#and then the flowers will depict something more visceral

[whateverisbeautiful]

♥️Reveling in Richonne - TOWL

#35: The Buildup (1.04)

gif cred: @perryabbott

This moment. This moment. This moment. Where to even begin? Let's just start by saying - hottest scene ever. 🔥❤️‍🔥🔥 When Richonne get back to that apartment there’s a whole stretch where they don’t do any talking...but yet they still have some very riveting communication 👌🏽...

They seriously tried to send me up into the afterlife with this whole moment, but it’s okay, I forgive them and thank them profusely. 😋

Y'all, I adore the way this pivotal, palpable, and incredible depiction of intimacy plays out. And the mind of Danai to turn both this buildup moment here and the love-making scene into something so deep and layered. Genius. 👏🏽👑

Rick and Michonne returning to this level of intimacy with each other for the first time in almost eight years was already going to make it pertinent to the plot and a purposeful development in the story - but for Danai to be of the mindset that she didn’t just want to stop at pertinent but instead communicate something profound and emotionally complex with Richonne's lovemaking moment. She deserves every flower for the thoughtfulness put into this. 💐

And TOWL in general was Andy and Danai getting to display their talent and chemistry to the max but from this moment on they broke the damn dial with the way they turned the volume all the way up on their talent and chemistry. 🙌🏽 🔉

source: @ririchonne

Genuinely, not even being hyperbolic, what was captured in the following passionate events feels out of this world and so of course when reveling over it I have to be...

This whole buildup moment in the apartment before Richonne heads to the bed is the hottest part for me. 🔥 The amount of tension and desire that they convey is crazy good. Richonne's hunger for each other is just visceral and it's like you can almost tangibly feel the way they're burning up for each other. ❤️‍🔥

So Rick and Michonne make it back to the apartment and we know adrenaline rushes really help set the mood for Richonne so the sexual tension in the air is thick immediately.

They’re both just breathing hard and then the temp controller chimes in to welcome them home again which I love. 😊 And this time they really are about to come home to each other in a sense.

gif cred: @nat111love

Like Michonne came really close to leaving but now that events have led them right back to each other in this apartment I feel like the thermostat is trying to get Richonne's attention like ‘hello, y’all are home to each other.’

Michonne is standing a bit ahead of Rick and looking around...and Rick ain’t looking anywhere but at her. Like homeboy is fixated. I feel like even if a dang meteor could be seen plummeting from that big window Rick wouldn’t peel his eyes off Michonne in this moment. 😋

I think after coming close to losing her several times in the last hour he’s a bit more aware of how much he needs to appreciate that she’s here with him. 

Michonne lifts up her sleeve a little because I think she can fully sense this hungry man behind her and what's on his mind (and her mind too.👌🏽)

gif cred: @nat111love

And the temp controller says, “Temperature control malfunction” and that’s probably because the temperature is already record levels of hot with Richonne's sexual tension permeating the air like this lol. 🥵

Rick slowly approaches her and Michonne slowly turns to him as they get up close and personal. The way Richonne can communicate without words, I feel like a whole lot gets said in their eye contact and kisses during this wordless sequence. 

gif cred: @nat111love

Also, I like how this scene parallels when Rick and Michonne were first in front of each other with the PRB earlier in this episode.

During that PRB moment, Rick was looking at Michonne like 'I know what we want to do but we can’t. ' And then now here when they've returned to the apartment he’s looking at her like 'I know what we want to do and we must.' They're starving and they can’t resist anymore.

Honestly, whenever Rick is within kissing distance from Michonne he looks like her presence consumes his mind and those inner magnets make it near impossible to not just lean in every time.

Also, I always get reflective of Richonne's overall journey and I just love how Rick and Michonne really went from this to this.

A love story for the ages. 🤩

So Rick looks down, mouth all open, and just again transfixed as he slowly reaches out his hand to touch her. One thing I love about this buildup moment is the slowness of everything. 😊 Like every movement takes its time.

And it makes sense that Rick is moving at a slower pace here because he’s trying to see if it’s okay to initiate all this after everything they just went through. But while the movement is slow, his heart looks like it's racing rapidly as he becomes pretty much intoxicated by her.

gif cred: @nat111love

...And Michonne can’t resist, y’all. 🤭 Like she knows she’s technically supposed to still be mad at Rick after the awful things he’s said but it quickly becomes clear that she misses him even more than she’s mad at him. 🥲

gif cred: @nat111love

And she misses all of him, including the parts she has yet to reunite with…but that’s soon about to change.

gif cred: @nat111love

Rick slowly puts his hand on her arm and she doesn’t pull away. And then Rick looks in her eyes like he hasn’t had a good glass of water in 1000 years and Michonne is the only woman that can quench him. Like the yearning in his look was really something.

gif cred: @nat111love

And then, y’all I thought it was laundry day the way our girl Michonne proceeds to fold. 😋 And of course, she folds. That's her baby and the love of her life and she hasn’t been able to be with him like this in years so...

Before Rick leans in for the first kiss, he’s already in the process of winning her over cuz she leans in a little first basically letting him know she does want this. It was giving magnets when she did that. 🧲👌🏽 

And her super subtle lean-in is all Rick needs to finally fully lean in and kiss her and I love Richonne’s slow single kisses. 😊 So far in TOWL they’ve been understandably ravenously making out and so this moment stands out for how much they let each kiss breathe a little. It’s so good.

gif cred: @nat111love

But also y’all, when I first watched this, knowing this is def building up to their first TOWL sex scene, I was sounding a lot like Nat. Cuz I was looking at Michonne like, “Sis...

I just wanted to be sure Michonne was going to be making love with her Rick and not the Sergeant Major who's been saying hurtful things and still hasn't asked anything about RJ.

Plus, I had a feeling Rick still had a little audacity left in his system and wasn’t yet going to agree to go home with her. (And that ended up being correct 🙃)…But look, it’s been a long time and so Michonne was like we’ll address all that later. 😅

gif cred: @kimwexlersponytail

So Rick kisses her once and then leans to the other side as Michonne puts her hand on his face, letting Rick know she doesn't want him to stop. They kiss a second time with a little more lingering on that kiss as things slowly but surely ramp up.

When they pull away Michonne looks at him like she maybe has 1% left in her that remembers she’s still supposed to be mad. The other 99% of her just longs for him.

gif cred: @msanonships

And then that 1% disappears into thin air during this next kiss and it’s my favorite part. 😊

Cuz Rick proves that it may have been some years but he still knows his wife and knows what gets her going because, while they don’t fully show it, you can tell that he definitely seems to have reached down to her derrière and that’ll do it for her, honey. 😋

gif cred: @fishalthor

Cuz when he does that and pulls her in closer to him, he has Michonne inhaling hard and fully leaning into that third hungry kiss. At that moment I was like...annnnd he got her. He got her and she ain’t mad no more. It worked like he knew it would. 😊

It’s also probably his first time even really being able to touch her like that since again those layers of clothing in previous eps were sort of a barrier.

There seems to be a consistent thing set up that her grabbing his hair gets him activated and as her husband, he definitely knows that grabbing her backside gets her activated...and him too lol. I think Michonne’s presence in general just gets Rick activated. Every part of her is a feast to him. 👌🏽

gif cred: @msanonships

And that last kiss just felt like they were about as ready to be intimate as they've ever been. After all that pulling each other closer in the previous kisses of this miniseries, this was the moment of them wanting to be as physically connected as possible and now they finally had the space to be.

Interestingly, they film a lot of this kissing moment where you mostly see Michonne’s response to Rick. I think that’s because she’s the one having to make the decision right now on whether she’ll let him in after everything he's said and done. And um I think her decision is clear.

gif cred: @msanonships

It's great how Rick is the one person who can make Michonne let go and get fully lost in the moment no matter what else is going on. And you know she has that same effect on Rick too. 👌🏽

I love how locked in they both get with that third kiss and how they turn things up a notch with it.

Those three kisses were communication. And, on top of them both communicating 'I need you and want you bad' in each kiss, the way I interpret the wordless conversation is that the first kiss was like Rick expressing, “I’m glad you’re okay and that you’re back” after the whole Michonne walking out and then later getting trapped by that chandelier stuff.

gif cred: @nat111love

Then that second kiss felt like Rick expressing, "I'm sorry" and Michonne receives that unspoken apology even tho when she looks at him there's a part of her that feels like there's still a lot for them to address and resolve.

gif cred: @lousolversons

And then y'all, to me Rick's little reach down with the third kiss was him saying, “Can I make it up to you?” And honey, Michonne's response said she'll definitely let him.

gif cred: @lousolversons

So then they really want to turn it up a notch when Rick proceeds to pick Michonne up. And clearly he’s done this before because Michonne is ready for it, and I love the way they just seamlessly transition into this. 😍

One thing I never questioned is if Rick would feel anxious about loving on Michonne with one hand. I knew that man would be like as long as I’m breathing that’s all I need to find a way.

gif cred: @nat111love

So Rick picks her up with ease and he’s basically just like 'alright you’re coming with me' and Michonne is like yes I am lol. And I also adore how even once he picks her up they immediately go right back to passionately kissing. The way these two fervidly desire each other is always 👩🏽‍🍳💋.

And I, of course, have to reflect on the overall journey once more because I just love that we went from Rick picking Michonne up on Day One of meeting each other as strangers, to now Rick picking Michonne up as husband and wife ready and eager to express their love in a way they haven't been able to in a long time.

gif cred: thewalkingdeadgifs/@msanonships

Seeing Rick and Michonne just get to operate fully in their husband and wife energy here was great to see. 👏🏽 They crave each other deeply and this scene captured that perfectly. ❤️‍🔥

The way their electrifying kisses slowly ramped up, it was clear that now that Rick and Michonne finally had the chance to reconnect in a way that they hadn't been able to with each other, nor allowed themselves to with anyone else, for several years, there was no way they were gonna just stop at these kisses here.

gif cred: @lousolversons

So y’all, this scene alone was already so hot it could break a temperature controller...but then the steamy sensual vibes continue. And as Richonne is finally intimate for the first time in years, the deep, passionate, and emotional moment is, in every way, a roller coaster ride. 🎢 😌👌🏽

[corinthianism]

DON'T THEY KNOW? (IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD) || BENEDICT BRIDGERTON (1)

pairing: benedict bridgerton/fem!reader additional tags: zombie apocalypse au, graphic depictions of gore/violence, fluff, angst, biology stuff i just made up so it's probs super inaccurate lol, slow burn, friends to lovers summary: ravaged by a relentless virus, the world as you knew it falls into ruin. survivors are hardened by the blood on their hands and the horrors in their minds. amidst the end of everything, benedict proves that there is still hope, and perhaps something more, for the two of you. word count: 6.4k

author's note: welcome to the first part of my new zombie au series with our boy benedict! for those who don't know, this is based entirely on the fic "i'll be seeing you" by @eleanor-bradstreet! thanks again to them for letting me vomit up this fic based on their incredible one <333 anyway, this chapter is mostly exposition, so most of the benedict/you romance will really start in the succeeding parts. hopefully, you find this chapter interesting enough to stick around! (+for readers of my dean winchester series, don't worry! chapter 3 will come out soon!)

masterlist | series masterlist | ao3 | next chapter

CHAPTER ONE: HERE, IN THE END

The world had been so loud before.

The droning noise of traffic. Of the intermingling of a thousand phone calls, nestled in between cheeks and shoulders. Of people talking at each other, screaming over each other, fighting to get the final say in even the tiniest little thing. Everything blurred together into one great ocean of sound. You could drown in it, especially in the big cities.

You were right in the middle of it all: a drifter. It took a while but eventually, that ocean of sound became your home. You struggled to recall what it was like before that. That too, was blurry now along with everything else from Before. All you had now were fading fragments of a dream to be someone. Anyone.

That was how you met him, just before the beginning of the end. You still weren’t convinced that Benedict Bridgerton wasn’t some kind of romance novel character come to life; a talented artist from a long line of English nobility, and the first friend you ever made in New York. It was like something out of a crappy Hallmark movie. He laughed at your reaction upon learning that his brother was an actual viscount and that Benedict himself technically should be referred to as “the Honourable Benedict Bridgerton”, but despite all the grandeur that came with his heritage, Benedict was still… Benedict. In time, he became just Ben. He’d paint while you ranted about your borderline dangerous work hours or how your parents were bugging you to settle down. In turn, he shared with you his frustrations as an artist trying to make it in the world, without his family name, and how at the same time he missed his mother’s cooking. Conversations with him were always lovely, like breathing in the air in the middle of a field of flowers after a decade of being locked inside a dark, stuffy room. He was just like you. Just trying to be someone.

But those conversations all seemed so far away now. If you had known then what would become of your life, of those dreams to be someone, maybe you would’ve just let yourself drown in that ocean of sound. 

It only took two weeks for the world to fall into ruin. Only fourteen days for everything to go up in flames. 

The virus was ruthless. The most efficient killer the likes of which no one had ever seen. A terrifying force of nature seemingly tailored for the extinction of humanity. You were right in the middle of it all. You saw it with your own eyes, a cluster of people beginning to form in Times Square. With New York being New York, you thought nothing of it. You walked away none the wiser.

Until you heard someone scream, a gut-wrenching, visceral scream, followed by a sound you would never forget. A sound you’d have to hear over and over again for the better part of the next ten years, though you didn’t know it yet at the time: teeth ripping flesh from bone and the primal snarls accompanying it that couldn’t have been anything except inhuman. Monstrous, even. It sent ripples into the great big ocean you called home, altering it so permanently just seconds before you even realized what was happening. 

Sound, quickly followed by sight. 

The people huddled on the outer edges of the crowd ran off in terror, revealing the gruesome remains of what used to be a person. Even that was something you barely registered at first, eyes too focused on the bloody mouths feasting on it and white, foggy eyes. One of those things stopped its chewing, head snapping up suddenly. It sniffed the air for a while, as if sensing your fear even from twenty feet away. Those white eyes were looking at you now. Staring you down. Seconds later, the corpse being eaten started writhing back to life, or a perverted version of it. Its jaw was skewed, perpetually stuck wide open as drool and blood ran down its chin. You weren’t someone then. If your body hadn’t gone into autopilot, legs taking you as far away as they could, you would’ve been one of them. That was the very first day of what would be the longest two weeks of your life. You remembered it well.

There was no time to think or breathe. Even when your chest hurt from overexerting yourself and your lungs screamed for a break, you ran. You ran as fast as you could, crashing into people, some of which were still unaware of the horrors spreading just a block away from them. In the corner of your eyes, you knew that there were others like you, scrambling to go home, to go anywhere but here. Cars stopped in the middle of the road, curiosity killing the cat as drivers left their vehicles to see what was going on, only to be met with the same sight you were: death. In only a few minutes, nearly a third of the people on the streets were running, too. 

A little girl cried in her father’s arms, a teddy bear left behind and forgotten on the cement road as they also tried to get away. The realization dawning on the faces of onlookers that they should be doing the same. 

You reached your apartment building, not really knowing what you would do next, just that you needed to get away. The hallways were empty. A part of you hoped Ben was far, far away from here. A more selfish part of you hoped otherwise.

Supplies. You needed supplies. Food, clothes, water. Emergency kit, tools, weapons. Weapons. You had no fucking idea what to do with any of this! Just yesterday, you held a steady, if not miserable, office job. Today, you had to survive against whatever-the-hell those things were and perhaps even other people. The weight of that sudden realization twisted your guts in a sickening way, enough to make you almost throw up.

Peeking through your blinds, there were already three or four ambulances rushing to the direction of Times Square.Those things were not here yet and still, you naively hoped that help would come and dispatch of them before it got out of control. 

You barely noticed the sweat that began to trickle down your forehead and back, hairs raising out of instinct. Your whole body was going into overdrive, hyper-aware of the fact that you were in danger. 

The rapid knocking on your door nearly frightened you to death, until you heard Ben’s desperate calls of your name. Out of breath and scared… much like you. You wondered if he had seen it, too. When you confirmed through the peephole that it was, in fact, him, you dragged him inside your apartment. Your hands were on his face as soon as he was inside, needing to know that he was here, he was with you, he was alive. It seemed he had the same need, icy blue eyes taking you in with such an intensity you’d only ever seen when he was painting. It was easy to feel small under his gaze.

“Are you alright?” he breathed heavily, larger hands covering your own. 

You could only nod, the words stuck in your throat, “Did you- did you see-”

“I saw them,” he said, his composure faltering for a split second. “I saw them.”

You could hear more sirens outside, one after another, disrupting the ocean you had grown so familiar with. Louder and louder. 

“We need to leave, get out of New York,” he ran a hand through his hair, eyes moving wildly as he tried to come up with a plan. It was the Bridgerton in him: the bravery of his father, the gentleness of his mother. It didn’t need to be said out loud that the moment he saw those things, all he could think of was you. Getting to you and getting you safe. His only true friend in this city. It took all of fifteen minutes before you were out the door, nearly overwhelmed by the swarm of people all running away from Times Square. Ben held your hand tightly, and you did your best not to look behind you.

The sun was beginning to set, wrapping the city in a bright orange light. It felt ominous somehow, so unlike every other time you’d seen it. Like this was some form of judgment. As if at any moment, you’d hear the seven trumpets telling you that this was the end. You learned later on that you weren’t the only one that thought that. Bile threatened to rise in your throat when the shadows of night grew with each passing second. It felt like it was going to swallow you alive.

The road was packed full of people, crying and yelling and praying for salvation. Ants begging to get away from the magnifying glass only to be burned anyway.

The screams grew louder and against your better judgment, you looked back. You were too far away to see everything clearly, and because Ben was constantly pulling you forward, but you could make out the smaller swarm of walking corpses slowly coming into view. The poor souls who weren’t able to keep up with the main crowd were dragged away to be bitten, spreading the godforsaken disease. More and more bodies littered the streets, staining the concrete with the blood of dozens. Then, not even a minute later, they would rise with jaws gnashing and wide white eyes, their humanity lost forever.

Your legs felt so heavy, as did the rest of you. If it weren’t for Ben’s ferocious determination to get out of the city and to keep the both of you safe, you wouldn’t have survived that first day at all. Helicopters flew above and across the city, the whooshing of its blades mingling with the screams. The ocean of sound was threatening to drown you. You didn’t look up anymore. It would’ve shattered you if you had, because you knew there weren’t nearly enough choppers to save everyone in the city. It was impossible. Your heart broke for all the people, all the someones, who were dead long before they could even fight for the chance to live.

The sky was dark now.

By some miracle, you reached the army’s barricade. Soldiers ushered people to safety, including you and Ben. You squeezed his hand, causing him to look at you for a moment. A temporary reprieve from that day’s horrors. His fair skin was shiny with sweat, his hair sticking to his forehead like black tendrils. It was like everything slowed down, but maybe it was all just in your head. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. The moment was cut short when you heard an explosion from behind you. Your head snapped to the direction of the noise, so did Ben’s, and the “small swarm” of the undead from before had multiplied to thrice its size in the short few minutes you spent running away. 

Gunfire rang in your ears once the monsters got a little too close for the army’s liking, but the crowds of the living and the undead had already begun to mix by that point. Bullets meant to pierce rotting flesh ended up killing people who were very much alive and uninfected. You could only watch, from behind the barricade of soldiers, the people in the perpetually moving crowd who would stop once they realized their loved ones were no longer beside them. You could only watch when the body of a child (belonging to the same little girl you saw earlier that day, you realized grimly) was forcefully torn from the arms of her father when a soldier spotted the bite mark on her leg, bleeding and angry. Her plump, tear-stained cheeks that were once symbols of her youth and innocence were ruined by a sickly green that rose to the surface, emphasizing violet veins that always looked like it was crawling, spreading just underneath the skin. Then, she was one of them. Writhing, bones cracking. There was no recognition in her cloudy eyes when her father begged for his baby girl to come back to him. 

Ben held you tighter, his hand cradling your head as the other soldiers evacuated as many people as they could.

“We need to go,” he pleaded, still firmly holding on to you as you were both pushed around by the crowd. “Please, love, just look at me.”

So you did. Those eyes, brilliant and blue and full of worry, were the only things that pulled you back down to Earth. Tears were shed and prayers were whispered on the chopper that whisked you away from New York. A couple hundred feet into the air, you could see the city crumble. You remembered briefly wondering how many bodies were left behind or how many turned into one of those things.  

Everything changed in those first fourteen days of the Outbreak. Eighty percent of the world’s population had been wiped out, unprepared to face a force so vicious. That was how effective the virus was, which was later dubbed the “Gaia Virus”. Mother Nature’s wrath.

The survivors in the States were brought to “safe zones” all over the country, areas barren and isolated enough that the Infected, which mostly stayed in the previously overpopulated cities and towns, were unlikely to get to them. The first few months after the Outbreak were spent being transferred to different safe zones, never staying for more than a week at a time.  

At first, the safe zones were supposed to be a temporary refuge for survivors. The government, or what was left of it, promised to reclaim the cities within a year and make them habitable again. Then a year passed, and they said it would take them another year. So another year passed and they said the same thing. Over and over until… radio silence. No one brought it up again. The few who did were not treated kindly by the rest of the survivors. 

Most people caught onto the memo fairly quickly, with soldiers and generals making up the new leadership hierarchy of the safe zones in place of politicians and peacemakers: you keep your head down, you do as you’re told, and you’ll get food and water and blankets.

The people brave (or stupid) enough to make a scene were never heard from again by the next week.

So there you were, moving across the country, going from state to state and living off of food rations and hope. Both were two resources that were steadily depleting. Benedict was there with you through it all, your steadfast companion. Conversations about surrealism and horrible bosses turned into questions about whether or not your friends and families were safe, if they had made it to the safe zones. That was the first time you saw him cry, not able to withstand the possibility that his beloved mother and siblings were gone, perhaps now part of the Infected. Even if they survived, he knew there was a slim chance he would ever see them again. He cursed himself sometimes, him and his foolish need to be someone. If he had stayed in Kent, if he just settled down like his brothers, perhaps he would still be with them today. But his mother was the kindest woman he had ever known and he knew deep down that she forgave him long before he realized what he’d done. He knew they all did.

Grief was your (and Ben’s) constant state of being. It weighed you down on most days, making your feet dig deeper into the dirt when you walked. On some days, it was all-consuming. It was the only reason most survivors rarely caused any trouble. As horrible as humans could be to each other, this shared grief that echoed through the hearts of everyone was translated into little acts of kindness that, at the best of times, were life-saving. To be given a drop of water by a woman dying of thirst. To be offered a piece of bread by a man whose stomach rumbled louder than his voice. More often than not, it was always the eldest survivors that did this. Perhaps it was because they knew that they had already lived long, fulfilling lives. Perhaps it was because they knew Death was already at their door, so they might as well help someone else live.

Of course, there would always be people looking out for themselves, you and Ben had expected that from the get go, but it still surprised you how much compassion a person could still have at the end of the world. It didn’t happen too often though, but the times that it did were memories you held close to your heart.

The days went by, often cruel and unforgiving to those who couldn’t adjust to the new reality, but Ben still found ways to make you smile. 

“It’s the artist in me,” he said to you one night, three years after the Outbreak, when you had asked him how he could bear to still be so… him. There was a secluded spot you two often escaped to whenever there was a need for it, a small cliff at the edge of the safe zone. You were both slightly tipsy from whiskey you traded some radio parts for. “The whole world’s gone to shit and I can’t help but still find it somewhat beautiful. It’s like a movie, isn’t it? Two friends at the end of the world— and besides, what else are we supposed to do? Wallow in self-pity? I think you and I do enough of that.”

The sun was beginning to set, something you had grown to dislike since that first day. You decided to lie down for a moment, uncaring if bits of soil got in your hair. You closed your eyes, trying to just be. You didn’t always get the opportunity to do that anymore.

“Look,” he nudged your side after a while, his accent slurring a little as he pointed at something. You raised a brow at him, now-open eyes following what his finger was pointing at. The sky. It was pitch black, but a splash of stars covered the heavens like a mural. You had never seen that many stars before, certainly not in the cities you’d lived in your whole life. Ben sighed and your attention was back on him. “You couldn’t see them as clearly back home, but I used to stargaze often with my siblings.”

“That sounds lovely,” you whispered.

“It was.”

The two of you were silent for a while, just sitting on that patch of dirt, overlooking the vast lands that spread as far as the eye can see. That was how isolated these safe zones were. The gentle night breeze tickled your skin. 

“I haven’t really looked at the sky properly since the Outbreak,” you confessed, slumping in your seat. “I think it makes me feel small. And sad. Look at us. Our tiny little planet, how fucked up everything is. Look at us. And there’s a whole universe out there that’s completely indifferent to everything that goes on down here.”

“It’s humbling,” he hummed in understanding. “To be a speck in a great big universe yet feeling a whole universe worth of emotion.”

“That’s good,” you chuckled. “Very poetic.”

He grinned at you, cheeks flushed slightly, “I try.”

Another bout of silence.

“Thank you, by the way.” 

“Whatever for, love?” he raised a brow in curiosity, his tone soft. It always was.

“For being here,” you took a deep breath. “For sticking around.”

His smile shone brighter when he heard this, his hand finding its way around yours. “You’d be mad to think I’d ever leave you here. If anything, you’re stuck with me. I’m just—” he cleared his throat. “I’m just sorry that… that it has to be like this. Drifting, never staying too long in one place to be able to call it a home. You deserve more. You deserve better.”

“You say that like it’s your fault,” your hand squeezed his in hopes of bringing him some comfort. “I’m not gonna lie and say we’re doing alright because we honestly look like shit”—that earned you a hearty chuckle from him—”but we’re doing better than most. And that’s because we’ve had each other all this time. That’s one of the things I was thanking you for. None of this on you, Ben. You deserve more, too. You hear me?”

