#black sails is good but also too heavy

[brittle-doughie]

Bake It till You Make It

I’m well aware “Baker” is also a label used for the reader for some writers and their self-aware fics lol. Got some inspiration from some of @yandere--stuck ‘s CR posts. Cannibalism warning for this one

The Sugar Gnomes were glad to announce to you that they were opening the seasonal cake shop to the cookies of the kingdom! They feel like the cookies would be very pleased if it were you running the shop, you were already endeared in the kingdom, so this cake shop deal would seek to further do that!

Oh! Seems there’s already a huge line waiting for opening time as you were under the admiring and affectionate gaze of the cookies watching you enter.

You quickly got the hang of the whole cake making process and made sure the ones you made absolutely suited the cookies’ needs. It brightened your day to see your fellow cookies visibly enjoy the cakes you made as they enthusiastically took bites out of them. The reviews that came in were nothing but stellar, brimming with praise of your cake making skills!

“This is pretty good! Well worth the trip! Me and you should go sailing some time, Y/N!”

“His majesty smiled after having this cake. It's been so long since he smiled...Thank you, Y/N Cookie. Your cake has brought me relief. You’re always welcome in the Dark Cacao Kingdom..”

“This is definitely worth investing. I will be sending an envoy in the near future. Let us talk business, shall we Y/N Cookie? The Republic will greatly welcome a talented baker like you.”

Business was bustling, but it was also partially just so the cookies would see you again. Conversation as you made the cakes was common, but it made the cookies waiting in line annoyed as they wanted their turn to speak to you too! There was also some disputes with cookies in line trying their best to be the first ones in the shop, with arguments over cutting the line also occurring often, but for your sake, they didn’t push past the point that would lead to a screaming match.

Cookies that were repeat customers had brought their own confectionaries too to gift you! It ranged from cupcakes, beverages, and even their own cakes..oddly flavored the same as the flavoring the cookie gifting you it had. Affogato sundae, a large cup of cocoa, a dish of eclairs, carrot cake, blackberry soufflé, Black raisin muffins, a mint choco cake, it goes on!

The cookies were also either hiding themselves a bit or are dressed up to avoid showing any part of their bodies, you thought it was odd that Blackberry was wearing quite a lot of winter clothing covering up her arms completely as she gifted you her soufflé, watching you in anticipation and with a hint of suppressed excitement as you took a bite of it.

She was more then pleased to hear that you enjoyed the soufflé she made, that you enjoyed her. She probably will leave out the part where she removed bits and pieces of her hands to make the soufflé, but if it was for you, it was worth it.

Don’t worry about Raisin covering up her head today with winter caps, it totally wasn’t because she used parts of her hair to make those muffins!

Why is Cocoa hiding her arm behind her? Don’t worry about it, but please enjoy the large cup of cocoa she made for you!

Affogato wearing a heavy coat covering his torso is odd? He just decided to wear one today! Please enjoy the sundae he made for you and don’t pay attention to the missing section of his torso as he hurried off!

The cakes you make are absolutely wonderful, cakes that had a sense of you in them as they ate. It’s only fair they make something of theirs to feed you with in return.

Don’t worry, they can heal off the missing parts..and once they do, they plan on doing it again in the future…

[sanjisblackasswife]

Monster Trio with a Black Girlfriend Headcanons (NSFW-ish)

A/N: this is like so long…like..wtf..

Luffy

our Brazilian King here would be the most fun to be with ngl. Being in a relationship with him is no different than being his friend really. The only difference is being a bit more touchy and protective.

He literally loves everything about you from your hair, shape, and just who you are as a person

He loves giving you his hat btw. Especially when you show off your natural hair

Speaking of natural hair…

Probably one of the funniest things that has happened in your relationship is when you take out your braids for the first time.

Ok picture this: Nami just announced it will be getting colder in the next few days as y’all set sail and it’s about that time you want to take out your braids and be natural while it’s cold.

So, You’re in your room as everyone is minding their business and Luffy barges tf in looking for you if you wanted to play tag.

Mf loses his mind seeing the braiding hair all over the place pls

“Y/N YOURE BALDINGGGGGG!!???”

“What? NO I AINT BALDING ITS FAKE HAIR!”

Pls calm this man down he is running all over the ship looking for Chopper

After a good kick from Sanji and Nami you drag him back to your room with your hair now half braided and half a fro to explain to Luffy that you’re not losing hair or balding it’s just fake extensions.

He’s still lost but he’s a good sport about it.

He actually sees your real hair for the first time, it was pretty short when you first met him but you stayed in braids for so long you managed to get a lot of new growth.

Luffy has sparkles in his eyes seeing how pretty and healthy it is(not in a weird way but seriously whether u had a TWA or long curly hair it was all pretty to him)

He also loves your thighs heh

Before you two dated Luffy was already close with you in friendship and very touchy too.

There have been many times you have just been chilling on the ship with Robin and Luffy comes in, put his hat on your head, and takes a quick nap on your lap.

You have gotten ALOT of spit in between your thighs due to this

Don’t worry he also makes a mess of your thighs when y’all are in bed together

Ok lemme put some angst:

We all know OP isn’t afraid to tackle issues like human trafficking and even racism so imagine you and Luffy are in a pretty bad town and encounter some rude racist mfs.

So you and Luffy are grabbing a bite to eat when two idiots in the restaurant come barging in demanding drinks.

The waitress tells them they’ll have to sit at a table but they seen you and Luffy sit at a booth and pointed

“Why don’t you get those two to give up their seats?…the boy and…that person…people like her don’t deserve to even sit in an establishment like this.” And the man had his thumb pointed back towards you.

His tone was so disgusted and to further insult he made his statement known LOUDLY that a girl like you shouldn’t be in a place like this.

“Excuse you?” You muttered looking at the two men in front of you and Luffy.

Luffy wasn’t dumb, he only found out recently after you both started dating the heavy racism people tend to have towards black people which caused Luffy to be a bit more over protective over you.

. Luffy did sit and watch the men’s movements and words, because he knew you could defend yourself, however racist idiots always managed to take it too far and then your sweet boyfriend jumps to action.

“What do you mean ‘a girl like me!?’”

“Do i have to spell it out for you?! YOU’RE A N—“

Immediate knock out.

Broken noses, ribs, you name it Luffy went tf off on them racist jackasses

Your hand barely touched your weapon before Luffy punched the daylights out of said man.

It was actually kind of hot because his hat was covering his eyes.

“Idiots.” Luffy grumbled walking out the restaurant . He took your hand and a piece of meat in the other hand mumbling something about them being bastards.

Long story short after Luffy tossed the men up and down the street so well you ended up giving him the OL sloppy toppy as a thank you that night.

Speaking of sloppy toppy let’s get into the NSFW part of your relationship:3

First off he has seen plenty of naked women. But yours is just better

He don’t know if it’s your shape not being the same as other girls or your skin or just the way you smell but he enjoys staring at your naked body and bending it im crazy positions as if you were made of rubber too during sex

You’re always more sore after one round of sex with him rather than actually fighting marines Sksjsksks

You of course initiated sex with Luffy first after a few months of dating and you were the one to take his virginity (he took yours as well). He was kinda awkward about it though because stuff like that wasn’t something he cared to do.

However, you both got into the oral sex part and goodness he fell in love with you after that.

Luffy has a huge oral fixation so he doesn’t mind going down on you

He actually likes it more than screwing you im sorryejsjhsjdsk

Not that it doesn’t feel good being inside you

Poor boy started crying and moaning so loudly cuming inside you for the first time

It’s just you have a very interesting and addictive taste

His words not mine

He also really likes staring at your pussy Abseiskjdhdj NO JUST HEAR ME THOUGH—

Like when he is eating you out sometimes he just stares at how his tongue is rolling and lapping up your clit he forgets that you probably came at least 2 times :((((

It’s just so nice to look at to him especially if you have a fatter ….cat.

Loves burying his face in your neck pls.

You smell like shea butter and cinnamon the man is so addicted to your smell.

I feel like Luffy doesn’t have a favorite body part your thighs

But he loves rubbing his cock between your thighs as you both sleep .

Literally they’re so soft and warm especially after taking a bath.

Speaking of baths you managed to get him to take more baths

ONLY IF you take one with him.

Usually ends with him screwing you in the tub and y’all get more dirty than clean sksjsjsjs

All in all he loves you sm

Sanji

This man deserved the best head ever omg.

Luckily he has you and your beautiful lips<3

Ngl Sanji is the type of dude to call you his “Black Queen” IM SO SORTEUEKDJSJ

Literally any corny black girl “compliment he can think of he’d say it to you.

“Y/NNNNN MY BEAUTIFUL EBONY PRINCESS I MADE YOU SOME TEA!”

:(….hes trying.

None the less you being his first official girlfriend actually was more work than you thought.

Yes he’s very charming, sweet, honest, giving etcetc but his jealousy sometimes wears you out.

Anytime you two go out together and another man drools—let alone comments your looks Sanji’s already lifting his foot .

He didn’t believe you actually liked him back at first :(((((

Poor baby, he has trust issues. Pls give him all your attention.

It doesn’t take long though for him to accept you actually do love him just as much (if not more) as he loves you.

Said “I love you” on the first date

Threw you off completely, but it was so sweet and quick so you said it back.

A few of your love languages with each other is most definitely quality time and acts of service.

When there is an off day with the crew you and Sanji spend the day cooking meals you grew up with

I.E. whether it’s from your culture (like Nigerian food) OORRR simple soul food baby he is ganna FLIP. Especially if you cook it for him to try!

“Okay so this is Mac and cheese, fried chicken, greens, & corn bread. I didn’t make a whole lot because I wasn’t sure—Sanji?”

His whole world is rocked.

The seasonings, the flavor, the texture, everything that you just cooked was something he will put on his “new favorite food list”

“PRINCESS THIS IS SO DELICIOUS I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU COOK SO WELL!”

He asked to marry you.

He ask to marry you at least once a day

That’s actually how y’all started dating heheh

When he first met you, you were actually intimidating to him but not in a bad way SKSJSJS

He still fawned and drooled over you, but you nearly thought he didn’t find you attractive because even when you joined his heart eyes was still on Nami more than you.

Even after Robin joined after you he seemed to stir his attention to the two girls more than you.

Granted you felt like it was probably because you weren’t his type, you didn’t have those girl’s shape(for example if you’re pear shaped) your hair wasn’t like theirs, and you were a bit more of a tomboy than anything so it made you feel a bit insecure.

Or maybe the mf didn’t like black girls who knows KSHSHSJS

Complete opposite tho this man is a whore for black women

It only annoyed you because somehow you’ve grown a crush on the idiot.

However all those things were the reason why Sanji felt so intimidated + you’re incredibly strong willed and ain’t afraid to speak your mind and that’s what made you so much more attractive to him than another other woman he met.

And you do so one night while Sanji cleans up the kitchen.

You knew this was a bad idea, a bit cringe, and out of character but the curiosity was eating at you and you knew if you didn’t ask right then and there you may as well just get over your crush with him; “How come you don’t like me?” You said without a care in the world leaning on the door frame arms crossed pouting, Sanji recognized your voice and felt his soul drop a little hearing your crazy question.

“Don’t… Like …you?”

“You heard me. It’s not like I’m jealous or anything (you were) but…I don’t know it seems like when I want to hang out with you, you seem to be more interested in Robin or Nami to be around…I know I don’t wear dresses a lot or skirts…and I’m a bit rough around the edges but …as your crew mate…AND FRIEND…I…um….I…”

You didn’t even hear Sanji approach you so closely as your tangent was going on with your eyes not meeting his. He felt so bad making YOU feel bad.

He grabbed your hand rubbing the palm of it with his thumb.

“I’m…im so sorry, Princess i—I um…”

Que the dramatic music

“I AM SO SORRY M’LADY! YOU DESERVE TO BE TREATED LIKE THE QUEEN YOU ARE I CANT BELIEVE I MADE YOU FEEL SO ABANDONED BY YOUR PRINCE! PLEASE FORGIVE ME—MATTER OF FACT NO DONT FORGIVE ME I DONT DESERVE IT!”

“Sanji..”

“I PROMISE TO NEVER HURT YOU AGAIN—“

“Sanji…”

“I’LL DO YOUR LAUNDRY, COOK ALL YOUR FAVORITE MEALS, ANYTHING TO—“

You actually found it amusing seeing how much of a drama queen he was asking for you not to forgive him, and you’re a big softie for him so to shut him up you grabbed him by his nape and kissed him.

His lips were so soft omg

“Marry me.”

“HUH?!”

And that’s how I met your mother

Ok we finna get spicy over here

Sanji is a boob man. We know this. And because of this he loves seeing your boobs ALOT.

“They’re like chocolate kisses.”

You nearly started crying from laughter when you let Sanji fondle your chest.

“Do not say that again will slap you—AH!”

Too late Sanji popped a whole titty in his mouth.

Ngl after a few months of dating and gaining each others trust he started to become a bit OOC.

Meaning….in the bed.

At first he’d ask you repeatedly if you felt good having sex with him, but now that he knows your body…well..

“R-Right right there San—-JI YES!”

“I know baby I know..”

Tf this boldness come from

Ok so you took his virginity too. It was just a Process because Sanji kept bleeding on you.

Had to use a blindfold on him which really had him cuming in seconds.

He sometimes moans in French.

Maam…

He moans in French in your ear and you slowly grind on his cock

“S-SA—-“

“Tu te sens si bien sur ma bite”

HOHOOO I GATTA MAKE A SHORT DRABBLE OF THIS

You find his French accent so sexy

Cocky bastard knows it too so if you are acting like a bit of a brat he whispers in your ear some of the dirtiest things he wants to do to your body in French

You don’t even know what he’s saying it just sounds hot KabsjsKSBSKS

Sanji most definitely loves to finger you.

Great past time when you both are alone and you wear a short dress or skirt

Your pussy>>>>>>>>>>>>life is his whole mentality being with you in bed.

