#This year has been a whole new experience

[miserycanary]

PERSISTS IN DELUSION ᡣ𐭩 previous ⤶

pairing: Simon 'Ghost' Riley & reader 

synopsis: you've left and what was left of Ghost (pt.2)

tags: I really don't know whether to tag this as fluff or angst 

The clock hanging by the wall ticks persistently like a bomb waiting to break Ghost’s delusion that you’ll come back. Ever since that night, he has spent his time like a literal ghost. Barely eating, barely moving, barely living without you. 

With each heavy step that he takes toward your shared bedroom—now bare—the pain in his chest drags him. “I’m home, baby..” he gruffs at the presence he tricked himself to think was still there. Dropping his things by the door, he moves so slowly and plops himself at the mattress that is now cold.. Like how it always was before you came into his life and warmed his whole body and soul. 

Ghost isn’t a crier. Never was. He took all the beatings from his father without letting a single tear fall. He didn’t shed shit when he had to force himself out of the grave he was put in alive. Not even when he left with no family and had to witness that moment with his own eyes. Ever since then, he has swore to heaven and earth that they will never take anything from him again. Depriving himself of anything that could tie him down emotionally.

Then suddenly there was you in all your glory.

Face painted similarly to his as you hand the kids celebrating Día de Muertos candies. Ghost never thought he’d take a step back in this country but as if tugged by fate, he found himself surrounded with the similar decorations that started his nightmare. Yet all he could zero out on was you. And that moment, Ghost knew that heaven and earth were snickering at him, mocking him for what he swore long before was now forgotten. 

As the crown dissipates, he takes all the scuffed pieces of his heart. “That’s a pretty flower,” he grumbles. He sees the way you flinch at the sudden person, turning around to see his towering self. Simon wasn’t stupid and he knew how intimidating he looked and expected you to be scared. His apology is already at the tip of his tongue. 

“Thank you! Do you want it?” He stills, blinking at the unexpected reaction. “O-oh, yeah, thank you.” You, on the other hand, expected the giant of a man to take the delicate flower with roughness, even expecting some petals to fall yet he took it so gently. Simon plucked the stem from your hand, placing it on the wide expanse of his palm and leaning lower to expect it. “Pretty..” he mutters, and you almost agreed if not for the way he said it with his eyes on you. 

Time passed and you guys were intertwined, lives and love exchanged throughout the two years he was with you. 

Ghost fully expected you to run when he first told you about himself, but you stayed. You tore down his walls with patience and care, showing empathy for what he has gone through but never pity and that made him fall deeper. Now Ghost would be lying if he said he has relationship experiences but he knew that if he doesn’t take this opportunity, then he’d lose you before he even had you (he lost you either way). 

But what could he do now? What’s done has been done. He could learn about a relationship all he wants but who matters the most to him is gone. With a new profound energy, he pulled himself up, opening the drawer beside him. He shuffles through the pile of things before pulling out what he was looking for. Sighing, he opens the box and stares at the engagement ring. 

Taking you for granted was not his intention. When you started to cook him meals, take care of the dishes, and everything else, he thought this was the norm. His duty was just to spoil his pretty girl. He never found anything wrong with the dread and exhaust that paints your face everyday because he was used to the heavy weight and assumed everyone was like that. You never complained, so he thought everything was fine. 

And he never wanted to snap back at you. He knew all about the sacrifice you did and gave for him, and how much you went through just to stay with him. He watches your eyes dim each time he tells you that you guys have to move once again or how broken you were when he found you at the hands of someone who wanted him dead. Loving him and being loved wasn’t easy but you did it with no complaints. 

Now he had to go out and be stupid, letting you slip from his fingers just because he couldn’t carry his weight for some measly housework. The very next day that you left the house, staying somewhere who knows where, he bought a dishwasher and hired a cleaner. Try as he might to do the housework just to please you, he knows that his time won’t allow it. So, he tried his best to work around it with the hopes that you’ll come back, but where were you? 

He has called your number multiple times after giving you enough space but no calls were returned. You were coming back to him, right? You won’t leave him, right?

You’ll still love him, right? You will. Ghost smiles softly to himself, kissing the ring while a shy tear slips. “You’ll look so pretty with this ring, darling…” he whispers to the presence that he tricked himself was still there.

꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱: this is so long overdue. Sorry for the person who requested this because it took me this long!! 📩

dividers by @cafekitsune

Please reblog!! Ask is open! 

check out my other works in the masterlist: ୭!

