#stupid problems require stupid solutions

[wunderflammer]

Whenever I'm faced with a really talkative colleague, I am just tempted to give them a big chunk of ice with fruit in it or a pumpkin stuffed with raw meat because like, obviously you're not getting enough enrichment in your enclosure and now it's become my problem.

[dirt-str1der]

Hirose is genuinely the coolest grandpa ever

[gideonisms]

today my bike I have had for 7 years got stolen so I was really upset and called or went to every pawn shop on my side of the city then came home and realized I hadn't eaten at all throughout the day and I'm bleeding into my clothing (normal monthly blood). well. :/

[autogeneity]

good lawwwd my maths is rustyyyyy

[homunculus-argument]

My motto in a lot of things is "stupid problems require stupid solutions". For one, it takes me an unreasonable amount of mental effort to wrangle myself to take a shower, because the ferret operating my brian goes "nooo, not the wet box, it takes forever in there >:C" and it doesn't like being wet.

So to compromise how to take a shower without it taking as much time and involve as much Being Wet as it normally would, I will instead wash my body without getting my head wet (hair is dry, therefore we are Not Wet), and then later on wash my hair and face in the sink (body is dry, therefore we are Not Wet).

Because somehow, taking a five minute body-washing-shower at one time of the day, and taking five minutes to wash my head in the sink separately later, is easier and more efficient than just taking one single ten minute shower.

[long-live-astronerd-ghost-king]

DPxDC prompt: Danny is Chronos' first child.

Well, not his first child biologically, to be completely honest.

It just so happened that the Phantom very often helped/helps/will help Clockwork at different times and his presence next to the titan required an explanation.

And the opportunity to call Zeus a little brother is worth a lot, right? So when the Ancient came up with this idea Phantom did not resist just to have such a pleasant bonus from their cooperation.

However, in the time of the gods and heroes, such a solution was not a problem. But in modern times, when Phantom tries to attract as little attention as possible in order to graduate from university, such relatives are more likely to cause a lot of problems.

~~~~~

Wonder Woman: Uncle Danny?

Superman, who wanted to chase away a teenager serenely strolling through still smoking battlefield, turns to Wonder Woman, who is waving affably at excactly this guy.

Well, Fenton honestly happened to be in Fawcett City by accident, and it just so happened that by chance it was on this sunny and cloudless day that the villains decided to cause riots worthy of the attention of the founders of the Justice League.

Danny: Diana! My dear, it seems like we really haven't seen each other not for a long time! In what century was it? Ah, I honestly, I barely remember it... The speed at which children grow up defies the laws of time. I mean, look at you! Your mother must be so proud. How's Dad? Still not paying child support, arrogant bastard?

Wonder Woman: Oh, uncle, please. I'm all grown up now, don't worry about me.

Danny: Hm, well, let's get back to this question later. I didn't want to embarrass you in front of your friends. Anyway, would you like to introduce them, little princess?

Wonder Woman: Of course, meet Kal El, Batman, and Shazam. The rest of the guys have already returned to our base. Would you like to...

Danny: Ooh, you're talking about, um... What do you young people call it? The Justice League, right? During my youth, the heroes rarely united and mostly performed all the feats alone. It's good that you help each other, kids.

Danny flies up a little to pat Superman and Batman on the head.

Under the Diana's gaze full of hope that they will get along with her uncle, the men do not move.

In the background:

Red Hood and Robin who used to hang out with Danny near the Lazarus pits: *sounds of seagulls dying of laughter*

~~~~~

Flash: So you're Diana's uncle?

Danny: Yes, call me Danny.

Flash: Cool, cool...

Danny: What does the temperature have to do with it? Do you need ice? Let me make some for you.

Flash: No, it's like,um, I didn't know that Zeus has a younger brother with that name. So, it's good to know?

Danny: Hmm, thanks. Many people tell me that I look quite young, hah. But actually I'm his older brother, so...

Flash: Older? Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to disrespect.

Danny: No, it's all right. It's "cool". I rarely appear on the pages of your human myths and legends, I know it. After all this business about Chronos devours his own children, my father punished me for a long time. So, yeah...It's a funny story.

Flash: Punished for what? How?

Danny: Uh, sitting in a room at a time when there is no Internet or electricity is not fun at all. You see, I just didn't want a younger brother or sister because I was afraid that my parents would pay less attention to me. So, I made up this stupid prophecy and persuaded Gaea to tell it in order to remain the only child in the family. My father would never have thought that I would decide to kill him, that's why...Phah, it's just a bad family story. In 10 thousand years, we'll all laugh about it.

Flash: Yeah, that's... funny.

~~~~

Danny *is woken up by an emergency call from the League at three in the morning, although he fell asleep at two o'clock* (he gave his contact so as not to upset his niece): I knew this would happen! I knew it!

~~~~

Billy Batson *stands in his human form in front of the Justice League and doesn't know what to say*,*sweating nervous*.

Danny *enters the hall*: What's up, mortals, Diana and...Batman? My father said that there is something that I have to be here for. Oh! Well, at least someone in this family is also a shapeshifter. Have you decided to make a younger form so that your uncle doesn't feel lonely? What a good boy! Usually everyone is so afraid to seem like children, once they turn a couple of centuries old. Ah, youth~

Billy: Yeah, I decided to..experiment? and it seems I got stuck by accident.

Danny: It's okay, Uncle Danny will help you. Come on, let's go...

~~~~

Danny *teleports them to the Fawcett City*.

Billy: ....

Danny:

Billy: Hey, I'm still stuck!

A new portal opens and a man in a purple cape hands Billy a note. "Go to Constantine. P.S., my son always completes all assignments only by half, sorry." written on it.

Billy: Oh... OoOhHh!!!

~~~~

Meanwhile, Constantine, who is forced to do additional work: Son of a bi... beloved and respected Master of Time.

Danny: Yeap, that's me.

Constantine: Damn it. Couldn't you just let Batman adopt him like in other timelines?

Danny: And where's the fun in that?

[weirddogsightings]

i watch the episode bad mood whenever i’m in a bad mood not because there’s anything special about this episode that gets me out of a bad mood (other than it being a pretty fun episode) but because i think it’s funny

[orderforbrian]

stupid selkie problems require stupid selkie solutions

(also heres how the baby seal sounds)

[Start ID: Jon and Martin in a selkie AU. Jon is a Persian man with dark, grey streaked hair, a beard, and glasses. He wears a plaid scarf and lined jacket. 1st panel: Jon looks disgruntled. Text above says "POV: you lost track of your selkie husband and your kids are fussing to go home". 2nd panel: Text reads >use baby to call husband. Jon holds up one of their kids (who's a baby seal pup) up to the ocean. The pup cries out "Mwuh! Mwuh..." 3rd panel: Martin (who's a seal) pops his head up from the water and swim over. 4th panel: Jon arches his eyebrows at Martin, saying "So nice of you to join us", still holding the baby seal up. The baby looks down with dewy eyes and goes "muh" again. Martin blows a raspberry at Jon, sticking his tongue out. End ID.]

[dastardly-imbecile]

RIGOR MORTIS

AO3 HERE

Jealousy petty enough that you know it’s childish, but still, you look at Simon—always straight-backed, at attention, watching Price with something that approaches reverence, worship for the hands that shaped him from the great primordial mire and brought him to this glorious cage of esse—and you wonder what he has that you lack. --- As the good Doctor's research assistant, you must take care of both him and his monster. | Frankenstein AU OR this is all an excuse to make a throuple, isn't it?

---

Wordcount: ~7k

TW for dubious consent

The good Doctor Price likes many qualities of yours: your quick, nimble fingers, your obedience, your willingness to get down on your knees when he asks you to. Sometimes, you can delude yourself into thinking he also admires the quickness with which you pick up mathematics in science, how you can replicate the circuitry of a machine with a glance, how you can lean over his shoulder and whisper, timidly, the solution to an equation before he finishes writing it down. 