When it’s your hair wash day Sanji always invites himself to help you, but it always starts off with him helping washing your hair, then once he rises it he begins kissing your shoulder, then your spine and then next thing you know he lifting your pretty brown thigh on his shoulder kissing and eating your pussy under the hot shower head <3

He keeps those days marked on his calendar SKSJSJ

Zoro

I told y’all he wasn’t racist

Mf is a simp for black and Latina women too he just won’t admit it fr.

This mf here..

He mf adores and can’t stand you all at the same time

Seriously your little smart remarks is ganna be the death of him.

Zoro actually loves a feisty/strong woman. He’s usually around the girly girl types plenty but seeing a woman that isn’t afraid of fighting grown men 10x her size is what led Zoro to pursue you

However he didn’t know he had a crush on you you were the one to get it out of him💀💀

“Why don’t you admit you like me already? We could have been dating like…a week after I joined y’all.”

“What?! I don’t— !”

“You’re literally cuddling me, Zo…”

When you first joined shortly before Chopper you both automatically had a love/hate relationship.

You were a gunslinger and he was a swordsman there were plenty of debates on which was better

“At least I can still fight if I run out of bullets..”

“At LeAsT I DonT RuN ou—-shut up! If it came down to it and we ended up fighting I’ll whoop you so disrespectfully boy..”

“YOU WHAT?!”

Me and Mrs. Petty everyone <3

You both tend to argue a lot but it’s stupid arguments that you start because you love annoying him.

And he knows this.

Zoro also likes patting your butt

It’s never sexual—you’re the sexual being in the relationship (we’ll get to that later)

But Zoro loves your fat butt.

Literally. The man is a butt man.

The way you sway your hips when you walk and how your butt effortlessly moves has him staring for way longer than he should.

And you know this.

However he usually pats your butt to get your attention

“Common we head to head to the ship.” He stated in your ear walking past you giving your bum a light slap and slowly dragging away said hand off your bum.

It turns you on sm pls

Loves to nap on your tummy

Looks like a grumpy baby with his strong arms around you and his face slightly tucked in with his eyebrows furrowed

He usually lift up your shirt to have skin to skin contact

Sniffs your hair a lot

Don’t know why he does it but sometimes when he’s standing behind you he just lowers his head and does a subtle whiff

You don’t question it….you kinda wanna though.

He lets you hold and use his swords

You have threatened him with it…many times.

Also if you have a TWA(or any natural hairstyle really) or like finger waves of the sort he friggin loves that. Whenever he’s holding you he tends to run his rough fingers through your curls and sometimes helps pull out any kinks he may randomly find

You woke up to him one time eyes completely focused on a tangled curl you had

It was so cute

“Zo—-?”

“Lay back down im not finished.” He pushed your head back down gently still taking out the curl.

Despite that Zoro really has no clue on how to be a proper boyfriend sometimes so you have to teach him.

A lot.

“Why would you randomly want flowers where would you put them?”

“ITS THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS YOU ASS.”

He’s trying.

Y’all never go on proper dates though.

Zoro doesn’t think it’s necessary, you both spend a lot of time together training or when you dock on a ship.

However if you REALLY wanna go on a date he’ll take you.

Ended up in a mess.

You both got lost.

Zoro was fighting random pirates

You shot a guy

Y’all fell down a hill because Zoro slipped and grabbed your arm

Never again

His dick makes up for all his stupidity though

Okay don’t get mad…

But I don’t think Zoro is as great with sex as y’all say he is OKAY JUST LISTEN TO MEJDJDDKSKS

I do believe he can LEARN HE IS A GOOD AND FASTER LEARNER

But it took so long because he’s so easily flustered.

Just like Sanji and Luffy he was a virgin and you had a bit more experience.

You went down on him first and he was actually more embarrassed than turned on KSBSJDKS

But he just felt weird seeing you in between his legs damn near gagging on his cock. You liked it though.

“Are —-are you okay?”

“Mmhm. Why does it not feel good?” :(

“No ! I mean yes! IT DOES! DAMMIT YES YOUR MOUTH FEELS GOOD!—“

When Zoro first slid inside you you swore his eyes rolled back and he swears you were just seeing things.

“Feel good don’t it.”

“Shut the hell up.”

No but after the 2 years he definitely got much better and bigger

He knows how to read your faces on what hurts and what feels good and it’s honestly something he pats himself on the back for.

He loves it when you sit on his face btw.

You’re thick, he’s thick , and he loves your thickness so sit on his thick head. Both of em

Remember how I said you were the more horny one of the relationship?

Not true he is but you’re more vocal about it.

“Zoooooo….I wanna sit on your face.”

Man nearly drops his dumbbells on his foot.

“What is wrong with you?!” Literally been craving to eat you out all day since he had a dream about it this morning though.

His tongue…..

Whew

My mans is a messy eater

VERY MESSY AND AGGRESSIVE TOO

You like how he manhandles you so it’s not a big deal but if anyone were to see him eat you out they’d think he’s literally EATING YOU

He loves holding you up on his shoulder to eat you out btw

You’ve been caught once by Usopp in the aquarium with you back high on the wall and him sucking your clit

Us couldn’t speak to you for weeks

Zoro didn’t give af

Ok he did a little because his dick was out

Amazing bf.

[bonearenaofmyskull]

Hey! Curious if you're currently into any great shows. If so, mind sharing your recommendations? Always on the lookout for some good TV suggestions!

I imagine you've seen everything I have. I spend more time gaming. Not into anything great at the moment, but I can dig deep and see if I can remember what shows I've watched since Hannibal aired and give my opinions. I binge TV series with my mom who is in her 80's and has Parkinson's and macular degeneration and can't really do activities or read anymore, so I rewatched some old ones with her here largely to torture her with them, so they'll be in here also.

S-Tier (Winners)

My Brilliant Friend. Probably the best thing I've watched since Hannibal. If S4 is out I haven't seen it yet, no spoilers.

Better Call Saul. Possibly tied with My Beautiful Friend. Better than Breaking Bad. Much better ending. So good, no complaints. Nailed the ending. Did I mention the ending?

A-Tier (Runners-up)

Black Sails: God, there were some parts of this that were so gratuitous and tedious, especially early on, and I hated Eleanor Guthrie and not in the kind of way that means good things for a show. Some of the dialogue was just really on the nose too. This sounds like a lot of complaints, but the things it did well, it did SO WELL that it really does make up for the negatives. The acting was sooooo good and the Flint and Silver dynamic was AMAZING and the show looked great, and over all that, it really had something thoughtful to say, and that stays with you when it's over.

Stranger Things: Some parts of this show hit better than others, but I'm squarely in the bullseye of the target audience and get the vast majority of the references and nostalgia, and I love David Harbour. I appreciate their exploration of various types of horror, attempting a new style each season, and I like the charm and humor and cheese, and it's a show that knows its voice and its tone and commits fully to those things. It's trying to be a fun show and it is, and it wants to deal with real fears and real grief, and it does.

The Handmaid's Tale: Speaking of shows that are committed to their tone, this one definitely is that. It's too heavy and relentless for most people, I think, but I don't mind that at all. Parts of it do drag, but it has a lot of the same qualities (for good or bad) as Black Sails: great acting, powerful character dynamics, the things that it does well it does so well it makes up for the shortcomings, imo.

Breaking Bad: Famous show, not much to say here. Rewatched it recently and don't think it's as good as Better Call Saul, so I put it here.

B-Tier (Can't complain but will anyway)

Good Omens: Can't get into it, can't find anything particularly wrong with it. I'm into the ship. I guffaw out loud while watching it yet am thoroughly bored most of the time. Love Michael Sheen and David Tennant on screen together. I know the show can't be that all the time but I wish it was. Aziraphale ftw. I feel like people missed the point of the ending of the last season.

Mad Men: Show could give Seinfeld a run for its money in terms of being about nothing, but definitely had its charm. Watched it with my mom so her nostalgia and appreciation for how historically authentic it felt went a long way. Good performances. God, it could be boring sometimes though.

Vikings: This one was a lot like Black Sails for me. They had a bit of a struggle for a season or two but once going, they really got going. Many great acting performances and characters. Loved Ecbert and Ivar especially. Didn't have Toby Stephens and Luke Arnold, so you know...can't quite make that tier. And didn't have as much to say, or didn't say it as well, and it doesn't stay with you.

C-Tier (Can complain and will, but were good enough to stick with)

LOST

The X-Files

His Dark Materials

Downton Abbey

BBC Sherlock

Game of Thrones (I think most people have misdiagnosed this show's problems, but it sure did have them)

D-Tier (Tried but could NOT, though many people will like these...they were just Not For Me)

Bridgerton

Dark

The Good Place

The Gilded Age

Outlander

The Crown

Outer Range (what even the fuck with this show)

I tried to think of more shows I've watched in this time, but this about sums it up. But here are a couple YouTube channels I really like:

Beau of the Fifth Column

Bistro Huddy

[cleromancy]

HI I WOULD LOVE TO SEE SNIPPETS OF THE EX CHILD STAR AU

thank you anon 🥰 sry it took me a few days to post this lol

cws: references to mental health problems and a previous suicide attempt, and lasting trauma from exploitation. uh, and past drug use.

*

If you had asked Dick twenty-four hours ago about his apartment, he would have said it was fine. Not too modest, not too ostentatious, not so public he has to worry about creeps but not as isolated as the villa. He's so glad they sold the villa. Nicest place he's ever lived, and if he'd stayed there one more day he'd have been peeling off the wallpaper muttering about ex-child stars trapped inside, creeping. Where he lives now is within walking distance from a friendly little corner store where he picks up cereal and almond milk and anything else he doesn't want to wait to get delivered, which is convenient, and a somewhat-longer-but-still-doable hike away from Dick's favorite store in L.A, a tiny little candy shop that only stays afloat out of sheer spite. The owner, a cantankerous old man that Dick loved immediately upon meeting, roasts Dick mercilessly every time Dick comes in, but he also keeps Dick's standing order of the tragically discontinued Triple Xtreme Face Pucker Nuclear Warheads in stock just for him, so Dick wouldn't buy them anywhere else even if he could.

And as long as you have that and a laundry room, you're golden. If Dick had to leave his apartment to wash his socks he'd just lie down and die, or else wear a lot of dirty clothes.

So normally if asked, Dick would conclude that the apartment is, actually, better than fine, maybe even pretty good, and then he would change the subject.

It's just hitting Dick now that he's lived here for seven years now and he doesn't think he's ever actually looked around. They hired somebody to move his stuff into storage while Dick was still in inpatient and somebody else to decorate the apartment so it would be livable right when he got out, before he got around to picking up his stuff (he keeps meaning to do that). Moving in, all Dick cared about was getting a burrito the size of his face and sleeping on sheets that didn't smell faintly of industrial bleach masked poorly by something artificial, vaguely floral, and marketed as *Mountain Breeze.* In the grey haze it hadn't occurred to him to wonder if maybe the decor was itself a little too grey.

"Or whatever color they call this," Dick says to himself, staring down an oversized decorative vase with a few sticks poking out that you'd think would be silk flowers or something, but instead have these fuzzy little puffballs attached for some reason. "Gray-beige? Taupe? Greige? Why do I even have you." He tilts it to one side. It's shockingly heavy. "Why do I have *six of you.*"

Looking down the hallway it's obvious that the interior design team had a vision, and that vision was "innoffensive, featureless neutrality." There are just enough wall hangings to qualify as "minimalist" over "austere," black and white photographs of bland still lifes in featureless frames. Some kind of hanging tapestry except it's solid white with hanging tassels. Grey-toned floor, lighter grey-toned floor runner. The end result sails right past "boring" into "escaped psych ward patient" territory. Which Dick resents. He did his time, thank you very much, and waited until his official discharge like a good boy. That's probably why he didn't notice until now, psych ward home away from psych ward home.

Yeah. Let's blame that. The fact that he spent his first year out of the hospital doing nothing but trying to beat his Tetris high score in his underwear and scouring the internet trying to find the tragically discontinued Triple Xtreme Face Pucker Nuclear Warheads had nothing to do with it.

"He's going to think I'm a serial killer," Dick realizes.

He's most of the way through Tetrising the unwieldy, surpringly heavy vases into the tiny cubicle the guest bathroom calls a shower—and he'd like to know whose idea *that* was when anyone with a lick of sense would have just made it a half-bath—when the buzzer for the lobby goes off.

"Crap," Dick mutters, taking half a step away from the tower, which wobbles ominously. He lunges to steady it. "Crap!"

He casts around for a surface and sets the last two vases on the toilet lid and the sink respectively, the stupid little Q-tip stick things rattling mockingly inside, then dashes out to tell the doorman that no, Roy's not a stalker, yes really, yes Dick wants you to let him up please, yes he is serious, yes he is sure. He has enough time to sprint back to the bathroom and make sure his hair is okay and confirm that at least he doesn't *look* as sweaty and disheveled as he *feels,* but thankfully not enough time to start worrying if he might be due early for another round of fillers or if his hairline might be receding or if the skin under his jaw might be sagging. He looks fine. Everything's fine.

When the doorbell rings, Dick has to pretend he doesn't know who's on the other side to get himself to finally open the door. His breath still catches when he sees him.

Roy, casual as ever, pushing a pair of Ray-Bans he told Dick he shoplifted as a teenager up his forehead. His crow's feet, because he stopped getting fillers at twenty-five, except *his* are laugh lines, not stress wrinkles, less those *Where Are They Now?* specials they used to do on VH1, more Paul Newman aging like fine wine. His crooked smile, and he doesn't whiten his teeth anymore either, teased Dick when he drove him for his root canal that he was destroying his enamel and then held his hand when they put him under. His scuffed bomber jacket, older than either of them, which sparked half a dozen anecdotes about an Uncle Hal when Dick brushed his fingers against a faded patch on the sleeve. His henley with three buttons undone, straining over the curve of his chest. His jeans tight around the thighs, a little threadbare in places after over a decade of wear. The whole of him, broad and easy in the doorway, unapologetically imperfect, smiling.

Dick just wants this to go well so *badly.* "Hi."

"Hi yourself," Roy says, shifting a little. "Can I come in?"

"Please."

Roy closes the door behind him, bending to unlace his boots. Dick's eyes catch for a second on the strain of his thighs against denim, and the nervous inane smalltalk on its way out of Dick's mouth dies on his lips.

