#cs travel

[bogkeep]

i reread captive prince trilogy for the third or fourth time recently

[manorinthewoods]

cultist simulator is a game set in 1920s london where you attempt to become immortal by abusing the power of eldritch gods, and also stealing priceless treasures from archaeological sites. one of the following did not happen in the setting:

[rinnysmuses]

She was humming to herself, stocking a few new Cait Sith plushies on the shelf. She really liked the little bow she gave some of them...

[ryukisgod]

C.S Lewis:

[fallenstarsandfiredemons]

we always get there eventually

Summary: When Henry accidentally summons a vengeful Captain Hook and a jaded Savior who's just climbed a beanstalk to Storybrooke, Emma finds herself considering just how much she and Killian have changed.

(canon compliant/set somewhere between seasons 6 and 7)

Read on Ao3

Well, as far as fuckups went, it wasn’t the worst Emma had seen.

Said fuckup made itself known when she walked out of Granny’s with morning coffees for her and Killian and spotted Captain Hook stalking toward Mr. Gold’s currently closed-up pawn shop. She’d known immediately it wasn’t her husband because Killian was back at the station, and because Killian hadn’t worn the heavy leather coat in years (except on special occasions in the privacy of their bedroom, ahem).

More than that, though, was the look on his face as she approached him, her mind already running through all the possibilities of how she could possibly deal with this and still manage to have a nice night in.

“Hook,” she greeted, smiling when he almost jumped out of his skin. He turned to look at her, and even though he wore the face of the man she woke up to every morning, they couldn’t have been more different. This man’s eyes were cold, his mouth set in a grim line, his jaw tight.  

“Swan,” he said, voice clipped. “Come to chain me up again?”

“Oh, is that where you’re from?” She glanced around. “Did you come here alone, or should I be worried about Cora wreaking havoc somewhere?”

He blinked, his perplexed expression quickly settling into a glare. “What game are you playing?”

Okay, so apparently she would have to dig a little more. As she considered her next words, she caught him studying her, confusion furrowing his brow and she guessed he was taking in her clothes, the faint signs of aging in her face, and all the other little details that told him maybe she wasn’t the woman who had chained him up at the top of the beanstalk.

Her gaze strayed back to the shop. “He’s not here anymore, you know. Rumpelstiltskin, I mean. He left at the beginning of the year with Belle to travel the realms or something.”

His scowl deepened. “The Dark One has fled?” Scoffing, he shook his head in disgust. “Once a coward, always a coward.”

Sighing, Emma set one of the coffee cups down and fished out her phone, pulling up Killian’s name and holding it to her ear. “Hey, you might wanna come to the pawn shop. We have…a situation. And maybe call Regina.” This had magic written all over it.

“What the fuck?!”

Emma winced and turned to find…well, herself, standing in the middle of the street, gaping openly at her and Hook. She recognized the dark red leather jacket she hadn’t worn in ages and the tired irritation lining the other woman’s face. “What is this?” the younger Emma Swan demanded. “Who are you? Where’s my son?”

“Mom!” Henry—her Henry—was rushing toward her. “This is all my fault! I—”

“Henry?”

“Henry, what did you—”

“Bloody hell.”

Emma held up her hands, magic suffusing her palms. “Everybody, quiet!”

The other Emma and Hook gaped at her, while Henry looked chagrined. She turned to her son. “What did you do?”

“I was working on the storybook, and it flipped open to the beanstalk, and I was just…thinking about things, and well…” He gestured to past Hook and Emma. “I guess it came out of the pen before I realized it.”

“So not time travel then?” The low voice was a welcome surprise to her, but the other Emma and Hook somehow looked even more shocked as Killian appeared, giving his past self a cursory once-over while the pirate did the same.

“Bloody hell,” Hook muttered. “What am I wearing?”

“I think it still qualifies as time travel,” Henry interjected. “Sort of.”

Killian raised a brow and walked past him to Emma’s side, exchanging a wry look with her. “So, do we have a plan?”

“That depends. Did you call Regina?”

“What the hell is going on?!” Past Emma demanded. She looked like she wanted to hug Henry but was also terrified to do so, because the changes in him were even more obvious than Emma or Killian. He wasn’t the eleven-year-old she’d been separated from anymore.

