#it’s a Monty Python joke for those who might be wondering

[quillyfied]

I’m delighted to see all the meta surrounding OFMD and relating it to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” but there are two problems with me specifically that so far prevent my complete enjoyment of these analyses:

One, I’ve never read the poem (which frankly is a crime and a preposterous injustice. I took the advanced English classes. I have an English degree. How have I not read this??? But. Then again. I also haven’t read Lord of the Flies. And didn’t touch 1984 until my final semester of college. And I’m sure there are more literary classics I’m missing from my personal canon).

Two, I hear “albatross” in any context, and this is where my brain immediately goes:

[spacewizardtrek]

WARNING: This post will ruin you. Like Medusa; look at your peril.

But here is is. It’s the one you’ve all been waiting for.

Kirk bod appreciation #7: The RIDICULOUSLY BEAUTIFUL FACE. A highly technical and academic review.

This is a rather nebulous one. And not, on the face of it (pardon the pun) very philosophical, as it’s essentially about Kirk being stupidly pretty. This post probably will (it will) descend into just screaming and sobbing, but there will be, I promise, *some* meaningful insight into the meaning of ‘beauty’ and textual analysis of its role herein.

Beauty is subjective. But look at him. It’s not just being aesthetic, but it’s the *way* he’s aesthetic. Here I might repeat myself a bit, but stay with me. I may have mentioned before once hearing him described as ‘beautiful in the way women are often described as beautiful’. He is PRETTY. He is indeed often conveyed in the way the women stereotypically (not necessarily rightly) are on screen: perfect, smooth skin; soft, big eyes; luscious lips (his body is sensually curvaceous and furthermore it’s emphasised). He’s not androgynous though. He’s masculine. And yet I still sense what was meant in describing him as ‘beautiful in the way women are often described as beautiful’. He is a rather uncommon form of gender fuckery. He is a form of stereotype-subversion not commonly acknowledged. He seems to be everything at once, ALL THE GENDER; combines whichever traits he desires from those categories, and yet is undeniably a man and masculine whatever the ingredients. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE, one might wonder. The fact of the matter is, that it IS. And it teaches us something.

The FUCK. nO. You are not allowed to be that pretty, and you are NOT allowed to look at her like that. We’re trying to have a SENSIBLE DISCUSSION here.

Sorry, that was a non-sequitur / nothing to do with what we learn by Kirk’s embodiment; I was just ambushed by my own gif. Only the control of a Vulcan. ONLY that could possibly withstand this onslaught. And even that won’t hold up forever AS WE WELL KNOW

God.

This is going well, as you can tell.

OK. So, it’s claimed he has Eyes and Stupidly Long Weakness-Inducing Eyelashes. You know, from all that fanfic that goes on about ‘big, sparkling eyes’ and him fanning his ‘long, copper eyelashes’. I mean, yeah right, tropey mc tropeface -

IT’S TRUE. HE IS LITERALLY AN ANIME PRINCESS.

There are some moments where he just BLINKS and, how to describe it...how does a BLINK have that effect. It’s NOT ALLOWED.

...I’m sorry. It IS allowed. All of it. I am not shaming you your beauty. Never change, Jim. Never.

OK. I’m ok. 3 pics down, we can get through this -

Oh you are joking. Stop.

I don’t understand how anyone can be so beautiful. Life is a lie. Reality is fake -

- you did NOT just turn your big anime eyes on Spock. You do know this is why he ran away to PURGE ALL HIS EMOTIONS?

And for that matter, you know when Kirk looks his most beautiful? Literally WHEN HE’S LOOKING AT SPOCK. Spock talks some bollocks and Kirk just sparkles like a fucking angel:

Unbelievable. But utterly undeniable.

Sigh. Moving on.

Oh - someone once suggested I talk about The Lips. Lips are so wonderful aren’t they. So many wonderful things they can do.

And Kirk’s. They’re there in every picture: perfect, rosy, soft and madness-inducing. My advice is just...don’t think about them. But since I’ve been asked to draw attention to them, well, you’ve just sealed your fate. Scroll down at your peril.

I WARNED YOU.

I am pulling NO punches.

I’ve seen this great meme going around:

Excuse me though....CUTE?

That’s the understatement of the 23rd century.

Try impossibly beautiful, mind and body: heart of solid gold, soul deep in love with you. Those eyes and all their passion burned into your memories a thousand times over, along with - maybe, suggestibly, idk I’m extrapolating from all the goddamn tension - even the one unforgettable time he laid between lily-white sheets and gave himself to you; every gift of the mind, body and soul - and your ostensibly-forced Vulcan conditioning, that completely ignored how incompatible one part of you was with it, caused so much dissonance that you thought the only possible course of action for you both to survive was to BREAK UP, tear yourself from this beauty and love and sweetness to PURGE ALL EMOTIONS because nothing, nothing equipped you for this; you were set up specifically to fail, and fail hard in the face of transcendental love and beauty by those who rejected such things and didn’t understand you and could never imagine this for you and who instead of helping your beautiful neurodivergent brain flourish taught you to repress and caused you pain and shame and Gol was so hard and Kirk was so sad, so very sad and depressed and hurt and yet he couldn’t stop loving you with a bond so strong he called to you across the stars and Gol was all for naught yet you still didn’t know how to live like this, it was torture, torture until the mind meld with the living machine flashed your BIOS and you knew, love.exe was suddenly running with no errors and he came after you and held you and you held hands and, and -

.

*sobbing*

.

just...give me a moment

.

YOU WONDER WHAT THE SUBTEXT (FRIKKIN’ MAIN TEXT) OF STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE WAS ALL ABOUT???

The pain?? The angst?? The two logical entities seeking contact, love, THIS SIMPLE FEELING? That fucking moment when spock walks on the bridge and the only way he can control himself is to be SUPER Vulcan, while his love gazes at him with those EYES, fucking huge and glittering and hurt and loving?? Is it so much a mystery what memories these two are carrying, what’s behind the searing tension???????

Love him. Love him Spock. Take him in your arms and love him. He’s for you. All for you. Fucking hell guys. The fuck. This movie.

.

ok.

ok I can do this

CAN U NOT

those damn eyes I swear

It’s obviously not all just superficial physical beauty. What IS beauty? Narratively we do sometimes find this ‘prettiness’ enhanced and emphasized like the old vaseline lens to set the tone of a scene (he’s vulnerable and delicate, or someone’s indeed in love with him so we see their ‘lens’ on him); but it is somewhat intangible and nebulous and changeable. I don’t think aesthetic beauty, if one deems it so, on its own, would be enough for the likes of Spock (indeed, no woman could charm him thusly); it's about something deeper. It’s about who he is. Who he is inside: the beautiful AND the imperfect. How his good and bad - how his ‘all’ -  chimes with Spock’s 'all’. The Enemy Within deals with this, and shows how Spock loves all of Kirk, wants him complete, with both his light and shadow. The beauty of all of us is this totality and variance, not one intangible quality.

I’ll bet Spock’s parents knew immediately. Can you imagine Sarek trying to be a total bitch over Kirk, having heard the rumours and just wanting to have one more thing to reject Spock over, immediately projecting onto Kirk as some blow-up pretty-boy and how Incredibly More Disappointing My Son Is for being Obviously In Love With Stupid Illogical Human Doll Face Bubble Butt Bimbo Captain, and Amanda’s like, stfu, let me remind you Kirk is actually a Fucking Amazing Highly Decorated Starship Captain who Saves Your Life and don’t you DARE resent him just because he’s got tits/ass/tum/lips that won’t quit and is obviously the freakin’ sun Spock orbits. Mr ‘I married a human but that was special because it was logical’ or some bullshit. How is Kirk an illogical choice? I mean literally, Spock is a Science Genius™ on the federation’s FLAGSHIP whose well-matched Genius Captain™ understands him, accepts him, brings the best out of him, helps him fulfil his whole potential and is in love with him in the deepest and purest way and will be his bonded soulmate for ALL OF TIME and that fucking sour-faced bih at the start of that ep, ffs.

Of course Amanda stays in touch with Kirk, adores the fuck out of him, sends him old Vulcan lit on t’hy’la bonds (yes sarek, a T’HY’LA bond, so revered freakin’ poets write about it) etc because frankly her son could do FAR FUCKING WORSE.

FAR. FUCKING. WORSE.

Don’t...just don’t slip the bod into the equation, the face is enough for one post. We’re all in therapy for this already, let’s not relapse.

Oh, what’s the use. I’m gonna die. This is it. This is like the Monty Python joke that is so funny it kills you. This man is lethal. I need to stop this thread and purge all my emotions

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

That’s it. I’m dead. You’re dead. We’re all dead.

I hope, however, seeing this post was worth it. See you at Gol everyone.

.

.

The Forbidden Texts, DO NOT READ:

Kirk bod appreciation #6: The Curves. The Front. The...chest. AND THE AMAZING GREEN WRAP

Kirk bod appreciation #5: The Paws

Kirk bod appreciation #4: The Curves. The Back. Poetry in motion.  

Kirk bod appreciation #3: Season 3 (Part 1)

Kirk bod appreciation #2b: The Gluteus Maximus

Kirk bod appreciation #2a: The Gluteus Maximus

Kirk bod appreciation #1: The Tum

[arcticdementor]

When the idea that a woman could have a penis was no longer a privileged insight of the academic elite but had gone mainstream, I remarked to my friend, “How long before we have to affirm the furries?” At the time I was joking, but after reading Kathy Rudy’s article “LGBTQ…Z?” in Hypatia in which she claims to “draw the discourses around bestiality/zoophilia into the realm of queer theory” I’m starting to wonder if my joke isn’t that far off. After all, there was a time when the idea of a man becoming a woman was a joke—as in this clip from Monty Python’s comedy The Life of Brian.

What Duke University professor Kathy Rudy seems to realize by arguing we should add “Z” (zoophilia) to the queer alphabet soup is that a great way to have a successful career in academia is to bring postmodern gobbledygook into absurd combinations with anything and everything.

…

I will hand it to Rudy, her article is at least comprehensible, even if it’s just as insane. Rudy begins by noting that humans who “kill animals, force them to breed with each other, eat them, surround them, train them, hunt them, nail them down and cut them open for science” are considered “normal, functioning members of society. Yet having sex with animals remains an almost unspeakable anathema.”

…

While some might conclude that, since we wouldn’t shag a pig, we also shouldn’t confine one to a gestation crate, Rudy’s reasoning seems to be that if we already force terrible things on animals, then why not also screw them? If you’re a cow, having a human copulate with you can’t be as bad as going to the slaughterhouse, right? Besides, Fido already humps my leg so why don’t I hump him?

Technically, Rudy claims “my argument is not for or against humans having sex with animals, but is a meditation on both the elusive nature of sex itself and the subjectivities of human versus nonhuman animals.” She never explicitly promotes sex with animals, but considering that the entire point of the article is to call into question the taboo against having sex with animals, well…

It’s as if I said I’m not advocating for pedophilia but then proceed to undermine all the reasons for being against pedophilia. “Why not?” might not be as strong as “you must” but it leads to the same outcome, namely, radical permission.

As is often the case with academic postmodernism, the claims being made become less clear the more the author writes:

“Put differently, queer theory teaches us that it's not really a question of whether we have ‘sex’ with animals; rather it's about recognizing and honoring the affective bonds many of us share with other creatures. Those intense connections between humans and animals could be seen as revolutionary, in a queer frame. But instead, pet love is sanitized and rendered harmless by the presence of the interdict against bestiality. The discourses of bestiality and zoophilia form the identity boundary that we cannot pass through if we want our love of animals to be seen as acceptable.”

Rudy’s elusive, wishy-washy prose is a common rhetorical tactic. The goal is to avoid clearly committing to an argument so that one can simultaneously promote radical nuttiness while removing oneself from the burden of defending it. After all, if the claim really were as basic as “we love our pets but not in a sexual way” then the article wouldn’t be, as Rudy puts it, “revolutionary.”

The only way the article can be truly “transgressive” is for her to argue that our love for animals is already sexual or should become sexual. After all, Rudy seems uncertain as to whether she is sexually attracted to her own dogs:

“I know I love my dogs with all my heart, but I can’t figure out if that love is sexually motivated.”

For some reason, I’ve never grappled with this problem, but then again, I’m not versed in Queer theory.

…

Indeed, what is the difference between inserting a piece of bread into a toaster and penetrative sex? According to postmodernism, nothing at all! As Rudy explains:

“The widespread social ban on bestiality rests on a solid notion of what sex is, and queer theory persuasively argues we simply don't have such a thing. The interdict against bestiality can only be maintained if we think we always/already know what sex is. And, according to queer theory, we don’t.”

Despite earlier claiming that she is not advocating for sex with animals, Rudy has just provided us with an indirect argument for it. She states that we can only maintain a ban on sex with animals if we know what sex is. She next states that queer theory has proven that we don’t know what sex is. Therefore, we cannot ban sex with animals. She suggests her indirect argument again at the end of the article by masking it in the form of a question:

“But without a coherent and agreed upon definition of sex (which queer theory persuasively argues is impossible), the line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is nonexistent. How do we know beforehand whether loving them constitutes ‘sex,’ and how can such sex be so dangerous if it so nebulous and undefined?”

Not only is it false that we have no idea what sex is, but it is also false to say that we require a taxonomy of every kind of sexual feeling before we can forbid certain acts (such as coitus) with animals (or children and the cognitively disabled, such as Chris Chan’s mother with dementia).

I may not be able to verbally capture the feeling of sexual desire or pleasure any more than I can define pain or joy or sadness. It’s something I know from experience. What I can say for sure is that what I felt kissing my grandma’s cheek is definitely not in the same category as what I felt kissing my boyfriend. Rudy may be unclear as to whether she is turned on by a slurp from her dog, but I personally have never felt confusion on the matter.

…

Yet, the true perversion, according to Rudy, is not to lust after camels, dogs, parakeets or naked mole rats but to set up the sexual boundary between humans and animals in the first place:

“Put differently, both animal rights (3) and psychosocial perspectives [which view desire for animals as mental illness] (4) do not believe that borders can be crossed. Queer theory, on the other hand, tells us that few of us have stable identities anymore, that borders are always crossed. We're all changing, shifting, splitting ourselves up this way and that. It labels these processes ‘hailing,’ ‘suturing,’ and ‘interpolation’; where once we saw ourselves affiliated in one way, a new interpretive community emerges to capture our passions and move us differently. I am asking the reader to entertain the possibility that the same kinds of shifts and disruptions happen with categories like ‘human,’ ‘rabbit,’ ‘ape,’ or ‘dog.’”

And no woke paper would be complete without the accusation of violence:

“Both positions [animal rights activists and bestialists] oppose sex with animals, and in doing so they perform a kind of violence on animals by lumping them all together into one seamless identity.”

That’s right. Physically violating an animal does not constitute violence. Words do. Especially when those words reject postmodern queer theory.

…

Unlike the many women who have been cancelled for claiming that males aren’t women, Rudy’s August 2012 article (republished March 2020) for Hypatia did not result in her being fired, censored, or otherwise deplatformed.

It’s not as if no one came across her article either. According to Altmetric, Rudy’s article is in the “top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric” and is “One of the highest-scoring outputs from this source (#1 of 704)” and has an Altmetrics attention score in the 99th percentile.

When Rebecca Tuvel wrote a paper for Hypatia suggesting that the same assumptions that ground transgenderism could be used to support transracialism, scholars demanded Hypatia retract the article and the journal's Facebook page posted an apology on behalf of the associate editors. Rudy, on the other hand, was invited to deliver the commencement speech for North Carolina Service Dogs in December 2012.

We must remember that the word “transgressive” has relative, not absolute, meaning. What is considered “normal” defines what is considered “transgressive.” If queer theory articles on bestiality result in publication and validation, then is Rudy truly, in her words, “transgressive”? Or is Hypatia, rather, representative of a new establishment norm that is just as desirous of punishing transgressors—now in the form of TERFs and other enemies of the postmodern left—as the old establishment was eager to fire and ostracize homosexuals? As The Who sang, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss.”

[goldenkamuyhunting]

Ramblings and crazy theory time about GK chap 253 “Her father’s sullied name”

So we digs into a chapter in which…

(If you aren’t familiar with this joke is a reference to Monty Python's Flying Circus)

…In which many unexpected meetings will take place.

But let’s go with order.

Toni and Ariko joins Hijikata-san along with Nagakura (and hey, those guys are fast Nagakura was supposed to be near Hijikata firing the firework and yet he’s now behind Toni), which means Boutarou went alone in Ushiyama’s direction. Keep this in mind.

Anyway Hijikata informs them about how his target too ran into the brewery (everyone is just going there) and, since his face was the one of a foreigner, he has to be the tattooed convict they’re searching.

Well, I would say the fact he approached who he believed to be a prostitute with a knife in his hand and used it to slash Kantarou when the latter tried to stop him was also a dead giveaway but whatever, let’s go on.

Toni then informs him that he heard the gunshots from Army rifles in Ushiyama’s direction, which hints Ushiyama might be fighting the army currently.

So to avoid a meeting with the 7th division Hijikata decided they’ll go get Jack/Ostrog and retire as fast as possible. Then he adds since Jack/Ostrog was hurt they should just search for blood to find him.

We switch to Ogata, still in the fire watchtower, checking the status of his poor rifle... which in the previous chapter had an unexpected meeting with a bullet.

Unluckily for him the shoot destroyed the firing pin which is the part of the firing mechanism designed to ignite combustions/detonations by delivering an impact force to shock-sensitive compounds known as primers, which, once ignites, will push the projectiles out of the gun.

To make it short, Ogata’s rifle can’t fire any longer.

So as the poor rifle is too damaged to work Ogata is reminded of how he saw that Usami conveniently dropped his type 38 when fighting Ushiyama…

...and wonders if it’s still there. We know it is because Usami was so focused on chasing Kadokura with his bayonet he committed what Ogata would judge a capital sin, he didn’t bother to retrieve his rifle.

The visual also confirms the rifle is still where Usami has discharged it.

So Ogata moves to leave the watchtower as he does so his gaze falls on the damaged rifle he’s leaving behind, his expression thoughtful, commenting if he hadn’t jerked back in surprise he would be the one who would have been hit.

He then looks at the inside of the empty watchtower and wonders:

‘Ore o tasuketa no ka?’

俺を助けたのか？

“Did you save me?”

We’re shown the exit of the watchtower, which we know is in Vasily’s full sight and then the back of it, in which Ogata is opening a hole before Ogata goes on and dismisses the idea he was saved.

‘Masaka na… Sono made ohitoyoshide wanai darou?’

まさかな… そのまでお人好しではないだろう？

“No way… you wouldn’t be that soft-hearted, right?”

The implication seems to be he knows who was the one who startled him.

The next panel shows that Ogata is leaving the watchtower, as he evidently had either jumped down of it or managed to climb down from the back exit he created and he’s now walking away, his hood pulled up as he speak to himself… or to the ghost… some more.

‘Ore no jama o suru tsumori ka… Akuryō-me ga’

俺の邪魔をするつもりか… 悪霊めが

“So you’re trying to get in my way, then?... You, evil spirit…”

Now… Ogata uses ‘Akuryō’  (悪霊) which is commonly translated as “evil spirit”, due to ‘aku’ (悪) meaning “evil” and ‘rei’ (霊) here read ‘ryō’ meaning “soul” (not necessarily of a deceased person).

Now… In Japan ‘Akuryō’  (悪霊) are generally considered the cause of calamities such as illness, misfortune, and curses.

As Yuusaku died of a violent death it makes sense in a Japanese perspective his soul couldn’t find peace and he became a vengeful ghost. On the other side Ogata had a good opinion of Yuusaku. He considered him a noble man, and personally witnessed he couldn’t kill a soul… so it’s a bit weird he thinks Yuusaku is not that kindhearted… even though of course he could be in denial.

I mean, believing Yuusaku would be so kind to keep on helping him despite having been killed by Ogata would only make Ogata feel more guilty for having killed him. Thinking Yuusaku is there to hinder him instead, might help lessening his sense of guilt.

On another side I wonder if Ogata actually believes the one haunting him is his father, who also died of violent death cursing him.

‘Kisama no iutōri, nanika ga kaketa ningen… dekisokonai no segareja. Norowarero!’

貴様の言うとおり、何かが欠けた人間… 出来損ないの倅じゃ 呪われろ

“As you said, you are lacking something… my pathetic son. I curse you!”

The uniform we saw the ‘ghost’ was wearing is the one of officials therefore not just the one of Yuusaku and Tsurumi but also of Hanazawa (when he didn’t feel the need to wear all his medals and aiguillette and other ornaments which weren’t worn in battle). As we can’t see the sleeves we can’t see the ranking and the head is completely hidden from us when instead, although Yuusaku’s eyes were usually not shown, we could see his head when he took the shape of an hallucination.

It would make sense Ogata, who’s deep down obsessed with his father, would think the man has turned into a vengeful ghost aiming to hinder him.

On the other side he could be assuming even Yuusaku would turn into a vengeful ghost after being shoot in the head, especially because he worked in his head that Asirpa was okay with killing him and, in his mind, she views Yuusaku and Asirpa as pretty similar people if not exactly the same.

So yes, it’s possible Ogata thinks the ghost is Yuusaku and that, at the same time, Yuusaku is getting in his way even though during his hallucination in Karafuto he acted kind to him... but well, Ogata was feverish so he might not even remember that.

Really, it’s hard to say what Ogata is thinking exactly... as usual, which is what makes him so interesting to wonder about!

