#LIAM YOUR MIND

[towards-toramunda]

Hey do you ever think about Orym being a self proclaimed romantic who is “super lonely all the time, especially at night” and how guilty he feels about wanting romantic connection because he still loves his husband, and sees Will’s face every night before going to bed, but he’s starting to realize his deeper attraction to Ashton as something real and realize his pining for Dorian as something he shouldn’t ignore, but he was supposed to be with Will and he’s come to terms with Will dying, but sometimes it hurts so much, and yes he wants romantic connection and he’s so lonely, but he still hasn’t gotten revenge for Will’s death, and he may die soon so why pursue anything if he’s gonna be with Will again in the afterlife, BUT he may die soon and why hold off on admitting how he feels when he knows that despite losing Will the time they had was real good and he wouldn’t trade it for anything, and what if he doesn’t die what if it all turns out okay and maybe he now really has a reason to want and hope for not just *the* future, but HIS future because that future could include Dorian or Ashton and is it bad to not want to be with Will sooner or is it better to want to live and be with someone who cares for him because thats what Will would want and he wants romantic connection and he is so lonely all the time, especially at night, and what if I started chewing the drywall huh?

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

Hiii everyone, say, how do your Hawkes go go about sharing their estate? If they do it at all? Is everyone free to come and go or are they more private? Or do they only invite their LI to stay? I'm curious!! :)

[coella-cox]

F1 is on fire and Oscar Piastri is posting his steak 💀💀💀 He said “it isn’t me this time, y’all be easy” like WAT 😭

[angelabsol]

Some more dehumanized ONE doodles. Some Liam, Texty, and Charlotte and the stages of the infection

yes texty has little charms of what everyone’s object was, the group isnt amused

and yes Liam does prefer the backpack form, but I do imagine the first time he turned AFTER finally getting everyone home and starting to cope with existing again wasnt the best time

Dehumanized au by @ecto-hazard

[lov3w0rms]

Do you think ONE was some sort of dream?

[eatyourdamnpears]

Ruby: *literally erases her entire existence from his mind and severely edits several months of his life from of his memory as a result*

Liam: this is only a minor setback

[im-no-jedi]

it always amuses me seeing someone be both a fan of Crit Role and TBB cause I’m like

do

do they know

do they know about Sam and Liam

do they????

[lesbiradshaw]

people being equally if not more mad that theyre doing the nogitsune storyline without stiles as they are that they’re doing it without kira aka the character that mythology belongs to rather than the white boy everyone thought was extra hot that season & also being more angry about the fact liam has a new (female) love interest than they are about the fact that the actress is 17 when dsb is in his 20s and shes clearly a last minute standin for the other asian actress they couldn’t get due to continued mistreatment… very awkward like THIS is where your priorities lie?

[confringo-]

the theme for today’s screenshots is honestly “the first thing i look at in a man is his heart. the fact that his tits are in front of his heart is NOT MY FAULT.” 

[doodlebeeberry]

Losing and Finding

Bryce stared out at the stars above. Near to the city as they were, the vast majority were still blotted out, but the relative dark of the campgrounds revealed a small smattering of them, glittering clear. He knew—or, rather, he’d once heard—that all he really could see through the light pollution were satellites and planets he couldn’t name, but he didn’t care. Tired and sleepless, he felt as though he could touch them. In which Bryce, Liam, and Amelia go on a very important road trip

for objectober day 5- reunion! (and also for a request over on ao3)

my fun fact about this is that its the only thing ive ever written that ive made a playlist for. make of that what you will

(ao3 link in source)

They left early in the afternoon. Liam fidgeted with the radio dial, flipping past top 40s stations and several newscasts while Amelia drove along beside him.

    “I still don’t get why we’re driving there,” He said, pausing for a moment at the tail-end of what seemed like some 80s dad rock. 

    “What else are we supposed to do,” Amelia asked, glancing between him and the road, “take the train?”

    “Yeah?” a trap beat started up and Liam frowned, flipping past it. “The train is way better”

    “But it takes way longer.”

    “So? At least you don’t have to stop for gas every twenty miles”

    “Are you accusing my car of having shit mileage?” Bryce butted in from the back seat, leaning in over the center console. He grasped his phone in his hand, halfway through entering directions.

