#in the hopes that you'll understand melinda's a little more

[the-silver-peahen-residence]

||Marking what's mine||

*waving* Hello once more dears. I got another drabble for you. I still have a request one to make but I'm writing this for fun for me. But I hope you like. Here is what this one is about today.

||Drabble Summary||

Remember that dark one's self world? Well, it seems we are heading back but were focusing on two people. Jaron was finding out his bloody lung dragon Melinda got hurt during a mission but he was fixing her up. However, they were talking about something to make the blood Jackal a bit..jealous? If you wanna know, read to find out.

||Warning||

~Blood will be present in this drabble

~Biting or marking will be present

~Wound is present (will have stitching or sewing wound close)

~Maybe flirting and possessive as well

~~Guests in this drabble~~

Jaron jackal along with the DBT belongs to my friend @demon-blood-youths

Also the Pure menace au/Monsters au belongs to her. If you wanna know more about it, please ask her. The idea is pretty good. ;3

Melinda brooks along with the Cursed vixens belong to me.

((Note: This drabble will have heavy grammar mistakes and errors but this was written for fun. I hope you understand but also enjoy please.))

"Hold still my dear. If you keep squirming like that I can't fix you up."

Jaron Jackal a.k.a The blood Jackal persuader was holding a thread and needle in his hand while sewing a wound on Melinda brooks a.k.a the bloody lung dragon of death's side. It was a rather rainy day here in the darker world of New York City.

His team along with Melinda's team just finished a mission together but she got injured a bit. Ophelia was going to heal her but he said he'll take care of her.

That leads to now as he was sitting on the chair holding a black needle with some wire thread as he was sewing her wound up. It stung like hell but Melinda was looking quiet then looks to him.

"It's not my fucking fault if it stings a little." she mutters laying on her back but she hisses feeling the needle in her again. Damn, she hated getting hurt like that but she relaxed as Jaron worked.

"Though, I'm shocked you didn't want Ophelia to heal me..."

"...Lets just say she was more busy having fun torturing the assholes that was targeting us for what we do in this damn city. But hey, at least she got new ways of testing things out with Navarro right now." As if on cue, screams of pain was heard while hearing Navarro shouting at their prisoner with Ophelia already experimenting on them to see what makes the other tick.

They been at this for hours but he already found out the guys team mates were dead already thanks to Ophelia's healing and experimenting. And with Navarro helping her, he got new ingredients to test on.

"Hmmmm...." she relaxed while looking down at Jaron but winces feeling Jaron working again. "Well, I guess I'll find a way to thank you for helping me..but you didn't have to you know." she looks to him but Jaron stops to pull carefully to see the wound almost closed.

"..I'm sure you'll find a way to owe me back but you know you don't have to. You already proven that by killing the assholes back then." He remembers when seeing they were going to kill both fractions. Well, Ink and Jinx stopped them and ended up burning the enemy alive. The screams were still pretty loud in his ears.

"But, I always told you to be careful when you don't know what anyone can do. As I always tell you, watch your back." he said but Melinda chuckled to look at him as he was working.

"I know that but you never liked seeing me get hurt. I was just having fun. Being able to kill them and cut their heads off was pretty fun. I think you liked it too..didn't you?" she smiled but he looks to her while his orange eyes met with her darker silver eyes. These two said nothing but he only looks back to work on her wound but felt a gentle touch to his cheek to make him look up at her.

"What's wrong-"

"You didn't answer me, love." Jaron looks up at her but she smiled.

"I know you liked it when you got the chance to kill with me Jaron..I know you since you told me about you, like i did with you. Besides, you taught me that...being able to let go is just what one needs when their trying to live..You showed me that.." she rubs his cheeks but he chuckled to stand up to look at her while leaning in close to look at her.

"I know I taught you that...I taught you to be open and not hold back anymore. Knowing how fucked up this world is..and knowing it didn't give a shit. What else makes you think that?"

"...Maybe it's because I just know...but..it leaves me wondering about tonight." she sees him curious to look at her.

"And what about tonight that got you wondering?"

"When I was being held captive by the swine, you saw what he did right? Had a blade near my neck...even had the nerve to fucking bite me. It stung true but I never seen you that...furious before."

"........" Oh right. He remembers that.