He straightened his back and flashed you a soft smile, “I hear you.”

The two of you looked back up at the sky, admiring the twinkling of millions of stars. You were somewhere in Arizona, according to the other survivors. Soldiers kept the exact location under lock and key to dissuade survivors from sharing it with others who were still out in the open world. There just wasn’t enough room. But you had a feeling that it had more to do with the risk of attracting Infected. Limited armada and manpower meant the military was just unable to handle that kind of scenario.

You learned more about the Infected over time, having worked odd jobs for the military for more food, water, or supplies. Even something as simple as filtration duty on Tuesdays earned you tidbits of information.

From what you could piece together in the past couple of years, the Gaia Virus most likely came from melting glaciers and ice caps, triggered by global warming. It polluted bodies of water across the world, eventually making its way into reservoirs undetected. It was the perfect way to spread. Nobody can last more than three days without water, so the virus made sure no one would last at all. Once fully turned, Infected were nearly perfect killers. Soldiers sometimes told stories of their encounters with them. They were completely blind, though that much was obvious from the milkiness of their eyes. Infected also didn’t react to any physical damage done to them. Whether or not they felt it was a different story. With possibly two of their senses out of the picture, the rest were heightened. They could hear and smell better than people. If prey were close enough, all those things had to do was follow the scent trail. The fact that these monsters could perceive things humans could barely register was a terrifying thought.

Bodies of Infected retrieved from the destroyed cities were studied, Ben himself had seen this on one such odd job. The virus kills its host before taking over the body, this much was known. However, the brain was shown to endure, preventing the more advanced stages of decomposition. It raised questions about whether or not hosts really died, or if a tiny part of them still lived on even as they transformed into flesh-eating beasts. You’ve heard whispers that it was more like the brain sent constant streams of adrenaline even after death, keeping the body going long after it was supposed to fall apart and rot. True or not, it was the only explanation you had.

You’d seen your fair share of people who’ve fallen victim to a bite; doomed to have their life snuffed out as soon as that was discovered, whether that was by execution or dying to the virus. 

The time it took to die after being bitten was different for everyone. Some died within minutes, others within hours. The longest one you’d seen was a soldier brought back to the Detroit safe zone after a patrol gone wrong. A stray Infected had sensed him and attacked him during the night, leaving a massive bite on his shoulder. He fought so fiercely against the symptoms of the fever, hovering between life and death for nearly an entire day before finally succumbing to the virus. You couldn’t forget how pale he was when he was wheeled into the makeshift camp on a gurney, watching the life be drained out of him in real time. He was shot in the head by his comrades as soon as he turned. The event shook everyone. The disappearances began shortly after that.

The people who spoke up against the military drew the ire of everyone: the military didn’t tolerate people who questioned their authority and everyone else just wanted to mind their own business. When these undesirables began to disappear, everyone chalked it up to them just being hard-headed. The popular theory was they got sick of the military’s iron grip and decided to leave the safe zone, and then probably died. Nobody took it too seriously. Nobody could have done anything about it anyway. Everyone was just focused on staying alive. 

Cooper was another survivor in the Arizona safe zone. You and Ben had been there for a month, and he was the first and only person to welcome you with open arms. He was a lanky man, and had blond hair and kind, brown eyes. Only a few years younger than you. He was the jovial type, often inviting you and Ben to tag along with him on whatever job he found earlier that day. His Boston accent was unmistakable, often getting stronger when offered liquor. 

He was also in strong opposition to the militant lifestyle in the safe zones, though he knew better than to broadcast his distaste. Cooper joined you and Ben on the night the two of you were stargazing, eyes wide in terror. You had never seen him like that before. He was always one to stay optimistic, which was a wonder considering the state of the world. Cooper looked like he ran to get to you, his damp tattered shirt sticking to his body.

He grabbed you by your shoulders, fingertips digging into your skin deep enough to make you wince all while a jumble of words were frantically spewing out of his mouth. Ben immediately got up, nearly growling at Cooper for hurting you, “Get your hands off them.”

It seemed as though Ben’s warning briefly snapped Cooper back to reality, because the man did pull away but his hands still trembled violently.

“What’s wrong?” you furrowed your brows in worry, unused to seeing Cooper in such a state.

“You need to get out of here,” it felt like there was something darker lingering behind his words. He looked at Ben. “You need to go.”

“Hold on, hold on,” Ben cut him off, his protectiveness from before calming down when he finally noticed the genuine panic and fear in Cooper’s eyes. “Tell us what’s happening.”

The poor man looked like he was ready to explode right then and there. He was practically soaked in his own sweat, both from the exhaustion of running to get to you and Ben, and the shock of the news he brought, it seemed.

“They were taking them,” he choked back tears, his feet stuck to the ground. His nostrils were flaring from how hard he was breathing.

“Who, Coop? Who’s taking who?” this time it was your hands on his shoulders, though your touch was gentle, trying to keep him grounded. 

“The soldiers,” he whispered, his voice grim. “We- we thought they were executing them for questioning the army but I saw them! I saw them. In the big tent. They’re trying… they’re trying to make a vaccine.”

The severity of his tone reminded you all too much of Ben at your doorstep on that very first day of the Outbreak.

Ben’s surprise was palpable, “What?”

“A vaccine,” Cooper stressed, each breath he drew was ragged (you could hear it from how close he was standing to you), “but it’s not working. I saw the bodies. Whatever they’re doing, it’s torture— you should’ve seen them. They infected them on purpose.”

Your blood went cold, like liquid nitrogen shocking your system. That’s what the army had been doing all this time?  It made perfect sense, but the new information flooded your brain with images of those people who went missing, strapped to a table, and being injected with the virus. If they were trying to make a vaccine, they—the test subjects—would have to have been kept alive for as long as possible, conscious of the parasite invading their body. It made your stomach churn, forcing you to step back and look away. Ben was similarly devastated, jaw clenched as he stared at Cooper. He zeroed in on a different piece of information.

There were Infected in the safe zone.

“That’s… they can’t just keep taking people,” he gritted his teeth. Cooper stayed silent. Ben spoke again, firmer and more desperate this time, “...can they?”

“Nobody’s gonna come looking for you even if they did,” Cooper said, defeated. Still breathing hard. “We’re too far away. And if the rest of the safe zones aren’t already in the same situation then they aren’t gonna waste gas to go all the way here. The soldiers here can just make up something and no one would know.”

An “oh, God” left your lips, your hands shaking, mirroring Cooper’s. From where you stood, you could see the main camp and the largest tent, the main military tent, in the middle of it. You’ve walked past it, stared at it a hundred times, and never knew what was going on inside. You found yourself asking if there was a time when you stared at that tent, and just on the other side was someone just like you being experimented on with the deadliest virus known to mankind.Your eyes stung with tears when your treacherous mind thought of Ben in that position, bruised by different needles and tubes protruding from him.

“Please, you need to go,” Cooper pleaded with the two of you desperately, his head hanging low.

“Shit,” Ben cursed under his breath, rubbing his eyes with one hand in frustration. “All of our supplies are back in the main camp.” 

“You can’t go back!”

“We’ll die out there if we don’t get those supplies,” you pointed out to the blond. “We wouldn’t last a week.”

Ben had already begun to walk back to camp, masking his anxieties to the best of his abilities if what Cooper was saying was true. You weren’t that far behind, ears ringing with Cooper’s pleas not to go back. He didn’t chase after you anymore, falling silent once he realized there was nothing he could do to change your mind. It was only a short trek from the cliff back to the main camp. The outer perimeter of the safe zone was always being patrolled by soldiers which meant, without any weapons, you would’ve been dead if you tried to escape right away. A checkpoint came into view along with the two guards, Paul and Walter, holding rifles on either side of the path. You were familiar with each other from how often you passed through this checkpoint to get to the cliff.

“Paul, Walter,” Ben smiled coolly at the guards once you were finally standing in front of them. “Late shift? I thought you’d have switched with Reese by now.”

“Higher-ups needed more men in other places, so here we are,” Paul sighed, before turning his attention to you. “You guys back at the cliff again?”

“Yeah,” you mimicked Ben, feigning a smile of your own. You still weren’t completely sure if Cooper had been telling the truth, but interacting with Paul felt different now that you knew what could’ve been happening behind closed doors. “Camp can be a little too much sometimes, y’know? No offense. Just… needed to get away for a while.”

Paul nodded in understanding. 

“Okay, you know the routine,” Walter shrugged, handing you and Ben a bloodchecker each. It was a small vial full of a blue solution, connected to a thin, replaceable tube ending with a needle. The solution would turn clear if mixed with Gaia-infected blood, and a dark muddy brown if the blood was clean. You pierced your arm with the needle, watching your blood travel through the tube and drip down into the solution, turning it brown as you had expected. Glancing over at Ben’s bloodchecker, you found that his was the same. Thankfully.

You were about to pass through the checkpoint when Walter pulled Ben aside, muttering something you couldn’t quite make out, but you saw Ben’s reaction. To anyone else, it would have seemed like he didn’t react at all. Most people only would’ve noticed his polite smile and hushed ‘thank you” to the guard before returning to your side, but you saw through it: the slightest twitch of his hand and the way his lips tightened at what Walter told him. It was so clear to you that he was bothered by it, whatever it was. 

“What was that?” you asked him, trying to keep up with his fast-paced stride.

He only spared you a single glance, only a single moment of softness, but now you were inside the central safe zone. Soldiers were standing guard in every direction. There seemed to be more of them than usual. Ben continued forward to the direction of your tent which was a bit farther from everyone else’s. He kept his voice low, “Not here.”

Your shared tent with Ben was bare. The apocalypse didn’t exactly grant you a life of luxury, but that tent was yours. It stayed the same after every new safe zone you were transferred to. Next to the two worn down single mattresses were your backpacks, one of the only things you still had from before the Outbreak besides each other. While you double-checked your supplies, making sure nothing was missing while you were gone, Ben slid one of the mattresses to the side, which was sitting on top of an old rug. He pulled that aside too, his hands digging into the soil, digging and digging until finally, you could see the lid of a crate you had buried.

The crate was filled with jugs of water. Clean, pure, uninfected water. The result of three years of patiently collecting rainwater and saving up whatever the army gave you, carefully filtering each drop throughout the night when you knew no one else would be bothering you. This water was precious. It was gold. And it was a pain to move from safe zone to safe zone. You and Ben had had to resort to bribing and lying for the past three years to make sure it was safe. 

Once you were done checking over the supplies, you knelt by Ben’s side. “So… are you gonna tell me what Walter said to you or are you gonna keep being mysterious?” you tried to keep your tone light.

“They were looking for Cooper,” his gaze didn’t leave the jugs of water. His hands, once always covered in paint, were now caked in dirt. “Said we should report him if we did.”

“What?” you questioned. “That doesn’t make any sense, everyone has to go in and out of that checkpoint to get to the cliff. There’s no way Paul and Walter didn’t see him.”

“So how could he have seen all of those supposed experiments in the main tent?” he turned to face you, his expression severe. “That tent is the most heavily guarded thing in this camp. If what he said is true, then there was no way he could’ve left and not be spotted and then somehow manage to get to us without going through the checkpoint.” 

The two of you sat in silence for a while, racking your brains for any sort of information that could help you get closer to solving this mystery. It was entirely plausible that Cooper had been lying about the experimentations and the vaccines but despite having only known him for a short while, you knew he wasn’t the type to do something like that. He wouldn’t lie about something like that. Hell, he was the kind of person that worked overtime during the apocalypse. He was an honest man.

Then you remembered something.

“It’s Tuesday today.”

Ben looked at you, puzzled, “Yes, it is… What’s going through your head, love?”

“Filtration duty,” you answered. “They filter out the water in the main tent…”

“...then dump the waste outside of camp,” Ben finished for you, eyes widening. “You think Cooper was in the main tent on purpose?”

“I mean, that’s the only explanation, right? Nothing else has left camp since last week and nobody checks a truck carrying waste. Maybe Cooper was on one of those trucks,” you said before looking back at Ben. “I… I thought I was just seeing things. Did you notice how he was earlier?”

“Out of breath from running…?” Ben frowned, not quite following your train of thought as easily as he usually did.

“He wasn’t just out of breath. He was smelling me.” 

You could practically hear the cogs turning in his head as he put the pieces together. He couldn’t quite believe the conclusion he arrived at, that much you could tell, but the disbelief washed away when no other possible explanation presented itself to him.

“How?” his voice was shaky, a quiet sort of devastation clouding his features. Cooper was likely already infected earlier, though you couldn’t tell which stage of infection he was at. The signs pointed to a peculiar middleground between the fever that occurred right before death, and the grotesque reanimation once the virus had complete control over the body.

“Maybe he was telling the truth. Part of it, at least.”

You both looked back at the jugs of water, taking out a few of the smaller containers before hurriedly placing the lid back on the crate. With the crate concealed by the soil and rug, you and Ben made quick work of gathering your things, hiding the small jugs of water underneath clothes, foods, and whatever else were in your bags. 

You always made sure to have a plan in case you ever needed to leave a safe zone. The water you collected was too valuable; you had to be able to move it whenever and wherever you needed, but with all the soldiers standing guard outside, you knew this would be impossible even with all of your planning. You just had to bring what you could.

Without uttering a word, you and Ben both knew this was the last night you were ever going to spend in this place. 

-

series taglist: comment down below if you'd like to be added!

[domokunrainbowkinz]

sorry for manhwa-posting guys it's not gonna stop

u kno wat I may as well give my thoughts on some of the ones I read:

semantic error - classic, everyone knows it, despite me being lukewarm about it it has some moments that made me go WAOUUGGHH.....nice, low-stakes fun read but if u hate miscommunication u r gonna have a bad time. the art is Very good though.

concubine walkthrough - EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS NOW!!!!! villainess transmigration story with chinese-style court politics, discussions about AI, VR, reality vs dream, and a plot twist at the end that makes you go AOUUGHGBGB!!!!! it made me ugly cry twice!!! READ IT NOW!!!!!!

lost in the cloud - currently ongoing, I stayed up till 7am reading this one. it starts off light and then hits u with The Trauma hammer and reveals its true colours (2 dudes dealing with The Horrors and being absolutely not normal about it). it deals with very heavy topics like bullying, SA, CSA, abusive parents, like these kids cannot catch a break. the characters are really well written and believable, their interactions are so raw and painful at times. I am obsessed. I need them to be happy or im going to cry. it really isn't for the faint of heart, I'm not one to be fazed by heavy topics in fiction but I felt so anxious during some chapters, like the way the scenes are depicted and drawn are so visceral. I also gotta say the art is BANGING.

dreaming of the dokkaebi (18+) - currently ongoing, VERY promising so far. I am a hoe for modern-day supernatural romance, especially when there's reincarnation shenanigans involved. there's a lot going on between the 2 leads and I love the incorporation of korean mythology and exorcism in the worldbuilding aouuggh...literally my cup of tea.

how to refuse the route - lighthearted low-stakes otome isekai where the protagonist is trying his absolute darnedest to NOT romance any of the characters (he is failing). It's pretty unserious fun, and I also love the ML in this one. pls give me more fucked up little guys. the story is starting to go in an interesting direction tho and I'm curious to see how it ends.

the guild member next door - very light unserious fun, basically what if ur online friend/crush that u met in a game is ur neighbour, but you never met irl so u don't know that?? it goes hard on the in-game mechanics and spends a lot of time building up the in-game friendship before starting to delve into the irl relationship. it's a slow burn and brother I am here for it.

netkama punch - this situation is something you'd read on aita reddit and think to yourself "there's something definitely wrong with both of you and I hope you don't involve anyone else in whatever the fuck is going on between you 2". it's so wacky and funny, definitely not one to take super seriously.

love in orbit (18+) - I originally read this bc there's a tall hot alien mommy in it, but the actual story is actually quite sweet. I also love the way the artist draws bodies in this one, for once the proportions don't make go "brother eughh". it's pretty light and low-stakes, but I was surprised by the discussions on loneliness and parental neglect/abuse that were a throughline in this series. the sex scenes are 🔥🔥

tears on a withered flower (18+) - still pretty early in serialization but I'm already so interested in where this is going homegirl needs to throw her entire husband out!!! an illustration of how an abusive relationship can wear a person down and eat away at them. seriously I hope she and her new man beat the shit out of her husband.

[mokutone]

For the tenzo haircut picture, i was wondering what your reasoning was for having his hair be longer in the mirror reflection? i can probably guess but i love hearing your thoughts on this stuff ^-^ <3

ah, hello! i wasnt actually sure that anyone would notice that detail because it was so small. essentially, like the black cloud of scribbles around him, the mirror and its reflection are not a true visual depiction of tenzō's world experience, he isn't seeing hair which is longer than it is, nor is he seeing black scribbles but he is feeling both, the panicked restless energy in the scribbles, as well as the fear that he still resembles the being he was when his hair was that long, and the fear of getting too close to that identity again, or seeing it in himself when he looks into the mirror

its all just kind of, visual metaphor for his mental state! this is actually how i use the sprouting flowers + leaves too—while i draw him sprouting plants and flowers often, i think it would be rare that, if i were writing say a prose fic about tenzō, that i'd have him bursting out in foliage, because in writing i have other and quicker, more elegant ways to depict a characters internal experiences

[liesonthefloordramatically]

i love ur writing so much! do you possibly have any tips on writing a non linear story?

Hello, anon! I'm really glad you enjoy my fic! ;w;

I have...a lot to say about writing non-linear stories (maybe too much), so I'm dropping it under a cut:

Necessary caveats: My writing style is SUPER idiosyncratic, so if you have a complete different method that works for you, you're not doing anything wrong! People write differently! People have different ideas about how non-linear storytelling should work! It's all good!

That said...

PART ONE: THE META OF IT ALL

Okay, so I've talked about this a little bit before but the first question I think it's helpful to ask is, "How does the structure of this story support its themes or narrative?" I tend to write super duper structured stories--not because I outline them (more on that below), but because I edit like wild and make sure that everything fits together as well as possible. Where non-linear storytelling gets sloppy, in my opinion, is where elements of the narrative are non-linear A. for no discernible reason (I'm sure you can think of something where you were sitting there going, "okay, but why is a flashback here?/why was that a flashback at all?") OR B. to disguise sloppy storytelling ("uh oh, forgot to set this up, might as well drop it in a flashback"/"let's just straight up omit this scene to raise the suspense").

Let me give some examples:

linear time is fake is non-linear both because A. it's a story about Jotaro being unmoored from time and B. the non-linear structure parallels Jotaro's cognition. Flashbacks don't just happen at random--they are triggered by something Jotaro is thinking about or experiencing. They are often intrusive and jarring and take him out of the present so fully that the people around him notice. (I have written...even more about tense in this fic if you are interested.)

a flower blooming is non-linear because A. it parallels the horror of GER's ability and B. it's a story about Giorno trying to constantly outrun his past while BOTH being narratively dragged backward in time (kicking and screaming) AND being in a situation that ONLY can be contextualized and understood by looking back. There are very few proper flashbacks--the only full-blown one is the end of chapter one triple death scene meltdown--and flashbacks are directly linked to Giorno's panic attacks and C-PTSD. (I write a lot of trauma unmooring characters from time.)

two points of a triangle is non-linear because A. it's a story about being haunted by someone's memory (and what's a ghost but time not working right) and B. it's a story about how hard it is to narrativize your own life ("hindsight is 20/20," I yell, yeeting the reader backward in time). (Also C. falling motif.) Flashbacks are, again, triggered by memories and are intrusive and shift the way that Hermes reacts to the situations she finds herself in. (My favorite is her making a decision specifically to spite the intrusive memory of her sister.)

If you're thinking about making a fic non-linear, one thing you might find helpful is paying attention to the ways in which your own brain moves in non-linear ways! What causes you to suddenly, viscerally remember something? When, halfway through a story, do you find yourself jumping five years back in time to explain an important piece of context?

I know this because part of my job is interviewing people, but almost no one can tell a story in a straight line without practice. You might double-back to add some detail or piece of context, or you might keep retelling a section in the hopes that you'll get it right this time, or you might find yourself skipping over a section because it's too painful to talk about or you don't have to words for it yet. And you very rarely tell the same story the same way each time (unless, again, you have practice). And you can write stories that mimic that to both more viscerally depict how a narrator's brain is making connections AND comment on the nature of storytelling.

PART TWO: THE ACTUAL WRITING (FT. SCREAMS)

Okay, so, again, caveat: my writing style is wildly idiosyncratic. I cannot outline to save my life, so I basically...just...start writing...and then I write until I'm done with a draft. I usually have themes and a couple of scenes that I KNOW I need to hit, and then I'll sketch in more scenes as I write (and often leave myself impenetrable notes to remind myself of the scenes I haven't written yet). I basically never write in order--usually I'll write parallel scenes together (so I wrote the two Mista & Giorno horribly charged cuddle scenes in a flower blooming back to back), and I'll often copy and paste chunks of text so that I can better parallel language and rhythm of prose. (linear time is fake has an obscene number of directly mirrored lines; every exit-from-a-nightmare + every panic attack have the same rhythm and grammatical structure in a flower blooming.) One of the nice things about writing non-linearly is that you can just! Write things! And then figure out what set-up you need to have it land with maximum impact!

The big downside of this is that if you're one of the folks who really needs reader engagement to motivate you to write...you are gonna struggle. I can't start posting anything until it's done, which means that I'm often working on fics for months or years with no one but some very long-suffering friends cheerleading. If you really need external motivation, you may want to outline or do a lot more planning in advance rather than my method of chaos writing.

PART THREE: EDITING! EDITING! EDITING!

Again, caveat: I know that editing makes most people break out in hives. I love editing--I prefer it to writing even. Getting a first draft is like pulling teeth, but editing? Marvelous.

Editing is the part where you make sure that all the bits fit together, that the story you're telling is coherent, and that the structure is actually supporting the story you're trying to tell!

My editing method is:

Read the whole thing from beginning to end and then read again in chronological order (this is to make sure that you don't have people knowing about things before they chronologically happen)

If the fic is long enough, I will often read individual storylines separately as well to check for pacing (I read the Bruno & Abbacchio + Bruno & Fugo storylines separately for disjoint, for example)

Make a big, stupid chart, if necessary, or write out a timeline

Get a beta reader! Rowan does most of my beta-ing because they are a gift and a marvel and also are very good at finding the threadbare bits of the fic that I tried to hide by putting a sofa directly on top of them

Come up with revision notes; this is where I put down both things that I want to rewrite/change/expand but ALSO my notes on what I think the big themes of the fic are, just to make sure that I'm carrying them through in the strongest and clearest way possible.

Revise!!!

Repeat the above until I feel happy with it. (Usually there is only one full round of revisions and then one round of minor revisions, but sometimes *cough maybe I will talk to you cough* it takes a lot longer.)

For the record, here's an excerpt of my revision notes for a flower blooming (yes, I write all of them like this; they do sound mildly unhinged):

(There were like 700 words of these for flower blooming, but I shall not inflict all of them upon you.) (It does have this incredible note, though: SOMETIMES YOU WIN AND THEN YOU’RE LIKE “UHHHH NOW WHAT???” AND IT TURNS OUT THAT WINNING DOESN’T FEEL GOOD AT ALL)

If you don't have a beta reader or you're not used to editing your own work, some questions that might be helpful to ask yourself:

What are the Big Themes of this fic? Are they consistent throughout or do they occasionally disappear?

What are the plotlines? Are all the plot threads that need to be resolved tied up?

Do all the major characters get an arc? Can readers trace the trajectory of that arc? (This is especially important in a non-linear story, because the reader might be seeing their trajectory out of order.)

Do the non-linear elements of this narrative support the kind of story I'm trying to tell? Are there clear rules that govern the non-linear elements or does it just feel totally random?

Do the non-linear elements make sense both within the chronological continuity AND within the narrative continuity? (check to make sure that characters aren't being named before they're introduced or that the character arc makes sense in both chronological and narrative order, for example)

Is the narrative voice consistent? (if you're using non-linear elements to tell the reader something about the narrator's cognition:) Is it obvious how the narrator's brain/memory/cognition is operating?

(For stories with reverse chronology:) Can this fic be read in either direction and still be intelligible? Is it a different story depending on which direction you read it? (I aim for my reverse chronology stuff to be intelligible in either direction but different stories.)

PART FOUR: POST YOUR DANGED FIC

Yay, you did it! Now you only have to respond to all the people in your comment section who are like, "wow, how can you write a fic like this, I would lose my frickin' mind if I attempted it."

---

SORRY FOR THE WALL OF TEXT; I hope that helps!! And if there's anything that needs clarification, please let me know!!

[kuroopaisen]

dawn. (sakusa kiyoomi)

➵  even monsters should have someone to bring them flowers.

wc: 3k

warnings: gn!reader, vampire!sakusa, visceral depiction of raw meat?

a/n: the biggest of thank yous to ren, as usual :( she doesn’t even like fantasy aus and yet she’s beta’d a fair chunk of them. as always, her advice is invaluable, and she helped polish this into something worthwhile. 

A note on the table.

The only sign you’d been here. That, and your lingering scent – warm, golden, comforting. 

He was almost sad that he’d missed you.

But the words in your letter would have to tide him over until your next conversation.

“Good morning! I hope you are well-rested this evening. I have left this meat here as requested. I couldn’t help but wonder what dishes you make with it. Are you much of a cook? If not, I am happy to try and prepare something for you. I cannot guarantee that it will be to your taste, but I will try my best!”

He let his eyes linger on it for a moment. He wondered how his chest might feel, if he was fully alive. Tight, maybe. Fuzzy.

