#r. tbd

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont’d from here }

And he says many things, this forked tongue, this sceptre wielder. And the shadow machina, the kindred soul, mirrors his posture, and pillars into helm and cowl, muscle and bone. Solid as his armor. A knight whose hilt was dusted with the stars from his travels, as of yet forgotten.

"I am of Ren.”

Gentle the voice. Gentle yet stern. Certain. Warped beneath the helm, the flesh cupped like ripe fruit within it. Still firm, sockets moonless, beset by eyes that still see in the simplest terms.

"I seek war." He raises his hand to grab the words through the ether and crush them. "No- I seek the thing that bubbles beneath war before it breaks."

The face he wears remains placid, semi-silver under the light and in places where its lattice still glares defiantly, a durasteel shield against that cutting glance.

Gods would grin.

A ghost paces the skein of the black sea. Places [his] hand on the mast.

-This conversation, game to [Set.]

Another wandering Kylo Ren's mind's eye. Kylo Ren. The name- among the many -Set doesn't get from this monolith. He receives little from the Ren but curiosity. Even as the god sinks his mighty canines into Ren's shadow tongue, the naked eye can barely catch the body twitch- which-

Perhaps gods like riddles.

-Games that will wound [you]

-Flaying games.

"There is no story." Ren straightens. The helm glares. "I am, and I become."

@acexval

[nexahexagon]

The Realm doodles of Sneeg and Ros!!

[kylo-wrecked]

Thanks for the heads up.

Ben receives the platitude about how the corporate world corrupts and groans. Pauses, waves at someone slipping by in chaise lounge green.

When you get here

It's settled, then. He makes his escape—

on me—

hair on his nape prickling, but arrived. Not entirely sure where, and spots Cullen in a booth, mop-curls backlit by red bulbs.

"I hope you don't drink with your students," Ben flouts from six feet and four inches above a saintly, expectant look.

He could send the tabletop flying the way he drops down on that cushion. Ben orders whiskey on rocks and the glass sweats in his hands.

"Okay. I’ve ‘sneaked’ away. I’m here, so, uh... well?”

Not everything has to be transactional. Ben has his suspicions, and his vices, and waiting is tonguing his whiskey and tasting ash.

@vitalphenomena

[ sms: Ben S ] Other people's expectations will drive you insane.

Cullen receives the text about not meeting—then sees the animated dots show up again at the bottom of the screen. He waits Ben's indecision out, has saintly patience about his inner turmoil.

[ sms: Ben S ] And not everything has to be a transaction. The corporate world corrupts you

Sigh. A carrot must be dangled.

[ sms: Ben S ] When you get here though first round will be on me

[spaceistheplaceart]

who wanna see designs for a magical girl PL au i made.

i was gonna wait until i had it super formatted but.... i just wanna get it out there hehe

[chatdae]

I'm watching ep3 of Yuri on Ice again and wow, Viktor having Yuuri skate Eros really is so fucking wild to me. On the one hand: reasonable choice. Viktor wants Yuuri to surprise the audience. He knows Yuuri can perform like this (cough banquet cough) and he knows that Yuuri capitalizing on this potential could win him the season.

On the other hand: oh my God. Does Viktor want to torture himself.

Listen: Yurio says Viktor was contemplating choreographies for himself during the past season. So, Viktor's been thinking about Love as a theme for himself. Man is 27. Everyone's asking him if / when he'll retire. He's considering his future. He's been thinking about love. He's considering his future he's been thinking about love He takes a season off, flies to Japan -- for Yuuri--,, he has Yuuri (who ran away from Viktor's flirting in ep2!) skate Erotic love. (aka the emotion he didn't return to Viktor during Viktor's first days in Japan ((aka an emotion that Viktor's been thinking about for a while (((aka an emotion Viktor believes Yuuri can pull off (because he's SEEN Yuuri pull it off (((at the FUCKING BANQUET where he flirted on Viktor THEN DISAPPEARED))))).

TL;DR this Russian knows how to pine.

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here }

Actions speak louder than words. They scream and throw consoles across the studio. They show up unannounced in Alexander Wang. They decide what is acceptable; that mouth-frothing is vogue. Ben wouldn't hide his teeth for forty million dollars and a little respect. 