Most of all, though, you think he likes your ability to hold a skull by its decaying hair and suppress your gag. 

Certainly, at the moment, that’s your most useful skill. Price does not spare you a glance—only a murmured, “there, keep still,”—as he sews careful sutures into the space between head and neck. The head was taken from a prisoner’s cemetery—those executed via guillotine. You do not know what crime the man went under the blade for, but it doesn’t really matter, not anymore, not when his face has decayed to the point of being unrecognizable as human. A gaping hole where a nose would be, eyes picked apart by carrion birds, and lips peeled dryly back to reveal yellowed teeth in blackened gums. 

Not ideal. You tighten your grip around the remnants of his hair and try not to look at the maggot peering out from his left eardrum. Avert your gaze, examine the rest of his half-body. His chest is in marginally better condition—taken from some fallen soldier, muscles well-defined, if bruised. Hip narrows down to a sexless pelvis, lean legs that you do not know the origins of. No hands, wrists cut off in flat longitudes of bone and tendon and nerve. 

Price finishes the last suture. Looks at you with that characteristic pleased look that has your chin inching forwards, smile brightening. 

You’re not a stupid girl. He wouldn’t employ you if you were, no matter how much he likes you to act pliably obsequious. He knows that you know that, and he knows you love him most when he praises you for your intellect, not only the fineness of your features, not only the warmth of your mouth and your quiet, docile moments. 

All that and more runs through his head, easily read in his eyes, when he turns to you. Gestures a single calloused hand towards the severed wrists. 

“Find a good pair of hands for me, Pet. That’s all I need.”

You nod eagerly. This, you will do. In a world where your kind, those of the fairer sex, are either housemaids or whores, you’ll do anything to stay in this rare position—in which you are not only an assistant to a greater man, but sometimes his muse. Sometimes—during late nights, in which he’s hunched over some problem of physics and electricity, trying to puzzle out the supernatural intricacies of the biological—you sidle up to him, whisper a solution that has his eyes widening, and you feel like an equal. 

So you will serve. You will please him, however he desires ((even if you prefer when it’s tasks like these, and not those that require your other womanly wiles (though, you’ll never complain, in that case, either.))

—

You spend a month roaming the city streets, pattering over the rough brick inlays and listening for words of gossip. Doctor Price has given you a handful of money on top of your usual monthly stipend—in case you must do something so uncouth as bribe a mortician, as pay your way out of a constable’s scrutiny—and your hands fiddle with the clean, crisp bills. 

It is one of those weeks in which you are distant from each other, which is not necessarily bad. You endure plenty of long stretches of partnership, crammed into a lab from dawn to dusk, midday to midnight, until you cannot smell anything but formaldehyde and leather, cannot see anything but dancing numbers and the crook of his smile. The perennial cycle of the binomial must be naturally balanced out by reserve, by your brief detachment into singular units. 

He spends his days penning through stacks of papers and fiddling with beakers of chemicals, working through the more conventional of his experiments—those that he displays to his fellows at the international symposiums, those that aren’t contained and rotting in the cellar beneath the house. You spend your days flipping through newspapers, sitting in patisseries, watching the ebb and flow of life, trying to pinprick where it falters, where you can reach in and staunch the flow. 

Nights, he spends in his study, penning letters to his distant, faceless family. You pad through gated cemeteries, toe at the freshly-dug graves. Peer through the window of the morgue, cataloguing the bodies within; trail behind the undertaker’s cart, handkerchief held delicately over your nose. 

It is practically a carnival of hands, that week, a catalogue, narrows your view to a single pinpoint. Strolling through the market, you look not at the shopkeepers’ wares but instead at the conditions of their fingers. When a handsome gentleman stops you in the street, whispers at you some honey-steeped woo, you brush him off with a smile and an admiring glance at his manicured fingernails. Gloves and rings, wrinkles and wrists, all the intricacies of the human body distilled to twenty-seven bones and thirty-four muscles. 

More than anyone else would, you take the job seriously, which is another reason that Price keeps you under his wing. He’s told you, many times, that it is not the eyes that are the window to the soul, but instead the hands—you may know everything about a person in the space between those five fingers. The callouses and dirt of a laborer, the grease stains of a factory worker. Know the washerwoman by the lye-beget cracks, know the noble by the pristine skin, as smooth and pale as cream. Spot the restless with their fiddling fingers, the murderer with the flecks of blood beneath the nails. 

The hands of the common, you rule out immediately. Too rough, skin sloughed away to reveal bone, jaundiced and colored with the grime of a hard life. Head of a prisoner, chest of a soldier, legs of some unknown class, you want something fine, something unique, perhaps even noble, for this final piece of the puzzle. 

You consider, briefly, finding a woman’s hands—you like the leanness, the slender fingers—but no, the image of a man must be entirely preserved. Besides, you think Price may see that as a bit of a slight—as putting too much of yourself into his glorious creation, diluting it with a feminine soul. Eve needs Adam’s rib, but Adam eschews all but what lays between her legs, perfection already, beget by the hands of God. 

As the week ekes on, you get closer. A sewer’s hands, a painter’s, a jeweler’s—that last one, you almost take. The fingers are long and svelte, well-proportioned, and there is just the right balance of callous and burn, teetering on the edge between pampered and industrious. The type of hand that knows both the sting of the flame, the thrum of the saw; and the heavy weight of gold, the feeling of opulence in the palm. 

Almost. Almost, but you shy away at the last moment, some dim part of your mind whispering that you can find better. 

Sure enough, it is on the seventh day that you do. Price watches you leave the dwelling with the same light, good luck, as always, but you can smell the impatience brewing, even if it has not yet materialized. He found the head in two days, the chest in three—he understands the necessity of perfection, but does not always adhere to those values. Sometimes, you fancy yourself—if not a better scientist—then, a better artist, a better eye for purpose than function. 

So, you set upon the streets with a mission. It is not yet midday before you find it, find the body in the morgue—a surgeon, cold and pale upon the table. Young, for both his occupation and his death, perhaps a decade and a half over you, yourself. If pressed, you could not name a single feature of his face, not the color of his hair nor the hue of his eyes, whether he smiled in death or snarled or wept. 

There is another thing to focus on. 

You look, and you know that they’re perfect. 

A physician’s hands. As dextrous as the jeweler’s, perhaps even moreso, hands well-worked. Same balance of both worlds, but instead of burying themselves in fire and metal, these fingers have known the body. Have known the push of the liver and the warmth of the blood, have touched the womb from the outside, performed some perverse violation of the art of birth—leave the mother through nature and instinct, return with the cold precision of a scalpel and the impersonality of rubber. 

It fills you with a brief joy to imagine. 

There is, as well, a connection to Price that you think he will appreciate, if not consciously. Doctor maker, Doctor monster. On those sleepy fall nights in which he indulges in the bottle, he tells you, sometimes, about his family—always his cousins, nieces and nephews and siblings. Never a wife, never a child. The topic is always skirted around with a reserved sort of sensitivity, despite the fact that you’re sure he would have both, if he could, if there was not some unknowable obstacle. 

So perhaps you will not make the monster into a son, with these hands, but you will connect them in a way you think he’ll be pleased with. 

Acquisition is a far easier task than location, funnily enough. You slip the morgue’s night guard a fistfull of crinkled bills, a coy smile and the promise of more, if he waits. Spend a few hurried minutes sawing at the hands with one of the Doctor���s serrated blades—less bloody, this many days dead—and shove them into a burlap sack. 