Now, the thrum of emotions just made his senses sharper.

And that made him uncomfortable.

He turned his eyes to the parcel sitting to the side of your note.

He unwrapped the paper packaging with a trembling gloved hand.

The ripest cut of the belly. It sat in a pool of its own liquids, a crimson slab marbled with white. He knew that there wasn’t a sufficient amount of blood in it – but it’s all he could handle. All he could stomach. 

He took a deep breath. The air in his lungs did nothing for him, but some habits were harder to break than others, even if it had been a couple hundred years. 

He picked up the meat with both hands, holding it just shy of his mouth. His face crinkled as the scent filled his nose, putrid, offensive, intoxicating. 

It’s disgusting. But it’s what he had to do.

He sunk his fangs into the meat, the damp flesh pressing against his chin. He could feel the juices running down his chin, and he shivered. His eyes fluttered shut, perhaps in some attempt to steel himself. 

It’s not blood. It wouldn’t sustain him.

Instead, it would just make him sick.

This meat, this scant amount of blood threaded throughout it, wasn’t enough to sustain him. But he’d rather go hungry than go out for a hunt, either for animal or human.

The thought was absolutely abhorrent, both in its ethicality and hygiene.

This meat was not enough to sustain him. But it would stave off the hunger, at least for a few days. At least until the next slab of meat, when he would feel this all again.

He’s trembling as he drank, hoping, wishing that it would be over soon.

A loud gasp sliced through the kitchen.

Sakusa tore his fangs out of the meat, his head whipping around.

You were stood in the doorway, eyes wide and hands clamped over your mouth.

At your feet laid a bunch of sunflowers.

You stared at each other for a long moment.

What was he supposed to do? To say?

He knew what he looked like. Sharp fangs poking through his lips, red staining his chin, the veins running along his jaw dark beneath his skin as he fed.

“Sakusa, sir…” There was a tremble in your voice. He despised the sound.

“Get out.”

“Sir—”

“Get out.”

You knew now. You knew that he was a monster. That he was disgusting. You’d seen it with your own eyes – eyes full of terror. Eyes he’d never wanted to look at him like that.

You waited for just a moment. And then you were gone.

Sakusa let the meat fall out of his hands and plop onto the wrapping. His appetite had entirely disappeared despite the fact he wasn’t nourished. He closed his eyes, trying to round up his whirling thoughts. 

You’d seen him. You’d seen him in all his disgrace. You’d seen him as the monster he was. 

He swallowed roughly, turning his gaze to the doorway. 

The sunflowers were where you’d dropped them, scattered across the floor.

Were they why you’d come back? You shouldn’t have been here. You should’ve left after finishing your jobs.

But it was just like you to bring him flowers on a whim.

He sighed, stalking over to them and picking them up with a grimace. The least he could do was to give them some water.

✧ ✧

Vampires didn’t need sleep, but Sakusa liked to pretend he did anyway.

He always had. He just did his best to quiet his mind, lying under his covers as he waited for the hours to ebb by. He couldn’t leave the house during the day; if he tried, he would simply shrivel up and crumble in the sun.

He’d tried facing the sun, once. The burn had been unlike any pain he’d felt before.

And yet sometimes he'd leave the curtains open, just a crack. And he'd lie on the couch, watching the light filter in. Sometimes, he'd even let himself remember what the sun felt like.

But every evening, he had to ‘wake’ as the sun set, watching the light shrink away from him.

That evening though, something was different. Something shook him from his self-induced slumber with an abrupt shock.

That scent. Blood.

He shot to his feet, head whipping around in the direction of the smell. It was heavy, oppressive, so thick that he couldn’t think of anything else.

He stumbled into the kitchen, hoping, begging that he might find some relief.

In the middle of the kitchen table sat a bucket. Sakusa took a series of slow, laboured steps towards it, gripped by some half-conscious fear.

A letter laid next to it, written in a familiar scrawl.

“Sir, I admit that I am confused as to how to comprehend what I saw yesterday, but if my suspicions are correct, then I believe this will do you more good than a simple cut of meat. If my imagination has gotten away from me, then simply ignore this – my father told me that mixing this into the dirt makes for a fantastic fertiliser.”

Had you really brought him a whole bucket of blood? There was more than enough here to sustain him for a week – maybe even two. How had you gotten your hands on it? How had you snuck it into his house? How had you felt, lugging this foul liquid all the way to his estate?

He closed his eyes, trying to quell the thoughts tearing through his mind.

He looked into the bucket. A dark shadow stared back.

He’d forgotten what he looked like. He’d forgotten how his dark, curly hair framed his face, how two dark moles crowned his forehead, how dark and deep his eyes were.

This was the monster you’d seen savaging a slab of meat in the kitchen. This was the monster that you’d somehow gotten your hands on a bucket of blood for. This was the monster you’d given a reprieve.

On the other side of the bucket sat a vase of sunflowers; the ones he had arranged the other day. He could swear they looked fresher than yesterday.  

✧ ✧

That awful, intoxicating scent.

He had awoken to that small three times this week. But on that Monday morning, he wanted to see you. To ask you the questions that had been hounding him through his days. 

He stood at the far end of the kitchen, arms crossed over his chest as he slouched against the wall. 

You were humming to yourself as you walked in, your knuckles blanching as they gripped onto the handle of a deep bucket. 

You flinched as you caught sight of him, your eyes wide and owlish. The jolt caused the blood to slosh around in the bucket. Sakusa feared, for a moment, that it would splash on the floor.

You placed the bucket on the floor and bowed sharply.

“Where did you get that?” Sakusa asked, his voice low and sharp. He suspected that you would interpret his tone as an angry one. In truth, he was frightened more than anything. Frightened of how this conversation could go. 

You straightened up, fixing your eyes on him. They were still wide, still afraid. It almost looked like they’d pop out of your skull. “The butcher… they drain the caracsses before, you know…”

Ah. Your body language, your scent. It all screamed of discomfort. Distress, even. Of course you would feel that way, talking of such things. You were much too sweet for such talk.  

This was his fault.

But you continued.

“So, when I saw you in the kitchen that day, I thought that…” You finally dropped your gaze. He was grateful.

“I know,” he murmured. “I read your note.”

You looked up at him again, a new expression on your face. He realised, not without some surprise, that it wasn’t fear. Perhaps something closer to hesitation.

“You were quick to make such an assumption,” he muttered, looking up at the ceiling. Sakusa wouldn’t lie to you; not when you’d gone through all this effort for him. Though, perhaps he should tell you that it was safe for you to leave his employ, if you wished.

“Well, it didn’t come out of nowhere, did it?” You smiled gently, tilting your head at him.

His head snapped around as he raised an eyebrow at you.

You giggled. It didn’t sound intentional, and you cut it off quickly. But he was glad to have heard it. 

“You’re most active at night, you seem to actively avoid the sunlight, you’ve always kept a distance between us…” There was a hum in your voice. A pleasant sound, but an out-of-place one.

He frowned. Your last piece of evidence had little to do with his affliction, but he wasn’t about to point that out. He would’ve kept that distance regardless; perhaps he would be even more stringent with it, if he was still human. But it was of no matter.

“So, you’ve suspected I was a monster for a while,” Sakusa sighed. “And yet you kept coming back?”

You bit your lip, folding your hands in front of you.

He scoffed. “That was foolish of you.”

“Well, I…” You swallowed, scratching the back of your neck. “I… I thought you seemed lonely.”

Something about those words set his heart aflame. Him? Lonely? What right did you have to say something like that?

“And… and you’ve never tried to hurt me,” you mumbled, interrupting the rage swelling in his chest. “If you wanted to… to drink my blood, or, or…” You took a deep breath, closing your eyes. “Well, you would have done that by now, wouldn’t you?”

You’d been tending to his house for the better part of a year. The longest anyone had.

He just frowned, looking away from you.

But you weren’t done.

“And… well, you wanted me to bring you meat, right? Which means… you probably weren’t hurting anyone else,” you bit your lip, tilting your head at him. “It may be foolish of me, but… I didn’t want to judge you for what you are.”

“For being a monster, you mean?” Sakusa snarled.

He couldn’t stop himself. He hadn’t meant to be so harsh, but he knew he sounded repulsive. He wanted to push you, to stop you from looking any closer. From seeing how horrible he truly was.

You looked at him for a painfully long moment. A moment he wished would shatter.

“You’re not a monster.”

“I’m disgusting.” A hiss. A baring of fangs. Responses made on instinct.

“And yet you won’t feed on humans,” you murmured, eyes scanning his face.

He faltered. Were the fangs not enough to make you turn and run? Was the bucket of blood at your feet not enough to make your stomach churn?

“Would a monster hold back like that?”

Would they? He couldn’t say.

“And besides,” you said, taking a tentative step towards him. When he didn’t move, you picked up the bucket and made your way for the kitchen table. You heaved the bucket onto it with a little grunt.

 “Even monsters should have someone to bring them flowers,” you smiled, nodding at the centre of the table. A vase, playing host to a small bunch of sunflowers.

“I see you haven’t brought any today,” he murmured, his eyebrows knitting together.

“I knew I wouldn’t need to,” you replied easily, leaning over to feel one of the petals. “You always look after them so well.”

He finally looked at you. You had the softest of smiles on your face. You didn’t look scared, or appalled, or upset. You were the perfect picture of contentment – just someone admiring the simple beauty of a flower.

A flower he had been responsible for nurturing.

Perhaps, there was still some humanity in him.

The thought was almost as soothing as your smile.

✧ ✧

You were terrified.

There were many whispers about Sakusa, and you’d heard them all. Even before you’d taken over the job of tending to his household, you were well-acquainted with the stories of this strange, pale man who lived alone in an excessively large mansion. A mansion that, except for a handful of peculiarities, was empty.

Previous housekeepers had nothing bad to say about him, but it was obvious they were unsettled by how strange he was. Apparently, he was a stickler for cleanliness. And yet, that wasn’t even the strangest thing about him.

You had almost decided not to take up the job, back when you’d first started. The thought of being in this big house alone with such a strange man had genuinely frightened you – but, as the story always goes, you needed the money.

After meeting Sakusa for the first time, you came to the conclusion that he probably wasn’t dangerous. Shy. Awkward. Intense. But not dangerous.

And maybe that really was foolish of you. That word had snuck back into your mind over and over, always in that harsh tone of his.

But you knew loneliness. It had carved a home inside you, a well so deep it could never overflow.

And in that strange, reticent man, you saw it. The face of a man who sheltered a deep, relentless loneliness; perhaps harsher and heavier than the one you knew. It was like he wanted to reach out, to find that sense of connection and understanding, and yet was too afraid to.  

Sakusa had never hurt you. He’d never made any move to seduce you, or trap you, or manipulate you. There were no stories of him having done that to anyone else either.

So, maybe you were being foolish. Maybe this was dangerous.

But you wanted to give him a chance. To extend a hand.

And that was why you had stayed later, with the intent of catching him.

You sat on the couch next to him in a tepid silence. You weren’t quite touching, but it was the closest he’d been to a human in a long, long time. He flinched, but he didn’t move away.

“May I?” You murmured, eyes flicking to the hands clenched in his lap.

Every instinct was screaming, a muddled cacophony of wants and fears.

Sakusa nodded, driven by something he didn’t quite understand. Something, perhaps, that he’d forgotten about long ago.

You gently took his hand in yours, easing the tension in his grip by running your thumb over the back of it.

“How long have you been like this?” You asked, looking right at him. You wanted him to know that you saw him, that you acknowledged him.

“Two hundred and forty-seven years.”

“Have you avoided people all that time?”

He looked away from you. In truth, he had avoided people long before he turned. 

You pressed your lips together, running your thumb over his knuckles. “Are there not… others like you?”

“There are,” he murmured. “And I want nothing to do with them.”

You bit back a smile, thoroughly amused by the dismissiveness in his tone. “Why?”

Sakusa frowned. The life of a vampire was invariably a life spent in solitude. As a rule, they weren’t the most social of creatures; and quite frankly, Sakusa was proud to be an outcast. But he wouldn’t bore you with the details.

“They’re all insufferable,” he mumbled.

You giggled. “How so?”

Sakusa pressed his lips together. There were many reasons to avoid covens; anxiety, petty politics, filth. Being around those who were just as disgusting as him – and who didn’t care about that. Who lived openly and freely as the monsters they were. Feeding on humans. Fighting amongst themselves.

Yes, covens sounded hellish.

But some part of him feared that maybe it was because he was afraid of connecting. Of reaching out. Of being seen – seen as the abhorrent creature that he was. To be around other vampires, to partake in their way of life, meant finally, truly facing the fact that he was a monster. That he was so, so far away from the human world.

From your world. You, who was sitting here with your hand wrapped around his.

“Why are you doing this?” He murmured, staring into the fire. The fireplace had been merely decorative until today. But he hoped that it was bringing you some warmth. He couldn’t tell how cold these early hours of the morning were. Everything was cold, to him.

“Doing what?” You asked, tilting your head at him.

He frowned. “Being so… so…”

He couldn’t find the words. Couldn’t shape them.

But you understood. He could tell, from the gentle look in your eyes.

“I want to get to know you,” you hummed, smiling at him.

He wanted to tell you that was foolish. That you were wasting your time. That he didn’t deserve you. But he had a feeling you would refute all of those points. That you’d smile and tell him that none of those things mattered. You were such a strange human.

“And,” you murmured, looking down at your entwined hands with a touch of red on your cheeks, “this might be selfish of me, but… I want to see you smile.”

And you got stranger. Every time you open your mouth, you would say something so odd. But it’s not unwelcomed.

He thought that you were something like the sun.

You gave off a certain warmth; the type that begot growth. It was a warmth that others could flourish in, that would give them the love and care that they needed. Perhaps this was the closest he would ever come to sunlight again.

Maybe he was ready to welcome the sun.

[limerental]

limerental’s witcher fic masterlist

all of this can be found on my ao3 of the same name but is sometimes nice to have a list on tumblr as well I suppose

yennskier & ot3 fic

the poet’s wish - yennefer/jaskier - 100k, canon divergent, slow burn enemies to lovers mutual pining

The one where Jaskier has a near-death experience, makes a wish, and inexplicably has a lot of amazing but ill-advised sex in a crumbling manor house with a sexy but insane sorceress. And then, keeps on having it. It's almost as if the universe is drawing them ceaselessly back together or something. Which would all be very romantic if not for the fact that they viscerally hate one another. Until, of course, they don't.

lilacs and dandelions - jaskier/yennefer(/geralt), 46.8k, canon divergent, explicit

Geralt seeks out Yennefer only to find her, of all unbelievable and ridiculous things, shacking up with his bard.

other things i’ll never be - geralt/jaskier/yennefer, 23.9k, modern au, everyone is trans,

Yennefer renamed herself when she was fourteen.

Jaskier re-learned his own name and built himself from the ground up and then again and all over again.

Geralt denies and denies and denies.

how long we were fool’d - jaskier/yennefer, aromantic geralt, platonic found family, suburban neighbors au, 9.8k

Yennefer and Jaskier are the eclectic, married couple who have just moved in to an ordinary suburban neighborhood next door to hot, single dad Geralt and his young daughter, Ciri.

Geralt has no idea what to make of them. None at all.

i been in the valley - geralt/yennefer/jaskier, 9.5k, polyamorous triad equestrian au, explicit

Jaskier is the reckless sort of brave that thinks nothing of wearing white breeches on an impromptu trail ride, and Yennefer has clawed her way up from nothing to an esteemed training position at a sprawling equestrian complex. When a mysterious, decidedly attractive stranger with a knack for horsemanship and an unknown backstory arrives one day at the barn, neither is the type to just sit back and let the other seduce him. Competition is what they know best, and Geralt is first prize.

Or the equestrian witcher AU literally no one asked for but that we all deserve.

(don’t) poke the sleeping dragon - geralt/jaskier/yennefer, 7.5k yen drives a wizard van au, pwp/explicit, warnings for drug use & mildly dubious consent

A retelling of Bottled Appetites but everyone is really high at a nerdy music festival and Yennefer has a wizard van for no discernible reason and also Geralt gets pegged.

twas nothing at all - geralt/yennefer/jaskier, 6.1k, pwp/explicit

There once was a succubus, ugly and crass who cast a dark spell on one fine lad and lass But Geralt of Rivia, who saw them enthralled took a cock up his arse like twas nothing at all

lay these things bare - yennefer/jaskier - 4.5k

Jaskier comes to Yennefer to solve a pressing issue.

Yennefer can't help herself from having a bit of fun. Until it's not really all that fun anymore.

Aka Jaskier goes bald and Yen has a crisis and it's somehow very very tender idk

over the edge - jaskier/yennefer, 4.2k, pwp/explicit

Returning from an errand, Yennefer catches Jaskier fucking the innkeeper's wife in her bed. Of course, the only logical thing to do is to join them. It is her bed, after all.

said you’d never smile again - yennefer/jaskier, 2.2k

“If you should ever witness that smile turned your way,” Istredd says, cross-eyed with drunkenness, pointing a sharp finger into Jaskier’s chest. “You will feel like the luckiest man alive. I promise you this. You will be half-ruined for any other. You will wish you could inspire that smile a dozen times over and then some. That she would look at you like that until the end of your days.”

And Jaskier doesn't really get what he means. Until, he does.

you’re not a stranger - yennefer/dandelion, book fic, blood of elves au, 2.2k

Sharing a meal, Yennefer had told the poet ”I know you and like you”, and expressed that strange affection as a show of gratitude for keeping Geralt sane and whole on the Path, but that was not the extent of it, no, not by half.

She had grown fond of him, the utter ignoramus, and equal parts curious. Curious whether she could coax more verse from him on the topic of her power, her heart, her strength, her beauty, and curious also, if the swagger he walked with was well-deserved, if he was as well-endowed in terms of his… talent as he professed in song.

you can sharpen your knife - yennefer/jaskier - 1.8k, pwp/explicit

After an ambush reveals that Jaskier is plenty handy with his little dagger, Yennefer finds herself hot and bothered.

that medicine i need - jaskier & yennefer, 1.6k

A Jaskier who skirts the boundaries of gender helps Yennefer navigate some identity issues of her own.

geraskier fic

long on the road - geralt/jaskier, 80s trucker au, 14.9k, warnings for major character death & depiction of terminal illness/HIV/AIDS

Geralt is a long-haul trucker who has recently broken it off (again) with his ex-wife. Jaskier is a free spirit musician hitchhiking across the country while grappling with a sudden reminder of his mortality. Geralt really, really regrets  picking him up at the last rest area. Until, he doesn’t.

how light carries on - geralt/jaskier, geralt/regis, 9.6k, sequel to long on the road

Jaskier dies in 1990. Geralt lives.

the waters dark and deep - geralt/jaskier, 8.7k, warning for character death

Yennefer wonders if the Witcher bent first to will the ground warm and dry or if he hacked with furious, shuddering blows until the earth fractured and gave way to him. No matter, the grave carved out of the swell of the bluff bears the same dark weight in the end. A little body, withered in age, wrapped in a worn quilt from their bed and swept beneath the soil one broad stroke at a time.

Or, the one where Geralt goes with Jaskier to the coast and spends happily ever after farming by the sea.

you were always gold to me - geralt/jaskier, greenhouse owner!jaskier, ex con!geralt au, 6k, explicit

After spending ten years behind bars for getting caught up in the wrong crowd while trying his hardest to be a worthy father to his little daughter, Geralt takes up a job at a swanky garden center owned by the bubbly and charismatic man of many yellow flower names. They rest, they say, is just gravity.

denial’s not just a river - geralt/jaskier, 3.7k, pwp/explicit

prompt fill for an anon who asked for loss of control/loss of agency in relation to edging/orgasm control/premature ejaculation/omorashi aka it’s geralt piss fic, babes

to pull me from myself again - geralt/jaskier - 1.8k, role reversal, bard!geralt & witcher!jaskier

“You could be my barker!” the Witcher exclaimed in a fit of wide-armed inspiration on the brown road. “You sir, seem in want of a muse, and I am chock full of musings. Full to the brim.”

“Full of something,” said Geralt, hands tight on the strap of his lute case, and Jaskier barked out a surprised laugh. Or at least, Geralt thought it was a laugh.

It twisted gutturally in his throat.

other fic

hands on my waist, do it softly - geralt/jaskier/eskel - 6.7k, fem!jaskier/witchergender fem-bodied witchers, pwp/explicit

 She had thought their ilk did not usually travel in pairs, but there they were, two great, hulking shapes in the rough-hewn doorway of the tavern.

Or: fem!Jaskier gets sandwiched between two beefy lady Witchers

blood of the covenant, water of the womb - geralt & renfri, 2.7k, warnings for imagined rape/non-con, gore, body horror

“Spoken like the beast the world will believe you to be. But we both know you’re no beast, my dear. Simply a victim of circumstance, as I was. No beast at all.”

“Quit blabbering,” said Geralt. “Let me guess. Find a way to lift the curse, and you sway the masses in my favor.”

Stregobor’s pleasant smile deepened his rosy cheeks.

“No, no, I know how to end my affliction. Now that you are here, it will not be long.”

respite - yen/vesemir, 1.8k

Vesemir is old. Yennefer allows him small moments of rest.

swallow - geralt/yen, geralt & ciri - 1.3k, character study, gore

May he rot to make earth. May he nourish one small patch of soil, one tuft of grass. That’s where he’ll retire, in the gut of a carrion bird. Vulture shit. A fitting tribute. All the memorial he’s ever going to get.

[davidmann95]

Superman’s 10 Best of the ‘10s

Good Miracle Monday, folks! The first third Monday of May of a new decade for that matter, and while that means that today in the DC Universe Superman just revealed his secret identity to the world on the latest anniversary of that time he defeated the devil, in ours it puts a capstone on a solid 10 years of his adventures now in the rear view mirror, ripe for reevaluation. And given there’s a nice solid ‘10′ right there I’ll go ahead with the obvious and list my own top ten for Superman comics of the past decade, with links in the titles to those I’ve spoken on in depth before - maybe you’ll find something you overlooked, or at least be reminded of good times.

A plethora of honorable mentions: I’m disqualifying team-ups or analogue character stories, but no list of the great Superman material of the last decade would be complete without bringing up Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye #7, Avengers 34.1, Irredeemable, Sideways Annual #1, Supreme: Blue Rose, Justice League: Sixth Dimension, usage of him in Wonder Twins, (somewhat in spite of itself) Superior, from all I’ve heard New Super-Man, DCeased #5, and Batman: Super Friends. And while they couldn’t quite squeeze in, all due praise to the largely entertaining Superman: Unchained, the decades’ great Luthor epic in Superman: The Black Ring, a brilliant accompaniment to Scott Snyder’s work with Lex in Lex Luthor: Year of the Villain, the bonkers joy of the Superman/Luthor feature in Walmart’s Crisis On Infinite Earths tie-in comics, Geoff Johns and John Romita’s last-minute win in their Superman run with their final story 24 Hours, Tom Taylor’s quiet criticism of the very premise he was working with on Injustice and bitter reflection on the changing tides for the character in The Man of Yesterday, the decades’ most consistent Superman ongoing in Bryan Miller and company’s Smallville Season 11, and Superman: American Alien, which probably would have made the top ten but has been dropped like a hot potato by one and all for Reasons. In addition are several stories from Adventures of Superman, a book with enough winners to merit a class of its own: Rob Williams and Chris Weston’s thoughtful Savior, Kyle Killen and Pia Guerra’s haunting The Way These Things Begin, Marc Guggenheim and Joe Bennett’s heart-wrenching Tears For Krypton, Christos Gage and Eduardo Francisco’s melancholy Flowers For Bizarro, Josh Elder and Victor Ibanez’s deeply sappy but deeply effective Dear Superman, Ron Marz and Doc Shaner’s crowdpleasing Only Child, and Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine DeLandro’s super-sweet Mystery Box.

10. Greg Pak/Aaron Kuder’s Action Comics

Oh, what might’ve been. In spite of an all-timer creative team I can’t justify listing this run any higher given how profoundly and comprehensively compromised it is, from the status quo it was working with to the litany of ill-conceived crossovers to regular filler artists to its ignominious non-ending. But with the most visceral, dynamic, and truly humane take on Clark Kent perhaps of all time that still lives up to all Superman entails, and an indisputably iconic instant-classic moment to its name, I can’t justify excluding it either.

9. Action Comics #1000

Arguably the climax to the decade for the character as his original title became the first superhero comic to reach a 1000th issue. While any anthology of this sort is a crapshoot by nature, everyone involved here seemed to understand the enormity of the occasion and stepped up as best they could; while the lack of a Lois Lane story is indefensible, some are inevitably bland, and one or two are more than a bit bizarre, by and large this was a thoroughly charming tribute to the character and his history with a handful of legitimate all-timer short stories.

8. Faster Than A Bullet

Much as Adventures of Superman was rightfully considered an oasis amidst the New 52′s worst excesses post-Morrison and in part pre-Pak, few stories from it seem well-remembered now, and even at the time this third issue inexplicably seemed to draw little attention. Regardless, Matt Kindt and Stephen Segovia’s depiction of an hour in the life of Superman as he saves four planets first thing in the morning without anyone noticing - while clumsy in its efforts at paralleling the main events with a literal subplot of a conversation between Lois and Lex - is one of the best takes I can recall on the scope on which he operates, and ultimately the purpose of Clark Kent.