    “I’m not saying that!” Liam defended, throwing his hands up, leaving the radio on a live sportscast, “I’m not! I'm just saying, having to worry about gas stations isn’t the best way to travel”

    “And counting train stops is? Or do you just like traveling around with a bunch of strangers?” Bryce countered, typing on his phone once more.

Something good must’ve happened in whatever game they were covering, given the whoops of ecstatic joy that suddenly came from the radio. Liam turned back to it, flipping to static.

    “At least it’s more efficient. Better for the environment.” He said, faux-defensive.

    “Whatever you say, man” Bryce replied offhand.

Relative silence lapsed between them, above the radio and vrring of the car down the road. It persisted for several seconds.

    “Your mileage is pretty bad, though,” Amelia said, not bothering to look at either of them. Bryce flicked her rim. 

    “Is it that one about laying..” Amelia snapped her fingers a few times, trying to think of the name, “Chasing Cars, I think? That one?”

Bryce’s car didn’t have an audio jack, let alone bluetooth. A bit of an old junker, alongside the radio, it boasted only a skip-happy cd player and a tape deck that had chewed up a few cassettes in its time. But that hadn’t stopped Liam from breaking out his phone and, armed with the tape to aux converter buried in the glove box, playing dj after the radio had failed him. 

    “I don’t know that one” Bryce said.

    Amelia glanced at him in the mirror, “Yes you do. It's the one they kept playing at the store the other week”

    “The 'just lay here' one? You mean that?”

    “Yeah, that! God, how many times in a row did they play that?”

    “Way too many,” Bryce cringed a bit at the thought, “ Way too many. But no, it’s not that.”

They’d spent a while going around in a circle, each of them picking a song for Liam to play, one after the other. At present, though, the cycle had gotten stuck on Bryce, fumbling for the name of the song currently stuck in his head that he hadn’t actually listened to since high school.

    “Does it sound like that, though?”

    “Kinda?” Bryce furrowed a brow in thought, “I think it's named after some sort of flower?”

    “Oh! Hey There Delilah!” Liam chimed in.

    “No, not that either,” Bryce paused, briefly, then, turning to Liam, “how’d you get that from flowers?”

    “Cause a delilah is a flower.” 

    “What? No, it’s just a name”

    “No, Liam’s right, I think it’s a flower, too” 

    Bryce stared at Amelia and Liam like they were spouting gibberish. “What are you two talking about?”

    “It’s true!” Amelia defended, “Look it up! Liam, look it up”

Bryce peeked around Liam’s shoulder at his phone, the browser already pulled up. Upon typing in ‘delilah’, Liam pointed to the suggested searches.

    “See? ‘Delilah flower’, its the third result”

    “That doesn’t make you right, though” Bryce replied, clicking the search and watching it load, slowly. Several pictures of pink and yellow flowers popped up on the screen.

    “The delilah flower is a type of dahlia,” Liam read, “and is a member of the,” he squinted a bit at the word, “Asteraceae family, alongside daisies and chrysanthemums. They often symbolize kindness and steadfastness—see? It's a flower!”

They’d been sitting in traffic for a while now. Well over half an hour, at least. Apparently, according to the traffic report Liam had pulled up some twenty minutes ago, there had been an accident somewhere just ahead of them. A messy one, by the sound of it.

    “I spy with my little eye, something that is…” Liam scanned the lines of cars stretching down the highway ahead of them, “Purple”

    “Purple?”

    “Yep. Bright purple.”

Bryce hummed, studying their surroundings. Purple wasn’t exactly a common colour on the highway. Still, he spotted a few speckles of it in the median to their left.

    “Those flowers,” Bryce said, pointing. Liam glanced at them.

    “Pretty! But no.” 

He sputtered a bit. “What do you mean, no? They’re the only purple things around here!”

    “No they’re not,” Liam said, grinning slightly at his frustration, “You’ve just gotta look closer”

Music swirled around them as he searched, Amelia humming along, tapping the steering wheel. He turned to her after a minute.

    “Help me out, here, will you?”

    “Nope,” she said, almost, sing-songy, “you got yourself into this, you—”

    “You don’t know either, do you.”

    “..no, I don’t.”

Bryce rolled his eyes, glaring out at the horizon. It was then that he spotted it: a splash of colour sticking out ahead of them.

    “So? Admit defeat?” Liam asked. 

    “Oh my god,” Bryce replied. He all but shot forward to point it out, “That car ”

How he’d missed it before, Bryce didn’t know. It stuck out like a sore thumb: bright, almost neon purple, with what could only be described as a gaudy, yellow-striped fin sticking proudly out of the roof. Liam cackled.