"I am an asshole," he replies sadly.

Leaf and Ben are different animals. His fans are as rabid as he can be, sharing one heart, one pumping unit on the fritz. Her fans put her heart in a glass display like a prized Barbie. Collectors that play with yarn and cotton. What they have in common are parasites.

Ben's cambers on his left shoulder—yeah, no, that's a knit headband crowning Leaf's skull in this backroom party of two and change, its mere presence coconut creaming the mala. Gross.

“’亲爱的(?)’ " 

His pronunciation is competent, evidenced by long tours through Singapore and Beijing, a past getaway to Guangzhou that led to their manager's untimely spiritual demise. 

And speaking of death. 

"If you pretend you like me, someone might notice." That's not a smile teething the glass rim. "Can't have that."

That's yet another beast.

Ben tongues wine like a cat. Eyes glittering with devil's mirth and a dusting of snow. His seasonal ~fun~ isn't yet habit— isn't yet something Condé Nast and its subsidiaries find tantalizing. He's not yet been burned like the KoR Grammys he'll toss in a fire, palladium with black-ochre edges. There are more delicious rumors. Murmurings that circle fruit baskets and moons of pâté. Wrapped in gold leaf. Right here in this chamber. 

'Mr. Adele' waves off Leaf's fleas. Her company, her entourage. Whatever they are. He's here for her.

"Can't prove what's not true, baby," Ben says, almost as bad as the wine. Acidic. Wan. Drinkable nevertheless. Leaning too close, spilling his scent, juniper, a hint of Hong Kong cigarettes. Searching her face. "Come on, don't be boring. You bother me when you're boring." 

Mr. Double-Platinum yields a coy blade from his Swiss army arsenal of angles, slicing Leaf up and down with a gaze. He's gone platinum again and could be a braggart, but that's not why he's here.

Yes, yes. Why here, why now? He's here for Leaf. He's here because everything is happening right now. He's here because he can be wherever he wants, because his presence is inlaid into the natural order, like a storm.

@t34dious

[bunnysnared]

OKAY sorry for wips and i am way too shy to tag.. iykyk.. but i just need to scream in to my pillow so to speak. them ⋆ ˚。⋆♡

[morganadismay]

unexpectedly spent the majority of this christmas break progressing on my quest of writing my terry pratchett style gay little arthuriana stories

[orpheuslament]

starting a collection

[wid0wd-archived]

anyway ... the way it doesn't matter if your name is james or steven, your hair WILL be red ( courtesy of one miss romanova )

[avrorean]

2 cents, being critical of the writers below the cut <3

Epler makes it SO easy to shit on him for making very tangible beef with the fake pixel man he was paid real human dollars to write, but it often goes unremarked that Weekes has been very loud and very public since Inquisition that they do not see the dalish or the elves a whole as indigenous, oppressed, or have any connection to the real cultures they've been very obviously influenced by since the first book and the first game. That they "could be analogous, but because those cultures don't have evil mage kings, I don't see it that way". And in the same vein, they've been very defensive on behalf of Andrastianism.

like. it's there in the bones. you kinda can't get away with a "fiction=/=reality" standpoint when the personal bias of the writers is driving the story. This is the game we have and what we have to sift through, but engaging with it critically like we aren't afraid to do with past games I think should be kept in mind.

[arobinwithoutbatman]

“All of that cake and I don’t even get to have one serving of it? Damn, you’re really depriving me out here, aren’t you?”  😭

Tim didn't say much, not until he'd found a closet to pull them both into and pulled Steph against him. His lips claimed hers, furious, messy and quick, hands settling respectfully at her waist.

"Wanted to do that all night."

It's a damn good thing he's not the host of this gathering, some other rich fuck was, it meant he could easily sneak away with his girlfriend and drop the polite Drake mask for a short while.

"If we didn't have to go out there again, I'd mark up that pretty neck of yours. I swear, you picked this off the shoulder neckline just to rile me up."