Roy kicks the second boot off and straightens up, dusting his palms off on his thighs, which probably shouldn't make Dick's mouth fill with saliva the way it does. He's looking around the entryway, curious. "Nice place."

*Don't mention the vases.* "You think so? I keep meaning to update a little."

"Yeah, man, it's nice," Roy says easily, and he's lying but Dick can barely tell, which is kind of him. "You want to show me around?"

No, Dick does not want to show him around. No, he does not want to discover alongside Roy what other modern minimalist nightmares the interior design team saw fit to install in case Dick got too overstimulated by non-neutral colors and tried to kill himself again.

"I want to show you the media room," Dick says, which at least has the benefit of actually being true.

*

The "whoa" Roy lets out when they enter the media room is gratifying. It's most people's reaction when they see it. It's always gratifying.

"Is that a pinball machine?" Roy asks.

Dick grins. "You wanna play?"

"Hell yeah, just. Later. You have so much cool shit here, show me all of it—"

Maybe the other reason Dick barely knows what the rest of his apartment looks like is because this is where he spends most of his time. Freshly discharged from the hospital, Dick had scarfed down his face-sized burrito, faceplanted on the bed, slept like a log for about two days straight and woken up not entirely sure what year it was or why. He looked around the room, remembered it was his, flicked on the lamp on his bedside table and didn't like it any better in the light. It was the smooth plasticine decor that Dick's belatedly come to realize populated the entire apartment, featureless, meaningless, trying desperately to be mature by being entirely devoid of interest. *My bedroom pays taxes,* Dick remembers thinking. *My bedroom has a 401k.* He grabbed his meds from his bedside table and stuffed them in his sweatpants pocket before wrapping himself in the big gray down comforter and dragging it to what he supposed was the den, flopping on the couch and sleeping for another six hours, eventually waking with the cap of PRAZOSIN - 10MG - GRAYSON, RICHARD J digging into his hip.

Time was sort of soupy a lot of the time back before he got his ADHD diagnosis, because of the brain fog. For the longest time his psychiatrists kept adjusting his Wellbutrin dose pretending they thought that had a chance in hell of working while Dick sat listlessly in their offices, missing meth. It wasn't until later when Jason Todd of all people dragged him to a specialist (because "if I have it, you definitely have it" successfully nettled Dick into going just to prove him wrong, except of course it turned out the bastard was right) and Dick found a new psychiatrist who was halfway competent and put him on Adderall that he really felt at all present again. The psychiatrist he has now, who is from hell and who doesn't let him get away with lying and who is incredibly good at her job, was the one who told him how much meth and ADHD stimulants have in common chemically.

Dick sat very still. Then he pointed to the throw cushion on the couch. "Can I borrow that for just a sec?"

"Take as long as you need."

Dick grabbed the pillow, buried his face in it, and screamed at the top of his lungs.

But for a while, yeah. Time was soup Dick was mostly afloat in. He spent it floating here.

Now that Dick is looking for it, he notices the gray in the floor and the walls, the aggressive featurelessness of even the window frames, but he likes the rest of the room enough not to mind. At one point he'd been irrationally angry at the pile of mail he'd put off opening for over a month, and he'd been going through a minor fixation with auction websites at the time, and there was an old, probably busted Ms Pac Man arcade machine up for sale and for some reason Dick latched onto it. For some reason winning the auction of the stupid Ms Pac Man machine was very briefly the most important thing in the world. And he did win the auction, because nobody else wanted the janky old thing, and to Dick's shock and delight it actually *worked*, and suddenly he had a project.

At first he bought and fixed up old arcade fixtures, classic games and pinball machines mostly but he dabbled in anything; he'd even gotten his hands on an air hockey table once. Then he'd get bored or run out of space, sell a bunch of things or even give them away if he was too sick of looking at them, and before terribly long he drifted away from arcades specifically. That part he credits to a film projector he ran into at a flea market and fell in love with, which prompted him to spend possibly obscene amounts of money on the sound system and improving the acoustics. He fell in love with a lot of objects, those days, maybe because he wasn't talking to *people* much. Not people who knew him well, anyway. He was on first name terms with his favorite antique dealers, one of whom inexplicably set aside an old Gibson electric guitar he found, a gorgeous machine in a charmingly 60s shade of Robin's egg blue, because he said it reminded him of Dick. Either because he somehow knew Dick would love it, or else because he knew Dick was a sucker with way too much money.

It didn't matter. Dick *did* love it, and he *is* a sucker with way too much money, and he *did* go straight home to almost give himself tinnitus playing every three-chord classic he knew at a truly unwise volume.

(Dick even replaced the original couch in this room because he kept falling asleep on it and his physical therapist threatened to quit over the havoc he was wreaking on his back. He's still not thrilled that he doesn't really sleep in bed ever, but the new couch isn't threatening to do permanent damage to his spine. Win/win in Dick's book.)

So. Not a home arcade, not a home theater, not a home studio. Scavenged bits and salvaged pieces, nostalgia probably in excess, anchors in time. Whatever magic they put in the air at antique stores and estate sales and really good museum exhibits, Dick managed to bottle a breath of it and take it home with him. When he finally started letting people into his life again, the unabashed delight often on their faces, walking into this room full of outdated obsolete frivolous things, sharing it with them… it's good. It feels good.

"Does that ancient popcorn machine actually work?" Roy asks, bouncing on the balls of his feet, grinning.

Dick matches it. "Yeah, and it's gonna knock your socks off."

*

So Dick gets the popcorn going and shows Roy around and silently laments that there was no way he could get his hands on film reels of The Muppet Show. Roy was almost as much of a geek about some of these machines as Dick was, and Dick had made it his whole personality for a while.

"It's just that there are some antique collectors that really don't mess around," Dick explained to Donna the week before, twisting and untwisting his napkin in his hands. "And I'm a competitive guy but some of the markets are totally cutthroat, and film people and puppet people are both intense. So this was better."

"Yeah, *and* it'd be insane to drop that kind of money on a first date," said Jason through a mouthful of bacon cheeseburger, Mister *we're not brothers we just played them on TV.* Dick had invited Donna to lunch, Jason had loudly said he was too busy to come, Dick said he wasn't invited, and Jason's schedule suddenly cleared up, *viola,* miracles do happen.

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Dick told him.

"Die," Jason suggested pleasantly.

'Just played it on TV.' Sure.

"And it's not a date," Dick added belatedly, stomach swooping.

Jason had opened his mouth to probably say something horrible, as is his way, and instead let out a hilarious squeak, turning to Donna next to him in the booth with massive betrayed Bambi eyes.

She ignored him, continuing to pour Sweet-N-Low packets into her half-empty coffee as if she didn't just stomp on his foot under the table. She didn't really like coffee until it got to the consistency of artificially sweetened sludge. When they were young Donna was always on top of what was *in*, considering it part of her full-time job to appear effortlessly sophisticated; she skipped the teen-preteen fashion beat and shot straight to the big leagues by fifteen. They were putting the equivalent of a *sophomore in high school* on best dressed lists alongside grown-ass women. It should never have happened. No one should have *let* it happen. One time even before all that, Dick and Jason stole a box of Krispy Kreme donuts from catering and absconded to her trailer to share and she had a panic attack. Years later she described her youth as being in a room full of invisible mirrors at all times. Those days she wouldn't be caught dead with anything less chic than an espresso from whatever new *it* cafe just opened. And there she was, two decades later, blithely desecrating two-dollar-fifty diner coffee with enough aspartame to kill a cart horse in front of god and everyone. She was probably Dick's favorite person in the entire world, and he went into a little trance for a moment, watching her graceful hands with horrified fascination.

Finally satisfied, she took a sip of her monstrosity and hummed, satisfied with that which she hath wrought. "Wait and see," she suggested. "If it goes well, it can be a date."

"And everyone says *I'm* the crazy one," Jason griped, rubbing the prison stick-n-poke tattoo on one thumb with the other.

"Well, if everyone says it, it must be true," Donna said warmly, knocking her shoulder against Jason's.

[ariel-seagull-wings]

THE HEART’S DOOR

@themousefromfantasyland @tamisdava2 @adarkrainbow @amalthea9 @princesssarisa @softlytowardthesun @grimoireoffolkloreandfairytales @the-blue-fairie @sabugabr @angelixgutz @shelleythesapphic @professorlehnsherr-almashy

(A Finnish Fairy Tale, also known as Severi and Vappu, a retelling by Gypsy Thornton and illustrations by Nilesh Mistry for DK The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales by Neil Philip)

Once there was a boy named Severi who announced one spring morning that it was high time he had adventures and seek his fortune.

“What are you seeking?” people asked.

”I do not know yet,” Severi replied, “But when I find it, I’ll know then,’ he said, and waved goodbye.

He walked over bright meadows and through dark woods, sailed over great seas and survived ocean storms. He climbed up a great black cliff and down a long stone stairway, until eventually, at what he thought must be the very heart of the earth itself, he found a golden door.

He lifted his hand to knock and it swung open for him, so he stepped through. Inside was a magical world of green hills with fragrant flowers and shiny plumed songbirds sang among lush trees, all laden with golden fruit. In the distance, turrets of a copper castle rose into the air, shining like red gold in the sunlight. Immediately Severi set out straight toward it. There he met a strange old man with glittering white hair and very young cheeks, who asked him who he was and where he was going.

“My name is Severi,” he replied, and told him of his journey so far. “And now I am here. I do not know yet where I am going to, but when I get there, I’ll know then.”

“Ka!” said the white-haired man, “Since you’ve come such a long way, why don’t you stay here with me awhile? I live in the copper castle, just beyond.”

So Severi went with the old man to live in the copper castle. When he’d been given all the good food he could eat, the old man held up a heavy ring full of keys. “Here are the keys to the castle: twenty four keys for twenty four rooms. Feel free to go into any, except for the last

. If you open that twenty-fourth door, you do so at your own risk. I am not to blame for whatever may happen.”

“I understand,” said Severi, accepting the keys, but already he was quite curious.

Before long the old man set out on a journey that would take him far away and the instant Severi was alone, he began to explore.

Each door held a room of wonders, the next even better than the last: one seemed on fire, it dazzled with so much copper, while the next glittered with so much gold it hurt his eyes. Another was all ebony, another, blue sapphires, yet with each door he grew sadder and sadder until he stopped in the middle of the twenty-third room, too sad, even, to touch anything.

“Now I have seen it all. My adventures are over and done. I might as well just go back to my tupa.” He sighed, lay down right where he was, and fell asleep.

When he awoke he found the key to the twenty-fourth door clasped in his hand.

“The old man said I could enter at my own risk, “ he thought, turning it over curiously. “I will open it and find out what happens,” and he bravely turned the key in the twenty-fourth lock, then pushed open the heavy door.

Inside, sitting on a very high throne, was the loveliest girl in all the world.

“Who are you?” asked Severi.

“My name is Vappu ,” said the girl. “I’ve been waiting for you a very long time.” Severi held out his hand and she put hers in his then climbed down to him.

The golden days that followed were like a dream as the two lived together in the copper castle. For a whole month, they sat by the silver stream and feasted on golden fruit with not a care in the world. One day Vappu led Severi into a deep orchard. Cool winds caressed the trees and their faces and at the center blossomed the Tree of Life. They sat beneath it, ate its fruit and drank from the sparkling brook nearby. Completely content, Severi fell into a deep sleep under the Tree. When he awoke, Vappu was gone.

“Vappu!” he called. “Vappu! Vappu!” and his calling turned to cries and his cries turned to tears, for she was nowhere within and nowhere without.

When the old man returned home he found Severi in deep misery.

“Please help me find her”, Severi begged. “I cannot live without her.”

The old man chuckled. “That’s the way it always happens when you do what you should have left undone. I warned you about that twenty-fourth door,” he said.

“I am a grown man,” Severi replied. “I make my own choices

. And you did not tell me I must not enter, only that to do so, would be my own risk. ”

“That is fair,” the old man said, gently. “But have your choices made you wiser?”

“My sorrow has made me older – but yes, wiser too. Please help me find my Vappu - that is all I ask.”

The old man muttered some words of magic

and there stood Vappu, radiant as a sunbeam.

“Did you miss me Severi?” she asked.

“All my happiness disappeared with you!” Severi said to her. “Please, never leave me again.”

“I will promise,” said Vappu, “But on one condition: you must hide from me where I cannot find you. Then, and then only, will I always be with you. You have three chances.”

Severi did not understand what she meant, but the old man whispered a magic charm in his ear and promised he would help.

Severi did not want to hide but knew he must try if he wanted to win her, so the first day he snuck away over the hills and whispered his charm to a rabbit running by. It stopped, let him hide inside its thumping heart then ran on, even faster than before. But Vappu quickly tracked him down.

“You are not very good at hide-and-seek

Severi,” she said. “Try again.”

The next day Severi stole away into the dark heart of the forest and whispered his charm to a bear ferociously guarding its den. It stopped, let him hide inside its warm heart then growled, more ferociously than ever before. But Vappu still, somehow, tracked him down.

“I have found you Severi! You cannot hide from me. You have one last try.”

Sadly, Severi walked back to the castle. He could not think how to hide from clever Vappu.

The next day, at a hint and a wink from the old man, Severi finally decided to hide in Vappu’s own heart. He drew close to her and softly whispered his charm:

“Three times I knock at your door, dear heart, 

Let me in, heart’s jewel, let me in!”

And he vanished right before Vappu’s eyes.

Try as she might, Vappu could not find him anywhere. When she had looked and looked and looked some more, Severi called to her:

“Can you not find me, Golden One?”

“I cannot - where are you?” asked Vappu.

“Here in your heart,” answered Severi.

“Who led you here?”

“You, Vappu. You led me here.”

“Then my heart is yours,” said Vappu.

Severi came out of his hiding place and she held him as close as he held her.

“And now,” said Severi, “I’ve found you.”

And they lived in peace, ever after, in their copper castle, beside the silver stream, beneath the golden trees.

[dontbotherwiththepronunciation]

Theon survey songs + links:

@feed-me-a-penny and @team-mom-wannabe In case you still want to see the songs that have been submitted until now.