For his part, Hook was still studying Killian, and it clearly hadn’t escaped his notice that one of the rings he wore was different, or that Emma was wearing a similar ring on a certain finger. But when Killian wrapped his arm around her waist, Hook inhaled sharply.

“This is the future,” Emma explained, more for the benefit of her past self than Hook, who seemed to have figured it out—or was at least processing it slightly better than she was.

“The…what…” Past Emma’s gaze had zeroed in on Killian’s arm and the way she had automatically leaned into him. Her gaze then flickered to Emma’s hand, a horrified expression chasing away the confusion. “You…you married—”

“Yes, we’re married,” Emma interrupted. “If you’ve just climbed the beanstalk, we’re about four years into the future. Everything is fine and we’re all happy. So let’s focus on fixing this.”

Henry groaned and covered his face. “I really screwed up.”

“Him?” Past Emma questioned, apparently unable to move past that point. “Really?”

Hook looked only mildly offended by her tone. He was eyeing the two of them with an unreadable expression, and for once she couldn’t begin to guess what was going through his mind. This was the Hook who probably detested her, whose most recent experience had been betrayal.

“I take it I don’t kill the Dark One then,” he finally spoke, an almost accusatory gleam in his eye as he regarded his future self. “I just give up on revenge?”

“It’s not so simple,” Killian admitted, sharing a glance with Emma. “But for what it’s worth, mate, revenge could never bring you a tenth of the happiness I have now.”

Hook’s gaze flitted to Past Emma for just a moment before returning to them. “Right, then. Let’s…get on with it.”

“That’s it?” Past Emma burst out. “You’re just taking it in stride? This has to be some bizarre parallel dimension, something Regina or Gold cooked up, or even fucking Jefferson and his stupid hat. Jesus…”

“I forgot how high your walls were back then,” Killian murmured in her ear.

Sensing her former self was coming unraveled, Emma patted Killian’s hand before breaking away from him and cautiously approaching the other Emma. “Why don’t we just go back to the station and wait for Regina to meet us. We’ll get memory potions and send you two back as soon as we can.”

“And in the meantime, what?” Hook asked, crossing his arms.

“Don’t cause trouble,” Emma said sternly. “Gold isn’t here for you to kill and if you try anything, you’ll be in a cell faster than you can say ‘ahoy.’”

To her surprise, Hook’s lips quirked in a flirtatious smile. “Still into bondage, are you?”

Emma rolled her eyes while Killian gave her a speculative look, likely thinking of the pair of handcuffs in one of the nightstands in their bedroom, something that had appeared not long after he'd taken over as deputy—and she was so not going there right now. Her past self looked like she was about to pass out from shock.

“Let’s get going,” she said. “It’ll be over before you know it, I promise.”

~

They’d been at the station for all of five minutes when David came barreling in, somehow still shocked at the recent events despite occurrences like this being just another Tuesday in Storybrooke. Killian caught him up to speed while Emma did her best to calm the other Emma down. Henry was at one of the desks with the storybook and Hook lounged on the couch looking bored and drinking rum. Occasionally, she caught him looking at her, his future self, and her past self, as if he still couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing. Part of her still expected him to take off and do something that would undoubtedly land him in a cell, even if it was all a ploy to rile her up and make her handcuff him. (He was Killian, after all, and some things never changed.)

Eventually, Past Emma slumped onto the other end of the couch and started sharing Hook’s flask. Emma was pretty sure she caught the words ‘fever dream’ and ‘delusion’ from their barely legible conversation but chose to ignore it. Had she really been this stubborn just a few years ago? 

As if he could read her mind, Killian smirked. “If I haven’t said it before, I really appreciate your patience,” she told him once they were sequestered in the office watching their past selves proceed to drink themselves into oblivion. Her dad had left to get Regina—who was no longer answering her phone (something about having reached her quota of magical assistance for the week)—taking Henry with him since he was the only person Regina found it difficult to say no to.

Killian’s warm laugh settled around her as he sat on the edge of her desk, his hand finding the loop of her jeans and tugging her closer. “So glad you see my better qualities after all this time.”

“Idiot,” she said fondly, running her hand through his hair. He leaned into the touch, moaning softly as her nails scratched lightly at his scalp. “I’ve seen those for a long time, and you know it.” She'd just been too stubborn to acknowledge them.