When you return home, under the cover of night, you first change your clothes from the formalin-soaked gore, scrub your hands down, and proceed down to the bereavement lab, where you upend the bag’s contents upon the great white table. Arrange the hands neatly, five fingers all splayed out, and only then do you ring for Price. 

With careful anticipation, you watch his face as he crests over the stairs, as his eyes alight upon your gift. First a contained interest and then, as he draws closer, it melts into flat-out intrigue. When he stands before the table, lifts them up and turns them about in the light, and you babble something about doctors and meat and dexterity, he smiles, turns to you. Wraps a single hand around your neck to tug you closer, brush a kiss over your hairline. 

“Good, Sweet,” he murmurs, “I knew you could do it. Good.”

You bask in his praise, as you have always done. Meet his eyes, and without needing to be asked, sink down to your knees. 

The mixing of the flesh and the theoretical is not too uncommon for Price. When he’s not in the mood to hear your input—or, when the problem he’s puzzling out is too complex even for you—he sometimes likes you under his desk as he scribbles overhead, finding the derivative of cosecant while you find the same in the gleam of his shaft, the heavy weight against your tongue. 

“A moment,” he says, moving swiftly off to one of the great refrigeration cabinets lining the room. He opens it to extract, of course, the half-man, the thing that is lining up to become his magnum opus: frost clouding his limbs, vaster than any human man would have the right to be. 

Price’s been refining it, in the time you’ve been gone. The face is still scrappy, almost repellant to behold, but he’s grafted upon it some other soul’s aquiline nose, refined the lips and cleaned the teeth to just off-white. It is eyeless, but you don’t miss, upon the shelves, a jar with two white orbs suspended in gray-green formaldehyde. 

With a grunt, he hoists the limp body up, carries him to the table and drops him with a limp thud. As he grabs a long silver needle and a spool of suture thread, you undo the buttons on his pants, slowly ease them down. Move to his boxers next, fingers looping under the waistband to tug them away for ease of access. 

If it were not for the hardness of his cock, you would not have thought he was aroused at all. Above you, his hands move with the practiced ease of someone who is utterly focused—threading the needle in a single thrust, picking up the hand and lining it up with the wrist. You hum in satisfaction when you see that it’s a perfect fit. 

It’s that that finally pulls an iota of attention towards you. He reaches down with a languidness that approaches absent, buries his hand in your hair and pushes you gently forwards, until your nose bumps against the tip of his cock. 

Right. The time for your scientific contributions is over, for the moment. Now, all it is is the widening of your mouth, the movement of your tongue as you flick it over the slit, lapping up salty drops of precum. He moves his hand back up to the creature, but not without an approving sort of pat, as gentlemanly as one would do to a dog. 

You lean forwards, taking more of him into your mouth, until he hits the back of your throat. Give him a light suck, tongue running over the most prominent of the veins. With your own hands, you reach up to cup his balls, squeezing them as gently as one would an overripe fruit. Not the most appetizing of metaphors, but you’re not in the mood to think of something more palatable. 

As you close your eyes, tears trailing off the edges, pushing his cock further into your throat, you almost laugh to imagine what your mother would think of you now. Somehow, you suspect she’d be less distressed over the image of you on your knees than she’d be over the visage of you in a lab coat, hair done up and graphite stick in hand. 

“I’m almost through with this side,” Price says, and you take it as the cue it is—hold your breath, move forwards, sucking and licking as much as you are able, cup his balls in the way you know he likes, after a thousand other nights in the lab. As his hand above ties off the final knot, his stomach stiffens, and he lets out the only indication of enjoyment this whole night, a low grunt that quickly dissipates. 

You have no opportunity to do anything other than swallow, as he unloads into the hollow of your throat. Another moment of rapturous tension before you cannot take anymore, before you must eject yourself backwards, draw a desperate heave of air into your lungs. You look up at him, trying to catch his eye, searching for approval in this art of yours as well. 

He does not meet your gaze, but he does extend a hand down—it smells faintly of rot and alcohol, of the sharp and the dull comingling into one—and uses his thumb to wipe a stray tear from your cheek. 

“I can handle the rest alone,” he murmurs, “thank you, Pet. Get some sleep.”

Obediently, you stand, brushing the concrete dust from your skirt. Proceed up the stairs and leave him to the darkest experiments of mankind. Down a glass of water to cleanse your mouth—necessary, if you’d like your tongue to taste any sort of pleasant come morning—but still, you mourn that bit of reminder, the tactile proof that you are loved, if only in a half, twisted way. 

—

It is not until the end of the month, until the autumn season begins to slide into an entropic sort of winter, that you’re called back into the lab. Also not entirely unusual, though the span of time is longer than you’re used to—but you find other ways to amuse yourself. Go rummaging through the market for dresses that you’d never find an opportunity to wear, spend morning hours people-watching in cafes and readjusting your comprehension of the human body from the phalanges to the face. 

Otherwise, you get to exercise the intellectual side of your mind by maintaining Price’s experiments, balancing chemical pHs and feeding the lab rats, marking down long lines of decimal-counted data. Even grade the rare student’s paper, when it passes across your desk. You’re sure that they—these gilded young men, hailing from rich families in distant, green lands—would throw quite the fit, had they known a woman’s hand gave them that red-inked, merely satisfactory, but that’s part of the fun. 

In all that time, you hardly see hide nor hair of the Doctor. A passing in the halls, wherein you do not have enough time to note any of his features except for the bags beneath his eyes. Half of a meal, during which he hurries out midway through, and you pack up his dinner for the next day (and, a week later, must throw it out, because he never came back for it). A quick suck in his study, where he leaves before you’ve finished swallowing, and you must wash blood out of your hair, scrub the crimson handprints off your cheeks. 

The night he finally calls you down, the sky is midway through birthing a storm—lightning striking indiscriminately at the ground, thunder speaking tongues of the ancients to the cosmos. His facial hair is thick and unruly, and his lab coat looks as if he has spent the entirety of the past month sleeping in it, but you cannot help the excitement bubbling in you as you descend the stairs—all this dishevelment only speaks of better things to come. He only ever loses track of his carefully-maintained facade when there is something bigger to worry about. 

Below, the basement is far messier than when you left it. The air is wet and heavy, permeated with a haze of decay. Every possible surface is crowded with opened jars, pooling discolored liquid, tools coated in gore. 

Most obvious, though, is the body laid out across the white table. Wrapped around its limbs like coils of chain are thick cords of copper wire, all of which spiderweb out to long, rodlike structures. As you draw closer, you’re able to make out more of its features, and they tell the story of work. 

Its—his, you suppose—face has graduated from ragged to defined, bones shaved away in some places, augmented in others, patchwork skin grafted over the wounds. Hair threaded like a wig, some dirty-blonde color that looks too smooth for its host. 

The rest of his body hasn’t been spared alterations either. Already-muscled chest padded out to gargantuan proportions, biceps almost as large as your head—when standing, the man must near seven feet. All decay cut away, replaced to a corpse in pristine condition. 

You hide a small smile when you notice he’s barely altered the hands, if at all. 

“What is this?” You ask, as Price buzzes around the room, checking the wires, flipping switches in small black boxes. He turns to you, and you do not miss the half-manic look in his eyes. 

“The boundary,” he says, looking up as if he can see through the basement floor, “that has never once been breached. The recreation of life, as God never intended.”

You draw in a quick breath. 

“What can I do?”

He shoots you a smile. You cannot tell whether it’s fond or patronizing. Probably both, but you choose the latter. 

“Watch, Pet.”

Thunder booms overhead. He steps back, moving to the doorway. A moment—the pounding of rain, the aftershocks of a storm, the buzzing of indeterminable power—and then, the room lights up. 