"You were so furious but it was a lot more murderous than before.." she sees him look but remain silent.

"You know how I hate when he was trying to harm you, Melinda. I don't like when someone tires to hurt you..."

"Or..." she moves to sit up slowly then moves to sit right in his lap, pressing up against him as he held her waist. He was careful due to her injury he was still sewing up. Melinda then grabs his shirt to pull him close that he looks down at her while she looks up.

"You hate when someone tries to harm what you've claimed as yours. I've seen it and you were a very angry jackal indeed..." she purrs to look at him but Jaron said nothing remembering. He was furious and angry seeing that dead beat idiot harming what he already claimed. How he dared to mark her with a knife and bite her too! He only looks down to Melinda but she looks to smile.

"See? I can tell just from looking at you, it's in your mind right? You hate when someone tries to do something even though I can fight to protect myself..it just leaves one guessing right?" she even reaches to sit up about to kiss him but he only held her close, to look at her while seeing her black hair loose but down her back but that look of a killer instinct still shows proudly on her face.

"You know how I am, Melinda. I already told you before I won't let anything take you away. I already claimed you as mine and I already proven it." he said hearing her giggle but even blushed to nip one of his fingers.

"You did with a kiss but....how would you have done it if it's possible hmm?"

"Your misbehaving but do you really need me to prove that to you?" he asked.

"Why not? I know I'm yours but...I'm sure you have ways to prove that right? Ooohh don't tell me my precious blood jackal is going soft on me.." she pouts that Jaron grabs her chin to pull her in close to kiss her deeply. Her eyes widen a little but she kisses him back while he held her. The kiss was warm still as it always was but she slowly grips his shirt loving how he just kissed her.

Jaron held the kiss for a while longer before slowly breaking that kiss. That's when he eyes looks at the healed knife cut leaving a scar and his bite mark that guy left on her.

That asshole. How dare he mark her. She belongs to him but he'll fix that.

As Melinda was about to speak, she yelps a little. She feels a sharp bite on her neck where that other idiot bit her. He bit hard enough that she shook with a hiss when he lets go. She felt blood running down her shoulder to her black shirt but she shivers feeling a slow heated wetness. He was lapping up the blood to make her silent again. When he did, he moves his head back, looking to her and tilts her head up by his finger.

"That should prove it right? Your mine so I hope you don't forget that." she didn't say a word but leans up to lick the blood off his bottom lip while blushing herself.

"That seems to prove enough.." she whispered.

"It will but you need to be still so I can finish sewing you up..now behave." he said but she smiled to see him set her back to sit down and work again on sewing the wound. In a two more hours, he was finished and covering the wound. Her demon blood will heal her later but he made sure it's covered.

"Oh and one other thing?" she heard him say while she was looking to him.

"Yes?" as she was putting away her two main daggers, he hugs her from behind as she keeps still feeling him turn her head to him.

"Don't bother covering that bite up. I want others to know who has you..so you leave it as it. Got it?" he asked but Melinda felt him let go as she only smiled to giggle.

"I don't mind. I mean after all..you did already shown what is yours...." she teased but as Jaron was ready to speak, he heard more screaming showing Navarro was now torturing the guy again. He sighed but looks to her.

"Come on, lets head on up. Your team is waiting." he said to head to the door but Melinda stops him to push him against the wall but looks up at him to giggle.

"Is something wr-" He stops speaking when she kisses him against his neck while he looks down petting her head. Even now she was teasing him. Feeling the kisses and the sudden bite with a wince of his own. She held the bite for a moment but slowly suck on where she bit him, pressing up against him not moving yet. He looks to feel her pull away licking her own lips.

"..."

"Now we owe each other.......hope you don't mind a gift."she winks before pulling away to head up. Jaron said nothing but he touches where she bit him but that leaves him chuckle. Sneaky little thing isn't she? For now, he'll think of a punishment later. He moves from the wall to head out with her into the DBT's base where the man the other two were torturing still screams in agony.

[hopevalley]

I just want to thank you for keeping this public. I have promoted you on Twitter and will continue to do so. I want to help in any way I can.

I debated all morning on how to reply to this. I know this is reference to Melinda making her blog private for Tumblr users only, and I think it’s important for me to express my opinion on that situation.