[kerosene-in-a-blender]

One thing about Orym saying that he can't put down the lens he sees the world with is that he's completely correct, he's always going to be viewing the moon plot and the conflict with the Ruby Vanguard from the perspective of "a guy whose husband and father were murdered by the Vanguard", but the same could be said about the rest of the party. They all have pre-existing experiences and attitudes that have shaped their perspective on things. Orym isn't uniquely biased in this sense.

The most obvious one is of course Imogen, as her long-absent mother is a Vanguard general. She heard Liliana's voice in her Ruidusborn nightmares telling her to run as long as she had those nightmares, and she came to associate that with her mother trying to protect her from whatever the red storm was. It resulted in Imogen giving a lot of grace to Liliana once she found out she was alive and with the Vanguard, a grace that more recent experiences are now making Imogen start to believe was misplaced, but a grace that was born over what she considered her mother's voice to be for years.

Fearne was raised in relative isolation in the Feywild by Nana Morri, and as result her approach to a lot of the events she's now embroiled in has an oddly naive slant to it. The whole would is new to her and she's approaching it like someone who is new to it; there's a lack of understanding of implications that she has that goes beyond her simply being fey. This is best seen in how she's grappling with the reveal that Sorrowlord Zathuda is her biological father. She's aware that Zathuda is terrible and that the circumstances that led up to her birth are dubious but there's also a large part of her that desires a connection with him as her parent and feels like they could have a relationship. She's naive to what exactly she is to him, and also influenced by having grown up longing for the parents that left her with Morri.

Ashton lost their parents and found themself blown halfway across the world after a cult ritual went wrong, and had a spectacularly shitty life that he often found himself begging the gods to fix without answer, and as a result he's very down on the idea of gods and even more down on the idea of letting a cult do whatever they want in order to achieve the perfect world that is just beyond reach by whatever means they must. Especially after the entire shard debacle in which Ashton learned that their parents were definitely wrong to do what they did and there were no good ends for the means that they engaged in he's fallen even harder onto the line of, as he said himself, "I hope her ends are fucking great because these means are just not forgivable."

Laudna's sole experience with anything resembling a higher power for much of her 50-odd-years of life has been Delilah Briarwood, the woman who had her horrifically murdered and is still rather explicitly using her as a means to some unknowable-to-Laudna end. This has both made her one of the members of Bells Hells most open to the idea of there being no gods (no more puppet masters) but also the most broadly sympathetic towards Liliana's view of the Ruidusborn (that they are creations of Predathos with no choice but to be slaves to his whims). Her ardent belief that her lift ended on the Sun Tree thirty years ago also means that she often refuses to advocate for herself or her own needs, resulting in moments where she openly wonders if it's Imogen's destiny to join the Vanguard, despite having herself been at one point brutally murdered by a Vanguard general.

FCG made it his mission in life to help people; that desire drove a lot of what he did up to and including his final act of sacrifice for the Hells. They saw the people struggling against the Vanguard and with the world that the Vanguard created and chose to do what they could to help them. Their desire to help even extended towards the gods, as one of the first things they asked of the Changbringer upon gaining the ability to cast Commune was, "Do you need help?". FCG was also a character driven by a desperate desire to find purpose and to understand the "why" of their own existence, a desire that ultimately drove them towards religion as a means of shaping the meaning of his life, and made him the most openly religious member of the group up to the moment of his death.

Chetney, while the most able to look beyond his own biases by virtue of being the oldest and most emotionally mature member of the party, still carries with him the perspective of having been someone who ultimately made little impact on the world up until, in his twilight years, random chance granted him the power to affect change. He gained lycanthrophy, he met other adventurers in the Hells, and got caught up in an end of the world plot and is finally making a true difference in the world. It's made him, arguably, the most enthusiastic adventurer in the party because he views that adventure itself as a gift, and as a way to create a legacy. The desire of legacy is also the reason he made the bargain that he did with Nana Morri; to secure a legacy as a famous toymaker that would persist after he is gone.

Orym's right that he's biased, but it's fallacious to assume that an unbiased perspective exists, because everyone in the story has their lens through which they view the world that they can't put down, not just Orym.

[our-lesboy-experience]

hiii!!! so uh, this is sorta about 'contradicting' (?) identities in general, but i only recently found out about, like, lesboys and gaygirls and all of that, but what is it exactly? like how does it work? or is that weird to ask? i'm trying figuring myself out but a lot of stuff i've seen doesn't exactly... explain it (or explain it well), and while i guess i do get why, it's just kinda hard to understand it myself for my own identity

also, probably a question you get a lot in a hating way, but isn't the definition of lesbian nonman loving nonman? so then how does lesboy work? like is it for people with more complicated gender identites, like fluctuating genders and bigender? just genuinly confused, my apologies...

sorry for not getting to this sooner- been busier lately and didn't have the time to collect everything I needed to respond!