7. Man and Superman

Seemingly geared on every front against me, built as it was on several ideas of how to handle Superman’s origin I legitimately hate, and by a writer whose work over the years has rarely been to my liking, Marv Wolfman and Claudio Castellini’s Man and Superman somehow came out of nowhere to be one of my favorite takes on Clark Kent’s early days. With a Metropolis and characters within it that feel not only alive but lived-in, it’s shocking that a story written and drawn over ten years before it was actually published prefigured so many future approaches to its subject, and felt so of-the-moment in its depiction of a 20-something scrambling to figure out how to squeeze into his niche in the world when it actually reached stores.

6. Brian Bendis’s run

Controversial in the extreme, and indeed heir to several of Brian Bendis’s longstanding weaknesses as a writer, his work on The Man of Steel, Superman, and Action Comics has nevertheless been defined at least as much by its ambition and intuitive grasp of its lead, as well as fistfuls of some of the best artistic accompaniment in the industry. At turns bombastic space action, disaster flick, spy-fi, oddball crime serial, and family drama, its assorted diversions and legitimate attempts at shaking up the formula - or driving it into new territory altogether, as in the latest, apparently more longterm-minded unmasking of Clark Kent in Truth - have remained anchored and made palatable by an understanding of Superman’s voice, insecurities, and convictions that go virtually unmatched.

5. Strange Visitor

The boldest, most out-of-left-field Superman comic of the past 10 years, Joe Keatinge took the logline of Adventures of Superman to do whatever creators wanted with the character and, rather than getting back to a classic take absent from the mainline titles at the time as most others did, used the opportunity for a wildly expansive exploration of the hero from his second year in action to his far-distant final adventure. Alongside a murderer’s row of artists, Keatinge pulled off one of the few comics purely about how great Superman is that rather than falling prey to hollow self-indulgence actually managed to capture the wonder of its subject.

4. Superman: Up In The Sky

And here’s the other big “Superman’s just the best” comic the decade had to offer that actually pulled it off. Sadly if reasonably best-known for its one true misfire of a chapter, with the increasing antipathy towards Tom King among fans in general likely not helping, what ended up overlooked is that this is a stone-cold classic on moment of arrival. Andy Kubert turns in work that stands alongside the best of his career, Tom King’s style is honed to its cleanest edge by the 12-pager format and subject matter, and the quest they set their lead out on ends up a perfect vehicle to explore Superman’s drive to save others from a multitude of angles. I don’t know what its reputation will end up being in the long-term - I was struck how prosaic and subdued the back cover description was when I got this in hardcover, without any of the fanfare or critic quotes you’d expect from the writer of Mister Miracle and Vision tackling Superman - but while its one big problem prevents me from ranking it higher, this is going to remain an all-timer for me.

3. Jeff Loveness’s stories Help and Glasses

Cheating shamelessly here, but Jeff Loveness’s Help with David Williams and Glasses with Tom Grummett are absolutely two halves of the same coin, a pair of theses on Superman’s enduring relevance as a figure of hope and the core of Lois and Clark’s relationship that end up covering both sides of Superman the icon and Superman the guy. While basically illustrated essays, any sense of detached lecturing is utterly forbidden by the raw emotion on display here that instantly made them some of the most acclaimed Superman stories of the last several years; they’re basically guaranteed to remain in ‘best-of’ collections from now until the end of time.

2. Superman Smashes The Klan

A bitter race for the top spot, but #2 is no shame here; while not quite my favorite Superman story of the past ten years, it’s probably the most perfectly executed. While I don’t think anyone could have quite expected just *how* relevant this would be at the top of the decade, Gene Yang and Gurihiru put together an adventure in the best tradition of the Fleischer shorts and the occasional bystander-centered episodes of Batman: The Animated Series to explore racism’s both overt and subtle infections of society’s norms and institutions, the immigrant experience, and both of its leads’ senses of alienation and justice. Exciting, stirring, and insightful, it’s debuted to largely universal acknowledgement as being the best Superman story in years, and hopefully it’ll be continued to be marketed as such long-term.

1. Grant Morrison’s Action Comics

When it came time to make the hard choice, it came in no small part down to that I don’t think we would have ever seen a major Golden Age Superman revival project like Smashes The Klan in the first place if not for this. Even hampering by that godawful Jim Lee armor, inconsistent (if still generally very good) art, and a fandom that largely misunderstood it on arrival can’t detract from that this is Grant Morrison’s run on a Superman ongoing, a journey through Superman’s development as a character reframed as a coherent arc that takes him from Metropolis’s most beaten-down neighborhoods to the edge of the fifth dimension and the monstrous outermost limits of ‘Superman’ as a concept. It launched discussions of Superman as a corporate icon and his place relative to authority structures that have never entirely vanished, introduced multiple all-time great new villains, and made ‘t-shirt Superman’ a distinct era and mode of operation for the character that I’m skeptical will ever entirely go away. No other work on the character this decade had the bombast, scope, complexity, or ambition of this run, with few able to match its charm or heart. And once again, it was, cannot stress this enough, Grant Morrison on an ongoing Superman book.

[teruthecreator]

smile for me characters put with the tma entities i think fit their character the most (even tho i’ve never listened to a second of tma and got all of my current knowledge from my girlfriend, who also got me into sfm)

I’m mostly gonna be focusing on the adults and important charas because the idea of labeling any child as The Slaughter or The End feels vastly Yikes to me

also spoiler warning for tma (if i manage to include any) and just a general trigger warning for talk about all sorts of fears (fear of the dark, spiders, body horror, etc.) if tma-talk has ever made you feel uncomfortable (as it has me, and is completely valid) then just breeze on past this post, folks. 

dr. habit: The Spiral FOR SURE!!!!! i know with all the teeth-pulling and body horror-type stuff he’d be more fitting for the flesh but just Think About It. the way he acts?? the way he depicts himself in the art all across the Habitat?? how he is specifically pumping gas into the air that like alters your mind and blurs your vision?? the psa’s?? i know he never talks about doors, but it just feels very michael spiral to me!!! or is it called the distortion??? idk but he’s spiralin! (also i’d say his proportions already feel spiral-esque so you might as well lean into the madness babey!!) 

kamal: THE LONELYYYYYY. this guy SAD. he literally sits in a locked rooftop balcony space for like 75% of the game. and the first sprite you see of him is just him curled up on the bench. that’s lonely vibes right there, no doubt! also, i’ve seen people draw like, concepts for his collage head (since you can’t get him in the collage ending) and they’ve drawn it as a cloud. clouds??? all that fog, vape-juice in the lonely??? it fits!! 

flower kid: honestly, because their character is left so purposely-blank, it’s kinda hard to say. but for most like, ambiguous main charas i’d say their vibe leans closest to The Eye. not because flower kid in any way seems to have a desire to know all, but as the vessel for the player there is a sort of push to know everything. also, flower kid just ends up getting everyone’s traumatic backstories/personal problems anyway?? which if they were aligned with the eye, that’s like...what it’s all about! 

wallus: The Stranger. i can’t really justify this one other than he just stays in the wall the entire time without ever bothering to know who’s speaking to him through the hole, and idk that feels...stranger to me. i just realized how hard this list is going to be. 

parsley: The Flesh. idk i just think about, like, the meat aspect of it??? and the fact that parsley never gets a real meal and will eat just about anything??? that’s all i can say

trencil: The Vast is, like, the closest i feel like i can get to “the fear that your daughter doesn’t love you and will never love you because you’re a centuries-old vampire and she’s a 13-year-old girl”. like the sort of insignificance to that is vast-like 

jimothan: The Hunt. i think about jimothan becoming a big dog and i think “yes, this feels right”. this is my only explanation. 

tiff: The Web. i’m saying this because her quest seems entirely based around getting herself out of manipulation (not that a contract is manipulating, it’s just the closest connection i can make with my brain running at low-battery), and also because i think the spider aesthetic would like Hella Nice with her style and sprite. i would like one cool singing spider lady, please! 

borbra: The Buried. maybe this isn’t a grouping of her, more-so of her bird that literally burrows into the ground the second you get near it and was the bane of my existence for over twenty-five minutes when i played through the game myself. that irritating need to claw my skin off when i was trying to catch that bird is the exact feeling i’d have if i was trapped in a small space, and i’m saying borbra did that to me. 

lulia: The Lonely, of course! without a doubt! look at how sad her sprite is! and how often she bemoans being alone! need i say more! this is correct! yes! it is! 

jerafina: The Vast??? maybe??? she seems like she’s too busy being out for a good time to be worried about her place on the planet, but idk i feel like she’s hiding something under that carefree facade and my gut is saying It’s This

questionette: The Spiral. i do not understand her and i don’t think she wants me to. you get it, spiral lady. 

marv: The Dark. water can get deep and dark, and he seems to not mind that one bit! also you need to get the security cam to be dark in order to get his fish, which feels pretty much like an admittance to this entity! 

mirphy: The Eye, only because i feel like as a photographer she’s gonna see All anyway, so might as well give the entity some extra knowing-snacks, yknow??? 

dallas: The Vast. his mid-game struggle with trying to find a muse and find someone who would enjoy his work sounds like an attempt to try and ground himself in reality, and that dissociation goes right to The Vast, my guy!!! yell heah!!

randy: The Corruption only because i feel like the pickle-scent gives me the same visceral reaction that i would if a bug was crawling on my skin, and he definitely doesn’t mind that at all if he doesn’t mind be permanently soaked in pickle juice. you do you, my man, but that’s why you’re gettin corrupted

gillis: i wanna sort of play off his toughness and say the slaughter, but it doesn’t feel right for the wholeness of his character, so i’m gonna go with The Dark. this one i can’t articulate why, but it just feels better than the slaughter so i’m going to go with it. 

this was very hard given i have only about a month and a half’s worth of knowledge of either of these franchises, and i’ve been staring at the tma entity wiki for the past 45 minutes. so please smash like, hit subscribe, comment with your favs, and i’ll see y’all next week 

[keepyourpantsongohan]

Ayesha Liveblogs Cardcaptor Sakura S1

For faithfulness reasons, I’ll forgo rewatching in English even though I’m Jared 19 and never learned how to read 

I will say the original English dub had a BANGER of a theme song and I do miss that

"I’m a Fourth Grader at Tomoeda Elementary” I know I watched this like when I was age 7 or smth but SHE’S LIKE 10?? OH MY GOD who is letting this ten-year-old roam the streets

“I’m gonna stomp on him” [Lucille Bluth voice] good for her

I fully forgot Sakura had a dad I was ready to accept her Grade 11 brother raising her

Sakura’s roller blades give me visceral memories of my barbie skates

Lmao is Yuki’s ability to throw a piece of candy at a child from a moving bicycle backwards foreshadowing his superhero abilities

Okay having checked this scene in both English versions and Japanese, my opinion no one asked for: the Aminax version is bad voices on all counts, Japanese has a better voice for Toya and original English dub has a better voice for Sakura and Yukito (who they called Julian lmao) I am not accepting constructive criticism 

Tomoyo and Sakura sound so similar I could not even tell that Tomoyo was speaking omg

“There isn’t anything cuter or more interesting than you Sakura-chan” Tomoyo is really honest with her feelings I guess ten-year-olds be like that sometimes

“Is someone there” home invasions are what happens when you don’t lock your front door

This is not a study lmao this is a personal library there is hardly a workspace just aisles of shelves

Oh shit The Clow WIND RAIN SHADOW WOOD SWORD POWER THUNDER SLEEP CARD CAPTORS OF THE CLOW EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED NOW

Wait if this is hanging out in her dad’s study was her dad the last Cardcaptor lmao

Or probs her mom, since she’s gone the way of all anime moms

Sakura is accepting this whole “tiny magical flying lion” thing p well

“I accidentally fell asleep” “For how long” “30 years” same

“Stand right over there” Kerberos does not ask permission before magical girl transforming you lmao

“Why are you acting so wimpy” bc she’s 10 and you’re asking her to fight a giant ghost bird???

Honestly I love a good quest-to-collect-important-items maybe Inuyasha and DBZ ruined my taste but it’s a great formula 

“You’ll be a better adult if you have all sorts of experiences in your life” r u going to take career counselling advice from a tiny flying lion Sakura

I do kind of miss Kero’s slightly unhinged young man energy

I like that whenever Sakura’s brother is rude she steps on his foot or kicks him fkjhjgkh excellent little sister depiction

I was expecting more secrecy but it is very funny to see Tomoyo try to convince her friend to be a superhero

“Do a flashy one” kfhkjdhkj Kero supports the use of magic powers for showing off

“Trademark poses and skills are the basic parts of being a magical girl” oh my gooood

I mean if I walked into my school and there was a mountain of haphazard desks waiting there I too would be threatened 

Sakura is the only one in this group who has a reasonable understanding of what ten-year-olds should be allowed to do

LMAO @ Tomoyo’s team of bodyguards dropping her off to break into the school ONLY TO DRIVE AWAY

Tomoyo and Kero’s friendship is killing me the SHENANIGANS

I’m not sure I accept this light logic bc you need light to cast a shadow

Sakura’s “heart-racing first date” ur TEN oh my god

I mean it’s nice that Sakura wants to save the penguin but why did it take that for her to get upset it was going to drown a whole adult woman

Did Toya just RIP APART a WHIRLPOOL with his BARE HANDS

I wonder how Toya feels that his little sister has a crush on his boyfriend lmao

This cell phone is really top of the line for 1999 lmao I love it 

U know if I were a high school student and my friend asked my 10 year old sibling out to lunch instead of me I’d be confused

"They’re not even gonna hold hands? Kids these days” This is a VERY weird vibe for an episode

You know I guess if you never watch the second episode you never have context for all of these superhero outfits LMAO

None of these locations have security cameras I guess the 1990s was a lawless time

Will all of Yuki’s magical advice be delivered in the form of mysterious field trips

LMAO @ YUKITO ALWAYS TAKING SAKURA TO TOYA’S TEMP JOBS

Say what you will about the ominous influence of the other card, I think Wood is being fairly polite since it’s contorting around her house instead of destroying it lmao

“I was planning to film ‘Sakura Dances in the Jungle’ in the park today” I love Tomoyo 

Every little girl in this show sounds so similar lmao this is not good for my distracted watching style 

Wow Ms Maki is really unloading on these two fourth grade girls 

Since Tomoyo clearly interacts with even the more spirit-like Clow Cards I really have to wonder why no one else in this town is seeing these giant ghost monsters loom around the city

Well I guess this episode is a direct response to my previous comment 

“I can’t stand scary stories” says the girl who spends her nights going into isolated areas and fighting magical ghosts

Seeing Sakura activate her Fly card really gives me overwhelming nostalgia for the days I wanted nothing more than to be a Cardcaptor I used to wave around a toy broom like that magic key ahhhhhhhh

In the absence of the first English voice and with the added gentle Japanese intonation for his speaking, I am constantly forgetting that Yukito’s character is a 16-year-old boy 

Toya is really casually bomb-dropping the fact that he used to see ghosts and Yuki’s just like ‘dope are there ghosts around now’

Omg Kero’s sad face as he dropped the flower in Sakura’s lap 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

“I want to see if she wants to tell me something” like maybe ‘don’t run around town at night chasing ghosts ur 10!!!’ 

UHHHH AGAIN TOYA REAL CASUAL ABOUT THE GHOST THING 

Yukito Tsukishiro: Chronic Aid-er and Abet-er of Pre-teen Mischief 

Also if I’m right his name means something like “Ice White Moon?” Very heavy-handed foreshadowing lmao

“After we left, I went to the museum again and borrowed one” TOMOYO U CASED THE JOINT KJDHFKJHF

WHY IS EVERY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL KID IN THIS TOWN ABLE TO BREAK INTO THIS MUSEUM SO EASILY

Tomoyo is eerily well-prepared for this mission it’s like she has been planning to burgle a museum all her life

They really made an executive choice to have both a Yuuki and a Yuki that was a decision that someone made

Oh hey it’s the other pre-teen supehero!!! That guy!!

The more I think about it, the stranger the height difference between Sakura and her brother becomes bc compared to him she’s really like 2.5 feet tall they did not pick a proportion scale

U see this what I mean by gentle intonation, Syaoran somehow sounds older than Yuki simple by roughness of voice

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH TOYA U DEFEND UR SISTER

“Here, a steamed pork bun” Yuki sure nows how to de-escalate lmao 

“That is made out of an insulator as well” Tomoyo is really prepared for any and every situation

It’s not fair of Li to compare what is probably years of magical training from his family to ‘trial by fire for eight weeks with a plush toy who doesn’t explain anything important until critical moments’

I’m really not sure what’s happening with Rika and the teacher but I DON’T LIKE IT

“I just want to be with you as long as possible” [cut to floral pattern] Tomoyo is aiming to supersede Yuki as Gentle Shojo Protagonist Sakura Fixates On looool

I’m sure there’s NOTHING significant about this familiar-looking sword brooch

Kero biting Li whenever whenever he says something rude to Sakura kghkjghk direct feminist action

What IS THIS business with Li running away flustered like that are pre-teen Cardcaptors ONLY allowed to have a crush on Yukito

“I guess I’ll have to beat him up once” Toya has zero qualms about fighting a ten-year-old

Two fourth graders giving Yukito chocolate while he peacefully hangs out with his boyfriend is the funniest version of executing this weirdness that could happen

What I’m really wondering is how the hell they cut out or explained away Li’s crush in the first English anime

“You were just a fledgling teacher and you married one of your [high school] students!!” u did WHAT what the FUCK MR. KINOMOTO I’m on Sonomi’s side

“Mother got married when she was 16″ MR. KINOMOTO CANCELLED! BANNED! THE HELL IS THIS!

“It was I who was granted time with Nadeshiko from her 16th to 27th birthdays” GO 2 JAIL DO NOT PASS GO 

This episode has added a lot of layers to this show none of which I like

“What kind of person was my dad” someone who should be banned from teaching

“Your father is a disgusting person” WELL

SONOMI I KNOW UR TRYING TO BE NICE BUT HE HAS AT LEAST ONE MAJOR FLAW

Lmao they’re not even giving context why Yuki is around anymore he’s just an accepted artifact of the Kinomoto household

How is that the Time card is Li’s but not Thunder since he also returned that one to its original form

“Their fastest confirmed speed is over 100km/h” Yamazaki leave Li alone he just wants to adore the sloths jhfkhgjhgkhg

Ahhhhhh Li helping Sakura get the Power card?? These motives are quite hard to read but it seems sweet

OMGGG @ TOMOYO MAKING SAKURA DEADLIFT A PLAYGROUND

“I heard a rumour that everyone who asked Kinomoto out has been denied.” Well. [x]

“It’s one of the seven strangest things at this school, that both Kinomoto and Tsukishiro don’t have girlfriends.” WELL. [x]

AWWWWW YUKI DOESN’T LEAVE THE OTHER PRE-TEEN FAN CLUB MEMBERS OUT OF HIS KIND GESTURES

[Hannibal Buress voice] I was so caught up in euphoria of festival arcs, that for like a minute I lived in a world where the rest of this anime didn’t exist 

TOYA BEING THE STAR OF DRAG CINDERELLA... OP UR MIND

I have no idea what the premise of the next Clow Card is but I really hope it’s “turn u into whatever ur acting as” bc I will LOSE my mind

I have not heard Yuki once intone as passionately as he did when he thought Toya was going to fall 

“You like someone else” 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

“I didn’t promise anyone else a dance” Can I just say I LOVE TOYA?

The moment of stillness before Yukito revealed who he was asking to dance lmao... the repressed teenage wlw inside me LIVES

Yuki and Toya tag-teaming as the Sakura Support Team my heart!!

Geolocating someone from a fax... the incredible 90sness of this act....

I seriously don’t understand this world in which you leave 5- and 10-year-olds unattended for hours where are your child welfare laws

I am really choosing to ignore how absolutely bananas the concept of Tomoyo having a hidden Sakura Movie Theatre is

Speaking of weird, are we just trusting that this old man is normal? Is everyone doing that? I’m still not ready to trust yet the Sakura’s dad situation really burned me

“Girls look their best when they smile” a sweet thought that would not fly if an old man I just met told me that lmao

I’m REALLY not trusting this old man dressing up this girl in his dead (missing?) granddaughter’s clothes and staring broodily when she mentions there is a parent with her

“My great-granddaughter seemed happy” YOUR WHAT NOW 

Their school trips seem much more fun than ours were we never went to the beach or fishing or got disappeared briefly in a cave

It continues to be funny how Sakura and Li have 0% tension re: Clow Cards, 99% tension re: Yukito who is already in a committed Something or the Other with Sakura’s brother

“Why were you on the roof” “Because it’s nice out today” LOL YUKITO

There’s no rhyme or reason to these card types huh some are like “I will destroy an entire zoo for fun” and other ones are like “mood lighting :)”

Sakura really isn’t out here to teach us any lessons lol it’s really a ‘get others to do your homework if you can get away with it’ episode

Rounding out the triad of superpowered pre-teens with Meilin I suppose

“Syaoran is my fiance” I have had it up to HERE with this anime cousinfuckery I don’t CARE if it’s cool in Japan or Hong Kong or whatever STOP BEING WEIRD WITH YOUR COUSINS

Poor Syaoran he was doing so well with getting along with Sakura until Meilin got here

"It was done by a girl again?” Oh my god is Meilin beating up grown men in parks for street cred

“It seems our relationship chart has gotten rather complicated” Tomoyo probably means astrology chart but here’s my understanding so far:

Speaking of complex relationships I wonder how Meilin will react to Syaoran’s crush on Yuki

This rivalry between Sakura and Meilin could not be more one-sided

I really was wondering for a second if the card was going to split in half

I love the vibe of Sakura and Toya teaming up to help their creepy dad but even MORE SO I love that Yukito is In This Household

“The contents are already up here” This episode really doesn’t hit the same way now that cloud storage exists and also what were all those floppy disks for if not to save your work Mr. Kinomoto

I love that Tomoyo always pulls her weight in her superhero sidekick role like she is here to support and help whenever needed 

Sakura using her powers to impress her crush with a ghost duet lmao these priorities 

“Sakura’s Little Adventure” I see what u did there

Kero’s little shoulder pat with his paw to let Sakura know he’s there aw

Omg this Clow Card is so cute “Is it your fault I’m so small now?” [nods pleasantly]

It is very bold of Sakura to be doing magic so casually when her brother and Yuki are right downstairs 

I like that this show recognizes the inherent intimacy of allowing someone to cut your hair

“Information about you has gotten around to the cards” well this is an ominous start to this funky tarot reading

Well the experience of seeing his little sister try to murder him has got to be traumatizing for Toya I hope he doesn’t remember this

UMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM DID TOYA JUST FALL OFF OF A CLIFF

“Can you give me a break... and stop looking like Sakura” EXCUSE ME

“My mom’s up there too, so say hi to her for me” OH MY GOOOOD TOYA REALLY DOES SEE GHOSTS AHHHHHHHHHHH

WAIT SO IT WAS A CLOW CARD DOES TOYA HAVE MAGICAL POWERS TOO

Omg @ Toya feeding Yuki from his bed this really is an intimate episode

I kind of appreciate the slow build of this show like it took them 25 episodes to introduce meaningful stakes

“But it might be tougher than the earth going ‘boom!’ Depending on who you are...” Well hello threatening figure in sunglasses standing outside Sakura’s house what’s up

“I’ll look the other way” Ms Mizuki is literally this meme:

I can only assume that if Toya knows Ms. Mizuki then she must be a ghost

Personally if Mizuki gives Syaoran the heebie jeebies I trust his instincts

“Um... do you like Yukito too?” Oh my goooood they’re sincerely discussing being Not Straight in middle school in this 90s anime that I watched when I was 7 I cannot believe

“And it’s been a year since you told me you loved me here” WHY DOES EVERYONE IN THIS FAMILY WANT TO DATE SOMEONE TOO OLD FOR THEM WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING DATING SOMEONE TOYA’S AGE MIZUKI

Also I have to rethink every thought I had about Toya being gay. I mean bi is great too but my thoughts..... racing...........