I found an acoustic version of the song Worms by Lolly Jane Blue on a Theon fan mix once and then lyrics really latched onto my Throne synapses! Very ADWD chapters, I think

The Lighthouse by Halsey; What the Water Gave Me by Florence; Piledriver Waltz by Arctic Monkeys; Ship to Wreck by Florence; Stone by Jaymes Young; Let Me Drown by Orville Peck; Atlantis by Seafret; Wade in the Water by Eva Cassidy; I Don't Want to Talk About Me by Stereo Jane; Sail Away Sweet Sister by Queen; and honestly every song on Everything Ends by Materia.

SOOO many. Ooohhh boy, I hope you like long answers, because you are going to hate me if you don't (you probably already do, I cannot shut up if I'm under the guise of anonymity lol). In terms of poetry, I will forever love this quote by Jenny Holzer: "In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy". It's so Theon, and I actually have it tattooed on me lol. Social Skills training is also a great poem for Theon ([PRIVATE INFORMATION]... hits so hard for so many reasons when paralleling w Theon), here are some raw verses: "Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother. Studies show that the mother we have in mind isn't the mother that exists. Mine says: what the fuck are you crying for? / Studies show the baby monkey will pick the fake monkey with fake fur over the furless wire monkey with milk, without contest. Studies show to negate something is to think it anyway. I'm not sad. I'm not sad. / History is a kind of study. History says we forgave the executioner. Before we mopped the blood, we asked: Lord Judge, have I executed well? Studies suggest yes. What the fuck are you crying for, officer? The wire mother teaches me to say, while studies suggest, Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?" Just literally everything about that poem hits me right in the Theon feels. Like, are you kidding me? Then The House That Dripped Blood by Mountain Goats is great for imagining Theon circa his Prince in Winterfell era. The lyrics are all about a house haunted by the pain trapped in there, which seems perfect for Winterfell imo. Any Florence + The Machine, but Heavy In Your Arms for painful throbb feels. Would by Alice in Chains has the right mood and great lyricism for Theon/Reek angst too! Then Everyone's Victim by Lisa Germano just has the right mood I feel for thramsay stuff, same vein as Would by Alice in Chains.

pearl diver by mitski, he doesn’t know why by the fleet foxes, cocaine and abel by amigo the devil

So many, a bunch of guns n roses songs, and dead hearts by stars

Dio Ed Io by Charles Wright, there are more but I'm all burnt out typing AHHH!!!

Cry for Judas the mountain goats "long black night/morning frost/I'm still here/ but all is lost" There is a light that never goes out The smiths. Robb and Theon vibes "to die by your side/ is such a heavenly way to die"

“archers never made good kings, fly headfirst into everything” -archers, the ballroom thieves

Almost Human (Aurelio Voltaire) for the Lucifer association

Putting the dog to sleep by the antlers!

call them brothers - regina spektor (that’s it, it’s split, it won’t recover just frame the halves and call them brothers find your fathers and your mothers if you remember who they are over and over they call us their friends can’t we find something else to pretend? like nobody won and we’re safe at the end) that’s okay - the hush sound (you were a child who was made of glass you carried a black heart passed down from your dad if somebody loved you they’d tell you by now we all turn away when you’re down you want to go back to where you felt safe to hear your brother’s laughter, see your mother’s face your childhood home is just powder-white bones and you’ll never find your way back) house of wolves - my chemical romance (well, i think i’m gonna burn in hell everybody burn the house right down and say what i want to say tell me i’m an angel / take this to my grave tell me i’m a bad man / kick me like a stray) mama - my chemical romance (well mother, what the war did to my legs and to my tongue you should have raised a baby girl i should have been a better son if you can coddle the infection they can amputate at once i should have been - i should have been a better son) JUDAS - the reverent marigold (god knew his face and held it but it still didn’t save him and i see far horizons where the lambs lie with the lions but there are poppies growing over where my friends are lying and paul had an old name, but we never use it you may call me traitor but my lover calls me judas)

i have a playlist, some accidentally theon lyrics i enjoyed is bad medicine by liz green (...) For every man wants more than he, ever did before He’s still got no way out We’ve got no way out No way out We’ve got no way out of this So if my eyes turn black and my teeth fall out and my hairs caught up in rags Don’t give me none of that medicine ‘cos I’ll spit it right back out He tried so hard to fit in but he never really got a chance Before he spoke they burnt him, cut him, roped him and finally put him in the ground He said ‘I’ve been though war, and I’ve been though law and I’ve climbed that hill so cold Yeah I’ve been though more than you’ll ever know still they never let me go And every man wants more than he, ever did before He’s still got no way out We’ve got no way out No way out We’ve got no way out of this So if my eyes turn black and my teeth fall out and my hairs caught up in rags Don’t give me none of that medicine ‘cos I’ll spit it right back out Oh yeah, I’ll spit it right Yeah I’ll spit it right Oh I’ll spit it right back out I will spit it right I will spit it right I will spit it right back out

I love Mr. Tambourine Man for Theon. Especially this line: “Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind, Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach, Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, Let me forget about today until tomorrow.” I also love Hurt by Nine Inch nails- All the lyrics and the entire soundscape of that song is Theon to me. Absolutely intense and amazing. And I also love and associate A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall with Theon. The "seven sad forests" the "dozen dead oceans" the "newborn baby with wolves all around it." But all the imagery in that song is so cool and very appropriate for asoiaf in general .

Oh man, so so many but to name a few: 1. How Soon is Now by the Smiths ("I am the son and heir of nothing in particular" / I am human and I need to be loved just like everybody else does") 2. Sorrowing Man by City and Colour ("Sorrowing man, look how worn you've become. You once were lord of the barren sea. There's blood on your hands." / "Oh, how you have lost your way." 3. Crystal Ball by Keane ("I lost my heart, I buried it too deep, under the iron sea." / "I'm fading out, everything I know is wrong, So put me where I belong.") 4. Bravado by Lorde ("I learned not to want The quiet of the room with no one around to find me out. I want the applause the approval." 5. Hurt by Johnny Cash ("And you could have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down. I will make you hurt" / What have I become? My sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away in the end."

iron by woodkid seven nation army (in a way) bones in the ocean under the water by the pretty reckless

"Oh No" by Marina & the Diamonds; "Bones" by Ms Mr; "The Ocean" by Dar Williams

i'm a marionette by ABBA starring role by marina and the diamonds asleep by the smiths i still have faith in you by ABBA judas by lady gaga california dreamin' by the mamas & the papas al andar by ABBA crucified by army of lovers i'm not coming home by the cowmen no more from into the woods oh i know by only natural waiting around to die by the be good tanyas

Smoke filled room - daughter

Gilded Lily : I remember when you told me it’s an every decision (Theon’s oath to Robb) But with my double vision, how was I supposed to see the way ? (Double vision : Greyjoy/Stark) Haven’t I given enough? Always the fool with the slowest heart (softie boi ) I know you’ll take me with you ( could refer to Robb or Ramsay as they die that they take a piece or the whole of him with) Every city’s got a graveyard (kinda makes me think of his prince of Winterfell era) Now I’m sleeping in the backyard (Well, his Reek moment ofc)

a spanish song by my fave band ever Fito y fitipaldis - Antes de que cuente diez (Before I count to ten) some verses i really like from it are: I got lost in a cross of words. They missed wrote down the address. I already engraved my name on a bullet. I've already tried the cannon fodder I already have everything under control. And someone said no, no, no, no, no That now the wind is coming from the other side Leave me the rudder And someone said no, no, no. What will take me to the end? It will be my steps, not the way. You don't see that you always go behind. When you pursue destiny And I won't feel strange again. Even if you don't get to know me And I won't love you so much again. And I won't stop loving you again I stopped flying, I sank into the mud. And between so much mud I found myself. Some warmth without your hugs Now I know that I will never come back.

I dont know many poems but sinnerman by nina simon and sorry by karine polwart and some other songs in my own language :)

honestly.. robb and theon are kinda two ghosts by harry styles if you squint

All of Radiohead tbh

Pardon this next block of text where I name random music. I have to say something about the album The Downward Spiral by NIN being huge Theon material to me (the instrumental track named after the album is so TWOW Stannis execution presumably foiled by old gods activity. also Hurt but everyone's saying that. ummm THE BECOMING.). Ptolemaea by Ethel Cain. 1906 by the West Coast Art Pop Experimental Band is so Bolton Occupation of Winterfell. Avalanche by Kyle John Kenowski. Sister Europe by The Psychedelic Furs feels TWOW Asha and Theon returning to the islands or something. Sweat by Oingo Boingo. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Bauhaus young Theon in Winterfell. King Rat by Modest Mouse feels either Jeyne and Theon escaping Winterfell or Theon and the invasion of Winterfell. I think I'm saying too much but I hate having things out of context, but I can't just parrot an entire playlist here: these are all ruthlessly selected from my playlist on spotify called [PRIVATE INFORMATION] (Epitaph by King Crimson inspired me to make the playlist) that has these plus more but fair warning it's under construction for my reread I've been doing this summer :^) . Um. A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers by Van Der Graaf Generator but it's 23 minutes long and all over the timeline sorrrrry I like prog rock so much. On Kyra thoughts: Please listen to To The Dogs or Whoever by Josh Ritter for Kyra and the keys thoughts.

Remy Zero - Prophecy: You walk this world like you’re a ghost / Your hands are coming through the needles / Sick of your tragic and your evils / I am the keeper of the songs of everyone / [...] / This is a coming of the times / You are a witness to the movement / If all you’re seeing is your lies / You had your chance, but now you’ve blown it / You want this world so you can own it / I am the keeper of the songs of everyone / / Look into the sun and see your soul is dying / Used to feel the faith, but now you’re tired of trying / Should have left alone what you have stolen from everyone / Mmm, how ya feelin’? Seems a little sick to me now / / From the light on high / A chance to change your fate / Forgiveness falling down / On those who chose to wait / Remember the time / Find yourself home again / Deep within your life / Find yourself home again / Find yourself home again / It’s a choice / You have chosen your own T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: And I have known the eyes already, known them all— / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? / And how should I presume? / [...] I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. [...] I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me. / I have seen them riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black. / We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Century Eyes by Shearwater (You are not the last of this house / Nor the first to go over the side / Remember the wrecks of those elegant ships / “Turn it off! Turn it off!” / Look with century eyes till they make you go blind) Two Evils by Bastille (I’m the lesser of two evils / Or am I, am I tricking myself nice? / If I’m a lesser of two evils / Who’s this man, who’s this act I hide behind?) Hurt Feelings by Flight of the Conchords (It’s my birthday, 2003 / Waitin’ for a call from my family / They forgot about me / I got hurt feelings, I got hurt feelings)

The Devil's Backbone by The Civil Wars

Lots ([PRIVATE INFORMATION I'M NOT GONNA DO MY COUNTRY DIRTY LIKE THIS] but a very tragicomical and delusional version), but I'm going to list purely English stuff for the sake of it: "Crucify your mind" by Rodriguez is my go to Theon song and I know no one knows or cares about Rodriguez and this might as well be one of those situations where this only works in my head, but fuck it: Was it a huntsman or a player That made you pay the cost That now assumes relaxed positions And prostitutes your loss? Were you tortured by your own thirst In those pleasures that you seek That made you Tom the curious That makes you James the weak? And you claim you got something going Something you call unique But I've seen your self-pity showing As the tears rolled down your cheeks […] So con-convince your mirror As you've always done before Giving substance to shadows Giving substance ever more And you assume you got something to offer Secrets shiny and new But how much of you is repetition That you didn't whisper to him too? "All these things that I've done" by The Killers has some vibes and lyrics too but god do I feel like an idiot for saying that.

[wearebackbagels]

Information on the SAS ships.

A post for those who are new to the fandom and are CONF U S E D or those who want to know what this fandom has to offer. 

Timestamp for post: 17 / 12 2022, this is the current status of the ships. Mild spoilders ahead!

            Ship. Paddy Mayne x Eoin McGonigal, sometimes called Paddon.

Who??? The short, angry irishman( Paddy) and the taller irishman with black, curly hair and a wide smile( Eoin, appears in ep 1-3).

Descriptive tags. Angsty in the poetic, “one died too early” type of way, really beautiful, two-sided love, loss.

Canon content. Lots, great for all the canon-lovers out there, anecdotes found in biographies etc, new stuff is always ticking in. These two are a canon and irl couple what more could you possibly want?

Fanon content. Angst, fluff, basically all is canon complient, not much smut yet.

Widely known? Yes, this is the biggest and most accepted ship you will encounter in this fandom.

Ship status. Undead, one is deceased the other never lets go and therefore the ship is forever sailing the seas.

            Ship. Paddy Mayne x Augustin Jordan, called Maydan, MaydAn and on rare occations referred to as The Poet and The Philosopher, more of a descriptive nickname but everyone will know who you are talking about,.

Who??? The short, angry irishman( Paddy) and the lanky, french guy with dark hair and glasses( Augustin, appears in ep 5-6), they have an erotic scrap in the sand.

Descriptive tags. Brat vs Brat-tamer, love to get on each others nerves, shared love of poetry, horny.

Canon content. About as much as Paddon but every interaction these two have gives off the same vibe as a watersoaked, sparkling power outlet.

Fanon content. A lot of the fandom’s content is dedicated to this ship. Dirty as all fuck smut, headcanons, fics, AUs (so far: vampire/supernatural, modern, pirate), playlist, moodboard.

Widely known? Yes, this is the second biggest ship( at the moment).

Ship status. Alive

            Ship. Reggie Seekings x Johnny Cooper (x Mike Sadler).

Descriptive tags. Two huggable bears and their twink, super sweet and caring ship-dynamic.

Who??? The guy that looks a bit like Draco Malfoy( Johnny), the guy who is shirtless a lot, has a heavy british accent and lots of tattoos on his chest( Reggie) and the one who has a poker game in Cairo on Thursdays, is blond and is also in desperate need of a haircut( Mike, appears in ep 4-6)

Canon content.  Some, Reggie and Johnny have good chemistry and the real people the characters are based on were close irl. Interactions are subtle but interesting. Lots of anecdotes found in biographies that strengthen the ship.

