💫 + deertaur because im never gonna forget about how cute he is
Send me 💫 + an AU and I'll reply with 5 head canons about my muse in that AU!
We believe in deertaur supremacy.
If you want an easy read on Dennis' mood, study his ears and tail. They're his biggest tells that he struggles to control. Flat features are usually tied into his more negative emotions like anger, stress, anxiety, and depression. Perks features fall in line with his excitement, happiness, and curiosity. Relaxed features are self-explanatory; contentedness, neutral feeling, boredom.
Yes, the antlers shed with every season. Yes, he's embarrassed when it happens.
Yes, he's kept fallen antlers before and used them as makeshift toys weapons. Just #BoyThings.
Despite having some trouble coordinating his legs, Dennis still try doing risky stunts with them. These stunts can range anywhere from simple long distance jumps, to climbing things, to crawling his way up the shelves at a store because he refuses to ask for help from a clerk, he can reach the item all on his own just fine if he stretches himself out just a lil bit further--
And yes, he's gotten his head stuck before by getting his antlers locked into something (tree branches, door frames). No, he will never, ever admit it.
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A response to this ask; taken from this prompt; anyone can feel free to send other numbers in at any time, I don’t care how long it’s been. (Just maybe add some context to your ask if it’s been like a month or more since I posted this, because otherwise I won’t know what to do with the random number in my inbox).
#28....as a lie.
*technically this one picks up after the end of this story if you want to read that first, although you don’t need to; it’s as much a self-contained snippet as any of the others, it just happens take place in a setting within the events of a specific fic, that’s all.
Gimli’s eyes were drawn ever and again to the elvish dancers, even as he was drawn several times into brief conversations as friends and acquaintances paused at the table he now shared with Gandalf to exchange a few words and toast their well-wishes together for Gondor’s king and queen. Gimli was glad of the toasts, at least, for they brought fresh mugs of cool ale, and the heat of so many cavorting bodies had raised the temperature of the hall to near-dwarven levels, despite the cool white stone and tall windows through which a summer’s breeze still wafted.
Legolas’s hair shone like a sunrise in the rich torchlight, and his eyes gleamed like starlight on pale clouds. Gimli was amazed that anyone could long look elsewhere, with the shine of him whirling there to draw the eye.
He was not amazed that the other elves twirling on the dance floor were drawn to him; of course they were. How could they help but be lured in, dull drab moths circling that golden glow? Long hands ran up and down Legolas’s lithe limbs and pressed against his slender waist, long fingers twined through the streaming locks of his unfettered hair and curled possessively around his braids—
The mug in Gimli’s hands gave a crack and shattered, soft metal collapsing in on itself in his grip. He stared at the mess in his hands, numbly grateful that he had at least drained it already and so there was no ale left to spill out across his lap, and then he hurriedly shoved it onto the table behind him. He could feel his cheeks burning hotter than any torch in the hall.
Gimli chanced a sideways glance at Gandalf, who was watching the dancers with every evidence of placid enjoyment on his old face. Had he seen? Had he heard? He said nothing, but that did not always mean anything with Gandalf. Perhaps Gimli should speak, should craft some excuse...
“Flimsy human metal,” he muttered, and glanced at the wizard again. Gandalf nodded absently, but did not otherwise react.
Gimli let out his breath in relief—and then a second later he nearly choked on it, as Legolas suddenly bounded out of the tumult to perch on the bench beside him. His eyes danced as merrily as any of the revelers and his smile beamed bright and clear upon his beardless face.
“Will you not dance with us, Gimli?” he asked. His voice was light with laughter and with joy and his thin chest heaved from his exertions. Gimli found his eyes drawn upwards to the bare lips above that smooth and hairless chin.
“What?” he said.
“Dance with us, Gimli!” Legolas repeated. “Come, you can teach us dwarven steps and I will show you the ways of elvish revelry up close.”
“No,” Gimli answered automatically, his heart stuttering in his throat. “No, I—I am quite comfortable here, thank you.”
“You do not seem comfortable,” Legolas observed, and Gimli felt his stomach drop like a stone. He could not stop himself from glancing behind him at the ruined mug, even though he knew the gesture was a dead give-away; if Legolas had not seen it before, he surely would now, with Gimli’s gaze to lead him to it like a map—or a swift arrow.
“I am perfectly fine,” Gimli insisted. “Gandalf and I are enjoying the dancing quite well from here, thank you.”