[dotsunflowers]

thinking more about disability in severance, and Bassam Sidiki's article about s1 now that we are at the midpoint of s2

Sidiki writes about the severance procedure as a process of capacitation — "If memory or nostalgia is a form of disability that capitalism both produces and shuns, then Mark’s traumatic memory of his dying wife is a problem that must be rectified [...] The home itself is a liability—nay, a disability—of capitalism"

in s2 we see how this analysis also applies to dylan, who's outie has various obligations and pressures beyond work (a relationship with his wife, caretaker of his children, needing to be able to secure health insurance for his family) and has had trouble maintaing employment. one aspect of the severance procedure for him is a capacitation — these pressure are removed, and he excels at his job in MDR

historical legal definitions of disability were defined by level of capacity for work — Sidiki notes that in US "Social Security law, “disabled” refers to someone who cannot engage inwork activity due to medical reasons" and that historically, "Because disabled bodies are not as exploitable to capitalism as nondisabled ones, they are shunned, segregated, and isolated from the workforce."

by attempting to remove disability, then, Lumon is attempting to make non-disabled workers that are exploitable in practically every way. they don't entirely succeed in this, though, as we see in season 1.

disability still finds a way in. the environment itself is disabling (see helly s1, esp. eps 4 & 5). outie!irving's disruptive tactic is to disable his innie by making it so he experiences overwhelming fatigue, so innie!irving can't help but sleep on the job. as soon as Lumon makes one slip and lets the outie/home world in (dylan ep 6), dylan can't think of anything else. he has been discapacitated.

and this is how the seeds of a rebellion (the OTC) are sown.

and so all of them have now gotten glimpses of their outside worlds.

and so (tl;dr) that's what i'm thinking about, in season 2. now that innie!irving has been killed. now that all of them have experienced the outside world, puncturing holes in lumon's capacitation experiments. now that all of them are dealing with various new traumas.

now that outie!mark has fully decided to mess with the system — and in order to do so, now finds himself with a live-in brain surgeon and pillbox full of daily meds.

yes there is plenty to say about a season touted as the adolescent season, touted as featuring not just romance but love triangles and quadrangles and shapes we've never seen on tv before.

but is this also the season of letting disability/disabling factors in? of our bodies are not meant for this system? if individualism won't save us? if we need to try and understand interdependence and precarity and entropy rather than lean away from it?

[kylo-wrecked]

There he was again, the man. Ben recognized him, stranger though he was. He'd appeared suddenly, too suddenly. Sure, Ben paid scant attention to his surroundings (he was more loping through his mind than Central Park East), but their happenstance meeting here felt a little too dreamlike. Ben stopped short of the curb with the weight of an incubus on his chest and a sour ball in his stomach.  

He couldn't remember the man's name. Ben remembered his face, the blond dollop of hair. The expectant air about him. He'd have recognized his teeth from several yards down this paved path. But those, that. That could only have been a dream. 

They'd crossed paths a few times now. What was his name? At Strand bookshop, which seemed a likelihood since they'd met, where? At some literati function on Frankin Avenue. It'd been too hot that night, the reading room overcrowded with heat and bodies. They were crushed into the corner bar-top arm-to-arm. Ben's brow was damp, and he was on drink three. The other man seemed cool in the city stew, wore sunglasses and an easy smile. He joked about the tight squeeze. What had he said? 

He'd offered to buy Ben a drink, and Ben had shrugged it right off his cotton shoulders. Oh, no. No thanks. The dark, rooty aperitivo was his third and final. 

Ben wasn't used to getting looks like that from—anyone? 

Men. 

Then the nightmares began, and Ben saw him again. Well, not all in that particular order, but sort of. At Strand and in his sleep. The dreams were always woven in the same fashion, with lurid alterations here and there. Mouths meeting mouths when they shouldn't, mouths where mouths shouldn't be. Existing in places they shouldn't. He'd wake in a cold sweat, revulsed by himself. 

No, this was not for his therapist to know. Ever? He thought, oddly, now as he willed himself to see if the man had moved. The lamp-posts bloomed as he sauntered over. Their light didn't comfort Ben one iota. In a sense, the yellowing orbs made the moment too real.

Ever. 

Freeze mode chose for him. No, Ben only swallowed and waited in vain for his Chucks to take his feet somewhere up or down this hex-paved road. 

