the original series of star trek is absolutely my favorite thing bc every episode is like:
-kirk manhandles a penis shaped rock prop for a very long time
-spock dances flamenco
-sulu fences down the hallway shirtless
-episode plot is kirk v massive sentient lump
-kirk tries to explain spock's ears as a childhood accident where he got his head caught in a mechanical rice picker
-on an unrelated note, spock starts wearing a beanie
-redshirts get turned into like. cubes of salt
-uhura defeats a giant green hand by hotwiring the entire comms console
-spock and kirk hold hands
-scotty stops chekov from starting a bar fight with klingons only to immediately start one himself bc the love of his life (the enterprise) gets insulted
-mccoy's fantasies involve meeting characters from alice in wonderland, including a giant anthropomorphic rabbit
-spock's alien sex drive episode
-kirk gets bodyswapped
-gladiator fight episode (1)
-gladiator fight episode (2)
-gladiator fight episode (3)
AND YET, every episode is ALSO like:
-war cannot be reduced to numbers from an outside perspective, because that makes it easier to stomach without change; the horror that is war must be acknowledged in order to make room for peace
-more types of life can be extant than we can conceive, and just because they are different forms of life doesn't make them incapable of prospering
-love cannot be programmed or controlled, and discriminatory hatred is a tool only for death and pain
-cultures that are different than our own are valuable and can be vibrantly rich with history, and judging them before we try to understand and empathize is not only reductive but contemptible
-happiness is something that we have to allow ourselves, and actively seek out, because it can't come to us without work and acknowledgement of our own state of being
-genocide can never be justified, and certainly not even to supposedly save the people that are more "valuable" by any given metric over those who are not, because all lives have worth
anyway the balance of absurdity and meaningfulness gives me life, and we haven't even gotten started on the whale movie lmao
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"If you're in a time loop, blink twice," Scott says, sitting on the steps outside of Bertha's plaza.
"What?" Cleo says.
"I mean, I'm not stupid," Scott says. "When a witch of time is looking at me like I'm a dead man or something, clearly they know something I don't. I've read books."
"That's not how that works. Well, I mean, sometimes that's how that works," Cleo says, and they shake their head twice, trying to shake the cobwebs out of it. "What do you mean, looking at you like you're a dead man?"
Scott shrugs. "I mean, you were looking at me like... well, not someone you were getting curses from, is what I'm saying. Like how I think I look when..." He fidgets uncomfortably for a moment. Cleo grimaces. Alright, so they looked like the unstable necromancer when he's thinking about the thing that made him unstable. That's... probably bad news.
"Sort of like how your magic makes you all... you know. Emo," Cleo starts.
"Wow," Scott says.
"A side-effect of time magic is deja vu."
"You're not talking me out of 'I died in the time loop', for the record," Scott says.
"Not exactly? It's more like... See, time magic isn't just about, you know, reversing time. Really, I can't do that all that often. The universe likes symmetry. Time magic is about... making that symmetry happen, really. A lot of my spells, the big ones? They're pulling things over that happened in another life. Another universe. And even if it's not one I remember living, I still lived it, because I'm the Time Witch, so I'm all of them, sort of."
As they speak, they play with their abacus. Purple bursts of magic flicker and fade around it. The shadows are long this time of day (or maybe that's just Scott's general moody aura), and it makes the color stand out.
"So you're... what, remembering things that didn't happen?" Scott asks.
"Sort of?" Cleo says, shrugging. "They did happen. Just only kind of to me."
"Huh," Scott says.
They sit there for a while. It starts raining. Cleo would stop the rain - they normally do - but they're wearing their hat, and it would require getting up, and they had just helped deal with the Storm Witch, so they don't feel like burning bridges at the moment. They can get wet for a few minutes.
Scott turns to Cleo, rain dripping across his face.
"So why did you look at me like you loved me?" Scott says.
Cleo feels their heart in their throat. They look back at Scott, wide-eyed.
"What?" they say.
"Why did you - you know, like you loved me and lost me? Like that," Scott says.
"If I knew, that wouldn't be deja vu," Cleo says, after a moment. "It's not from this life. No time loop. Promise."
Scott shrugs. "I'll hold you to that. Will you do your rain thing, by the way? Getting all damp isn't good for my complexion."
"Making your makeup run?"
"Hey, I'll have you know these eyebags are all natural."
Cleo lifts up her wand. Sparks flicker across from the abacus to her hand, but she doesn't need the number from it anyway. She casts the spell to make the sun come out, and as the beams fall on her arms, it's warm, and she feels strangely safe. She doesn't look back at Scott, though. Neither of them say anything more.
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