#let your heart be heard

[attorneys-against-court-violence]

Honestly, I really like that interpretation you laid out; that Phoenix treats Athena differently, because he realized that he fucked up with Apollo. I think on some level, Apollo would be glad for Athena's sake, but he'd also think that it doesn't change the past for him.

(And God, with Apollo's injuries and leave, it bugs me to absolutely no end how they go from saying he's suffered from injuries severe enough to re-hospitalize him after one of his wounds re-opens, but then like a day later he's 100% healed up)

Well, Apollo's the most anime protagonist of the bunch so him healing quickly isn't out of the question! If you can't come back to work the day after being hospitalised you might just not be fit to work at the WAA, buddy.

But yeah. I'd be constantly worried about him dropping unconscious from the myriad of physical trauma he's endured. I'm sure that was a concern for them but Athena especially being like "what do you MEAN a leave of abscence???" doesn't beat the asshole coworker allegations.

Athena definitely dodged a bullet by coming to the WAA when she did though. By that point Phoenix's loose ends were tying up and he'd already given Apollo the hard lesson. With how that boy turned out I'm not surprised Phoenix took a different approach with the one who suffers from full-on PTSD-induced shutdowns.

[ah-bright-wings]

Sound - A Triduum Story

Malchus can feel the heavy gazes of the others. He ignores them. His own eyes are pinned to the door they guard, listening to the drip of water condensing and dropping onto the floor. There is no rain, but the air is damp, as if the heavens are drawing out the wet stores of the earth in preparation for a storm. 

Customarily, the chill would make him wish for his bed. He’d grumble with his fellows about the weather, about the work, peppering complaints with a few stout curses. But there is no discussion tonight. Malchus sits hunched forward, forearms braced on his thighs, and he waits.

What are they waiting for?

Cold fingers touch the lobe of his left ear. He turns to see Jesse, who’d touched him, withdrawing, fingers curling into his palm. The apology is gruff. “Just wanted to see.”

That’s a lie, thinks Malchus, turning back to the door. They’ve already seen tonight. What’s left is to believe.

Malchus doesn’t ask permission before he rises, taking the flask which hangs on a wall hook, and the keys there beside it. The eyes of the others follow. He unlocks the door and slips in, shutting it behind, and then pauses, palm flat on the wood. He takes a breath. 

Drip.

Drip.

The Nazarene’s hands are chained so that he must stand. His head bows, forehead resting against the bruised back of his right hand. He lifts himself when Malchus enters. His lips, which had been moving silently, still.

Malchus holds out the flask. Then, as an embarrassing afterthought—the man is in chains—he uncorks it. 

“It’s just water,” he assures when the man doesn’t move to drink. He tips the flask close enough to meet the cracked lips. The Nazarene swallows twice and then pulls back, chains jingling. His face is wet. Tears, Malchus thinks, until he hears the drip of water dropping onto the man’s head. It slides down his temple and dirty cheek, carving a clean track through the crust. Malchus re-corks the flask.

It’s not quite fear that he feels. He had felt fear on his knees in Gethsemane, blood down his neck and a howl on his tongue. The world was silent, then, and shrieking, dizzy with pain and the terror of new loss. When strong hands cupped his face, he clung to them. He grabbed hold of words he could not hear but lips he could see moving, breath he could feel on his face, brown eyes he could see.

And then, he could hear. 

It was as if he’d never before heard sound, not true sound, but only echos, half-formed, half-heard, until that very moment when he heard truly. Each noise was crisp and new. Around him were the night birds stirring in the trees, the puffed breath of the disciples, the crackle of licking flame, the creak of leather belts. He heard them all, and he hasn’t stopped hearing since. Creation is vibrating, uncountable voices overlapping in the same tremulous song. Even the breeze seems to have a voice, and the water running on stone. Even his own heartbeat. They cry out when the rest of the world is silent.

“What did you do to me?” Malchus asks, voice barely above a whisper, for everything is new and he cannot make sense of it. 

The Nazarene’s smile isn’t mocking. It’s as quiet as his voice, and it crinkles the corner of his good eye. “I know how long you’ve waited to hear.”