Fanon content. Fluffy smut, smut, AUs (modern, supernatural, pirate)

Widely known? Yes and it is gaining recognition fast.

Ship status. Alive.

             Ship. Bill Fraser x Mike Sadler.

Descriptive tags. ? I’m not very famililiar with the ship.

Canon content. Non-existing.

Fanon content.  Some.

Widely known? Not really.

Ship status. Alive.        

            Ship. Paddy x Eoin x Augustin

Who??? See “Paddy x Eoin” and “Paddy x Augustin”.

Descriptive tags. Fix-it, more of a love-corner than a love-triangle, two of the characters never even met but that is easily fixed in fanon.

Canon content. None( ish). Two characters have a similar relationship to the third only in different periods of time.

Fanon content. Not much.

Widely known? No.

Ship status. Undead, one is deceased, the other never lets go and the third never met number one.

             Ship. Walter Essner x Herbert Bruckner.

Who??? The tallest of the french legionnairs, the one that got baptized as Mr Real Thing and got his hat kicked(Essner) and the other german, the guy from Dark (Bruckner, both appears in ep 5-6)

Descriptive tags. Angsty but in the ugly way, betrayal, friends or something more, outsiders being alone together, lies.

Canon content. Non-existing, the ingredients are there but you’ll have to squint really hard and use your imagination.

Fanon content. M I N I M A L.

Widely known? No.

Ship status. Ghost. Both died under *caugh* tragic circumstances.

             Ship. David Stirling x Eve Mansour

Who??? Adam from Sex Education( David) and the beautiful woman( Eve)

Descriptive tags. Two-sided love, really beautiful.

Canon content. Lots, these two are a canon couple.

Fanon content. Not much.

Widely known? Yes.

Ship status. ?, it is a bit muddy.

            Ship. Jock Lewis x Mirren ?

Who??? The small, eccentric guy( from GOT, Jock, appears in ep 1-4) and his hallucination  wife.

Descriptive tags. Really sad, beautiful but sad, two-sided love.

Canon content. Lots, but there are a lot of gaps to fill in.

Fanon content. None.

Widely known? Yes.

Ship status. Ghost.

I know I have forgotten some information because I can’t keep up with all of the ships being born and reborn in our conversations so if anyone could help me out with more info on Bill x Mike for example I’d be thrilled!

@rosescruensixxam @fergusfraserapologist  @homeahoy  @invisiblegargoyl @elkro  @akatsuki-rin   who have I forgotten this time?

[chardbones]

Summer morning (Ana Amari x Fem! Reader)

A/N so it's been a really long time since I've written any fanfics at all and I thought I'd jump back into the ring for fun. I've had this fic idea for the better part of two years now but for some unknown reason I decided to write it just now. I might make a second part to this but I'm not sure, like breakfast and maybe a bit and what the reader would do with Ana all day. I also saw that there isn't many fanfics of my girl Ana and she deserves it so I might post a fic or two more about her.I hope you blokes enjoy what I wrote

Y/N Pov:

I woke up to the light shining in my eyes, I slowly got up and looked over to left where I could see my wife peacefully sleeping. Ana and I decided a while ago that we both deserved a holiday together after going on countless missions. A few years ago, the both of us decided to buy a small house in Iilios, somewhere close to the beach and not too far from the town square where the market could be found. The light was thankfully poring slightly and only on my side so Ana wouldn't be woken up by it.

I slowly got up and made my way to the window, looking out I saw the clear blue sky and the vast never ending sea, in the distance I could see sail boats. Even though it was just the morning, looking at the sun, it was already quite hot but thankfully there was a cool breeze. After a bit I quietly opened the door and carefully made my way down stairs. My body isn't what it was 20 years ago, I'm still pretty physically well off but I can feel my body slowly but surely having enough of all the running around, carrying heavy ammo and making sharp moves.

As I walk down the stairs I look to my left and see the photos of me and Ana, most of them were of us during the glory days of overwatch. Boy, that was a long time ago. A lot of them were of the both of us and Fareeha, especially when she was just a kid. As I got downstairs and made my way to the kitchen, I stopped to look at a group of photos hanging over a dresser. One of them was of the three of us when we went Trick or Treating, Fareeha was just 10 years old then. Another was of Fareeha on her first day of school and another of her standing all happy with a trophy she won. One of my favourites was the wedding photo, that was taken year's ago, now the both us are old women.

Fareeha always saw me as her second mum and always treated me like one. And I always treated her like my own daughter, the best years of my life have been spent with them, seeing Fareeha grow and become stronger. Experiencing new things with Ana and loving her more and more.

Finally after a few minutes of remember wonderful memories I finally got to the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove, the house still had an old fashion stove oven that used fire, you almost never come across those in households over anywhere. I opened up a cabinet and took out a jar full of the best black tea and put it in two cup. As I waited for the water to boil I put in 1 and a half teaspoons of brown sugar and got out a desk to put the tea on. I placed the tea cups filled with hot and cold water on the tray and just incase the sugar if Ana wanted more.

I made my way back up the stairs and place the tray on my nightstand, I crawled back into bed and pulled Ana a bit closer to me so I could spoon her. The second I placed my wrinkly hand into hers, I could feel Ana stir in her sleep and see her eye flutter open.

"Good morning my love" I spoke quietly as Ana rolled over to look at me

"Good morning alsaqr" Ana said with a smile.

Alsaqr is a nickname she gave you because of how similarly you acted as a falcon in combat and how you armour resembled one.

"I made us some tea, drink some" I passed her a cup as Ana pushed herself up to sit.

"You're up quite early Y/N. Any reason why?" Ana asked as she put the cup to her mouth.

"Not really, I just did... I can believe that we're old women now. Looking at the photos it seems like it was just yesterday that I carried Fareeha on my back and ran around with her pretending that she was flying and I was her suit of armour" I spoke in a slight sad but glad tone.

"It has been, the time really does fly quickly, our little Fareeha has grown up really quickly and subsequently we have gotten older."

"I'm happy that you are the one I'm growing old with Ana. You're the only one I'd ever want to grow old with and have experience all the things we have gone through. I love you Ana."

"I love you too Y/N and I'm as every bit as happy as you are alsaqr"

The both of us put our cups away and kisses one another. It was a long and sweet kiss. As we parted we just looked into eachother worn eyes (well, I was looking into just one of her eyes). Even though we both look different then we did 20 or even 30 years ago, Ana still looks at me with the same passion and love that she did all those years ago. The same goes to me. We have said it many times before and shoe shown it to eachother on multiple occasions, and it's not going to stop.

The both of us just layed back down in bed and cuddle, the white sheets being partially draped over us. I held Ana in my arms while we gave eachother kisses. We could feel the breeze coming in every now and the through the open windows cooling us down.

And we just stayed like that until the sun started to shine on our faces and we knew we'd have to get up and start the day.

[jeannereames]

Hi Dr Reames!

Would you say that Macedon shared the same "political culture" with its Thracian and Illyrian neighbours, like how most Greeks shared the polis structure and the concept of citizenship?

I don't really know anything about Macedonian history before Philip II's time, but you've often brought up how the Macedonians shared some elements of elite culture (e.g. mound burials) with their Thracian neighbours, as well religious beliefs and practices.

I've only ever heard these people generically described as "a collection of tribes (that confederated into a kingdom)", which also seems to be the common description for nearby "Greek" polities like Thessaly and Epiros. So did these societies have a lot in common, structurally speaking, with Macedon? Or were they just completely different types of polities altogether?

First, in the interest of some good bibliography on the Thracians:

Z. H. Archibald, The Odrysian Kingdom of Thrace. Orpheus Unmasked. Oxford UP, 1998. (Too expensive outside libraries, but highly recommended if you can get it by interlibrary loan. Part of the exorbitant cost [almost $400, but used for less] owes to images, as it’s archaeology heavy. Archibald is also an expert on trade and economy in north Greece and the Black Sea region, and has edited several collections on the topic.

Alexander Fol, Valeria Fol. Thracians. Coronet Books, 2005. Also expensive, if not as bad, and meant for the general public. Fol’s 1977 Thrace and the Thracians, with Ivan Marazov, was a classic. Fol and Marazov are fathers of modern Thracian studies.

R. F. Hodinott, The Thracians. Thames and Hudson, 1981. Somewhat dated now but has pictures and can be found used for a decent price if you search around. But, yeah…dated.

For Illyria, John Wilkes’ The Illyrians, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, is a good place to start, but there’s even less about them in book form (or articles).

—————

Now, to the question.

BOTH the Thracians and Illyrians were made up of politically independent tribes bound by language and religion who, sometimes, also united behind a strong ruler (the Odrysians in Thrace for several generations, and Bardylis briefly in Illyria). One can probably make parallels to Germanic tribes, but it’s easier for me to point to American indigenous nations. The Odrysians might be compared to the Iroquois federation. The Illyrians to the Great Lakes people, united for a while behind Tecumseh, but not entirely, and disunified again after. These aren’t perfect, but you get the idea. For that matter, the Greeks themselves weren’t a nation, but a group of poleis bonded by language, culture, and religion. They fought as often as they cooperated. The Persian invasion forced cooperation, which then dissolved into the Peloponnesian War.

Beyond linguistic and religious parallels, sometimes we also have GEOGRAPHIC ones. So, let me divide the north into lowlands and highlands. It’s much more visible on the ground than from a map, but Epiros, Upper Macedonia, and Illyria are all more alike, landscape-wise, than Lower Macedonia and the Thracian valleys. South of all that, and different yet again, lay Thessaly, like a bridge between Southern Greece and these northern regions.

If language (and religion) are markers of shared culture, culture can also be shaped by ethnically distinct neighbors. Thracians and Macedonians weren’t ethnically related, yet certainly shared cultural features. Without falling into colonialist geographical/environmental determinism, geography does affect how early cultures develop because of what resources are available, difficulties of travel, weather, lay of the land itself, etc.

For instance, the Pindus Range, while not especially high, is rocky and made a formidable barrier to easy east-west travel. Until recently, sailing was always more efficient in Greece than travel by land (especially over mountain ranges).* Ergo, city-states/towns on the western coast tended to be western-facing for trade, and city-states/towns on the eastern side were, predictably, eastern-facing. This is why both Epiros and Ainai (Elimeia) did more trade with Corinth than Athens, and one reason Alexandros of Epiros went west to Italy while Alexander of Macedon looked east to Persia. It’s also why Corinth, Sparta, etc., in the Peloponnese colonized Sicily and S. Italy, while Athens, Euboia, etc., colonized the Asia Minor and Black Sea coasts. (It’s not an absolute, but one certainly sees trends.)

So, looking at their land, we can see why Macedonians and Thracians were both horse people with their wide valleys. They also practiced agriculture, had rich forests for logging, and significant metal (and mineral) deposits—including silver and gold—that made mining a source of wealth. They shared some burial customs but maintained acute differences. Both had lower status for women compared to Illyria/Epiros/Paionia. Yet that’s true only of some Thracian tribes, such as the Odrysians. Others had stronger roles for women. Thracians and Macedonians shared a few deities (The Rider/Zis, Dionysos/Zagreus, Bendis/Artemis/Earth Mother), although Macedonian religion maintained a Greek cast. We also shouldn’t underestimate the impact of Greek colonies along the Black Sea coast on inland Thrace, especially the Odrysians. Many an Athenian or Milesian (et al.) explorer/merchant/colonist married into the local Thracian elite.

Let’s look at burial customs, how they’re alike and different, for a concrete example of this shared regional culture.

First, while both Thracians and Macedonians had shrines, neither had temples on the Greek model until late, and then largely in Macedonia. Their money went into the ground with burials.

Temples represent a shit-ton of city/community money plowed into a building for public use/display. In southern Greece, they rise (pun intended) at the end of the Archaic Age as city-state sumptuary laws sought to eliminate personal display at funerals, weddings, etc. That never happened in Macedonia/much of the northern areas. So, temples were slow to creep up there until the Hellenistic period. Even then, gargantuan funerals and the Macedonian Tomb remained de rigueur for Macedonian elite. (The date of the arrival of the true Macedonian Tomb is debated, but I side with those who count it as a post-Alexander development.)

A “Macedonian Tomb” (above: Tomb of Judgement, photo mine) is a faux-shrine embedded in the ground. Elite families committed wealth to it in a huge potlatch to honor the dead. Earlier cyst tombs show the same proclivities, but without the accompanying shrine-like architecture. As early as 650 BCE at Archontiko (= ancient Pella), we find absurd amounts of wealth in burials (below: Archontiko burial goods, Pella Museum, photos mine). Same thing at Sindos, and Aigai, in roughly the same period. Also in a few places in Upper Macedonia, in the Archaic Age: Aiani, Achlada, Trebenište, etc.. This is just the tip of the iceberg. If Greece had more money for digs, I think we’d find additional sites.

Vivi Saripanidi has some great articles (conveniently in English) about these finds: “Constructing Necropoleis in the Archaic Period,” “Vases, Funerary Practices, and Political Power in the Macedonian Kingdom During the Classical Period Before the Rise of Philip II,” and “Constructing Continuities with a Heroic Past.” They’re long, but thorough. I recommend them.

What we observe here are “Princely Burials” across lingo-ethnic boundaries that reflect a larger, shared regional culture. But one big difference between elite tombs in Macedonia and Thrace is the presence of a BODY, and whether the tomb was new or repurposed.

In Thrace, at least royal tombs are repurposed shrines (above: diagram and model of repurposed shrine-tombs). Macedonian Tombs were new construction meant to look like a shrine (faux-fronts, etc.). Also, Thracian kings’ bodies weren’t buried in their "tombs." Following the Dionysic/ Orphaic cult, the bodies were cut up into seven pieces and buried in unmarked spots. Ergo, their tombs are cenotaphs (below: Kosmatka Tomb/Tomb of Seuthes III, photos mine).

What they shared was putting absurd amounts of wealth into the ground in the way of grave goods, including some common/shared items such as armor, golden crowns, jewelry for women, etc. All this in place of community-reflective temples, as seen in the South. (Below: grave goods from Seuthes’ Tomb; grave goods from Royal Tomb II at Vergina, for comparison).