“Because the next time I see you, you’ll have someone else that you’ll be in love with” Yukito BF confirmed but oh my GOD this relationship chart IS complicated good lord

If there’s anything the episode “Sakura and Her Shrine of Memories” has taught me it’s that everyone in this show is bisexual and all teachers in their neighbourhood should be in jail

I understand that Meilin is a kid but poor Syaoran he is constantly being harassed 

I love Yuki’s bottomless stomach lmao

Syaoran and Sakura have such a genuinely supportive relationship but it is very funny how they try simultaneously to get Yuki’s attention with the exact same words

“I’ve been thinking for a while that Mr. Terada is a lot like my dad” oh thank you Rika for someone finally being normal in this show

“Well it’s a harmless one” You see this is what I mean the dichotomy of Clow Cards is like... “I’m going trap you in a maze until you perish” or “I’m gonna give you a sugar rush :]”

I like that Sakura and Syaoran are starting to partner up as a duo on purpose like yessss I love a 1-2 finish and friendship development

Ahhh poor Syaoran he’s realizing that Yukito’s #1 in his life is the Kinomoto fam

We’re all familiar with the eternal struggle of whether using ur superpowers for school sports is cheating 

AWWW SYAORAN USING HIS POWERS FOR MAGICAL PEP TALKS AFTER HE HELPED TURN REI’S PET FOX INTO A POKEMON CARD THAT’S MY BOOOOY

“I will stomp on him” it’s been 31 episodes let Sakura stomp on her brother

Oh my GOOOD does this Big card mean that Sakura WILL FINALLY STOMP ON TOYA LMAO

Ur telling me that no one else in this ENTIRE TOWN notices this altercation of a giant preteen vs a dragon

Why does the logic for how voices travel based on size apply for the Little card (when Toya was speaking) and not for the Big card (when Sakura is speaking)

Sgskdhgkhkgjh honestly body switching as a trope will never not be funny

Syaoran blushing and running away from Sakura oh how the turn tables

Every domestic scene that Yuki and Toya have adds ten years to my life we love some gay/bi teens about to be gay/bi adults

Ffskhhfkj I absolutely cannot relate to this Southern Hemisphere nonsense of finding ten degrees celsius arctic cold like BRO that is a normal spring day here

“We’re not frozen because we have magical powers” I know that cutaway was to confirm Mizuki’s magical powers again but this would’ve been a hilarious time to reveal that like Yamazaki the Compulsively Lying Classmate had powers

Awwww he likes her now that’s cute 

“I got work that day” I will bet someone ten dollars that Toya is working at that quiz rally

Update from 5 minutes later: PAYPAL ME $10

Kero keeps whispering to the moon when in fact some iteration of the moon is right around the corner (literally)

GOOOOOOOOD SYAORAN REALIZING HE HAS A CRUSH ON BOTH HALVES OF THAT TEAM KILLS ME SWEET BOY

Shared Gaze of People Who Have Dated* Toya and Have Magical Powers They Haven’t Revealed Yet

*Go to jail Mizuki

I am really going crazy wondering when they’re gonna reveal stuff about Yukito like bitchhhhhhh I know you’re a moon man when will u tellll usss

How many more times will Sakura have this same threatening dream before she realizes her math teacher is probably going to try to kill her

Update from one minute later: I guess it was exactly one more time

“That’s right, Yukito’s birthday is on Christmas day” is this coming to be a coming of age where he like suddenly sprouts wings at age 17

I’ve been thinking this for a while but this show makes it seem like Japan has a much more fun approach to athletics than my school experiences

Yukito really is unflappable about hanging out with a bunch of kids half his height huh he’s like the Fourth Grader Whisperer

I KNEW IT YUKITO NEVER GOES WITH SAKURA ANYWHERE UNLESS HER BROTHER WILL ALSO BE WORKING THERE DFHKDFHKJ every time it’s just “Hey Toya :)”

“This kid...” HAHAH TOYA HAS JUST REALIZED THAT SYAORAN HAS A CRUSH ON HIS LITTLE SISTER AND HIS BOYFRIEND THE UTTER SUSPICION IN HIS TONE

“Wind become a binding chain” Whoops Sakura foiled by 4th grade knowledge of the elements

Oh shiiiit love a world-building moment now we have two card combos in play ayyyyy

Lmao @ Kero using his returned powers immediately for fireworks mood lighting is a serious Clow Card priority

“I would like to come again this year” everything in this show feels like foreshadowing for dramatic irony

[ala-mhinyan]

XVIII :: Wilt

{{ Feat Mentions: The entire Pack, Past Lovers and friends. Too many to tag. }} {{ TW: Body Horror, Gore, Mentions of Child Sexual Abuse, Physical Abuse, Mentions of Adult Sexual Abuse and Detailed Character Death }}

The events depicted are one of the possible realities that COULD happen to C’arha and are not canon as of this moment. They may never be. We don’t know.

Please do not read this if visceral gore or the above skeeve you out! C’arha’s backstory is long, heart breaking and ugly. Read at your own risk!

The desert sand burns hot across her tanned skin, roused awake from her half conscious slumber against burning stone where no one can reach her. The Arms of Meed have always been a safe haven for those seeking religious refuge while the ever present eye of the Destroyer watches overhead. It has always been a place she can go where no one will find her--No one would try to. The Peaks is too big of a cemetery to find a patch of flowers wilting in the drought.

When you leave this world, what legacy will you leave behind?

The words roll around in the back of her barely conscious mind, haunting her dreams and creeping around the edges of her very awareness despite the shrouded veil she flings at it to force the distance. They remind her of her failures as a person--how in every avenue of her being there is but naught a thing she has left behind that they will remember her by. No songs. Ghosting memories of dances performed in the highlight of her joy. Her flowers will shrivel and perish without tending to. The ink she used to write her letters will fade. There will be nothing left of her to remind them that she existed but the lingering smell of fire and flowers.

Hot tears rush to her hazed eyes, falling freely and dripping onto sizzling stone beneath her head. She’s too tired to move into the peace and relief that is offered just ilms behind her in the form of a knotted tree that looms over most of the remaining structure. Light filters between lashes and blinds her no matter what direction she tries to turn her head. There is no escape from it.

Panic settles deep in her chest, curling up her throat and expelled in the form of a sob.

“Sen--i…”

He cannot find you. No one can.

Fear. Panic. Relief.

It tangles together into a motley that she gives the last of her strength to battle down, to push away and down. So she can rest. So she can recover.

The reaction is instantaneous; those feelings of fear, panic, elation, confusion, regret, resentment and rage manifesting itself within her breast. The sensation is hot and sharp, spreading throughout her body like a flash flood and bursting from her flesh like lightning. Skin cracks, splitting--vines that twist and curl around limbs to encompass her in a tomb of her own making. She wants to scream but its stolen from her, throat filled with the prickle of brambles as stalks bloom beautifully from the shape of her terror stricken maw. Blood fills her jaws in the spaces between the leaves and the flutter of petals too pristine to have been grown in a garden untended by human hands.

It hurts.

Flower buds flood from the holes in her nose, from the fluff within her ears, under her fingernails, out of every open cut or scrape she’s garnered over the past month. She tries to breathe in, to counter the pain by breathing through it and it only causes the blooms to accelerate their escape from their prison. Ocean waves of regret crash against her lungs, the useless flailing of too tired limbs that try to pull the flowers out from her throat getting forces aside by the sheer magnitude of how much that flows forth. A cold truth settles over her consciousness and she resigns herself to relax as much as she can while the inevitable continues on.

Within her mind she walks the path of her life; she remembers playing in the tribe on dusty rugs with sticks and rocks as if that where the best thing she’d ever done. She remembers the first kiss she shared with C’mune under the persimmon tree when she thought no one was watching. She remembers the first time C’tolemy called her princess and when he was brought into their home, the silent promise they made to each other under the light of the moon. The memory of the quiet night that Garleans burned the only place she had ever known to be home flitters around her as a butterfly just out of reach, it’s wings retelling the exact moment the gunblade slipped through her father’s neck and his blood splattered across her face--the weight of his own skull tearing the rest of the connected skin as his head falls to her feet. She remembers being taken on her mother’s bed by men twice or even three times her age who held the older woman tied by the wrist to watch them defile her daughter, the bodies of her eldest and middle son lying just arms length away.

The glass of her mindscape shatters, the shard ripping through flesh and spilling blood across her beautiful skin. She can only look down at herself with vacant eyes, the pain dulled to almost a whisper that licks at the back of her neck. A hand pushes aside the remaining glass, cutting cleanly through tendons until it carves against bone--then everything is lighter. She pays it no mind. She knows her fingers are gone.

The crack of her jaw brings her back from the memories, feeling the sudden pop as it dislocates and the flesh pulled as her lips split at the seams--pulled and pushed by the unrelenting pressure of the growing flowers. She cannot feel her hands or legs anymore but she can vaguely tell that they don’t belong to her any longer--that her belly is bloated and dissented until it pops like a balloon. Her innards grow thousands of holes in seconds, the bloom of stalks and flower buds growing from the blood within them into the most beautiful of deep red roses. Her lungs fill with flower petals. Her heart slows and slows and slows with the ever looming threat of her soon to be end. She closes her eyes and falls back into her mindscape.

Her disfigured body limps along the path, a steady goal in place--mind the only thing keeping her feet on the path before her. With each step she takes a glory of flowers bloom from beneath her feet and have wilted and died by the time she lifts that same foot to take another step. Her conscious mind is swarmed by more butterflies whos wings reflect the past in all of its ugly beauty.

She remembers being dragged by her ankle into a caravan--abandoned on the side of a road somewhere in The Lochs when the soldiers had had their fill of her body. She remembers being found by a fox-faced Roegadyn who promised he would take care of her and that everything would be okay, those large fingers brushing away the constant stream of tears. She remembers the exchange of gil, the ugly smiles, the blindfold over her eyes. She remembers waking up in a bunker, chained by her ankles and wrists to cement walls on a bed of straw and dirt. She remembers how the other chained women looked at her and tried to soothe the little girl that everything would be alright. She remembers the pain, the ache between her thighs and the flit of too-bright light filtering in from the cracks in the roof. She remembers the sting of lash. She remembers the words said to her for acting out. She remembers, for years, being nothing more than something to be used.

Her body doesn’t feel pain any longer, shock having settled in where the blooms continue to grow and grow and grow from everything left in her body. Petals and leaves push from around the edges of her eyes, slicing against sensitive muscle and blinding her permanently. There will only be so much time left… She can feel the curl of petals squeezing her ribs and starting to curl around the still-beating muscle in her chest.

Once more, she walks this path--butterflies flitting about her hair and resting on her skin. It tickles and she laughs out gently, feeling serene in this place where she is reminded of the torture of reality. Again, the memories play out; She remembers coming to Eorzea with no gil in her pocket and under the order from her mother to go live a better, safer life there. She remembers being homeless. She remembers starving. She remembers being despondent on the floor of the Quicksand while feet stepped over her and left her there to rot. She remembers Koto’ya. She remembers Ryusei and his betrayal that broke her heart and made her feral. She remembers the snake pushing her down onto water worn rocks, suffocating her under the rush of water while he had his fill of her body. She remembers how he beat her to the brink of death and later said he loved her.

She remembers meeting Bremwyda and how quickly they became friends that could share anything with one another. She remembers meeting her darkness and light, her beautiful, perfect Zareen. She remembers the day her beloved plunged a knife into her heart and twisted it until she was on her knees and begging to be spared. She remembers Ayanga and Dunrai in the basement of the Respite--she remembers the look of disdain in the Uyagir’s eye from her prank. She remembers Burkegan’s laughter, F’cannah’s betrayal, Delesta’s garb, Sana’s smile, Yekegan’s whisper, Anakari’s demand, Ganbataar’s foolishness. She remembers and remembers and remembers until she’s bloated and full with memories and more memories and more memories. She remembers Aveis’ grin, Twi’s smile, Kadour’s desperation, Kindoron’s fear, Kojhin’s elation, Berric’s terror, Rothgar’s advice, Eigengrau’s wish, Saia’s misstep, Saiun’s food, Luar’s giggle, Zurri’s smirk, Elodea’s taunt. She remembers brushing her fingertips across the palm of the first and last man she would ever call her husband and longed to call his name once more. She remembers and remembers and remembers until she can only see the the passing faces of loved ones circling about her with their smiles, laughter and joy.

She remembers her lovers, her family, her heart and soul. She remembers.

‘I love you.’

The flicker of a barely there smile from the Light Scale so far away, covered in blood and crowned in flowers is the last thing she sees before the world turns from black to white and a hand extends to her.

‘I love you.’

She reaches, clasping the hand tightly and falls within herself as she takes her final breath.

‘I love you.’

The body left behind erupts one last time in a rush of blooming, beautiful, perfect flowers that reach and reach and reach for the sky--towering high above the Arms of Meed and then collapse like a deck of cards. The area is swallowed by beautiful flowers that glitter and shine and will last a lifetime.

Even after all of the others have wilted away.

[magaprima]

The introduction of Adam 2.0 has many effects, including narrative, but one of the things I loved the most was how it really opened the gates for showing us Lilith’s story, why she is the way she is, what her experiences are and, what I believe, is used as a metaphor for female victims of male and domestic abuse. 

This essay got hella long as it covers Adam 2.0, theories about First Adam, Lucifer’s abuse, Lilith’s story as victim, and one who encourages the abuse cycle as well as breaking it, how male abuse influence her and Sabrina’s relationship, the development of her relationship with Sabrina in general, freedom and self-worth....it covers a lot of stuff. 

I wish to note in advance that my analysis is here based on my qualifications in film studies, writing for performance, cinematography, my mother’s study into domestic violence and women in the home, as well as my own negative experiences at the hands of men, and therefore is still only an opinion/observation. I like analysing stuff, I enjoy it, but always remember it’s fiction, it’s TV, and therefore intended for fun, so please remember opinions can be shared or ignored, enjoyed or blanked. 

Firstly, we establish from her very visceral reaction to the mere mention of the name ‘Adam’ how much of a shitstorm her experience with the First Adam was. We’ve all had that person, be they male or female, who have had such a negative impact on our lives that even the name alone is enough to dredge it all up in our memories. For Lilith it’s so extreme, and also because she’s Lilith, she attempts to kill him from an armchair within hours of meeting him. 

Also, when she enters the cottage and Adam is there she immediately suggests a backrub, she expects that a man in a relationship with a woman expects the woman to serve him, to worship him. And then, later, Adam makes a comment on her appearance;  

Adam: You look so different Lilith: You don’t approve

When Adam comments that she looks different, Lilith immediately jumps to the conclusion that it’s a judgement, that he will disapprove. We can presume this is how First Adam was, how he told her to how to be, also the False God, and also Lucifer. These are three main male roles in Lilith’s existence and they have all tried to control her in one way or another, so much so that she expects it from Adam 2.0 as well.  

She also immediately presumes she will be judged, and he will disapprove, when he catches her about to spike the punch (admittedly she’s poisoning the punch, but he thinks it’s only alcohol). “Don’t judge me” she immediately says, a knee jerk reaction with how quickly she says it. She has only been with Adam 2.0 one day and yet she is already regressing to how she was in the beginning with the First Adam, and, we can presume, given what we’ve seen of their interactions, even with Lucifer. The fact she is regressing to these knee jerk reactions of presuming judgement, is really revealing of Lilith’s experiences.

Similarly, when he declares he has a gift for her, she’s already internally expecting something generic and what men typically give women-- more flowers like earlier perhaps, or chocolates or jewellery. Yet, she is genuinely surprised to find it’s not something generic at all, but something he’s bought specifically because he knows Mary will love it (and coincidentally so does Lilith. He inadvertently buys something Lilith adores. Which begs the question why Wardwell and Lilith have the same tastes). The fact Lilith is so surprised and delighted by this suggests no man has actually ever considered her so personally before, not even Lucifer. 

When Lilith declares she doesn’t ever want to get married and Adam 2.0 suddenly jumps up and marches over to her side of the table, she looks at him wide-eyed, there’s no anger, no defence, just surprise and also the markers of fear, however mild, as if she is expecting an angry protest or even a violent outburst. This is the marker of a woman who is scarred by her past, an abusive past. It can be implied here, I believe, especially considering her reaction to the Adam name earlier, that it isn’t just that she refused to submit to the First Adam, but that his reply, his refusal was a violent one, but primarily it’s that the Dark Lord’s replies to any arguments are always violent ones. She is not able to refuse him, and if she tries, she is punished. Hence, out of habit, she expects a violent reply to her refusal here too. 

She also avoids Adam’s eye when he says “I promise I’ll never hurt you”. Avoiding eye contact, the down slump of the shoulders, the way her hands remain out of the way, chin down, are all typical body language markers of a survivor of abuse, of someone who has learned to behave a certain way in order to minimise punishment/injury. And if we consider how much Lucifer abuses and manipulates her, in the mere scenes we see alone, to the point that she has been convinced all this time that she has free agency (and that she was simply working for a promotion basically) when she didn’t. 

“He was cruel to me, Adam; he was only ever cruel”

Again, this could be taken to mean First Adam or Satan, or it could mean both, that the only men in her life were both only ever cruel, but we know for certain, with Lucifer, that it has been cruel and it has been constant. Regardless, the way she leans into Adam 2.0′s touch is for comfort and reassurance-- she might be playing the game, doing what’s expected, but the way she rests against his hand does seem genuine, and this is supported by how, in the very next moment we see the first genuine kiss between the two of them. Previous kisses are all Adam, Lilith has her eyes open, surprised, and doesn’t return the kiss, but in this moment she kisses back, her eyes are closed, she’s enjoying it, giving back. It’s immediately followed by the forehead touch, looking at him, which is all very emotionally intimate. This is the very first instance of Lilith experiencing something non-abusive from a male. 

Later, we see  her leaving the bedroom, calling out ‘I’ll be right back, my love’, as she leaves Adam in bed. It’s very calm and post-coital, there is even an element of romance in the air. She’s casual, content, walking slowly, enjoying herself, pouring herself a drink, temporarily without a care in the world. We have never seen Lilith like this before. 

And then suddenly, Satan arrives, and Lilith drops the jug on the floor, smashing it, as she is so shocked and panicked by his sudden appearance, he breaks right through her calm and we see her tense again, on edge again. This is typical of someone caught by an abuser: she’s wide eyed, not blinking, heavy breathing with panic and fear, she whispers his name with that same shock and fear. These are all the very classic reactions of an abuse victim caught ‘in the act’ of something forbidden by an abuser. In a normal mundane environment, this would be her caught talking to someone or being out of the house too late, but regardless of the supernatural elements, it’s still the signs of an abuse victim.

Satan then says:

“Get rid of him, Lilith, you belong to me and only me”

This is very typical abuser language; you’re mine, you’re my property, you’re not allowed to be with anyone else, talk to anyone else, without my permission because you’re mine. The controlling language of this is obvious and immense and it’s paired with Lilith’s response. Her expression is not just wary of his wrath, but also resigned. She’s remembering what her life actually is. That’s it’s not the pleasant little house-play she had moments ago, where she was promised she would never be hurt, she is the Dark Lord’s Handmaiden, she’s his to do with as he pleases. This is in direct contrast to Adam 2.0 saying how he didn’t care whether they were married or not, just so long as they were together. She is, ironically, free with the mortal, but a prisoner with her Dark Lord, the one who was meant to free her. 

Now we see, shortly after, that despite realising how trapped she is, she chooses to defy him and protect Adam 2.0. She disguises it as ‘I won’t get to play with him’, but there’s something much deeper here; it’s as clear to the viewer as it is to her familiar. And it’s proven in how desperately and urgently she tells Adam to put the enchanted ring on and never take it off. This is the action of someone determined not to lose the one thing that is making her remember herself, the self that defied the False God, defied the First Man and became the First Witch. Someone who wanted freedom, to be equal. 

And the whole scene plays out like a real, genuine proposal. If you were shown the scene without any context of the characters, the setting etc you would simply see a ring being slipped on a finger and a man picking up a woman, the woman laughing (she actually laughs, genuinely laughs happily when he picks her up)...they look like a genuinely happy couple getting engaged. This is essentially a metaphor for a woman escaping her abuse cycle. We see it in life, and in dramas depicting life, as usually the woman running to family or friends, leaving the home and finally daring to try and make new links, new ties, beyond the abuser’s circle. For Lilith, it’s Adam 2.0. 

As she looks at him in that proposal scene, the way she bites her lip, looking up at him with...well, love, it’s incredibly sad, especially when you know it won’t last, because here we get a glimpse of who Lilith was before, when she was first created. Before she was abused and controlled and manipulated and any other number of things at the hands of the False God, First Adam and the Dark Lord. Just like long-term abuse victims lose who they were, lose themselves in the abuse, so Lilith has lost herself (We do see hints of her original self in the way she helps students at Baxter High, though it serves no true purpose beyond just simply helping them, we see it in the way she does become genuine with Sabrina upon occasion etc but this is the first time we start to see glimpses of it properly). 

Experiences at the hands of men, no matter who those men are in relation to you, can change you, depending on the experience. It can warp you, it can make you feel less than yourself, trapped, injured, disgusted, especially if it’s been constant as it has been for Lilith. And these feelings stay with you, they never go away. And they can make you hate all men and want nothing more to do with them, even if you love the idea of them, or even the concept of that perfect relationship, it’s prevented by how your opinions are now effected by your experiences. And I think we can safely say this is the case with Lilith when her origin story includes saying she is equal to Adam, she doesn’t ask to leave him, she doesn’t say she doesn’t want to be with him, she says she doesn’t want to be less than him. So we can presume Lilith would have been happy with a romance if it had been a partnership not a domineering dynamic.

Lilith is a female icon, and her dialogue and actions in this show often add to that, alongside many other reasons within the CAOS mythology as well as as Dianic, Witchcraft and revised Jewish mythology. But her story, particularly within the context and established mythology and narrative of the show (which does choose to take different pieces from all mainstream and modern religions and combine them) is also one that shows her as representative of female victims of abuse at the hands of men: what it can do to us, how it can make us unrecognisable to ourselves. As I said in my previous post, Adam 2.0 didn’t have to be a man for this new dynamic, it’s not about a man rescuing Lilith from abuse and making her happy, it’s about a person doing that, a person showing her there’s something else, another life. It’s simply poetic narrative to have it be a man named Adam. 

We continue to see her happy and content when she’s strolling through the woods with Adam 2.0, she’s the most relaxed we’ve seen her be with anyone (she’s certainly not relaxed in any of her scenes with Satan. I mean remember her first scene in part 1? Where she was begging forgiveness and kissing his feet? The first blatant clue that this was not a good relationship, and there was definite control and abuse in the dynamic) , she genuinely laughs at his suggestion about Tibet and then looks genuinely awkward when she realises he’s serious. She is falling into this relationship, and though I know other viewers will disagree, but for me personally, you are seeing someone falling in love. Even if she doesn’t quite identify it yet herself (she only says love once he’s dead, unfortunately). 

She has this gentle surprise when Adam 2.0 says he wants to show her the world. She’s freaking ancient, she’s literally been around forever, she has seen the world and everything in it, but Adam 2.0 wants to show her a world where she’s free, where it’s just the two of them, no arrangements, no deals, no promises, just two people, travelling together, equals. And she knows this. This is the moment where suddenly she’s awake. Adam 2.0 is making her realise that Lucifer has been as much a prison as First Adam and the False God were, and here is a chance to run away from all that, to finally have no prison at all.

 And so she says with genuine feeling ‘I will consider it’. This is very much the part where, in a normal drama about an abuse victim, the writers would typically having her finding a romantic connection and the partner begging them to run away with them, the victim trying to get up the courage. Narratively and cinematically we do start to see full on, direct parallels here. Especially when he tells her to make a wish, and she genuinely does so before throwing the pebble, smile on her face, then laughing with his arm around her. The way she looks at him when he’s not looking (which is something you do do when you’re in love), genuinely considering him, sort of bewildered for this is literally the first time ever that she has felt this way, with the person she’s with not demanding anything of her. He has asked her to go to Tibet, he hasn’t demanded, and he’s asked because he wants her to be with him, not because he needs her to do something. 

This all very much the set-up trope we see in those very serious TV dramas, where we see the victim planning to be free of her captor and abuser and we, the audience, feel so worried it will never happen. 

And just like the TV drama tropes, we have the scene where it all goes wrong. We see Lilith eating a meal with ‘Adam’, she’s relaxed, she’s enjoying herself, she believes she’s free, she’s found a path to choose for herself, something to do for herself. When she replies to ‘Adam’ suggesting she’s going to say yes to Tibet, she speaks firmly, confidently. ‘Yes I am’ is saying goodbye to her chains, it’s saying ‘Yes I am leaving my abuser’, ‘Yes, I am leaving and doing something for me’. 

But the way she looks at the ring when she pulls it out of her mouth, the confusion, the bewilderment, she was so certain of her escape, of her plans, that what the ring signifies hasn’t clicked yet, there’s a small delay as denial argues with facts. The entire cinematography of this scene really does remind me of basic murder dramas, when the person comes home and doesn’t yet realise that their loved one has been murdered, or when we see the person being happy and carefree and they haven’t yet realised it’s all about to be ruined by what’s behind the door. 

“Did you really think you could deceive me, Lilith? Our bond is eternal. Our bond is unbreakable. There is no escape to Tibet or anywhere else”

This could not be more obvious abuser language if it tried. It’s threatening, it’s possessive and it’s reminding the victim that there’s no escape, emphasising the idea of an unbreakable bond. Like, ‘did you really think you could just leave me?’ and we see the utter horror in her eyes at this, at the ring, at Adam 2.0′s head, at Satan’s words, all of it. She is utterly horrified in a way we’ve never seen before. She’s incredibly human in this moment. 

We see this type of scene in a lot of films and dramas where an abused wife believes she is finally getting away from the husband, but then he’s there, blocking the doorway, having discovered her plan, and she has no idea if he’s going to kill her for it. The way Lilith silently cries at the sight of Adam’s severed head, the way every time she looks at it she gasps for air, her shoulders heave, this is all very much a parallel to when the abused character in dramas realises all their plans were false hope and that they’re never getting away. Sometimes even in those non supernatural dramas, the lover, the friend, is still killed by the abuser just as Adam 2.0 was, in order to teach the wife/girlfriend a lesson. 

“Now clean your plate of the mortal,” only adds to this parallel, as it is so much like when you see, on screen, the abuser character beat the victim’s character senseless, before adding ‘now clean this mess up’ as if it is all her fault (Think of the way Bill Sykes behaves with Nancy in Oliver, until he does eventually beat her to death) and her whole expression is exactly what would you would expect. She looks trapped, scared, horrified; she is so broken by this she almost cries at the table. 

And even though we know she eats male flesh, we’ve seen her picking her teeth clean with delight, here we see her vomit it all back up, every piece of Adam 2.0 is expelled. This is partly to show us how the taste of Adam 2.0 is vile to her, because it’s not what she wanted (and supporting hints from Part 1 that it isn’t just any man that she eats. If she wants a real meal, it has to be the right choice, like the misogynist nightmare of a principal) and because of how she felt about him. But it’s also what we tend to see in dramas in post-abuse scenes; crying over the toilet basin, vomiting, before crumpling onto the floor. Out of context, she looks simply like the trapped abuse victim, the abused wife who has suffered this for so long she doesn’t remember it being any other way. Yet, she recently had hope for it all changing, but that hope is gone now, taken away by her abuser, and now she’s more trapped than ever and it makes it so much worse than before, because before she lived in ignorance and now she’s awake, but still trapped. 