About what it exactly means to be a lesboy or a gaygirl ('turigirl' is the more common term, 'turi' meaning turian, another word for gay attraction to men. so I'll be referring to it as that from now on), there isn't exactly....one right way to call yourself such. it really depends on the person, but I can give you a basic definition and a list of common reasons someone may call themselves such

im gonna put a read more because this ended up being super long so sorry

lesboy is a term for any lesbian who may have a connection to manhood and/or masculinity. turigirl is just the opposite of that, a gay person (mlm/nblm) who may have a connection to womanhood and/or femininity. common reasons I've seen are:

being multigender or genderfluid

being cusper/in between trans and cis gnc (in between trans man and cis gnc woman, in between trans woman and cis gnc man)

being a system who uses lesboy/turigirl as a collective identity or when identities blur together

a person who uses man/boy or woman/girl as a means of masculine or feminine gender expression but not actually identifying as such

being a trans man/ftm or a trans woman/mtf who still identifies as lesbian or gay for personal reasons

those are far from all the reasons, everyone has their own unique experiences, but the gist is these people may have some sort of connection to manhood/womanhood while still having a queer attraction. personally, I'm multigender, genderfluid, and transmasc. lesboy I find is a nice label to express being both my bigender self and being a lesbian, as it forces people to acknowledge both without separating the two. it's cute and makes me feel validated!

as for "nonman attracted to nonmen" definition of lesbian......it has its issues. it's received criticism all around from all sorts of lesbians in the community. this definition is very new - it emerged only in the recent years, and someone on twitter had date searched it and found it didn't even really exist before 2019. and having that as the one and only official definition that every lesbian has to abide by, when lesbian is a centuries old word with so much history behind it, is a bit ignorant. people who are multiple genders or ftm or bi being lesbian is not even remotely new, going back decades upon decades, and it never stopped existing too. It's a bit weird to have a whole new definition that doesn't include all sorts of lesbians that have been here for so long and just tell them they're not welcomed anymore, right?

that's not even close to the only issue there is with it. it's been disliked for centering lack of attraction to men, or defining lesbian in relation to men, rather than who we're actually attracted to. putting nonbinary people in a new binary of either being "men or nonmen," which not all feel comfortable putting themselves into. especially when considering a definition of gay being "nonwomen attracted to nonwomen," man-woman bigender people are simultaneously excluded from being both lesbian or gay. It inherently overlaps with mspec identity ("attraction to nonmen, which is more than one gender" and "any orientation that involves attraction to more than one gender" kinda obviously overlap), despite people insisting that a lesbian can never be mspec. people have found multiple loopholes in it, (which I can elaborate on if someone wants me to, for the sake of trying to make this as short as possible), and lastly, and term "nonman" (and nonwoman) were found to have existed before to describe the degendering of black people in society. this isn't the only source I've seen for this, but sadly I can't exactly find it (or find it without going back to that hellsite called twitter and I'm not doing that to myself)

oh and as the link points out, defining lesbian by these words also ends up excluding a lot of two-spirit people from ever identifying as lesbian, myself included. which is also really racist. I don't know how you're gonna end up excluding a whole cultural gender that's common for indigenous americans to describe themselves with and try to prove it somehow isn't racist, to be honest

and lastly, some surveys/polls have shown that the definition isn't the most widely accepted by lesbians as people make it out to be. there's this simple poll that someone posted asking how lesbians felt about the definition that received 1,529 responses, and 61.1% of voters said they disliked it. comments gave lots of reasons I've stated already. there was another survey put out that received 211 responses that for any lesbian who had a genderqueer or unique relationship with gender, and one of the questions asking opinions on the "nonmen loving nonmen" as a definition. the average among the group was slightly negative (average 2.838), and reported that the group who tended to feel the most positively about it didn't consider themselves to be trans, with the other positive leaning group considered themselves to be somewhat cis. the group that felt the most negatively sometimes considered themselves to be trans. and of the multigender participants, the average opinion was 2.255 (more negative than the overall average). When concluding, the original poster stated, "When divided by gender, the only groups to feel positive about this definition were "not trans" and "somewhat cis" participants. Multigender participants felt especially negative about this definition"

