sapphicjackal

[sapphicjackal]

I have no morals. Death to the baddies, you won't be missed, and you will be smited post-haste when I get my hands on you

ill always find it amusing when american fiction wants to be moralistic about not killing the bad guy but the author doesnt actually have a more humane way of resolving the conflict so they instead take the infinitely more progressive solution of "indefinite imprisonment"

[sapphicjackal]

Fic where Su Xiyan lives but she's like, a huge asshole about it.

Tianlang Jun still gets stuck under the mountain, see, and Su Xiyan's been thoroughly betrayed by her own master, and seemingly not just him but also all the other major sects too. They all sided against her and against her lover based on prejudice. The fact that they were tricked likely wouldn't be known to her, from the outside it would just look as though they all readily dogpiled on at the first opportunity to take down a heavenly demon, even though he never did anything wrong.

Plus her own reputation has been ground to dust, going from the respected head disciple of the second greatest sect to being slandered as a honeypot who seduced a demon emperor in order to bring him down. She was used to destroy the man she loves, she almost died trying to keep her baby, her cultivation's probably taken a massive hit and she has no chance of getting to that mountain and digging her lover out from under it. Even if she could, he believes she betrayed him, so what kind of reception could she hope for?

Not that this will stop her from trying to dig him out anyway, but it's not like she can just snap her fingers and get him out. There's a whole mountain on him, and she's on the run with an infant.

So she decides she's going to make this everyone's problem as much as she can.

For a couple of years she lays low, just trying to rebuild her cultivation and look after the baby. If she's being honest, she's not great at it. She loves her son but maternal instincts don't really kick in, he's kind of a shriveled ball of misery and mess, and she doesn't really see the appeal. It gets better as he starts to get bigger and more of a personality asserts itself, and she can start treating him more like a small human than a wailing parasite that's latched onto her tit.

She would still hire someone else to look after him at the first possible opportunity, but she's paranoid about some aspect of his seal slipping and giving them away. With no body ever recovered, Huan Hua Palace is still looking for her. So she's stuck with childcare and she hates every minute of it and spends most of her time changing diapers just seething about dropping her old shifu into a mountain of shit and watching him suffocate.

Once Binghe is big enough to walk, and Su Xiyan is well enough to fight, they make for the borderlands. Su Xiyan starts teaching her son the earliest forms of cultivation he can learn, but his demon heritage is still sealed and right now he's too weak and small to risk unsealing it. So she focuses on herself, on rebuilding her own strength, turning to demonic methods and forbidden techniques (why not, when one has already been tarred and feathered and was never particularly precious about righteousness to begin with?) and hunting other cultivators just as often as demonic beasts.

Time passes and Su Xiyan begins to build a reputation even worse than Wu Yanzi's. A deadly rogue cultivator known only by some epithet or other who kills even powerful disciples of mighty sects. She experiments with what it would take to destroy a mountain, how much force, and what could provide it. Sacrificial arrays that feed off of the energy of cultivators or demons. Rituals and artifacts that demand high prices. Ways to summon demons or open gateways for them to possess others. She even considers using her son -- his blood is heavenly demon blood, his body is the closest thing she has to a suitable vessel for Tianlang Jun.

It would probably work, is the thing.

As the thought turns around her mind and she washes the blood from her hands, she decides that she's got to send her son away, actually. He's too weak and burdensome (and the fact she'd even consider using him such a way means that not even she is fully safe for him to be around any longer, not with the kinds of things she's doing, not with the kind of creature she's becoming). Now that he's big enough to survive on his own, she can ditch him somewhere to level up and bring him back once he's got enough strength to actually make himself useful.

So she sends him off, tells him not to come back until he's strong, ignores the tears and the hands gripping her robes until she finally has to wrench them away and strand the boy in a city far enough from her hunting grounds that he can't easily get back on his own.

Of course, he does still try, but he's lost and doesn't know where he's going. A kindly washerwoman takes pity on him and takes him in. The now-named Luo Binghe (his mother only ever called him 'son') isn't sure what he's supposed to be doing, but he suspects it's not just keeping house with his new caretaker. However, at the ripe old age of five he doesn't really know what else to do, so he stays and gradually the memories of the cold-eyed woman he called mother start to fade, until he wonders how much of it was merely a dream.

When his second mother dies and encourages him to go become a cultivator, Binghe decides that sounds right, so he goes to the Cang Qiong entrance exams and gets taken in. There's something familiar about his new shizun. Not in his looks, really, but in the way he acts, how he snaps and sneers, how he seems to hate Binghe but also claims him. Luo Binghe finds himself utterly desperate for the man's approval, even though he can't completely explain why. But it feels like, if he could just get this person to love him, the world might make sense.