Legolas spared a glance at the unmoving wizard but his eyes soon fixed on Gimli once more. “You are bothered by something,” he said quietly. “I can tell. Will you not tell me what? Perhaps I can help.”
Gimli’s mind stuttered with the possibilities of the help that Legolas might offer, and he quickly shied away from the idea. “No!” he blurted. “No, I—as I said, I am fine. It is merely warm in here.”
Legolas laughed. “Warm!” he cried. “But you are a dwarf!”
“Aye, a dwarf,” said Gimli, “and one who is enjoying his ale from his comfortable seat, and has no need to go whirling about like some flighty elven dandelion!”
Legolas should have laughed; Gimli knew his friend well enough to know that much. He should have laughed, but he did not. Instead his pale eyes narrowed sharp and keen on Gimli’s face, and Gimli could feel himself blushing beneath that tight scrutiny.
“Does it bother you,” Legolas asked in a low voice, “to see me frolicking so with these other elves?”
“What?” Gimli exclaimed. His hands clenched convulsively, and he was glad that he had already broken his mug; had he still been holding it now, he would surely have turned the thing into a flattened disk of over-stressed and useless metal. “Bother me! Of course it does not!”
To prove it, Gimli made himself laugh and shake his head, as though Legolas had spoken some ridiculous jest. He even lifted the elf’s lean brown hand and kissed the smooth knuckles as more evidence of how thoroughly unbothered he was. “Go back to your dancing, Master Elf!” Gimli chortled. “I am doing quite well watching it from afar, thank you!”
Legolas stared at him for another moment, his smooth face unreadable . The tips of his ears were flushed dark red from all of his cavorting and his pale eyed looked very wide with no beard to frame them.
Then he shrugged, and said, “As you like, then!” and squeezed Gimli’s shoulder once before bounding away and throwing himself back into the whirl of the merry elvish dancers.
Gimli let out a shaky breath and flexed his hands a few times, getting the blood-flow back into them.
"Lying will do no good for either of you," Gandalf declared calmly. "And it is hardly fair to Legolas; he will take you at your word, whatever you tell him."
Gimli could feel his cheeks burning hotter, shame coming along to add its kindling to the blaze. He managed to force an unintelligible grumble of disagreement from his lips, but nothing more articulate than that; he felt as though he was already strangling on all the words he would not, could not, say.
"He will," Gandalf insisted. "The elvenking might be able to spot a lie from 300 leagues and skewer it as neatly as his son ever has an enemy with that bow of his, but Thranduil's people are another matter. Lies are not generally told in Mirkwood. It is not a place for dissembling, or oaths, or scheming. The Wood-elves are a simple, honest people. And you are Legolas's friend." Gandalf pulled his eyes away from the dancing and fixed his gaze on Gimli instead. His bushy brows were drawn very low atop them, making his eyes glint like embers in deep shadow. "If you tell him something, he will believe you, Gimli. And you will have none but yourself to blame for the results."
Without waiting for Gimli to muster either the courage or the wits for a response, Gandalf swept to his feet and strode off into the tumult of the party.
Gimli slumped low on his bench and stared miserably at the dancing elves.
Legolas was still so impossibly vibrant and noticeable against the duller backdrop of the others. Gimli's eyes fixed on him at once. He seemed to be moving now with even greater abandon than before, if such a thing were possible.
And if such a thing were not impossible, Gimli would almost have said that Legolas kept glancing back at the table where Gimli sat as well—but he was not, of course, and so Gimli put the thought from his mind.
He had more than enough to think of anyway, when a tall elf of Lórien slid up behind Legolas and snaked her arms across his narrow shoulders, leaning in low to murmur something into his finely-pointed ear.
Legolas laughed and turned to face her, their long lithe arms entwining as close as any dwarven lovers. They swayed and swirled together with the music, and the elf-woman’s hands slid up from Legolas’s shoulders to tangle in his braids. Legolas smiled up at her and said something that Gimli was too far away to hear, but it made her laugh. Then Legolas gave one of her dark braids a gentle tug, and Gimli realized that he was growling low in his throat as though facing down a horde of goblins.