all of this shows that this definition isn't nearly the best for everyone who considers themselves a lesbian. I know it's been a way to include nonbinary people who are lesbian in it's definition, but I think it really misunderstands why nonbinary people are included in lesbianism in the first place, and just assumes that all nonbinary people aren't men and fails to recognize that multigender/genderfluid people are nonbinary too. and it's not like lesbian has to only have on definition- it can definitely have multiple and depend on each person's experience with it. if someone personally defines them being lesbian around being a nonman attracted to nonmen, and takes pride in not being attracted to men, that's totally fine. what becomes a problem is forcing all lesbians to define themselves like this and make it the standard, or else they're "not real lesbians." it is ahistorical and ignorant to require this or else you'll strip them of their lesbian status, and is really at the end of the day, lesbophobic. especially as a requirement that primarily exists in online spaces. im sure the lesbian who is not at all connected to these circles doesn't particularly care about strict requirements or whether someone is a "nonman" or not. in conclusion, it is not the best nor most accepted definition of lesbian, and deciding which lesbians are valid or not based solely on that definition is pretty exclusionary and ends up policing a lot of lesbians, myself included

[6thofapril1917]

don't wanna be alone anymore [ken lemmons x oc]

A/N: the first in what will (hopefully) be a series of maggie/ken drabbles and one-shots. this one is pretty stream of consciousness and shifts tense so i apologize if it's incomprehensible. in my defense uni has been kicking my ass lately (one more week of the semester left, thank GOD) ken lemmons x oc. word count: 1.3k. crossposted on ao3.

For Maggie Zielinski, romance is something that she watches other people get to experience. She’s long been resigned to the fact that it isn’t something she’s meant to experience herself.

She doesn’t know what it is about her. She certainly isn’t bad looking, she understands that much. Clear blue eyes, full lips, and an even fuller chest. Still, that had never stopped her from becoming the butt of all the boys’ jokes back in grade school.

And it’s not like she’s never had friends. No, Maggie’s always had loads of friends. She knows how to work a crowd, how to say the right things at the right time to set the whole room laughing. Even before she met Vee, Loretta, Mabel, and the rest of the ground crew, she’d had a whole gaggle of friends back home in Detroit. 

Her main circle was a raucous group of six—Ida and Annemarie, Nina, Victoria, Victoria’s brother Paul, and Ida’s cousin Vinny. They’d been friends since the very first day of junior high, maybe more out of the novelty of the experience than anything. For all that Detroit was a metropolis, its neighborhoods could be as insular as any backwater town. In Maggie’s world of newly-arrived immigrants and babcie who watched the streets like hawks, where everyone worked at the same auto plant and everyone knew everyone else’s business, it was nice to see some new faces.

Maggie loved her Detroit friends. She loved their laughs, their smiles, their inside jokes and their secrets. She tried her best to help them out when they needed it, to offer a shoulder to cry on or an ear to talk off. She gave her friends everything she could. It was just a shame that they never did the same for her.

As the years passed, Maggie found herself confronting a terrifying reality—that for all she was devoted to her friends, they would never love her as much as she loved them. 

Sure, things were fine when it was just two or three of them alone. Catching a matinee with Victoria, or going out to lunch with Ida and Annemarie—here, Maggie felt comfortable. Victoria would always riff on whatever movie they were seeing, making her dissolve into giggles. Ida and Annemarie would insist on paying for Maggie’s meal, and they’d stay in their booth for hours on end, just chatting the day away.

But when it was the six of them all together, Maggie couldn’t help but feel that something was off. That there were things that the other five were privy too that she wasn’t—and to which she maybe wasn’t meant to be. There’d be some new in-joke that nobody ever bothered to explain, some party that she hadn’t been invited to, some other get-together that they’d forgotten to tell her about. 

Well, two could play at that game.

When Maggie enlisted as a technician with the Army Air Force, she didn’t tell any of them what she had done.

Nina and Vinny, newly engaged, spotted her the day before she left for basic training. The image of the couple stopping dead in their tracks, eyes wide as they took in Maggie’s new uniform and fully-packed suitcase, filled with a determination that would carry her thousands of miles away from Poletown, was forever burned into her mind.

Maggie wasn’t sad that she’d be missing the wedding. It wasn’t like she was going to be chosen to be a bridesmaid. Money was still tight, after all. There was only enough in the budget to get dresses made for Annamarie and Victoria. Ida, of course, would be the maid of honor.

(She understands, Maggie says. No, Nina, really. It’s fine. She understands completely.)

(She cries herself to sleep into Agnes’ shoulder that night.)

When she meets the Mavens in basic training, she spends the first few months of their friendship waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

It’s not that she’s awkward around them; in fact, it’s exactly the opposite. The four of them get on like a house on fire. Loretta with her witty comebacks and shining black curls, Mabel with her dry wit and hands that always smell of chain grease, and Vee with her earnest modesty and the snapping lens of her Kodak 35. For all her faults, Maggie’s never had a problem charming people. It’s getting them to stay that’s the difficult part. 