Anyway, as far as I’m involved, from what you can gather from my previous post, I like to think the ‘ghost’ is nothing else but the personification of Ogata’s guilt for killing Yuusaku and so its intent was to stop him from killing Asirpa and saving Ogata was coincidental… or, if it really is a ghost and Golden Kamuy is meant to turn into a ghost story, like killing two birds with one stone.

But whatever, I might be wrong, we’ll see.

We move back to the brewery and back to Sugimoto and his murderous group of drunken companions. The group is completely plastered and crawling on the ground.

While Nikaidou promises death to Sugimoto and demands his arm and leg and Sugimoto babbles about being immortal and not having time to deal with them, Tsukishima tries to hold Sugimoto still by clinging to his arm… and, as ridicule as this is, he’s the one who’s accomplishing the most because Nikaidou will attempt to use his ‘shooting leg’ to kill Sugimoto but, due to being drunk, ends up on shooting the floor and is sent flying and Koito, who managed to find the strength to grab a bottle and stand up, slips again and ultimately tosses the bottle to Tsukishima’s head, causing him to let go of Sugimoto.

Now free Sugimoto happens to find in front of himself his rifle and, not only takes it but evidently Ogata’s scolding about how one should never fire his rifle when it has water inside...

...left such a strong impression that, even a plastered Sugimoto now reminds he has to remove the beer that got inside it.

I’m not sure if he’s blowing it out or drinking it and I’m not sure this qualifies as thoroughly drying the interior but well, at least now he tries.

Then as he manages to stand and run away he realizes Asirpa is nowhere to be seen (evidently he hadn’t heard Kikuta claiming he seized her) and wonders where she went, calling her while Nikaidou, still on the ground, begs him to wait.

Honestly I wonder if a drunk Sugimoto is a better shoot than a sober one since drunk Sugimoto managed to remember to dry his rifle while sober Sugi couldn’t. We’ll see.

We move back to Asirpa and Kikuta.

Asirpa is still aiming at Kikuta and, since her past experiences had turned her into a person that doesn’t even trust Shiraishi easily, this works in her favour as she doubts his words, claiming Kikuta is lying when he says they understood something from the Ainu bodies and their belonging and that it should be a lie also that they were the first to find the murder scene.

Doubting him in this way brings forth the advantage Kikuta now has to bring proof of his words and,a fter a moment of hesitation, he does by asking her if she had seen an Ainu gold coin.

Her expression gives away her surprise at hearing this and the clever Kikuta, from this, figures she knows what he’s talking about.

This also tells us that Ainu gold coins weren’t something commonly used between Ainu, otherwise Kikuta would have found nothing strange in finding several of them among the Ainu belongings.

Kikuta claims only who were to be the first to investigate the scene would know about them, as they would be the first thing who would get stolen by others. Actually well, no, not everyone who finds corpses thinks to check on their belongings and steal their valuable, this is just Kikuta used to battleground and to tell his men to steal from deceased Russians their Nagants but yes, it proves that Kikuta at least was there and was there prior to people who could steal from those poor Ainu.

Now… Kikuta claims the coins confirmed to them the existence of the Ainu gold as Tsurumi claimed they were made with the Ainu gold dust. Kikuta says that after seeing the tattooed skins he realized their design matches with the one of the coins and therefore the coins are Nopperabou’s work.

I’ve many things to say about the coins but I’ll let them on hold and discuss them at the end. For now I’ll focus on the plot.

Kikuta goes on and says Tsurumi knows other things too so Asirpa should totally go with them as they can tell her whether her father really did kill the Ainu.

Now, this might seem a good proposition but it actually sucks.

First of all because nothing will stop them from lying and claiming they got or they didn’t get evidence X that proves or disproves if Wilk killed them or not.

Second Tsurumi is not the Japanese Meiji era equivalent of C.S.I. with the technological means to find all the tracks left on the scene and analyze it with amazing pc… and let’s not forget that in real life even modern police can’t find all the evidence or can interpret it in the wrong way. So even if Tsurumi were willing to be honest… who says he has found all the evidence and correctly figured out everything? Knox’s Decalogue?

Third and last… always assuming Tsurumi will tell her the truth then… what? Tsurumi had made clear in their past meeting he’ll plan to hide and trap her. The truth might be great as Wilk might not have done it or suck as it might say Wilk did it but then… what? Never mentioning Tsurumi would have been a jerk for allowing for Wilk to stay in jail and for the true culprit to roam free if Wilk were to be innocent, Asirpa would still end up trapped and unable to do anything afterward.

Asirpa has a moment of uncertainty, it’s clear now she believes Kikuta got on the crime scene first and having more info on it tempts her…

...which in a way is weird because she has never considered asking Ogata... or Tanigaki for that matter, or even Koito and Tsukishima since she travelled with them on the way back to Karafuto, about what they knew, even though it was Ogata who first brought up how Tsurumi collected the evidence on the crime scene… and Tanigaki indirectly confirmed it as Ogata spoke about it as if it was common knowledge among the 7th and Tanigaki didn’t deny it.

Overall Asirpa’s ‘quest’ for the truth shows her lacking initiative and doesn’t feel like a quest at all. At first she just aimed to have the one she believed to be her father’s murderer executed, then she went to Abashiri to check if the ‘murderer’ was actually her father, then followed Kiro in Karafuto but her interest focused merely on Wilk’s far past, without considering Wilk might have been changed between the time he met Sofia and the incident with the gold and, what’s more, it was actually a study in other cultures with some vague additions of anecdotes about Wilk’s life.

Think at the long explanations we get about the Orok and the few sentences about ‘oh hey actually Wilk too, when he was young, shot somebody’s reindeer like Ogata did’. So much for Wilk’s past and of course him shooting a reindeer is totally relevant in how he might have killed the Ainu.

Lastly, after Kiro dies, she decides to hunt again for the gold with Sugimoto, thinking this will unravel the truth… but we see that when facing Tsurumi she was actually worried not for what the man knew about the incident but for the fate of the Ainu and, later on, she decided Wilk didn’t do it merely by watching a coin he owned and she believed it meant Wilk held it merely because she assumed it meant he hadn’t given up on his idea about how minorities should unite… never mentioning if instead Wilk really got greedy he would have clung to it merely because it was a gold coin (in fact Kikuta implied people would have stolen the coins exactly for this).

Did she discuss with Hijikata about what he knew about Wilk?

We don’t know but really, despite this being supposedly Asirpa’s quest, her interest for it seems to be definitely lacking.

It’s nowhere near close to her wish to be next to Sugimoto for example.

And she will prove it’s not a priority even now, claiming than more than clearing Wilk’s name she’s interested in the future of the Ainu that she believes he entrusted to her.

Kikuta then goes and says a very wise thing that Asirpa takes in the entirely wrong way.

He warns her if she doesn’t abandon the gold, all of the people around her are going to be killed.

Asirpa angrily retorts he’s bringing up this now, after how far things have gone and the visual shows she’s clearly thinking at Sugimoto as she says so, the image showing her and Sugimoto walking together, Sugimoto, for whom she has decided to turn into a human shield as proved in the previous chapter and for whom she believes she can kill.

Interesting enouth, although this image looks similar to it, it’s not the image on the cover of chap 73

...and comparing the two I couldn’t help but realize in this image Asirpa seems taller than she did in chap 73 (yes, it could be due to the position she is, but the relevant part is that at a first glance she seems to have grown up) and she’s looking in the same direction as Sugimoto while in that previous image she was just looking at Sugimoto.

But still the problem is that this image seems to imply when Kikuta brings up the people around her might get killed she thinks at Sugimoto only when Kikuta is probably thinking at her grandmother and the rest of her Ainu family, those future she claims she wants to protect. Kikuta has seen firsthand how Tsurumi considered killing Huci and how he threatened to kill the whole of Ariko’s relatives.

While Sugimoto is, at the moment, not in Tsurumi’s reach as far as Kikuta knows (he can’t be sure that Tsukishima’s drunken group will manage to seize him) Huci and Asirpa’s other relatives are basically sitting ducks waiting for Tsurumi to target them.

Unless Noda is meant to say something else with that image, something that will be cleared up in the volume version, Asirpa’s crush is, again blinding her to other problems… and not only to them as she doesn’t hear Usami walking close to her and being about to grab her, which is a rather careless thing from her as she knew Kikuta didn’t come there alone and someone could come to aid him.

Luckily for her Kadokura, who’s basically Usami’s kryptonite, tosses himself at Usami, causing him to fall, before yelling at Asirpa to escape as they would be in troubles if she were caught.

Asirpa does. Usami is furious as Kadokura twarted his plans again and tries to murder him, calling him ‘Kono Abazure’ (このアバズレ "this whore” albeith it’s a rather derogatory way to say it) also in reference to his disguise.

Kadokura though, not only manages to avoid being stabbed by Usami’s bayonet but also manages to cause Kikuta to trip.

Kadokura is his own special brand of awesome when he wants to.

We should remember it’s thanks to him who managed to open all the convicts’ jails in Abashiri at the same time, Tsurumi’s invasion of the place in attempt to seize Nopperabou and Asirpa completely failed and Tsurumi found himself involved in a battle with tons of murderous convicts, unable to do something until it was too late.

Kikuta still tries to follow Asirpa but he’s forces to stall as Asirpa tosses an arrow in his direction. The arrow though falls on the ground as she clearly didn’t aim to murder him. She would have done better to remove the poison and wound one of his legs but whatever, let’s assume she’s aware in normal life this kind of wounds are more often fatal than not and decided against that.

Meanwhile Usami, who’s so obsessed with Tsurumi but doesn’t give a damn about Tsurumi’s plan, instead than helping Kikuta get Asirpa, which should be his priority if he ever cared about or understood Tsurumi’s plan resumes his chase of Kadokura.

Basically Usami’s obsession for Tsurumi is as selfish as it can get, we saw it when he tattled out Tsurumi’s plans to Ogata out of jealousy ultimately damaging them but hey, telling Ogata Tsurumi didn’t care about him was much more important than harming Tsurumi’s plan.

We change scene to see how a figure wrapped in a white cape is running to get Ogata’s rifle and is promptly shot in the head by Vasily. Only it’s not Ogata but a random man (Vasily seems to have the bad habit to shoot random men in his attempt to get Ogata; first it was the Orok, then it was Shiraishi, now it’s this guy).

The man was likely paid by Ogata to try to retrieve the rifle wearing his cape, in fact coins fall along with him. As the brewery is an area where prostitutes went to search for customers and that place by the night doesn’t seem the ideal place for beggars and the guy doesn’t seem to aim to become a prostitute’s customer since he accepted money to do such a job for Ogata I’ll assume he’s a pimp.

I might be wrong though.

Anyway, as soon as he falls, we see someone else who’s wearing gaiters is running. Vasily tries to recharge but Ogata (because it was Ogata the one who was running) manages to grab the rifle and get inside the brewery from the window Ushiyama broke, Vasily completely missing him as he hits the wall below the window.

Ogata, who’s clearly the child Nihei wished to have since he shares his, points out how Vasily keeps missing his shoots and that chances like those don’t come around all that often.

Ogata clearly embraced Nihei’s one shoot theory.

Anyway now Ogata has a new working rifle and is inside the brewery, same as Asirpa, his run inside it kind of paralleling hers.

What however really matters is this is a huge divergence from how things at Abashiri went as Ogata never got to get inside the prison and it’s also the first time Vasily CONSISTENTLY affected the plot creating a situation that was unlikely to happen hadn’t he been there.

In fact if Vasily hadn’t shoot Ogata’s rifle, Ogata would have very likely remained on the watchtower as he had done in Abashiri... and has he had done in Barato until Hijikata’s men had encircled him, trying to shoot him.

Maybe he wouldn’t have managed to shoot to Asirpa same as it happened before, but he likely would have remained there, at least for now.

Now instead, he had been forced to get inside the brewery.

Either he finds a new sniping post inside it, basically bringing back to zero the way Vasily affected the plot, or he’s going to join the battle.

We see that Vasily attempts to say something, but what comes out are merely sounds.

It’s a pity, Noda let us know Vasily’s though only when he was fighting Ogata in chap 161. 162, 163 and when he though he would be fighting him in chap 202 and discovered he was fighting Sugimoto instead.

I was hoping this time we would hear him speaking/thinking again as Vasily is seriously undercharacterized but whatever, maybe it’ll happen later on.

However, despite having missed to hit Ogata again Vasily doesn’t seem displeased or distressed.

As the first time he shoot at Ogata who was in the watchtower with killing intent, I’ve a hard time thinking this time in which he hit the wall, he missed Ogata on purpose, so he should be upset he had missed him again and lost his chance to kill him… unless he’s thinking Ogata will soon be forced to get out as Sugimoto is in the brewery and he also has a grudge against Ogata.

Or, like Sugimoto, all he cares for is getting Ogata dead so he can go back on being sniper number 1 and doesn’t mind much who kills him, being fine if it’s Sugimoto who does the job.

We’ll see… and we’ll also see if Vasily will remain outside the brewery in wait for Ogata or will try to get in as well.

Meanwhile Hijikata’s group is wandering through the place, searching for Jack/Ostrog.

They’re advantaged as Hijikata’s group has Toni, who can detect people from movements, and Ariko, who’s a hunter. So Toni detect something moving deeper insde the building in 10 o’ clock direction and Ariko finds Jack/Ostrog’s blood and from it figures in which direction he’s moving.

Kantarou thinks Jack/Ostrog has no chances to escape from THEIR GROUP and he wouldn’t be wrong… if it wasn’t for the fact Jack/Ostrog spots Asirpa walking through the place.

He might mistakenly think she could be a convenient hostage… but he might also think she would be the perfect victim. Jack/Ostrog came there aiming to kill his last victim there.

Asirpa isn’t a prostitute and she’s a bit underage but beggars can’t be choosers and since his aim was to recreate his ‘sacred place’ by killing a female in that night and in that place he might opt for trying to murder her.

We’ll see as with this scene the chapters end.

So… remember when I told you at the beginning to remember how Boutarou went alone in Ushiyama’s direction?

Well, as far as we know Boutarou is MIA, as we hadn’t seen him through all the chapter. He should have gotten on the place in which Usami and Ushiyama fought and entered from the window prior to Ogata entering in the factory. As far as we know he hadn’t met up with Sugimoto… did he met up with Shiraishi, also MIA in this chapter?

Or are Boutarou and Ogata going to meet as they supposedly entered into the brewery from the same place?

Hard to say.

Or did Boutarou found Ueji outside while going there and decided to settle the little matter of Ueji making fun of him by telling him he had a aunt wishing to met him and never coming?

We’ll see.

For now all we know about Boutarou is we don’t know where he is.

I really wish there was a map of the brewery. Jack/Ostrog supposedly entered from the back entrance (or was it a side entrance since he ran into a small street?) and is being followed by Hijikata’s group.

Sugimoto and Ushiyama entered for the opposite side to the one in which Hijikata was, Kikuta’s group tailed them there (actually Tsukishima entered from the back) and they meet up inside the brewery. It’s unknown though where Sugimoto and the others were pushed by the beer, where Shiraishi and Ushiyama ended and in which direction Sugimoto is running.

Ogata also entered from the windows from which Ushiyama and Sugimoto entered but, as we don’t know where they had ended they might even be far from him.

As for Asirpa she got in from... where exactly?

It’s a mess and while Hijikata’s group is possibly the closest to Jack/Ostrog and Asirpa, as we don’t really know where the others are, it’s possible for everyone to be closer than them to them, making impossible to predict who will reach Asirpa and Ostrog/Jack first.

We’ll see.

And now… the golden coin mess. Again.

I’ve already brought up in the ramblings in chap 242 how I couldn’t find info about Ainu using ‘Ainu coins’ in real life. I searched more about the topic but I still came up empty handed as all I could find is they would exchange goods among them, or with the Japanese or the Russians or the Chinese, and would sometimes use Japanese, Russians or Chinese coins as exchange material as well… but apparently they wouldn’t make their own.

This chapter seems to remark that even in the world of Golden Kamuy Ainu gold coins aren’t something Ainu use daily as, Kikuta brings them up as something Wilk should have created.

(Though if some of they have info about Ainu having their own coins I would be glad if you were to share them!)

But at the same times here come the troubles.

Wilk and the Ainu were there supposedly to move the gold.

In Kikuta’s theory at a certain point, either before moving it or after moving it, they paused and decided to make some golden coins out of it, coins Ainu previously didn’t use.

For who’s not familiar with golden coins making they aren’t so easy to make.

Gold melts at 1.064 °C, one of the highest melting points of any metal. True, if the gold dust is not pure it might melt at a slighter lower temperature. Ainu had the means to melt brass (brass melts at 900 °C) to make Ninkari (the Ainu earrings) so maybe if their gold was really, really poor they could melt it the same way.

Still, assuming they didn’t bring some dust home, they should have built a furnace in a place in which, supposedly, no one lived (I doubt they hid the gold in a place where lot of people lived) to melt the gold and create a mold (the coin we see is seems regular and well printed so it’s clear they aren’t made with the ancient method of hitting the metal with a hammer but they’re casted) to use to make the coins.

Then they would have to get at work and made the coins for… which reasons?

Commemorative purposes like Boutarou says which is actually something people who regularly use coins do?

A future currency they would use when they didn’t even currently have a nation and exchanging gold for goods would be more convenient if it was in unsuspicious gold dust than in Ainu coins shape?

I don’t know, unless the coins were meant to be some sort of signal, like an ID that would identify whoever were to join their cause and therefore were meant to be given to… let’s say all the Ainu partisans who would join the fight as proof they were on the same side, I genuinely see no point for all that work. Keeping the gold as gold dust is definitely more convenient as it’s not suspicious, easy to move in small measures and people were used to convert it in cash.

But well, we’ll see.

LOL, this whole thing of the gold coins is really getting me curious!

Anyway that’s the end of the chapter. I wish we had at our disposition a better map of the place to know where it’s everyone as it’s not exactly easy to follow them moving in the brewery but whatever, I think this is done on purpose as Noda might not want us to know what the characters are up and who’s closer to who.

We’ll see.

[theliterateape]

Mooning the Crowd and Waving Your Balls was Funny—Until It Wasn't

by Don Hall

The dressing room was oddly configured and presented the opportunity to swing open the door to the toilet in such a way that he who sat, pants around ankles, was hopelessly exposed to the rest of the cast. While, you know, taking a shit.

Brian was a wonderful actor. He was also a very serious person, more self-serious than anything else. He was so serious that taking the piss out of him in vulnerable moments was just fun. And funny.

For a few nights in a row, he had his ritual; for the same few nights, I had mine. He'd get in costume and makeup and suddenly need to have a pre-show shit. I'd wait. He'd close the bathroom door. I'd give it beat. Then I'd swing the door open and he'd squeal like a child, then yell at me "GOD DAMMIT, DON! What the fuck, dude! I'm taking a crap!" And I would laugh until my ribs ached.

It was stupid. As most truly funny things are, it was at the expense of someone very serious. It was also fundamentally harmless.

When I was a kid, there were few things funnier than Monty Python's Flying Circus and I'd watch it on PBS (long before cable or streaming or even VHS) and laugh hysterically at Terry Jones sitting naked at an organ with his back to the camera. "The Naked Organist" was the character and it solidified one of two rules of comedy that seemed inviolable: few things are funnier than a nude man's ass when combined with a fool's grin and the non-sequitur location. 

The first rule involved underscoring anything—no matter how mundane—with the music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Always silly. Always funny.

Jones contributed to my go-to disruption of the status quo comic leanings and resulted in a nearly non-stop barrage of moonings and random public nudity that always cracked me up as those very serious people at the 'butt' of the joke gasped and wrung their hands. Fundamentally harmless, defying convention, funny as hell. Nothing sexual about it. Simply buffoonery.

Years into my days of theater, I still found it hysterical to ask "Is this your gum?" while stretching a section of my nut-sack through my zipper or 'hanging a brain' or my favorite sort of Stupid Human Trick: The Clapper. The Clapper was simple. Turn off the lights. I would go to the far side of the stage, drop my pants, and swing my balls back and forth, hitting my stomach and ass and making a loud smacking sound. As I write that, I'm astounded how stupid it must sound, but it was funny at the time.

It was funny because it was subversive and weird. It was funny because in a society so buttoned up and self serious that nudity is considered somehow forbidden but is, at the same time, the baseline of our existence, absent of costume and exposing our most vulnerable selves, the act of someone naked playing an organ in a field is a flat-out hoot. It was funny because you aren't supposed to do that.

A few years ago a woman who stage managed some of our shows pointed out on Faceborg that The Clapper made her uncomfortable at the time and that it wasn't funny to her. I publicly apologized—not for doing it because I still thought it was funny—but for making her uncomfortable. Given that her discomfort was the point but not to traumatize her by any means, I felt bad that my stupid joke stuck with her as a negative.

I feel a certain simpatico with actor John Barrowman these days.

Recently, Barrowman was embroiled in the allegations surrounding Clarke’s history of sexual harassment accusations when a clip of both actors at a fan convention in 2014—appearing alongside actresses Camille Couduri and Tracy Ann Olbermann—went viral, which discussed Barrowman’s alleged frequent exposure of his genitals on the set of the show, framed as pranks. Following a report by the Guardian about allegations against Clarke specific to his time on Doctor Who, Barrowman released a brief statement to the paper about his own incidents, for which the actor was eventually reprimanded on-set for in 2008. 