Every cord of wire flares bright white, and the body upon the table begins to jerk, spasming and seizuring with a force that would crack a normal human’s spine. Price rushes forwards, places a hand upon the chest, and though you know the art of science—frog legs twitching at electric shock, exposed muscle convulsing with a bit of salt—it looks, for a moment like magic. 

Moreso, when the lightning fades, and the body is still twitching, when its head slams each cheek against the table and…

And it is the hand that moves first. The twitch of the fingers, breaking free from the stiffness of quietus—and then, they clench into a fist. Price steps back. 

It fills you with a horrible, heady sort of terror to watch. You stumble back, pressing a hand against the wall, as you watch what you feel humans were never meant to behold—the cleaving of the veil, the swing of the elbow and the slow opening of the eyelids, revealing the rutilence of half-life behind them. Your stomach churns, pushing nauseous bile up your throat, and you must turn, retch some vile green liquid onto the ground. 

Intellectually, you prepared for this—no good result could come out of six months of collecting corpse parts, after all—but it is different to watch, as different as voyeuring a murder versus feeling the knife across your own throat. If it hurts this much to watch, you cannot imagine how it feels to engender—to bring life back to the dead, to buoy along the soul like Charon and his ferry. It would have driven a lesser man mad, you suspect. John Price is not lesser. Nor, at times, do you think he is a man. 

Certainly, he doesn’t look the part now, wild-eyed and laughing and cursing all at once, spitting the language before humans knew languages up at whatever Gods he purloined this soul from. You shy away, despite yourself. 

Upon the table, both hands move in unison. Even Price backs away a step as, with the clumsyness of a newborn foal, the monster pushes himself up to a sitting position. You resist the urge to put a hand over your face as he looks around, head ticking slow as a clock’s hand. Some animal instinct kicks up in your hindbrain, archaic warning of predators before humanity divined gunpowder from the womb of the earth. 

He opens his mouth, closes it again. 

“...Where?” He croaks out, eventually, the word so mottled by disuse that you only translate it when Price answers. 

“Life,” he says, “you are alive.”

He tilts his head. Surprisingly innocent, childish, but then—you suppose that this man, large as he is, is an infant in the technical side of things, in the eyes of God, if God dares to peer at this small crescent of His earth. If you were Him, you would let this storm rage until forty days of inundation wash all traces of this from the land. 

“I… I. I am? Am?”

Above, the rain lessens. Looks like you have once again escaped the merciful wrath of your maker. 

“Simon,” Price murmurs, reaching out to brush a single finger down the space between his eyes, as one might anoint the holy with ash, “Simon.”

“Simon,” he repeats. Slowly, he turns, and the dully-rising dread peaks when his eyes land upon you. They are a strange, electric blue, as striking as the storm that birthed him. 

Price says your name, but you don’t hear it, caught in the nexus of those eyes. The monster repeats it as well, and it’s only when his scarred lips form the shape of your soul that you snap back into reality. 

“Your hands,” you say, swallowing past the lump in your throat. He looks down at them, as if he’d not realized he had these limbs. “I gave them to you.”

You chance a look at Price, afraid that he will anger at your presumptiveness—really, you only found them, it’s him who gave them—but all he does is nod, a paternal sort of pride painted clear on his face. 

“And I, the rest. Price. Doctor.”

“Doctor,” Simon says, and this one comes with a low, hungry sort of growl. You must concentrate on not letting your legs give out beneath you, not letting the rasp of his voice shake you to the core. 

—

There is much to do during winter—a deceptive amount, especially with the new addition to your household. In the early days of spring, Price tells you, he has a yearly symposium—the largest, the glitziest—and there is only one creation he will be presenting. 

And so, besides the normal jobs, now, you must contend with the monster stalking your home. At the best of times, Simon is unnervingly quiet, an unknowable presence that lurks in the corners of the house, watching you with those eyes like midsummer noon. At worst, he trails hardly a step behind you, hands so close that they brush the small of your back. 

Hard to tell which one of you he takes to more. Spends more time with you than Price, of course, but that is simply because you have been set to the task of glorified governess. Smarts at you, at times, because you know your skills are higher than teaching a half-man the alphabet, but he takes to it surprisingly quickly. By two weeks' time, he can tear through any book you give him, discuss it in that gravelly, halting voice (that is, if he deigns to speak, which is not often). Mathematics, similarly, he soaks up like a sponge—arithmetic in two days, algebra in a week, trigonometry by the end of the month and calculus in three. 

Sometimes, when you perch upon the plush chair in Price’s office, teaching him in one subject or another, he seems to be hardly listening at all—fixes that queer gaze upon you, hands fluttering like caged birds, like he wants to grab something, twist something, break something. 

Quite the contrast to his manner around Price. Him, he watches as well, but there is a shade of devotion to his gaze that is off what he gifts to you—he is utterly still and utterly proper, always a polite distance away, speaks when ordered to and seems to leave you by the wayside. It smarts at you in the same way that catcalling men do, that your crisp University rejection letter did—the idea that you are somehow, automatically lesser, that you do not deserve that same measure of respect despite your competence. 

Perhaps it’s loyalty to his maker—nothing personal. Still. You cannot help it if you’re a bit snippier, next time you’re instructed to teach him something as inane as the history of the Greek city-states. Cannot help it if you try to meet his gaze, which is both bright as flame, and dark, dull as pennies, avert your eyes almost immediately. 

Spring approaches. There is a strange, thrumming energy in the air that you cannot quite capture, no matter how many times you attempt to revert to homeostasis. Help Price in the lab, and he is there, standing in the corner with hands behind his back. Spend time for yourself, those rare snatches that you can flee into the city streets, and it simply makes his presence all the more suffocating, when you return home. 

One night, you seek some release of your own, huddling under your sheets and running a finger through the slickness between your legs, only to see the gleam of blue in the darkness, the shape of someone in the doorway. 

“Out!” You shriek immediately, bolting up, smoothing your nightgown over your thighs. It is not even so simple an issue as a casual glance—he must have opened your quarter doors, stood there for who-knows how long. 

When you complain as much to the Doctor, he simply hums in acknowledgement. Does not even bother to look up from his newspaper. 

“It’s his way, Pet. He watches. Doesn’ mean he knows what he sees.”

Your neck bristles, and you turn to see him standing a ways behind you, watching, listening. “Price, Sir-”

“Relax,” he says, “lock your door, next time, if it bothers you so much.” 

You know that it’ll be no use arguing. Don’t bother to say you did, don’t bother to point out whatever smug satisfaction radiates from his broad shoulders. 

It is as if you are a moth, and Price, your lantern, your light, has been dimmed. Sometimes, taken entirely. Strangely, you find yourself missing those quiet moments in which he’d take his pleasure from you—now, all his time is monopolized by the hulking creature. Wherein once you would have had a brief snatch of free time, now, he stands in the lab and runs a magnifying glass over the expanse of his back, takes small samples of skin from his chest to biopsy in spinning machines. 

Jealousy petty enough that you know it’s childish, but still, you look at Simon—always straight-backed, at attention, watching Price with something that approaches reverence, worship for the hands that shaped him from the great primordial mire and brought him to this glorious cage of esse—and you wonder what he has that you lack. 

He plays into it too, you’re sure, though not sure enough that you can call it out without fear of appearing hysterical. Tilts his head up and exposes his neck in the way you know that Price likes, in the way that you perfected. Rasps quiet questions about his family, about his life outside the bounds of a lab, those that you have always wanted to ask, but have never mulled up the bravery to do so. 

When Price answers—muses on a childhood among the Swiss alps, talks briefly of some beguiling young love who he does expand upon—Simon fixes you with those eyes and you can swear he almost smiles. 