They’ve never met, of course. Of course not. This man doesn’t know him. How could he? Malchus has taken great pains to hide his gradual loss of sound. Each year, the muffle covers his ears a little more, stealing his senses, deadening the world to him. If he misses a call, he plays it off. If he cannot hear his wife calling, he feigns captivation by his task. He does it well, he thinks, well enough. Perhaps his wife suspects. But only he knows, only he and his God. And this backwater Nazarene with an accent pulled from Galilee’s fishing waters—because Malchus can hear the accent now—cannot know Malchus. How could he? No, he does not.

But he knows. 

Malchus is sure, standing before this man who made him more than whole, that he is known. Known, and known truly. And here stands Malchus, his jailer. His enemy.

“How could you know?” he asks, eyes searching the Nazarene’s. The water drips, drips. A rat scritches at a bit of stone. “I can’t do anything for your case. They’re bringing you to Pilate.” His grip tightens on the flask—his only offering—and the stale water it holds. The words pour out of him. “I’m a guard. They told us to go, so we went. I had no stake in it, see? See, we were told to go. I was told to go. I never intended—”

“Malchus,” the man says softly, almost fondly, as if he is interrupting a brother and not one walking him to his death. “Will you pray with me?”

The request startles Malchus out of his own thoughts. He pauses, wary of some trick. Without meaning to, his hand rises to touch the warm outer shell of his ear, tracing the connecting point between the cartilage and his skull. There’s not even a seam to show where it had been severed.

Mouth dry, Malchus finally nods, and the Nazarene closes his good eye. The water slides again down his temples. His words fill the damp space, and Malchus recognizes them at once, joining the recitation:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked shall I return.

The Lord gave—”

The man breathes in, and Malchus breathes with him.

“—and the Lord has taken away;”

Their breath stirs the stale air of the room. All has finally gone quiet. The Nazarene opens his eye and tips his head to look up, past the stone roof, past the courtyard and the trembling earth, to the heavens, spread out over them like a tent. The water no longer falls. The rat is silent. 

“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” he says.

[patroclusdefencesquad]

i think sam reid could play achilles. i think he could do it

[found--family]

am i the only one who sensed some jilted lover vibes from jensen? 

[whiteshipnightjar]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOANNA NEWSOM! 🥳️💖🥳️ January 18th, 1982

“If you were a world leader, what would be your first law? Gravity. I feel like we need to tighten up the constitutional protections that particular law enjoys. It’s a ticking time bomb, if you ask me. Who would be your top advisers? Cute angel on one shoulder, cute devil on the other.”

[moonfromearth]

[girlcrushau]

[ragnar0c]

Absolutely criminal. Lesbian visibility week and I haven’t posted nearly enough Alope. She’s a lesbian. LOOK AT HER (thumbnails) more rendered part 2 later lol

[ikishima]

.

[everysongineverykey]

genuinely how can you listen to mother love by queen and not come back a changed person.

[attorneys-against-court-violence]

This may be a mess, and I could very well be viewing this wrong, but here it goes.

I'm not sure if how Apollo's character has been handled in not the best way comes down to the change in writers/gamerunners or not, but I can't think about it for too long without being frustrated.

In AJ:AA, he was at least allowed to be outright resentful towards Phoenix for the bloody ace debacle as well as jerking him around with no regard to his feelings on the matter, which is something Phoenix NEVER apologizes for. Then Phoenix gives that nice little promise to Thalassa on how he'll look after Apollo because he grew fond of him.

And then Dual Destinies happens, which is where the meat of my complaints take place.

Apollo's best friend has been murdered and all the evidence is pointing towards another friend of his. He had serious injuries from the courtroom bombing and then got assaulted not long after. On a way more minor note, everyone's dunking on him and roasting him constantly, and *tinfoil hat moment*, he sees how differently Phoenix treats Athena compared to him. And outside of lipservice comments about what all he's been through, no one outside of Athena and Trucy truly seems worried about him.

Apollo takes his leave of absence, and everyone's reaction is basically the Surprised Pikachu Face meme.

That made me want to hit my head against the wall, because what the fuck did they expect? He's still recovering from his injuries, his BEST FRIEND was murdered, and he doesn't trust Phoenix to help find the truth. What did they really expect him to do? Maybe it was just bad writing, but I'm not sure.

In a similar vein, when Apollo is confronted with Nahyuta and Dhurke coming back into his life, it's treated as yet another thing to make of him about, despite him clearly not wanting to talk about them and having trauma/negative feelings associated with them. He's left in the dark YET AGAIN when it comes to Maya's kidnapping (I do like that he called Athena out on this), Dhurke DIES and no one besides Nahyuta seems to care about how it affects Apollo. Then he decides to leave the WAA for good in SOJ, everyone's clamoring for him not to go, and I'm just like, are you fucking kidding me?