    “What is that ?” Amelia cried upon spotting it.

    “That’s it!", Liam said between giggles, “You got it!”

Bryce continued to stare at it. He wouldn’t consider himself, or any of them, for that matter, an authority on good taste, not by a longshot. Their furniture clashed, their mugs were tacky—just about nothing back home in their apartment matched with anything else. But good god,

    “That’s awful,” he said, balking, “what the hell?”

An hour later, traffic finally began to let up. They’d fallen into a bit of silence by that point, letting the music alone fill the space as they passed by the reminisce of the accident. Pointedly, Bryce stared down at the directions on his phone, listing the miles and miles they still had left to travel, his chest just slightly tight. He didn’t look up until Liam choked, suddenly, somewhat past the reminisce, snorting at the garish car they were passing. Upon spotting the matching fins stuck to the side doors, all striped with different colours, the three of them nearly howled with laughter.

They’d pulled into a small rest stop just after the car chimed about being empty, a larger one boasting several little restaurants if the sign was to be believed. Bryce stood beside the car, nozzle in hand, listening to the fwish of gas rushing between the pump and the car. The total cost whizzed higher and higher, much faster than the slow climb of the gallons beneath it on the display. He grimaced. Liam’s train idea seemed to make a lot more sense, then. He took to watching the highway instead. A tractor-trailer roared past, followed shortly after by a u-haul van and a tiny bright orange fiat. He tried to squint across the distance, to make out the figures behind the wheels or in the passenger’s seats, but they all just blurred together, sticking out no more than a single leaf on the trees boarding the road, dense in early summer green.

He couldn’t remember the face of the driver. It’d been chaotic, and in the moment, he couldn’t care less. He wasn’t looking for them. He—

The nozzle stopped, clicking. He blinked out at the scenery for a moment. A red SUV breezed past, then a black sedan, then a convertible, and so on and on and on. He forced his thoughts back to the present. Sparing the screen a glance, he found the tank hadn’t quite reached full but returned the nozzle anyways. It would be enough for tonight.

    “Bryce!”

He turned, finding Amelia and Liam trotting out through the service center doors. A little black plastic bag hung off Liam’s arm, a sandwich in his hand. Bryce had just enough forewarning, when Liam threw it to him, to catch it. He turned it over, reading the label. Turkey and swiss.

    “They’re doing renovations in there, so the restaurants were closed,” Liam said on approach, “It was kinda slim pickings. I got some snacks too if you just want those instead” he began digging through the bag a bit. Bryce hadn’t actually told them he’d wanted anything, to his knowledge. He'd forgotten about eating almost entirely. Still, heart warm,

    “Nah, this is fine,” Bryce said, “Thanks.” He began unwrapping it carefully. Liam smiled gently, pulling out a snack cake for himself.

    “Of course, man.”

The three stood clustered together for several minutes, chatting and eating and stretching out after being cramped in the car for nearly five hours straight, drinking in the long shadows and the warm slant of the late afternoon sun. Amelia swallowed the last bit of her granola bar.

    “How much further are we going today?” She asked.

    Bryce hummed. “I think we're...an hour out from Pittsburgh? Something like that”

    “Alright, cool” She replied, crumpling up the wrapper. It glinted, silvery, almost dazzling in the light. Amelia tossed it into a nearby bin and stretched a bit, groaning slightly. “God, I don’t remember the last time I drove this long.”

    “I can take over, you know.” Bryce offered.

    “No need,” Liam butted in before she could answer, oozing with mock confidence, “I’ve got it!”

Amelia and Bryce looked at him flatly.

    “No,” they said, together.

    “Why not?” Liam whined.

    “Cause we wanna get there without wrecking the car first” Amelia replied, patting his shoulder when he frowned, “Sorry”

    Liam grumbled, bitelessly, “You crash one car four times—”

    “How do you still have a license?” Bryce asked, opening the driver’s side door.

    “No idea. Dumb luck, probably”

    “Really?” Amelia said, sliding into the back seat, “I just thought you bribed the DMV somehow”

Liam sputtered as she shut the door.