So, if some things are shared, others (connected to beliefs about the afterlife) are distinct, such as the repurposed shrine vs. new construction built like a shine, and the presence or absence of a body (below: tomb ceiling décor depicting Thracian deity Zalmoxis).

Aside from graves, we also find differences between highlands and lowlands in the roles of at least elite women. The highlands were tough areas to live, where herding (and raiding) dominated, and what agriculture there was required “all hands on deck” for survival. While that isn’t necessary for women to enjoy higher status (just look at Minoan Crete, Etruria, and even Egypt), it may have contributed to it in these circumstances.

Illyrian women fought. And not just with bows on horseback as Scythian women did. If we can believe Polyaenus, Philip’s daughter Kyanne (daughter of his Illyrian wife Audata) opposed an Illyrian queen on foot with spears—and won. Philip’s mother Eurydike involved herself in politics to keep her sons alive, but perhaps also as a result of cultural assumption: her mother was royal Lynkestian but her father was (perhaps) Illyrian. Epirote Olympias came to Pella expecting a certain amount of political influence that she, apparently, wasn’t given until Philip died. Alexander later observed that his mother had wisely traded places with Kleopatra, his sister, to rule in Epiros, because the Macedonians would never accept rule by a woman (implying the Epirotes would).

I’ve noted before that the political structure in northern Greece was more of a continuum: Thessaly had an oligarchic tetrarchy of four main clans, expunged by Jason in favor of tyranny, then restored by Philip. Epiros was ruled by a council who chose the “king” from the Aiakid clan until Alexandros I, Olympias’s brother, established a real monarchy. Last, we have Macedon, a true monarchy (apparently) from the beginning, but also centered on a clan (Argeads), with agreement/support from the elite Hetairoi class of kingmakers. Upper Macedonian cantons (formerly kingdoms) had similar clan rule, especially Lynkestis, Elimeia, and Orestis. Alas, we don’t know enough to say how absolute their monarchies were before Philip II absorbed them as new Macedonian districts, demoting their basileis (kings/princes) to mere governors.

I think continued highland resistance to that absorption is too often overlooked/minimized in modern histories of Philip’s reign, excepting a few like Ed Anson’s. In Dancing with the Lion: Rise, I touch on the possibility of highland rebellion bubbling up late in Philip’s reign but can’t say more without spoilers for the novel.

In antiquity, Thessaly was always considered Greek, as was (mostly) Epiros. But Macedonia’s Greek bona-fides were not universally accepted, resulting in the tale of Alexandros I’s entry into the Olympics—almost surely a fiction with no historical basis, fed to Herodotos after the Persian Wars. The tale’s goal, however, was to establish the Greekness of the ruling family, not of the Macedonian people, who were still considered barbaroi into the late Classical period. Recent linguistic studies suggest they did, indeed, speak a form of northern Greek, but the fact they were regarded as barbaroi in the ancient world is, I think instructive, even if not necessarily accurate.

It tells us they were different enough to be counted “not Greek” by some southern Greek poleis and politicians such as Demosthenes. Much of that was certainly opportunistic. But not all. The bias suggests Macedonian culture had enough overflow from their northern neighbors to appear sufficiently alien. Few Greek writers suggested the Thessalians or Epirotes weren’t Greek, but nobody argued the Thracians, Paiones, or Illyrians were. Macedonia occupied a liminal status.

We need to stop seeing these areas with hard borders and, instead, recognize permeable boundaries with the expected cultural overflow: out and in. Contra a lot of messaging in the late 1800s and early/mid-1900s, lifted from ancient narratives (and still visible today in ultra-national Greek narratives), the ancient Greeks did not go out to “civilize” their Eastern “Oriental” (and northern barbaroi) neighbors, exporting True Culture and Philosophy. (For more on these views, see my earlier post on “Alexander suffering from Conqueror’s Disease.”)

In fact, Greeks of the Late Iron Age (LIA)/Archaic Age absorbed a great deal of culture and ideas from those very “Oriental barbarians,” such as Lydia and Assyria. In art history, the LIA/Early Archaic Era is referred to as the “Orientalizing Period,” but it’s not just art. Take Greek medicine. It’s essentially Mesopotamian medicine with their religion buffed off. Greek philosophy developed on the islands along the Asia Minor coast, where Greeks regularly interacted with Lydians, Phoenicians, and eventually Persians; and also in Sicily and Southern Italy, where they were talking to Carthaginians and native Italic peoples, including Etruscans. Egypt also had an influence.

Philosophy and other cultural advances didn’t develop in the Greek heartland. The Greek COLONIES were the happenin’ places in the LIA/Archaic Era. Here we find the all-important ebb and flow of ideas with non-Greek peoples.

Artistic styles, foodstuffs, technology, even ideas and myths…all were shared (intentionally or not) via TRADE—especially at important emporia. Among the most significant of these LIA emporia was Methone, a Greek foundation on the Macedonian coast off the Thermaic Gulf (see map below). It provided contact between Phoenician/Euboian-Greek traders and the inland peoples, including what would have been the early Macedonian kingdom. Perhaps it was those very trade contacts that helped the Argeads expand their rule in the lowlands at the expense of Bottiaians, Almopes, Paionians, et al., who they ran out in order to subsume their lands.

My main point is that the northern Greek mainland/southern Balkans were neither isolated nor culturally stunted. Not when you look at all that gold and other fine craftwork coming out of the ground in Archaic burials in the region. We’ve simply got to rethink prior notions of “primitive” peoples and cultures up there—notions based on southern Greek narratives that were both political and culturally hidebound, but that have, for too long, been taken as gospel truth.

Ancient Macedon did not “rise” with Philip II and Alexander the Great. If anything, the 40 years between the murder of Archelaos (399) and the start of Philip’s reign (359/8) represents a 2-3 generation eclipse. Alexandros I, Perdikkas II, and Archelaos were extremely capable kings. Philip represented a return to that savvy rule.

(If you can read German, let me highly recommend Sabine Müller’s, Perdikkas II and Die Argeaden; she also has one on Alexander, but those two talk about earlier periods, and especially her take on Perdikkas shows how clever he was. For those who can’t read German, the Lexicon of Argead Macedonia’s entry on Perdikkas is a boiled-down summary, by Sabine, of the main points in her book.)

Anyway…I got away a bit from Thracian-Macedonian cultural parallels, but I needed to mount my soapbox about the cultural vitality of pre-Philip Macedonia, some of which came from Greek cultural imports, but also from Thrace, Illyria, etc.

Ancient Macedonia was a crossroads. It would continue to be so into Roman imperial, Byzantine, and later periods with the arrival of subsequent populations (Gauls, Romans, Slavs, etc.) into the region.

That fruit salad with Cool Whip, or Jello and marshmallows, or chopped up veggies and mayo, that populate many a family reunion or church potluck spread? One name for it is a “Macedonian Salad”—but not because it’s from Macedonia. It’s called that because it’s made up of many [very different] things. Also, because French macedoine means cut-up vegetables, but the reference to Macedonia as a cultural mishmash is embedded in that.

---------------

* I’ve seen this personally between my first trip to Greece in 1997, and the new modern highway. Instead of winding around mountains, the A2 just blasts through them with tunnels. The A1 (from Thessaloniki to Athens) was there in ’97, and parts of the A2 east, but the new highway west through the Pindus makes a huge difference. It takes less than half the time now to drive from the area around Thessaloniki/Pella out to Ioannina (near ancient Dodona) in Epiros. Having seen the landscape, I can imagine the difficulties of such a trip in antiquity with unpaved roads (albeit perhaps at least graded). Taking carts over those hills would be daunting. See images below.

[butternuggets-blog]

FOR WANT OF A NAIL

@baldwin-montclair @adowobsessed @sylverdeclermont @nicki-mac-me @thereadersmuse @kynthiamoon @wheresthesunshinesblog @adowbaldwin @beautifulsoulsublime @lady-lazarus-declermont @adarafaelbarba @dogblessyoutascha

Part Fourty-Two

Summary:  Baldwin Montclair had a string of ex girlfriends, a single child, and a  lifetime longer than most people could dream of to make all kinds of  mistakes. His family knew one which kept coming out of the woodwork to  irritate him every other century.

Also on AO3

The house on Drury Lane lay to its south, on the intersection between Wych Street and the rest of London. It had its back to the river and open fields on all sides, hemmed in by high brick walls to keep out prying eyes. There was an apple orchard and herb gardens, and Martin had built a series of interconnected streams and ponds full of fish and other wild animals to provide food and entertainment.

Martin was observing one of the ponds now; a family of otters had moved in and were scampering happily along their new home, climbing over rocks and flinging themselves into the water with a loud splash.

'Are you not concerned that they will eat everything?' asked Fernando. He happened to be passing through the neighbourhood that afternoon and had, on a whim, decided to come calling.

‘They are small creatures, they will not eat everything’ Martin dismissed him with a wave.

‘They may surprise you yet.’

‘If that becomes the case, I assure you you will hear of it first.’

‘I will,’ Fernando agreed, pointing. One of the smallest babies, a fuzzy little fluffball with slightly lopsided ears, was hauling the biggest fish it had probably ever seen in its life out of the water, squeaking indignantly as its siblings tried to grab its prize from its grasp.

‘Ambitious thief’ Martin said, laughing.

The faint sound of a racing carriage interrupted the moment, growing louder as it got closer to the house.

‘Should we go and see who that is?’ asked Fernando. Martin nodded and got to his feet, walking quickly. They reached the front door at the same time as the carriage pulled up and a pale-faced Matthew emerged, clutching a crumpled piece of parchment.

‘The Knights Templar-’ Matthew’s hand squeezed the parchment tighter for a moment. ‘-We are being rounded up and arrested. On King Philip’s orders.’

****

They managed to stop Fernando charging off long enough to leave instructions with the servants and then they were off, tearing across the city to the docks, and a boat waiting with an anxious Gallowglass behind the oars.

‘Could you not have found us a sailing ship?’

‘At this time of year? In this weather?’ Gallowglass swept a hand expressively towards the wild October sky. In the short time it had taken them to reach the Thames the sun had been covered by heavy black rainclouds, the wind whipping impressively fast through the streets.

‘A fair point,’ Fernando conceded. He hopped down into the front of the boat and took up a second set of oars while Matthew and Martin sat in the middle. ‘I will row too, the better to get us to France faster.’

And to Hugh.

They hadn’t said anything at all really on their way to the dock, too wrapped up in their own thoughts. Martin had asked Matthew where Philipe was; his stepfather and Ysabeau were out of the country, leaving his sisters in charge of Sept Tours while they were away.

‘Where are Baldwin and Godfrey?’ Martin asked.

‘With Ysabeau and Philipe,’ said Matthew.

‘Is Hugh at home?’

‘No,’ said Fernando, grimly. ‘He is in Paris.’

Martin and Matthew shared a look as Gallowglass pushed them off the dock wall. Paris was a month’s trip from London, even with favourable weather and fast horses.

This is going to be close…

________________________________________________________________

The crossing was choppy, but with everyone working in pairs to row they made good time.

Hugh's plans had succeeded beyond anybody's wildest expectations; the Templars paid no taxes, could move troops without issue throughout Europe, and were the rulers, or directly supported the rulers, of at least one country. King Philip IV of France, on the other hand, had inherited a kingdom crippled by loans his father had taken out to finance his war in Aragon, on top of Philip's personal debt to both the Templars and the Jews.

'He rid himself of one problem and now he is mopping up the other.' Fernando muttered, darkly. Philip had expelled the Jews from France in July the previous year, and collected their assets for his coffers in August.

Martin nodded, staring sightlessly into the water.

Perhaps that should have been a sign...

‘I can see the shore,’ Matthew said sharply, pointing. Gallowglass followed his uncle’s finger and helped Martin to row the boat into the bustling port of Calais, drawing alongside Stasia who had stopped pacing up and down the dock and was frantically waving them down.

‘What are you doing here?!’ Matthew and Gallowglass exclaimed, at the same moment that Martin and Fernando leapt out of the boat and asked ‘Have you any news of Hugh?’.

‘I am so, so sorry,’ Stasia sniffed back the tears pricking the corners of her eyes. ‘Hugh was arrested. He was being held in Chinon, and we tried to rescue him, but he was too well-guarded and nothing could be done-’

Her voice broke a little on the last word; she took a breath and gathered herself. ‘He is back in Paris now.’

‘Who betrayed him?’ Fernando was clenching his hands so tightly into fists it looked painful.

‘Guillaume de Nogaret.’

‘The keeper. of the. fucking seal.’ Martin growled. Fernando grabbed one of the oars from the boat and squeezed its handle to splinters.

________________________________________________________________

Dawn raced them across the countryside.

They had rarely ate and barely slept since setting foot in France, only pausing long enough to feed and water the horses before carrying on. What discreet enquiries they had managed to make on their travels had built into a kaleidoscope of confusing misinformation, so by the time the first twist of the Seine was in sight they still weren’t sure if Hugh was alive or dead.

They slipped into the city with the morning crowd, heads down, buried in simple cloaks. Martin had died his hair black and would normally have been the subject of intense teasing from somebody if the situation hadn’t been so tense.

‘Where is he?’ Fernando muttered, mostly to himself. Matthew closed the distance between them and pointed to a town crier standing at a crossroads up ahead. Silently, the group advanced.

‘What news of the Templars, good sir?’ Martin asked, when he realised that he had been shuffled to the front. ‘Is the trial done?’

‘Aye tis done, I am afraid.’ The man raised a hand and pointed to a distant speck in the middle of the Seine. ‘They executed them over yonder, upon Île aux Javiaux.’

All Martin could hear was the sudden wild beating of his heart and Fernando’s laboured breathing in his ear that had skipped on “executed”.

‘And who has been killed thus far?’ Matthew prompted, first being prompted himself into asking by a pallid Stasia.

‘Jacques de Molay, Geoffroi de Charney, Godefroi de Gonneville, and Hugh de Clermont,’ said the crier.