The article reads: “Barrowman said his ‘high-spirited behaviour’ was ‘only ever intended in good humour to entertain colleagues on set and backstage,’ ‘With the benefit of hindsight, I understand that upset may have been caused by my exuberant behaviour and I have apologised for this previously,’ he added. ‘Since my apology in November 2008, my understanding and behaviour have also changed.’”

SOURCE

I'd argue that if you can't see the difference between someone sexually harassing another and someone flashing his ass and balls for a joke, the issue lies with you not the jokester. 

Have you seen a dick? They're hysterical! Like a flabby mushroom connected to a flesh bag. Or a skinny turtle out of his shell. A turkey neck without feathers. Who designed this, an idiot? The vagina is far more practical.

The difference between the days of comic stupidity and today is that in 2021 we are subject to the news of the horrors of the world every second. We doomscroll non-stop and bathe ourselves in the pain and suffering of every victim—real and imagined, genuine harm and outrage profiteering—that the act of finding fucking anything subversive and funny is unimaginable.

Like Barrowman, I stopped exposing myself as a joke decades ago. It just stopped being funny, I suppose. Maybe I grew up some which might be a shame. I still laugh at the sight of Jason Segel getting dumped in Forgetting Sarah Marshall while completely nude and Will Ferrell streaking in Old School. And Ferrell running around in his tidy whiteys in Talladaga Nights. And in Semi-Pro with a basketball covering his package. 

I remember thinking the shock of the prudes was hysterical back in the days when the uptight came from the mostly conservative crowd. I'm finding that while the scolds have switched up agendas, that desire to take the piss out of those hellbent on controlling everyone else for the sake of wholesomeness or self righteous definitions imposed by puritanical rule is still healthy in me.

I can't speak for anyone else but in the face of so much horror in the world I'd much rather laugh than cry. So get naked. Especially in the presence of those so offended that their faces screw up and they openly shame you for doing so. 

Get naked. I could use a good chuckle.

[thisblogisalsoboundforglory]

WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING LATELY

Kage Baker’s Company Series

In the Garden of Iden

Sky Coyote

Mendoza in Hollywood

The Graveyard Game

The Life of the World to Come

The Children of the Company

The Machine's Child

The Sons of Heaven

The Empress of Mars

Not Less than Gods

Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea

Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

Gods and Pawns

In the Company of Thieves

Ø  Science Fiction written by a woman with Asperger’s. Wildly uneven. Main protagonist is female, but there are lots of POV characters, male and female.

Ø  Big ideas.

Ø  Lots of adventure, some action.

Ø   Small doses of humor.

 Neil Gaiman

Good Omens (with Sir Terry Pratchett)

Neverwhere

Stardust

American Gods

Anansi Boys

The Graveyard Book

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Ø  Neil’s books are a road trip with Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a baggie full of sativa.

Ø  Ideas are incidental. The Milieu’s in charge.

Ø  Adventure happens whether you like it or not.

Ø   Cosmic humor. The joke’s on us.

 Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel Series

Firewatch

Doomsday Book

To Say Nothing of the Dog (and the novel that inspired it – Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat)

Blackout/All Clear

Assorted:

The Last of the Winnebagos

Ø  Connie loves her historical research. Blackout/All Clear actually lasts as long as the Blitz, but anything in the Oxford Time Travel series is worth reading. Doomsday Book reads like prophecy in retrospect.

Ø  One idea: Hi! This is the human condition! How fucking amazing is that?!?

Ø  Gut-punch adventure with extra consequences. Background action.

Ø   I’d have to say that Doomsday Book is the funniest book about the black death I’ve ever read, which isn’t saying much. To Say Nothing of the Dog is classic farce, though. Girl’s got range.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash (After the apocalypse, the world will be ruled by Home-Owners Associations. Be afraid.)

Cryptonomicon

Anathem

Seveneves

Ø  Neal writes big, undisciplined, unfocused books that keep unfolding in your mind for months after you’ve read them. He’s a very guy-type writer, in spite of a female protagonist or two. Seveneves, be warned, starts out brilliant and devolves into extreme meh.

Ø  Big. Fucking. Ideas.

Ø  Battles, crashes, fistfights, parachute jumps, nuclear powered motorcycles and extreme gardening action. Is there an MPAA acronym for that?

Ø   Humor dry enough to be garnished with two green olives on a stick.

  Christopher Moore

Pine Cove Series:

Practical Demonkeeping

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror (Okay, yeah, Christmas. But Christmas with zombies, so that’s all right.)

Fluke (Not strictly Pine Cove, but in the same universe. Ever wonder why whales sing? They’re ordering Pastrami sandwiches. I’m not kidding.)

Death Merchant Chronicles:

A Dirty Job

Secondhand Souls (Best literary dogs this side of Jack London)

Coyote Blue (Kind of an outlier. Overlapping characters)

Shakespeare Series:

Fool

The Serpent of Venice

Shakespeare for Squirrels

Assorted:

Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Cargo cults with Pine Cove crossovers. I have a theory that the characters in this book are direct descendants of certain characters in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.)

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (So I have a favorite first-century wonder rabbi. Who doesn’t?)

Sacre Bleu

Noir

Ø  Not for the squeamish, the easily offended, or those who can’t lovingly embrace the fact that the human species is pretty much a bunch of idiots snatching at moments of grace.

Ø  No big ideas whatever. Barely any half-baked notions.

Ø  Enthusiastic geek adventure. Action as a last resort.

Ø   Nonstop funny from beginning to end.

 Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London Series

Rivers of London

Moon Over Soho

Whispers Under Ground

Broken Homes

Foxglove Summer

The Hanging Tree

The Furthest Station

Lies Sleeping

The October Man

False Value

Tales From the Folly

Ø  Lean, self-deprecating police procedurals disguised as fantasy novels. Excellent writing.

Ø  These will not expand your mind. They might expand your Latin vocabulary.

Ø  Crisply described action, judiciously used. Whodunnit adventure. It’s all about good storytelling.

Ø  Generous servings of sly humor. Aaronovitch is a geek culture blueblood who drops so many inside jokes, there are websites devoted to indexing them.

  John Scalzi

Old Man’s War Series:

Old Man’s War

Questions for a Soldier

The Ghost Brigades

The Sagan Diary

The Last Colony

Zoe’s Tale

After the Coup

The Human Division

The End of All Things

Ø  Star Trek with realpolitik instead of optimism.

Ø  The Big Idea is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Nor over it.

Ø  Action-adventure final frontier saga with high stakes.

Ø  It’s funny when the characters are being funny, and precisely to the same degree that the character is funny.

Assorted:

The Dispatcher

Murder by Other Means

Redshirts (Star Trek, sideways, with occasional optimism)

Ø  Scalzi abandons (or skewers) his space-opera tendencies with these three little gems of speculative fiction. Scalzi’s gift is patience. He lets the scenario unfold like a striptease.

Ø  What-if thought experiments that jolt the brain like espresso shots.

Ø  Action/misadventure as necessary to accomplish the psychological special effects.

Ø  Redshirts is satire, so the humor is built-in, but it’s buried in the mix.

  David Wong/Jason Pargin

John Dies at the End

This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

What the Hell Did I Just Read?

Ø  Pargin clearly starts his novels with a handful of arresting scenes and images, then looses the characters on an unsuspecting world to wander wither they will.

Ø  Ideas aren’t as big or obvious as Heinlein, but they are there to challenge all your assumptions in the same way that Heinlein’s were.

Ø  Classic action/adventure for anyone raised on Scooby-Doo.

Ø  Occasional gusts of humor in a climate that’s predominantly tongue-in-cheek.

 Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St. Mary’s Series

Just One Damned Thing After Another

The Very First Damned Thing

A Symphony of Echoes

When a Child is Born*

A Second Chance

Roman Holiday*

A Trail Through Time

Christmas Present*

No Time Like the Past

What Could Possible Go Wrong?

Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings*

Lies, Damned Lies and History

The Great St Mary’s Day Out*

My Name is Markham*

And the Rest is History

A Perfect Storm*

Christmas Past*

An Argumentation of Historians

The Battersea Barricades*

The Steam Pump Jump*

And Now for Something Completely Different*

Hope for the Best

When Did You Last See Your Father?*

Why Is Nothing Ever Simple*

Plan For The Worst

The Ordeal of the Haunted Room

Ø  The * denotes a short story or novella. Okay, try to imagine Indiana Jones as a smartassed redheaded woman with a time machine and a merry band of full contact historians. I love history, and I especially love history narrated by a woman who can kick T. Rex ass.

Ø  The ideas are toys, not themes. Soapy in spots.

Ø  Action! Adventure! More action! More adventure! Tea break. Action again!

Ø  Big, squishy dollops of snort-worthy stuff.

 Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell Series

The Beekeeper's Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor

Jerusalem

Justice Hall

The Game

Locked Rooms

The Language of Bees

The God of the Hive

Beekeeping for Beginners

Pirate King

Garment of Shadows

Dreaming Spies

The Marriage of Mary Russell

The Murder of Mary Russell

Mary Russell's War And Other Stories of Suspense

Island of the Mad

Riviera Gold

The Art of Detection (Strictly speaking, this is in the action!lesbian Detective Kate Martinelli series, but it crosses over to the Sherlock Holmes genre. If you’ve ever wondered how Holmes would deal with the transgendered, this is the book.)

Ø  Sherlock Holmes retires to Sussex, keeps bees, marries a nice Jewish girl who is smarter than he is and less than half his age and he’s mentored since she was fifteen in an extremely problematic power dynamic relationship that should repulse me but doesn’t, somehow, because this is the best Sherlock Holmes pastiche out there. Mary should have been a rabbi, but it is 1920, so she learns martial arts and becomes an international detective instead. Guest appearances by Conan Doyle, Kimball O’Hara, T.E. Lawrence, Cole Porter, and the Oxford Comma.

Ø  Nothing mind-expanding here, unless the levels of meta present in a fictional world that is about how the fictional world might not be as fictional as you thought come as a surprise to anyone in the era of tie-in books, films, tv, interactive social media and RPGs.

Ø  If these two geniuses can’t catch the bad guys with their dazzling brilliance, they will happily kick some ass. Adventure takes center stage and the action sequences are especially creative.

Ø  Amusement is afoot.

 Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

Ø  In a world where Librarians are revered and Shakespeare is more popular than the Beatles, someone has to facilitate the weekly anger-management sessions for the characters of Wuthering Heights, if only to keep them from killing each other before the novel actually ends. That someone is Thursday Next – Literature Cop.

Ø  Mind-bending enough to give Noam Chomsky material for another hundred years.

Ø  Adventure aplenty. Action? Even the punctuation will try to kill you.

Ø  This is a frolicsome look at humorous situations filled with funny people. Pretty much a full house in the laugh department.

 Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series/City Watch Arc

Guards! Guards!

Men at Arms

Feet of Clay

Jingo

The Fifth Elephant

Night Watch

Thud!

Snuff

Raising Steam

Ø  If this were a game of CLUE, the answer would be Niccolo Machiavelli in Narnia with a Monty Python. Everything you think you know about books with dragons and trolls and dwarves and wizards is expertly ripped to shreds and reassembled as social satire that can save your soul, even if it turns out you don’t really have one. Do not be fooled by the Tolkien chassis – there’s a Vonnegut-class engine at work.

Ø  Caution: Ideas in the Mirror Universe May be Larger Than They Appear

Ø  The City Watch arc has plenty of thrilling action sequences. Some other of the fifty-million Discworld novels have less. Every one of them is nonstop adventure. Most of the adventure, however, takes the form of characters desperately trying to avoid thrilling action sequences.

Ø  Funny? Even though I’ve read every book in the series at least ten times, I still have to make sure I have cold packs on hand in case I laugh so hard I rupture something.

[creativenicocorner]

Quarantine Q&A

Tagged by @bifacialler

I don’t know why I put this off for so long, something for me to think about later I suppose. Hell I don’t think half of these answers are well articulated enough - ah well, here’s an attempt 

Are you staying home from work/school?

Yes, I caught a plane out of the UK as soon as the course I was taking was canceled. 

If you’re staying home, who’s there with you?

I’m with my parents and younger sibling and two dogs. 

Are you a homebody?

Yes, I’m very good at making a burrow and staying put for long periods. As long as I have books, a notebook, a laptop, my switch, and a crust of bread and cheese, all will be well. I will adapt no matter what comes in the future. 

What movies have you watched recently? What shows are you watching?

There’s a Korean drama I started watching recently with like time-traveling doctors which has been very cool so far, called “Live Up to Your Name” I’m excited to see where it leads 

“Avenue 5″ is...okay I suppose, had to stop cause it was giving me too much anxiety ^^’’ Been watching a bit of “Magnum P.I” as well just, a loooooooot of Animal Crossing letsplays, and Letsplays in general (been exploring Snap Cubes channel and their Luigi’s Mansion 3 run) 

As for movies, I haven’t sat myself down to watch a movie since the in-flight movies in my return plane ride. To which I watched “Detective Pikachu” (very amazing very adorable! heck yeah) attempted to watch...well I don't know what I attempted to watch but for the remainder of the flight I watched “Jojo Rabbit” on repeat and kept laughing and crying and laughing. It was a very very good movie, and honestly can’t wait to watch it again. 

And I know this isn’t ‘watching’ but I’ve also been re-listening to The Adventure Zone Balance arc. 

AS WELL AS 

Clint McElroy read the Wizard of Oz, it’s [ chef kiss ] I really needed something like this - I think a lot of us needs something like this. 

An event that you were looking forward to that got cancelled?

A lot of events actually. 

The a course I was taking in Uxbridge at the Pinewood Studios, an audition to get into a very prestigious showcase that would have been performed in front of casting directors and scouts, a job at a theater, an apartment, among other things. It...it felt like my life was finally starting to shape into, idk, something. I haven’t been that excited and hopeful about my career and just...the sense of being an adult(tm) since moving to LA. 

But it’s okay, this was all out of our hands, and despite feeling massively disappointed and just...idk...a feeling I can’t describe yet, who knows what the future will hold...right? 

Time will tell, in the meantime let’s keep doing our best.  

What music are you listening to?

Ler’s Amazing playlist from her beautiful birthday gift, it’s been on repeat for sometime and a BIG help getting into certain writing moods!! AAAH Honestly I’m still just blown away!!! UTTERLY and COMPLETELY! 

I’ve also been listening to just..random stuff really, whatever that could get me a step closer to writing.  

What are you reading?

Still slowly going through Neverwhere, and re-reading Sandman, but aside from that A LOT OF AMAZING AND AWESOME THINGS. I have a server (still in beta that I’d like to keep small for now) with a few wonderful friends that is a bit like a reading-club and we get together and read out loud all sorts of things, from fanfics, to the classics, to other fiction - I think my favorite fiction piece so far is finally being able to dive into Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld properly. [ palpitates over Monstrous Regiment ] 

Honestly it’s been such a beacon in the night of my heart 

What are you doing for self-care?

Head Empty 

No Thoughts Animal Crossing 

jfjdlja jokes aside, I know I can get easily overwhelmed, and these days it doesn’t take me too much to feel overwhelmed so I avoid things I know might be a bit too much(tm) for me right now. Be it certain whatsapp group channels or discord channels, or content I know might make brim ‘over the line’.

 Keep in mind I don’t mean this in the sense of burying my head in the sand, though...sometimes it feels like just that, so maybe this isn’t as healthy as I thought, maybe it’s just straight up avoidance? Idk...I’m just... reading, playing animal crossing, cooking with family, and taking things that are a bit much (which could range from not answering messages right away, not reading something too angsty, or not watching Broadchurch but instead watching Monty Python for the gazillionth time, maybe not listening to Mitski so much) with baby steps

Take this fic blog for example! I’ve distanced myself a bit this past week not cause of anything negative, but just needing that choice of breathing space. 

If that makes sense, does that make sense? Idk, I hope it does. It’s also a bit of a slippery slope for me as I do also have a habit of just wanting to blink out of existence socially. idk...idk... 

We’re going to see our way to the other side of this event one day at a time. With every sunrise we’re a day closer. Believe in kindness, no matter what certain politicians are doing and how hopeless it feels sometimes. It’s okay to feel fear, I’m scared every day, my anxiety has never been more through the roof, so I’ll share my favorite quote from one of my favorite Hobbits below. I know there are so many of us sharing these words, but I do feel like we need them, I know I do. I have it written on my board like a mantra:

Frodo : I can't do this, Sam.

Sam : I know. It's all wrong By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo : What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

I tag whoever wants to take part in this Q&A

[glorious-blackout]

Summary of Junior Doctor Life - Part Nine:

Got a call at 3am from the Advanced Nurse Practitioners who do rounds of the hospital at night. They basically wanted to make sure I wasn’t snowed under, which was lovely of them. So lovely in fact, that I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the reason they’d missed me during their rounds was because I was holed up in the Doctors’ Room watching ‘Derry Girls’. 

Good news can feel like an anomaly on some days and miraculous recoveries are as rare as you’d expect, but they can happen. By the end of my first night-shift I had two patients who were very unwell and had shown no improvement despite being given appropriate treatment. One of them had gone to ICU in the hope that he might ultimately pull through, but my registrar received a call at 7am informing him that nothing more could be done. The other patient was a lady who was only appropriate for ward-level care (anything more would likely be futile), and we ultimately had to start her on morphine via a syringe-driver to provide comfort because she was so breathless. I left work that morning feeling rather deflated and expecting both patients to die during the day. The man sadly did pass away in ICU, however I arrived at work to find that the woman had remained relatively stable. Two nights later I was taking her off her syringe-driver because she frankly didn’t need it, and two weeks later we’re now thinking of getting her home. Not the most common outcome for someone who at one point was knocking on death’s door, but certainly a welcome one!

During a rather busy night, I got a call twenty minutes into my break asking me to come back to the ward immediately. When I tried to get some information, the nurse barely managed five words before resorting to “Just come to the ward!” Turns out one of the patients had managed to disconnect the attachment to his cannula, meaning there was nothing stopping his blood from leaving the vein and escaping into the outside world. By the time this was discovered, his bedsheets were almost completely red and his blood pressure was in his boots, to the point where we needed to pour a litre of IV fluids into him as quickly as the machines would allow. 

He was ultimately fine and cracking jokes before we’d even got one bag of fluids into him (including, but not limited to, “I thought I’d had a wet dream!”). What made him more problematic, however, was that he’d been admitted in the first place with chronic anaemia, which blood loss obviously doesn’t help. It wasn’t long before we were arranging a blood transfusion on top of the IV fluids we’d already given him. 

Got called to prescribe some IV fluids on my last day of nights, at the tail-end of what had been a rather hectic shift. In the hopes of grabbing a break, I asked if there was anything else needing done that I could quickly power through, only for the nurse to say she didn’t know. I must have looked about as rotten as I felt, because her friend immediately came to my rescue and said “Well go and check, the poor girl wants to sleep!”

We’ve had a couple of patients recently with horrendous kidney failure leading to fluid overload because they can’t produce urine, so now several nurses are acutely concerned with how often patients are peeing. It’s not an unfounded concern, but the patients they make you aware of tend to have perfectly normal kidney function on their blood results and very little urine in their bladder on an ultrasound scan (we might worry about urinary retention if they were holding over 600mls). The kicker is that on particularly busy shifts, those same patients are often managing to pee far more regularly than we are.

Confirming a death tends to be more of a box-ticking exercise than anything else. Often the nurse will do a quick check themselves beforehand and they may even leave it a while before contacting a doctor to give the family space to say goodbye. Ultimately, by the time we enter the patient’s room it tends to be obvious that they’re gone before you even check for a pulse, and thankfully none of us have had a Monty Python-esque “I’m not dead yet!” moment so far. 

One of my colleagues came close though. After being asked to confirm an expected death of a palliative patient, he walked into the room only for said patient to turn his head when he announced himself. Apparently he managed to recover from his mini heart-attack just in time to blurt out “Just wanted to see how you were doing sir!” and perform an impromptu review, despite wondering what the hell was going on and why he’d been asked to confirm the death of a very much alive man. He got his answer upon leaving the room, when the nurse rolled her eyes and said, “The next room, you pillock!”  

I spent my night-shifts with a genuinely lovely registrar who was always available if I needed to page him and managed to put me at ease even when we were dealing with really sick or dying patients. He was such a reassuring presence that the two hectic nights (out of four) didn’t necessarily feel like bad nights. In contrast, the girl who did her night-shift after me got a registrar who was sick (and therefore made her examine every patient on his behalf), complained very loudly about the fact that he was at work, looked rather pissed off at me when I dared to go home (despite the fact that my back-shift should have ended half an hour earlier), and proceeded to spend eight hours of a twelve-hour shift sleeping on the mattress in our Doctors’ room so my colleague had nowhere to go to rest. It’s luck of the draw which registrar you end up with, but if our positions were swapped I probably would have spent my night-shifts craving the sweet release of death.

My registrar’s quirk is that he has a weird love of taking blood from the femoral artery (accessed via the groin) in patients with horrendous venous access. To be fair, there is a certain logic to this - it’s far less painful than taking arterial blood from the wrist and if you can get into the femoral artery, you’re more likely to collect a large sample so you can run more tests. It’s just always amusing to witness an enthusiastic Spanish man declare, “Let’s go for the groin!” when he finds out we’re struggling to take blood from a patient.

We’ve finally found out what jobs we’re getting next year! My FY2 is going to be spent between Geriatrics, Neonates and Obstetrics/Gynaecology so there’ll be a whooole lotta babies 😊 Still not too keen on Geriatrics, but I’m delighted about the Neonates job and Obstetrics is the only surgical specialty I actually like so I’m pretty thrilled overall. Though I imagine my poor sister - who happens to be a neonatal nurse - is going to be subjected to a lot of texts which basically boil down to ‘Help!!!’