He turned away blindly and reached for his mug, realized that it was both empty and broken, and turned back around just in time to see the elf-woman twirl away into someone else’s arms as another pair of hands took Legolas by his trim waist and plucked him out of the center of the tumult to pull him in close against their long lean body, and—
And it was Haldir, Mahal curse it. Gimli’s mouth went dry, his blood pounding in his ears like drumbeats as the March Warden leaned in close and lowered his mouth to Legolas’s ear, whispering something. He took one of Legolas’s braids in his hand and rubbed his thumb across the heavy golden strands, like a dwarf might test a metal for its quality. Haldir was hardly dancing; only swaying a little as he stared down at Legolas, who stood balanced before him on his toes like a bird paused on the edge of flight.
Gimli was on his feet before he realized it, about to start forward and—and what?
His hand was at his belt, which was empty of course; a wedding was no place for weapons. And why was he reaching for his axe, anyway? He sat back down on the bench with a heavy, hollow thump. What was he thinking? What was he doing?
He had had too much ale, clearly. It was the only explanation for his strange behavior tonight. His throat was dry, but he would not drink anymore tonight; he had drunk too much already, clearly, and it was clouding his thoughts. Making him think strange, impossible things. Making him dream things that—that were not, that could never...!
Legolas laughed and rose up onto his toes to press a light kiss to Haldir’s lips.
His head reeling, Gimli watched as the March Warden took Legolas by the hand and led him, smiling, towards the door. If Gimli thought that Legolas paused on the threshold and looked back, somehow finding Gimli’s eyes across the crowded room and glancing at him hesitatingly, questioningly, even hopefully—well, then that was just another sign that he had reached the night’s limit for ale; reached, and more than passed.
Gimli held himself very still, schooling his expression to a placid calmness that might have rivaled Gandalf’s, and then he forced a smile and a nod—just in case Legolas was really looking; just in case he could really see him.
A shadow seemed to flicker across those bright elvish eyes, as though one of the torches near the door was on the verge of guttering; although when Gimli looked at them, they both appeared to be burning tall and strong still.
When he looked back, there was only a faint fading flicker of golden locks flowing around the corner as Legolas vanished into the night and Haldir’s arms.
Gimli sat there for several minutes, staring into the empty darkness of the door. The noise of the wedding revels that had once filled the hall with such bright merriment seemed to have faded now, somehow; he heard it from a distance, like echoes from some far-off cave. Eventually he forced himself to rise, and murmur unintelligible farewells as he passed his friends, and trudge his way across the long white hall towards the other door.
He stumbled back to the rooms the Fellowship shared, alone.
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" - And he wasn't happy about finding someone else in the temple, but he was so certain that his little map meant he would be able to find the artifact before I could," said Scott to his audience. The regular meeting between rulers had concluded, and while some had already left for their respective empires, a few stayed to socialize. At some point the conversation turned to how some of them had coincidentally first met years before they held any power.
"He didn't know I could see it glowing through the walls," Scott continued. "Gave him quite the surprise when I walked out of the room with the statue in hand just as he got there."
"Gave me quite the surprise when you decked me, too," said Pix. "You laid me out and took off with it."
"Well, I wasn't about to risk you getting hold of it when I'd done all the work," said Scott smugly.
"Most embarrassing excavation of my career," sighed Pix. "Outwitted by a common thief."
"Excuse you," said Scott indignantly. "I'm not common. And what's an archaeologist anyway but a thief who writes things down."
Pix laughed. "I'm not a thief at all," he said. "I'm a collector, as you're so fond of calling it yourself."
"Yes, and 'collecting' is how you learned to pick locks," smirked Scott. "A skill you picked up for only the most noble of endeavors, I'm sure."
"You punched me in the face the first time we met too!" interjected Fwhip. "Am I detecting a pattern?"
"That was your own fault," Scott reminded him. "I so graciously let you stay at my camp and you tried to steal the ores I had on me."
"Such violence hidden behind such a pretty face!" said Sausage, and winked at Scott. "Now I kind of feel left out. I think we just kissed in a pond the first time we met."
"That was definitely not what happened," said Scott.
"Okay maybe not, but we did kiss on day one." Scott rolled his eyes, and Sausage grinned.
"Wait wait wait, I think I know how Scott picks his friends!" laughed Fwhip. "He just plays Kiss or Kill with everyone he meets, and if the answer is 'yes' to at least one of them then he keeps them!"
Scott let out a heavy sigh. "I really want to argue that point, but I think you might be right," he said. "Maybe not from the first meeting, but I've definitely either kissed or punched every single one of my allies at some point."
