#author’s note

[cod-dump]

My brain becoming more and more obsessed with NikPrice and when I'm brainstorming Graves will randomly appear. Like Nik and Price are superhero comic style and Graves is cartoon chibi-ish (a blob shape really) witn a >:3 face slapped in the frame with them, and they’re both "Yes, this is our thing". That's my brain at the moment

[letraspal]

“It’s her sister, I think. She’s too young for Watford yet. She looks like his stepmother, dark-haired and pretty, but not like Baz and his mother—they’re drawn in bolder lines than this.”

Mordelia Grimm | Women of the Simon Snow Trilogy

[angstitty]

Foretelling of a scrumptious chapter

[lithepetal]

About four years ago, I was an active writer on Tumblr. I’ve returned with a new story—a story I’m excited to tell, with delicate handling of sexual abuse, which I myself have experienced. As someone with C-PTSD, I was once content to dwell in darkness until I found people who believed in me, who challenged me to heal. That is why I’m inspired to write this story.

Aurora Stark was born in 1997, six years after the deaths of Tony’s parents. The events of the movies prior to and including The Winter Soldier are canon for my story, while Civil War and beyond do not take place.

Warnings and what to expect: slow burn romance with Bucky Barnes, healing through trauma, aftermath of sexual assault, underage sexual assault (non-graphic, but Brock Rumlow is a warning, folks), mentions of the 1940’s, father-daughter relationship.

If you’d like to be tagged, let me know!

[forever--darling]

i finished one of us about a week ago and still cant stop thinking about it it's easily the best fanfiction ive ever come across heres a little drawing inspired by this story and tysm for creating this masterpiece🥹🫶

stop omg I literally am going to cry 🥹 this is so beautiful and you are unbelievably talented. thank you so much! you perfected this in every way and I am in complete awe. 🤍🤍

[wcstarless]

@harriertail reread Omen of the Stars and now I’m actually excited to rework it for Starless. It made me remember stuff. So thank you!!!

Also originally I was gonna be all about Ivypool buuuutttt Docewing’s poor story. I may have some dark forest warrior hovering over her too.

Maybe her Great Great Grand Dad?

[agendercas]

Comments from Murdoc during the Silent Running Music Video Q&A (Part 1)

(Part 2)

[katmajik]

Ten-plus years of identity crisis distilled into a single blog post. How very early 2000s of me.

[iamtheunicornwizard]

The account that wrote the fic this note comes from was orphaned but god I wish it wasn’t so I could read more from this person 😂

[taevbears]

little life update: but i got a new job 🥹

i’ll officially start with them next month! what’s nice is that i think my new schedule will allow me time to actually write 😭 (or at the very least, get me motivated again bc the burn out from my last job was UNREAL 💀)

i’m sorry for the lack of updates, but when i tell u it’s been a JOURNEY these past couple of months lmao 💀💀

but with all that said, once i adjust to the new job and everything, i hope i can start updating more frequently again. thank you for bearing with me. i have some stories that are slowly cooking, and i’m very excited to share them with you when they’re done 🫡

[dietmountaindewbae]

Miss you and your fics, lovely :( <3333

Hope you are feeling all well & taking care of yourself. :)

i’m boutta cry, i’m so sorry for not updating.

my life has gone wild so fast so i’m just trying to get by while also trying to find moments for you and for me.

i’m sorry guys but hold on tight.

this isn’t the last of me.

[cod-dump]

Getting flustered when trying to write a spicy piece. Who is in the room to judge me? My cat, that's who but he can't read

[xerotiny99]

My blog literally turned into one of those who just reblog and don’t stay that active. Ever. Honestly, I only started using Tumblr again to post my writing. Anyway…

I revamped my “look” “layout” whatever you call it. And just want to let my followers know that I’m not dead….yet. (This is a joke).

I’ll be updating our precious series soon! Here’s a sneak peek till then. ;)

[in-her-shadow-if]

Just letting y'all know the demo is being worked on! I took a Tumblr break from this game and @nextinline-if but I'm back now so I'll try to answer some of the Asks that have been sitting for a while soon.

For now, I'm not going to do NSFW. I need a break from that.

Thanks and can't wait to launch the demo!