But first: thank you for the Twitter promotion! I have a Twitter account, but I admit I rarely use it (because I find it confusing to use lol). It’s @july_skies !

Regarding Melinda’s decision to privatize her blog: I support it. She works hard on her content and deserves to feel that people who like it will be capable of supporting it in a direct way (reblogs specifically). Nothing sucks more than making stuff and seeing that nobody’s looking at it or enjoying it, and whether or not that’s what it seems like to (general) you, that’s how it comes across when people don’t reblog her stuff. It’s depressing. It’s like she’s throwing her hard work right into the void.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to talk about content creation a little more, to help give you guys a better idea of fandom and your place as a consumer of fanworks; I know a lot of you might be new to the concept, and you can’t know if nobody thinks to tell you.

For my “credentials,” let’s just say I’ve been a content creator for more than half my life and there’s something we lifers call fandom participation or fandom engagement. They are more or less the same thing, and the terminology boils down to us answering this question: “How is the fandom at large engaging with our content?”

In the last handful of years, participation is down across the board. When I first got into writing fanfiction I’d get at least 40 comments on anything I wrote. Many of my works ended up with 60+ comments on them! 

Now I’m lucky if anyone comments at all, especially in this fandom. Again, it’s a problem everywhere, but I still get comments on fanfic I posted five years ago in other fandoms; meanwhile, this one remains relatively silent. 

I post on AO3 for two big reasons. 1) ACCESSIBILITY. AO3′s site layout is easy to read! It’s easy to format! It’s friendly to people with issues seeing small print! And then we have 2) I do it to give people the option of commenting anonymously (in case they’re shy or nervous).

Having an account there isn’t required at all. People just choose not to engage with me when I post fanfiction.

It feels bad to spend hours of your time on something only to see 0 notes/comments/likes/reblogs/whatever on it later. Four ‘likes’ doesn’t feel that good either. Did people actually like it? Are they pity-likes? Do they even care? People mindlessly ‘like’ a lot of things; maybe they did that with your content, too. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy seeing ‘likes’ but a ‘like’ is more or less an acknowledgement that they’ve seen the content, not that they enjoyed it or want more of it.

Also, likes/kudos don’t draw in more readers: comments do. When a reader’s scrolling down the front page of their favorite AO3 fandom, they click on the ‘fics that look like they might be ‘good’ and even though it’s not always TRUE that the ‘best’ stories have the most comments, a lot of readers filter by the number of comments! 

Comments tell other readers: this is worth checking out!

Let’s look at a quick example of one of my ‘fics:

This is from my AO3 account, a random WCtH fanfic. It’s not a long one, but it’s not short either. It’s a reasonable read in terms of time spent to read it, and as you can see 185 people clicked on it, 14 people ‘liked’ it (kudos are “likes”), and I have two comments: one of those comments is @trash-god and the other is me replying to her comment.

Her comment isn’t ‘less than’ because she’s a close friend, but she and I spoke at length about this story on Discord and her comment was just a nice little ‘addition’ to that conversation. Sure, the story’s about characters not many people care about, but look at that: 185 hits on the story. 14 likes. And only one person who read it took five seconds to leave a comment? Really? What about the 13 other people who ‘liked’ it?

What this says to me as a creator is that the ONLY person who is going to comment is the one person who might feel obligated to, and if that’s the case, why don’t I just save my stories to show her privately? Why bother posting them out into the void to hear nothing but silence from everyone else?

This is the direction that @whencallstheheart is coming from. What’s the point of spending hours creating these things when nobody interacts with you? Posting to silence feels bad. And look, to put it into perspective, editing gifs to post, writing fanfic, doing write-ups, maintenance of a blog, site, or social media presence: it’s super time-consuming. 

Melinda and I both work full-time jobs as it is. My job hit full busy season and I’m even getting overtime now. I’m in training to take over the department next year and I’m tired at the end of the day. When I get home I have eight cats, a house to take care of, and a spouse, not to mention my in-laws live right next door and need help sometimes. We also have a property we just planted 1500 trees on by hand that we have to monitor, and my husband owns a house we rent to someone that needs work done on it, too. Sometimes, life is busy.

And don’t get me wrong! I enjoy creating, just like I’m sure Melinda does. I feel awful if I can’t “create.”