It all makes, of course, for a tense carriage ride to the Symposium, held in the center of Ingolstadt. You join, as you enter the city outskirts, many other carriages, all carrying scientists of varying ages and echelons, all carrying a menagerie of experiments. Tall machines of glittering copper that spin and squeal, animals with too many heads and too few limbs, anywhere on the spectrum from stark white to tar-black, great bushels of papers that are marked from top-to-bottom with lines of text crammed tightly as ants.

Price leads you through the streets with a hand upon your waist, the other wrapped around Simon’s arm. Two equal measures of possessiveness that somewhat shift your idea of the balance of power—he puts the same level of control over both of you, exerts it like a driver might the carrot and the stick, a scale balanced by a ton of feathers and a ton of hearts. 

The day of the Symposium is a blur of motion, sights and sounds and lights, until, suddenly—before you can even really think to process it—you are standing in the centre of a grand amphitheater, Price to one side and Simon to the other. His voice is strong as nails, carries to the edges of the space, as he details the process of resurrection—makes the act of the unholy into a simple recipe, a checklist of ever-increasing sins. 

It’s not until Simon steps into the limelight that the crowd gasps. Even without the necessary backstory, he is a striking sight—man of scar and gnarl, standing tall enough that he could hold the earth on his shoulders. Somehow, it puts him in a suddenly different light, than the one of half-vertigo, half-abhorrence—you can find traces of the grandiose in the space between his shoulderblades, see some ancient regality in the strongness of his features. 

He raises his hand as Price withdraws a long knife, so sharp that the edge is invisible. You bite your lip as he carefully steeples the blade against the skin and then draws a slash that has the crowd clamoring. Blood, red as jewels, seeps from the wound, but before your eyes, it closes, drawn tight by the suture of some invisible angel. 

After the dramaticism of the presentation, you flee back to your quiet room in the inn. Night falls, is long-past, by the time the Doctor returns—you’re sure he spent much of that time explaining the further intricacies of drawing life from the earth like thread from a spool. Simon, of course, trails behind him, but you’re gratified to see Price direct him into his own room. 

When he approaches you, you fall upon the bed, already assuming your position, eager to let him fill the ache that has had an entire season to fester. He does not, however, seek the warmth of your mouth—but, instead, undoes the clasp of his pants himself, and tells you, with a low voice, “undress.”

Your heart picks up pace. In all the five years you have served Price, he has taken plenty of climaxes in the warmth of your mouth, under the pressure of your fist. More rarely, has coaxed one out of you with the help of his fingers and his mouth. Only twice, though, has he truly fucked you—some hang-up that you have never questioned him about. Something that transcends the expected boundaries of the master-apprentice, the bounds of the illicit, and makes it into something that approaches a partnership. Puts you on the level of equals, somewhat, exposes a soft vulnerability that Price does not trust you enough to show. 

Today, though, you suppose he is exhilarated by a successful demonstration. Perhaps, also, on the glass of whiskey he no doubt had while talking business with his fellow men. In any case, it’s enough that, when you extricate yourself from his undergarments, he starts immediately upon your neck, sucking wet bruises into the skin. Moves to your clavicle, where he plants one right in the hollow center, and then down to your breasts, where his mustache tickets the sensitive skin enough for your nipples to harden. You wrap your hands around the back of his head—perhaps, the only time you have ever felt in control of this man—and allow him to take his measure from you. 

When his fingers dip into your slit, he groans. “Already, Pet?”

You can only whimper in response. When he withdraws from your breasts, you are suddenly near the point of shivering—but it only lasts a moment, as he lines up his cock with your hole, too desperate to continue his ministrations. Desperate for your gloved embrace, desperate for this to end—as with the previous two times he has had his fill of you, you can already sense that some vulnerable part of him is withdrawing into the darkness, that he is already half-regretting letting you take so much of him. 

When he thrusts into you, all that goes fleeing from your mind. He fills you to the brim, hips locked together, and though his kisses tastefully avoid your mouth, you take your pleasure where you can get it—this case, in the nips upon your throat, your earlobes. 

And then, everything freezes. 

The door to Simon’s room is open. He stands there, watching you with an unpracticed curiosity, and you freeze immediately, hands splaying against Price’s forehead and chest. 

“Stop,” you say, “he’s- he’s watching, he’s-”

Price doesn’t pause. Quickens, if anything, another powerful thirst that blows your words out from under you. Leans down, to whisper in your ear, “let him.”

When rapture washes over you, when your walls begin to stutter, and he pulls out to spray his spend across your stomach and breasts, your eyes are still locked onto Simon’s. 

—

Back at home, things are different, a buildup that escalates over the course of a week. Simon, now, does not only deign to follow—sometimes, you turn, to find him near-pressed to your skin, breath fanning out against the back of your neck. Dinners are somehow both more and less awkward—you are suddenly acutely aware of the balance of power in the room, the idea of the Doctor and his hounds. The hunter and the chaser, the killer and the lapdog. 

But you do not know what it is building up to—at least, not until you stand in your room, one hazy afternoon, perusing your books, and turn to find Simon—as per usual—close enough to stab. This time, he blocks your exit from the room. 

“Excuse me,” you say sharply. He does not move—simply tilts his head down, regarding you with those peculiar eyes. 

“You,” he says, voice deep and husky as laudanum, “you and the Doctor.”

Your skin prickles with discomfort, with the memory of being watched. 

“...Yes.” An attempt to sidle around him is quickly aborted by the shuffle of his body, and now you find yourself cornered against the wall. 

“What he does t’ you,” he says, drawing a step closer, chest now practically pressed against your face, “You must… must find a way.”

You blink up at him. He lifts his hands, flexing his fingers. 

“A way for what?”

“Y’ gave me these,” he says, reaching for the hem of your skirt, and you are suddenly acutely aware of the pace of your breath, “find me a cock, as well.”

The sentence is so absurd that it takes a moment to process—and, the instant it does, you’re trying to move, dodge past him. “I-”

He catches you before you can spit a denial, hand around your throat, the other coming around to your waist. Effortlessly, he lifts you, pinning you against the wall, bringing the one at your neck to traverse under your skirt, hemming you in with his body. 

“Can do so much,” he grunts, fingers navigating past your undergarments, “with only this, Dove, imagine-”

His finger sinks into your hole, aided by the slickness. You let out an inarticulate sort of cry, half-speech, half-moan, still wriggling in his grasp. The memory of his body flashes before your eyes—the smooth stretch of skin, between his legs, missing the masculine that characterized the rest of his bulk—but the thought flees as he adds a second finger, driving it deeper inside of you. Simply one of them, those long, surgeon’s instruments that you hand-picked, is enough to fill you—two borders unbearable. 

It’s enough to make you cry out. “I can’t,” you manage, but he shakes his head, growls something about need. 

You feel a third finger probing at your folds, and gather the last of your wherewithal to yell, “Price!” 

Simon does not quite laugh, but the rough exhale of breath might be a chuckle on any other man. He draws his fingers back, then thrusts them back in, curling them into your warmth. 

Just barely visible over his shoulder, you see the crest of the Doctor’s head, see the way he halts at the door. Steps into the room with a far more measured pace, circles around Simon to observe you with the same idle detachment that all of his specimens get. 

You can’t summon the breath to plea. Useless, in any case, as he places a hand upon Simon’s arm. 

“She likes it,” he says, “when you touch the clitoris. It should be higher.”

You jolt when Simon finds it, shockwaves pulsing at the rough brush of his thumb. You sob something, back rubbing up against the wall with the intensity, but all he does is smooth a hand over your hair, coo a few gentle words. 

“Shh, Pet. This is what I made him for.”

You throw your head back, not caring that it collides against the wall, as Simon slowly adds a third finger into your hole, stretching it beyond its limits. 

When you climax, it’s with a special sort of violence, that that pumps adrenaline into your heart, exacerbated only by the four pairs of hands running down your skin. Good thing you are being held up, because all the tension bleeds out from each joint, rendering you into jelly and pigfat. 

