#closeness lines over time

[marianatrenchsthings]

Closeness Lines Over Time by Olivia de Recat

[ffc1cb]

morning in the capital

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

epic fail <3

[batsplat]

random throwback to fabio's response to casey saying he should've been black flagged for the whole open leathers situation

[astarionbraiinrot]

One for the Road

Having acquired himself a brood of many daughters, and with enough years passed since the last was born that he's certain they're done having any more, Astarion is content to be a very happy certified Girl Dad™ to his flock of lovely little feral princesses. Which he's over the moon about, because honestly, what would he even do with a boy? No, he’s quite satisfied with the pack of little gremlins he has, thanks very much, all braids and pink ribbons and lace trim, and he’s not interested in adding to it. He and Tav are living their best No More Babies life. They're consistently sleeping through the night without interruption, they can have a glass (or four) of wine whenever they want, and he can’t remember the last time he’s had to wipe an ass that wasn’t his own. No, their house is FULL and they are DONE. No new Ancunins, shop's closed.

She’s bright red herself, wailing with all the power her little lungs can muster. He still can’t see much of her from where he sits, not with Tav sagged back against him, finally able to rest. The Midwife says something he doesn’t catch as she gently wipes the babe off. He’s too busy whispering to Tav about how well she did to pay much attention to anything else right at this moment, but Tav isn’t, and she starts to giggle, quietly, just this side of audible. Odd, he thinks, but adrenaline’s a hell of a drug, so he doesn’t think about it too hard. His towel-wrapped (and still a little fluid-covered) daughter is gently placed on Tav’s chest as the Midwife busies herself with cutting the umbilical cord and delivering the afterbirth. The baby calms a bit as Tav gently coos to her and strokes her back, her cries tapering off into soft whimpers.

So of course, barely three days after finally clearing out and donating all of their various and sundry baby stuff, Tav informs him that there's going to be a last-minute addition to the family, very soon (school had just started back again, and the girls had spent the entire summer banding together to hide increasingly-inappropriate new "pets" in their rooms no matter how many times they got caught, so he supposes Tav can be forgiven for having mistaken the symptoms of yet another impending-dhampir as typical parenting exhaustion. He certainly had). It's the middle of the night when she tells him, and he spends at least an hour pacing the floor of their bedroom and summoning every scrap of memory from his law school days to argue that she must be mistaken, because their eldest just started COLLEGE and their youngest is TEN and they've already given away the crib and you can't have a baby if you don't have a crib because where would it even sleep? So obviously they can't be having another baby. Checkmate. He rests his case, Your Honor.

When his arguments to the contrary do not, in fact, render the impending child any less impending, and he’s had another hour to stomp around the backyard lecturing himself (quietly, so as not to wake the girls or the neighbors) that this is what happens when you drink two bottles of wine and an entire cow and can’t keep your stupid hands to yourself and convince Tav to throw caution to the wind because “it’ll be fine just this once, what’s the worst that could happen,” you idiot, he comes around to the idea. Because, sure, maybe they're starting all over with the diapers and the teething and the sleepless nights, but their other children are old enough to mostly mind themselves now, and the youngest had started asking for a baby sister as soon as she was old enough to figure out that her parents were where siblings came from.

Plus, if he's honest with himself, he may have - just a very teeny tiny bit - missed the feeling of holding a tiny infant curled up on his chest, burying his nose into their fluffy newborn hair to inhale the scent of their little scalp, listening to those soft snuffly noises they make as they fall asleep, his finger held in a ridiculously tiny hand only just barely big enough to wrap around it. Not enough to have another one on purpose, obviously, but if she's coming along anyway, then he supposes he might as well enjoy it all the same.

So he starts the same preparations for her that he did with all her sisters, sewing tiny frilly things as Tav knits yet another blanket and they bounce potential names off each other. Of course it's a girl, he says, when questioned on his name suggestions. With how many children they already have, there would have been a boy by now if there was going to be one. He scoffs each time Tav jokes over the next few tendays that this one feels different, and they could have a little combo-breaker on the horizon. No, not possible, he assures her, with an unearned confidence that he nonetheless felt was quite deserved. Their Standard Operation Protocol is that, once a baby is on the way, a little girl is born soon after. No deviations, and no reason to expect any now after all this time. Repeated experiments have produced the same result every time. They'll have another member for their infamous flock of Ancunin Daughters before the month is out.

When Tav tells him one evening just before their soon-to-be-second-youngest's bedtime that the little one's announced her debut via a puddle on the kitchen floor, there is no panic, no rush, no mad dash to ready everything. They've been through this far too many times for that. He takes a moment to be grateful that at least this one had waited until the sun was down to kick things off. Most of her sisters had not been nearly so courteous, choosing instead to have their first act be one of defiance against their poor stressed out father by beginning their journey into life in the middle of the day.