Is she boring? She doesn’t think she’s boring. Especially not here in the army, where stories of home practically form a currency among the enlisted women and men. Besides, Maggie knows how to spin a yarn, to make even the most mundane story from a life spent in auto plants and dim garages seem like something out of an adventure magazine.

But that’s never enough, is it? It wasn’t enough to keep the people she thought were her friends, the people she loved more than life itself, from leaving her in the dust. It wasn’t enough to keep her from becoming a veritable untouchable among the boys in grade school, the kind of girl you would ask out to the pictures on a dare, only to leave her stranded at the ticket booth. Even the boys who considered her friends were just that—friends. Never anything more. While Ida and Victoria and Nina and Annamarie were busy with first kisses and sneaking out of bedroom windows late at night, Maggie sat in her room and watched them grow up without her.

There’s only so many rejections you can take before you start to think that romance, hell, even reciprocated platonic love, just isn’t something that you’re made for. Only so many missed engagements and plans made behind one’s back until you start to think that maybe there’s something, some reprehensible quality inherent to yourself, that pushed people away. 

So, she holds her breath and waits. Waits for the Mavens eventually grow tired of her. 

But they don’t.

Because it’s there, isn’t it? The love.

It’s in the filmstrips Vee develops late at night after their shifts, holed up in the makeshift darkroom she’s set up in an abandoned storage closet. It’s in the magazines Loretta always passes to her once she’s finished reading them, telling her to use it for the scrapbook, there’s some great stuff in there. It’s in the way Mabel taught her how to ride a bike way back during basic training, shocked that she had never learned, but oh so willing to help her try. Maggie can never forget the way Mabel had cheered when she finally got the hang of pedaling.

And then, of course, there’s Ken.

When she kisses him that night on the floor of Rosie’s Riveters, she burns with shame and tears, shed and unshed for her siblings and for Cleven and for Ken and for herself. She waits for him to recoil, to glare, to tell her not to do it again. At best, she waits for him to let her down easy. But he doesn’t.

That night he kisses her like she’s the only thing in the world that matters, and it just makes her want to cry harder, because she doesn’t deserve it. Her brother is dead, her sister is missing, Major Cleven is God knows where, and she completely lost it at Rosenthal, so what right does she have to be touched like this, to be held like this? None. None at all.

At the same time, she doesn’t have it in her to fight herself. The floor of the nose is cold, and Ken is so, so warm. The kind of warmth she wishes that she could crawl into and live inside of. East Anglia is chilly this time of year.

She shifts, opening her mouth to his, and for a moment wonders what sins she’s committed to have had this feeling denied to her for twenty-one years. Yet there’s no use wondering, is there?

Ken loves her. That much is clear.

She just has to be ready to accept it. And after two decades of loneliness, that’s easier said than done.

[usbkinitopet]

have you ever heard of olms? they’re very interesting creatures and even look a bit like axolotl’s!

they can live a lot longer than axolotl’s and surprisingly aren’t related to them. they are blind and are endangered. It has the longest lifespan of any amphibian, often living to over 70 in zoos, and with a predicted maximum age of over 100. Their reproductive cycle can change depending on their environment, they will lay eggs if it’s warmer and give birth to live young if it’s colder. Olms live in well-oxygenated underground waters with a typical, very stable temperature of 8–11 °C (46–52 °F), infrequently as warm as 14 °C (57 °F). There have also been observations in northeastern Italy where they swim to the surface in springs outside the caves, even in daylight, where they occasionally feed on earthworms. The black olm may occur in surface waters that are somewhat warmer. The olm swims by eel-like twisting of its body, assisted only slightly by its poorly developed legs. It is a predatory animal, feeding on small crustaceans (for example, Troglocaris shrimp, Niphargus, Asellus, and Synurella amphipods, and Oniscus asellus), snails (for example, Belgrandiella), and occasionally insects and insect larvae (for example, Trichoptera, Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Diptera). It does not chew its food, instead swallowing it whole. The olm is resistant to long-term starvation, an adaptation to its underground habitat. It can consume large amounts of food at once, and store nutrients as large deposits of lipids and glycogen in the liver. When food is scarce, it reduces its activity and metabolic rate, and can also reabsorb its own tissues in severe cases. Controlled experiments have shown that an olm can survive up to 10 years without food.

"That is so fascinating!!, I love learning about new sea creatures!!.. and new things!!.. Olms sound so fun to hang around with!.. do you think their favorite games would be sea chess!?.."

"Are you sure, they aren't just a long axolotl?.. they look like one to me!.."