“Come, Simon,” Price says, and he spares you only a single further glance, as you’re lowered, not ungently, to the ground, left to recover yourself and reorient your mind, recover the memory of this encounter in the first place. 

—

It’s not a surprise when he calls you down to the laboratory. When Simon is naked upon the table and Price stands behind him, a hand upon his shoulder. Nods to you, benevolent smile upon his face. 

“I have a new job for you. Did so well on the last one, Pet.” 

Your eyes flick first to Simon’s hands, then, to the space between his legs, the emptiness. Swallow once, trying to harness the saliva to quash the arousal burning behind your naval. 

“Of course,” you say, dipping your head once, “anything, for you.”

You’re not sure who you’re talking to. You’re not sure if it matters. You’re all, in the end, one entity, lightning and flesh and eyes that pierce you like a butterfly to a pinboard. If this is another chance to seek approval, to prove worthiness, then so be it. There are, after all, many things to like about you, but it all narrows down at this moment to your ability to perform (though, of course, the body of a courtesan and the mind of a virtuoso don’t hurt, either).

[bridenore]

HD Erised 2024 recs

Here are some of my favorite fics from @hd-erised 2024. Listed in alphabetical order.

All These Winding Threads by @starquestingfordrarry [35k]

The tides of Draco’s accidental magic pull him under and leave him gasping. There’s a hungry ache that sits deep in his bones, growing worse every day. Soon it’s all he’ll be, a starving skeleton clawing at its throat. He needs a solution. Unfortunately, that solution looks an awful lot like Harry Potter.

As Luck Would Have It by @sleepstxtic [12k]

In Sixth-Year, Harry and Draco both win a vial of Felix Felicis from Slughorn and, under its influence, have sex in the Room of Requirement. In the aftermath, can Draco and Harry navigate their respective roles in the war, while grappling with their burgeoning feelings for each other?

Body and Soul by Justlikewriting [22k]

When the headaches became worse and it got more and more difficult for Draco to work, he was left with no other choice but to recognise his stupid problem exactly for what it was. Even if that meant realising that the best, or perhaps even only, solution could solely come from one person: the one person he hadn’t seen for months, the one person he was still in love with. The one person who should never know. Because, clearly, Harry would never be able to give Draco what he needed anyway.

A Dragon to Call Mine by @fantalfart [24k]

Well, Harry is tired. Somewhat. He’s been The Boy Who Lived for quite a few years now—or what Harry privately likes to call himself; The Boy Whose Life Is Continuously Messed Up By External Forces or The Boy Who Can’t Take a Break or The Boy Who Gets to Keep Living Indefinitely or The Boy Who Is So Done or even The Boy Who Is, Apparently, Never Taking Time Off—and it never really gets better. Easier, yes; boring even, but never better. So, when he was about to finish his speech that morning, when a rogue dark spell was aimed at him and that dragon showed up, white scales blanketed by the sun, Harry almost grinned. Because seeing the creature felt more like finally than it did danger. — Or, Harry finds out that living with a dramatic, opinionated dragon might be everything he’s ever wished for.

Equally Cursed and Blessed by @moonflower-rose [18k]

Harry's back at Hogwarts to attempt his final year, again. This time he's sure there'll be no shenanigans. Well. Maybe there'll be a few.

In a Year’s Turning by @hoko-onchi-writes [89k]

There’s an undeniable crackle in the air. Draco knows it down to his marrow. Can never unknow it. He doesn’t have to turn to know that Harry is standing at the library entrance. The hair on the back of Draco’s neck prickles. They’ve avoided one another for nine years. Managed not to run into one another during the week of Andy’s funerary rites. They’ve glimpsed one another several times. But they never came close enough to speak. Draco’s kept to their rules for most of a decade. Letters only. Plans for Teddy. Updates on Pansy’s gardens. No references to the Christmas of 2001. Draco spares a moment to grieve that he couldn’t have put this off another nine years. Then, he turns. “Hi,” Harry says. Draco’s throat aches. “Hello. It’s been a while.” Harry quirks a smile. "I wondered where that top went." -- Or: Harry is struggling to raise Teddy by himself. Enter Draco.

Just a little liquid luck by @smehur [5k]

Draco unbuttons his cuffs and the first three buttons at the neck and pulls both his shirt and his vest up over his head. “Oh,” comes a shuddery sigh from the other side of the bed. “No, leave it,” Potter hurries to say when Draco moves to smooth his hair back into place. “It’s just. It’s. Good. Like that.” Draco smirks, though he dares not look down at himself and the expanse of the flush burning hot stamps into his flesh. Tracking the movement of Potter’s eyes, he runs a greasy finger over the thickest of his scars. “You like them, don’t you? Pervert.” Potter tosses his head back, jostling the mass of his curly fringe from his forehead. “I bet you were into scars long before you had any of your own, Malfoy.” Yes, Draco wants to say. I want to lick yours. What he says instead is, “Fuck you.” “Fuck you,” Potter echoes, putting the same pregnant emphasis on the F. Draco bites his lower lip, wrestling down the rise of euphoria. “Your turn,” he says. “Take that off.”

The Most Splendid Thing by @lqtraintracks [61k]

Star Quidditch rivals Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter become accidentally bonded. They still hate each other, but now it’s untenable to leave each other’s sides—and my, but it feels oh so good to touch. They’re either going to murder one another, or fall in love. OR: A story in which Draco finally allows himself happiness, and Harry finally learns that he deserves to be whole.

Old love don't rust by tray_la_la [20k]

“Why do you keep coming?” Malfoy asked at last. Harry mulled over the question. For a moment he debated trying to turn the tables and asking Malfoy the very same thing. But this time he didn’t want to hold back. “Because I can’t stop,” Harry said.

The Pain From an Old Wound by @citrusses [30k]

Getting hit with a mysterious blood curse is all in a day’s work for Harry Potter. Having to work with his former colleague, rival, bully, and boyfriend, is not. Harry’s not sure which is going to do him in first: the curse sucking his magic dry, or Draco Malfoy, as frustrating, condescending, and painfully attractive as he’s always been.

palindrome by @garagepaperback [25k]

“Why did you let me kiss you?” Potter smirks. “That’s not how I remember it. Why did you let me kiss you?” “I’m stuck in a time loop. You’re not going to remember, so.” Draco’s tongue drags, calcified around the words. “Why not.” Potter’s brows furrow but the smile stays undented. “That’s the best you could come up with?”

Runaway Train by iota / @sorrybutblog [18k]

Harry was already keen to figure out what’s been causing a series of disturbances in the London Underground before Draco Malfoy showed up acting suspicious. Two explosions, several very confused Muggles, and a cloud of mysterious sticky powder later, Harry and Malfoy can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. Can Harry shag his way to the answer to all of his questions? Seems unlikely, but what can a man do but try?

A Soft Place to Fall by @amomorii [142k]

When Harry arrives for his first year teaching at Hogwarts and is struck with a bizarre malignance, how on earth is he supposed to react when Draco Malfoy suddenly cares? Or; A darkness crawls out of Harry, and there's only so long he can keep it to himself.

Storm's Eye by @shiftylinguini [12k]

Harry's surprised that Draco didn't have wards up preventing mortally wounded former school mates-turned-ghosted work fellows from bursting into his house. In Harry's addled mind, this seems like a great opening line to say to Draco's gobsmacked face. He doesn't get that far, though. Or: Harry gets hurt, Draco is a vanishing alchemist who may or may not be able to save the day, but under no circumstances are either of them willing to talk about Their Feelings. Well. Maybe "mortal peril" circumstances will do it, actually.