Bryce stared out at the stars above. Near to the city as they were, the vast majority were still blotted out, but the relative dark of the campgrounds revealed a small smattering of them, glittering clear. He knew—or, rather, he’d once heard—that all he really could see through the light pollution were satellites and planets he couldn’t name, but he didn’t care. Tired and sleepless, he felt as though he could touch them.

He wasn’t sure how, exactly, Amelia and Liam had convinced him to go camping on the way here instead of just getting a motel somewhere. Some mix of ‘it’ll be cheaper' and ‘it’ll be good weather for it’ and ‘we can borrow the neighbour’s tent, he’ll let us’ and ‘come on, it’ll be fun’, combined with the fact that those two were very, very good at convincing him to do stupid stuff, regardless of the fact that none of them had been camping in ages at least, if at all. Between the three of them, they could hardly even set up a tent, a fact proven when they’d been startled awake by it collapsing onto them while they slept about an hour ago. They hadn’t bothered setting it back up, though. Rather, they’d chucked it into the back of the car, opting to sleep under the sky instead, still pressed shoulder to shoulder as they had been in the just-to-small tent. But he hadn’t fallen back asleep yet. For nearly an hour, he stared up, listening to Liam and Amelia snore or mumble occasionally in their sleep. Frogs and crickets sang out, all around them. A warm night, just slightly windy. He counted the stars once, twice, thrice, until he lost count, over and over, trying to drown out the creep up his spine. Not unease, not anger, not quite numbness. He clenched clover-filled grass between his fingers.

Half a block away. So, so close to home—most accidents happen close to home. He wasn’t sure where he’d heard that. It sounded true. It felt true. Bad things always happen close to home. He heard it happen from the front door. Screeching. Crashing. Clattering. Screaming. A voice.

Bryce swallowed. He counted the stars again. He didn’t know any constellations but sought them out anyways.

He could hardly see her. A flash of torn blue. Warped plastic, forced into itself. Crunched metal. Glass shards glittered. The streetlights hid nothing. Above the haze of voices, he heard her gasping.

Fuck.

Her friend was shaking, scraped. The driver could hardly stand. Despite the early summer, a chill seized him.

Liam, rolling over, threw an arm out, smacking Bryce in the face. It forced a shaky breath from him, so suddenly wrenching him from his thoughts. Once he realized what’d happened, he shoved his arm off of him. Several moments later he rolled over himself, facing the trees, and shut his eyes.

    “Right, you’d think that,” Liam said, “but that’s not what he did”

Amelia picked a glazed munchkin from the box between them. They idly soaked up the morning slowly, clustered around a teeny table in a rest stop dunkin.

    “What else could he do?” She asked before popping it in her mouth.

    “Double down.”

    “Didn’t you just say he was completely wrong?” Bryce asked.

    "Oh, yeah, totally,” He sipped his tea, “The book said he was wrong, but he didn’t care. He just started railing on us about it”

    Amelia wiped her fingers on a napkin. “Why?”

    “Cause he didn’t wanna be wrong? I don’t know. But he spent, like, half an hour arguing with us. He even gave one of my classmates detention over it.”

    She raised a brow, “Really?”

    “M-hm. I don’t think she actually went, though.”

    “Wow,” Amelia paused a moment, then, “He sounds awful.”

    “Yeah, he sucked,” He leaned back as Bryce sipped his coffee, “He was probably the worst science teacher I ever had. Like, he would fail you if he didn’t like how you did your notes”

    Amelia hummed, perking up, “I had an english teacher like that. She’d make you rewrite your homework if she didn’t like your handwriting.” 

    “Must’ve been a bad class for you, then” Bryce quipped. 

    “You have no idea. I still have nightmares about it” She grimaced, chuckling a bit.

Wind whipped in through the open windows. It would, under any other circumstances, be hard to make out the music crackling through the speakers, but,

    “Mamaaa, life had just begun!” Liam crooned along from the backseat, horrifically off-key, “But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away!”

Bryce held back a laugh, “At least sing it on key, ”

    “No! That’s no fun, come on,”

    “Oh my god—”

    “Mamaa,” Amelia sang, a bit more subdued but just as pitchy, “oooh,” She glanced between the road, Bryce, and Liam. Liam brightened. Bryce all but buried his face in his hands. “Didn’t mean to make you cry,”

    Liam joined her, “If I'm not back again this time tomorrow,” he leaned over the center console. Side-by-side, they nearly shouted, “Carry on! Carry on, as if nothing really matters,”

    Bryce snickered, “I can’t go anywhere with you two,”

    “Come on, you love us,” Amelia grinned at him.