He rested his cheek against her stomach for a moment as she carded her fingers through his hair and listened to the quiet sound of his breathing. It was something she did often without realizing it, reminding herself that he was alive and here with her, that no one was about to take him away. And on the nights when she woke up to find him wrapped around her so tightly she wasn’t sure where her limbs ended and his began, she knew that was his way of doing the same.

“They’re taking it better than I would have expected,” he mused, and she followed his gaze to the still-drinking couple on the couch. Past Emma was almost smiling at something Hook said, and she wondered briefly if things could have been so much simpler had she just let herself trust him a little sooner, let go of all the pain for even an hour and given someone a chance to see her for who she was and not the armor she wore.

Then again, Killian had seen past it right away, and she'd repaid him by leaving him behind on the beanstalk. But Hook, who was grinning at her past self as she took another drink, didn't seem the least bit angry about it now.

"Pretty sure they're both convinced it's a fever dream and drinking until they pass out is the best solution," she mumbled, unable to let go of the other thought. "I can see the appeal." She'd been broken by enough people in her early life that getting over it easily was more of a fairy tale than anything else she'd encountered. Even on her twenty-eighth birthday, she'd blown out the candle and made that wish, knowing in the back of her mind that it was impossible, because even if she got what she'd always wanted, there was no chance she would be able to keep it. People came into her life and then they left; it was all she'd ever known.

If she'd had more faith in others, in herself, even right after the curse had broken, would it have changed anything?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Killian murmured, and when she looked at him again, his eyes were on her face, studying her with the same precision he had displayed all those years ago on the beanstalk. “It doesn’t matter how we got here. What matters is that we’re here now.”

She sighed. “But don’t you just wonder about all the things we could have avoided?” Becoming the Dark One, turning Killian into another Dark One, Killian’s death, losing him again in the underworld. All that suffering, all the days they'd spent separated from one another by realms, by death. They both still carried the memories, the nightmares, with them.

“No,” he said simply, surprising her. “Our journey had a rough beginning, it’s true, and there were painful moments, but each of them led us here, led us to each other. Alter one element and it shifts the rest. And Emma, I don’t want to change one thing. I wouldn’t trade all the bad for even a second of the good.”

His gaze was steady, his words full of conviction, and she felt her heart give a familiar somersault. I’m already there, she wanted to tell it. I’ve been there for a long time now.

His lips curved, and his hand found hers, his thumb resting on her rings as he pressed a kiss to her fingers. “Just think of how far we’ve come.”

“We have, haven’t we?” When she looked through the window again, their past selves were watching them, and for the first time, there wasn’t anger or fear or confusion on either of their faces. In fact, it looked a whole lot like longing, the kind that came from years of being alone and thinking there would never be someone who saw you for who you were beyond the face you showed the rest of the world.

She knew that Past Emma was terrified because she had been there already, and she also knew that buried underneath the layers of armor and the near-impenetrable walls, that Emma still wanted a happy ending, still held out hope that such a thing might be possible for her even after everyone in her life had managed to let her down again and again.

And Hook…well, he wasn’t so different. She knew Killian almost as well as she knew herself, and the two of them always had been alike.

"Maybe we were both there before we even knew it," she said, laughing when he tugged her closer.

“Can you two go one day without being nauseatingly sappy?”

Killian rolled his eyes as Emma turned in his embrace to find Regina in the doorway regarding them archly before turning her attention to the pair on the couch. David and Henry hovered behind her. “I see we have another problem.”

“Any idea how to fix it?” Emma asked.

Henry opened the storybook and placed it in Regina’s arms. “Here,” he said, pointing to one of the pages. “This is where it broke off into a new story.”

“I guess there’s not an undo button that comes with your author powers,” Emma mused.

Henry cringed and shook his head. “I still haven’t worked it all out. Sometimes, I don’t think I ever will.”

“Of course you will,” Regina said before Emma could. “But don’t worry. This should be a simple fix. They’re not exactly you from the past, just copies living out a different timeline. We don’t even need a memory potion.”

Past Emma and Hook rose from the sofa, both eyeing Regina warily. “You can send us back?” Emma asked. “And…make us forget?”

At her side, Hook’s expression was flat. “Yes, I’ve got an apparently doomed revenge quest to be getting back to.”

“It’ll all be some strange dream you can hardly remember,” Regina promised, raising her hand. Words floated off the page, and Emma made a mental note to ask her what spell she was using as the words hovered over Regina’s palm. “Ready?” she asked.