A lot of abuse victims don’t acknowledge they’re abused because that’s worse, admitting it makes it more painful and more unavoidable (things are easier to live with if you don’t think it’s true). It’s especially true in Lilith’s case, because it would be admitting that she left one abuser for another. And when we consider a following scene with Sabrina in a later episode: 

Lilith: Promises were made Sabrina: And you believed him? Lilith: You don’t understand. He was kind at first. Gentle. We’d spend our days near the place where he’d fallen and hit the earth. The more time passed since the fall, the more he turned into this thing of darkness

This dialogue is so typical abuse victim dialogue. The ‘he wasn’t like this before’ is extremely typical as reasoning for his behaviour and the reason why they stay. No abuser starts off the abuser, they start off kind at first, engaging, drawing the victim in and by Lilith’s own words we see this is exactly what Lucifer did too. And so we see Lilith has lived in wilful ignorance of his behaviour, remembering how he was before, focusing on their promises, their lovemaking, how the relationship was in the beginning, as many abuse victims do, in order to remind herself why she stays and to convince herself she doesn’t want to leave. But now, with Adam 2.0 and Satan’s murder of him, and the way he made her eat his flesh afterwards, has forced her to wake up and admit the abuse, admit that he is no longer the same person at all. 

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand. How did the Dark Lord discover us?”

This is another abuse victim signature; questioning yourself, trying to figure out what precisely went wrong, to find the rhyme in the reason, an excuse for why it happened, why the escape didn’t work. This reasoning and questioning is so desperate and internal, because if a reason is discovered, an excuse, then it means that it’s not that she can’t ever escape, it’s that this time she did something wrong and was caught. An excuse means hope isn’t entirely extinguished. 

Yet, when she finds out the ‘thing that went wrong’ was Stolis, that her own familiar had been the one to tell Lucifer about her and Adam 2.0, is a direct metaphor for an abuse victim discovering that their friends are, in fact, the abuser’s friends rather than their own, the discovery that she has no supporters around her, that her social circle is a false circle. It is confined to simply Stolis with Lilith, but he is, admittedly, the only one in her intimate circle. 

But abusers do this: they surround the victim with people they believe are friends, people that they will share things with and talk to, treat as a confidante, when in reality, these ‘friends’ are false and in fact serve as spies to the abuser, just as Stolis was resurrected under the pretence of returning a companion to Lilith but in truth it was just so Satan could know everything she was doing. Eventually, with this abuse technique, the victim begins to feel that they can trust no one, reach out to no one. Lilith was betrayed by her own familiar; that is how deep the control and abuse goes in this relationship, that even that bond cannot be trusted. 

She then proceeds to put on the enchanted ring like it is a wedding ring while saying ‘He took away the one thing I loved’. This is an abuse victim who has lost the one person who didn’t use her, didn’t abuse her, he was the one person who was her escape and so, yes, she even grew to love him (and as I have said, it could have been anyone who treated her equally and had interest in her. That love would have grown with anyone in this situation, it is the way she is treated by the person rather than the person itself that makes this dynamic turn romantic). Because of this, because she had equality and free will with this person, she feels comforted by the feeling of the ring, not just keeping him close but keeping that feeling close. 

Now, when an escape route for a victim is entirely ruined, usually one of the following things happen. Either they resign themselves to this life they are stuck with, and give up the fight entirely, or they try to resist in one last do-or-die attempt. Lilith chooses the latter, even burning everything to do with Adam in order to give her the emotionless strength to destroy Lucifer’s love as he destroyed hers (the fact Lucifer’s love is his daughter, not romantic, is an interest point, because, in retrospect, it emphases the familial dynamic with Adam 2.0, as family, traditionally, means equality, everyone together).

“You did this to me; you made me weak, Adam”

She places blame entirely on Adam 2.0 because she needs to do this in order to survive. She calls herself ‘a grieving widow’, which is her admitting to herself she saw their partnership as legitimate, she had been making official plans around it, she had been making a new life for herself, away from Satan and now she is genuinely mourning not just that life, but the person she was going to make it with. But specifically the use of the term ‘grieving widow’ is especially revealing as it shows how much her dynamic with Adam 2.0 was more of a relationship than her ancient dynamic with Lucifer. Because with Lucifer it is just abuser and victim. And that’s all she has again. 

But being a ‘grieving widow’ is weak in her eyes and she needs to be strong. A lot of abuse victims need to cut out parts of themselves to survive; sometimes it’s the ability to feel things at all, sometimes it’s their empathy for others, something it’s their own goodness, their own morality, anything that they feel will help make the abuse more bearable. 

“I was getting very comfortable in this woman’s flesh suit”

Not only is this Lilith admitting she was starting to enjoy parts of Mary’s life, the line between them blurring a little, but by this phrase we see that Lilith is choosing to forget she was ever just a woman herself, ever just a witch. Being Mary was making her remember that, and this is another part of herself she needs to cut out to survive, she believes; her humanity (because remember, Lilith does have humanity, as that was what she was created as originally and, technically, that humanity is still there, it’s just been pressed down by experiences and abuse and time). Yet as she says this, she is stroking the doll, the gift from Adam 2.0, affectionately, which betrays her words. This wasn’t about getting comfortable, or forgetting she’s in a ‘flesh suit’, she genuinely felt something here, something unquantifiable, and something that can’t be so easily ignored. 

So, because she still has these feelings, all different ones for different reasons, but all very much making her feel things, which, right now, she is reasoning it’s something that will make her weak,  she literally tears them up and destroys them, physically burning them, declaring that she’s now remembering ‘who and what I truly am’, but this isn’t true. What she is remembering to be now is what and who Lucifer has made her into, it’s not actually her. Her is who she is when she’s free from him. 

She then says ‘time to burn the monster’, which with all this in consideration, could mean the monster she has been made into, or that the monster is Lucifer, or it could be the monster is Sabrina because of what Lucifer wants her to be. We, the audience, could even take it to mean all three. But, regardless, as she burns everything, we see a woman who has decided no one can save her, but she isn’t saying ‘no one can save me I’m stuck here’, she is saying ‘no one can save me, I’m going to save myself’. 

And what’s her first step in doing this? Making her own person to control; and this is where we see what can happen with abuse victims-- the abuse cycle begins, where the victim then becomes the abuser. Although, with Lilith it’s not with any actual person, it’s with a creature she creates, just as she was created, well...more specifically how Eve was created; with a rib. And it’s no small coincidence that she has to kill a man to make this creature.

Lilith: I’m your Mother. Do you love me? Adam 3.0: (nods) Lilith: Then you’ll do what I tell you to do. 

This is the only kind of love (With the exception of Adam 2.0, who, technically was loving Mary, not Lilith. Although he seemed to be really into the Lilith changes in Mary?) that Lilith has ever known. And we love from experience, the love we know is the love we show. And so abuse victims, to quote Regina Mills (another complicated character who has abusive and grooming relationships that dictate the Evil Queen she becomes) ‘don’t know how to love very well’. If all you have known is abusive, controlling love, then that’s what you think love is, and that’s what you repeat. That is an abuse cycle.

Now, we come to when we see Lilith with Lucifer properly for the first time. As in, it’s now him permanently here, and him as the man she recalls in her memories, only we discover despite his beautiful face, he just as dark and abusive as ever. 

Lilith: Those things you promised me are going to Sabrina Lucifer: It’s not your turn Lilith: Nor ever. Begging the question; why her?

Abuse victims who feel they have no escape, who have resigned themselves to this life, tend to get defensive against and jealous of other women coming into their life and threatening to take their place. It’s basically the feeling of ‘I put up with this abuse, but at least I reap the benefits’, but when a newcomer arrives, it’s now ‘I suffer the abuse but someone else is reaping the benefits’. It prompts irrational jealousy, which is, personally, what I feel we’ve seen with Lilith towards Sabrina throughout the series; her flip of emotions towards her, her erratic behaviour with her, change of vibes etc, is all linked towards this irrational jealousy caused by the fight for importance, for any kind of benefit,  within an abusive dynamic. 

“Self pity bores me, Lilith. And you know what I’m like when I’m bored”

Lucifer grabs Lilith’s chin forcefully, with a menacing firmness, as he says this, and lifts it, forcing her to look at him. The entire body language as well as the verbal language, the low, implied threat, is so demonstrative of extreme domestic abuse, so much so that it’s entirely impossible to ignore. He is controlling her, his menacing air is as blatant as is her tension, her fear. We see Lilith constantly strong against others, defiant, but here she doesn’t resist, she lets him lift her chin because she has no choice and she opens her eyes to look at him directly, because she knows avoiding him, refusing to look, will make it all worse, he’ll be even angrier, and then she immediately agrees to what he asks of her. If we only had hints and metaphors for abuse here, here we see it beyond metaphors and parallels; it is very literally demonstrated. Long time abuse victims, those who have suffered it constantly, repeatedly, over a long period of time, reach a point where they no longer have to be ‘controlled’ by physical abuse; the threat of it is enough, even the hint of the threat. 

“No good to run; believe me, I’ve tried....Come now, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting...and now you have to come to him or he will come to you and destroy everyone and everything in his path”

This language is extremely resigned-- we saw Lilith broken before, but still with fight left in her, but this time the fight is gone entirely. And we also see her resignation to another victim being made. Yes, Sabrina is her ‘competition’ and taking her promised place as Queen of Hell, but the entire dynamic here can also be taken as an abuse victim bearing witness to another victim being added and having nothing they can do to stop it. The only power they have is to try and lessen the pain of the transition, given them the advice they didn’t get. 

When we have ‘The Beginning’ scene, Lilith says ‘I was his handmaiden and he was my master’, so that we see from the off, from mere language alone, that he has always controlled her through the illusion of partnership, which is exactly what abusers do. They don’t arrive and abuse immediately from the beginning, it’s subtle at first, disguised as simply being caring and protective; ‘I just want to take care of you’, ‘You’re so small, I can protect you’, ‘you mustn’t do that; I’ll do that for you’. 

Sabrina: Why do you still serve him, even now? Lilith: It’s all I’ve ever known

This is very much a typical abuse victim answer, and the entire framing of the scene, the way Lilith and Sabrina are sat in the chairs, the luxurious surroundings, the waiting on the other side of a curtain to be called by the ‘boss’ echoes a human trafficking scenario, with the new ‘livestock’ being brought for presentation, the former victim, ‘promoted’ to assistant, and thus made to recruit the newer ones. This is especially emphasised when Lilith nods at Sabrina and she steps through the curtain to meet Lucifer who is sat there like the head pimp of hell. 

“He’s not a God. He’s just a fallen angel”

This quote is extremely important, because it’s a reiteration of her moment in the bathroom where she reminds herself that Lucifer isn’t everywhere and can’t see everything, but also because it’s her admitting aloud, to other people, that Satan may be powerful but he isn’t all powerful. She is admitting her abuser is beatable; this, along with sharing his weak spots with the Spellmans, is her breaking away from the abuse

But when it fails and Lilith is sent to prepare Sabrina for the wedding regardless, we see her crying at the dress, because despite everything, despite admitting he is an abuser, talking of gutting him, sharing his weak spots, she still wants to be his Queen (well, Queen in general, but at this point she believes he is going to rule, so Queen only exists besides him) because despite everything, abuse victims do often return to their abusers, or at least still want their love, especially if they know they are trapped with them regardless (a logic of making abuse easier if there’s love there, at least).

Yet despite this, despite this pain, despite still wanting his love, despite wanting to be Queen, Lilith manages to say to Sabrina ‘You’ll make a wonderful Queen’ and it does sound genuine, resigned, yes, but also genuine. This is partially because she knows Sabrina no more wants the title than Lilith wants to lose it. There is a break of the abuse cycle here (the cycle she did continue with her Adam-Monster) as she is broken, losing, but she manages to wish Sabrina well, perhaps even manage to suffer less than Lilith did. In the room we have two resigned women, two women abused by the same man, together, allied even if they don’t win. 

Sabrina, however, hasn’t been broken yet, she hasn’t suffered yet as Lilith has, she hasn’t known Lucifer as long as Lilith has, and that’s what she observes

“Plucky till the end. But you’ll learn. He always gets his way”

There’s something so entirely resigned and cynical about that, and it also implies that the rebellions we have seen against Lucifer in Part 2 are, perhaps, not Lilith’s only rebellions, that there had been times in the past when she has tried to win. We can imagine that after leaving the garden because she refused to submit to First Adam, and then agreeing to serve Lucifer because he promised to make her Queen, she must have realised, after time, that she was being to Lucifer what she refused to be with First Adam, that she has ended up with the same fate regardless. And Lilith is a strong person, she’s strong, she knows her own mind, she’s determined, we can easily imagine she began to push against him, to try and claim what was promised, to get her equality again, but like with abuse victims who fight back in the beginning, they are beaten down so many times, that their rebellions become smaller and smaller until they stop rebelling at all.

When it is the Masquerade scene and the coronation, Lilith is constantly tense, holding back a wave of understandable emotions, ranging from fear to jealousy to resignation to sadness to determination, but as she is feeling all these things, Sabrina looks back at her through her mask and smiles, she even looks at Lilith as the crown is placed on her head; there is an alliance here, two victims of abuse at the hands of the same abuser standing together and Sabrina’s gazes are showing that support. The fellow victim saying I am with you and I am fighting beside you.

And I think it’s as much this visual confirmation of alliance and support, as well as things that happened in the lead up to this moment, that prompts Lilith into her ultimate defiance against Lucifer. A defiance that is for Sabrina’s sake more than her own; she physically, by her own magic, holds Satan back, stopping him from attacking Sabrina physically. We can presume he has attacked Lilith physically before-- it’s evidenced in the way he grabbed her chin, the way she cleans his feet, the way she flinches when he gets angry or comes too close-- but she uses her power to stop him from ever even starting on Sabrina. Not a hair is harmed on her head. 

“Hold that nasty thought; I can’t restrain him forever”

The long-term victim is finally standing up to her abuser, calling him out for what he is, and she is doing it for herself yes, but she’s also doing it to help another victim. In a mundane drama, this would be the moment where the script would depict the abuser about to hit a young girl, the new girl, and the older victim would bash him around the back of the head with a bat. We’ve all seen those types of scenes, and this is what we’re seeing here as well...only magically. 

Before, even when Lilith advised them how to stop him, how to attack him, she stayed hidden, she didn’t risk exposing her rebellion in case it went wrong, she hedged her bets still out of fear and caution. But in this ultimate moment, it all goes, she doesn’t backtrack, she doesn’t go back to his side and beg forgiveness; she defies him openly and completely. She finally breaks free of the abusive relationship, and considering Lilith was originally created to be the ultimate symbol of womanhood and maternity, I think it’s incredibly important that she does all this in a moment of protecting Sabrina rather than herself. It’s Lilith returning to her true nature; she is the First Woman, she is the woman who said women were equal, she is the woman who would not submit to a man, she is the First Witch, the first to have power, the first to heal. 

And from this, it is extremely important that not only is Lilith crowning herself, taking power for herself without needing any man or any coronation but her own, but that it is Sabrina who hands her the crown. This is two women having defeated the man who had power over them and them each giving one another power in return. They restore each other. This is an entirely female moment. 

“I restore all your witchly powers, so now you may have both power and freedom. And may you never give up either again”

And for the conclusion of Lilith’s abuse narrative, this quote is so incredibly important. Not only is it Lilith restoring Sabrina’s powers and thus showing she no longer sees her as a threat or competition, she no longer views her through jealousy over the attention of a man, but she is also stating she has her freedom. Satan has always demanded they sign the Book of the Beast to get the most out of their powers, he demanded in exchange for power they must always do what he asks, that they belong to him. Lilith is Queen of Hell, but she doesn’t ask for anyone to give up their freedom; she took power for herself way back in The Beginning, and so the new witches can have power for themselves as well. It is very revealing of the type of ruler Lilith will be, a victim who has learned from her abuse rather than choosing to repeat it (giving Sabrina back Ms Wardwell, recalling that she was her favourite teacher, is also further evidence of this)

May Sabrina never give up her power or freedom again, yes, but it is, obviously, implied that Lilith is also speaking of herself and that she will never give up her power or freedom again either as she did that day when she agreed to be Lucifer’s handmaiden. 

[moiraineswife]

Okay so I could definitely do with some more queer rep from Sanderson but I will say that I love the richness and complexity of his characters and the fuck that they almost all say ‘fuck you’ to writing gender roles. 

‘Strong women’ doesn’t mean ‘woman punches loads of things and is badass’ it means a rich variety, of complex women who are each strong in their own way.

 Vin, the street-urchin and constant survivor, whose strength comes as she grows and actually learns, in so many ways, to outgrow that ‘strong woman’ archetype. She learns to be soft. She learns to embrace her feminine side. She learns vulnerability, and love, and trust, and she grows into a better, stronger person for it. 

Marasi who finds her strength in knowledge, and in loving herself for the things she can do, instead of loving the idolised version of herself who has all the things she wishes she could do. Who learns to stop revering and living in a man’s shadow, and steps out to cast her own. 

Steris who is a canonly autistic woman who is never forced to be ‘normal’, in any sense of the word. The characters around her learn to read her, to understand her, and they fall in love with the woman that she is because of her quirks, because of her differences, because of her autism, and not in spite of it. 

Shallan who was a sheltered, naive young abuse victim, with very obvious PTSD and anxiety who has undergone an incredible, uneven recovery journey. She has found herself, her voice, her independence, and her agency. But she is also learning how to accept what has happened to her instead of hiding from it, to heal and grow while retaining her wit, her drawing, and her smile. 

Jasnah who, frankly, couldn’t care less about people’s expectations when it comes to her. Her mind is her own, and her strength comes from knowing herself, and refusing to compromise that self even when it goes against her entire culture and society. A woman who presents a composed, cold, blunt face to the world and is allowed to, and is never undermined or ‘thawed’. She is who she is, and that’s final. 

Navani as a mother, a wife, a lover, in many ways the embodiment of traditional roles for a female character over a certain age. But she’s also a scholar, an engineer, an inventor, a visionary. A woman who knows what she wants, and inevitably finds a way of getting it. A woman who has deep loves and passions, and pursues them, but never loses sight of the merit of logic and order. 

Vivenna, who grew up with the knowledge that she was to be a sacrifice for her people, that her pain and happiness were as nothing compared to her duty. A woman who grew up with deeply rooted prejudices, and a naive, ignorant view of the world. She grew up, she learned her own mind, and followed it to the ends of her earth and into another, where she came to lead men in battle in a notoriously misogynistic/gender-role based society. 

Siri the dreamer, the free spirit, who learned that she didn’t have to be like her sister, and didn’t have to ascribe to the things expected of her to have value, and worth, and power. Who becomes a queen in her own right, and matures into a powerful woman who refuses to accept life on any but her own terms. 

It’s a common enough critique that female characters get stuffed into one mould that’s described as ‘strong’ and that’s it. Which is almost as limiting and stifling as the traditional expectations of female characters. But tbh I love what he does with his male characters and the complexity and rejection of typical masculinity there, too. 

Elend who grew up under the thumb of an abusive father and an oppressive system, but still had the softness, and the hope to dream of building something better. Who was more than comfortable having his wife protect him, and having everyone know that, who took pride in Vin, without ever once having it be hinted as some sort of slight to his masculinity. Who was able to accept the correction and guidance of another woman everyone else scorned and ignored who helped shape him into a better king, and a better man. 

Sazed who was portrayed both as the gentle, reserved scholar, but also a rebel and an instigator, who went against his people to build a better world. Someone who was presented as rational, and calm, and arguably nonbinary, and mostly shuns pretty every typically ‘masculine’ trope in the book. 

Kelsier who had the fairly typical ‘dead wife, revenge plot’ story, but that was explored in a thoroughly atypical way tbh. A man full of darkness who insisted upon fighting with a smile, and encouraged others to do the same. Cocky, and arrogant, and selfish was balanced by a little flash of sentiment, the hope for a new world, and the picture of a flower he carried with him to remind him what they fought for. 

Adolin who’s regarded as one of the best swordsmen in the world, but who talks to his weapon before battle and thanks it for serving him. He wears his mother’s necklace as a good luck charm in battle, and goes against cultural expectations by being physically affectionate with the people he loves. Also has a keen interest in fashion he refuses to be ashamed of, and while his actions characterise him as a womaniser, his thoughts/behaviours display his dissatisfaction with that, and his desire for stability. Also very emotionally aware of those around him, and takes care to look after them when he reads them being in trouble. 

Dalinar’s honestly fascinating journey from a bloodthirsty, violent soldier, to a depressed, traumatised alcoholic, to a struggling general, a hero of mankind, and then again struggling with PTSD is honestly so well-written. This man is literally a military legend, renowned for his prowess in war and we see him, in the course of the series: give away a legendary blade that is literally more valuable than kingdoms for the lives of a group of slaves, and consider it a genuinely good deal as he’s learned that all lives are precious. Struggle with very obvious flashbacks and panic attacks as a result of war trauma. Meekly align himself with distinctly feminine things to quietly support his son and stop him feeling awkward. 

Renarin, who is a canon autistic character, who cannot be a soldier in a distinctly war-driven society, and is allowed to explore that, to feel bitterness and frustration with his condition. But who is also slowly starting to learn, with the support of his family, that there are different kinds of strength, and that they love him and are proud of him even if he can’t march into battle at the head of their armies. Who is allowed to stim openly, who is largely accepted for his differences, and is defended fiercely on the occasion that he’s not. Who is a goddamn super hero in this world, and is a massively progressive piece of honest autistic representation, in which he is not a character with autism, but an autistic character. 

Kaladin who is honestly one of the most visceral, honest portrayals of depression I’ve seen in a fictional character. Who still, three books on, suffers from depressive episodes, who acknowledges that this kind of thing sometimes doesn’t just go away, or get better, that it’s always there, somewhere, and he fights it, and keeps fighting it, with the help and acceptance of those around him. Who is also a goddamn super hero who is warned by his surgeon-father that he’ll have to grow calluses, that he can’t care so deeply about his patients. Who becomes a soldier to support his younger brother, and tries to strike the balance between killing and protection, and to deal with his soft heart that has never truly hardened. 

Male characters that have genuine, honestly explored mental illnesses, insecurities, and who are frequently depicted crying, and otherwise being allowed to freely show and explore their emotions and honestly, i could say a hell of a lot more but this is quite long enough so that’s enough of that.  

[docholligay]

Comments for “Perfection, Oil on Linen, Date Unknown” 

everybodyknows-everybodydies

oh my gosh oh my GOSH this is LOVELY I'M EMOTIONAL WOW

I’m so glad!!! 

everybodyknows-everybodydies

THE EXTENDED METAPHOR OF MICHIRU AS A PIECE OF ART UNDER GLASS IS SO GOOD I LOVE THAT

Thank you! I was really On My Shit for this one, I have always loved Michiru as a museum piece. 

everybodyknows-everybodydies

"things lose their value when you touch them, when you use them" U G H YESSSS LISTEN MY IMMEDIATE THOUGHT WAS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MONETARY VALUE AND PERSONAL VALUE AND CONTINUING ON WAS LIKE YOU REACHED INTO MY BRAIN AND GRABBED THAT THOUGHT TO CARRY IT THROUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh my god mouse, this is MY GARBAGE. Like, not just with Michiru, but in LIFE, I have no concept of keeping something in its box, under glass,because then why have it? For some imagined money you may never see? 

everybodyknows-everybodydies

also the description of the city lights as "the Milky Way of mankind" is absolutely gorgeous I'm going to be thinking about that line all NIGHT

Thank you!!! I was rather pleased with that line myself

everybodyknows-everybodydies

Haruka sleeping curled up small even though she is a LANKY NOODLE AND TAKES UP SPACE = SUPERB CHARACTER DETAIL 10/10 I WANT TO HUG HER DANG IT

THANK YOU I LOVE THE IDEA CONSTANTLY AND ALL THE TIME

everybodyknows-everybodydies

AND THE BIT ABOUT THE MASTERS PAINTING OVER THEIR OWN WORKS I don't know if you had a specific one in mind when you were writing this but all I could think was the Artemisia Gentileschi painting (the name ESCAPES ME sorry) where she covered her brutally visceral depiction of a woman with a more male-approved and less disturbing version and AGAIN, MICHIRU AS A PAINTING OW OW OW

I think you’re thinking of Kathleen Gilje! https://kathleengilje.com/artwork/321721_Susanna_and_the_Elders_Restored_X_Ray.html   The underpainting is actually fictional, that’s Gilje’s “thing”as an artist. BUT YES I LOVE THE IDEA. I didn’t have a specific one in mind, it was something I’d just been tossing around in my head, that you paointed amasterpeice over whatever it was you did first, and that whatever came first was lesser, what might have been. 

everybodyknows-everybodydies

"her footsteps soft as church whispers" FORESHADOWING I DO EMBRACE THEE (AND that line is absolutely beautiful oh my word)

Thank you!!

everybodyknows-everybodydies

Michiru's quiet conviction that Haruka is beautiful and that's the word she KNOWS is right makes my chest hurt I LOVE

Listen I have FEELINGS about butch women and how one is not ‘supposed’ to think of them as beautiful or give them flowers or what have you but They!!! are not men!!!! And I’ve known many who like either of those things but feel like they aren’t ‘supposed’ to and ANYWAY YES HARUKA TENOH IS BEAUTIFUL. 

everybodyknows-everybodydies

aND HAND-TOUCHING FULL OF EMOTIONS AND PINING I AM THE MOST BLESSED

I HOPE YOU WOULD!!!

everybodyknows-everybodydies

ANYWAY TLDR I'M ALSO FULL OF EMOTIONS ALL OF THEM GOOD THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS

I am SO happy!!

keyofjetwolf

(thought a quick reminder on the epilogue for this, if you didn't do it yet, because my brain is too delighted with the thought)

I TOTALLY FORGOT THANK YOU

keyofjetwolf

"Michiru had been a primed canvas from birth"  The opening line is instantly amazing, I THINK I'M IN FOR A TREAT

THANK

keyofjetwolf

"she laid a sheet of plexiglass over what Michiru Kaioh might have been"  --This whole extended metaphor is *kisses fingertips*, and this line especially got me.

