#grinding my teeth into dust. i have to digress

[purgetrooperfox]

I can’t be the only one who looks at fanon for Quinlan Vos with moderate to severe levels of “he would not fucking say that”. y’all know he’s like, intelligent, right? he can have a sense of humor and be nonchalant and fool around with his friends and Also be smart and cunning and professional. he can be painfully genuine at some times and a world class liar at others. his JOB is deception and infiltration and covert ops. he's trusted to act as a liason for the Jedi. he can be reckless but he has to be measured too. he can be flippant but he can also be ruthlessly efficient. like come on guys he's not an idiot and his personality doesn't revolve around being a stoner or a dumpster fire or a one-dimensional lifeless counterpart to [Obi-Wan / Ventress / Fox / Aayla]. let him be his own guy with his own complexities or face my wrath

[climbthemountain2020]

Flame of Autumn - Chapter 2

Part 3/25 Also on Ao3!

*Mild TW for extremely brief violence.*

Eris

He hated the Hewn City. And more than that, he hated the fucking Night Court. Rhysand and his worthless “inner circle” as he dubbed them. Pretentious assholes who paraded around like they were better than everyone else, despite leaving their very court to its own ruinous spirit.

Of course, Eris made the effort to be cordial, if not somewhat aloof. Sometimes. Eris knew the importance of keeping Rhys and his bat collection in his favor. Their alliance, though fraught with taunting and toeing the line, was vital to him one day overthrowing Beron and becoming High Lord. Truthfully, he could admit to himself and only himself that he was somewhat jealous of Rhysand.

Eris knew that Rhysand wore the same mask he did. A cool, cruel demeanor allowed him to keep things in check, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the High Lord of Night was not that way with his family. Eris could see what his life might have been like if he had people he truly trusted, a family who loved him. He shook the thought out of his head as that trained voice taunted him: No weakness. No consequences.

He straightened his coat a final time as he waited in the stone-walled room for Rhysand and his party to arrive. It wouldn’t do to have him thinking such thoughts once they arrived. Though his mental shields had been honed for hundreds of years, Rhysand could easily tear them apart if he felt particularly cruel. Best to not tempt fate with any sort of redeeming thoughts about the great bat and his gang of merry followers.

He rapped his long fingers against the table in front of him, and only years of training his reactions stopped him from flinching when the massive stone doors abruptly burst open.

Always so theatrical.

Rhysand arrived with Feyre, Cassian, and Azriel in tow. No Morrigan. Not unexpected. Perhaps she’d still tell them one day of the truth behind their encounters, but until she was ready to face that truth herself, he would play the villain. He was a natural.

“So Eris, I hear congratulations are in order.”

How in the fucking cauldron could news have possibly already traveled here? Inwardly he rolled his eyes and outwardly he projected a bored demeanor.

“For?” He refused to give an inch, ever, where the Night Court was concerned.

“We hear a wedding is coming up. A lovely Autumn bride for the fireling.” It appeared Rhysand and Feyre had not told their warriors. They worked quickly to school their shock, but Eris registered it anyway.

“Yes, I’m told she’s wonderful. About the reason I am here today–”

“What? Not excited for your own wedding, Eris? I would think this betrothal is already going much better than your last.” He fought to not grind his teeth, and he watched Azriel tense visibly across the table. So, no truth yet, then.

“My betrothal is going fine. I am not here about that.”

Cassian smiled. “You were certainly willing when you were propositioning my mate.”

Gods, were they ever going to let this go?

“As I have said before, and will say again, I saw her power, and I thought it would be usefully honed in Autumn. I have offered my congratulations to you many times since.” He projected as much exhaustion with the topic as he could into his voice.

More like I saw that your High Lord would mistreat her then hone her into a weapon, but I digress. Seems to have worked out fine.

“I’ve found traces of stores of what appear to be faebane in the oceanside manor.” This stopped them. He had known it would. “The stores were no longer present, but they left behind traces of the stone used for shackles and the powder dusted on arrows as were used in the war with Hybern. I don’t have any ideas where they might have been moved to, but I haven’t seen traces of them within the Forest House.”

The males nodded, then Feyre spoke up. “Do you think Beron is hoarding them with a purpose in mind? His own safety, or an attack on others?”