    “Maybe, when you can sing on key”

    She reached over blindly to nudge at him, “You’re mean!” before launching back into the song with Liam. Bryce watched them, smiling slightly. He’d heard them both sing before, when making dinner or sweeping or flipping through the mail, melodies under their breaths. They weren’t quite so off-key, normally. Though in those cases, he supposed, they weren’t singing around fits of giggles either. And, during one such bout of laughter, when he chimed, a bit flat, 

    “So you think you can stop me and spit in my eye?”

Liam threw an arm around his shoulder. Amelia beamed, and the three of them sang into the afternoon, ringing out along the seemingly endless highway for all the world to hear.

    “Would you rather…” Amelia tapped the steering wheel, thinking, “fight one bear-sized ant, or a hundred ant-sized bears?”

    “Ant-sized bears” Bryce replied, almost off-handedly.

    “Really?”

    “Yeah, you just step on 'em.”

    “But they have claws, they can attack you. Ants don’t have claws.”

Liam butted in, “What kind of ants do you mean, though? Some of them b—”

He was cut off by a loud thup-th-thump from the back of the car. They tensed, and when it continued,  jolting the car as it drove along, Bryce’s heart lurched, uneasy.

Upon pulling over, though, the issue became clear enough.

    “Shit,” Bryce grumbled. On full display before them, the rear right tire had been rendered flat as a pancake. Despite the simplicity of the issue, the slight unease in his chest stuck.

    “No big deal, we can just replace it,” Amelia said confidently, turning to him, “Where’s your spare?”

    “That is the spare,” he replied without looking up.

    “Ah.”

They stood there for several moments, staring at it as though it might, by some miracle, reinflate. Cars breezed by, uncaring, filling the silence. When it became clear the issue wasn’t going to fix itself, Liam ducked into the car for his phone.

“How long have you been driving on it?” she asked.

    “About a month”

    She turned to Bryce once more, “You know you’re not supposed to do that, right?”

    “I know”

    “So…why?”

Now, the honest answer was simply that Bryce hadn’t gotten around to changing it, but,

    He glanced at her, “Is there any answer that’ll keep you from chewing me out?”

    “Not really, no”

    “Then I don’t know” Bryce replied, looking back down at the tire. She sighed, only somewhat exasperated, luckily enough for him.

    “Before you lecture him,” Liam said, popping back out of the car, phone in hand, “can one of you give me the number for the tow truck first?”

It took the truck about an hour and a half to get there, and another thirty minutes to drop them off at a garage. It would be at least twenty minutes before the mechanics would even be free to see their car, and even then it would take another ten to actually change the tire. They’d been a bit thrown off schedule, was the point. But, unlike the wait for the truck, which the three of them spent baking in the sun and, in Bryce’s case, getting just mildly chastised by Amelia for being unsafe, the garage sat right next to a strip mall, which they took to wandering through at their leisure. Most of the storefronts were fairly uninteresting: a craft store boasting a 50% sale on yarn, a dance studio through the windows of which they could spot a handful of kids stumbling their way through ballet, a shuttered antique shop that was nearly empty, it seemed, beyond a half-open box of ceramics, and so on and on. They drifted into a few shops but hardly stayed long enough to peruse, much less buy anything. 

The unease in Bryce’s chest hadn’t left. Really, it’d been hovering over him all day, just enough to be noticeable, but the blow-out had far from soothed it. As he trotted around aimlessly, making idle chatter with Liam and Amelia, it seemed to curl its way down from his chest to the pit of his stomach, wriggling ever so slowly into a dreadful weight. He knew, despite the setbacks, that they’d likely still make it there by the end of the day. Stepping out of a pet shop, he tried to tune the realization out.

    “I think we should’ve gotten that kitten,” Liam said, walking alongside Amelia a step ahead of him.

    “I don’t think our landlord would let us have a pet,” Amelia replied, “he was pretty cute though”

They wandered up to a little flower shop, nearly bursting at the seams with blooms if the view through the window was any indication. Several bins of bouquets sat beside the door.

    “We could’ve hidden him. That’s what I did when I was little”

Bryce slowed to a stop beside one of the bins.

    “You had a cat?” Amelia asked.

    “For a little bit, yeah. A little grey one. I called her Dusty”

They stopped, then, no longer hearing his footsteps.