Thank you so much!

keyofjetwolf

"She would stubbornly survive against all enemies and against all allies"  --yessss, ugh, what a perfect line for Michiru, I'm furious.

THANK YOU, so much of what I think of for Michiru is her ability to make herself into an island,where she doesn’t even really care for the people who are ON HER DAMN SIDE, but it’s so hard for her to see that, all she sees is the rope (which is valid) 

keyofjetwolf

"Michiru wandered out of the living room with its barren and spare decor"  --I don't know why I'm so tickled at you noting how there's fuck all in their apartment/penthouse/whatever, BUT I REALLY AM

ahahaha MICHIRU HANG A PICTURE

keyofjetwolf

"She often pretended to her own sort of Sight, quickly adding to Michiru’s visions that she had seen the same, that the wind had told her one thing or another"  --I feel so oddly catered to in this. Haruka and her "oh yeah the wind said the same thing to me, totally" and Michiru knowing it's utter bullshit, I'M DELIGHTED As much too by contrast of Haruka wanting the visions, jealous of them, and Michiru wishing they could just fuck off and she could be left alone.

 I know you and I have a pretty similar idea about Haruka’s actual psychic ability, which is basically “zero.” But yeah, the idea that she thinks this is something intrinsic to being a senshi and not realizing it ‘s just Michiru’s “thing” and so trying to cover with “oh yeah I totally also heard that” is so central to me, because Haruka is trying so hard to be the senshi she thinks she needs to be, what’s she’s SUPPOSED to be

keyofjetwolf

"her footsteps soft as church whispers"  --you drop brilliant shit like this so casually sometimes and I want to punch you in the fucking face, it's so good, I'm screaming

Thank you so much!

keyofjetwolf

"not the prince that came to rescue this sleeping beauty but the witch who had enchanted her."  --We already talked about this line, I know, but it's somehow even better in the full context of the work and if it weren't so cold and windy outside, I WOULD come punch you in the fucking face.

THANK YOU I LIKED IT TOO

keyofjetwolf

It's all just so, so good. You did an amazing job capturing Michiru's bitterness and longing, in a way that's uniquely Michiru, cynically resigned to the whole affair. Yet then there are these little bursts of hope, and it makes it all that much sweeter. You always do fantastic with Haruka and Michiru, of course, but I think you may have outdone yourself a little here.

Thank you so much I tried very hard!!

[chamberofnectar]

Distant dread through observation panes

SUMMARY

Contains spoilers for The Sacrifice

Nrtya stares into the enveloping black, emotionally numb as his mind swims as he tries to settle his taut nerves. Despite his attempts, a voice grinds at his restraints, body trembling as stones tap on wood.

Mature | Graphic Depictions of violence

Tags: Excalibur Umbra | Operator (Warframe) | Loki (Warframe) | Mawframe | Non-canon biology | Canon relevance | Post-Quest | Mental instability | Anxiety attack | Psychological Trauma | Dysphoria | Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – PTSD | Body Horror | Trauma recovery | Father figures

[ Link ] or continue reading below! - AO3 account is connected to nsfw theme content as a fair warning -

The hum of the liset’s void mask lets his mind drift unobstructed; focus honed to the paced breath escaping reformed lungs, the shifting of a dark scarf laid between crossed legs as it lifts and eases down against his sword-steel skin as his palms lie barren. He thinks of nothing, only of the inhale and exhale, his glazed vision drifting down from closure to the skiajati laid out on the blanket in front of him, a glance of reassurance that it’s still there. The singular eye drifts closed again amongst the mass of exposed flesh, where veins echo tainted blue energy around his sullen eye.

In front of him, in the thick glass separating him from the empty voids of space, lingers his reflection.

An encrustment of faded gold stands firmly in the center of his helm – his head – and trails down along the sides of the prominent jut that provokes the silhouette of an excalibur warframe. The gilding is twisted by the exposing damage on the left side, leaving his vision exposed, the innards of his firm features laid bare and pink with maddened flesh. Aside from his gilding, a rarity, it was a distinction of who he is.

Not of who he was.

Breathing sighs as he adjusts himself, feeling along his biceps his escaping breath from unseen vents tucked against his sides, along ribs refashioned for his broader chest, an increased capacity. This body, so comforting yet so foreign. That he was not his yet, it was. It was regrettably his own despite being reformed by the tenno in the other room.

Even I make mistakes, like you.

His constituted, formless brow squeezes; pressuring the memory from his thoughts as he focuses outward beyond himself. Fingers drawn over the scarf lingering around his neck, rubbing the fabric between forefinger and thumb as he focuses on the physical world around him. The mild hum of the void mask engines as prevents its presence to the passing corpus ships – shapes dulled and their lights outlining their rounded features. He watches it beyond the glass, drawing breath within himself as its where his focus shapes. To his predicament, his situation.

Stay on the ship, stay out of trouble. That’s all his directives he was given before the teen’s parental figure headed out for a long mission. It’d take a tentative week or so, the warframe had estimated before leaving the ship; leaving him alone with the kid and a different warframe with back-bent horns. An ‘oberon’ or whichever they were referred to as being – too different from him, too uncomfortable to fathom as he isolated himself from the others.

All he needs is space, as he closes his eye once more; breath exhaling against his biceps lying limp against his chest. They just need to leave him be, to come to terms with the reality within self-isolation.

Embroidered by thought he refocuses again, distraction tempting as the void mask around the ship begins to dissipate, the empty air refilled with the ambience of the ship’s normal functions in a regulated cloak as it drifts in orbit. Technological clicks merge into the backing of noise, analysis of system functions running routine. Music whispers around him, singing faintly as his head drifts back serene, calming, listening to the mellow sounds taking him adrift in his mental landscape and retain placidity.

If only it would remain thus; the clicking of something foreign taps.

And another.

He rejects the taunting against his nerves, carving his attention back to the meditation and away from the disruption. It’s a distant noise, a brief nuance in the variety surrounding him in humming machinery, the rustle of bobbing bonsais, the texture of his deep umber skin and the fibers of his loose flowing scarf. There’s always something he attunes to and pull him back, drawing himself away from the sound of what seems to be … stone on a hard surface. Smooth. Small. A dainty tap as it makes contact.

His singular brow presses against the flesh crafted into his cranem jut, trying to push out the thoughts, the memories forming, away.

It just won’t stop.

A black stone placed.

Tapping.

A white stone is laid.

Again.

A carnal shake doesn’t displace the feeling oozing through his gut, the dread sinking through his nerves; the visceral and the carnal. Desperate to evoke himself back to silence, staring out into the emptiness and his own glazed sight in his reflection. Skin formed into sword-steel, darken, saturating in the depths of space as gold gilding reflects the backing light of the quarters. A hideous visage reflected, a body his own but also not. Skin made of infested flesh, yet smooth beside his damaged face where his eye squints alone.

A tap, followed by another.

The eye closes, energy surging as he tries to focus himself to the foliage around him. The humming electronics. The texture of his scarf as he pulls it against his side.

Tap.

Anywhere but his memories, he tries to draw himself.

Tap.

His fists ball against his thighs, the scarf around his neck tightens as he loses track of his breathing. Relentlessly he tries to keep his focus contained, away from the figments forming, digging against his anxious nerves as his hand plays with the coils of his dark scarf. It draws the curled fabric tighter against a muted scar, a carryover from his transformation, the congealing of organic matter permanently scarred.

He chokes.

Voice hoarse, barely a cry as his memories flash.

Laid upon a hospital bed, tucked tightly, body bound, unable to move as the Orokin sits with leg over knee. He can’t breathe, struggling in the concealed binds.

Ballas is staring. Luminous eyes glowing.

The faint of a callous smile.

A click.

His hand around his throat presses against the sullen wound, a tinge of pain that draws him back to the present of staring out into the unending black. It’s a false comfort as the anxiety bleeds, his glazed eye reflecting the tinted bleached blue energy swarming beneath his umber skin and destressed gilding. Fingers press around the faint of the wound, a reminder of the one memory that remained prior to being taken in by the teen and their warframes. He was not like them, there was no one like him.

Tap.

Palm pressed against the floor, he hoists himself up, exhaling a breath he had unattentively holding, drawing breath quickly as the skiajati is held tightly against his side. Almost conjoined to his hip, he rises to his full towering height, lording over the surrounding bonsais and flowering plants that decorate the meditation platform. He pressures the memories away even as they fleet at the edge of his attention, drawn against his nerves as the incessant tapping persists beyond the closed door into the small quarters.

Anxiety draws him away from investigating and hesitation makes him still; yet he needs to know, discomfort a primary that forces him to move. Despite the crawling within his nerves, the anxiousness that dampens his mood, his movements display as a façade of calm as he wanders up the curling stairs around the flora display. It’s merely a falsehood of stability, his lack of visible stability his only salvation from trembling as he steps towards the tap of stones.

It beats within his temple like naga drums, a daft percussion as the door eases itself open with a vocal hiss.

His inability to express himself is a double-edged vice; suited more for the dredge of battle than in the company of discomfort. Unable to speak, expression null by contorted flesh aside from a sullen eye glazed by disease and painted stark white. His voice; taken from him; leaving only a berserker howl from mutated lungs and barely the figment of a whisper as he breathes – his wheeze a sound only he is so privy to hearing.

The stone taps that extubate his anxiety meld with his mild wheezing; two sounds that draw him back to trauma.

Lied back on a bed unable to move, voice taken from him, a pain jolting through his body as he’s forced to move figments of black stones. The difficulty of concentrating on playing, to satisfy a mocking emotionless mouth. Golden sight baring down at him; cold and taunting.

Tap.

At the corner his motion slows moreso, half standing on the ramp towards the central hub of operation and leaning in to peek with concealed sight.

It’s the teen, hair tussled from clawed fingers running through front to back before it scratches the head of their resting two-toned kavat. Across from them sits the boy’s oberon, the warframe hunched down and staring intently at the item between them. As he peers further, it’s a goban, decorated with black and white stones.

A wave of relief coaxes through his systems. Ballas hasn’t come back for him.

But the sound of the tapping stones still draws him anxious. Too close to the panic he felt so long ago, a reminder of what he’s lost and of the pain he was put through.

The oberon catches sight, and then the teen does.

“Oh, Nrtya!” the teen calls.

The umbra barely flinches, restoring himself to a nearly proud stance – his first instinct.

“Would you like to play-“ the teen starts.

“- a game of komi?” his anxiety finishes, reliving the surge of pain digging around his throat, held reveled around his wrists making him plank stiff. Nrtya barely raises his hand and fingers brush down in a brief dismissal, forcing himself to breathe, to relax. It’s not the executor; he’s safe; he’s okay – but he knows he’s not actually okay as panic storms through his stoic shape. Nrtya fumbles to remember the teen’s name – Warren, was it? He can’t be sure as his mind continues to swarm with trauma received by Ballas.

Warren goes silent as he watches the umbra’s posture shift. Nrtya’s posture displays an air of discomfort inadvertently as he wavers in place; standing separated by a structure strut from the goban despite Warren sitting between him and the block. Fingers dig against where they lie, the skiajati held angular down for fight or flight, his breathing slow yet whining very faint. The teen’s singular visible eye traces over the umbra’s both language, his partly concealed mouth dips to one side in a sympathetic frown – jagged and toothy on the other.

“Sorry,” he whispers, guiding the kavat’s face away from his side as he motions to stand. Digitigrade feet carry him to his full height – mutated legs remarking him taller than the stature of teenren untampered by the void. Dark claws paw against the floor in idle thought, straining to find his words. “I forgot about… yeah,” he fumbles. “were we playing too loud, Nrtya?”

The umbra doesn’t respond, keeping himself anchored beside the column.

Warren doesn’t shift from his position, hesitant to making any aggressive movements. “I’ll try to keep it down, find another surface we can use,” a toothy smile grins warm. “I’ll see if Obses can’t put audio dampeners on the personal quarters, let you have some peace and quiet.”

Nrtya doesn’t respond; but he does move, letting the skiajati lie against his thigh, his palm hooking over the smooth sheath made of his flesh.

There’s a moment of pause before the umbra moves himself away from the pair, wandering back into the personal quarters to quell his burning anxiety. An aching expressed in his slowed steps as Warren watches Nrtya walk away.

The kavat winds itself against Warren’s thigh, butting and nipping at his hand for more attention. His hand drifts down and scratches it behind the ear as hi listens to Nrtya’s shallow steps, the sound of the quarter door opening and closing. He whispers down at the kavat before looking back to where the oberon sits crouched, tapping a white stone against its snarling concentrating teeth. “Kiln,” he whispers, “stop that.”

The oberon grumbles in response, dropping the piece back into the basket beside the goban.

 …

 A heavy sigh heaves from the umbra as his single gaze opens to the depths again, the liset rising over the horizon of Saturn and rising up through the clouds of debris. Nrtya is motionless as he watches the accent through the side of the ship, accustomed to the settled transition of below to above as it’s been since the tenno’s warframe left. He hasn’t paid much mind to count the hours, the ship cephalon already had that responsibility. They’ll be back eventually, he figures, taking a deep breath and exhaling once more into the cooled atmosphere of the homelier quarters.

The flora sits perked around him and the mute ayatan sculptures, items that would’ve been a cause of great duress before due to their ambiguous nature. But, their rhythmical motions made it easier to disrupt his anxiety, entranced for a brief time until he was able to keep himself away from the burning thought. It was the teen’s idea to introduce them; of course, he had his apprehension, foreign objects introduced into his meditation routine, retrieved from some place unknown to him.

He was given something foreign along with it; a choice of ambiance as dampeners are put in place around the room – leaving him separated from the rest of the ship. The ambience, a serene song of occasional plucked chords, the quiet whisper of a drifting stream, the gentle sound of wind established around him at his own discretion. It’s a first, to have a semblance of control over his environment.

His breathing is calm, yet his joints radiate tension from sitting still for so long, adrift in his own null thoughts on nothing in particular. They scream for movement, to stretch, to lunge and eviscerate; a carnal side he despises due to its bestial desires – and its origin.

“Trouble concentrating, old friend?” the single sullen brow presses against his exposed flesh, hand drifting up along the folds of the long scarf and feeling over the lingering scar felt faint beneath his fingertips. A ghost snaking through his nerves, imagery of staring down glowing eyes that feed him anguishing truths as he lied drugged and dazed – forced to play through the nerve damage tingling through fingers and bone. A swarm presses inside his mind, his fingers pressing around his throat and grasping it as his breathing wheezes.

“Umbra,” the ship cephalon starts, and stops, correcting itself, “Nrtya.” He’s broken out of the repeating memory as he stares at the ceiling – where the cephalon’s voice resides. “Would you prefer another soundscape? Your stress levels have risen above the specified threshold.”

With a chuff, Nrtya rises to his feet and plucks the skiajati from the nook between the kneeling cushion and the thick observation glass. It’s not the noise, he just needs to move; that’s all he rationalizes. Just too stuffed up in the lingering ship to be anything but neurotic. He’s taken time to meditation, letting his mind drift to and fro; he needs to stretch his legs, pace around the ship a couple times and do something besides being static. Perhaps memorize the layout of the ship in case anything was to happen.

His steps are slow as he moves to the back of the room, where the dampeners are the weakest, where the ship’s ambient hum overtakes the customized soundscape and where the door slide open with a hiss. There’s a hesitant flinch that crawls over his shoulders as the thick blocks are cradled by their interior housing, leading him out into the open space of the lower galley. The cephalon’s core hums below the center region as he wanders, investigating the stunted growth firmly ingrained into the ship’s paneling. He doesn’t stray too far however, a sense of unease swarming before he maneuvers himself to where the operation hub rests in the upper galley. The machinery sits quiet, the slate grey panels reflecting sunset orange light as he traces over the sleek white bordering.

The style, distinctly not orokin; comfortable, not orokin.

On the far end the ramp is held up tight, the navigation systems closed off until the tenno’s warframe returns. There was a strain between the two he felt as he stepped aboard of his own volition – a hesitation from the heavily scarred loki as the umbra passed without a word. Too mentally strained, leaving the tenno’s side as he just wanted some peace; their words tense as he found a place to settle.

His dark fingers graze over the surface as he looks to the center of the galley, where the teen had set up the day prior – it was yesterday, wasn’t it? There was no indication in how much time has passed since he last left the personal quarters – that was the cephalon’s job. And he couldn’t just ask. His hand drifts away from the sleek surface and beneath his scarf, grazing at the remnant scar.

Nerves jolt as something grazes along his thigh, reaction quicker than thought as he smacks downward towards the offending touch. Warren’s kavat jumps away, tail flickering as its faint blue energy glows through squinting eyes. Nrtya goes still, his hand held firmly idle as he processes what had just happened. The cat creature was just seeking attention… he’s unsure what to do and holds out his palm that he had swatted the kavat with. He strains to make some sort of noise; a soft breath as he squats with his hand held out.

The kavat leers at him, but slowly crouches forth and smells his fingers.

It doesn’t proceed any further and instead wanders back around to the lower galley with a low meow.

Still knelt on the floor Nrtya watches the creature vanish down the ramp, and as it doubles back to peer at him.

He was never good at reading body language. Nrtya stands up again, following the kavat down the ramp and back towards where the transference chamber resides. It stands on its back legs, scratching at the sealed door, and meows. It goes unnoticed by the cephalon until Nrtya moves closer, letting him and the kavat into the arboriform lit room. The creature trots around the corner quickly, its short tail vanishing behind a screen panel.

“Rhubarb, how’d you get in here,” the tenno fumes around the corner as Nrtya slowly walks; half curious, half hesitant. He can hear a stone tap on a hard surface, a game in session he had interrupted.

You spied on me, intercepted my communications.

He didn’t mean…

Anxiety chokes out hesitation, curiosity satisfied, he turns heel.

“Nrtya,” a voice whispers behind him, the only thing that brings him to pause and look back.

The kavat wiggles as its held restrained by Warren, meowing and pawing to get free.

“Can you take her out?” The digitgrade tenno slowly approaches him – though the wiggling kavat makes it difficult. “I don’t like having her in here, she gets into trouble.” The kavat’s tufted ears brushes Warren’s short hair around, exposing a voided eye bleed white surrounded by deeply scarred skin.

Nrtya scoops the kavat up, fumbling the creature as he turns around to leave as anxiousness spikes. Its spindly legs make it hard to manage, dropping it back to the floor as soon as he’s out of the room only for the kavat to turn heel and run back in.

“Rhubarb!” And he hears a small scuffle down the short walk into the transference chamber. The umbra watches as the tenno heaves the kavat back into Nrtya’s arms. “Can you watch her for me?” he sighs, fixing his hair back to cover his void tainted eye. “There should be some toys in the personal quarters to entertain her for a while.”

Nrtya nods, holding the disgruntled kavat against his chest as the transference chamber door eases shut.

The kavat meows in his arms, pawing to be let down.

He releases the fawn-marked creature with a steady exhale, watching as it circles in place before it returns to pawing at the door once more. He watches it for a moment, then turns back to the open galley ready to stretch his anxious nerves.

Eventually, the kavat gives up, joining in the circular pace aching for attention and after his wisping scarf.

 …

 Nearly a week passes before the tenno’s warframe returns. He’s decorated with angry healing wounds, sprayed with sticky blood ichor black and red, and it drips down the white and tan inhuman skin as he paws back aboard the vessel. Warren’s unfazed by his warframe’s gruesome appearance, and it leaves Nrtya to stare as the warframe collapses back on a short stool on the other end of the galley. Blood soaked weapons are callously cast into a stained bin, a later preoccupation for the pair to tend to as the umbra only watches from across the way.

From where he leans against a wall panel leading to the lower galley, he can hear the warframe wheeze through his chest vents. Shaking exhales held firm as a wet rag washes away the blood onto a soaked basin. The loki sits hunched over, elbows lied over knees as his operator cleans away the dark stains and pulls at metal shrapnel clustering in the warframe’s back. Barely a sound rises from the loki as they’re removed piece by piece, the only acknowledgement being the resound of metal as they’re cast aside into an awaiting pail. The wounds reseal as blood begins to welt, padded away as the pair speak barely above a whisper; the loki’s voice strained.

The loki – T’viska, the umbra catches – runs his fingers through the tenno’s hair, ruffling it into a haphazard mess with a tired smile. Warren huffs, dropping the dripping rag to brush his hair back into place. A milky white eye catches sight of Nrtya as he looks away, as does T’viska whose breathing holds firm as he stares the other frame down. Neither of the frames move, a sightless gaze peering into a singular white eye.

Last they met, Nrtya threw T’viska into a wall and nearly choked Warren.

T’viska flinches when Warren presses his thumb into a healing wound, ichor black dripping over his finger. “Dad, it’s okay,” he sighs, “just give him some time to adjust.” The loki relents with a sigh, his shoulders drooping down with his crown, shadowing himself as Warren tends to the damage he sustained in his escape. Metal burns, blood drawn by tracer rounds, a marking of explosive damage laid bare to the bright light of the galley.

Nrtya excuses himself.

As he passes into the personal quarters his singular eye squeezes shut, a hand grasping against the front of his helm as restrained memories swarm. ‘Isaah…’ his soul aches, carrying himself back to the panoramic glass. The skiajati clatters to the side as he drops down onto the cushion in a hurry, knees crumbled against it. Rending disrupts his thoughts, the burning agony biting into his restraint with vicious malformed teeth wrought with infestation. Tearing of metal perturbs his nerves, throwing him back into reliving the trauma. ‘Isaah…’ his vents breath with a deep aching sigh – both hands cradle his face as he kneels forward as his movements lie barely restrained. The memory just won’t stop.

His throat aches as he tries to sob, tries to cry, tries to mourn! But with him trapped inside the melding of flesh, in a body once completely his viciously taken from him. And palms press against his made strange skin, the faded gilding, the exposed flesh crafted within his helm and leaving him with a singular sight that can see into the void itself. Fingers claw against his skin, digging against the flesh as he tries to find something to hold onto, something to become transfixed as he can feel himself breaking down bit by bit.

The realization upon waking up and restrained to a hospital bed, the executor poised with a board laid between them, his son standing by his side unassuming to the horrors before him. If only he knew, if only he knew; but they were dax, there was only the servitude to the orokin. There was nothing he could’ve done to prevent it. But still, it doesn’t cease the burning in his nerves as he crumples down, fists held against the glass staring out into the depths of space as the ship hums through a collective of corpus ships.

The time between, far too long.

But the hurt is deep, scratching as it replays in repeat, a focal lens he’s unable to control.

Don’t worry, old friend. I’m not going to kill your boy…

A jaunt hand raised, an invitation to the horror pilfering his restraint. Made broken, a fist strikes the glass to the cephalon’s muted displeasure. An ill scratching through what could constitute his throat, breath in heavy exhales as he recoils into the surface astrewn. He’s inattentive as he stares into the memory, the infestation burrowed into his body and mind, twisting him into whom he was forced to become and only then breaking the restraints that held him.

You are.

Tearing the restraints as his body metamorphized, a snarling mass of constituted claws and teeth shattering dax armor, rending blood upon the hospital floor as the bastard only watched. Watched how good of a servant the serum turned him into as he claws through Isaah’s dax armor, bit into arms raised in defense and yanked them from their sockets. An uncaring body displaced from a broken mind that can only watch nervously numb. Fist run gory as he strikes again and again, shattering armor with formed metal knuckles and singing gilded claws saturated with maroon. Vision draws away from indulging on warm flesh swallowed in vicious snaps, looking down as life bleeds out of the younger dax’s eyes.

Only then, after his uncontrolled body made his son into ruin, did he have control.

He mourned for what felt like a lifetime until the Orokin commanded him to stand, his front saturated with his son’s blood, he was forced to walk out in his new body. One he caught in a reflection as he left his son’s corpse behind, only giving it one last courtesy glance. He didn’t have to see the Orokin to feel his smile – that he took his will away, his personhood.

If he was able to, he would’ve wrung the Orokin’s neck.

Again the memory relapses, fighting against it as his hands grip against the juts in his forearms, pulling against them as he collapses against the glass. Unable to even cry as his energy flares up.

Across the quarters the door unseals, hissing open.

His energy flares into an exalted blade, the burning energy brimming with anguished ferocity as he scrambles to his feet even as his body trembles. Nerves still run erratic as he holds the blade towards the intruder, the battle-marred loki T’viska, ready for any trickery even as his limbs are still trembling, still reliving the trauma in the backdrop of controlled motions. They stare each other down, vision meeting a lacking sight made of tan and cream. It’s featureless shape unnerves him, unable to read the loki’s emotion as he starts to walk down the curved stairs and around the display that used to separate them.

T’viska plucks a cushion from the rounded couch, still keeping Nrtya in his sights as he moves. The loki’s golden claws are nimble as it grips the white cushion, holding it outstretched behind him as he so casually approaches Nrtya, the exalted blade held against his chest with a mild burn.

And the two stare.