[holy-mountaineering]

This spread is for @faerys-wear-boots

Thanks for the donation!

Tonight you’re getting the full Qabalistic Tree of Life Spread that I do and here you are. What I’m going to do is go through and briefly explain each card, its position on the Tree, and then I’ll give you a summary/synopsis of the spread as a whole.

Think of this spread as a sort of quantum map, or even the land of a regular map, everything is happening at once, in each place. It’s important to think of yourself as moving “through” the map but you are also simultaneously everywhere at once. For the sake of this specific experiment, think of this as a map.

Where we’re starting the journey from is Kether, the monad, the first sign of creation. We’ll call this your hometown, since it is where you’re from originally. Here we have the Prince of Disks, the airy part of Earth or thinking about what’s going on in the material/normal-ass world.

This prince is a map maker, an amateur cartologist. Holding his globe, he is pulled along by the sturdy bull of Taurus who is familiar with the terrain so the prince can gaze down and take note of where he is, where he’s been, and where he might be going. In other words this is learning about how to navigate life.

Pay attention to where you are and what you’ve been doing. Take notes. Have you been here before? Do you know where this leads? If not, mark it out in your globe so you know if you ever get there again.

In Chokmah, which is like your freeway getting you out onto the road out of your hometown is the Princess of Wands, the earthy part of Fire.

This is the material substance that comes from fuels action. Think of this: you have to make a fire because it is cold. You have a set amount of wood. You can make a big ass, bright ass fire that will leave you cold later that night when you’re out of wood, but jazzed while it’s happening. Or you can make a smaller, less exciting fire that will keep you warm all night. There is also a message about the last step in any action is really to become the actions and to let them become you. When your very Earthly substance is in it, you are no longer doing you just are.

Don’t burn yourself out and exhaust your resources on what you’re tackling in life right now. Do this and you shall live to dance and party another night.

In Binah, which is ruled by Saturn and for the sake of this reading we will call the first stop on your roadtrip. You haven’t really arrived anywhere but you’re stopping and getting a chance to repack your car in a more efficient way. Sitting in Binah is the 3 of Swords, Sorrow.

This is the first shape the suit of Air takes in 2 dimensions and it can be a bit disappointing. Your structure and order (Saturn) needs balancing (Libra) to be blunt. You must let go of your ideas of how things were going to be because now they are the way they are. Just because what you have isn’t what you thought you wanted doesn’t mean it’s not good.

Try to get your mind around what you’ve learned and and how to form it into a useful basis to move on from. Do not continue to focus on how you thought it “should be”, nothing is ever as pure or awesome as we idealize it.

Sorting out your mind means actualizing some of the things you’ve been thinking about instead of not doing it because it isn’t perfect in the way we thought it would be.

In Chesed which is ruled by Jupiter and again for the sake of this experiment we’ll say involves your influence and benevolence in your current trip is the 7 of Cups Debauch.

This is Venus (beauty, personal growth) in Scorpio, the dark water where things growing aren’t seen so clearly. There is a kind of completion of a cycle in the 7s and this Seven is about “letting go” of rotten feelings and connections that have festered. This is a need for what I call “emotional composting” so let things rot out to fertilize future emotional growth. But like a compost pile, you must turn it, give it Sun, and make sure that it doesn’t get rancid.

In order to grow through the darkest of times, we have to stretch out and take in as much light so we can illuminate the darkness. Our emotional problems and trauma shouldn’t sit alone and in shadow collecting molds and stinking up the place. This darkness is a resource and should be utilized for your future growth. It is work and does take energy and labor but I assure your swimming out of this “undertow” (Scorpio) will be worthwhile work you will live to not regret.

Emotionally things might seem rotten, people might appear all shitty, but it’s just trying to become wonderful fertilizer for greater emotional maturity and better future relationships.

Across the Tree in Geburah, which is Mars Town, where you find your drive and what you’re trying to accomplish/conquer is III The Empress, Daleth, Venus.

Daleth is the open door, like you’d leave your bedroom door unlocked if your lover were coming over, you want them inside (pun sort of intended). This is not passivity but waiting for the spring (or Aries her partner IV The Emperor) to energize what you have. Like the symbolic Pelican (phoenix also) spitting its breast open to feed its young, or like a pregnant person, the brunt of the responsibility for your future growth lies in you. Be ready and prepared for new growth like springtime, but remember, this all hinges on you and your openness to growth.

In Tiphareth, the Sun and center of gravity holding all this in place, the heart pumping the blood through this, your heart is the 7 of Swords, Futility.

This is the main thrust of the Will through the mind being thwarted by in helpful organization of ideas. Each sword with a planetary sigil are like the spikes in a parking garage, one way. It isn’t that the ideas or aspects represented by these swords are “bad” just that their placement and yours are not lined up in the best way right now.

Mentally and communication wise pull back from what you’re going at and work on how your organizing the information in your head.

In Netzach, Venus town, where you have the realization about how this is going to change you as a person with a personality is the Knight of Cups, the fiery part of Water or acting on feeling.

Ideally this is the drive to seek higher connections and feelings and being driven by intuition and love. Just don’t fall for illusions and false ideals. This is the love that brings you closer to connecting with everything, recognizing connection and it’s drive. This is the Arthurian tale of chasing the Holy Grail *Insert Monty Python joke here* simply to have a true connection to their god. Seek love like that.

Act on what you feel and truly intuit but only to the ends of unselfish almost worshipful Love. Do things that get you really really feeling.

In Mercury Town Hod-ville, where all the Universities are and everyone has real intellectual shit going on is the 5 of Disks, Worry.

Like all of the 5s in Tarot, this is the microcosmic or human number . Don’t believe me? Stand up, stick your arms and legs out and counting your head, congrats, you’re a pentagram. Lord knows people worry like motherfuckers about how they are going to get by in the “normal” world, so there is a stress and strain in this card that everyone late on a bill can understand. This is the worry that you’ll get your intelligence (Mercury) smothered by the laborious strain of Taurus. This is, like all 5s a human limitation issue.

Well it won’t unless you only see your limitations and make it happen. Be smarter about you material situation so you don’t have to work harder.

On the Moon in Yesod, the receptive and reflective place that is alot about the feelings that you’re picking up from all this is the Ace of Swords, the root power of Air or the mind.

This is the sword of the Magus and the magician’s Sword is the physical representation of our mind and it’s ability in its rawest state of being. Thelema is inscribed on the blade of the Sword in Greek because the Magus uses their mind to the end of their True Will. The Crown of light at the tip of the Sword is the illuminated mind, because in its singleness and sharpness it is the foundation of the mind, intellect, and communication powers.

Use your mind for what you need it to do. Remember that a sword is useless at best and dangerous at worst when it isn’t handled correctly. You can cut down an army with a sword, but you can also cut your whole-ass leg or arm off too with one too. Knowledge is dangerous and scary, be prepared.

Down here in Malkuth-istan, the everyday life mundane, waking up pooping, and going to work world is the 9 of Cups, Happiness.

I call this ‘mutually beneficial relationships’ or expanding influence (Jupiter) going or being pulled both ways (Pisces). Each cup has its own source but everything is flowing into each other down to the base of the 3x3 structure. There is a lot of water and all it represents and it hasn’t reached its peak yet and is still driving upward and outward.

Cultivate relationships and connective feelings that aren’t lopsided or just giving/taking. Keep building you’re not done yet.

So, you’ve got to learn and make new paths, while not burning yourself out and getting over these ideas of how you wanted things to be. Things aren’t turning out expectedly at all, but if you just pace yourself and keep track of where you’re heading and how you got there, you’ll be fine.

You need to focus on “airing out” some emotional hurt before you can affect the World how you need to. You start by letting those feelings out, let them die and rot and become useful, they’ll help you open up to the new possibilities that will guide you down your new path. Feeling like the Universe is pushing against you just means you need to find a new way around. This is all about that new path, that’s what is going to help you find the “path of least resistance” which will be a nice reprieve.

Your growth and that path we’ve been talking about is not some mundane-ass life. You need to seek that stuff that “lights you up” and connects you to the higher things that stir inside of you. Don’t be limited by your, uh, limitations or the limitations of those you’re trying to communicate with. When you open up to the new path, you should see yourself, just as you and not what “isn’t” you. Getting your head around this new path will require you to surround yourself with people, places, and things that will help you hone your Will and get you thinking in new ways for your new way! That Sword with Thelema on its blade isn’t just decorative, it’s for sharpening and being around sharp people/places/things will help you stay sharp!

And in your down here, everyday, just work on connecting with people in genuine ways that are reciprocal. Don’t try to give too much or take too much, but let things grow and connect naturally, in mutually beneficial ways.

There it is! Thank you again for donating!

Hit me up with any questions!

[cruddyborderlandstheories]

Sanctuary-III: Demo Analysis

Hi again! I’m here to do my full Sanctuary-III analysis. (im back on my bullshit of actually structuring posts like a functioning human. holy mother of g-)

Tl;Dr: So from what I’ve gathered so far, Sanctuary-III looks like a Maliwan-inspired ship, but was actually built by a company named <SUPAMAX MFG>. I do think the ship we go on in the demo is taken from another part of the game, probably the time period when we’ve reached the Maliwan/Monastery planet of which I don’t know the name (the one we see Maya on). I understand that we can see Pandora in the demo, but it’d be easy to travel back there and simply remove the option for the monastery planet when we go to Promethea. I have a couple reasons for thinking this, so I’ll go over it when we get there.

For now, let’s get started :D

So, even though we’re going to be doing a full analysis of the demo, I did want to start with our previous sightings of the ship.

Ellie hanging onto a smaller version of the ship.

Lorelei resting her foot on a larger model

one hiding behind Zane near the car

better view below:

and a ship as we see it on the cover art:

notice I say A ship because there are definitely differences between this one and the Sanctuary-III we meet in the demo.

Most notably the colors/design, but also the back engines are missing from below the spoiler and the fins on the front are different shapes. Additionally, the one in the cover has windows that are significantly different from the demo and the engines in demo have fins coming off the tops that we don’t see here. I’ve been yelled at before that this isn’t a noticeable enough difference to think about, that the developers just decided to roll with it, but honestly I believe if the designers put that much time into ensuring the cover art has a dozen easter eggs to solve, why would they look at the ship and decide “eh, that’s good enough”? I wanna believe they’re not that laidback about this.

So I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now and provide a handful of theories as to what this cover art ship could be:

1. Sanctuary-II or an earlier model of Sanc-III (or both)

2. A shuttle used to move people to-and-from places Sanctuary-III is too large to access and the drop pods are too violent to hit (I’m thinking meteors/asteroids here) annnd hopefully we get to putz around space in one

3. A fully separate ship from Sanctuary-III that we’ll have to use later on in the game, either due to Sanctuary-III being destroyed, or other weird circumstances that would render it unavailable. Could possibly be used to reach Elpis?

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get right into the thick of things with the actual ship from the demo!

This hit me right in the heart. I love that u can see Pandora in the background, too.

The actual ship! Do you see what I mean by those minor differences to the cover art ship? Moving on.

The reason I thought this ship was mainly because of the huge swaths of orange and the blue engines/bridge. I had thought it was Atlas as well at one point, but retracted both those statements when I saw the name of the manufacturer printed everywhere inside lol

It is possible it was made specifically for either of those companies. I am leaning towards Maliwan, so I’ll point out my reasons why as we move through this.

Also, check out the docking bay on the bottom there. That door leads to the large room we see Ellie in. I think the fins on the front of the ship are to hold it up when it’s landed so we can drive vehicles out the bottom. I am hoping for a scene near endgame where the ship is shielding us from huge attacks from above as we drive out of the bottom and, right as we escape, it collapses behind us. Fingers crossed.

the back of the ship. And the engines I mention you can’t see protruding out the back on the cover art.

Oh, and say hi to the CoV!

that’s where Troy’s sword gets launched from orbit

as we zoom in, we can see a whole bunch of things

to start, looks like Hyperion got some nice rebranding. I hope Blake took over tbh

a poster of moxxxi’s. I love the feather in her hat; I wonder if that means her a mordy got back together...

also im going to take the time to point out

how much I love that each Vault Hunter gets something that glows. Amara has her tattoos (and she can customize the color!), Fl4k has their eye, Moze has Iron Bear’s digistruct pack, and Zane has a cool jacket. Rock on my babies, you’re all beautiful. Oh, and the whole teleporting animation for this, I don’t know if its like a “first time” only thing or what, but I love it, I love it so much. I’m so glad we’re going to be able to see our Vault Hunters in the third person.

okay moving on

so right away you notice the guide telling you where places are, with arrows point in different directions. It’s quite hard to read at the moment, but we do see it again later. 

We all know about the quick change station and the lost-and-found, so I don’t think I ought to go over those right now. 

claptrap seems to have his own little cereal or something, not sure if that’s been sighted anywhere else, but im afraid for anyone who eats it

player quarters! holy balls im so excited for these

We can see the display cases everywhere, but there’s also a vault (not that kind) in the back left. I imagine that’s the bank. Hoooopefully we get a larger storage capacity or my mule characters are gonna have a ton of new buddies to talk to lol

better look at the cereals.

also apparently that water bottle we see in the Game of Thrones joke the twitter posted is an actual asset in the game.

While we have singular display cases for guns, it looks like items get their own display cases

it can show off rarity color and on the bottom left, you get to see exactly what you’re looking at. no more confusing grenade mods for shields in this house

a non-holographic poster for the Typhon Deleon movie. I think this is the first we’ve seen outside of Promethea. I guess Amara’s a fan.

A vault symbol rug, and the symbol spray painted onto her punching bag. I think that poster in the back is a Monty Python reference? I didn’t get quite a good look at it, we might see another one later on.

Amara has a window seat, I’m actually hoping we’ll be able to hang out in our rooms and look out the window at space. I would honestly spend so much time here. Also, regarding the bed (not pictured, that’s the window seat), I’m wondering if that will have any gameplay effects or if it's just aesthetics. I hope it’s at least bouncy...

she does have some jakobs crates holding up the plants. Don’t know if that has anything to do with her backstory or if its just to fit the aesthetic of her room.

we’re also told “again, you can modify your player quarters to how you want to play” which... I don’t know if I’m looking too deeply into that, but it seems like we’ll be able to pick and choose things like furniture or overall layout. I wonder if they’d let us cycle between the other VH’s rooms. Not sure exactly what it’s supposed to imply, but it is something to point out.

Our first look at the SUPAMAX MFG logo. “Ships made Quick”

We also get our first look at Ellie’s cargo bay. More on this later

behind the curtains to the left of here

a poster of Jack and some lootable washing machines. We’ve seen the poster before, from what I’ve heard it's a movie poster starring timothy doppleman. Which... What a legend. 

Now, I do want to point out we see this logo next to the cargo bay

this is one of the reasons I thought the ship was Atlas at first, however you can tell there’s no gap on the right of the triangle and the bottom edges don’t match. I definitely think the new Atlas logo is a delta to signify change, though, cause Rhys is a big ol nerd.

some blueprints of the ship and a bunch of reused posters from BL2 thrown in for decor purposes. There’s another poster of Typhon to the left of that, but since we’ve already seen it, fuck ‘em

We also see a buttload of Maliwan crates hanging around the ship, matching the color design of the one we saw floating around space 

here’s one of them!

a better look at the blueprints as a standalone poster. It looks like ‘Sanctuary’ was written over with something, but I can’t make out what. also checkout how the paint on top doesn’t match the paint on the cover art’s ship. Nor does the cover art have the fins coming off the engines like we see here. I actually just noticed that even the spoilers are different shapes.

Moving on before I go off on another tangent

a poster for Marcus’s shop

the new golden chest as Randy called it. I believe we’ve seen the animation already, where the guns splay upwards like a peacock or smth

a cowgirl hangin out on more Maliwan chests

Marcus’s new sign. Honestly? He’s rocking the bun.

this dude we find walking out of the store. Don’t know what his deal is, but I’m digging it.

this Amara already has 5/8 Pistol SDUs unlocked! (Also, there are 8 max SDUs) Makes me think she’s a high level character. That’ll come into play later lol

5/8 Backpack SDUS. I didn’t show it but she also had 1/8 Shotgun SDUs. Also only +3 to backpack space each. Considering Amara already has 5 unlocked, that means we get the regular 12 backpack space to start. D:

bank space only gets +2. Amara already has 2, meaning the bank can only hold 8 items without upgrades. F in chat for the big bank dreams. Max amount the bank can hold is 24. Somebody comfort me... hopefully these SDUs increase exponentially 😭

the mystery SDU. It looks like a box with a question mark on it, giving out guns and grenades. Makes me worry this is some form of loot box, but considering it can be bought with cash in-game, that’s probably a good sign. Maybe you can buy golden keys in game to open the gold chest now? Randy said no microtransactions and, while he is Randy, I want to believe him (disregarding the skins fiasco because we all knew that was coming).

since i’ve also seen speculation that it’s the upgrade for the capacity of the Lost-And-Found, I think that’s probably what this actually is.

the shooting range we can see from here. Doesn’t appear to have any targets yet, but it may be like the one in BL2 where they only appear when we enter.

more Maliwan boxes to the left of the shooting range.

Crew Quarters sign!

some very big (tm) Maliwan crates

tannis’s sign!

this NPC actually seems important, I’m wondering if she’ll give us a side quest or something

what i’m guessing is the power core to the ship. It’s in such a great place to get shot... i wonder if perhaps... we’re going to have to do that at some point...

“ain’t no place like space” I love this place.

also looks like there’s a shortcut here. You can see the planks across the pipes, the balcony, and the railing here that’s gonna be easy to get over. Excitement!

looks like a control panel right in front of the core. Yeah, there’s definitely going to be something related to it. Maybe we’ll get attacked and we have to go stabilize it. Maybe our ship will get hijacked and we’ll have to blow it up from the inside. I can’t be the only one who thinks this place is wayyy too grand to not get destroyed...

better look at that bad boy

the opening to moxxi’s bar

actual bar

i have no idea what this is, but i dig it. Also the zer0 for the O is making me go  🤔 i don’t THINK Zer0 would get involved, but then again, they are doing missions for Moxxi in Tales, so maybe the two got together to make something

this door seems different enough and detailed enough (red glowing light) to make me think we’re going to be unlocking this and going through it at some point. Then it shall glow green and make me happy instead of frustrated. the minimap, unfortunately, does not agree with me, but I want to believe. or that’s gonna bother me to no end. Maybe some sort of “we just escaped control core angel” situation, idk.

some slot machines. Ca$hTrap! and Tinx’s Hijinx. Looks like an NPC is using the latter though so idk if it will be available to use. 

scoring system. Looks like the ??x row will give us a new character skin!! hype.

the uhhh... Lava Lamp column... will give us...? ???

A devil fruit?? A grenade? wtf is that???

3 bananas gives us new colors! Crowns = head

the... Eridium...? That seems way too pink to be Eridium tbqh. It reminds me more of Seraph crystals, but maybe its a reference to the ‘Eridium’ growing out of the ground on Promethea? ...... Maybe that’s growing because Atlas/Typhon actually DID open the Vault on Promethea

uh anyway

The last column is about more crystals and then cash and then the last one... I assume the icons are Claptrap’s eye (considering the game), but the reward? i think that’s the grenade the demo player gets in the demo 

we’ve also got Loot Boxer (also taken by an NPC) and Vault Line. I’m wondering if the NPCs using the machines are just a gameplay mechanic and they’ll disappear after a certain level/event. Maybe those ones give us better loot. idk.

for Vault Line, i think that says “Knockout Prizes” but I could be wrong. More importantly, it looks like we can get legendaries from this one! First column shows a green/purple/yellow (legendary?) gun. I can’t tell what the other icons are meant to be, though. i think the next 3 are shields, then maybe class mods? or... grenade mods? i don’t know. The last one is a total blob for me, no ideas on that. Also wondering if that machine costs Eridium to play or something, 1) because of its design and 2) because the rewards seem sooo much better than Claptrap’s.

outside we see the Crew Quarters sign for the first time and, interestingly enough, a TV broadcasting the same symbol we see being broadcasted all across the CoV camps. What’s up with that?

infirmary and crew quarters signs on the wall this time

more Maliwan crap. even says it right on the tin. Why is there a pokeball on there?

a map of the ship. We see this on a bunch of monitors, even ones on Promethea, for some reason. This one is mirrored. dunno why.

more signs. Left top to bottom: “Cargo Bay” “Armory” “Infirmary”

Right top to bottom: “Engine Room” (OwO) “Crew Quarters” “Cargo Bay” “Armory” annnd nothing on the last line this bend around. when they turn the corner, you can see that it, too, says “infirmary”

Also, the Heatant and Coolant Pipes lmao

“LAB/SICK BAY” pointing to the left towards Tannis’s corner

so, here’s where we get our first glance at something very very interesting

now, the crew makes us think this is our first time visiting Promethea in the demo. But if it is, why are there Promethea civilians wandering around the ship? I believe i go over this some in an older post, but I’ll recap:

1) It could be that Sanctuary III was already in the air before the game starts and had already visited Promethea to take some Civilians off Rhys’s hands so he had less to worry about. That would mean that we’d need a shuttle or something to reach the ship in order to activate the fast travel station, which is (possibly) where the ship on the cover art could come in. Because in the borderlands universe, you need to reach a Fast Travel station first before you’re able to teleport to it and if Sanc III is flying and Lilith doesn’t have her powers, we’re stranded on Pandora. (Alternatively, the ship could come down from space, but... I kinda doubt it can without not being able to take off again. Maybe borderlands just has cooler spaceships... idk. They were able to make a caravan space capable). Unfortunately, this would mean those screencaps from the new trailer that looks like Sanctuary III being infested with wildlife would not take place on early-game Pandora/that we wouldn’t rescue the ship and claim it as our own. (We could possibly get Sanctuary III in the air in the new BL2 DLC if this is the case.) The ship getting infested then could take place above the Maliwan planet or Promethea or soon after we join the crew and we’re sent down there to clean it up as a side quest. Or there’s a time skip and the ship gets overrun and we have to fix it. Now that’d be rad... 