“My guess would be that he is keeping them to keep tabs on them, as he does all of his belongings. I think if he wanted to use them, or had any use for them, he would have already done so. I would wager he thinks if he keeps them close, that no one can use them against him.” Feyre nodded.

“You’ll keep tracking them and let us know if and where they resurface?” He nodded. He far preferred working with Feyre. Despite their history, she had softened to him after the war, after becoming a mother.

She was young, but practical. She displayed a haughty aura in situations that called for it, but she wasn’t unnecessarily cruel in the way Rhysand could often be. He respected her more for the things she’d been through, even as a human.

“I will. Are there plans in place yet for an attack on Beron?”

Rhysand responded this time. “Our spies tell us that this is not an ideal time for an attack. I must agree. If he is staying close to the Forest House and hoarding faebane, it would be prudent to wait until circumstances change to move forward with any planning.” Eris tried not to deflate visibly. It was the same every time for the past few years. One step forward, two steps back. He took the opportunity to stand.

“In that case, that concludes my business here.” Rhysand stood and smirked at him wickedly.

“See you at the wedding, fireling.”

Matilda

This region of Autumn was stunning, the leaves changing like fires racing through the trees as they passed in the carriage. The ride had been very bumpy, so she hadn’t been able to sleep. Not that she’d felt comfortable enough with her uncle to sleep near him anyway. She wished she’d been able to stow away a weapon or two for her journey. Indeed, she’d planned to, but the servants burst in before dawn’s first light today to shove her into embroidered dresses and rip at her hair until it sat in a coronet upon her head.

She sighed lightly as she looked again at the passing scenery. At least she would be seeing new parts of Autumn. She hadn’t been to the Forest House since she was very young, perhaps in her late teens. She remembered the gaggle of rowdy redheaded boys, all roughly around her age and younger, and the sad, eternal eyes of the Lady of Autumn. She recalled with vivid clarity the savage and cold face of Beron Vanserra.

“You’ll be on your own tonight. I will be expected to eat with the family of the High Lord, and you won’t be welcome.” She snorted.

“A female? Unwelcome in Autumn? How unexpected.” His hand shot out to slap her and she reared back, still unfamiliar even after two years with a male raising his hands to her.

“Enough of that, you wretch. You’d better get your tongue in check before you enter the Forest House. Eris and any other member of the family will have you killed for speaking in such a way.”

“Why will it matter to you?” She sneered. “You’ll have your coin and be gone, spending my father’s money.” For a second he looked like he might hit her again, but instead he settled for calling her an ungrateful bitch beneath his breath and turning back to look at his letters.

“Once I am gone, you’ll have no one to protect you.” She fought every single impulse to roll her eyes at her uncle’s feeble claim to have ever protected her from anything. “You’d better hope you can spread your legs and produce an heir with your mouth shut. Otherwise, I’m sure Beron will find a more suitable use for you.”

She winced at the implication. She knew she needed to rein it in before arriving. She truly was being dumped into a den of snakes, and she easily could be killed for a slip of the tongue.

She looked back to the beautiful woods.

I wonder if I might be able to wander the woods here. Will he even let me outdoors?

She let her thoughts wander again to what he might be like.

Would they share a bed? Would he hit her? Ignore her? Pretend she didn’t exist at all?

She had the vaguest recollection of Eris from her visit long ago. He’d been impeccably mannered and quiet for the shortest bit of time he was even there, and then he had been sent off only a day into her trip. While the other boys had been running wild, Eris had sat at the table and displayed incredible etiquette for a fae of no more than twenty. He’d walked with an almost undetectable limp, and she remembered that his hair was a beautiful shade of Autumn red–she’d even been jealous of the wine red color against her auburn orange.

She wondered if he might have grown to be handsome, or if he would now bear the vicious features of Beron as an adult.

As she rested her head against the window to watch the passing trees, she couldn’t get the haunted eyes of the Lady of Autumn, shining starkly in her memories, out of her mind.

[phrynewrites]

just kidding here’s the real wip wednesday

Here’s a little snippet from The Audit, which is moving slow and steady. Enjoy!

Yvie raises her gaze to meet the woman’s, grinds her teeth, and replies with a curt “yes.” 

