger than anyone has ever given us credit for, and I can't help but be proud of that. And I know not all disabled people feel like we should take pride in our disabilities and have flags or whatever, but I think not just living, but thriving, in spite of a world that wants us dead and gone, in the face of both illness and persecution, and how we've not only bought ourselves forward, but uplifted the disabled people around us, secured more equal futures for everyone who will come after, and truly changed the way so many abled people have seen us for the better is something to be damn fucking proud of.

We have always been here and we always will be, there will never be a world without disabled people because being disabled is not bad, it's a natural part of the human experience and yeah it sucks some times but even when it sucks we have fought to build beautiful, unique, happy lives with people, both like us and not, and that should be celebrated.

The first sign of human civilization is the healed femur. The body of the profoundly disabled person who would have needed help to even just eat being carefully laid to rest after decades of a full, happy life. The medicinal plants showing even before we were entirely human we were doing what we could to not just survive, but alleviate suffering while we're at it. Above everything, evolution selected not the baby who can walk and eat and be quiet, but the one that can ask for help.

Disabled people are not just angry cockroach motherfuckers who refuse to die, we are proof of humanity's HUMANITY. Proof that natural selection selected a species that takes care of each other. From healed femurs and medicinal plants to vaccines and IVs and insulin to now, we are driven to help one another, we are at our strongest when we don't leave our most vulnerable behind. And I am living proof of that. My mother is living proof of that. Every disabled and chronically and/or mentally ill person I know is living proof of that.

And I don't know about the rest of you, but will carry that shred of humanity's true nature inside me like it's my fucking soul. I am scared and angry and hurt, but I have a lifetime's experience being scared and angry, and I can shake off the kind of pain that would make Atlas crumble to dust like it's nothing but a stiff fucking breeze. Disabled people have always been here, turning fear and anger and pain into joy and beauty and connection, and I'm not going to let everyone who came before me down. I'm not going to give up. Not now, not ever.

It's okay if you're disabled and you've hit your limit, you're too scared and tired and hurt, I won't blame you. But I won't abandon you, either. I might not be able to right all of the wrongs in the world, but I'll be strong, I'll carry all of you with me, I will not give up.

As I've said before, society hates a cripple who won't die, so we must spite them and live anyway.

Please, live anyway. I know if anyone can, it's us.

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We have 30 days until the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) laws are rescinded. This is the 50-year bedrock of American conservation. Normally, these actions take years but the administration has provided 30 days for public comment gutting clean water and clean air. Drop what you’re doing, before you make any more calls or read any more social media posts, please populate the Federal Register with dissent.

A. Go to https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/25/2025-03014/removal-of-national-environmental-policy-act-implementing-regulations

B. Click on the green rectangle in the upper right corner ("SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT") .

C. Fill in your comment, and info at the bottom, and SUBMIT COMMENT.

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cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

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Listen you can’t give me an assignment to adapt text of some sort into an animatic and NOT expect me to make book fanart! Sorry to all for my crappy midnight voice acting

This is from chapter 2 page something near the end? (I’ve only got the ebook on me rn sorry) of @ink-splotch/E. Jade Lomax’s Beanstalk which is book one of the amazing (if slightly confusingly similar in name to a certain video game franchise) Leagues and Legends series. Which is GREAT and I hadn’t made any fan content for in WAY TOO LONG so this was like... healing to draw even if I did finish editing the morning of class

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Well I came out of the alliance trilogy with a mountain of headcannons and ships so here are the ships that stabbed me in the feelings the most  @ink-splotch why did you do this to my emotions? 

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Some modern au Sash, I headcannon them as nonbinary leaning into trans-masculine. Also they live in snap backs and are ridiculously fit

Sash is from @ink-splotch ’s Alliance Trilogy

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June fanbinding - Sneak

Only half a month over schedule but oh well! A bind of Sneak, book one of the Alliance Trilogy by @ink-splotch, using Secret Belgian binding pretty much purely because it amused me given the theme of the book about secrets and sneaking around.