2) gearbox is being sneaky beaky about the demo time. We do see Maya later on, which leads me to believe this takes place after we meet her. Where does it look like she’ll be? On the Maliwan/Monastery planet. It could be possible that the devs took the ship back to Pandora and simply removed the Maliwan planet from the list of places to take our ship. That would leave Promethea as an option while also explaining why there are both Promethean citizens and Maya on board. Could also explain Lilith having her tattoos back, since we don’t know the events of the story that lead to us going to find Maya. Though, I think I have an idea... I’ll leave that for my Maya masterpost though. Lilith also says “We arrived in one piece... that’s a first” when we travel to Promethea, leading me to believe either that’s where Sanctuary-II warped and got destroyed (maybe explaining why there are Promethea Civilians with us now), possibly in the asteroid fields, also maybe due to a mechanical failure, or Sanctuary-III, when it first went to Promethea with us, got a bit damaged by the rocks floating around Promethea or some other thing like the CoV attacking, idk. What are those rocks for, anyway? ....... I gotta make a post on that, don’t I? oi oi oi...

Moving on

the front of the Infirmary

....

this kinda looks like a baby T-Rex. There are T-Rexes on the swamp planet, which we now are assuming is Promethea, aren’t there? Oh hell yeah. If the swamp planet ISN’T Promethea I’m gonna be all like [shocked pikachu face]. that outskirts area was really making me believe. 

anyway, see above lol

we also get another glimpse at the SUPAMAX logo

some lootables in the back

not sure if these are Maliwan or not.

Zed also has a machine in the back here. We haven’t seen him around yet, but odds are he’s still kicking because of this. And hopefully still friendly with the crimson raiders. Maybe Tannis locked him in a closet or something, idk.

oooo i haven’t seen this screen before

i want to know what it isssss

this also looks eerily familiar. brb, gonna go find what this reminds me of

okay, so

not sure if its exactly the same material/type of symbol, but this location, what i have dubbed the “temple” cuz i got no better name for it, does have square emblems across the floor with borders.

so, interestingly, this one has what looks like an eye with beams shooting out of it. if that description sounds familiar to you, it should, because

EYEBALL

now i got no idea if these are related aside from being in the same game, but it does interest me that they’ve both got eyeballs and streaky beams.

Oh and Tannis’s Vault symbol doesn’t have the writing (?) across the edges, but I will say, it does kinda look like cuneiform and eridian writing had a baby. Like, if you super heavily pixelate the Watcher’s name on her title card...

tbh I’ve theorized a lot about this place, but haven’t found anything I particularly like. From the place where the first Vault Atlas ever opened is (meaning its on Promethea and could explain why Tannis has that slab), the Great Vault’s holding place (where the skeleton on the ground is Typhon and his final journal) (perhaps the Great Vault is the entryway to the Eridian homeworld... that could explain why the CoV are trying to find it... might be a reason why they’re being manipulated by new aliens to find it. god please let them be the Seraphs...) uh, anyway, I also had an idea that it was someplace on the Maliwan planet, and maybe that it was in the archives area that was taken over by Maliwan and that the skeleton was of a Siren. That would explain why Maya is shown handing the book to Little Blue in the MoM. I go over that in an old post though, so moving on.

 oh, there’s also a frame of Tannis’s animation where the dinosaur she was inside stands up and clips through the table:

there’s a small room over here we don’t get to see, and I’m wondering if there’s another NPC joining us on Sanctuary-III that isn’t showcased. god I hope if its pickle he got more bearable as he got older because dear god i hated him in tps. I can’t see Athena nor Janey with a desk like that. Maybe Vaughn? Though would he really want to go back to being an accountant after everything...?

more maliwan boxes btw. looks like someone scribbled on this one lol

now we head to the bridge!!!

looks like an arcade game lol

but possibly a control mechanism for shuttles coming in???  👀 👀 👀

Crew Quarters and the SUPAMAX logo

oh yeah, and in case you were doubtful that this was a borderlands game:

“Caution: Excessive Farts Detected”

the Bridge!!!

We’ve got a holo-projector thing up front like we’ve seen Rhys use, as well as a mini one used as a digistructer during Lorelei’s hamburger quest. Most interesting, Lily has her tattoos! Definitely wondering if this takes place later on in the story or if they swapped her early game model in. either way, they’re definitely there. 

some cool art of Sanctuary III zooming away

just have to say

i love this so much

its great

okay moving on

I wish they’d be more specific. do ruins = vault? Typhon says he discovers the Vault and the Key in one fell swoop. if Typhon DID give atlas the Vault key and the location to the Vault (and we’re not just listening to an ARG for the movie or smth) then why didn’t Atlas open it immediately?! I mean, in TFTBL Cassius says Gortys is their last ditch attempt at opening a Vault! So what the heck?? I can’t believe that it would be less than 200 years from the first Vault being discovered to the Eridians abandoning everything. like vault keys take 200 years to naturally charge so there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be already charged and available (Unless its more of a cycle thing where it charges and then discharges after a while for safety’s sake??). 

And another thing, if that IS Eridium growing out of the ground on Promethea, then they totally DID open the first Vault. Or at least Typhon did. Unless there was something stopping them... like... Maybe in the temple those demon-looking-things stopped them from getting through and that’s why we find a bunch of skeletons around the place? Or maybe the Guardians got to them, or some other Eridian protection scheme. i don’t know... im so confused... brain hurt...

anyway

why the fuck does Elpis look like this

is that the light side of the moon? dear god im blind.

hhhh at least we can still see the crackening

lowkey wondering if the ship is based off of Eridian tech. I could totally see a slip-space drive being based off Lilith’s phasewalking

when we finish travelling, Lily says “We’ve arrived in one piece. that’s a first” and yeeah, i can see whyyy

rocks. rocks everywhere. tbh i think these rocks are 1) why lilith says that (we’ve either been to Promethea before in Sanc-III or Sanc-II got decimated slip jumping here) and 2) why the VH’s entry into Promethea is apparently so awful Lilith needs to ask if they’re actually still alive. also, we get to see just how much of Promethea is cities and goddamn. that’s a lot for a borderworld.

sorry for the youtube bar. 

Deck A: Hammerlock - Infirmary/Tannis - Deck B: Marcus - Moxxi Deck C: Cargo Bay

I am honestly so curious how they got this ship with that lettering on it. I guess they could’ve made it themselves, but... you gotta wonder... maybe we get the ship built on Pandora by Ellie. Or she helps us fix it up after we remove all gross rat things from it.

MAYAAAAA

better look at the Monty poster plus some other stuff, like a clock, dartboard, and a gas mask. Also if anyone knows what that says up top there, please let me know, im super curious!

Hammerlock’s quarters!

this guy has the same facial hair as Zane. I swear to god if I hear “Oh, that’s me fourth brother” im gonna lose my absolute shit

something to the far left outside of Hammerlock’s quarters we’re not allowed to see yet :(

there’s also graffiti of “Charge port here” around the ship and i think that’s hilarious. It’s like an airport

put your ports in, damn it!

Ellie!!!

More maliwan boxes to her left, btw

the actual cargo bay. remember how i said to look at the bottom of sanctuary III to find the door? I’m like 90% sure that’s it right there. Randy also says “down here we can check out the vehicles we’ve collected AND this is how/where we get access to the planets while we’re in orbit”.

Crazy Earl’s black market! dunno how he’s actually, like, connected to the black market from here, but, hey, who knows what he’s got in there.

veteran rewards, apparently drawn over one of Marcus’s machines lol

“Inter-Galactic” a little drawing of Sanc-III and another Maliwan box (you can see why I think this ship is Maliwan, right?)

Clappy and his GF... yeah...

one very big digistruct pad. listen... im praying for a space shuttle. i really am.

finally:

the drop pod

god this looks awesome. I bet we’re gonna have many a fun time in there lol

I finally get to live out my dream of being an ODST in borderlands. what badasses they are.

[robronsecretsanta]

Fic: Sweet Tooth

to @golaulau love from your secret santa

Robert knew better than to attempt Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. Everyone did. Yet here he was, shuffled around with the masses of last minute shoppers getting the last few gifts he needed for his family gathering tomorrow.

If Robert has it his way he’d avoid the whole bloody day altogether, spend it eating a takeaway and drinking the expensive bottle of whisky he got from his boss as a Christmas present. He already had plans for his very hefty Christmas bonus, a nice long vacation somewhere warm and the new Audi he’d been eyeing all year.

Unfortunately, Robert has a sister; the kind that loved you absolutely and for some reason wanted to spend time with her brothers. They’d been getting along better since Katie had left Andy, doing exactly the same dance on his brother’s heart that she’d done to Robert. Nothing brought people together more than shared distain.

So now Andy focused on his two children from a previous relationship, and seemed to understand Robert a lot better, or at least was trying to.

Buying presents for them all was proving a bit of a headache though. Andy had sent him a list of things the kids wanted, all cheap and way less than Robert had been prepared to spend. Robert’s money and Andy’s lack of it was still a sticky point. It hadn’t helped when Robert had paid off the mortgage on the farm after Katie left, knowing his brother was in a bind. Andy thought Robert was throwing his weight around when Robert had just been trying to build a bridge back to who they used to be, before they’d been waring brothers and actual friends.

Plus Robert had a soft spot for Sarah and Jack, his niece and nephew who thought Uncle Rob was pretty great, even when he wasn’t showering them with gifts.

Still, last year this had all been easier when he’d left it all up to his assistant. Except Victoria had made a joke about it during the last Christmas dinner and Robert had gotten offended. It wasn’t that he couldn’t buy presents for people that were meaningful; he just didn’t have time.

So now he was standing in front of the shops with a few bags of items that didn’t seem like the right things and regretting telling Bernice he had it covered this year.

An understated but expensive Tiffany necklace for Victoria (Breakfast At Tiffany’s was her favourite film), a new Chevalier jacket for Andy (just like the one Robert had but in green, he’d noticed Andy admiring his a few months back), the latest gaming system for Jack (with enough games to make his head spin) and a new iPad for Sarah with a hefty gift card attached (the girl loved blaring her music, just like her Uncle Rob.)

So why didn’t he feel done?

He needed caffeine to make it through the rest of the evening, especially if he was going to be mad enough to keep searching for a present he didn’t actually need. This Christmas was going to be the start of a new tradition, all the remaining Sugdens together under one roof. They hadn’t done that since they were kids. Robert remembered after the day of excitement and food sitting around the living room sofa playing Monopoly with Andy while Victoria pretended to be the banker, too young to actually understand the game. No one ever really won, they’d just play until it was time for bed, for once not arguing over who was the better man.

Robert ducked into the first Starbucks he saw, thankful that the line was only halfway across the store. He juggled the bags in his hands, trying to ease the pull of cheap plastic against his wrists. He ended up jostling into the body in front of him.

“You alright, mate?”

Robert had intended to be polite and beg forgiveness from the person who turned around to look at him. He had intended to be apologetic and charming. Then he met a pair of crystal clear blue eyes and his brain short circuited.

“Huh?”

Robert closed his eyes at his own stupidity but opened them to the sound of deep laughter. Those eyes belonged to a stubbled face, broad shoulders and a voice that made Robert’s insides feel like they had collected in a pile at his feet.

“Yeah I know the feeling. Not a fan of crowds myself.”

Robert had absolutely no idea why this man was talking to him and his tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of his mouth. Robert wondered if he was drooling? He might be drooling. A man this gorgeous needed to walk around with some kind of warning label. Also, say something Sugden, Jesus.

“Sorry about that, it’s bedlam everywhere innit it?”

Good job, ask him a question. Get him to keep talking. That way you can look at his face more. Robert really liked that face.

“Serves us right waiting until the last minute like this. At least someone will be very happy tomorrow.”

Gorgeous Stranger motioned to the bags in Robert’s hand with a jut of his stubbled chin, specifically the bright Tiffany blue one.

“It’s for my sister. I’m single.”

Robert wanted the ground to open up and swallow him whole. Yes, tell Insanely Attractive that you’re single after 30 seconds. Way to keep a cool head. Thankfully before Robert could shove his foot any further into his mouth one of the barista’s shouted “Next!” and Blue Eyes turned away from him.

Instead, he stared at the back of the man, tried to gauge his age. Younger than Robert, but not by much. He wished Touchable Hair wasn’t wearing such a puffy jacket, but it showed off how broad his shoulders were. He looked cool in that whole “I don’t have to try to work at being attractive because I am, I just don’t know how much” kind of way. Robert was more of a “Yeah I look good but when I try I look better” man himself. They didn’t create well fitted suits for no reason and he wasn’t going to squander what God gave him by not enhancing it.

Wonder what Hidden Biceps would look like in a suit? Wonder what he would look like out of a suit? Or in just a tie? Or in…

“Uh, Sir?”

Robert realized he was next in line and had been daydreaming like an idiot.

“Yeah, Grande Peppermint Mocha, extra shot of peppermint, please”

Robert loved anything sweet; it was another addiction along with Calvin Klein boxer briefs, his sisters shepherd’s pie, and his Monty Python’s Flying Circus box set.

He paid for his order and headed to wait for his drink. Wet Dreamwas leaning with his back against the wall, tapping away on his phone. Robert rolled his eyes at the slowed down guitar riff version of Jingle Bells that was being pumped through the sound system.

He only had about three or four more minutes to look his fill before they’d go back to their shopping and on with their lives. They’d never see each other again.

So what would be the harm in offering Look At Those Thighs his number? Robert was usually more self assured than this. Clearly Christmas and the nostalgia was getting to him, taking him back to when he was an insecure boy, not the confident Robert of today. He was dressed nice, leather jacket over his well fitted jeans. His hair was probably perfect and he’d gone to the gym this morning.

If Kissable Mouth turned him down it was his loss than wasn’t it?

Emboldened he stepped forward just as Scruffy Sex On A Stick put the phone to his ear and started talking.

“Yeah, I’ll be home soon. Of course I’ll pick up dinner on be way; God help us if you decided to cook.”

Robert’s stomach sank, Unavailable Dream Man was beaming as he talked on the phone and that could only mean one thing, love. It was punctuated even further by the throaty laugh that spread want through Robert’s entire body.

“Yeah, I love you too. See you soon.”

Seriously Fuckable shoved his phone in his pocket and offered Robert a smile as he reached for the cup the barista put before them on the counter. Robert offered him a tight smile, trying to not show disappointment that this was the end of their epic love story.

He sighed as I Want His Mouth On Me took a large sip of his drink and turned to walk away, until he heard the sputtering and coughing.

“Ugh, what the hell is this?”

Robert looked at the cup, saw his name written on the side and grimaced.

“Sorry mate, I think that was mine.”

Adorable Frown shook his head and looked down at the cup in his hand, finally realizing he’d grabbed the wrong drink and downed Robert’s sugary concoction.

“You actually like this stuff?”

Robert couldn’t help but laugh.

“It’s Chrismassy.”

“So is holly but you don’t see me blending it up and swinging it back.”

Hot And Sarcastic smiled at Robert’s short burst of laughter and dropped the drink into the garbage can beside him.

“Well let me get you another one, because there was something clearly wrong with whatever that was.”

“No, really it’s fine.”

“Look mate, you want to drink this swill, I ain’t gonna stop yah. Let me please, my fault after all.”

Robert opened his mouth to protest again until I Want To Lick Himraised his eyebrow in a seductive challenge that had Robert licking his own lips instead.

“Yeah, okay. Peppermint Mocha, extra shot of peppermint.”

Are Those Eyes Even Real grinned and moved past Robert, going to the head of the line and gesturing slightly before handing the barista more money than it should cost. The barista looked Robert’s way, grinned, writing the order on the cup and passing it over to be made.

Robert was trying to think of something impressive and lasting to say but once again words failed him. Instead, Smells Good Enough To Eat snagged his correct drink off the counter and kept walking, a friendly “Happy Christmas” thrown over his shoulder that sent a shiver down Robert’s spine.

Ugh, Robert hated himself and the world in general as he watched All The Good Ones Are Taken disappear out of sight.

“Sweet Tooth.”

Robert blinked and looked at the barista as she held out a red take away cup towards him.

“Excuse me?”

“Peppermint Mocha with extra peppermint, he said your name was Sweet Tooth.”

Robert smiled at her and took the cup from her hand. She winked at him and turned back to making another drink. It wasn’t until he was out on the street that he looked at the cup more closely and noticed the phone number scribbled on it with a heart and the name Aaron in bold letters.

One Year Later

Robert scrolled through his phone, reading intently the article he’d found about Monopoly strategies. He was going to wipe the floor with Andy this Christmas.

After he’d left Starbucks a year ago, he’d headed to the nearest game store and bought the swankiest version of the game they made. It was pretty expensive but it would last forever, mahogany board and actual silver pieces. There was even a banker drawer which he knew would make Vic happy.

Christmas on Andy’s farm has been tense at first, Andy giving him a tight smile with every excited squeal Sarah and Jack made over the presents Robert gave them. It wasn’t until everyone was done that he pulled out the game, wrapped in gold paper with a giant red bow and placed it in front of Victoria with a flourish.

“So this is a Sugden present; it’s for all of us.”

Victoria had cried when she’d opened it and Andy has just looked at him, a genuine smile on his face and declared he was going to wipe the floor with Robert.

The kids hadn’t been too interested but after dinner the original Sugden kids had played well into the night, Victoria losing early but still willing to hand out money and hold the deeds. They’d finally called it a draw at midnight after too much wine and a lot of laughter.

But for the last few weeks, Andy has been texting him trash talk about the upcoming game and Robert was not going down without a fight.

A slight cough made him raise his head and take in Sexy In A Ridiculous Christmas Jumper as he held out a mug for Robert.

“You are not actually looking up Monopoly strategies online are you?”

Robert took the cup, smiled at the candy cane and whip cream piled out of his hot chocolate that The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me had made for him.

“Aaron, he’s been winding me up for weeks. It’s a matter of pride now.”

Sweetest Smile just rolled his eyes but sat down on the couch and snuggled into Robert’s side.

“What time do we have to leave to get Liv?”

“Not for another hour yet. But I’m driving, you know what you’re like after…”

He Knows Me So Well waved his hands at the empty chocolate wrappers on the coffee table and the cup of sugar Robert was drinking.

“Only if I get to pick the radio station.”

“Ugh, fine.”

It had taken every ounce of willpower Robert had possessed to wait until after the holidays before he called Hogs All The Covers and asked him out to dinner.

Robert was in love before their appetizers made it to the table.

In the year since, they’d argued over everything under the sun, gone on vacation to Spain, met each other’s families, and were about to celebrate their first Christmas together in the home they shared.

It’d been a wild ride and it wasn’t about to stop anytime soon. Because they had Liv, Kindest Person I Know’s little sister, to pick up from the airport. She was going to be the first guest in their newly redecorated spare room.

Christmas Eve was with the Dingles and Christmas Day was with the Sugdens. Somewhere in between all that Robert was hoping to get a few moments alone with God I Love Him So Much It Hurts, because he had a ring box hidden in their Christmas tree and a question he wanted to ask.

“You’re not going to win the game, you know that right?”

Robert looked at I’m Going To Marry Him in mock horror.

“Aaron, whose side are you on here?”

I Can’t Wait To Spend My Life With You just snuggled in closer and lifted his face to Robert’s

“Mine, because I’m playing this year. I am going to own you, Sugden, just wait and see.”

Robert couldn’t resist tipping his head down and pressing a kiss on those lips before he whispered against them.

“You already do, Aaron. You already do.”

[eeveevie]

Shadow and Light

Nothing in Varric’s life ever goes as planned, but he’s damn good at improvising with the hand he’s dealt.

Varric introduces Hawke to the Inquisition, and with Garrett Hawke comes Bethany, much to Varric’s surprise. And there was much rejoicing. (Monty Python jokes not included).

Chapter Summary:  Typical Orlesian bullshit occurs at the Winter Palace. Varric has some memories, Bethany has some feelings, and Hawke has excellent timing. Also, Alistair.

Varric Tethras x Bethany Hawke previous | next

5457 words (chapter) | Teen + | Ao3

Chapter Two: Coup de foudre 

Kirkwall, 9:34

“I can’t believe Garrett killed the Arishok in single combat.” Bethany’s eyes shined with a mesmerized glint as Varric recalled the tale for her.

They sat in an isolated alcove of the Gallows Courtyard, hidden by the cover of night. It was risky for her to sneak away, but the Templars had their share of work cut out for them in the clean-up of the Viscount’s Keep.

“Are you sure you’re telling me the truth?”

“Would I lie to you, Sunshine?” Varric grinned.

Bethany copied him, though her smile didn’t reach her eyes. That hadn’t happened since before her mother was murdered earlier in the year. That was something Varric had wished he could lie about. Hesitantly, he reached out to place his hand over hers.

“Did you get my letter?”

Bethany shook her head, and her disposition changed. “They keep confiscating them. Classifying them as love letters.”