“I imagine you are to be their supervisor then, and yet, they are clearly unsupervised.” She extends her hand, which Yvie unceremoniously shakes, before letting them drop. The woman takes in the disarray of the office and the embarrassed expressions of the employees, and continues. “So I must ask, of course, why exactly you have one employee teaching another employee how to do drugs off of my desk, while looking at another employee’s nude pictures, while your secretary rolls back and forth between you and the conference room, creating as many safety hazards in the process, just to make sure she doesn’t miss out on everyone crumpling up suggestions from concerned citizens and playing a game with our constituents’ lives.” 

“I’m not a—” Scarlet begins before the woman looks at her.

“Well, technically we’re not elected,” Yvie mutters, hoping the woman might just catch it, burning for an argument strong enough to get her out of her department. 

“Also, it’s not drugs, it’s candy because we got a call from Charles Middle that kids are crushing up this candy and it’s got to do with DARE and...anyway it’s not drugs and we’re trying to figure out what’s up there,” Silky digressed.

The woman rubs between her brows, urging them to unfurrot. “No, you misunderstand me. It was a rhetorical question to emphasize that you, a group of grown adults, being paid with tax-payer money, could not possibly be allowed to supervise yourselves.” 

“Well, technically, I do supervise them,” Yvie added, again, growing more irate at this conversation.

“Please,” The woman brushes it off, “If you’re aware that your department is throwing around paper airplanes of suggestion forms, then you’re clearly complicit in their misuse of time and resources.” 

“Only the good ones become paper airplanes.” Nina shrugs. “The bad ones are crumpled, that’s how we sort.”

“You heard it, that’s how they sort,” Yvie gestured to the group before snapping, like her patience had been pulled taut for far too long. “I’m sorry, who are you?” 

The woman continues, unfazed. 

“So, we just ignore concerns?” She looks to the ground, before crouching down to snatch up a crumpled paper. She chokes a snide laugh, unfurls it, and continues. “A slip from a concerned citizen, writing into your suggestion box. And it says.” She pauses, face twisting, eyes widening, before returning to her previously cold countenance. “It says: The Mexicans are throwing cocaine over the fence and I’m scared one of them will become strong enough to throw it into Virginia you need to stop them.” She turns the paper over. “Sincerely, Jenny Miller.” 

Vanjie grabs the slip from her hands, pouring over the words before recrumpling it and shooting the paper ball into the trash can behind Scarlet’s desk. “That’s fucking racist, Jenny.” 

“Yeah, that’s fucked up,” Silky pipes up, rubbing her fingers together to get rid of the candy dust. 

“Vanj is right, it’s racist, and either way, no one could throw that far, Jenny,” Scarlet drawls, bobbing her head. “We’re a hundred miles from Mexico, at least.” 

The woman lets out an exasperated huff, not even touching upon the poor display of geographical awareness. It’s Virginia, for fucks sake. “Who’s Vanj?” 

Pulling at her bottom lip with her teeth, Yvie points with her pen, releasing her lip as she replies, “The one who took the suggestion slip from you, threw it in the trash, and called Jenny a racist.” She crosses her arms. “And again, who are you?” 

The woman pulls back her blazer and taps at her badge. Vanjie tries to look like she’s still offended, but it’s harder by the minute. 

“My name is Brooke Lynn Hytes, and I’m your state auditor.” She fishes around in her purse, undisturbed by Yvie’s tightening glance as she scans over her employees. “And you’ve just made my job exceptionally easy.”

[frontporchlit]

The MFA for the Emotionally Stunted by Robert

We came to an MFA creative writing program. We eat food, and read books, and attend classes to learn things, and secretly hope to publish something and win accolades and fame and fortune, before our Panoptical doubt sounds the alarm and rushes in riot-gear clad. We attend the cool readings of visiting writers. We smoke cigarettes, which according to science, activates the writer gene in our DNA. We struggle and struggle to write human characters.

By “we,” I mean me and the baby in my stomach. But not in a pregnancy way. I’m a guy. I have balls. The baby is also a guy, but really, he’s just a small dick motherfucker. I mean, look at that little baby dick. I’m laughing.