Past Emma and Hook exchanged a look before turning to Emma and Killian. “It’s been…uh, enlightening,” Hook said, scratching behind his ear.

“Right,” Past Emma agreed tersely. Her armor was back on. “What he said.”

Emma couldn’t help but smile. “Don’t worry, you’ll get there…eventually. And it'll be worth it.”

If they smiled back or took her words to heart, she would never know. Regina blew gently on the words in her palm, sending them erupting into smoke that surrounded the two visitors. When it cleared, they were gone.

~

Later, when they’re back at home and Henry has gone off with Regina for the evening, she thinks back on the relatively painless events of the day with a strange sense of ease. “If you had even the slightest guarantee of a happy ending all those years ago, would it have changed a thing?” she asked softly. They were entwined on the couch, a movie they'd both lost interest in playing in the background.

He shrugged against her, his arm tightening around her waist as his hand rubbed circles at the small of her back, his fingers warm beneath her sweater. “Maybe, but I think the day I met you, I felt…” He hesitated, and she pulled back just enough to look at him.

“What?”

“I think, even back then, you gave me hope,” he admitted, almost sheepishly. “It had been a long time since someone managed to surprise me like you did, and even longer since I felt like I was looking at myself in someone else.”

She knew exactly what he meant. For all her avoidance of him and his probing words on that beanstalk, she’d felt laid bare. An open book, indeed.

“Except,” he continued, softer now. “You were obviously a hero, someone who put the needs of others before your own even when it hurt you to do so—and that was never me. I think it frustrated and fascinated me, trying to understand how we could be so alike and at the same time, how you could still be so much better than I ever was.”

“At the risk of sounding like my mother,” she said, reaching down to touch his face and draw his gaze back to her. “You’re my hero, and you have been for a long, long time.”

His eyes were warm and bright, and she kissed the few tears that fell down his cheek. “Well, your mother usually knows what she’s talking about,” he mumbled, making her laugh.

“But you were my hero first,” he said into the quiet that settled around them, and there was no trace of humor in his eyes, only earnestness. “Never forget that.”

Though she'd never had his finesse for words, she felt it all the more keenly then, and so she hugged him closer and kissed him like it was the first time and the last time, kissed him like only she knew how. And remembering the looks of longing on the faces of their past selves, she smiled against his lips.

One day, they would know this feeling too. Maybe they already did. 

[pandion-aves]

Player Appreciation Week Day 7: Time Travel

Title: Done Waiting Around

Player, from the 1970s, wants to help Carmen, because no matter how advanced modern technology is, hypothermia can't be cured easily. https://archiveofourown.org/works/64378612

GRAAAA IM DONE!!!

[justanothertogblog]

I like the crop on the black and white but I like the colours of the lights and windows in the colour version.

[ravenpuffheadcanons]

I wanted to do the 100 favourite films game that I saw half my dash doing, but the moment I tried, I immediately felt as though I had never seen a single film in my whole entire life. Everything I had ever enjoyed went out of my head. Thus, the obvious solution: books!

(I suspect there of being quite a lot of recency bias in this list - I've read several of these for the first time within the past three years - but I do really love them all...)

(Anyone expecting me to believe that they have read all 100 of my favourite books should prepare a short explanation for how and why they came to read a) a comprehensive history of British council housing and b) a short series of essays about the Beeching cuts. Also, that person should prepare for us to be best friends forthwith).

[seafoxgirl]

[chemicalarospec]

What if you said: Okay fine maybe I do WANT to become a librarian *buries face in hands in shame of succumbing to my inevitable destiny*

but society said:

(and meanwhile for computer programming:

I guess the plan is I get on the GRIND for a couple years and SAVE SAVE SAVE and then go back to grad school for a library sciences degree?) ughhh this is so embarrassing to plan out I TOLD YOU ALL I TOLD YOU ALL I TOLD YOU I WAS FATED, DOOMED I SAID, to become an English teacher or a librarian

AND YOU KNOW WHAT MADE ME CONFRONT MY DESTINY???? writing an rpf for a 2000s emo bands ship where one of the guys is a librarian 💀💀💀

[cupcakegalaxia]

.