It was only Martin’s fingers wrapping around his wrist that kept Fernando from ripping out the crier’s throat with his bare hands. His other hand was busy propping up Gallowglass, who had gone chalk white and was swaying ever so slightly.

________________________________________________________________

The smart thing to do would have been to wait until nightfall, but none of them were in the mood to do the smart thing.

Martin didn't trust the oars in anyone else's hands so he rowed the boat from the riverbank to the shore of the island. Gallowglass and Fernando were holding hands and weeping, Gallowglass's face buried in the crook of his father's neck.

Stasia was crying too, head bowed beside her brother as Matthew worked his way silently through his rosary. Martin moored the boat as gently as he could, giving everyone a moment before he broke the silence.

'Someone else is here.'

The heartbeat he had heard resolved itself into a young boy. The fourteen-year-old was knelt in the dirt beside a burnt circle, head bowed, hands clasped around a rosary of his own. His monk's habit swamped him; when Martin deliberately sent a small stone skittering along the ground the boy started, tried to jump up, caught his feet in the folds of his robe and stumbled.

'You are not supposed to be here.'

'I..I am aware, m'lord,' the boy righted himself, and bowed, red-faced. He gestured feebly towards the circle. 'I..I wanted to pray for them. Someone should.'

Martin swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded.

'There should be ashes.' Fernando had started to pace the burnt ground and stopped, staring. 'There is nothing. Where are their ashes?'

'They were taken away.' The boy flinched under the intensity of their gaze. 'They...their ashes were collected and taken to various shrines and churches through the city. I-I know not where.'

Gallowglass shut down, stomping back to the boat and sitting heavily beside it. Fernando nodded once and held out a shaking hand; Matthew took it and helped his brother-in-law to walk back to the shore.

________________________________________________________________

'So this is where you betrayed my husband.'

Guillaume de Nogaret shot up from his desk, gripping a short sword in his hand. 'I was following orders.'

'Orders you poured like poison into the King's ear.' Fernando glared at him, eyes flashing. Behind him in the corridor Guillaume could see his guards lying dead or dying, gore splattered across the carpet and up the walls. Distant screams echoed up from the depths of the house.

'The Templars owned the world! They had too much power!'

Author’s Notes

'ENOUGH!' Fernando roared. He gripped the desk and flipped it, sending it crashing into the wall.

Guillaume lunged, stabbing forward. Fernando blocked him and he swapped hands, swinging behind him, his left hand gripping his sword as he spun.

Fernando blocked again. He grabbed his wrist and his upper arm; Guillaume shrieked at an ungodly pitch as he twisted both in the opposite direction.

Guillaume collapsed into a heap, clutching his ruined arm. Fernando stood over him; he looked up as Gallowglass appeared in the doorway, dripping with viscera from head to foot, Martin at his heels.

'Help- help me!' Guillaume moaned.

Gallowglass stepped up beside his father, looming over the shivering lawyer as Martin turned away, locking the door behind him.

There was a mansion built on Drury Lane, but Drury House was owned and built by Suffolk barrister Sir Robert Drury, circa 1500. It passed into the hands of the Earl of Craven, became turned into the public house The Queen of Bohemia, and then was finally demolished along with the small houses built over its former gardens in 19809.

Otters don't hibernate! I thought they did. There are over ten species of otters; the ones in Martin's garden would be Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), the only wild species found in the UK.

London in October has an average temperature of 15ºC, with a lot of rain and wind competing with sunshine to make the weather very interesting.

According to Wikipedia "...King Philip IV of France mistrusted the Templars. The Teutonic Knights ruled Prussia under charters issued by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor as a sovereign monastic state. He was concerned that the Templars in the Languedoc of southeastern France were planning the same thing.

In 1306, the Templars had supported a coup on the island of Cyprus, which had forced King Henry II of Cyprus to abdicate his throne in favor of his brother, Amalric of Tyre. Philip had inherited land in the region of Champagne, France, which was the Templars' headquarters. The Templars were already a "state within a state", were institutionally wealthy, paid no taxes, and had a large standing army which by papal decree could move freely through all European borders.

However, this army no longer had a presence in the Holy Land, leaving it with no battlefield. Philip had also inherited an impoverished kingdom from his father and was already deeply in debt to the Templars. However, recent studies emphasize the political and religious motivations of the French king. It seems that, with the "discovery" and repression of the "Templars' heresy," the Capetian monarchy claimed for itself the mystic foundations of the papal theocracy.

The Temple case was the last step of a process of appropriating these foundations, which had begun with the Franco-papal rift at the time of Boniface VIII. Being the ultimate defender of the Catholic faith, the Capetian king was invested with a Christlike function that put him above the pope : what was at stake in the Templars' trial, then, was the establishment of a "royal theocracy"."

Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was arrested on Friday, 13th October 1307, but he wasn't put to death until sometime between 11 - 18 March 1314. I sped things up because having a shorter window of opportunity to rescue Hugh made his demise make more sense in my mind.

Guillaume de Nogaret was the keeper of the seal of King Philip IV of France, not the Knights Templar (sorry for the confusion but the title sounded snappy). He was a lawyer, a statesman and a councilor, and was an active participant in the arrest and torture of the Knights Templar. After the trial, he went on to be involved with the trial of Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, on various charges including witchcraft, and was making plans to go on crusade and pilgrimage when he died in April 1313.

Now known by the moniker Île Louviers, the Île aux Javiaux "...is a former island in the Seine in the centre of Paris, just upstream of the present Île Saint-Louis and of a similar size. Never built up, it was connected with the north bank of the river in 1843. Just before it ceased to be an island it had a surface area of 33,638m². In modern Paris the former island lies between the quai Henri IV and the boulevard Morland." (Wikipedia).

The remains of the Knights Templars burnt on Île Louviers were collected and delivered to various churches around Paris.

[badstargateimagines]

I don’t know if you take requests for anything but I loved your post of the skincare/makeup products the Stargate characters would use and I need to know….what perfume/cologne do you think they would wear? Or types of scents that they’d be into? (Btw love your imagines)

Yay!!! I’m so glad you like my stuff!! Also yessss I do take requests and I would love an excuse to talk about fragrance! My credentials are I worked at Sephora for a year and a half and I spent a lot of time on the frag wall huffing every single bottle. As a general thing I’m very obsessed w genderless, warm spicy scents so that will be reflected in this post.

Jack: By The Fireplace by Replica was my gut reflex for Jack as soon as I saw this ask. I think he’d really love the woody notes and I think he’d also like it because he has the vibes of someone who smells like a campfire in general. A quick side note, I don’t think he’d wear fragrance too much and I think Normally he would smell like Gillette shaving cream. Also heads up, Replica will be over represented on this list because I love all their frags

Sam: not a perfume by Juliette has a gun. One of my personal favourite frags bc it has no base scent really it j mixes w ur body’s natural PH. I think she’d like it because it’s entirely unique to her and also because the brand name Juliette has a gun totally speaks to her

Daniel: Either Jazz Club or Coffee Break both by replica. I really think he’d go for a heavy musky scent as frags like that tend to be both timeless and classy. I think he’s definitely the type to consider names when he buys frags too, so these town seem perfect for him. Also as I’m writing this I am HUFFING Jazz Club like I’m fucking Jeremy Fragrance.

Teal’c: I desperately want him to smell like Carbon by Prada. I think he’d be super into the earthy scents but not the warm earthy. Just a nice cool kind of scent but still heavy. Overall, idk if Teal’c would be 100% into frags but this is my vision.

Janet: Chanel #5 100%. I think Janet would in general go for a light, barely there scent. It’s for that reason that I think she’d go for an eau de toilette as opposed to a full on perfume bc I think she would want it to wear off a bit quicker than normal in case she gets called into work (I’d imagine the infirmary is a scent free environment)

Jonas: THIS MAN HAS 1 MILLION FOR THE MEME!!!! I don’t think he cares about notes or anything I genuinely think that he saw a bar of gold on the Jeremy Fragrance “SEXY SWEET YUMMY” clip and just added it to cart lmao

Vala: when I first saw this ask I had so many ideas for vala that I think she would just be a fragrance addict. Like obviously Black Opium crossed my mind bc I do really think she’d like a heavier scent BUT I also thought about Miss Dior for a bit of a softer more floral moment. Then, I immediately was brought to Burberry Her for a more fruity floral. And, obviously, because she’s Vala, she would 1000% have a vast collection of Victoria’s Secret body sprays. Anyway I think she would have YSL Black Opium as her signature scent but she would be at Sephora every other weekend trying out a new roller ball.

Cam: Dior Sauvage enjoyer and not because he likes it but because it’s what he was told he should like. If I were to pick a fragrance for him, I would stay away from the warmer scents and actually go for something a bit lighter and fresher. I would probably steer him towards Gentleman by Givenchy bc I really think of him as more of a fresh and clean kind of guy as opposed to such a heavy and smell-him-before-you-see-him Sauvage type of guy. Idk I think Cam would walk into my Sephora I would also guide him to Sailing Day by Replica for that fresh goodness.

General Hammond: Tom Ford Noir Extreme. Not only can he afford it but I think he’d really like Tom Ford as a brand. General Hammond seems like he’d go for more earthy and woody scents that can air on the side of overwhelming. Also he seems like he’d like sandalwood but not know it’s called sandalwood. Unrelated I think he’d be a really good client at Sephora and we’d all love helping him. He would have a beauty insider account so he can get points for his grand daughters.

Apophis: Dior Sauvage (Derogatory). Look, to my core I am a hater towards this frag. Everything about it gives me the ick. I knew what Sauvage clients were like in the store and I knew men who wore Sauvage everyday. They were both unpleasant groups of people who bought it because Johnny Depp was the face of the line. Obviously this is a perfect pick for Apophis.

[konnorhasapen]

Treading Water — Chapter 3: The Wallowing Wolves I

Also found on ao3!

Links to The Intro, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 :)

I did have my also dyslexic sister read every Asher line just to make sure it could still be understood when written in his dialect. I also hope I wrote an Irish dialect correctly ':)

ENJOY

——

   Heavy wood creaked and moaned as the ship rocked in all different directions, bobbing gently over small waves of the calm sea on a clear night. Billions of stars twinkling overhead like freckles and blemishes of light on the face of Lady Midnight, not a single cloud in the sky to shield the clusters and constellations adorning her pitch black complexion from the sorrowful green eyes peering up at them.  His thoughts swam through his mind restlessly with a lack of distraction, the feeling of slight regret drawing a low growl from his throat that was chased by a tired sigh as he recalled his and his First Mate's conversation earlier that dusk.

   "We should take a rest t'nite," he'd said, every word doused in his thick Irish accent. "Been up t' ninety movin' teh past weeks 'r so." He'd remembered even what he replied with:

   "You can all take time to rest now, have an easy day doing simple deckhand work tomorrow. I'll pick up any harder slack," his answer had drawn an exasperated sigh from the dirty blonde.

   "While I'm sayin' "we," I do mean ye need the rest as damn well as teh lot'f us," David had hummed, acknowledged Asher's unsaid concerns while he didn't agree to abide by them.

   "David," he'd said sternly. "Drop anch'r t'nite," the Captain's hard green eyes had met the gaze of blue hues as vibrant as the ocean they sail upon, riddled with worry and sympathy. "Please." It had been David's turn to sigh, but he'd nodded, and received a gentle smile in return.

   "Tanks a million," Ash had placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed a little before he'd sauntered off to help Booker with the supplies below deck. The remaining bustle of the evening had been a distant blur of memory as he'd been dreading the thought of stopping for the night. The feeling lingered long after silence settled over the ship.

   And now he was here, head lulled back against the wooden railing as he sat on the quarter deck, his arms rested and draped over his bent knees, and his eyes on the sky. Thinking. That's what rest, for him, opened the floor to.  From memories, fond and foul, to the ache of regret and doubt that often plagued both heart and mind.

   He never sees himself as a good leader—a good Captain. And the words spat with venom from his sibling in bond were ones that would echo in his head forever, just giving him more reasons to doubt himself and his capability to lead. The dispute between him and his wayward sibling had begun as a war of sharp tongues, but it was quick to escalate into such a discourse, all in the wake of Gabe's declared death. It was nasty when it got physical, but the words were what left behind scars that hurt more than physical pain, so many open wounds to add to the hurt that still had yet to heal. 

   And those thoughts often lead him to remembering the day his father was gone. With the crops and materials thinning as that year's drought had been relentless and unforgiving, despite his and William's allied efforts, they still were accomplishing too little. Being denied aid from Favíll even after offering more strength to her ranks, and denied by King Pluvaes simply because he was revelling in the fact that his kingdom was finally thriving far better than almost all others in Dahlia, he'd set out on a journey to Northern Ferris in an effort to make contact with an old friend of his, King Gregory Keaton. Only, he never made it to Alfanes, nor had he returned to Canis. He was gone without a trace and declared dead after months of searching from both his own subjects—or family, rather—and King Solaire's.

   It had all spiralled downward from then. His wayward sibling had grown even more distant than they ever were before, causing David to believe that, most nights, they had disappeared just as his father did. Especially when they would end up unable to be found for days, sometimes weeks. Canis castle was stormed, the kingdom had crumbled to its knees at the feet of a single man who stole his place upon the throne, announcing the wanted capture of David Shaw and the rest of the late King's bound family. Each and every person of his family had a bounty over their head, with the biggest rewards pinned on 'David Shaw' and 'Asher Talbot.'  When the family fled, they were missing one. One only very few noticed hadn't been on the ship when they were forced to evacuate their home.

   Then the fall of King Solaire had taken every hope they had of ever being able to go back and reclaim their home, and hanged them in the gallows. So caught up in all of these thoughts and memories flooding his conscience, David hadn't heard the soft thumping of boots travelling up the steps to the quarter deck.

   "Ye know," a thick accent began, "I'd a feelin' ye still be bright-eyed an' bushy-tailed t'nite," Asher shifted his weight to one foot and propped his hands up on his decorated hips.

   "I don't know if I'd call this "bright-eyed,"" he replied, only sparing a glance to his First Mate. His best friend.