But if my choices are:

work for five hours on a fanfic or episode write-up only to get 4 likes on it, OR

play a video game or watch a movie or read a book or sit on the deck watchin’ the sun go down while I work on a crocheting project…

The latter definitely appeals to me more knowing I have to get up in the morning to go back to work again. My time is worth something. Neither Melinda nor I are getting paid to create this content. We put it together for free, in what spare time we have, in the midst of our own chaotic lives. My website costs me a chunk of money every year to keep up and running ad-free, and I could get all 1500 trees weeded in the amount of time it takes me to put together an episode write-up or decent fanfic.

All content creators ask for in exchange for their free labor is a sense of community, and that can be anything from:

comments on fanfics you enjoyed, even if they are just to say, “I read this and enjoyed it.” 

messages that say, “I really like how [this edit you did] turned out.”

reblogs on Tumblr, retweets on Twitter, emails to website owners

you can even create your own blog and use it to begin conversations with those creators!

You guys have been pretty good about engaging with the show itself through us, but don’t forget to engage with the content you enjoy seeing that comes about because of the show. 

Fandom content keeps the show alive even when it’s not currently airing, and supporting content creators keeps them creating. Everyone wins, then!

To talk specifically about written content...

Readers are the ones who ensure more material is created. Hands down.

And again: I love writing!! I DO. I’ve been writing seriously for more years of my life than I haven’t been writing seriously! But it’s disheartening to post a fanfic and get my one obligation comment.

Now, it’s fine if you don’t read fanfiction or even enjoy it. It’s also fine if the things I’ve posted aren’t to your specific tastes. Trust me, I get it; nobody is obligated to comment on my fanfiction, and I don’t want anyone to feel that they should be.

But please know this: if you do enjoy something, whether it’s fanfic or edits or something else, you NEED to engage with it, or it WILL disappear. People don’t like talking to walls. It’s frustrating and it isn’t a good use of their time.

(This is one of the reasons I haven’t bothered doing a novelization of the series. It could be fun, but for 0 comments it’s not worth spending the time on.)

Again, you guys have been great when it comes to engaging with the show material, particularly while the show is airing. It’s been fun speculating with you and hearing all of your different thoughts. I know sometimes Tumblr doesn’t make it easy to communicate, either, and you’ve all done a great job of getting around that.

But in between seasons things get slow on this blog and it’s hard for me (or anyone running a blog) to feel motivated to provide content of any sort if you’re not going to take the time to engage in it.

I’ll never mark this blog as private, but if I get to the point where I can’t get any engagement from the fans, I’ll shut it down. The point of having a “fandom blog” is to interact with other fans.

I enjoy providing content to you guys, but if participation drops off to nothing, I’ll be taking that as my signal that the audience is gone and my time would be better spent elsewhere. 

So if you’re here and you’re enjoying things, don’t forget to take a little time out of your day to let your content creators know! Not just me and Melinda, of course, but your favorite people on Instagram, Twitter, and other sites as well. ♥ You might be surprised how happy they’ll be to receive interaction from other fans.

And another plug for fanfiction, because 1) they always get the short end of things considering how hard it is to amass the creative energy necessary to tell a good story, and 2) I noticed it’s the #2 page on my website getting visited: if you’ve enjoyed anything you’ve read for When Calls the Heart, tell the author! Here’s the section for WCtH on AO3! Is English not your native language/you’re not confident in your ability to write English? No worries! I’ve gotten many thoughtful comments in other languages and from people who spoke limited English, and trust me: I treasured every one. If you’re just not sure how to comment on fanfic, send me a message and I’ll give you some tips!

I don’t intend this as a slight against my anonymous friend up there AT ALL; I think it can be hard to be in fandom, especially if you’re newer to the scene. There’s a lot of history that’s long gone by now and missing out on it means it’s harder to step into fandom without also accidentally stepping on toes.

Sometimes we take for granted that we have an almost unlimited supply of fanfiction, gifs, memes, blogs, and so on at our disposal. But none of that comes from thin air and it never did. It’s the cumulative hard work of millions of people throwing their hearts and souls into something they’re passionate about in an effort to engage with other fans.

I hope this helped put things into perspective a bit!! Sending love at all of you that stuck around this far; I know it was quite a bit of a ramble LOL!