"They're not related to me, Sam!.. but I'm sure it'd be silly if I had a cousin that was a Olm!!.." "I don't get it still.." "This is why I like teaching you about things!!!, you silly sea anemone!!"

(This was a fun ask to answer!, poor Sam.. he doesn't process info as well as Kinito!!.. :D) - Mod Soni

[msfcatlover]

I have been thinking so much about Jean-Paul Valley in my Reverse!Robins AU. Specifically, how he’d react to Steph’s return.

Because, listen: here is a man who had his autonomy stripped from him. Had his identity stripped from him. By the cult his father secretly raised him to serve, while letting Jean-Paul think he was having a normal childhood (and he did. That is one of the things I like about JPV as a character; in the original “Azrael: Fallen Angel” & “Knightfall” stories, he had a perfectly normal childhood… aside from the hypnotic brainwashing implanted while he slept.) This guy who was tricked into murdering several people, when he never, ever wanted that.

He gets saved by the Bats. And they help him. They really, genuinely help him, and sure, Duke & Damian are still teenagers (JPV’s like… 20-22 at this point in my mind,) but they’re also his anchors to reality. Damian, who also was raised to be a weapon by someone he should’ve been able to trust. Damian, who has experience with cults & rebuilding your identity after losing everything. Damian, who’s basically JPV’s “Brainwashed Cult Assassins Anonymous” sponsor. Duke, who also had a normal childhood. Duke, who knows Gotham like only a kid who was raised in its heart can. Duke, who agrees that this whole situation is certifiably fucked, but never hesitates to help Jean-Paul potentially recover a lost memory or find a new one, because it’s not just about who Jean-Paul was before the cult of St Dumas got their hands on him, it’s about remembering that he’s a living human being right now.

They take him in. They save him. They help him save himself. Bruce offers to pay for him to go back to college, for fuck’s sake!

They gave him his life back.

Jean-Paul can never, ever repay them. They tell him they don’t need it, but he wants to and he can’t. He feels so selfish to take & take without giving back, but how do you pay someone back for all that?

So his couch is always open to them, whenever they want. He’ll be their ally, their friend, their confessor, their confidant, their homework editor if need be. And when newer batkids join, well, Jean-Paul would’ve done his best anyway, but the fact he’s entrusted with Duke & Damian’s apprentices is just. It’s something else. And it’s hardly a hardship—the kids are a delight. Obnoxious, sure, and messy, and pushy, and constantly interrupting, and sometimes they break his stuff, and always they eat all his food, but Jean-Paul has more civilian friends now, and they tell him that’s just what kids are like.

What matters is that he loves them. He loves them because Duke & Damian love them, and then he loves them for being them.

And then. Stephanie. Dies. (Because Jean-Paul is broken, he’s a sinner, he can never make up for what he’s done, what he is, and he can never have nice things. Because Steph was sunshine & rage & stubbornness, because she joked that “We blondes have to stick together!” Because no one was there for her when it mattered most. This has to be punishment, right? He got too close, and Steph paid the price.) (His therapist says he’s being irrational again, but it doesn’t feel irrational. They say they need to adjust his medications. Jean-Paul knows better than to trust himself, but he can trust in Bruce to make sure the therapist is safe, so Jean-Paul doesn’t fight it. He’s not happy, but he doesn’t fight it. Because if he starts hallucinating again, he knows it won’t just be his father hovering over him, demanding to know why Azrael refused to avenge them. So yeah, sure, adjust the meds if you think it’s needed—he doesn’t miss Steph that badly. Yet.)

And then. Steph. Comes. Back.

She’s not dead. She’s not dead, but she’s different, she’s so very, very different. Damian says she fights like she spent time with the LoA, that same cult that raised Damian which he’s told Jean-Paul so much about over the years. Training like that takes time, but it’s been 6yrs, and she’s back, risen & gifted back to them! And she’s killing, but Jean-Paul’s killed before, and he’s been kidnapped by a cult before, and he thinks he knows how this goes. Death Mask isn’t Azrael, but he thinks it’s close enough.

And. And. And. He can save her. Because he knows what to do now, after nearly a decade in recovery. He can make up for his sins, he can bring her home again, and maybe, finally, he’ll have finally managed to pay them all back! He can give Steph her self back to make up for—(“You didn’t kill Stephanie,” his therapist reminds him, “you never laid a finger on her. Remember? You didn’t hurt her. It’s not your fault.” But it feels like it is, it feels like it, he can’t shake the idea that he did)—and he can give the Bats their sister back to make up for all that they’ve given him over all this time! A life for a life, and yes! This feels right!