I only include him in the we because he goes everywhere with me. He just bounces around in my gut, as we ride the bus, buy milk, go to coffee shops. I feel I should explain the bouncing verb—I’m not an idiot with no conception of human anatomy; I understand human midsections are full of organs and blood and digesting shit and the whole 37 yards, or whatever our 8th grade science teacher told us, of coiled up small intestine—so I get that the kid wouldn’t literally be bouncing around in there; he’d be drowning, and clawing at my liver, and trying to poke a hole in my lung to put his little mouth against to breathe. I’m laughing. But anyway, I say bouncing because in my visual representation of my guts, I imagine a dark pit: it’s part prison (my ribs as a cage), and part cave (I fancy the imaginary floor of my pit gut as nature-ish, with dead leaves, dust, maybe the skeleton of a dead squirrel, etc.). The kid has room to move is what I’m saying.

But I’m also saying he doesn’t move, at least of his own volition, for two reasons. Firstly, I’ve been beating the shit out of him for as long as I can remember. Not because he’s a bad dude or anything—rather, when I was a kid, I thought he was pretty awesome; we were pretty tight. I couldn’t even tell the difference between him and me. If we’re talking pronouns, him and me was probably just I. But as I got older, I learned there was supposed to be a we—I saw other guys beating their babies down into their guts, and I was like oh, guess that’s how it’s done, and I started beating mine. Since I spent so much time depicting the gut pit, I’m probably obligated to depict how the violence works (and you’re a real sick fuck for expecting that from me)—essentially, the brain secretes an ooze from the stem that drips down the nasal cavity, coagulates in the squeezing tight throat, gains size and speed at the chest, and runs four taut knuckles straight at the small, scared, upturned face…no, no, I won’t be describing that after all (if you’re disappointed, you need Jesus).

[SCENE OF VIOLENCE]

I learned, I would say in adolescence, that you are supposed to cripple the little bitch, but you shouldn’t kill him. When you kill him, he decomposes worse than roadkill and mucks up all the plumbing (back to the more anatomically correct conceptualization). Most guys usually try to drown the putrid carcass with alcohol (I mean it makes a kind of sense, right?). Or they just take to beating someone else. Usually once you kill the kid, you’re on a timer until you kill yourself. I don’t recommend it.

Secondly, I keep him asleep. You can beat him into submission, but he will still catch a mood occasionally and start screaming and screaming, and that’s never fun. I went to cut out his tongue one day, and shit, he’s a little goddamn savage. A lullaby of grinding my teeth and clenching my fists accompanied with steady rolling melodies of seething anger usually keeps him quiet. Because as we all know, the world, or is it society? or is it family? or is it friendship? or is it romance? is essentially an airplane, and no one wants to hear your baby cry on an airplane.

Except in an MFA program. (And we’re back, I hope you can forgive the digression.) The MFA is all about the baby. Or maybe that’s wrong. The MFA is all about people who seem to have actually raised the baby, became the baby, but, you know, like the adult-version of the baby. We walk into class and see other baby-saturated adults doing cool things like talking about their feelings and encouraging each other. Suffice it to say: some weird ass shit. Which is all well and good as a tourist, but the thing about MFA programs is they’re full of sharers: you have a turn.

And so, I’m up for workshop and I’m sitting with my laptop trying to think of a story. I look to the baby for help: Hey! I need you right now—but as usual when I’m writing, he runs feral, smearing himself in intestinal oils, slippery as a greased pig. I grab at him, chase him, catch his ankle before he squirms away, lose him entirely and hear only his mocking laughter, until I finally pin him down. I cut off one of his fingers and leave him to howl and kick. I fingerpaint the story.

When workshop begins, they start with a round of compliments. The round lasts 1 minute and 47 seconds. Long enough for the baby to flush pink and crawl inside my head, nestling warm, and to look out my eyes, little mouth pressed so close it fogs the pupils, trying to see other children like him in their faces. The round ends.  

The workshop is unimpressed.

“It needs more paint.” — I throw him from my brain.

“Deeper color here.” — I shove him back down into the pit of my gut.

“Another stroke here.” — I grab his shoulders and shake him and blame him.

“This character just doesn’t feel human to me yet.”

Next time I’ll cut his arm off.