-Vi

[whinlatter]

author's note | chapter 7: caged 🪽

thank you for reading chapter seven of Beasts! this chapter, we see the fallout from the controversial punch, watch harry and ginny go through about ninety bottles of ink writing precisely one bazillion letters to one another (my loves), and fret as the residents of grimmauld place fight a losing battle with pixies that may or may not be a metaphor for our characters’ own multiplying traumas, chasing everyone around and refusing to be contained. pray for our babies, for no-one is thriving - let's chat chapter seven! (plus a sneak peek of chapter eight, which includes a letter from a character yet to make his Beasts debut...) 👀

✨ spoilers for this chapter below the cut  ✨

writing notes and headcanons:

vibes: this chapter, i wanted the vibes to be claustrophobic, tedium, all hogwarts, real focus on ginny and her restlessness and over-it-ness, her starting to write a lot, both to harry and to others, and her starting to push the boundaries and rebel now she's lost her sense of purpose in returning. (@pocket-lilacs brought up pandemic-era uni vibes of 'what is the point of studying when all this is going on' and that is exactly the energy here). the politics is more a backdrop to ginny's arc in this chapter, though the thicknesse trial has uncomfortable echoes for gin's own set of experiences, and i'm having so much fun but also banging my head up against the wall/grappling with turning up/turning down the volume on the different macro/micro plots in different chapters to try and get different effects and to follow ginny's own engagement with the Big Questions of the postwar wizarding world. scale is hard, who knew!

quidditch: by far the hardest part of this chapter to write was the quidditch scene. it was 3000 words long originally, and i had to go at it with a sledgehammer to bash it into bits, dump most of it, and then just keep the most important parts to fold into this much quicker, punchier scene. the worst part of writing is spending days crafting a section and in doing so learn that you don't need it lmao. so yeah that's why this chapter was a week late. this one was a nightmare but we got there in the end lmao

the forest detention: our first flashback to the war year at hogwarts! why haven't we had more? answers on a postcard, all will be revealed, including the context for the silver trio's forest detention, but for now will just say the fact that snape sent the gang into the forest with hagrid for detention after stealing the sword has a) always had me in a chokehold because all of the endless ginny/forest foreshadowing but also because i've never been satisfied with the explanation that the detention was just an obvious easy option. can't wait to share more !!!

harry and ginny: all i want to do is write more letters for those two. 'sneaking out of grounds, booze, leather gangs' - that was how @madammalkins23 summed it up beautifully, getting at the vibes i keep coming back to with both of these characters: the sirius-black-shaped elephant in the room, basically. escaping from hogwarts with buckbeak? the risk being what makes it all fun? harry fixing up the motorbike? fighting a war against grimmauld place and getting on the whiskey? the looming shadow of molly weasley? it's truly giving padfoot. the idea of harry and ginny in cahoots, as partners in crime, really kept me going when writing this chapter - like, what if harry for the first time did have another person in his life who was of the 'fuck it' school of thought? (i even went back and read that jkr short story of sirius and james on the motorbike lol). basically, the sirius echoes just sort of ended up writing themselves, as they always seem to do in this fic. when it comes to the letters, it's striking to me that in canon harry is very preoccupied with who does or doesn’t write to him - at the dursleys', but also after sirius' death ('It’s just hard,' Harry said finally, in a low voice, 'to realise he won’t write to me again.' - HBP). i've never really got fics that have harry as a non-loquacious letter writer in the post-war period, especially to ginny - harry seeks huge comfort and reassurance in getting letters from people who care about him, and channels his worries about people he's close to into letters, especially people he views as family (sirius, ginny). that harry and ginny would become a bit emotionally codependent through letters seemed in some sense a natural choice, basically, and although they're still being very avoidant, in some ways, i think they're building a foundation towards becoming each other's person in ways that's important. (i am putting together a sirius and ginny parallels meta playing with these ideas and character-trait overlap that i'll share hopefully soon, so stay tuned on that one)

why won’t ginny open up? by far the question i've been asked most this week! i am really really excited and happy about the arc i’ve got in store for ginny on this question, so don't want to reveal too much, but there have been some beautiful insightful guesses in the comments section about why ginny is struggling to come clean with harry or her family. here we see harry begin to see through gin's defences, a little bit, but also show his own blindspots that come from him not having asked the right questions or always probed about her interior life before now. i'm always so grateful and blown away by the trust readers have put in me to deliver on all these protracted question marks but this week especially i felt v glad for readers' compassion towards these characters and especially for ginny and hermione, as they fuck up and get it wrong and struggle yet still get grace in the comment section. both are on a journey, but i know more impatient readers could be sick of waiting for them to get there, so just to say i am really glad everyone is getting it and seeing where both characters are at with empathy and kindness, because ofc what they’re both doing is frustrating (and, when it comes to gin, harry is beginning to think so, too)