    “Bryce?” Amelia called back, turning. He didn’t reply, looking over the flowers, frowning slightly. Thinking. She came to his side, Liam not far behind.

“They’re pretty,” she said, after a moment. He hummed, half listening. Carefully, he picked up a bundle of bluebells and baby’s breaths, turning them over in his hands. The back half of the bouquets had wilted noticeably. 

“Do you wanna get some?” she asked, gently. Bryce glanced at her. “For..”

    “Yeah…” he said, “I think so?” he set them back in the bin just as gently as he’d grabbed them. His hand hovered slightly at the edge. “I don’t know” 

He was almost sheepish—an odd look on him, in both Amelia's and Liam’s eyes. She looked out over her choices for a moment before reaching for a bunch in the center of the bin.

    “Here,” Amelia held the bouquet out to him: a small assortment of iris and white chrysanthemums, “how about these?” He took them, vibrant and alive, in his hands.

    “...They’re nice” he replied, smiling just slightly at her. She smiled back. The three of them trotted inside the cramped store and up to the till. But, when Bryce began fumbling for his wallet, Amelia set a hand on his arm.

    “Don’t worry about it,” she said, wallet already in hand. He didn’t get the chance to reply before she stepped up to the counter to pay.

It wasn’t until they began making their way back to the garage, side-by-side with her, that he said, warmly,

    “Thanks, by the way”

And she grinned up at him once again, just as warm.

They did not, in fact, get there before the end of the day.

Bryce gripped the wheel a bit too tightly, staring out into the evening din at the red light. They’d left the music on autoplay, and it’d wandered its way from oldies to 00s alt to soft jazz, somehow, spilling from the speakers alongside Liam’s gentle snoring from the backseat. Glancing beside him at Amelia, she seemed on the brink of dozing off, too. He watched the light, taking deep breaths. The feeling in his gut had only gotten worse, bigger, threatening to crush him beneath the dread.

Caught between a rock and a hard place. Metal against her arms. Her chest. Her legs. Unyielding, sharp. Pinned like an insect. She could hardly squirm. She couldn’t speak. Just stare. 

They were just outside Hartford. Twenty minutes out. Less than that, even. He hadn’t seen these streets in years, but somehow he still knew the path like the back of his hand. He wished he didn’t. He wished he didn’t wish that. 

He met her eyes around the mess. Wide. Terrified. Desperate. Staring straight into him. 

He wished the light would change. He wished it wouldn’t. He watched it, palms clammy, half seeing around the lump in his throat.

Friends and neighbours scrambled around them. She only looked at him.

Fuck. He couldn’t do this.

He said something, numbly. Whispery. Mumbling. Drowned out in the panic.

He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t do this.

He said something to her. He couldn’t do anything else.

He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t do this. He had to turn around. He couldn’t do this. He—

    “Hey,” Amelia knocked him out of it, nudging him, “light’s green.”

He struggled to swallow. The buzz in his head lifted just enough that he could acknowledge the little green dot hanging in his sight. 

    “Right,” he said. Steeling himself, he pulled ahead. Nobody had been behind him, thankfully. Liam had stirred, at some point, leaning to look at him. The music had stopped. The quiet drenched him like cold water. He went a little faster, filling the space with the low vrr.

    “You alright?” Amelia asked eventually. He adjusted his grip on the wheel.

    “M-hm” he replied, flat, staring dead ahead. He didn’t notice the look she and Liam shared, much too focused on pressing onwards. He couldn’t do anything else.

Bryce stood at the threshold. A short stone wall stretched on either side of him, moss-speckled. Beyond the first few rows, the streetlamps did little to light the plots. Cricket song once more filled the air, now gone humid. His legs felt like jelly. Like bricks. Too heavy to move. Too light to control. The flowers had wilted just a bit on the car ride here. He clutched them in his left hand. Amelia held his right hand loosely. Liam stood at his other side. They hovered there for a minute, unmoving. Liam set a hand on his shoulder.

    “You don’t have to if you’re not ready,” he said, “it’s fine”

Bryce took a deep breath. Without a word, he stepped forward, pulling away from them, past the wall, and into the cemetery itself.