Sub rosa by @tessacrowley [37k]

After the tragic and unexpected death of his mother, Draco Malfoy’s quiet life as Potions Master, Hogwarts professor, and Head of Slytherin gets upended—first by the manifestation of mysterious and inexplicable magic, and then by the revelation of an inheritance deliberately hidden from him his entire life.

Where Starlight Falls by @agentmoppet [33k]

The magic concealing Sirius’s Last Will and Testament doesn’t reveal the full extent of Harry’s inheritance until two years after the war. When it does, it turns out that Harry has inherited more than just the Black Family vault—he’s inherited the family’s magic, too. He just has to find it first. And he needs Draco Malfoy’s help to do it.

I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I did!

[haikyuuharemdreams]

Rich!Sakusa headcanons ✨

- Sakusa Kiyoomi is not good with words.

- He tries!! He really, REALLY does. But he definitely does better at showing love through acts of services and buying you things that reminds you of him.

- You live in his head rent free, so feel free to simply imagine how much that simp man has actually spent on you. He never minds, of course, money’s is of no issue to him.

- When you show up at his penthouse crying over an upsetting incident that occurred at your workplace, he rushes over to you.

- He has 0 idea what to do. He stands there like 🧍🏻‍♂️

- You wipe your tears away, attempting a forced smile that really isn’t convincing anyone. You tell him that it was minor, there is no need for him to worry and that you’ll be fine.

- It doesn’t matter, though, whether it had truly been minor or not. What matters is that you’re crying, that it pains him, and he feels helpless. He doesn’t know how to fix your problem.

- He sits you down and tries to find out what had happened. You tell him, tears pooling in your eyes and making their way down your cheeks as you recounted the events.

- He thinks, like you said, it was minor. He gets why you’re upset, but it really is a small matter that requires a simple solution. He offers some words of advice and pointed out what you could’ve done better. He also offers to support you in any way you need regarding your workplace situation.

- This only makes you more upset.

- You just wanted some reassurance and words of comfort!!! You just wanted him to express that you’re not incapable and incompetent and careless and stupid and useless!!! But no!!!

- You don’t blame him; you know he’s not the best with words. You know he doesn’t do comfort. But, it hurts.

- You simply just apologise, and hurry to take a shower to cool yourself down. You are too overstimulated and emotional to be capable of communicating how you feel to him without possibly starting a fight.

- Man is, however, confused. He genuinely thought he did a great job at being there for you; he even told you that he wants you to be his wife (disclaimer: he never explicitly said that; he mumbled to you that he’ll support you if you decide you don’t want to work ever. Unfortunately, you didn’t even pick that up.)

- He follows you like a puppy, confused. He wants to ask if he did anything wrong, but you aren’t even acknowledging his presence.

- “Y/N, please, darling.” He knows you like it when he calls you by a pet name. “What’s the matter?”

- His cooing softens your frustration. You turn around, and as you begin to tell him how you feel, you start sobbing. Your words are muddled, but he manages to pick up the gist of what you’re conveying.

- He hugs you, and you go limp in his arms, all tension melting away. He ignores your protests of being unclean and caresses your back. He murmurs comforting words in your eyes, telling you that he’s sorry, validating how you’re feeling and rebutting the negative beliefs you had about yourself.

- He draws up a bath for you and helps you to remove your clothes before his.

- It’s an intimate moment between two people who love each other, okay, nothing MORE!

- He gives the best bath 💯

- He dries you off, blow drying your hair as well, and wraps you up snugly in a towel before doing so for himself. He holds your hand when he’s done, leading you out back into his bedroom.

- He big spoons you in bed, and strokes your hair till you fall asleep.

- Sakusa, though, is unable to fall asleep. After all, the ring is ready in the drawer in the nightstand beside you. He was just finding the right time to propose to you, and you’ll in for a very pleasant surprise !! upon rising.

[gravedwe11er]

Some more texaid for the @keferon mecha au! Comes after part one and part two, though it can be read on its own with just the knowledge of the AU itself.

Cw: Vortex, a bit of innuendo and semi-graphic descriptions of violence and death

A new point of view on recent happenings in the shatterdome, and also Felix.

Or: Vortex is here, and he has Opinions.

Vortex really likes Felix.

Has liked him ever since he saw this quiet, boring-looking little doc sneak around the base at night, and instead of going to hook up with someone - like a normal fucking person would - breaking into the research lab and messing with quint corpses. At first, he thought it might have been an op of some sort, but no! The guy just really liked cutting the things apart. Which- Tex could relate, honestly.

Seeing Felix bumbling about in the dark and excitedly muttering to himself through the cams quickly became the highlight of his mind-numbingly boring days. And then, to absolutely no surprise, the man got himself caught, and things went from good to great real fast.

As he watches little Mr. First Aid dig dried blood out of his crevices, with a stolen butter knife of all things, he really has to applaud himself for how well it all turned out.

Here’s one thing about Vortex – he likes violence. Always has - it’s one of the very few fun things that was never in short supply during his life, and the same goes for his after-life. And now that his other sources of entertainment are largely, hah, dead in the water? He very much likes to indulge.

Despite that, the first pilot he killed actually was a complete accident. He’d been pretty freshly dead, floundering around in his new body, when whatever control he’d manage to wrangle from the mech had been ripped out from under his hands. In his horrified flailing, he somehow managed to jerk the guy’s seat so hard he cracked his skull open on the console, and that was that. Only once he felt his death throes through the neural link had Vortex even realized what had happened.

And fuck, was he livid! Now, let’s be honest, Tex could absolutely get behind some rough manhandling of his person in the right situations, but this was outright violating! And like hell was he just going to put up with it.

Here’s another thing about Vortex – he hates being told what to do. And gee-whiz, it really doesn’t get any more being-told-what-to-do than some tiny fuck crawling into what is now your actual head and moving you around like an overgrown puppet.

So, he kept pushing. The next few casualties were only partly accidental, him testing out his range of motion, so to speak. And once he figured out how to establish himself as the dominant consciousness in the mech, even with a pilot plugged in-

Hah, let’s just say they definitely weren’t accidents after that.

It was part spite, part entertainment, and part just wanting those bastards out, their minds grating against his consciousness and giving him the closest thing he has to a headache nowadays. And what fun it was! He’d never really gotten to kill people before, not on purpose at least – his minders always kept him on too tight a leash - and damn was it great to see those uppity little shits turn to red mush in his gears.

For a while, at least. Look, he’s a creative guy, but there’s only so many ways to kill a person with no opposable thumbs available for the job! Not to mention, he was sorta hoping they’d get the hint eventually. He thought if he showed his ability to function on his own and his inability to tolerate pilots, they’d kinda just- leave him to it.

But of course not – that would require those bastards in command to actually give a shit about their people. They never did while he was under their tender care either, so he shouldn’t have been surprised. Kinda stupid of him actually, but excuse him, he’d, hah, rather recently lost all his braincells. Still, it was a problem he needed to figure out.

Then the solution waltzed into his cockpit, first aid kit in hand and doing his darndest to resuscitate the latest thoroughly dead pilot, and Tex started having ideas.

Here’s one thing about Felix – he’s a real gentle, meticulous sort of guy. He’s seen it in the man’s treatment of his patients, in the way he always tried to check on the vital signs of Tex’s broken toys, even when it was super fucking obvious they’ve long since kicked the bucket. Even now, as he’s poking around in the seams of Tex’s pilot seat with a rag, he’s still displaying a level of care in it he hasn’t seen from any of his actual technicians. It’s pretty nice, being treated like an actual person for once.

And damn, it’s times like these he really misses having a human body. Having this pretty man on his knees and all up in his business like that would have been a lot better if he could properly feel it. Vortex-the-mech has sensors for pressure, temperature and structural integrity, but it doesn’t come anywhere near to what he was used to when he was alive. No sense of pain either. Boring!