They did no such thing, of course. And Ben was a 6'4" pillar of nerves digging the hard-bitten crescents of his nails into his palms' heels. 

"Uh..." was all he managed. It was such a failure of sound, he could've laughed. 

@eyeless-smiles

[kylo-wrecked]

When Kylo fumbles the saber for the second time, he stops training and finds a place to look at his hands. Holds them up to his face under the lights of a Chandrila balcony constructed an age before his grandfather’s. They shake.

He closes his eyes, follows his breath like a path before him and knows he feels fear, a film of sweat that isn’t his; yet, somehow, relief washes through his center. The release is one of ritual, and spilled blood, the insistence of time, that it must move forward. 

Snoke is dead. Cleaved in two by a sword of ash; his failure of Order. Kylo rises, possessed by the absence, eyes blind to panels burning in the teeth of white domes, the black sea shimmering with starship beams. Body numbed to the fresher’s efficiency, stomach and balance indifferent to speeder travel, the weight of armor, and the stenches of war.

He arrives like the silence after a storm. His presence is a ghost aboard a conquered district; the eastern seaboard bloodied, ragged, and burned, then sanitized with imperial spaceports. Those whom the helm passes fall quiet. And Kylo Ren is silence, cloaked. Watching Kai wonder under pillared silhouettes; sharing in her uncertainty. 

Would she- will she- kill him, too? How very interesting it would be to feel that stillborn attempt in his ribs like a knife. Cinders spit in his heart; it is the first thing he’s felt since Snoke’s death.

Turn around.

He doesn’t care that his voice haunts her skull. Kai’s eyes are wolf’s eyes, flickering in Chandrila’s last shadows. Death moves within her. The Ren without her, expunged and ectoplasmic, dulling their bond.

Kylo presses the release valves on his totem; his vigil hisses and lifts from his crown of dark hair. Seaspray covers their voices from the night watch. 

“What did you do?” 

His jaw twinges at Kai's approach, the youth in his face set in a grave bust. Hardened and wary with right arm over his helmet and left forefinger curled toward his hilt. His eyes tell a different story—Kai has only to look to see understanding. She has only to look to see fury.

@ofthestcrs

Her hands are shaking. Splattered red. An imitation of a beating heart prepared to burst. Her eyes watered with tears at the violence she had caused. She should be happy. She thinks. She should be proud. Killing the most powerful man in the galaxy should be considered an honor. So then why does she feel so empty?

Her feelings are tossed to the backburner as troopers enter the throne room. She turns from the carnage and looks to their blasters. She expects to die, because isn’t that what she deserves? But then they drop their weapons and bow down on one knee. Her quivering lip stills. Her eyes filled with both tears that burn her scraped up cheeks and hesitation.

“Supreme Leader Snoke is dead.” Her voice seems like it comes from someone else. “Killed by the resistance.” The lie slides off her tongue and tastes like bile, but they believe. “Have the men clean up the body and prepare a small funeral. The war truly begins now.”

It’s so easy to blame someone else. Even if it makes her stomach turn. She knows what she did. She knows that she’s guilty. Even as she goes to her quarters and scrubs at her skin. Even when the water turns clear again. She knows. She doesn’t know what else to do. She knows not who to turn to. Until she thinks of him. Kylo. Ren. One but two and the same and she has to see him.

He’ll understand.

It’s easy enough to get her ship ready. Easy enough to find him on her lonesome. When she steps off the ship, she knows he knows she’s come to see him. Could he feel it? The way the force bent and weaved from the violent death? She knows he knows. They know.

She doesn’t bother with the helmet. Smashed it to pieces in her bedroom. Her fingertips covered in bandages from the cuts it bred. It doesn’t matter. All that matters now is seeing him.

Kylo, where are you?

@kylo-wrecked

[akunaa]

bode's love language is towering over u — and getting u anything from the top shelf, picking u up with only one arm like u weigh less than 1lb, making u amazing home-cooked meals bc he's absolutely Husband Material, and being great with kids — be it his own cute lil kid, the future kids u have with him, or the children he teaches bc he's a school teacher :-)