Then Phoenix comes out of fucking nowhere with his "I'm so proud of Apollo" platitude, RIGHT AFTER Apollo found out that Phoenix considered him to be untrustworthy and unreliable. This is coming from a man who has used him and hid so much from him.

I love Ace Attorney, and God knows I love Apollo and his trust issues/trauma, but I wished they were properly acknowledged.

Laid out like that, yeah - most people are major dicks to Apollo most of the time. Props to Beanix for taking that uppercut on the chin - he deserved it - but that's only the beginning.

I think I've complained about how the WAA - Phoenix and Athena mainly - treat Apollo when he announces his leave of abscence. The last case he was meant to be a part of, he was blown up badly enough to need full-body bandages, passed out because of his wounds, then got hit on the head by a rock that could have just as easily killed him... and they still chew him out for leaving. I get that their focus is on him straying from the path of unconditional trust that Phoenix set up. But the man has suffered physically and lost the one person in his life he could confidently say didn't have anything to hide from him (Clay); they should not be surprised or offended in the least!

The "Phoenix treats Athena very differently from Apollo" point I have seen and I do agree with it. I do think it comes from Phoenix seeing a bit of himself in both of them and reacted in opposite directions based on his current situation. Maybe he decided to be softer on Athena because he realised he made a huge mistake with Apollo, but it doesn't seem to translate to treating Apollo that much better until he sets his mind right about Clay's death.

I guess when you've survived falling off a burning bridge into a running river, you forget that people can still be grievously hurt and might need to take time off work to heal!

That could have been an easy way to keep their concern without making them look like dicks. Phoenix could be the one encouraging a leave of abscence for the sake of recovering from the physical and psychological damage Apollo has endured, only to find he's instead fueling his own paranoia while ignoring his injuries. It's the fact that Apollo is practically torturing himself for this that should be the main source of worry, not that he's taking time off from the office at all.

Not that they aren't concerned about his mental well-being, it just comes across that like they're treating "leave of abscence" as a resignation at best and a mutiny at worst (it's neither of those things, Apollo would still be an employee under a leave of abscence).

Yeah. Yeah. The WAA's attitude around Apollo's leave really does bug me.

[x-ladydisdain-x]

My biggest pet peeve is people who brag about being bad cat owners like it’s funny

[mobius-m-mobius]

I'm not sure if it's true. But I heard mobius is gonna be in deadpool 3.

Your guess is as good as mine anon, I've actually heard the opposite but at this point am just along for the ride wherever it happens to be going 😅😂

Honestly completely fine either way because if Owen's filmed a cameo then I'd never turn down the chance for Mobius, but at the same time it's hard to sort of reconcile where he was and very likely still is after the finale with anything along the lines of the tone of Deadpool 3?? Not to mention I also don't want him turned primarily into the inevitable comic relief that seems to await a majority of characters in the MCU so it's hard to look towards the film verse when continuing the TV series would be such a perfect format to expand on instead, season 3 rescuing Loki from the tree followed by case solving through time and space when please 🙃

[redjaybathood]

Every fucking westerner, and easterner, and both southerners and northeners too, on this god forsaken website, who said anything at all about how the world manages to discern politics from art for Ukraine but not other nations or ethnicities, based on, idk, Russians being banned from Eurovision which is surely because Ukrainians are white, and not, you know, the full-scale invasion that happened in the ninth year of Russian war against Ukraine, the ninth year of my hometown being occupied, and is still ongoing, and is a real fucking genocide on the scale unseen in Europe since WWII or Serbia, owes me, personally, to donate to a charity of their choosing:

Donate to Come Back Alive Foundation (life-saving defense)

Donate to Leleka Foundation (life-saving medical supplies)

(do not, under any circumstances, donate to Red Cross)

[milf-harrington]

i will never be mad at or blame my sister for the situation she has been forced into, but i will forever be frustrated with our family for the responsibility thats been shoved onto me

"he'll have a village" my ass, he's got two mentally ill siblings and a FIFO worker who are all in their 20's

[oatbugs]

i can feel every single nerve and organ and bone inside my body. an exercise in emptiness: what will the next thought in your head be?