“Damn,” Varric cursed. He squeezed her fingers and eyed the way her frown only increased. “And here I thought I kept the lewdness to a minimum…I didn’t even mention my—”

“Varric!”

“Shh!” he hushed her, pulling on her hand so she was closer to him. She giggled softly, head ducking into his shoulder to stifle her sounds. “Do you want us to get caught?”

Her laughter slowly died down and Bethany leaned away from him, again a serious look in her eyes. Varric reached up to tuck the loose strands of hair from her brow behind her ear.

“No,” she locked eyes with him and was silent for a long moment before continuing. “Varric I don’t think we—”

“I know.” It was his turn to interject.

He could sense this was coming, but he didn’t want to be the one to say it. Their meetings had become more and more infrequent, and with the ever changing political climate in Kirkwall, the harder it was to maintain a clandestine relationship with a mage. If you could call stolen kisses and hand-holding a relationship. The death of Leandra only distanced Bethany further. Varric couldn’t, and would never, blame her. She hadn’t moved away, solemnly looking down at their clasped hands.

“Keep sending me letters,” she finally spoke. Her eyes flicked back up to his face. “Never stop writing to me.”

“I’ll make sure to remove the lewd comments then?” he asked.

“And miss an opportunity to embarrass a Templar who reads them?” She shook her head. “Don’t you dare.”

Varric eyed her for a moment, wondering for a brief moment what it would be like if they weren’t in such dire circumstances. “We’ll have to try this again one day, Sunshine.”

“When society is done locking up mages, perhaps.” Bethany nodded. “And the Qunari aren’t waging a war.”

“When the world isn’t burning?” he suggested.

“When nugs fly?” she countered. Varric smirked, amused at the notion, even if it bruised his ego slightly.

Bethany eventually stood up, holding onto his hand until he followed suit. And then, she leaned down the small fraction she needed to do so to close the distance between them, her hands framing his face as she brought him in for a kiss. A last kiss—not nearly as long as he would’ve liked. She moved to place a second kiss to his temple. Varric could only shut his eyes to keep himself grounded in the moment.

“I’d like that.”

Orlais, 9:41

The memory had come to Varric out of nowhere. Dwarves didn’t dream, but that didn’t stop his mind from wandering in the waking hours, taking him back to a time he thought he had moved on from.

Kirkwall had been in his thoughts more frequently than not as of late, and it all had to do with both Hawkes’ presence in the Inquisition. The investigation into the missing Wardens was taking longer than expected, so Garrett Hawke stayed in Skyhold to lend support when needed. As such, this extended Bethany’s stay with the Inquisition as well.

Nearly a month had passed since their initial arrival, and while Hawke was more frequently out in the field with the Inquisitor and her agents, he was still grateful to have one of his closest friends around. It wasn’t Kirkwall, but the two still managed to stir up their fair share of fun and trouble. When Hawke was away, Varric found himself spending more time with Bethany. He would observe her studies with the mages, and he even helped her gather herbs from the Skyhold mountainside, as much as he loathed the cold. She would sit with him as he took care of his Merchant’s Guild correspondence, giggling as she “proof-read” the letters to make sure they weren’t too snarky before sealing them.

At first, the more time he spent with Bethany, that initial awkwardness Varric had felt when they were reunited had disappeared. He was settling into a familiarity he hadn’t had since crossing the Waking Sea. Their friendship had picked up right where it left off, but sometimes, in the quiet moments, Varric would wonder if he could really classify their relationship just so plainly. She’d tease him about something he’d mentioned in one of his letters, remind him of something he’d said to her years ago and it would send his gut into a spiral. He thought he had lived a life of minimal regrets. Yet, he would look at Bethany when she wasn’t paying attention and wonder—what if?

The memory flashed in Varric’s mind again. Kirkwall. How he would do anything to be standing in the Gallows instead of the Winter Palace courtyard.

“A dwarf in Orlais,” Varric mumbled to himself as he climbed the stairs leading to the palace gates.

He made sure to size up—quite literally—every person he passed. He stuck out, but maybe this was why Josephine had insisted he join the event in the first place. All for the Game. It was also why Hawke had also joined, or at least a rumor that the Champion of Kirkwall would be in attendance. In reality, he was scouting to the East in the Western Approach with some of the Inquisitor’s most trusted companions—Blackwall and the Iron Bull to name a few. The rest were in Orlais, just like Varric, dressed in finery to be paraded about while the peace talks were underway.

By the time Varric reached the Vestibule, he was uncomfortable and cranky. He tugged at the collar of his tailored jacket, and looked around for a more familiar face. At first he only saw the Commander—Cullen standing near the top of the stairs with a pensive look. Beyond him were Josephine and Leliana at the large door to the ballroom, presumably waiting for their Inquisitor so they could make their grand entrance together. Just as he started to think about what kind of gaudy dress her female advisors had drowned her in, Aurelie appeared at the top of the staircase, escorted by the Grand Duke Gaspard. She was dressed much more elegantly, the ball-gown she wore made of flowing silk and lace. In a daring statement, the fabric cut low across her back, as if to purposely leave her exposed.

Varric was impressed, and judging by the hushed whispers around him, so was the court of Orlais. He watched as Cullen fumbled over a greeting, bowing politely. He stumbled over a proper compliment, and instead fell silent when Aurelie called him handsome. The exchange amused Varric to no end—this would be going in the book for sure.

“He looks like he’s been struck by lightning,” he spoke aloud as a body moved behind him. He might as well join in on the gossip with the court.

“Coup de foudre.”

Varric turned at the familiar voice and nearly swallowed his tongue. Bethany had snuck up on him, and surprised him in more ways than one. While not as dolled-up as the other Inquisition members, she was dressed in a stylish floor-length gown, one of Ferelden design. Deep red velvet, accented with gold—it got him thinking of Kirkwall again. He cleared his throat, glancing back at the Commander and Inquisitor exchanging pleasantries. Awkwardly. Varric vowed to not fall into that much of a stupor. He grinned at Bethany, exaggerating his bow to her.

“M’lady, if I do say so myself, you are looking exquisite this evening,” he noted her bashful smile. “If you aren’t careful, they might mistake you for Orlesian nobility.”

“Oh hush,” she waved her hand at him while using the other to try and cover her amused expression.

Varric shrugged. “I didn’t know you spoke Orlesian, Sunshine. You’ll have to translate for me.”

“You were saying that Cullen looked like he had been struck by lightning,” she started. “Coup de foudre. Though, that’s the literal term.”

She seemed to hesitate when Varric raised a curious brow for her to continue. “It’s more commonly known as, well, love at first sight.”

“Damn Orlesians and their romance,” he softly chuckled. “A phrase for everything, giving me a run for my money.”

Bethany didn’t respond, and he wondered if that was the reaction she was looking for—or if she was even looking for one at all. He didn’t want to think about it. Varric shook his head, focusing on the mission at hand as a loud bell rang out. The Inquisitor would make her grand entrance, and then one by one her entourage of advisors and companions would be introduced to the court. That was more trivial than some imaginary romance. Still, he offered his arm to Bethany with a smile.

“The Game calls us, Sunshine.”

As expected, Aurelie’s entrance alongside Gaspard was calculated, the herald of the ball taking his time in calling the names of those who passed through the doorway. Leliana must’ve paid him off to stretch out the fanfare.

“The Lady Inquisitor, Aurelie Trevelyan, daughter of Bann Trevelyan of Ostwick. Vanquisher of the rebel mages of Ferelden, crusher of the vile apostates of the mage underground, and Herald of Andraste.”

Varric rolled his eyes. “This guy writes better fiction than I do.”

“I’ve already heard so many titles, you’d think we were in a library,” Bethany mumbled back as they slowly walked behind the procession of people.

Cullen, Leliana, and Josephine had their share of flourish as well. Vivienne and Cassandra’s introductions were long enough that he almost didn’t notice the announcer presenting him. They didn’t introduce Bethany—most likely to spare her the inevitable questions of where her brother was. She didn’t seem to mind, instead holding an amused grin.

“Renowned?” she questioned. “I thought your books didn’t sell in Orlais.”

“Ouch!” He mocked her with a pained expression. “At least they didn’t call me Lord.”

After the last of the Inquisition companions had been introduced, Aurelie and her advisors approached the Empress for a more private conversation. At least, as private as the ballroom dancefloor allowed for. Varric made sure to slip away as soon as Josephine wasn’t looking, deciding that Aurelie would come find him if he was needed. Bethany followed suit, though she seemed much more uncomfortable with her surroundings than he was. He led them to the garden, hoping the fresh air would calm her nerves.

“Shouldn’t we mingle?” she asked, looking around. “Or at least people watch and gossip?”

“Sounds delightful. But first, some fancy wine,” he suggested, stopping one of the wait-staff as they passed. Bethany took two glasses from the tray and passed one along to him, the two clinking the sides together in a silent cheer. While it tasted just fine, Varric couldn’t help but make the joke. “Is that despair I taste?”

When Bethany didn’t respond, Varric followed her line of sight across the courtyard towards a gathering of people. She glanced at him for a moment before looking back. “Is that…?”

“What?” He stared until he could clearly see she was staring at an unexpected guest indeed. The King of Ferelden. “King Alistair?”

Bethany whipped her head back to Varric with a bewildered expression. “Why are you so nonchalant? That’s King Alistair!”

“Yes,” he agreed, before waving his hand towards another grouping of people. “And there’s the Queen of Antiva, probably. Also, I’ve met the guy, remember? Rivaini and I helped him a few years ago now.”

Realization washed over Bethany’s face as she nodded. “Those letters didn’t have a lot of detail, Varric. For all I know that was some strange fever dream you had after leaving Kirkwall.”  

“Would I lie to you, Sunshine?” Varric noted the way she titled her head with an arched brow. “Don’t answer that.” He gestured towards the King. “I could introduce you, if you’d like.”

Bethany’s face went white and he nearly laughed at how she flattened her hands against the skirt of her dress, smoothing out the fabric. “Oh—right. Of course.”

“Remember, you curtsy to the King.” Varric teased as he took her arm once more.

As they approached the group surrounding the King, Varric caught Alistair’s eye and the man did a double-take, his dignified demeanor disappearing as he waved for the person he was talking with to shut up. A bright smile lit up his face.

“Varric Tethras! Finally, a familiar face.” Alistair didn’t seem to care that his guests were slowly departing from around him. “Are you here with the Inquisition? A little birdie had told me you were serving with them now.”

“You know me, can’t keep myself out of trouble for too long.”

“Indeed,” Alistair agreed. His eyes shifted to Bethany, and for a moment, scrutinized the way her arm was draped around Varric’s. “Who is your lovely companion?” His eyebrows seemed to waggle. “You never told me you had married.”

“I’m not—” Varric countered, and glanced to see Bethany’s face had turned a similar shade to her dress. She moved away from Varric a fraction. He was reminded again of why some thought the King of Ferelden to be just a silly man—it was the Queen who was the real diplomat. Varric knew that was just one side of the coin, of course. King Alistair was more than capable as a ruler.

“This is Bethany Hawke,” he finally introduced and watched as she curtsied. “The Champion of Kirkwall’s little sister. She’s staying with the Inquisition for now.”

Alistair nodded for a moment, and Varric could tell the King knew there was likely more to the story. But there were ears everywhere, and he wouldn’t risk giving up Hawke’s location, or Inquisition business. Instead of pressing for more information, he slyly took Bethany’s hand and dipped it in greeting.

“A pleasure.”

“Oh!” She seemed startled by his action. “Thank you, Your Majesty.” She held onto his hand for much longer than Alistair had intended.

Varric cleared his throat, and Bethany glanced down at him, her blush not fading in the slightest as she finally pulled her hand away. At least he had more blackmail to use later on.

“What brings you to the Winter Palace?” Varric asked. He took a larger sip of wine as the King pulled a face.

“Does anybody ever really know why they are invited to Halamshiral?” he joked. “Peace talks? Though I’m not sure what Ferelden has to offer at this time.”  

“I don’t envy you one bit, Your Majesty.”

Alistair stared longingly into his cup of wine at the comment, and sighed. “It would be easier if Evelyn were here.”

Bethany looked to Varric, her brows knitted together in concern. He had only met the Queen of Ferelden—the Hero of Ferelden—Evelyn on a few occasions. It was always when Alistair was leaving Denerim to take passage on Isabella’s ship, the Queen entrusting the pirate and dwarf to keep her husband safe. For the brief encounters Varric had had with the woman, he knew that she was a kind soul, and worked tirelessly to keep Ferelden a safe place after the Blight. She was one of those rare people that lived up to the reputation build around her. Mostly though, all Varric knew her as was Alistair’s love—a story for the ages.

“How is the ol’ ball and chain?” he asked, remembering the nickname Alistair liked to use.

Even though Alistair offered a small smile, the sparkle was missing. “I’m afraid she’s not present at court,” he explained, before lowering his voice. “There’s been no contact for months. Even I can’t stall the nobles for very much longer with silly excuses as to where she’s gone. ‘Warden Business’ only gets you so far, even as King.”

“I’m sorry to hear.” Bethany sympathized. Alistair nodded and Varric could tell the man was getting sick of hearing condolences on his disappeared wife, even if they did not know the whole truth.

“You know, I could have people look into that,” Varric offered. “Think of it as just another royal favor I can cash-in later.”

Alistair’s smile was a little more solemn. “Thank you Varric, but I’m afraid Leliana has already diverted many of her top agents to search for Evelyn.” He explained. “If the Inquisition cannot find her, I doubt the Merchant’s Guild could.”

“You underestimate the dwarves,” Varric countered, pausing to drink from his glass.

Bethany took this opportunity to bring up an obvious, overlooked point. “We could ask Ser Stroud when Hawke makes contact in the Western Approach.”

Alistair held a knowing look, while Varric nearly choked on red. “Say that louder for the spies, Sunshine.”

She covered her mouth with her fingertips, while Alistair turned his attention to Varric. “Stroud and Evelyn worked together when rebuilding the Amaranthine Wardens. The Inquisition is investigating Wardens, right? They may have crossed paths.”

“Who says we are investigating Wardens?” Varric asked, narrowing his eyes at the King. Alistair arched his brows up in surprise and sipped his glass of wine, feigning innocence.

“What?”

Before Varric could ask any more questions, the three of them were interrupted by Lady Fleur, one of Celene’s ladies-in-waiting. She leaned as she waved at the King in some sort of Orlesian greeting.

“Your Majesty, King Alistair,” she started. “The Empress wishes to speak with you in the ballroom. At once.”

“You hear that?” Alistair smirked. “At once.”

Varric watched as the King followed the lady out of the garden, briefly wondering when the next time he’d encounter the man. He also made a mental note to ask Leliana if she had been sharing Inquisition secrets with him, even though she had told Varric otherwise. Not that it was a huge concern of his, but perhaps the Inquisitors?

Bethany let out a solemn sigh that brought him back to the moment. He looked up to find her frowning into her cup.

“That was…rather depressing, don’t you think?”

“How so?”

“Well…” Bethany trailed. “I always thought of the Hero of Ferelden’s story to be so romantic. It’s this epic tale of fortune and glory and in the end, the female hero saves the day, and marries the love of her life.” She moved to place the glass on the nearby bench. “Turns out, the fairytale doesn’t have much of a romantic ending. She’s missing, and he’s lonely.”

Varric wasn’t sure how to respond. “I’m sure not all heroes are affected by this.”

“Hardly.” Bethany’s expression steeled. “Even my brother suffered the safe fate. Sure, his relationship with Isabella isn’t…conventional, but perhaps it could be, if they could spend more time together. But no, he has to spend most of his life running from the Chantry, the Inquisition, the Templars…”

“Sunshine…” Varric tried to intervene, wondering where this was all coming from.

“Who’s to say the same thing won’t happen to the Inquisitor and the Commander after Coryphaeus is defeated?” Finally, she seemed to be finished with her rant and silence filled the space between them. She looked embarrassed.

“I stand corrected,” Varric muttered, and shot back the rest of his drink. “This is why I don’t write the shit.”

Bethany’s expression seemed to worsen, which wasn’t what Varric intended. He was about to suggest they sneak away to the private party Dorian had mentioned happening in the lower gardens when he noticed the Inquisitor approaching. She seemed to have urgent news.

“I hope I’m not interrupting.”

Bethany shook her head and Varric waited for Aurelie to tap her nose. That was the signal. A little on the nose, they had joked, but it would have to do in their current setting. Before she could usher them away, Varric thought of something to save face. He quickly grabbed Bethany’s hand, cupping her fingers in a way so that he could bring it to his lips. He gently kissed her knuckles, flashing a wink and chuckling as she flushed with color.

“Romance ain’t dead yet, Sunshine.”

Bethany spent the next half hour in the garden unsure of what to do. At times, she felt lost without Varric’s companionship, but only because they had been spending so much time together as of late. Ever since she had come to Skyhold with her brother, much to Varric’s surprise, most of her time had been spent with the dwarf, even when she was supposed to be studying with the Inquisition mages. It was a relief to have a familiar face in the hold, other than Garrett. Sure, there was Commander Cullen, but Varric was somebody she could trust. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt so happy.

Bethany smiled to herself as she looked down at her hand, brushing over her knuckles with a thumb. A warm feeling washed over her chest and she rolled her eyes, internally yelling at herself for allowing feelings from nearly a decade ago to resurface. She admitted, to nobody but herself, that she still harbored a small flame for the man, even after all this time. It was easy for Bethany to hold a soft spot for anyone, but Varric was special. But now, she was older, and with those memories behind her, she felt foolish about the way her heart nearly leapt from her chest when she first saw him in the Skyhold great hall.

Perhaps it was the letters. They had stayed in written contact the entire time, even if the correspondence dwindled when the two were far away or isolated. For the most part they were informative; letting each other know where they were and what they were doing. Now and then they would trail into random thoughts, and memories of the past, including their own. As much of a feat as it was, they had kept it a secret from everyone, or at least nobody had informed them they knew. In the letters, they didn’t have to hide.  

She had tried to move on, but nothing had ever felt right, even with Varric’s written encouragement. Instead, she found herself holding back in other relationships until eventually she found herself with the Inquisition. With Varric. Everything seemed to click into place. Bethany was almost sure about the way she was feeling. But what did he think? She didn’t want to have any regrets.

The change of scenery did nothing to help quell her emotions. She had foolishly brought up romance far too many times. Maker—the King had thought she was his wife! With a groan, she decided it was best to return to the ballroom. Perhaps she would be swept off her feet by a random Orlesian noble and fall in love. Problem solved. Instead she ran into a familiar figure, his smirk something she could recognize even if he was burnt to a crisp. Her brother, Garrett Hawke.

“Don’t ever say I didn’t have good timing.”

Bethany looked at him flatly. “For what exactly?”

As if right on time the nearest doors opened, and the Inquisitor shot through, her dress swapped for rogues’ armor. She made a beeline for Cullen, panic on her features. “Detain the duchess. She’s the assassin!”

Bethany whipped her head back to Hawke and he only flashed another grin. Quickly following Aurelie were Dorian, Cassandra, and Varric. They too had changed out of their Inquisition finery to armor. Just where had they been? What had they been doing? Aurelie and Cullen rushed across the ballroom, and Inquisition guards moved into position as the Inquisitor called out for Duchess Florianne to stand down.

“Now!”

Hawke pulled Bethany closer to him as Florianne’s spies attacked. She froze, and watched as people in the room started to move in a panic. The duchess quickly escaped out towards the Winter Palace courtyard, but Aurelie was hot on her trail, not before instructing Cullen to protect the people. The other Inquisition members in the ballroom quickly escorted guests to safety, those who were secretly armored or holding weapons rushing to dispose of the duchess’ plants.

“Come on, let’s get to the courtyard!” Dorian ran after Aurelie, Cassandra following suit. Varric hesitated, the only one to notice that Hawke had seemingly materialized out of thin air.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Orlais?” he asked.

Hawke chuckled in response. “I am in Orlais.”

“You know what I mean,” Varric waved his hand at the man before switching his attention to Bethany. “Sunshine, are you okay?”

She nodded. “Yes. What’s happening?”

“Typical Orlesian bullshit,” he answered, before pulling his crossbow from his shoulder and nodding towards the door. “Let’s go.”

While Bethany ran with them to the courtyard, she wasn’t sure how much help she would be without a staff. It wasn’t always easy for mages to focus their casting without one—not impossible, but difficult. She instead trailed behind Varric, who rushed to find cover behind one of the bushes. Hawke had ran ahead, happily pulling his daggers from his back as he leapt into the fray.

“I’ve come to save the day!”

“I’ve missed that man,” Varric commented.

As sounds of fighting rang out around her, Bethany looked to Varric. He took the periodic shot from behind cover, and she would spot him, careful to watch their flank. “What do you need me to do?” she shouted above the chaos.

“Here, hold this.” Varric didn’t give Bethany a chance to dispute as he handed her a handful of explosive charges, her eyes widening as he struggled to reload his crossbow—it looked like the pin was stuck. “Come on now Bianca baby, don’t quit on me now.”

She blinked, looking between Varric and the weapon, before shaking her head. Now was not the time to conjure up jealous feelings about a feminine named crossbow. Instead she focused on the barrage of arrows coming overhead. A few stuck through the wall next to Varric’s head. Another arrowhead shot through the wall, closer to Varric and Bethany felt the panic rising. After a third arrow caused his hair to fly upwards, she pulled him aside, just in time for a fourth arrow to pierce the spot he was standing in.

He could only smirk at her. “Thanks, Sunshine.”