[gyuuberryy]

school starts tmr and i have a horrible jet lag🥱 idt im gonna go. also pls be patient with the upcoming fics, i promise they're in the works<3 i may or may not have a LOT of schoolwork that i procrastinated HEHEHE(internally dying)

[welcometoteyvat]

love your thoughts on character’s ages. looking forward to fontaine & sumeru :) i think you described it really well. ages for my are like… they exist but they don’t at the same time.

edit: OH MY GOD TUMBLRS EDITOR FORMATTING SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!! if you see random parts of words bolded PLEASE ignore i dont know why it keeps happening

if you're the same anon as the og ask i am so so so sorry about the delay T_T T_T i was drafting my answer and then boom life happened ..... anyways. thank you for enjoying my thoughts wah <3333333 "they exist but they don't" SAME SAME frfr. like the most on-point (internet) discussion I've read on ages is that the stage of life you're in is often the only factor that matters, and that can vary a lot based on like your past experiences and stuff. and from my own perspective this holds true—similarly, in genshin where all the playable characters have jobs it's hard to kind of quantify them into really distinct age ranges tbh. sometimes it's just vibes (unfortunately vibes often includes height bc it's a game w not very diverse model types). anyways! character hcs:

sumeru (sans scaramouche): collei, cyno, tighnari, faruzan, layla, nilou

i think collei has an actual canon age right? unless I'm tripping and fanon has solidified so much in everyone's minds. I still haven't read the manhua <3 but iirc people think she's 12-13 there right. maybe she's like 17 rn, i can see anywhere from 14-16 though. idk anything abt her timeline so these are quite literally guesstimates from vibes and they're likely to be wrong. Layla is such a college girlie, she's like 19-20 and sleep deprived (same fr); begging for her to catch a break on behalf of uni students everywhere. I don't have a set age for Faruzan, I can see her anywhere from 30-40, 26 years old minimum (the redesigns people give her where she looks visibly older are so cool <3). Given she was a pretty well known researcher back in her day and since academia is a long and arduous career choice, I think it makes sense; also if she's like way older than Kaveh appearance wise (≥ 10 years) , even if she hadn't gotten trapped for a century, that would be sick af (their dynamic is impeccable and I think a larger age difference makes it better, sweeter, and funnier). Nilou also feels 19-20 years old to me; no real explanation, she just has a young adult vibe, like someone just out of her teenage years but quite capable at managing her life, although still testing out responsibility for major decisions and stuff like that (age solidarity w yun jin)

iirc cyno was already mahamatra or something WHILE tighnari was still in school; thus this makes cynonari EXTREMELY funny if you're a moral purist who ships it and thinks they fell in love in their akademiya days LOL. jkjk it's also a reasonable interpretation that Cyno became mahamatra at an insanely young age, since uhhh fucked up temple of silence background smth smth and honestly it feels in character for him to go buck wild at a young age like that (person most suited for young collei fr). HOWEVER. personally I think being mahamatra at like 19 is insane—thus I think tighnari's probably 23, cyno might be 27? I don't know if that makes it """""""better""""""" from an age gap standpoint but I also don't really care. Cyno being older but more joking around friends, while Tighnari is the younger kohai but serious and no-nonsense is pretty funny to me and when they're both serious you know you're fucked

fontaine: lyney, lynette, freminet (are those the only medium youth models so far lol. damn)

anyways lyney and lynette are confirmed to be at least 10 from Lyney's story quest. such helpful information I know lol. I'd think they're probably around 19-20? 18 minimum—I personally wouldn't watch 18 year olds do gravity defying magic tricks at the nation's biggest opera house—being like 1 year older doesn't make it any better ofc lol, but I think they're above the teenage threshold bc of that. Kinda fucked up to think about the timeline and house of hearth stuff though with this in mind

Freminet I'd say is around 16; 14 minimum. No thoughts for this just vibes. mmmmm idk when he was adopted into the house, if he's around 4-5 years younger than L+L, and let's say they entered the House when they were maybe 6-9 (my headcanons, is it now possible to piece together an accurate timeline of this from in-game lore??), and that was maybe 3-4 years after freminet entered, he probably was like 5-7 when he entered... wah frem............. poor child I'm giving him a hug (knowing that he's also a killing machine)

[antisocial-transfag]

Going by my actual name hours

[justanothertogblog]

Team Labs Borderless in Tokyo | 3 March 2025

[jokesboy]

im going to budapest tomorrow on a train all on my own i havent travelled alone for so long and im so nervous . ive never been to budapest and there are many train lines