He cooks up scenarios, imagines Steph reaching out in a moment of lucidity, or showing up injured on his doorstep guided by muscle memory, or running into her on the street or in a cafe and the look of alarm & recognition in her eyes as she—like he did, still does occasionally—knows that she knows him but can’t remember. He imagines the conversations they could have, all the different variations, and knows that it will take time, but patience is a virtue and Jean-Paul’s gotten rather good at it. He can be her anchor.

He just needs to figure out how to start.

(And meanwhile, Steph’s on the other side of Gotham like, “Why are my ears burning, and why do I feel like I’m staring down a tsunami-level wave of second-hand embarrassment right now?”)

[iventig]

“A new recruit? What do we would need a newbie for?”

“Soap, there's no use questioning it,the decision has been made months ago.Now quit bothering me.” Price is truly annoyed. Ever since he broke the news to his team,Soap has not stopped asking about why, when, how and for what reason this new teammate will arrive to the taskforce.

“Okay,Okay,I get it at least tell us where they’re from,I mean we need to work with them at the very best of our abilities and-“

“Johnny”

Finally, freedom and peace arrived in the menacing form of Lieutenant Simon “Ghost” Riley. Never, in his years of work had Price thought that peace and Ghost would occur in the same sentence within his thoughts. As he stood just a few meters away from his office,and the peaceful moments that he’d get by just getting through that door, Gaz came from behind.

“Captain,outside is -“

“what time is it Gaz?” Price asked in the most nice and calmest tone he could muster. Inside his chest panic rose, as he reminded himself of today's date. The recruit is coming today at exactly 16:15 pm

“Its 16:13, sir”

“Thanks Kyle, I need all of you to go. To your bunks,or the main hall,or somewhere else. Now.”

“Why?” again, Sergeant soap thought it was a good idea to talk again and so to break the last straw of his captain’s calmness.

“Ghost make sure this nuisance doesn’t get in my way with his stupid mouth today again, or he’ll gets to experience a whole week of outside recruitment training.Understood?”

With that Price turned on his heel and out of the sight of his teammates

“Fucking bloody muppets” he mutters as he made his way outside

“Great job, Soap.Now what?”

“I know we’re all thinking the same. So, Gaz , even if you don’t want to say it, Im going to say it.We’re going to follow him, obviously.”

Soap looked to his brothers, expecting a quick response,but none came.A minute of silence followed.

“Soap,no”

“C’mon L.t, I know you give more fucks about this as you let on,so if nobody’s going to stop me,I’ll be following my Captain.”

With that he to turned in a over dramatic way just as Price did three minutes ago, and got to follow his captain way outside.

“This godforsaken scottish bastard.A’right ill better follow him and get him back before the captain does, if anyone asks for me tell’em i’m dead or drunk. Thanks sergeant Garrick.”

And so Gaz now stood alone in front of his superiors office door , neither knowing how to react to the oder given or the situation that had just occurred, while he simply wanted to inform his captain of the helicopter sighted near the base. So, he decided, he will do as told by both his Lieutenant and Captain Price, staying right where he was and tell anyone who asked that the Captain is on his Period,Ghost is drunk and Sergeant McTavish turned feral.

A rather peaceful start for them, Garrick thought.

In the helicopter, a young man looked down at his wrist, the watch showing exactly 16:14.

In exactly one minute the helicopter should land,he’d get off his seat, take his duffel bag and backpack, depart the helicopter and meet the Task force 141, under command by the British army and the CIA. He would meet his new colleagues and captain, staying with them for a exactly three months before He would be seated in this exact position, back to his home country and comrades.in exactly 45 seconds he would be on time, he thought, in 46 he would be late.

He hated being late, he despised the thought of being where he was supposed to be even a millisecond late.He knew how much could change within a single minute or even second. His time out in the fields made it even mir obvious to him, how important it was to be accountable, accurate and quick. He dreaded the thought of being late, as he knew, the seconds one waste, may be the last of anothers life

How long are thirty seconds really?

He looked down at his watch, he laughed. It was a quick moment of bitter happiness filled by empty thoughts.

29…28….27

The Helicopter landing and the small ruckus of the helicopter as it touched the ground was the only thing he felt.

16:15 exactly on time, Second.

[girls-and-honey]

.

[thedevotionaltour]

marvel should hire me to write bc i'd pull the funniest thing on earth where i am wiping his catholic slate CLEAN and i would explcitily have him go ehhhh i've never really been religious me and my dad went some easters and christmases and attended a few services outside of that but that stopped by the time i was around 10 and my dad just kinda gave up on it because he didn't particularly want to go by that point either. and even then we hadn't gone every year for easter and christmas in that time frame. and then we never bring that shit up again in the story. he is only catholic in the sense he went a few times and it's the only church experience he knew and his dad probably grew up going to church more in his youth being dragged in by his family but he never felt particularly compelled to go back to it once he moved out on his own. catholic only in the fact that his family was irish catholic but his dad is a lapsed catholic who did not give a fuuuuuck

[zainmalik]

.