He’d only actually visited once, following her burial, early in the morning with his mother, just before they’d stopped talking completely. Even still, he knew exactly where he was going, moving on autopilot past rows and rows of graves. A few had candles lit around them, while others were decorated with flowers or pictures or the occasional odd trinket. Others still were laid barren, unloved. Moss and weathering crept up the headstones, so much so on some that their names became no more than unreadable impressions on the granite. He turned right. It was almost hard to breathe. The grass had grown in long, lit mainly by the little lights from Liam and Amelia’s phones. Hardly any of these graves were decorated, though none were yet overgrown. It seemed to take ages, like the row grew longer with each step. Eventually, though, he stopped, one grave over from the edge. It, too, was undecorated, a few leaves having gathered on the headstone. After a moment’s deliberation, he reached out and brushed them off with forced-steady fingers. 

Stella Hansen, it read. Dead exactly six years to the day. He set the flowers down and stepped back, hanging there just above her grave like a ghost. The dread was gone, somewhat. The weight remained, but it morphed into obtuse shapes, the names of which escaped him, moving senselessly through him. He remembered, last time he was here, how his mother had spoken: a curt, one-sided conversation, her shoulders stiff. He felt, now, that he should say something too. Some greeting, at least. Some talk about life. The scrips were there, in his head, for meetings with estranged family and friends he hadn’t seen since high school and any number of contexts he could try to slot his words into, but they refused to take form. He opened his mouth, and his throat went numb, language morphing and dying on his tongue. 

The world seemed small, impossibly so. Bryce stood in a bubble, him and her and the sounds of night, where life and death seemed to blur until he was back at the accident, in the radio room, her eyes meeting his across the distance. Like she’d be able to hear him, somehow. 

He stayed there until the numbness and weight grew too much and he stepped away, breaking back into reality. Turning, he walked off without saying a word, Amelia and Liam trailing behind him.

They sat on the hood of the car, shoulder to shoulder, parked in the near empty lot beside a worn-out epic burger, parking lines faded away and overrun with cracks. Yellow dandelions and little white clover blooms climbed up and spilled out across the pavement in clusters, soaking up the orange-y glow of streetlights in place of the sleeping sun. 

    “So I spent a few days feeding her, and eventually she let me get close to her,” Liam said. Hesitantly at first, both he and Amelia had taken to telling old stories to fill the dead air circulating around them. He gestured a bit with his cup, half-full with a sub-par chocolate milkshake. 

“But when I tried to pet her for the first time? She bit me! Pretty hard, actually. I’ve still got a mark on my thumb from it”

    “Is that what that is?” Amelia said, looking to the tiny scar on his hand.

    “M-hm. I still kept feeding her, though”

It was appreciated, honestly, but Bryce was only half listening to them, peering down into the depths of the vanilla shake slowly but surely numbing his palms. His thoughts all wandered in the same direction.

He had a lot of things he wanted to say. They rushed to the forefront now, well after they’d driven off and Stella was out of reach to hear them, like a delayed reaction.

He didn’t move an inch until they’d finally gotten her free. Hands hovered over her. Distant sirens wailed. She couldn’t hear him screaming her name. He’d scrambled to life several seconds too late.

He wanted to chew her out, so badly. He wanted to rant and rave at Stella for everything she had done, how she’d left and taken the fragile stability of his life with her. He wanted to apologize for never mourning her, never visiting, spending years drowning thoughts of her in idle stressors. He wanted to tell her everything— everything: how bad new action movies looked, how expensive gas was, how her favourite band released another album, how his new boss was kinder, how there was an ant colony outside their building, how the weeds in the grass had grown in lush. About moving and losing and finding and living and breaking and dying and living again. He wanted to ask her if she’d be there, when he finally, actually, kicked it. He wanted her to say that she would. He wanted, needed, her to understand the space she left behind, sometimes expansive and sometimes so very small. 

The cup crinkled, contorting in his grip. milkshake dribbled onto his fingers.

He wanted to remember her. He wanted to stop missing her.

    “Bryce?” Amelia set a hand on his arm delicately, “What’s wrong?”

    Liam leaned in closer at his other side. “Are you ok?”

He couldn’t see them clearly; he wasn’t sure when, but his vision had gone blurry, stinging. He opened his mouth to answer, but once more the words died on his tongue. What was he supposed to say? He hadn’t cried about it in years. But Liam took the cup carefully from his hands, and Amelia pressed a napkin firmly into his palms, and their voices were low, and warm, and palpable enough to pull the weight in his chest until his shoulders shook and his face was striped wet. They wrapped their arms around him tightly, murmuring, rubbing circles along his back. The first of few stars watched them overhead. Once more the world seemed to shrink. Bryce held them back just as tightly—tighter, even—letting Liam and Amelia fill in the gaps.