He bundles the girls off to the neighbors' house for the night, leaving them with a quick kiss on the head each and a promise that he'll send a Message as soon as their new sister has arrived, before making his way to fetch the Midwife. He vaguely wonders if she's even necessary, considering they have enough offspring that he's got the whole process all but memorized and is fairly certain he and Tav could deliver the child themselves at this point (and had done, once. Baby number five had been VERY eager to make her way into the world, with such a swift entry that she'd nearly been born on the living room floor. He'd had no time to even grab a towel and was forced to catch her with his bare hands. She'd ruined his shirt, and the rug, and nearly scared the unlife out of him on top of it. He'd been very calm throughout the entire event, though, a paragon of unflappable stability, patiently waiting until the babe was born, cleaned, and moved upstairs to the bedroom where she snuggled peacefully in her sleeping mother's arms, before politely stepping out the bedroom door and proceeding to have the quietest panic of his entire existence).

When he arrives back home with the Midwife, he doesn’t bother to direct her to the bedroom. She knows where it is, this isn’t her first rodeo with an Ancunin birth either. Water is boiled, clean towels are at hand, their nice bedding has been replaced with plain serviceable sheets, a layer of newspaper underneath to protect the mattress, a tiny outfit and knitted blanket sit ready nearby. Check, check, check. He completes each step with pure muscle memory and no prompting, all routine, everything exactly as expected.

The next nine hours are spent keeping Tav as comfortable as possible. Rubbing her back, walking circles around the house, stopping at each contraction to gently sway and do the breathing exercises that they'd learned so long ago the first time they did this. Normally, she'd catch what sleep she could in between contractions in these early stages, but this one is determined to allow her mother no rest. He really hopes that's not an indication of what the little one’s sleep schedule will look like once she's here.

They near the end of this whole ordeal with the first light of morning. He's sat behind Tav, holding her up, as she grits her teeth through near back-to-back contractions and shakes with the effort of bringing this last child into the world. She's exhausted, grumpily hissing between pushes that of course his child would be fucking nocturnal and think the asscrack of dawn was a splendid time to be born. He considers reminding her that most of their children had been born during the day, so he really didn’t think the timing of this one could be blamed on him, but any response he might have had is cut off with the next push, when he feels his knuckle bones grind together as she once again resumes her efforts to reduce them to powder. It's probably for the best that he keep that comment to himself right now, anyway, he thinks.

One more big push to get the head out. It's barely visible from his position, head leaning over Tav's shoulder, but he can see that she definitely has the same full head of hair all her sisters did, and maybe his hair color as well, though it's hard to really tell through the blood and fluids plastering it all to her scalp. Could be red for all he knows. He mutters something about not being able to see her hair through the blood, and Tav gives him a sly sideways glance and starts to crack a joke, something about him not having eaten since yesterday, he thinks, before she’s interrupted by a loud, pained, groan and the need to push again.

A few more hard, steady pushes, guided by the Midwife, for the shoulders this time. This is always the hardest part, he remembers, the final hurdle. He whispers gentle encouragement into Tav's ear as, timed with her pushes, the Midwife carefully guides first one shoulder, then the other, out into the world. Poor Tav is bright red from the exertion, covered in sweat and panting. He places a cool hand on her forehead and she leans into his palm as, with a scream and one last push, the babe is finally brought into the world.

Oh.

Able to get a closer look at her now, he can see this one bears more than just a passing resemblance to her father. Frankly, she looks exactly like him, albeit smaller, wrinklier, and with fewer teeth (for now). Pale, even for a newborn, with tiny, finely-pointed ears, and a head of unruly white curls. When she finally opens her eyes, leveling her parents with an annoyed glare that could have come right off his own face (or so he’s been told), he sees his own gaze reflected back at him in pale green, the color they’d learned with the birth of their second daughter that his eyes used to be. He feels a little bad, honestly. Tav did all the hard work, and yet here their daughter is, their last baby, him in miniature. Not bad enough to keep him from preening a bit when he mentions how beautiful she is, though.

Tav is still giggling. Quietly, but noticeably louder now than before his comment.

He raises an eyebrow at her and asks just what is so funny, and her giggling increases to laughter.

You, she says, in between fits of giggles. She asks if he had been paying attention to anything the Midwife had said, and the confused look on his face only serves to make her laugh harder. He waits while she tries to contain herself, releasing a very put upon sigh when, a few minutes later, she’s still laughing at whatever this joke at his expense is.