[nerdynikki94]

SUNNYBLR: So, I know that if I have a reputation for anything as of late, it would probably be for my Rob-Hating-Rants about how (imo), he's done a great disservice to Mac's identity as a gay man.

This has been misconstrued before, and recently was again with a reblog of one of said posts:

Despite acknowledging 1000 times over that I do understand the humor/satire of the show, often I'm accused of not 'getting the point'.

I get the point, trust me. I've been watching this show consistently for well over a decade (& I'm nearly 30; so, I've always been aware/analytical enough to realize that these characters are objectively awful - it's intentionally written that way). That is not where my issue with the writing lies.

Mac may be my baby, but he's an immensely flawed individual. There really is no shortage of terrible qualities that he possesses: he's arrogant, crass, delusional, ignorant, obnoxious, prejudiced, rude, stubborn, tactless, etc. (We all know there's many more fucked up characteristics to his personality) Still, once he came out, the majority of the focus for his flaws surround his sexuality. (Since S12...)

-Mac making his sexuality his entire personality.

-Mac never sincerely showing honest romantic/sexual attraction unless he is exhibiting the 'predatory gay' stereotypes.

-Mac becoming a spineless doormat who happily takes heaps of verbal (& sometimes physical) abuse regarding his sexuality.

-Mac constantly trying to reduce his sexuality by subscribing to constricting stereotypes.

-Mac's sexuality being a characteristic of his personality that he has to receive gang acceptance/approval for (i.e. Frank in MFHP & FVR).

-Mac struggling with reconciling his religion and his sexuality (even 5+ years later) and continuing to be made fun of for grappling w/ongoing internalized religious homophobia.

-Mac's sexuality being used as a constant punchline to countless jokes. (I.E. S16E1 - Running blowjob joke. Funny in context; still using as reference because no one has ever made fun of Dee for sucking dick - because she's a 'straight' woman.)

As I've said too many times before, I know these characters are fucked up and I love them for it. I've never expected them to become benevolent individuals or upstanding role models. They wouldn't be the gang if they were. However, I do and will continue to have a problem with Mac's sexuality being the focal point of his shortcomings or being the cause for any suffering he continues to withstand.

These characters are meant to be punished for their greed, abysmal self-centered behavior, and detestable qualities; so, why is Mac's character still being punished for being gay? The gang is ashamed of him for it, & as the show only centers on them - their dynamics, opinions, schemes - it consistently carries the tone that it is something Mac should also be ashamed of; as if he hadn’t already spent the first 40 years of his life in self-loathing because of it.

Mac is NOT a gay role model, obviously; but that doesn't mean his character should be settled into being a gay joke.

[goldensunset]

i need the full geeta lore actually

[prettysymbiosis]

really sorry to the few followers I gained from sunnyposting who are now being spammed with dnp content but they're my friends and I missed them AND it's their best era yet :)

[randomminty]

2022 art summary!!! Very boringly designed bc im Lazy lol (i did it based off when i made the art, so some of them dont match when i posted it um. Just ignore that)

And then just for fun, a lil comparison to the past 4 years

This year ive been feeling meh about my art and that im not improving as quickly as i want to, but seeing my art slowly changing over only 4 years is definitely helping with that! And apparently i drew a champion iris at least once evey year which is neat (rosa too but she got cropped out of 2021)

And also, heres 4 years worth of yellow bday art. i plan to keep this trend going until i forget

[curioscurio]

I don't know if I really can pick a favorite Undertale song since I love them all but every single boss theme goes so hard... Death by Glamour is definitely up there though. Also this post was supposed to end here but I started infodumping in the tags and reached tag limit AHAHAHA

[woundedheartwithin]

There’s an influx of city folk out here in the fuckin boonies where I live, and occasionally one of them will think it’s funny to rev their engines to try and scare my goats and/or horses. And just based on principle, I frown on that type of behavior and don’t appreciate it, because hey you’re harassing my animals, but I do concede that it is funny to see them run, because my goats have floppy ears and they fly around everywhere. The funniest part of all of this, tho, is that they’re inevitably disappointed because my goats and horses do not give a single shit about the cars/motorcycles/what have you or their silly little engines, so they just flat ignore them and keep grazing and I sit here on the porch laughing as they just putter off real slow in defeat

They do end up making my dogs start howling but I guess that’s just not as entertaining