[newbiealliance]

i dont trust people who hate liam im not sorry

[flowercrownroman]

pov you find out your best friend has been sleeping with a really hot chick who also may or may not be fucking your girlfriend so you decide to haggle said on again off again girlfriend into having sex with you to settle the score but your sworn enemy is watching the entire thing through your girlfriends eyes and rating your moves on a scale of 1-10

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

Philia 2 for Neira and June

Storge 3 for Noya and Liam

Storge 5 for Kala

(I hope your weekend is going well! c:)

[ask game]

Weekend's been busy but not bad (sans the heat lol), hope yours went well too! :]

Philia 2: Does your OC find it easy to make friends? Or are there barriers to them doing so? If so then are these due to issues of inclination, communication, or something else entirely?

Neira: To her surprise, she's better at it than she thought! Jowan was practically Neira's only friend in the Circle for various reasons, and after being conscripted is the first time that she forges connections with such a wide array of people. She is a good listener and respects boundaries and is doing her best to learn, though she does have a sort of. quiet stubbornness when it comes to getting through to people. The part she struggles with is the "i am allowed to gain something in turn" part of friendship, but what are friends for if not for forcibly teaching her this

June: She's... really not great at it, and shies away from even trying for a long time because she is very aware of this fact. June has trouble emphasising with people if she can't directly relate to them in some way, and often isn't good at communicating what she needs, both things that, you know, are important for friendships. The thought of having to Learn how to do it, and worse, the possibility of being rejected regardless is fucking intimidating. So for her finding friends is basically done via vibe check; either they get on from the get-go, or not at all.

She gets better at it though! Throughout Inquisition and after she puts a lot of effort into actually forging and maintaining proper friendships, and hey, it works! :)

Storge 3: How far does parental approval (imagined or expressed) impact upon their current sense of self-worth? What might they sacrifice or attempt to achieve in order to ensure the approval of their parents?

Noya: Her parents managed to leave her with a pretty good sense of self-worth, all things considered. Noya used to look up to her mother a lot, so when people told her that she was just like her it made her proud, even if it wasn't always said as a compliment. It did sometimes leave her feeling like she couldn't live up to the image she'd built of Adaia in her head, and things got even more muddled after she died. Eventually it circled back around to giving her confidence though. Cyrion surely played a big part in this, his support did a lot for her self-image. As for approval.. it wasn't exactly for approval and more for the sake of making him happy, but she did agree to the wedding for Cyrion's sake.

Liam: Ahahahah. Well. Intentional or not, both his parents' but especially Leandra's way of raising the kids has strongly tied his sense of self-worth to his ability to care for his loved ones. He is already protective by nature, and living as a family with apostates naturally meant they had to be careful, so protecting the family and his siblings has always been a high priority. Leandra starting to put increased responsibility and blame on him after Malcom's passing obviously didn't help. What would he sacrifice for it? A Lot <3

Storge 5: Is your OC able to love without necessarily needing or expecting reciprocation or reward? Or are all their relationships to some extent transactional? Have they ever loved another person unconditionally, whether a child or another adult?

Kala: Ohh this is an interesting one. For a very long time she believed that everything in life is, in some way, transactional. Nothing is for free. However i would also say that she loved Rica unconditionally. She would have argued that it was still transactional; they were both instrumental to each others' survival, after all. And she would have said that the reason she did not expect anything from Rica in return was because she owed her anyway.

It takes her a long time after getting out of Orzammar to come to appreciate love for its own sake, but at the same time comes to the conclusion that love is never unconditional. She believes that love doesn't form without prior conditions and will not last without them either, even if they are indirect or subconscious.

[tweedstoat]

What do you think would be funnier, Rhaegar being super average looking and everyone thinking he was gorgeous because of a beautiful singing voice, or him being a terrible musician, but everyone being too distracted by his beautiful face to recognize it?

BOTH AKSKDJSLSJS I'm sorry the comedy of him being so hot he manages to distract people into not realize he's absolutely butchering the harp is priceless

[justascrollingghost]

Imagine if you went online one day and it’s trending on Twitter that you liked your pals photo on Instagram🥴😂

[captainkingsley]

episode 140 time .....