   "Aye," the blonde shrugged, "just teh bushy-tail then." In a single motion, Ash spun around and joined his Captain seated on the wooden floor. After a few minutes of easily comfortable quiet, nothing but the creaking of wood and the gentle sounds of the calm, undulating sea lapping at the ship. Sparkling blue eyes following his to admire the scenery above that not even the most professional of artists could ever hope replicate.

   "Stirms follow ye, ne matter how clear be teh sky," he sighed. There was always something so delicately kind about the way he spoke, a kindness that was always so genuine. David was both impressed and, honestly, grateful that he'd been able to maintain such an aspect of his personality after everything that's happened. The Captain only hummed, drawing a breathy chuckle from his friend at his side:

   "If ye just wan' teh sit here en quiet company, I'd be perfec'ly fine widit," Asher spoke softly again, leading the deep brunette's attention to catch his gaze. "But if dere's anytin' ye'd like off ye chest, I'd also be mar then willin' teh listen. Maybe even share a shot'a wisdom," he winked with a smile, feeling a smidgen of pride swell in his chest while a trickle of relief washed over his soul when David huffed a laugh.

   "I think I might trust Aggro to steer the ship through a storm more than I trust your "wisdom,"" Ash dropped his jaw, eyes bulging dramatically as he chortled a little heartier than the other had.

   "Aye, I'd trust that cat wit my life if it came down t'it," he shrugged, pulling another small chuckle from the Captain as he nodded, the First Mate laughing softly along with him. Quiet befell the deck of The Wallowing Wolf once more, a tangle of nerves perched upon David's shoulders growing noticeable by the man beside him as he took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

   "I can't stop thinking about what I might be doing wrong," he said, brows pinched tightly as his vivid green eyes now stared out at the nearly invisible horizon across from where they both sat. He didn't need to steal a glance to know Ash was listening with his full attention focused on every word.  "It's easier to push it down and ignore it to some degree when I'm busying myself with something..."

   But once I'm sitting alone on a night of silence with no work to be done, no voices scattered across the whole ship—chattering about what someone will request for the next meal, or making plans to enjoy some proper drinking and merriment once we find land that hasn't gotten word of our bounties yet—all the thoughts, all the memories of everything I've ever done wrong, of everything I am doing wrong.., they crowd my conscience and they refuse to leave until the noise and distractions pick up again.

   Is everything he wanted to say.

   He clenched his fists as he felt them start to tremble, a distant sting that he'd always made such strong efforts to keep away finally coming to his eyes. Giving up on what his throat wouldn't let escape yet, he started elsewhere to Asher, however continuing from where his thoughts broke away:

   "But the sunlight fades so fast, and the dark lasts an eternity." David couldn't will himself to say more, but the strong squeeze from a grounding hand on his shoulder told him he didn't have to.

   Asher may parade about under the guise of a pirate jester, but he was perceptive as the owl; he had a sixth sense for just knowing when something wasn't quite right, especially up in the mind of his best friend and Captain, David Shaw. When their eyes met again, it was like Ash suddenly knew everything he'd done and seen, all the words he said, every expression of boiling rage and animosity his sibling had shot at him ever since their biggest fight, the pain he felt when they declared his father's death—the inadequacy he'd felt in himself ever since that day, when he was told he was to take up the throne, only to watch his home crumble before his eyes.  Asher hummed,

   "Teh rain is faded when teh Lady o' nature wills it, but teh cleods are still dhere. Even dhen, only teh passage o' time may carry them awae, an' this stirm canny start movin' befir ye let it rain, my friend," David sighed and his lips offered an almost microscopic smile.

   "Thank you, Ash," he replied.

   "Aye, not eh probl'm." Asher took in a deep breath and sighed, humming an old tune as his eyes traced the constellations above. It was quiet as the two best of friends sat comfortably in each other's company. It was indeed quiet and tranquil.., for a few minutes

   "Ye know what helps teh time pass dhat, en turn, will give thes stirm a hand en movin' along?" Asked the First Mate, receiving a tired expression complete with a cocked brow.

   "Goin' d'feck asleep." David rolled his eyes and the two shared their laughter, one heartier than the other as always. "Talkin' cen help ye out as well," he added, "not necessarily teh me, lettin' ye know." David grunted as if to say that he understood clearly, and he did. He knew what Ash was hinting at when he said it could help, the two looking back at one another with something akin to a brotherly love embedded in their eyes. Then, Asher stood with a dramatic grunt.

   "Welp, s'pose I'd best be off on my own way," he said as he reached his hands over his head and stretched out his spine, groaning in satisfaction when a series of pops sounded in his ears. "Ye better treat dhat hart-a ye's a lot bit kinder dhan ye have been." Asher told him. The Captain nodded.

   "Merry calm nite to ye, me mule of a Captain, and best o' friend, David Shaw" he took an elegant bow before he spun smoothly on his heel and started back down the steps from the quarter deck and ducked through the door of the Captain's quarters, the space the two friends shared as Asher new that being alone in that cabin—the cabin his father used to sleep in on his own journeys—was bad for the heart and the head.

   Mulling over what the Irishman had said in their conversation, David found himself staring up at the sky, glassy-eyed and conflicted for but a few hours longer before he finally let himself retire to his cot in the Captain's quarters. His final thought as he nodded off being one he found crossed his mind more frequently these days:

   Are they alright?

——

HOPE YOU ENJOYED!! I have decided to go with 'Talbot' as Asher's last name, but I'll be giving Baabe the last name O'Connell—which is the only case that I will be giving one of the listener characters a name myself.

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[lightningandfireinmybones]

Yeah, water sports goofing off in the ocean not watersports the piss kink Just the idea of them being SO acomplished in parts of their lives and when it comes to sailing they're both hopeless? like they know the theory behind it but suck at it and bicker at each other?

an addition prompt I had when realizing how fun the above was was "yeah it would make sense that in a modern AU they're both accomplished amateur pilots even though Valaenas side has heavy sailing ties."

Which lead to an Amelia Aerhart style 1930's-esq they're attempting the first ever doubles small craft pacific trip and get blown off course in a storm and are forced to land they both argue if they were in their respective planes this would never happen (obviously their planes are grey ghost and vhagar)

It gives so much; both of them sleeping in shifts and they both start fussing over the amount of sleep the other is getting because they both start cutting into their allotted sleep time to talk to each other. I wish the timelines matched up better because I love the idea that these privileged kids snuck away from their families to join WW1/WW2 as fighter pilots, Valaena gives straight up Night Witches vibes and Aemond is Pat Pattle but with Erich Hartmann numbers. Hartmann had the name "the black devil" and I totally see aerial combatant Aemond named "the black prince"

But just, super capable pilots with a reputation a mile long at being able to hand the roughest conditions forced to land in the middle of the Pacific is so cringe of them and obviously the only solution is Blue Lagoon style island sex while waiting to be rescued.

I also feel like they’re both so used to both of them being good at most things that they’d just naturally assume one of them knew how to sail,,, only to find that the only real seafaring skill between them is Valaena’s diving and Aemond’s knot tying:’) (I typed knotting first and considered leaving it like that but felt like knotting makes more impact called out lmfaoooo)

OKAY PILOTS YOUVE STUMBLED ON ANOTHER OBSESSION OF MINE

Valaena feeling so disconnected from her family because while everyone else is so at home on the sea, she longs for the sky, for the open air and the free fall of an airplane that she is controlling

Unfortunately, aemond also has that same dream and that same craving (and aemond getting his pilot’s license first doesn’t at all motivate her)

Their parents hope it’ll be a bonding thing for them, let them regain that friendship of their youth

Unfortunately,,, it just sparks something else in the fire of competition,,, lingering glances at the way their flight suits bunches around their waist when they strip a bit to do mechanical work, the way the sun gleams off hair in the sun up 10000 feet

AND THEN THE CHANCE TO BREAK A RECORDA

Viserys not wanting to show favoritism, funding both of their trips at the same time, so an adventure turns into a challenge and a race,,, both of them so blinded that they fly into the storm, having to make emergency landings on an island where it’s just the two of them

For the first time, no family expectations, no watching eyes, no pressure to be who their parents want them to be,,,

Survival is a competition too, at first

But one day, when Valaena spends falls asleep at the waterfall pool and aemond loses his mind searching for her, convinced she died in some terrible accident when he wasn’t there for her, crushing her to him when he realizes she’s just sleepy and sunburnt

Valaena realizing Aemond’s need for control isn’t all that bad all that time when he keeps them fed and warm and safe,,, and maybe watching him swim is a mesmerizing,,,

BLUE LAGOON WATERFALL SEX

[im-goofball]

Hi hope you're well

If it is not to much of a bother I would love to read more of Garp, Xebec and Roger's brotherhood.

Hello, Anon. I am doing fine and thank you.

Part 2. Sailing together

After the incident with their boat, both Xebec and Garp decided to train more and more, not wanting to repeat what happened to Garp again.

After few years, they finaly set sail at the age of fifteen. And thus the adventures started. They had lot of fun just two of them, fighting the marines and attacking other pirate crews and stealing their treasures.

But... Garp felt something was missing. Something really important that would fill up the gap between him and Xebec. Something deep inside his head told him to go around Logue town and Xebec agreed. He too felt something, whatever it was, it was hiding in the Logue town.

After restocking their resources, they met atleast one year younger boy, who wanted to set sail with them. Garp eagerly accepted but Xebec was wary of that stranger and didn't want to let him join.

After lot of convincing and pleads, Xebec finaly accepted the boy onto their ship, but was still cold around him, not trusting him completely.

The boy's name was Gol D. Roger, another D. and another black hole. Great... Now there are three of them.

After some time adjusting onto their small crew, fighting with the marines and pirates alike, Xebec found out he started to care about Roger, which was strange for him, since the only person he ever showed any kind of affection was Garp. But the more time he spend with that kid, the more he liked him. He was the missing piece, balancing Xebec's brutality and Garp's mercy perfectly.

After going onto another island, all three of them went shopping, since their pipes were heavy demaged. This is where Xebec found his saber. It was perfect for him and he switched it with more heavy and alredy broken pipe very gladly.

Instead of looking for Garp and Roger, they found him, but also brang company in form of marines. Xebec just huffed and all three went running back to their ship, while Xebec scolded both of them for being idiots. Garp and Roger just laughed, saying: „Don't worry! This one was worth the shot!“

After sailing off to the wast sea, Garp pulled for his shirt a bottle with clear liquid and three sakazuki cups. He poured that clear liquid into each and three of them sat on the deck, holding their cups.

„Hey, Xebec! Do you know what happens when people share saké cups?“ Roger asked.

„They become subboardinates, why?“ Xebec replied with narrowed eyes.

„Well, yes...That too, but they also become brothers! So I thought we would make it official!“ Garp beamed with his eyes sparkling.

Xebec didn't know what to think of it. He heard about the subboardinates thing, yes, but the thing about brothers? Well, that was new.

Both Roger and Garp raised their cups waiting for Xebec. He just smiled and they all shared saké, on that fateful day in the East Blue. They drank the liquid and Garp laughed out loud.

„Bwaahahahahaaa! I have brothers! Finaly I am not slone anymore!“

„Of course you're not, we are here with you! Right, Xebec?“ Roger asked, but Xebec wasn't there. „Huh, where is he?“

Xebec was in his room, laying on his bed with huge grin on his face.

„Brothers...Two brothers...Yeah, that does sounds nice.“

Now he had two brothers and he'll make sure nothing bad happened to them. They will be there for him and he will be there for them. Nothing will torn them a part.

But we all know good things must end.

[pygian-weapon]

what show should I rec my dad, since he seems to be really into the stuff that 2012 era tumblr was in?

He wants to learn what the deal is with series with season-long arcs, not just self-contained stand alone episodes (like Poirot, or Columbo). Preferably not too many episodes per season tho!

I tried with stuff like "oh, Black Sails is really good" or "you like 19th century period pieces, right? The Terror is about the expedit-" and he shot them down. He's not into horror or heavy action, but he likes murder mysteries and sci-fi and such. He, uh, liked Merlin and BBC Sherlock. Not necessarily an English or American series, he can understand pretty well also Spanish and French with subtitles

[monstrousproductions]

I again come to you, my all knowing dude, since last time you gave me some badass recs on fantasy books that I really ended up liking!

Do you know some good anime, TVshow or movie you would like to recommend? I just don’t like straight romcom stuff!

Ooh I'm glad you liked the books!

I'm not a great person to ask for recs for visual media to be honest, I don't watch a lot of TV or films and generally don't enjoy them as a medium. I watch a lot of TV with my eyes shut lol

That said, there are of course exceptions! But my apologies in advance if these are all old news to you xxx Again, putting this under the cut to save clogging up the dash!

I went to the cinema three times last year, and every one of the films I saw was a banger. They were Everything Everywhere All At Once, Glass Onion, and Banshees of Inish Erin. Really brilliant, highly recommend them all.

I actually love rom-coms but will resist the urge to rec those here. The exception is Big Eden, which is sweet and gay and lovely and makes me cry. It's a pure regular 2000s rom com, but gay, but like, actually gay, not just "we made the two main characters both men but didn't actually deal with the fact they're queer". I love it.

Emma is my favourite Austen, and my favourite adaptation of it is the 2009 four-parter with Romola Garai.

Black Sails starts slow but is worth every second of slowness, especially if, like me, you're more for the "rip someone's throat out with your bare teeth and howl in ungodly gay rage" kind of queer content than the "nice boys kissing" kind of content.

Speaking of men in boats, the Terror is very very good. Ooh it's very good.

And hey, while we're talking Jared Harris (as I often am), Chernobyl was also very very good! Also made me cry, unsurprisingly.

If these feel a little heavy, RTD-era Doctor Who is my go-to comfort telly! I was once in the middle of bad depressive episode and had been sitting on the sofa crying in front of Gilmore Girls for a good few hours when I realised I was too sad for Gilmore Girls, and had to stop mid-episode to watch the Agatha Christie episode of 10ant/Donna to actually calm down. Don't talk to me about Steven Moffat.

And finally, if you're at all into Star Wars then I really recommend the Clone Wars! The first season is a little janky but it's good craic and also has lots of my favourite and best boy, Darth Maul, a man who is kept alive purely by homosexual rage and, for a brief time, robot spider legs.