With that, he grabbed a grenade from her and lit it with a match, peeking over the wall before tossing it. It wasn’t long before he had dispersed all the explosives in the enemies’ direction, and Bianca was in working order. As the fight continued, Bethany found herself shooting the occasional firebolt from her fingertips, much to Varric’s surprise. Dorian kept her guarded with a mana shield, and even laughed as she shook her hands in mild pain after sending down an electric shock to a soldier with a shield.

It took longer than expected, but eventually, Aurelie cut down Florianne. It was a sight to behold, really, for Bethany, watching as the Inquisitor emerged from battle breathless, but nearly unscathed. She was covered in her enemies’ blood, and had a triumphant glow. It was admirable, unlike the shit-eating-grin her brother held as he danced in place nearby. The fool. Aurelie was amused, but she quickly directed the group back towards the palace.

The party wasn’t over yet.  

It was a long night. Bethany didn’t bother to stick around for the negotiations, knowing somebody would inform her of Orlais’ outcome in the morning. Josephine and another noble helped escort her to her own private suite for the evening. She was overwhelmed by the size, never knowing what it was like to have her own space. Living life in Lothering, Lowtown and the Gallows didn’t give her much space. Now, she was surrounded by gold and silk, and even if it was temporary, she would relish in it.

She began to retire for the evening, changing from her velvet dress into her nightgown and coat. Still, she admired the dress she had worn that evening, smiling when remembering the way Varric had complimented her. Again, she found herself frustrated and closed her eyes, wondering if it was a good idea to come to Skyhold in the first place. Garrett made it seem like she would have fun, and while was was—having fun—there was something off.

Just as she hung the dress back up, she heard the balcony door handle wiggle. Her heart lurched forward and she glanced around for the nearest object she could use as a weapon before a second thought entered her mind. What if…? She slowly approached the door, cursing the fact she had closed the curtains in order to sleep. Hesitantly, she opened pulled down on the knob, and jumped back as the weight of a person came barreling into the room.

Again, she was not surprised to see her brother. She glared at him.

“Expecting somebody else?”

Bethany only rolled her eyes and watched Hawke close the door behind him, his eyes scanning the room before he fell face-first onto the nearby chaise lounge. She grimaced, noting that he was still covered in blood.

“I think Varric would just knock.”

As soon as she said it, she widened her eyes, knowing it wasn’t wise. Curse her thoughts. Her brother sharply turned his head, his eyes gleaming as he looked at her from his awkward position.

“And just why would Varric be visiting you at such a clandestine hour, dear sister?”

When she couldn’t come up with a clever answer, she stayed silent, and hoped Garrett couldn’t see through her expressions. He was the last person she wanted to be talking to about Varric—at least about this specific topic. After all, Garrett knew nothing about their past. Who knew what he would think. Her brother leaned up the more the silence dragged on.

“I’m glad the two of you are spending time together, but I hope nothing serious is developing!” He wagged his finger.

Bethany knitted her eyebrows together. She didn’t like what he was insinuating. “And why not? Why exactly did you push for me to come to Skyhold then? And keep it a secret from Varric?”

Garrett pondered that with a finger to his chin. “I may have been drinking when I made that decision. Also, Isabella.”

“Fuck you.”

“Language!” Garrett gasped. His expression softened a bit as realization hit him. Bethany shifted, uncomfortable. It seemed the preverbal cat was out of the bag. “Wait. Beth.”

He shifted so he was sitting upright, and could clearly see Bethany. “Do you have feelings for Varric? Our Varric?”

Again, she couldn’t answer. Not without revealing too much. That wouldn’t be fair. But her silence was an answer too, it seemed. Bethany was shocked to see that it had stunned Garrett. He blinked, and he rubbed at the stubble on his chin for what seemed like ages.

“Beth. Varric. Beth. Varric.” He repeated until she moved her foot to kick him in the shin.

“Stop it,” she insisted. “I’m not a child. I wasn’t asking for your opinion anyways.”

Garrett pursed his lips, and surprisingly, didn’t say another word. The two sat in silence, Bethany caught up in her mind and wondering more and more what her brother thought, despite what she had just said. It was all so damn confusing. Bethany did have one question she wanted answered. She wrung her hands together and Garrett seemed to pick up on her nerves.

Finally she sighed out. “Did Varric ever tell you why his crossbow is named Bianca?”

“No.” He shook his head. “The one story he doesn’t tell, I’m afraid.”

Bethany wondered if her brother would lie to her under these circumstances. She looked at his expression, and the softness in his eyes and decided he was telling the truth—for once. She wasn’t pleased with how serious the conversation had turned, and how strange her heart and mind felt after an eventful day.

“Bethany, you know I love you.” Garrett reached over to take her hand. “Just be careful with your heart.”

Bethany nodded. She had a lot to think about.

[latenightcinephile]

#876: ‘Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot’, dir. Jacques Tati, 1953.

I’ll come right out with it, and start this year off on a great note: I don’t really get this film. Far from being the uproarious comedic spectacle that I was led to expect by some of the critical writing, I don’t think this film provoked more than an occasional chuckle. This might be because of my generally melancholic outlook after one too many war documentaries, but I think it’s also largely because this kind of comedy is no longer as affecting as it once was. We expect our farces to be more firmly rooted in a culturally-specific context, and Les Vacances seems to be trying to parody an ill-defined thing. Nevertheless, it’s inflential, so let’s give it a go.

One of the most immediate things about this film is its general lack of dialogue. Most of the comedy in this film is through slapstick and sound comedy that functions independent of language. A group of travelers hustles from railway platform to railway platform, constantly missing their trains by seconds. A squeaking restaurant door makes precisely the same noise whenever anyone passes through it. When this comedy works, it’s mostly because the lack of dialogue gives the impression of an awkward or shamefaced silence - two characters staring at each other trying not to express the obvious. It’s no wonder M. Hulot (Tati himself) resorts to hiding in coatracks to avoid the consequences of his klutzy actions.

Les Vacances was created at a time of social change in France, with the middle classes becoming more fond of summer holidays that allowed them to leave the large cities in exchange for a simpler resort experience. Tati’s parody is of these people’s inability to completely shed their social roles in this new place, and so the film is full of pretentious political students, straight-laced older people with simple ideas of fun, and bratty children with parents whose long-sufferingness tends towards hostility. Into this mishmash of character types comes Hulot, who doesn’t seem to fit into any of these categories, but is more inept than any of them.

Where this film’s comedy is lacking, though is in a sustained response to any of these character types or deeper themes. Take, for example, the elderly couple who are often shown meandering around the beach, with the wife taking a keen interest in the sights and the husband outright rejecting this enjoyment. For most of the film, Tati merely shows us these two going about their business. Here’s the wife handing her husband some pretty shells, which the husband turfs away the moment her back is turned. It’s a chuckle-worthy moment, with the target being the husband’s obvious disgust. But that’s all it is - a moment. We don’t know anything about these characters beyond these moments, and so the film doesn’t have any ability to spin this out into a sustained parody. The same goes for that squeaky restaurant door: beyond the bit where the door makes a funny noise, Tati doesn’t play with tempo or anything. There are no characters annoyed by the noise, where comedy could stem from their ineffectual attempts to stop it. It’s an observation and nothing more.

These jokes are reasonably clever on their own, but the film overall keeps jumping between unconnected moments with little explanation. There’s no overarching plot, like with Keaton or Chaplin, and not even a metatextual rejection of narrative, which is what made Monty Python more endearing than annoying. At the end of the film, Hulot is shown in a shed at night, trying to find his way by matchlight. Why he’s in the shed is unclear, and so is why the shed is full of fireworks. It’s a funny event, but it doesn’t bear any resemblance to a logical event, and so it’s ultimately dulled.

Of course, it’s an important film - Tati was an influential comedy director, and there’s now a statue of Hulot at the hotel where this was filmed. But there’s no immediate connection to the subject of the film any more, and even if there was, there’s no narrative development. What it reminds me of is one of those Norman Thelwell books about horse-riding, if you tried to turn it into a film. A bunch of moments that are funny on their own, but would become meaningless if you tried to impose a plot on them.

[lolalexturnerlol]

Drifter (Negan x reader)

Lil somethin somethin kind of inspired by the song drifters by the delphines. I want to say there’s going to be two parts, but there could be three. Who knows. Certainly not me. 

Warnings: bit of angst, bit of fluff, swearing, depressed reader (there’s never any mention of the actual word, but there’s a lot of self deprecation and negativity) if any of this is a possible trigger for you, please proceed with caution. 

I’m a drifter, honey

i’m a tumbleweed tumblin’ from town to town

I ain’t got no home town just a town where I was born

I’ve been movin baby

Since my legs, they hit the ground

Until I hit the curb driving 105 and it shot my body down  

You tend to get cabin fever.

Not in the sense that you’re ever cooped up. You hate being indoors, you’re always outside and always going exactly where you want, whenever you want. It’s not like there had ever been anything holding you back. No, the cabin fever hits when you’ve been in one place for too long. It doesn’t feel right. You haven’t stayed in one place since you were eighteen and running from a bad home life and even worse boyfriend.

It might be boredom. Maybe it’s just the realisation that you’ve used up everything in a place. You know the people, the streets, the coffee shops and the train routes. Maybe it’s the crippling fear of having anyone too close that causes the itching in the balls of your feet and the impulse to pack your meagre belongings and get the hell out.

This town though - this town, smaller than any you’d been in -is different. And you can try to hide it, act like you have no idea why you feel the burning desire to stay just a week, a month more in this tiny town. But you know, that your whole reason for staying in a deadbeat town like West Elizabeth, Carolina, is in your kitchen in your floral dressing gown, gazing at an old Jamie Oliver cookbook through his black rimmed reading glasses.

“Y/n, y/n come in here.”

You walk into the kitchen, socks slipping against the polished hardwood. “What is it now?” you ask laughingly.

He throws the book down on the kitchen bench, grinning. “Oh, come on, I’m just trying to make you dinner for once. Not my fault this recipe is bullshit.”

With a giggle you move forward, tugging the spatula out of his hand and discarding it on the counter. "Forget dinner. Let’s just order pizza or something.”

He wraps his arms around your waist, his head dipping down to look at you. “Don’t like my cooking or something?” he chides.

“Just plenty fond of my kitchen being unsinged. Pizza. I’ll pay.”

The grin makes an appearance on his face, that charming, dimpled one he’d given you the very first time you’d met him. “Can never say no to you, can I?”

You pull away from him, jaw breaking laugh bubbling at your lips. “Pepperoni, yeah?”

“What else? I’ll choose the movie.”

A week used to feel like forever

Now it’s only 7 days I hate to bum the last one from you, friend

You know I’ll get you back when I come through again

“Hey, Carl.”

The teenager smiles, blushing a little at your attire. Or rather, lack of it. “Hey, y/n.”

“How’s your dad?” You ask, handing him a twenty dollar bill. “And Judith?”

You don’t stop to question what the fuck your doing. First name basis with the pizza boy and his family? Asking how his kid sister is? You don’t do that, it’s it far, far too personal.

“They’re both good.” He grins impishly, getting back on his bike. “Michonne’s been asking for you, wondering when you want your next kickboxing lesson.”

“Tell Michonne I’ll stop by tomorrow. Keep out of trouble, kid.”

“Always do, miss.” He yells as he pedals away.

Inside, Negan is stretched out on my little couch, feet propped up on the coffee table. He beams up at you as you walk in, chucking the pizza on the coffee table. “What are we watching?”

“Monty Python.”

You sit down on the couch, and he slings your legs over his, and once again, like always, you’re tangled up, head on his chest and his on top of yours. Your bodies are pressed against each other to stay on the couch. His thumb rubs absentminded circles in your thigh, and you can feel his body shake when he laughs.

You’re so used to this now. The cuddling, the affection. You haven’t cuddled in years, since your high school days. But with Negan, it doesn’t feel silly and forced, like it had back then. It feels correct. It just fits.

And it’s terrifying.

You push those thoughts from your head. You don’t need to deal with them. Not now. You don’t need to ruin this.

You feel his nose nudge at your neck, lips leaving trails and teeth nibbling little marks.

“Negan,” you laugh, hand on his chest, “we haven’t even started the pizza. Or the movie”  

“Forget the fucking pizza.” he growls, grabbing the slice of pizza from your hand and tossing it back  in the box. “And the movie.”

With a scorching kiss he throws you pins you onto the couch, body coming down to cover yours. And just like that, your previous thoughts are gone. Because the though of leaving always tends to disappear when Negan is around.

I’m just a drifter on the run I’m just a wagon wheel rollin’ on

Maybe someday I’ll unpack my bags and I’ll stay

But I’ll always see you when I come through that way

“You ever think about leaving?”

It’s a rainy day, overcast and drizzly. Negan’s 87 Chevy pickup is parked on the edge of a little sand dune, overlooking the stormy water. There’s a Bob Dylan record playing from the beat up sound system, a greasy brown paper bag filled with hot chips sitting on top of the front dash.

“Why, you thinkin’ about skippin’ town or soemthin?” His joking demeanour never drops. He shifts his arm a little bit, jostling my head tucked under him.

“No.” Liar. “I mean, It’s just - I don’t know, it’s a small town. Surely you’ve thought about getting out of here before.”

He’s silent, and you start to panic. Surely he hasn’t caught on to how you’re feeling. Surely he hasn’t cottoned on to your want, your need to get out of here. Surely -

“I have.” His answer interrupts my inner turmoil. “But I like it here. Been here for twenty years, don’t see much sense in moving on now.”

Maybe it’s the fact he’s so much older than you. Maybe it’s the fact that you’d never settled in your life. You were born into a shaky, semi-permanent life. How are you meant to settle when all you know how to do is move?

“Why are you asking me this, doll?”

And there it is, the million dollar question. “Been here for nearly a year.” You can’t look at him now, even though you can feel his eyes burning into you. “Haven’t stayed in a place longer than six months since I was eighteen. That’s ten years of moving around, Negan. I guess I’m just not used to this.”

He’s silent, and it scares you. He never moves his arm from around you though, never moves to push you off him. You finally look up at him, you have to know what he’s thinking.

You’re shocked at what you see. His eyes contain an ocean of tenderness and love, the smile on his face conveying what no words ever could.

“You’ve had it tough.” He tells you softly. “Must be hard to trust anything around you enough to stay.” He shakes his head, chuckles quietly. “But god damn do I feel honoured to be the the one you try with.”

Th thoughts come to me then, like they often do.

You don’t deserve him. You’re going to pull him down.

A week used to feel like forever

Now it’s only 7 days I hate to bum the last one from you, friend

You know I’ll get you back when I come through again

Your one year anniversary in West Elizabeth is a strange thing. Negan had everyone you knew gather at the diner in town - the very one you’d met him at a year ago today. Michonne is there, your kickboxing teacher and friend, with her partner Rick and his two, Judith and Michone. Maggie and Glenn are there with their newborn. Tara and Rosita, the girls you work with. Daryl, Negan’s best friend. There’s other people too, people from this little town that you’ve grown close to - something you’re not sure you’ve ever done in your life.

They all come, carrying smiles and bottles of alcohol and well wishes.

All it does is shock you.

You’ve become so attatched to these people. You can easily say you love a lot of them.

You love Negan.

“Y/n, you look so good tonight!”

You look up to see Maggie standing in front of you, Tara by her side. You give her your best winning smile, wrapping your arms around her in a hug. “What about you? You look fantastic.”

“Oh, please.” Maggie rolls her eyes, but she’s still grinning ear to ear. “I just had a baby.”

“Baby or not, you look beautiful.” You turn to Tara, unusually dolled up for the night. “And you, look at you. If I wasn’t taken I know who I’d be going home with.”

Tara laughs, giving my shoulder a shove. “Who says I’d go home with you, loser.”

You sit, and you eat dinner with the people who’ve come to mean something to you. And it’s so nice, joking and laughing with people who know you, care about you, and for an hour, maybe two, you let yourself slip into that familiarity, the warmth of it all.Because you know it on’t last long. 

And Negan, god, Negan. He sits by your side the whole night, hands linked, stealing chaste kisses whenever possible. You feel cherished, so absolutely loved.

And you want to bask in it. Let all of it in, let it seep into your blood and your whole body. But you know you don’t deserve it. You know that Negan, this sweet, caring, potty mouthed gentleman, is only wasting time with you around.

“I can’t believe you did this for me.” There’s a smile on your face, and you feel happy. But it’s an empty feeling, like it’s covering up waves of other, deeper things. It makes you feel guilty. You don’t deserve to have that deep down happiness anyway. 

Negan brings your linked hands to his lips, pressing a quick kiss to your knuckles. “Of course I did. You deserve it.”

As nice as the sentiment is, you know it’s not true. 

People start to filter out, and eventually Negan calls it a night, dragging you with him out to the truck. In the chilly night air, he presses you up against the faded blue metal, grinning against your neck.

“Have a good night, baby?” He husks. 

“The best.” And it’s not a lie. It’s one of the best nights I’ve had in a very, very long time. You still feel heavy though. And no amount of good nights could change it.

He pulls away from your neck, tawny eyes gazing straight into yours, like they’re stripping you bare. “What are you thinking? You’ve got that tone in your voice. You wanna know something.”

I want to curse how well he knows me. I take a deep breath in. Let it out. In. Out.

“Do you ever think there’s more out there for you? I mean, I’m so much younger than you, did you ever think you’d end up with someone like me?”

My words spark that look on his face. The unbearably intense one that gives me chills, makes me feel like he can see right into the depths of my soul. “I’m lucky to have you.” He tells me lowly. “Ain’t a lot of good I’ve done in my life. But when I’m with you, none of that matters.”

Your heart pounds in your chest, the noise of it drowning out everything else. You zero in on Negan’s face, his adoring expression, his loving eyes that normally make everything so much better. But tonight, all they do is unsettle you.

You don’t deserve him, y/n.

“Kiss me.” You breathe out. Because it’s all you can do right now. 

His lips are on yours. Warm, passionate, loving, soft. He’s all you could ever hope for. All you’ve ever wanted from anything in your life. But with that comes the fact that he’s everything you don’t deserve. You part from each other, breathless. 

He beams down at you, grabbing you by the waste for once last kiss. “Come on, let’s get you home. I’ve got a whole other celebration in mind.”

I’m a vagrant, darling I’m a castaway, a renegade, a vagabond

But you know that I ain’t too strong when it comes to leaving you behind

We had 40 oz. We had let it bleed and blonde on blonde

I’ll sit through one more song

Before it ends I’ll be gone

The next week is tense.

You want to act like Negan doesn’t realise the shift in you. But you know he’s not stupid. He knows, he’s sensed it. But he’s giving you space, like he always has. He’s thinking you’ll go to him when your ready, like you always have. But it won’t be like that this time. You don’t want to bother him anymore.

It’s like you’re moving in autopilot. Like you’re not even aware of what you’re doing. You don’t think about it. But in five days, all your belongings have been packed into the boot and backseats of your car, the little house you’d come to call home stripped bare.

You want to leave Negan a note. Explain everything as best you can. But you know that you shouldn’t. If you owe him anything, it’s a proper explanation, face to face. At the very least, you have to tell him in person.

You know this, and still, you can’t bring yourself to. So when you’ve finished packing the very last box, you send him a text. It’s three in the morning, so you know he won’t get it until he wakes up. By then you’ll be long gone.

I’m sorry, but I’m leaving. I love you, and I won’t drag you down.

You sit on the back porch, making your way through a pack of cigarettes, telling yourself this is what you need to do. Move on. You’ve done it plenty before. You can do it again.

Wandering through the house that has been your home for the last year, you run your hands over the kitchen counter. You’ll miss the cicadas, a noise you’d hated when you first arrived. You’ll miss the far off sound of the ocean, of waves crashing against rock. You’ll miss the sound of Negan’s breathing lulling you to sleep.

“Y/n? Y/n!”

Out of everything you might’ve been expecting to hear at that moment, the front door slamming open and Negan’s panicked voice calling out your name is the very last thing.

He runs into the kitchen, stopping abruptly when he sees you. Your heart falls to the floor at the look on his face. At the fact that he’s even there at all.

“Y/n? What’s going on? What was that text about? And where the fuck is all your stuff?!”

You feel tears spring at your eyes. This isn’t how this was supposed to go.

“I’m leaving, Negan.”

He blinks, mouth popping open - then slamming shut. It might’ve been funny in any other situation.

“What in the fuck do you mean, you’re leaving?” He’s angry now. Hurt, confused. I want to take all that away from him, take away the space between us and fall into his arms.

But I won’t. I can’t.

“I mean I’m leaving Negan, what more do you want?”

“What more do I want?” he splutters incredulously. “ An explanation would be really fucking nice. You can’t leave because your scared y/n! Don’t let go of this just because you won’t grow some balls and face up to your fucking issues!” There’s a vein popping out of his forehead, a fire in his eyes that I haven’t seen before. This isn’t the two in the morning, quiet kisses fire I’d grown to know. This is anger, pure and terrifying.

The tears have fallen now, marking their way down my cheeks. “There’s nothing you can do, Negan. I’ve made my mind up. You’re just going to have to deal with it.”

“Deal with it? Deal with it?! Are you fucking serious, y/n? I love you, I love you so fucking much, and all I get is ‘deal with it’?”

I snap now. I don’t want to deal with this anymore. I didn’t want to hurt him. That’s the last thing I wanted. But this is the only way he’ll understand.

“Don’t you fucking get it, Negan? Hasn’t it gone through your thick fucking scull. I refuse to stay here and drag you down. I won’t fucking do it. I’m leaving. And that’s it.”