plus thicknesse: had a long chat with @saintsenara about ol thicknesse, because he's kind of a baffling figure - ex-auror who gets successfully imperiused, becomes minister and then goes on to actively commit horrific war crimes while under yaxley's control. what's fun about the trials, though, is that you can use them as a conduit to raise these big moral questions for postwar wizarding society - in thicknesse's case, it's questions about agency, free will, and culpability, in ways that has real implications for ginny's reflections on her own experiences. so cheers pius love u

harry's patronus: i am salivating at all of your theories for this one - obviously i'm saying nothing for now, but keep them guesses coming, i live for em! and if you guess right, i'll come up with some kind of prize lmao

detention, career advice (and graves' apathy): back in the site of former detentions, ginny shows her remarkably sparse knowledge of wizarding careers in a scene that i hope shows her trying on for size different role models/authority figures and seeing which ones she feels most like. (i like the idea that ginny would actually be a bit interested in being an auror, if only she'd been in of age and able to benefit from kingsley's hiring amesty after the battle). having ginny hover over the idea of being an unspeakable was particularly important for me, because i like the idea of the dept of mysteries being quite a formative space for her (i feel like all i do is say 'wait and see!' but... i have things to do and say with this dimension i swear!) graves is like, do what you want, babe, i don't care. i'm here for the pension, frankly

michael corner: 'surprise bitch!' - michael corner, probably. do i think michael and ginny were mates after the breakup end of ootp? no i do not. but i have always been so struck that ginny and michael must have actually spent a lot of very intense time together during DH as die-hards in the DA (michael is the only character we hear whose torture by the carrows after attempting to rescue a younger student is described as particularly severe, which i think suggests his level of commitment to the cause). readers will recall my open disdain for michael corner up til this point - i have described him as the jack berger of hogwarts quidditch, for my satc fans - but i'm afraid to say i have now decided i quite like him and am excited for him to rock up in person real soon. i think he's a know it all softboi but with a goodie core. also as a writer there's something quite refreshing about bringing in a character who is an ex who probably can see through some of ginny's shit by virtue of having spent a lot of time with her but no longer needing to/caring about impressing her, placating her or keeping her on side lol

hermione: alaskanastro left a comment that summed this up: 'Man, Hermione is really just doubling down on the whole "I'm going to try desperately to control something in life to feel like I'm in control even if it's my friend's life" isn't she? Or at least trying to'. yep, that's what she's doing! we still don't know all that hermione's going through, but this hit the nail on the head fr. i feel bad that this fic is ginny pov at this stage in its arc, because i think ginny sees hermione in a particular way rn (their final conversation in this chapter really speaking to these tensions - ginny does not want to feel mothered, at least not by hermione...), but these two have a long way to go to get to a point of mutual understanding. wanna write a meta on their friendship soon, hopefully will get chance to before i finish chapter 8. but anyway - wonder what's going on with her and ron... hope we find out soon... hope someone tells us... :) :) :)

everything but the ghoul: the dumbest pun, but had to use this joke in a chapter where ginny skips school (everything but the girl's most famous song is called 'missing'... get it)

songs from the playlist for this chapter:

girls getting grouchy and teenage in their feelings is the big ol mood this week:

the middle of the world - nicholas brittell | sidelines by phoebe bridgers | difficult by gracie abrams | simulation swarm by big thief | crisis by elizabeth m. drummond | delete forever - grimes | chinese satellite (copycat killer version) by phoebe bridgers

i did promise a sneak peek didn't i...

From the desk of the MINISTER OF MAGIC Whitehall, London Dear Ginny,  I hope you’re well. I’d like to meet with you on Saturday the 12th of December at 11 o’clock. It’s important that we’re discreet. Please vanish this letter after reading. Sincerely, Kingsley

[wcstarless]

The New Prophecy (since nobody is asking about it I'll just spill)

Blossomfeather is sent a vision from StarClan about the journey.

Without darkness light can't triumph, light can't exist without the dark to oppose it.

The vision is sent to her by Spottedleaf (ew) Goosefeather and Yellowfang. They insist that the dark forest has to follow them to the lake.

I imagine StarClan and the dark forest had to actually make the journey with the clans. But it's like first class versus the back of the plane. StarClan gets fed and sunny pelts and a wonderful peaceful journey.

The Dark Forest cats have basically a comedic road trip with Firefall asking are we there yet every fifteen seconds.