Shen Qingqiu doesn't love him, though, if anything he hates him, and that only seems to change at random after a qi deviation. Which at first drives Luo Binghe slightly mad trying to figure out what he did and guarantee he can keep it, but gradually his thoughts and feelings on his master start to shift as, it seems, the man becomes someone completely different.

Meanwhile Su Xiyan has built up enough strength and information that she has a plan to move a mountain using a legendary blade that can open portals. She's also gradually begun to infiltrate her old sect again, using dark techniques to turn some of her former shidimei into puppets. By the time the Immortal Alliance Conference comes around, she's built the underpinnings to take the entire sect out from under her old master, and the chaos of the conference provides the perfect opportunity.

Shen Yuan has no idea what he did to cause the Huan Hua Palace Master to get ripped apart by demons during the invasion, and he's even more confused by the woman who materializes during the final hour and does him the favor of throwing Luo Binghe into the Endless Abyss herself, saying something about needing him to fetch a sword for her before she'll welcome him back to her side.

[sapphicjackal]

On a moshang kick but there's just something extremely compelling about the idea of Mobei Jun spending years expecting Shang Qinghua to betray him, getting impatient waiting for the axe to drop, deliberately creating opportunities for Shang Qinghua to betray him, still no betrayal happens, until eventually it gets to the point where Shang Qinghua has like, the fantastical demon king equivalent of Mobei Jun's credit card numbers and a joint account and free access to his bedroom and food and a great big cabinet full of poison and his detailed schedule and the exact time when he'll be bathing naked with no weapons under the moonlight at the one time every five years when all ice demons temporarily lose their powers for a full night and etc etc. Mobei Jun is doing trust falls (even though he doesn't know it) but Shang Qinghua just keeps catching him.

Until the whole lack of explicit communication and cultural differences thing explodes, and even then the big betrayal that finally happens is that Shang Qinghua saves Mobei Jun's life but then LEAVES HIM, he GOES AWAY, he doesn't even push Mobei into his own metaphorical abyss he just goes "this isn't worth putting up with anymore" and forces Mobei Jun to confront the fact that in his determination to be reassured he actually failed to prove himself to Shang Qinghua in return, which reduces Mobei Jun to a shattered wreck struggling to figure out how to fix it.

[sapphicjackal]

leaving some wips here from a short rhaenicent angst im doing, wish me luck

[sapphicjackal]

[sapphicjackal]

The Kim's all have 1 braincell in common . . . They should really get rid of that braincell

[sapphicjackal]

*shen qingqiu's voice* it's not gay if i lay back and think of making binghe happy

[sapphicjackal]

SISYPHUS GETS A 9 TO 5

[spoilers for all of severance season 1. words by northernlion, brain worms by me]

[sapphicjackal]

brienne come get ur man

[sapphicjackal]

brienne come get ur man

[sapphicjackal]

I’m a fever in your chest

Pedestal written by @floodonthefloor. and inspired by the song “skin” by marika hackman

[sapphicjackal]

[sapphicjackal]

During the day Rhaenyra is wearing

the colors of House Targaryen. She must be strong she must be a dragon. There is no place for weakness or vulnerability.

But when Rhaenyra is alone/at night she wears blue, color of her mother's house. Is it when she feels connection to her mother? Or when she allows herself to be vulnerable and weak?

And Alicent? At her worst, it's blue, not green or fucking red. It's blue.

Connection to her youth before Viserys, and connection to her mother.

Which leads to this scene. Both wearing blue. Is it "Masks are off. At our most vulnerable, laid bare before each other. We're still the same girls who just longed to have our mothers by our sides. We're still the same girls who dreamed of better things before all of this happened. Just girls who wanted to be happy and free"? Or accidental?

[sapphicjackal]

deleted rhaenicent season 2 scene omg

[sapphicjackal]

what should have happened instead

[sapphicjackal]

chains

[sapphicjackal]

I dont think lbh ever really tried to kill lqg during the 5 years of corpse-zun...but i think it would be hilarious if, because liu qingge is an anomoly who was never meant to fight lbh, who admittedly isnt on binghe's level but hes still pidw's war god.....

Lbh just is incapable of killing lqg. Like some sort of video game glitch, like when you take an item out of its designated area when youre not supposed to and the game cant quite do what you want to, everytime binghe tries to kill lqg some sort of looney tunes-shit happens that save lqg last minute. Like the worlds game engine can let them fight, and Lqg will never be able to beat lbh in a fight, but everytime lbh tries to actually kill the man, he starts falling into xianxia manholes and xianxia anvils start falling a la the beam falling during the skinner incident