And stare until it’s all Nrtya can think about – the ‘what is he going to do?’ pervades his thoughts.

Just enough to make the umbra hesitate, but not enough for him to withdraw the exalted blade until the loki shifts to kneel – tapping it against the warframe’s bare chest. T’viska stares back, and then, just as casually, puts the cushion down beside Nrtya’s. He kneels as the umbra holds the exalted blade against his nape, letting out a sigh and a worn exhale.

Then a quick inhale. “Join me,” the loki softly snaps, looking up to Nrtya.

Only then does Nrtya displaces his exalted blade; when he’s sure the warframe isn’t interested in hurting him. He adjusts the cushion he collected prior, easing it off to the side to give the loki unassuming space before kneeling upon it.

And again, between them is only silence, leaving the soundscape to prevail.

T’viska’s decorative piercings jingle as he adjusts, pierced through his horns and in the back of his head, tapping against the metal covering his spine as he stretches out his neck. Across the loki’s body rifts of black wounds return mostly healed – excluding the deep scars decorating his chest, ones that makes Nrtya curious. Why didn’t those heal like the rest?

T’viska breathes beside him, looking over to catch Nrtya’s curiosity. He says nothing, but runs his golden claws over the scratches and fogging marks in the glass in front of them – what Nrtya left behind in his erratic episode. It makes Nrtya flinch.

The loki drags his fingers across them, pulling back to rub index middle and thumb. “Panic attack?” he questions, looking over to Nrtya.

It takes him a moment to respond; a slow nod, resenting the embarrassment of such an act.

“It’s okay,” T’viska sighs as Nrtya looks away. The loki’s formed maw frowns as he watches the umbra and looks towards the ceiling. “Obses, hologram please.”

“Certainly,” the cephalon replies, dimming the external glass coating as light ignites in front of it, a display made of series of pinpointing lights narrowed down into their location. T’viska taps away at a dialogue screen, formatting it, navigating it as he searches for a certain function. Not something among the cephalon weave, or to prod through the signals of the ships the liset speeds past, but instead to a simple writing surface.

“Warren, filled me in,” the loki starts, moving back into a kneel. “On what… happened to you.” There’s a pause, a tension as within Nrtya memories threaten to swarm. “Just use this,” T’viska motions in front of them, “to communicate for now… I have another job lined up once we arrive at the destination, and I’ll have to leave again.”

He can feel Nrtya’s hesitation, looking over at him for a moment. Claws trace against the light laid upon the glass, images responding with the gestures, drawing out tenno words. “You had a son, right…?” he questions, to which the umbra nods a confirmation. T’viska sighs, sitting back onto the cushion. “I’m not like you… Nryta. But Warren is my son; I only have a semblance of what you feel.”

Nrtya looks over T’viska, his single solitary white eye narrowed. Then he looks over to the displayed screen on glass, slowly raising his hand to draw out a word in Orokin, the letters slightly distinct from the tenno’s concise language.

‘how?’ is written over the glass in a smooth hand gesture.

At his side T’viska sighs, looking out past the tinted glass to the silent space beyond. There’s a motion to speak – but he thinks other of it, his hand rising to the illuminated screen in front of the glass. Motions trace out words as he begins to speak, “Warren…” he starts, “saved me.” His fingers form a mimicry of what had transpired, a forced connection, the empathetic link, of shared pain.

As the loki’s finger withdraws, a dark digit traces out among the scratchboard, spelling simply among the complex. ‘why?’

T’viska’s golden claw returns to the malleable surface, etching out as he explains the circumstances to the umbra. He allows Nrtya to interrupt him, explain their differences – one transformed, the other a flesh-craft golem given sentience; of one’s loss, the others gain. Their conversation bleeds between verbal and written, the once firm tension dissolving as the ship hums towards its next destination. T’viska will have to run another dangerous espionage mission to keep them afloat, leave Warren again despite how much it pains him – something he is eager to express to Nrtya.

He notions this through voice and gilded claw, looking over with seamed eyes echoing steaming blue.

 Please, take care of him for me.

 A breath eases from Nrtya’s lungs as he watches Warren and the oberon across the transference chamber, observing the kavat making a nuisance of itself by worming between the two and the goban settled between them. Leaned against the wall, far from the board bound with the burning memory, he’s able to disassociate from it easier, muting out the sound of stone on the fabric covered wood surface.

Don’t concentrate on the object itself, Nrtya. Leave any noise as an afterthought if you want to get comfortable with it again. The loki tried to encourage, feeding him to just watch the two play and not listen to the sound that could trigger his relapse. Taps still resound in his head, tearing himself away before he can get too focused on the noise.

He watches as the kavat viciously rubs against Warren’s face, pushing him as he tries to lay down a stone. “Rhubarb,” the teen curses, wrapping his clawed limb around the creature’s neck, spined elbow easing the creature gently before it flops and drags along the floor. With a stone placed, Warren releases the kavat’s neck, adjusting to not let the creature between him and the block again. But the kavat is persistent, rubbing into the tenno’s loose clothing, pawing at the flaps of cloth that hangs over the teen’s thighs.

Warren grunts, his somatic implants glowing as he tries to ease the kavat away again. “Go bug Nrtya or something, Rhubarb, shoo!” The kavat doesn’t move, too encouraged by the attention.

He grumbles before cupping the kavat between the shoulders and behind its rump, scooting it across the floor and out of the way. Rhubarb looks back over the floor space to where Warren settles back on the cushion, her tail flickering from being unceremoniously moved, expression disgruntled as she is relegated to just lying on the floor and watching.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” Warren exasperates, rolling his visible sight as he turns back to the goban.

At the acknowledgement of her presence, the kavat moves back to lying on her legs, shifting to get up before there’s a single snap that makes her pause. Tufted ears twitch towards the source of the sudden noise, glancing back towards the other end of the room where Nrtya has a hand held out.

He watches the creature carefully as he eases down into a crouch, his scarf dangling down around him, dragging across the ground as he anticipates the kavat’s response. It lies still across the room, watching him, waiting; and he snaps his fingers again with a breathing chuff – hoping the creature is able to understand his intention. The kavat lies back down on the floor, rubbing as it looks over towards Nrtya.

“She wants you to come get her,” Warren sighs, placing a piece to claim a forgotten stone. “Ignore her enough, and she’ll come to you.”

Nrtya’s hand drops against his thigh, brushing along the fabrics attached to his person as he watches the kavat between the support beams. It leaves him separated from the other ship’s occupants, but he’s not alone as before and shutting himself out and isolated; and perfectly fine with watching the ongoing game from afar now than before. ‘Give it some time, Nrtya,’ he can remember the loki say as he etched along the holographic display before them, ‘take care of yourself, ease yourself into your comfort zone.’

Dark fingers edge along his fractured feature, staring down at his hand as it pulls away.

Maybe someday. He’s gotten better with suppressing the anxiety the simple game brought, partly due to T’viska’s adamancy about him recovering from the trauma and removing it from the situation. He’s fine with the its occupation in his region, but the noise.

The tapping; the taunting of stoned placed in confidence.

A struggling to remain focused as pain surges through his body made of the orokin’s dangling serums, only able to look over the board as his concentration is the one to set the stones into place. Unable to control himself, forced to play the orokin’s little game as a mind forces him to listen…

Nrtya holds his face, shaking it to replace his throughs elsewhere.

He quietly excuses himself, swiftly walking out of the chamber with so much of an acknowledgement of the kavat tailing his scarf, nor the call of the tenno sat around the corner.

 …

 Nrtya is at ease back in the personal quarters, staring out into the darkness beyond the tinted observation glass, eyeing the swarming corpus vessels as they drift out of sight as the liset drifts through its passive orbit around pluto. There, amongst the gentle hum of the ayatan sculptures, surrounded with bobbing foliage, his breathing lies calmed; traces of bleached blue crease around the sides of his chest as his vision drifts comfortably closed. A soundscape echoes through the chamber an ocean breeze, soothing his anxious mind away from trauma, coaxing it to drift comfortably safe.

Against his side, the kavat years for attention. Fangs drag against his skin as she rubs her jowls against his shoulder, headbutting as he sits poised in the center of the raised platform. She’s persistent, trying to nudge herself beneath Nrtya’s arm, pawing at the loose fabric hanging around his shoulders and down his back. Gently she pats at it, claws pulling against the cloth and yanking till they’re free once more.

Eventually, Rhubarb gives up, curling in her bed, dozing off to the serene tunes.

After some time, Nrtya removes himself from the room, wandering back into the transference chamber and lying back against the wall, placing himself faintly closer to where Warren and Kiln are kneeling with half-adverted attention. ‘Take it easy,” the loki’s words spring to mind as he stares into the distance, hinted with the imagery of a golden claw etching as the other spoke, ‘don’t push yourself too hard. It always takes some time.’ His hand kneads against his helm, rubbing at the feeling of his temple. He doesn’t need to stay in its presence, he can excuse himself when he’s uncomfortable, which he inevitably does.

Wandering out of the transference chamber, settling back into the personal quarters to bleed the anxiety plaguing his systems. Mind drawn to a blank as he stares out into the depths, to the pinpoint glint of the sun as the ship’s orbit erodes and passes a corpus station.

He wants to get better; a hand balling against his face, pressing into the gilding crest of his face, a voided eye drifting close as he lets the sounds eb and flow. He just wants to get better; a simple game he once enjoyed made him weak. ‘It’s not your fault,” he remembers, Warren’s voice, his face torn into anguish as the umbra remembered. “Ballas did this, not you,”

Fingers claw against his thighs as the memory fades, hands balling into fists as he presses himself up to return to the transference chamber. Once there, he remains quietly leaned up against the wall faintly closer to the silent pair, still separated by the decorative struts lining the central path. And again, the anxiety begins to compound as the gentle tapping of stone on the cloth covering digs through his senses, a nuance that forces him to stand upright and return to the personal quarters.

On his way back, he catches the tenno’s gaze following him out; Warren says nothing…

But his expression tells Nrtya enough.

And he persists for untold hours, edging himself closer, leaning against the inner side of the struts as he keeps his distance. Even when he finds himself alone, the goban and kneeling cushions unoccupied, a game set and ended with any space left aside from a draw – he leans up against the strut, releasing a deep exhale as he waits… hoping they’d return. To start up another game of soft taps and let him stare at the ceiling once more.

His gaze traces over the pieces left behind, a mosaic of white and black laid upon a cream cloth lined with a grid in black. Nrtya can barely see it from this distance, hidden beneath the pieces and tempting him to come ever closer. Just a mimicry of charcoal, he figures, fingers pressing against his crossed biceps, fiddling with the scarf as he forces himself to look away in exasperation.

It’s only a couple steps, his mind so adamantly declares.

He’s gotten this close.

A memory surges through his thoughts before vehemently shutting it out, a singular brow squeezing against his congested features, his horizontal pupil staring towards stilled game. It’s only a couple steps away, so close, but still a distance. Silence is his only company, a relieve and an anxiety – no one can see his reaction…

His confidence strains, lifting himself off the column with a deep exhale.

The umbra crosses the central path leading up to Warren’s somatic link, a hand extending and grasping a decorative strut connecting the left region. Carefully, he eases himself towards it, holding it not for physical support but as a stabilizer – pulse hammering in his throat. Now only a simple screen panel separates him from the little gam – a voice chuckles in his thoughts.

Moving forth, Nrtya’s fingers find themselves adrift without contact, drawn close against his body and becoming enthralled with the fabric draping down his front. Nervous, he can tell as they fiddle through the material, a palm roving ever so closer to where his breathing chokes in his throat. He’s trembling, and he forces himself to breathe as he moves to the sidelines. Deep in, deep out; he stares over the goban and the mischievous mistakes laid out in stone, where countless errors and careless placements coaxed the game into a draw.

‘Take it easy,’ the loki’s words spring through the hammering panic ‘don’t force it.’

The words repeat even as a glowing sight forms inside his mind, staring him down from across a digital komi display. Anxiety stammers through his throat.

It’s just a game; his mind cries.

Sound rumbles through his chest as his voided eye squeezes shut, hands balling into fists as trauma surges through his thoughts. The fear caught in his throat rings too similar – a voice box removed, his individuality stripped – and yet he’s still there.

He’s still there.

Blood oozes down his fingers, forgotten as he crosses himself down into a kneel, breath rumbling through the flaring dark vents along his side as they bellow gas. A knee bends against a bead of blood, followed by the other as his palms aggressively press against his legs. Torn through there and now, forcing air out of his lungs as he tries to get himself to settle on the floor. His vision averted – he’s gotten this close.

Nrtya teeters at the edge of his comfort zone, rubbing a hand clean of the foreign stickiness, he reaches out and traces a digit over a smooth stone settled at the edge. His vision remains averted as his breathing is forced to slow, finger tips grazing from stone to another as his relief sighs erratic. His forefinger is slow to drag, moving over onto a third with a brief hesitation.

And then, the hesitation is stripped. Not from relief, as the anxiety tumbles.

To when he was held in restraints.

An object jabs and prods as it digs through a hole in his head, arms held down as a device mutilates and coils. Blood, so much blood oozing down his arms, a billowing scream hampered by dampeners inserted into his back. He wants out; he can’t run, his legs are gone – and his claws dig into stone as a voice disregards his anguish. Ballas, his gut twists, howling as he’s able to strike. Smooth stones rattle to the floor, an object overturned – bringing him back to the ache in a body not his own – a body moved through another’s mind as he’s only able to claw internal; mind numbed, sedated, tormented as a single voice coaxes him to brutalize.

Just a husk… an empty shell.

Blood oozes as he cuts through flesh, cutting into sword-steel skin and digging against phantom restraints with an anguished hushed gasp. Body trembling, the goban knocked to its side, blood dripping from his wrists and throat…

“Nrtya!” The tenno, “are you alright?”

The umbra’s scarf flourishes as he storms past the tenno. Nrtya doesn’t want to think; throwing off the teen’s hand with an aggressive growl.

 …

 His breathing stammers as he stares out into the darkness, coiled upon the cushion with his head between his hands, blood oozing down his chin as his voided eye squeezes shut. Despite the calming environmental tones, all he can hear is static overstimulation – a tone between comfort and dread, the agony of long ago prying at his thoughts as his breath shutters through his vents. At his side, the kavat stares but remains distant, kept away by his growling breaths.

Anxiety chokes within his throat, kept in place as his mind rockets between horrors sat between remembered and blurred. Tormented, eviscerated, toyed with relentlessly; mind brutalized again and again –

Nrtya doesn’t want to think.

As his breathing wheezes, he’s unable to pull himself out of his coiling state, too exhausted by his anxious mind to move, emotions running numb as the flaring vents at his side flex contradictory to his aching inhales. Choking, he can feel in his sore lungs, hands wrapping and pulling at the gilding fused into his skin. His hands eventually faulter, crossing over his knees as the head is cradled by his forearms, run ragged into disassociation.

Rhubarb inches herself closer, until she’s rubbing beneath his arm. Her wide head snakes beneath him to sniff his gored face, lapping at the traces of blood clinging to his visage. Still too exhausted to protest, he allows the kavat to lick his skin, her whiskers tickling at his slumped features as she presses further and rounds to his other side. She nudges his arm, pawing against his leg with a chuff as she tries to scoot herself into his lap. Between his exhaustion and her persistence, she wins, forcing him to sit up with an exhausted sigh.

Before she can crawl into his lap, he pulls her close; his face buries into her fur, his features rubbing until she worms out of his grasp and turns into his lap. Still ringing emotionally numb, he stares back into the depth of space; his hand remains occupied with the kavat’s fur.

She purrs as he strokes her fur, the noise strumming against his lingering tension in his nerves to dilute, letting the tension in his senses loosen and listen to the whisper soundscape around him. Emotions still ringing null, exhausted.

“Nrtya…?” the umbra doesn’t move, even as a hand comes to rest on his shoulder. His sight remains to stare out into the distance even as Warren drops a cushion beside him, collapsing down with a sigh.

Strained, anticipating silence.

Two hands reach out, taking a dark palm gently outwards from its petting strokes. “Nrtya,” Warren whispers, “you’re bleeding.” From the side Warren pulls a rag from a dry basin, the fabric smooth against the umbra’s skin. It’s healing, but there’s still the traces of blood between his digits and along the sharpened claws. Hand over hand, Warren grasps the injured palm – a hold that gently returns. After a moment, he finally speaks, “there was blood on the goban cover.”

Nrtya flinches.

Warren kneels, wrestling the umbra’s other hand over to clean it of lingering blood. He wipes it from the kavat’s fur as he goes along, paying more attention to Nrtya’s lingering injuries over his pet’s personal appearance. The umbra doesn’t move as the tenno works. “You pushed yourself, didn’t you,” Warren muses, returning to sitting on his cushion. Nrtya doesn’t respond, cleaned hands burying into the kavat’s coat. “To approach the goban.”

The tenno signals to his cephalon, indicating to turn on the temporal screen in front of the observation glass. As before it darkens the glass to dilute the incoming light, and around them the lights proceed to dim until the orange glow of the display screen is the brightest thing. The writing display reignites in front of them, the size doubled with the teen’s hand gestures before he sits back with a sigh. “Don’t worry about it, the mess is already cleaned up, you aren’t in trouble,” a laugh left dry. Nrtya’s silence tints his mood, drawing Warren to sigh.

“Listen, Nrtya,” he tries again, “you heard what my dad said. Don’t force it if you feel uncomfortable – that’s the last thing I want you to feel.” With a huff, the tenno’s mismatched arms cross, getting himself settled. “If you still have any inclination,” he pauses, looking for a momentary reaction by the umbra. He finds none, “we play for the fun of it – no risk, no gambles…” his voice chokes, breathing a sigh. “Sorry, I should probably just leave you be, I apologize.”

As he goes to stand, a hand grips his wrist. Nrtya’s dark limb holds him there, the only change in the umbra’s body language.

The tenno relents, getting settled on the cushion once again. “I can stay, if that’s what you need.”

Nrtya releases Warren’s wrist, and slowly, he nods.

 …

 Warren finds himself playing alone in the transference chamber, moving the smooth stones in a meticulous fashion to bide his time as Nrtya watches from a far. His nerves still ring anxious, but the tenno’s presence eases the worry about his own self-control. Separated from the screen panel once torn in a panic, he listens to the gentle taps, the tenno humming a song that doesn’t strike him as foreign, but still unfamiliar.

Under the tenno’s directive, Nrtya’s stopped forcing himself closer to the game; he’s already gotten himself worn down from the prospect of forcing himself closer only to have to remove himself again to calm down. It was Warren’s suggestion to linger as the tenno played, remove himself when the noise got to be too much for him. And from his position, Warren is able to watch him, stopping his game whenever it looked like the umbra was pursuing enough duress.

Someone must escort him out for his own good.

And when the umbra’s nerves settle, they return to the small area in the transference chamber. Warren on one side of the divider, Nrtya on the other. It’s a rhythm they fall into, silently as the duration increases, the proximity narrows.

That is, up until Nrtya is able to hold himself composed as he kneels onto a cushion, the breath through his vents a deep exhale as he stares at the empty grid in front of him. Across sits Warren, drawing their colors at their side. Two baskets hold the colored stones, and Warren holds up a black piece between them, deep in thought.

And carefully, he places it down, giving Nrtya the right to play as white.

The game is slow and methodical as around them a soundscape plays, it’s a gentle forest from the cephalon’s archival records, a distinctively different mood from the personal quarter’s mimicry ocean breeze. And Warren speaks of nothing in particular – something to add to the auditory combination to suppress Nrtya’s bleeding anxiety, letting him play longer games as time goes on.

But, nonetheless, he still needs his occasional break to breathe, to step away and settle the anxious thoughts before they resume.

Gradually, as the time passes from hours into days, Nrtya can feel a semblance of comfort again as he plays, plotting out between their movements as the operator droops across from him. The tenno’s voided eye stares unobscured through Warren’s hair as time elapses, yawning as he leans against the wall exhausted, yet still playing.

If he could, Nrtya would smile, placing a white stone beside black on an unfiltered grid. Capturing a sum.

Warren grunts from against the wall, beaten again.

[modmad]

holy shamoly there are so many things to play with here AAA (also Gladstone doesn’t have friends like OOF anon ouch right in the kokoro)- imma waffle about possibilities for a bit so feel free to read or ignore

Oh man I’m super into this thank you anon whoever you were.

This is the original from the comic scan! Regarding your observation of it not relating to marriage, I think that’s covered by the Don Rosa original explanation in Sign of the Triple Distelfink that it was designed specifically for the coming of a new child. Taking that packaged on top of the fact that it was in fact his mother who received that particular hex effect, and that Gladstone inherited it after the fact, I suspect there’s room for a shift in how the luck functions. Also this is like, happy fun duck comics land so I’m not gonna get too bogged down in technicalities (also going to talk about the theme of isolation in this later).

I do like that you pointed out it has stuff to do with familial love and is different from the symbol for friendship- that works all too well! Gladstone loves his family a lot, but even then his actual friendships with and within the family aren’t all that great! He loves Scrooge, and doubtless (deep down) Scrooge loves him, but they don’t always see eye to eye and in terms of ‘friendship’ it isn’t easy to say that they have a good relationship. Same with Donald; ultimately, they’re cousins, and would never hurt each other seriously in any way, but they fight all the time! Donald in particular is very open about the fact that he hates Gladstone, and while I don’t believe I’ve ever read Gladstone saying he hates Donald, he certainly enjoys being his rival and getting on his nerves!

The one-instead-of-three tulips is particularly laden with possibilities; with how you described them, I would say it fits Gladstone very well! Gladstone has absolute faith in his luck; in fact it’s when he doesn’t that it sometimes stops working for a time. If we take that as ‘faith in what one does’, that erases ‘faith in oneself’ and ‘faith in ones fellow man’- which half works, because he doesn’t trust others (perhaps with the exception of his family, but even then in O Lucky Man we see he was suspicious of Donald using him too), but then Gladstone is very arrogant and confident, so does that negate the first? So perhaps we have to cancel out ‘faith in what one does’ and THAT fits in the sense that, even if it always benefits him, he doesn’t have any control over his luck and effectively is hostage to its whims. Moreover, as in this particular comic, it’s suggested that he feels frustrated and guilty that it doesn’t matter whether or not he tries to achieve something good, it just happens to him. Basically, the thing that he lacks is faith in his worth as an individual: however, is that ‘faith in oneself’ or ‘faith in what one does’? I’m not actually sure! But he certainly doesn’t have faith in all of those three aspects, so one tulip sounds just right.

In terms of the birds, that is to say the ‘distelfinks’, there are several ways to interpret their positions and behaviour, but I can only make these guesses as an outsider based on what you’ve said and other symbolisms I’m more familiar with (there are so many little tie-ins to heraldic, alchemic and tarot symbolism with this image but I’ll try not to deviate).

From your statement it’s unusual for them to be facing each other, and hex signs are usually applied to households, marriages, or friendships; i.e. situations that involve multiple people. This along with ‘inward facing’ creatures to me implies a statement on inwardness, and an inward channeling of the power it is meant to summon. Gladstone’s luck may have a slight umbrella effect, but what is repeatedly enforced in the comics is that it only benefits him. There’s some amount of his luck ‘rubbing off’ on people, whether by literal touch or simple proximity, but the hex only affects him to the absurd degree we’re used to (which makes it entertaining as a character feature, but has proven to be distressing both for him and others). 

We can, again, take this imagery as a depiction/description of Gladstone’s selfishness, or it could be a conscious decision on the part of the hex maker to restrict such a high level of supernatural luck to one entity only. Imagine if that level of luck happened to everyone who was within shouting distance of Gladstone, or everyone who happened to walk past that particular barn, or stayed with people who’d made contact with him etc. The results would be impossible! Dangerously so. With inward facing distelfinks, it leads to a supposition that the only beneficiary of the hex is someone who it explicitly refers to; it worked for Daphne, obviously, as she was the person it was made for and was born directly in front of that symbol, and it works for her son who was born on her birthday. My redraw excludes that specification of the ‘newborn child’ image in the heart, and I’m starting to think that I’ll have to fix that! Because this is so obviously an inherently important aspect of the symbol- this hex can only be received as a birthright. In this sense, the spell is purposefully isolating itself from outsiders, and that reflects perfectly with how Gladstone has done the same to himself; in that vein, it could be said that Gladstone’s self centred personality is not only inevitable as a side effect of being so lucky, but is a necessary form of self-defence to cope with the mechanics of his luck.

As for ‘staring down’ at the tulip and the heart (which I take to be a symbol of the hex’s receiver), it could again be seen as a literal depiction of the distelfinks having a position of superiority and control over the subject. In my redraw I attempted to keep it close to the original, but I took the liberty of making it look even more like the tulip is viscerally connected to the heart. It could be seen either as a tulip growing out of the heart, or being forcibly inserted into it by the distelfink- either way it is a slightly uncomfortable concept. It also struck me that the birds were clearly holding onto the tulip, and the centermost bird is in a slightly aggressive stance- leaning over the flower, looking right out at the viewer. In other symbol language, a symmetrical creature gazing front on to the viewer is often a warning or a confrontational statement; again, a form of exclusion, and a statement of something that should not be interfered with. I wish I knew what the four flowers in the design were, and whether they have some inherent symbolism too...

SO yeah that’s my little analysis. It has to be said all of this is complete speculation on my part! Whether Don Rosa had any of this in mind when he was making the design is anyone’s guess, but he has a long history of depicting very accurate research and I strongly suppose that he knows a lot more on distelfinks than I ever will. Whatever the case this sign is certainly one that could stand more exploration in the canon! There’s just so much to play with!

Anyway, this was fun- now I have to work. Oops.