Finally, she takes a deep breath, holding in her laughter, eyes still sparkling with mirth, and slowly unwraps their daughter. He is, once again, confused, and the baby’s none too happy either, starting to fuss with the sudden loss of warmth. Before he can say anything, Tav shifts and places the now bared and still slightly-slimy infant in his arms, advising him to get acquainted with their newest little one. He wrinkles his nose at the goo rubbing off onto his sleeves, some sarcastic remark ready on his tongue, reaching out with one hand to take the towel from Tav as he looks down to begin settling his daughter, and-

Well.

That explains why Tav was laughing at him, at least.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks that he probably should have caught that a lot sooner. It’s almost embarrassing really, considering his various skillsets, he’s usually pretty good at noticing little details. He doesn’t really have the brainpower to ponder that too long though, because the rest of his mind is still trying to reconcile this shift in information.

The best he’s able to come up with is dazedly asking Tav how that had happened, which just induces her into another fit of tired giggles as she presses a gentle kiss to his lips, and another to the top of their son’s fuzzy head.

He smiles and thinks that the girls will be delighted at this change of protocol.

[veggiecorner]

I woke up within a cold sweat with this botw/totk zelink headcanon but i like to think Link actually proposed to Zelda but in an unplanned unofficial way. Like...a week after totk happens and they're having their first breakfast at Hateno (or maybe Akkala) and Zelda's rambling about how she's sad she never recorded ancient food recipes she's tried at her time in the past and Link just stops her and goes "hey...do you want to get married?"

Zelda's visibly like ??? huh??? and he repeats it. She's a lil spooked cause where is this coming from. Also she's dense so she says "well...I've...assumed I'll be married sometime in the future..." not connecting that he's literally proposing to her and he smiles so sweetly at her and says "I mean with me. Will you want to marry me?" And he steps over to her side of the table and finally gets on one knee.

[gammija]

it's a bit of a fandom joke that Martin is good at lying to authority figures (elias, peter, even jon with his CV), but i wonder if his CV is the first of it, or if he had to learn younger

we don't get a lot of info on his mum, but we do know a few things. she's stubborn, too unwell to support both herself and a child, hates Martin, awful.

Probably too proud to ever ask for help, much less from Martin, much less to weather the indignity of having to ask her only son to drop out of high school to support the both of them. So it was probably Martin's idea, and i bet he was already trying to work full time at whatever paying job he was able to get, a while before he actually officially dropped out

just leaving in the morning, after helping his mum, telling her he was going to go to school and then going to work, hoping school wouldn't call about his absences while she was awake

on a sidenote, it makes a lot of sense that he would start lying about his age specifically - minimum wage practically doubles between being 17 and 21. and when minimum wage still didn't pay enough to support two adults, well, it's a small step to try and fill up those extra years with some extra credentials

[mango-mya]

@catfacedcat @om0000 @thunderblazz pspspsp ....hey.....

[transmascutena]

thinking about how akio sees his younger self in utena and wondering if there's any fondness there. doesn't change the horror of what he does to her obviously but i do wonder

[bumpylines]

This is my favorite interpretation of them tbh

Hopelessly in love for the first time It-Boy and Secretive ojisan who pretends not to notice, being like "hey if he wants to do this he can say something about it. I'm not gonna initiate this".

[3416]

the more i look at mitch's stats, the more i'm fucking cackling at the idea that people think trading him is all but confirmed............ like girl this organization would be proving itself absolutely incompetent.

[forestgreenlesbian]

.

[starlight---starbrights]

Undertale yellow flowey embroidery

This took about 40 hours, give or take a few

[lord-squiggletits]

Speaking of Tyrest. A lot of people forget that he treated Pharma with absolute disdain, not only using him as a test subject for a clearly painful mass murder machine, but talking to Pharma like he saw him as nothing but some henchman to order around that was nothing more than a 'diseased cripple' if Tyrest hadn't come to rescue him.

Like it really is an interesting background dynamic with some curious implications, but when you look at fandom posts from around that issue/the years after, for some reason people just saw "Pharma worked with Tyrest" and concluded Pharma is a card carrying bigot ksjfnskxkd. Like yeah Pharma didn't do anything to stop Tyrest but it seems his main beef with the Autobots was with Ratchet in particular and maybe a general disdain for his ex-comrades. As well as continuing to hate Decepticons which like, not even the "good Autobots" are immune to (even in Pharma's introduction, First Aid says in his journal something like "yeah we all hate Decepticons, but Pharma REALLY hates them"). And despite what fandom likes to construe there's really no evidence in IDW1 that Autobots and Decepticons are different "races" or "types" of Cybertronians, so Pharma hating Decepticons really isn't a bigotry/robot racism thing. And instead probably has something to do with, idk, the 4 million year long galaxy-spanning blood feud war, or maybe being blackmailed and tortured into insanity by the Biggest and Most Decepticon-y of Decepticons.