Oli let out a dramatic gasp. "I've never been struck by your fair hand nor kissed by your sweet lips!" he cried out, clutching his chest with one hand and sweeping the other out to the side. "Are we not friends, Scott? Have my affections for you been one-sided all this time?!"
Scott regarded the bard with a bemused expression. "Oli, what affections? We don't have an official alliance," he said. "And we've barely interacted outside of these meetings."
"Oh yeah, that's true," said Oli sheepishly. "Had a bit of 'fomo' for a second, don't mind me."
"It sounds silly, but Fwhip might actually be on to something," mused Joel. "With the fellas, anyway."
"The girls get a free pass," agreed Scott. "We're automatically friends unless they try to steal my man."
"But you don't have a man to steal," said Lizzie.
"That's twice you've pointed out I'm single. Friendship revoked," said Scott, and Lizzie cackled.
"There's only one ally that doesn't fit," said Sausage. "Unless you've already dumped Jimmy and I just didn't know it."
"No, we still have an alliance," said Scott.
"My theory still works with them anyway," said Fwhip to Sausage. "Scott and Jimmy have definitely - ow."
Scott sipped his drink and acted like he hadn't just kicked Fwhip under the table, but to his displeasure everyone's eyes were already on him. He'd never been more glad for Jimmy's habit of leaving almost as soon as meetings ended instead of sticking around to chat.
"The sheriff is an exception," he said, fixing Fwhip with a stare that he hoped conveyed his silent demand for the goblin's discretion. "Gunpowder and terracotta are valuable resources to have access to. And I feel sorry for him. He's trying his best, but you lot do nothing but give him a hard time despite claiming to be his friends."
"He fired me," said Fwhip. "I'm allowed a bit of a grudge before I forgive him."
"And he's so easy to tease," said Joel. "He's always getting in someone's face at the slightest provocation. He practically begs to be given a hard time!"
"That may be so," said Scott, "but you don't have to take it as far as you do sometimes. Give the poor man a break."
He reached for the last slice of cake, but Fwhip beat him to it and clambered up into the rafters. "Too slow!" he crowed. "Mine now."
"It's cute how you think I can't reach you up there," said Scott. "You have five seconds to give it back before I come after you."
Fwhip smirked, shoved the cake in his mouth, and made a rude gesture. "Come an' get me, circus boy," he said around his mouthful of dessert, and scrambled to the next beam as Scott jumped to his feet amid cheers of fight, fight, fight! from the others.
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💫 + dragon au
Send me 💫 + an AU and I'll reply with 5 head canons about my muse in that AU!
Another AU where Dennis has the magic hands that can heal most anything, but at the cost of making himself nearly comatose because healing anything exhausts the crap out of him. Doesn't stop him from ever trying though, even on a beast as huge as a dragon. An injury is an injury and if he can help it then nothing short of actual physical restraint will stop him.
On the flip side of the coin, Jaden's also still an adept with fire but has way less practice in the other magic arts. His career path went more towards hunting and leather tanning until Jasper got burnt down. Then, he shifted gears and joined up with a dragon hunting guild. Then, after finding Dennis and making some loose connections with the kid's draconic friends, he went back to regular hunting.
Jaden has the suit of armor his former guildmaster wore stashed away in his new cabin too, and he refuses to do anything with it because he'd much rather see it collect dust and rot away than ever see the light of day again. It's a mark of shame for him and all of humanity as far as he's concerned. Such things need to be lost to time.
Nowadays, Jaden uses his new found skills in dragon hunting to do some light dragon management. The beasts like to get nosy and sassy with him from time to time, so he's quick to whap their noses with a staff covered in irritating stimuli (think like pepper spray) just to annoy them. And teach them to mind their manners. But mostly annoy them.
Dennis is secretly filthy rich in this AU as well. Hot Spot had scrounged up a whole chest full of lost gold from the ocean early on in their friendship, then gave it to Dennis as a gift. After using some of the money to buy himself new clothes, Dennis just ran out of purpose for it. His caretaker didn't want to fix up her cabin because she was quite content with how things were and he had no further use it after that. When Jaden came back in his life, he did use the money to help with buying some land and materials for their own cabin but, again, Dennis ran out of reasons to spend it once the cabin was set up. So, he just figuratively sits on a pile of money, like dragons allegedly do.
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