You’ve never regretted anything in your life. Not leaving running away from home. Not leaving a single place since then. But there’s something now that you’ve never felt before, deep down in your heart, dragging all the way down to your stomach. You try to ignore it, as you walk out of those doors and down the steps, even as you cross the border into Georgia, the boot filled with your belongings. But the guilt is eating you away, the sadness causing you to pull over more than once.

But you don’t stop. You won’t. Because you’ve down the right thing. You have to have done the right thing. And if that means you never see the man you love again, then so be it.

A day used to feel like a lifetime

Now it’s no different than the rest I’ll just roll on roll on from town to town

Until I’m six feet underground  

I don’t even know if this even makes any sense at all rip me

feedback would be mucho appreciated 

[sunken-standard]

Drabble Meme Prompt Fill Number Infinity

Since I had three sets of prompts with significant overlap, I combined them:

Requested by @mistykins06:Dear one. I'm incredibly late to the latest Drabble challenge so I shall throw 86 (You’re cute with glasses)  and 96 (I could’ve gone pro) at you to do with what you will. Love, Mistykins06 Requested by @mizjoely: If you're still taking prompts, 20, 21 & 22 would be fab (together, apart, whatever floats your boat!) - When’s the last time you smiled?/ Stop being such a brat/ If I wanted one, I would have gotten it myself Requested by @theleftpill: For the drabble meme - I have no idea what the phrases are since I don't have the original list, so I'm choosing numbers for personal reasons: 86 (You’re cute with glasses ), 20 (When’s the last time you smiled?), 22 (If I wanted one, I would have gotten it myself)

Set in The Cheese Stands Alone ‘verse.

"You’re cute with glasses"/ "I could’ve gone pro"/ "When’s the last time you smiled?"/ "Stop being such a brat"/ "If I wanted one, I would have gotten it myself"

"Stop being such a brat and just come back," Molly said, her ancient cordless phone wedged between her ear and shoulder as she refilled the salt shaker.  She always tidied her kitchen when she was using her land line, it was ridiculous.  Who still used a land line anyway? Her one remaining friend from the Tom-era and former colleague 'Meena,' apparently.  Dull.  "Three is old enough to stay home alone for a few hours while you take a shift in the lab.  Just give him a little Benylin and put him in a dog crate with a blanket over it, turn on the telly for some noise, he won't even know you're gone."

Ah yes, the future mother of my children, Sherlock thought dryly.

"Pfft, unfit.  And if I wanted one, I would have got it myself.  No, it's not baby-snatching if you leave something of equal value in the pram, like a puppy or a bag of apples."

He glanced up and she was smiling that little dimply, impish smile of hers.  She was trying to murder him; cause of death—ironically unrequited love and cuteness.

"I'm telling you, the new techs they send in just keep getting worse.  I don't know where they're getting them, but..."  A pause while Meena said something that made Molly's lips twist into a half-smile, half grimace.  "Oh, he was a dope, but at least he's not a creep.  This new one, Gaz—yeah, I know, right?—spent his entire first day staring at my tits like he was trying to make eye contact with them to assert his dominance or something."

He's not going to last long, Sherlock thought darkly.  His eyes drifted to her chest, her bra-less breasts wobbling  rather enticingly under her t-shirt.  Molly would find a way to take care of it, she always did, but if she didn't, he could arrange for 'Gaz' to accidentally fall down some stairs or something else equally violent and debilitating.  One of the many perks of associating with the criminal classes.

Molly snapped her fingers in front of her chest to get his attention, then pointed rather pointedly to her eyes while pursing her lips.  They're up here.

Shit. She'd caught him looking.  And rather than being flustered or flattered or—best-case—ready to throw the phone down and whip her t-shirt over her head to let him have a go at them, she just looked annoyed.

She laughed at something Meena said and went back to tidying the worktop.

*

"Ugh, my ear feels like it's going to fall off," she said, flopping down next to him on the sofa.  It was a Herculean effort not to watch her breasts bounce as she did it; now that she knew he looked and she wasn't happy about it, it was all he wanted to do.  Well, more than he normally did, which, to be fair, was a significant amount of time anyway.

He looked at her ear, instead, which was quite red from where it had been pressed to the phone for the last hour and change.

"Now you know why I don't like lengthy phone conversations."

"You don't like any phone conversations," she contradicted, pulling that scornful face of hers that made her look like she should be wearing a ball gown, surrounded by birds and anthropomorphic mice and talking teapots.

"Texting is easier."

"Not when I'm in the middle of a post-mortem."

"That's why you have assistants."

"I have assistants to assist with the post-mortem. Not to answer questions like, 'Could you, in theory, fit three Walnut Whips in your mouth at once?'  Though really, can't complain about that one, the next day I had seven of them on my desk because apparently Ann told everyone in the department and they all wanted to know.  So, I mean, free chocolate.  Oh, don't make that face."

"What face?  This is my normal face."  He might have been making a face; that text was actually supposed to be private, since it wasn't for a case and more a matter of personal curiosity.  He'd also been eating a Walnut Whip at the time and was having other, entirely less innocent thoughts about her eating one, too.

"Well, yes, but it's a glower.  When's the last time you smiled?"

"Yesterday, though it may have just been wind," he answered dryly.

It had the desired effect; she couldn't help herself and snorted.  Molly loved a fart joke.  Maybe he could get her to watch some Monty Python again later.  

*

"I really wish Meena would come back.  She was so good at her job—no accidents, always there on time, never ran the wrong tests on the wrong samples.  And she was so much fun!  She was the one who dared me to wear her glasses when they did the new ID badge photos.  We were talking about how no one ever checks them anyway and I could probably wear a clown nose and a rainbow wig and no one would even raise an eyebrow," Molly said, her tone wistful.  

"Mm, always wondered why you had them in that picture," he murmured distractedly, deftly applying a second coat of red varnish to her middle toenail.  Being her stand-in girlfriend wasn't all bad all the time; at least he got to be physically close to her and she talked to him. "You look cute with glasses."

Bollocks, he thought.  He hadn't meant to say that out loud.  He hoped she'd just take it as a girlfriend thing, like telling her her hair was on point or those shoes were hot or whatever it was women said to each other to be supportive.

"Oh, ah, thank you," she said.  It was almost a question.  

"You're welcome?" he answered, making it a question himself.

He finished applying the varnish in excruciating silence; he was very aware of Molly watching him as he picked her foot up off his lap to blow on her still-wet nails.  It was a heavy moment.

"You're, ah, really good at that.  Pedicures, I mean," Molly said, her voice strained.

"Had a case once for a nail salon owner.  Industrial espionage, more or less—well, less, more than more, they had their own line of varnishes and care products that were being tampered with.  Learned how to do it there.  She said I could've gone pro.  I even got to keep the tips," he babbled, realizing he'd been swiping his thumb over Molly's ankle.

"Just the tips?" Molly asked, and he really wasn't sure if she was making a sex joke or asking a genuine question; he swallowed hard against the implication of the former and the very vivid image his brain supplied him with.

"Actually got a bottle of nail varnish, too.  I used it in an experiment.  It was purple."  I carried a watermelon.

Good thing she didn't know he'd actually seen (and liked) Dirty Dancing; he could at least maintain the illusion of having a working pair of testicles. There had to be an appropriate joke in there about the colour blue as well, but he was having a hard time (ha) thinking past the smoothness of her skin.  She'd shaved just the night before.

"How is your ankle, by the way?" he asked, changing the subject to something safe.

"Much better, barely feel it now.  Bruising's almost gone," she said too quickly, grateful that the conversation was moving away from weird, at least.

"I see," he said, pushing up her trouser leg under the pretence of inspecting her ankle.

"I mean, you can still wait on me hand and foot and carry me up the stairs, if you're still feeling guilty," she joked. "Wouldn't mind a bacon butty right now.  Or a glass of wine.  Or both."

He turned to her with a look of appalled affront at her gustatory choices, then let it drop.  "Actually, do you have any bacon in? I'm a bit peckish myself."

"No, but I've still got plenty of cheese."

"Grilled cheese it is, then.  Goes better with the wine, anyway," he said, easing himself out from under her feet.

*

"Mm, God, this is gorgeous," she said, using her finger to swipe a gooey string of cheese off of her chin.  "Since when do you know how to cook things that aren't potentially explosive or otherwise hazardous?"

"I'm a man of many talents," he said before biting into his own sandwich.  Using the sliced apple in it had been a stroke of brilliance if he did say so himself.  "I know how to both boil and fry an egg, too," he added.

"With skills like that, you'll make some lucky woman very happy one day," she said lightly.  "You can certainly fill out an apron." She gave him an amused mock-leer from where she was leaned against the sink with her plate.

The apron was rather ridiculous, but he wasn't going to ruin a £300 shirt with grease splatter.

"Well, if you ever come across a woman who doesn't mind the occasional potentially explosive or otherwise hazardous dinner, enjoys solving crimes, and can provide me with human body parts for experimentation, then do give her my number," he said, skirting the edge of actually flirting by injecting just a hint of sarcasm into his tone. It was either that or drop to his knees and beg her to just give him a chance to make her happy; he'd rather not ruin the evening, though.

"I don't know, a woman like that sounds awfully dangerous.  Probably has a few bodies buried in her back garden.  Could have had an ex-boyfriend that was a criminal mastermind.  Maybe he's even buried in her back garden."  She smirked before taking a bite of her sandwich.  

He was hit with the memory of when he'd told her Moriarty was dead and she needed to do something with the body until Mycroft could arrange disposal; Shall I just bury him in my back garden, then? had been her incredulous response.  Hadn't been nearly as amusing at the time.

Wait, was she flirting?  Or was she just going along with the joke?

"I like a woman who knows her way around a shovel.  Graverobbing's always much more fun with two."

"I thought that was housebreaking."

"That too. Lots of things are better with two.  Vandalism, confidence tricks, footraces, most board games..."

"Sex," she supplied.

"Probably," he agreed.

He could almost hear the needle scratch across the vinyl before she scrutinized him.

"I mean, with one person it's not really sex as such and three or more is just too many, so two for sex.  Two is the magic number there. Two people.  Having sex," he stumbled to clarify, anything to cover the fact that he had no first-hand knowledge of the act.  

"Ohhh-kay."

And it was going so well there for a minute.

*

"Sherlock," she said, pulling her calves away from his still-cold feet.

"Hm."

"If I, ah, ever did meet a woman like you described before, or, I mean, someone I thought you might like, would you, ah, ever want me to introduce you?  Because, I—I would."

"Thank you, but no."

"Women not your area, married to your work, right."

"No, that's just what I tell John when asks annoying, invasive questions." Because it was dark and he was turned away from her and there was always something about the night-time that made confessions easier, he said it.  "To be quite honest, I'm not interested in meeting any women.  I've already met one and I can't really imagine anyone else being able to hold a candle to her."

"Oh," she said quietly, sadly.  "If you, ah, ever want to talk about it, I mean, it must be hard to keep up long distance for so long..."

Long distance?  What was she—oh.  Irene Adler, John's blog and the lie he'd told about the witness protection scheme in America.  

Really though, what he had with Molly could be considered long distance; the other side of the bed may as well be the other side of the world for all the distance between them.

"It can be trying at times, but every moment I do get with her is precious," he said sincerely.  It was probably a cruel thing to do to make her think it was someone else, but maybe, just maybe, if he could get his feelings out like this, he could tell her the truth someday.  Or else he was shooting himself in the foot.

She reached over and gave his arm a gentle squeeze.

"I'd spend every hour of every day with her if I could.  Sleep next to her every night.  Apart from the cold feet, I don't think she'd mind."

"She probably doesn't mind the cold feet as much as she pretends to," Molly said, her voice taking on that gentle, heartbreaking tone of hers when she was clamping down on her own misery to ease someone else's.  

He'd maybe made a bit of a mistake, miscalculated how deeply buried the feelings she used to have for him still were.  He didn't want to hurt her.

He wiggled backwards a bit and pressed his feet against her again; this time to the outside of her leg, one foot from her ankle to mid-calf, the other above it.

"Or maybe she does mind it, but she puts up with your bullshit because she loves you too much anyway," Molly said, poking him in the back.

His heart sped up with the thought of Molly loving him in return; what a wonderful thing that would be.

"I do sometimes wonder if she does.  She's never said it.  Not in so many words, at least."

"Have you ever said it to her?  I mean, assuming you do love her, which it sounds like you do."

"Oh, I do.  More than I ever thought possible.  Never found the right moment to actually tell her, though.  The timing's always bad."

"Mm. Yeah."  A pause.  "I'm sure you'll find the right time and the right words one day."

"One hopes," he dismissed.

They settled back down to sleep, both lost in their own thoughts.  

"Molly—"

"Hm?"

"Goodnight." He just couldn't do it.  Wanted to, but couldn't.

One day.

[denial-island-spn]

[Admin Island] Sunset

Megs sits at the overlook.  Having texted Gabriel and received confirmation that he would meet her, she waits for his arrival.

Gabe: *appearing beside her, he teases* Hey, sweetness, I was wondering when you were gonna remember I existed.  *he throws an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into a hug*  Allow me to officially welcome you back, since we were a little caught up in my counterparts imminent demise… or not so imminent as the case turned out to be, thanks to dad…

There’s an immediately sense of relief that she doesn’t have to drop two bombshells this evening since he’s made the assumption there was some divine intervention. 

He releases her, turning to take a moment to admire the view which is spectacular at this time of day as the sun sinks low along the water, lighting up the sky in vivid splashes of color that contrast the darkness of the sea.  

Megs: *after a few moments* When’s the last time anything has surprised you?

Gabe: Oh, I dunno… the renaissance maybe?  After a certain point in your life everything starts repeating itself so it all looks and sounds the same… *looks at her curiously*  Why?  You got a surprise for me?  *his brows give a playful bounce*

It takes more effort than she remembers to play the game and not only keep the smirk on her face, but make it convincing.  Because maybe if she can pretend things are normal, that nothing has changed between them, it can help salvage some piece of their relationship once he finds out the truth.

Megs: I… might.  *she inclines her head to the blanket she’s brought* you might want to sit down though.  It’s a bit of a shocker.

Gabe: Sweetheart, there is nothing left in this world that can possibly shock me.

Megs: Want to make a bet?

He just watches her a moment as she takes a seat, and she does her best not to nervously fidget beneath his appraising gaze, wondering just how many differences he sees in the woman sitting in front of him and the one that went through the doorway what seems like ages ago.  

Gabe: Sure.  Why not.  *he drops down beside her*  If you succeed in actually shocking me, I will…do a one man show of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, exclusively for your benefit.  

She smiles, and her eyes brighten a little, though she can’t see how faded they are.  It’s nice he even remembers that’s one of her favorite movies, though he knows something’s up because he also knows it’s her go to when she needs a solid pick me up.  

Gabe: And if you don’t… You’re going to tell me what is actually going on with you.  *despite the lightness in his tone, his eyes convey just how serious he is*  Everything.  Deal?

Megs: Deal.

Her automatic agreement has the archangel suddenly looking unsettled, and the hollowness behind the wry smile she gives isn’t helping.  

Megs: Hope you’ve been polishing your British accent…. *she pulls out a flask from her pocket, unscrewing the cap and taking a long swig from it*   Because… I’m a mate.  

Gabe: A what? *he makes like he’s questioning her sanity, making a show of sticking his finger in his ear and wiggling it around*  I’m  sorry, I think I have a little crazy in my ear because I could swear you just mentioned something you should have no idea even exists… since it doesn’t here.   

Megs:  I’ll gladly take a second opinion that tells me I’m wrong. *the smile she gives is bittersweet because she knows in less than one minute everything about her relationship with someone she considers a good friend is going to change.  

Gabe rolls his eyes and takes a good look at her.  His eyes narrow and he blinks, almost doing a double take as he looks again, this time harder, and suddenly his eyes are wider than she’s ever seen.  

Gabe: Oh.  Oh.  Oh shit.  You’re – you –  Shit, sweetheart, you’re activated.  *he runs a hand through his hair, panicking*  Shit you’re not claimed.   *he immediately jumps to his feet, stepping several feet away before beginning to pace*

Megs: *is torn between amusement and exasperation* For fucks sake, Gabe, I’m a mate, not the plague.  You’re not gonna catch anything just by being in my presence.

Gabe: *shakes a wholly serious finger in her direction* You don’t get it.  You’re dangerous.  

Megs: *arches a brow, because while she doesn’t disagree with that these days, this particular issue is the least dangerous thing about her* Ok… can I ask why?

Gabe: You’re joking right?  Entire civilizations have come to an end because of disputes over your kind.

Megs:  *rolls her eyes, not taking him seriously* Great.  Now I’m Helen of Troy.  

Gabe:  Exactly my point!  She was one and look how well that turned out!

Megs: *she opens her mouth, about to express her disbelief that any part of that mythological tale was true, when she realizes what it means*  No *she shakes her head dismissively*   It’s - it’s not night here.  It’s day.  This world is full of sunshine and I’m not a fucking firework display.

Gabe: *stops his pacing, looking at her like she’s completely lost her mind*  

Megs: *insistently* You just said they didn’t exist here.

Gabe: That’s because we killed them all!

Megs: *her mouth drops, horrified* You what?!

Gabe: I - *he let’s out an exasperated huff, taking offense* Not me. I didn’t kill anyone… but… after debacle after bloodbath after internal civil wars, Michael gave the order to wipe you all out.  Though it wasn’t easy considering it’s less about genetics and more about soul susceptibility and cosmic variables… but he did it.  Or… *looks uneasily at her* I thought he did.

She digs her fingers into the corners of her eyes, because she doesn’t know what else to do.  She’s in information overload again and all she wants to do is cry.  Scream.  Break something.  Do something because she’s so tired of having to just accept that things are just as fucked as they seem.  

She wants to leave.  In the least, she wants to blast his ass for acting like she’s diseased.  She can’t do either, however, though she hopes Suzy manages to keep it short because her limits aren’t just incredibly short to reach these days, they’re feeling incredibly brittle, and the moment Gabe touches them in just the right day, everything is going to start crumbling.  

Megs: *Exhales forcefully through her nose, drawing it out as she tries to keep it together.*  I was told it wouldn’t be much of an issue here.

Gabe: By whom?  *his eyes darken* By him?  *he suddenly looks angry.  Really angry* Is he the one that activated you?

Megs: *laughter bubbles up, spilling out of her lips, though there’s a touch of manicness to it*

Gabe: *Forcing himself to not completely lash out at her*  Did.  He.  Activate. You?

Megs: *brings her hand against her chest as she takes a moment to catch her breath*  You activated me.  *Gabriel pales, looking like he’s one second away from needing a change of pants and she loses it, dissolving into a fit of laughter*

Gabe:  *the most serious she’s ever seen him*  Megs, I’m so sorry. *the way his fear shifts from being scared of her to for her, has any amusement immediately dying*  If I had known…

Megs:  *trying to convince herself as much as she is him* Look, it’s - it’s not that big of a deal.  You didn’t even notice until I pointed it out.  I’ve been places where they not only knew what I was immediately, they saw me coming a mile away.  

Gabe:  The longer you’re unclaimed, the brighter you will get and eventually, everyone will know, and I”m not talking about just here on the island.  You will become a homing beacon, kid, and they won’t need to see you to know what you are.  You’ll just call to them, and eventually they’ll start coming to you.

Megs: *she pales as the world feels like it’s once again dropping out from beneath her*  I thought it was supposed to be about consent…

Gabe: *he crouches down in front of her, but he still remains at a cautious distance* It is.  Don’t let anybody tell you differently.  You can’t be forced to bond with anyone… but eternity can be a lonely prospect not all of us can handle and that won’t stop some of my brothers fighting for the right to be considered.  

Megs: Well… fuck.

Gabe:  *he’s clearly conflicted, like he wants to comfort her and get as far away from her as possible at the same time* Yeah.  Fuck.  

Megs drops her gaze down to the blanket, not wanting him to see how much his reaction hurts.  She knows it’s not personal.  She knows him, and the thought of commitment or anything that could tie him down has him feeling cagey and makes him panic.  She also knows it’ll be easier for both of them if there’s just a clean break with their friendship.

Megs: I understand, Gabe.  I really do.  You don’t need to be around me anymore.  Ever.  

Gabe: *in disbelief* None of us should be around you.  It’s like… hearing an incredibly catchy song on the radio.  It doesn’t matter whether you actually like it or despise it, once it gets inside your head it’s there and you can’t get rid of it.  Eventually, the majority of us will be able to tune it out, but the ones that don’t… those are the dangerous ones.  

Megs closes her eyes, unsure of what else to say.  After a few moments she hears Suzy’s voice float across her mind*  

Suzy: I’m back and got what we needed.  Hope everything is ok on your end…

Megs:  I - I need some time to think.

Gabe:  You can have all the time you want, sweetheart, after I get you somewhere safe.  

Megs: *looks up at him, unable to believe what she’s hearing* I beg your pardon?

Gabe: You can’t go back to him.  It’s too dangerous for you.  You’ve already spent far too much time –

Megs: *her eyes flash angrily at him* You know what?  Fuck you.  Who are you to show up after all this time and claim to want to protect me?  You won’t even come near me!

Gabe: Sweetheart –

Megs:  Fine.  I’ll go with you… but you have to come get me.  *she stands up, folding her arms over her chest as she waits.  He also rises, but it becomes clear he isn’t coming any closer to her,* That’s what I thought. *she blinks back the tears forming again as her anger hits a tipping point*. At least he's not a coward.  *she turns and heads back down the path, knowing, for once, he’ll actually keep his distance*