Tyrest treated Pharma like trash, the other Decepticons working for Tyrest (how come no one ever brings that up btw) also hated him, so if anything it seems that Pharma was more of a rogue element only staying with Tyrest bc he was his best option and probably had no way to even escape.

I'm glad that at least in recent years the fandom has acquired a keen reading eye and good taste to finally recognize Pharma as the (accidentally) complex character he is instead of making him some posh, racist Starscream clone SHSJDGSGDH

[serialreblogger]

the thing about the joker

is that - well, even canonically, he’s not actually “insane.” in the most canonical version of his backstory (bc there are many conflicting incarnations, but this one is the touchstone for a lot of later canon), he was part of a street gang before falling into a vat of Nondescript Toxic Waste that damaged his melanin production and That’s It. he supposedly “lost his mind” after seeing his reflection, which is absurd on many levels. no. he’s not “insane.” what he is, is an angry white boy.

the thing about the joker is that he exults in his own uncontainability. He laughs, because all of gotham - all the world - is built to be his playground. the only lunatic thing about him is the lunacy of ~Society~, to borrow from the joker’s own playbook; the lunacy of the joker lies in the world that grants him power: in the inheritance of loss: in white privilege, and what it means for everyone else.

“to prove a point.” those were the joker’s exact words, when he shot and paralyzed Barbara Gordon. she asked why: he laughed. “to prove a point.”

because that’s all he ever does. he hurts people because he can. and because all the power in the world can’t save him from getting hurt - and isn’t that just peachy?

because the thing about the joker is that he can get hurt. he has been hurt. but he has so much more capacity to harm than to be harmed. he is immortal. he and he alone will never have to face the consequences of the hurt that he inflicts on other people.

so then: why not hurt them? misery loves company, after all.

the joker is the embodiment and end result of our own social system: the madness of the exception: the laughter of the white man: the imprecation to smile, as he kills you.

(no one ever says it, i find, but it’s still true: barbara deserves to kill him.)

and who, then, is the batman? if the joker is the yin to his yang? if they’re two sides of one irredeemable coin, if they represent the “balance” of an unjustifiable system - who is he if not another white man?

because he is. Bruce Wayne is a white boy born into unspeakable privilege and forced to endure suffering anyway; who copes with his suffering by taking it out on others; who copes with his suffering, not by taking advantage of the world as it is, but by attempting to reshape it. to make it in his own image - as if it isn’t already his, as if claiming it further will crush out the pain.

the batman is the benevolent oppressor to the joker’s malevolent one. he changes nothing, in the end. two privileged white boys with their own respective navel-gazing grudges - where, after all, lies the difference between benevolence and malevolence?

because they are not “chaos” and “order.” not really. They are laissez-faire laughter and law. Joker exults in the disease of the system, Batman seeks to treat its symptoms, but neither of them will ever change anything about the root cause. because they may have suffered the faults of this system, but they still benefit so much more from it as it exists. Uphold it or break it, neither of them wants to change the law.

but the law is only as good as the people it’s made to protect. and who does that law protect, really?

waylon jones is, in one issue, explicitly depicted as Black. between that and his skin disorder, there has never once been room for his character to be any more than a monster: king croc is, always, a character to be violated and brutalized, over and over and over and still - always - written as the villain. (he tried so hard to scrape out a place for himself, so many times, in so many incarnations, and each and every time he finds himself relegated once more to the sewers. he will never be anyone’s king. there is no place under the sun for people like him.)

victor fries only ever wanted to save his wife, and a capitalist mogul decided a few extra numbers on his eight-digit paycheck were more important than the people whose lives depended on that money. fries’ body was damaged to disability by that choice, left without the resources to find a cure for his wife, and he robbed banks because there was no other option available to him. we seem to have forgotten, or maybe never really understood, why that matters. why a desperate man trying to save his life and that of his loved ones under the crushing gears of capitalism is a villain, and the one who stops him is our hero. why, under the law batman upholds, a bank vault and a CEO’s hoard is worth more than a life.

poison ivy just wants to live, too. wants a life not defined by the devastation of her body, of the beings that exist as extensions of her, a life where green and growing things are not commodities to be plowed up and poisoned and destroyed for the sake of another man’s profit. these are villains; they are written as such. these are their motives.

who does batman fight for, really? who is our hero, this emblem of our law?

is he our hero? ours, the broken and bleeding members of the world he claims to protect?

who does the law protect, except him - him, and the joker?

[bahoreal]

lol i knew the fucking xiaoyu/xiaobao thing was in the book i still just dont understand it like. thats his sister. what the fuck