But oh well; he’ll take whatever fun he can get. Aaand speaking of fun-

As Felix sticks his hand in one of the seat’s movable joints, Tex mentally reaches for the mechanism and jerks it back – easily slow enough to avoid, but more than fast enough to make the man jump.

Here’s another thing about Felix – under all his outwardly softness, the man’s got teeth.

“Fuck!” he shouts, and Vortex cackles, the mech’s internal vents clicking and hissing to convey his glee. “What is your problem?!” Holding his – completely unscathed, mind you – hand to his chest, Felix looks at the screen, awaiting some sort of answer with just the most hilarious looking scowl on his sharp little face.

Mentally kicking his feet, Tex sends his words out to display on the red glass.

JUST PLAYING, BABY

GOTTA KEEP THOSE REFLEXES SHARP!

Felix huffs, relaxing a little now. “How nice of you,” he says, snide as all fuck, reaching for the rag he dropped when trying to avoid getting his fingers pinched, “but let’s keep the fun to a minimum, please.”

Then he pauses, giving Tex’s screen a considering look. “But seriously, should I not be touching that?” he asks, concern twisting his features. “Does that hurt? Or tickle? I don’t really-“ he waves his hand in an ambiguous gesture, “-know anything about how all this works. Suppose that’s something I should look into…”

Aaand off he goes, lost in his own head. Actually worrying about him. Fuck, when’s the last time someone cared about Vortex that openly? Huh, long before he was ever called that, he’d say. Hard to remember. These days, Vortex is fifty tons of stainless steel killing machine, very much not a squishy human patient for the soft-hearted doc to be fussing over. And yet.

Damn, what a weirdo. What an odd little freak.

Vortex really fucking likes Felix.

Thank you for reading, and many thanks to my beta @jayden-writes for the help!

[revoleotion]

As I was ranting to Milena, I did realize something that probably has already been said by people more eloquent than me but I have to get it off my chest here.

DATVG does spend a lot of time trying to get us to forget the problems the world of Thedas was facing, so it can spend its entire runtime bashing the solution a very desperate (and misguided) person proposes. When I played Trespasser, I didn't think that the Veil was about to come down in the next game, but I did believe that it was going to deal with addressing the problems the Veil evidently causes and how to deal with them.

I don't think any DA fan, even Solas' biggest haters, will argue that the blight or spirits being twisted into demons (and becoming a threat in the process) are a great and wonderful thing we want to keep, actually. But even his biggest fans might argue that tearing the Veil down without any preparation or care for the world as it exists now is maybe not an ideal way to deal with all of that?

VG wants us to believe that tearing down the Veil is somehow a personal goal that Solas has that is purely fueled by his own guilt and regrets. But that is not the case. He wants to solve the problem he created (well. as of trespasser, anyway, but it wasn't his fault in the first place uwu), but that is not because his loyalty to Mythal forces him to do it but because he SAW how badly he fucked up. We can only trust him when he claims that any alternative would've been worse... but even if it weren't. Even if this was just one guy fucking up on such a giant cosmic scale that it's almost hilarious if it weren't so bad. The motivation we are getting from him in Trespasser is one of trying to fix what he perceives to be a broken world.

(That is not to say that ALL problems in Thedas are created by the Veil, but interestingly enough those are the issues Solas does react to in Inquisition as well. He is passionate about mage rights and ending slavery and the systematic oppression elves face. And he does try to help with that, even if his priority is more on the cosmic fuck up side.)

VG tries to link the entirety of the Veil (and all problems it causes) to your personal opinion about Solas, and then tries its damn hardest to make him as unsympathetic as possible so that there can never be any doubt that he is an asshole who is wrong about his stupid plan.

Funnily enough, when we meet him for the first time in VG, in the middle of his ritual, it doesn't look all that much like ending the entire world to me. Yes, there is collateral, but he's clearly been adapting his plans, and I would've expected the game to expand on that. Maybe there IS a way to approach things in a better way, after all, and maybe Solas can understand that.

But no. Because that approach would require for the game to address issues instead of bashing one guy's approach to solving them. So what it does is make all issues miraculously disappear, so that Solas is no longer providing a solution but instead just wants to do evil shit for... (checks notes) situationship reasons. Right.

And as I was ranting about that, it came to me.

Maybe, VG never could've been anything different. Because remember another game in this series? A game that spent far too much of its third act discussing the action one very desperate person took after every other option was taken away from him and he feared that every single member of the oppressed group he was in would be eliminated? Remember how the game following that one will only ever speak of this person as a monster - even in the most sympathetic world state - because maybe the DA writers are just afraid of what they had set up.

And maybe VG is a perfect example of a game written by people who are terrified of anything but the status quo.

[wiremotherofficial]

stupid problems require stupid solutions

[homunculus-argument]

One worldbuilding thing that's always fun to do is take something you've encountered in the real world, and apply something similar with the same logic into your own. Like those sayings that have two halves, but people usually only know the first half and misunderstand the saying - like "birds of a feather flock together (until the cat comes)" or "great minds think alike (but fools rarely differ)." So I came up with a few for The Book I'm Not Writing:

Hungry dogs are loyal dogs (until someone else feeds them) - neglecting and mistreating your underlings may work as a short-term tactic for making them obey, but it's also a guarantees that they'll betray you at first chance.

The mouth of an idiot is as loose as the strings of their purse (so be there when gold may drop out) - just because nine out of ten things that someone says are completely useless doesn't mean you should dismiss them altogether. They might still know useful things, even if they can't tell it's useful.

Blood makes a foul dye (it stains, but it won't last) - here "foul" is often interpreted as "brutal" or "gruesome", when it's meant as "of low quality". Using violence as your way to establish dominance and maintain authority because it's easier than building networks of mutual trust and respect is as stupid and short-sighted as using blood to dye clothes because it's cheaper than proper pigment.

A fool will starve to death while waiting for grain to grow (but it is also a fool who'll slaughter an ewe an hour before it lambs) - Immediate problems require immediate solutions, but you'd better make sure that your drastic emergency solution is the right one.

A blind horse will go as you guide where a half-blind one dare not (both through the darkness and down a cliff) - an agent who doesn't know the purpose of their task will obey blindly, where one that knows some part of it might disobey out of distrust, but neither is as reliable as one that does see the big picture, can draw their own conclusions from the information they gather, and adjust their plans accordingly.

[ilk-insolence]

Raph Is A Great Strategist

Numerous times in the show Raph has shown to have a preference for straightforwardly punching his problems away rather than think up a more complex solution. Like how his immediate fix to getting Mayhem out of the mirror in Mystic Library was to punch everything in the bathroom but the mirror. However, when Raph understands the situation requires more in depth strategy, he’s shown to be an incredibly capable tactician.

(long post ahead!)

In nearly all the plot heavy episodes like Shadow of Evil, Many Unhappy Returns, and the season finales, Raph gets moments where he’s highlighted for his strategic thinking. In Insane in the Mama Train, he’s the one who figures out which eyeball-button goes to the front car with the dark armor, because “‘it was the only button [the Foot Clan] didn’t want me to press!’” [21:05]. He’s also the one who came up with the scheme to defeat all the (known) combatants in the train, with Leo specifically attributing Raph as the deviser during their mind meld [19:46]. In Many Unhappy Returns, after spending a single night waylaying the Shredder, Raph formulated a plan using all the tricks the team learned, seamlessly transitioning the mystic collar Leo acquired into it [19:53], to defeating the Shredder. Additionally, he’s repeatedly called for a retreat during fights, like in Shadow of Evil, Shreddy or Not (Finale pt 2), and the movie, when he can tactically recognize that a battle couldn’t be won. Each time, the show/movie implied that that was the right call, for the family to lose the fight but win the war.

And it’s not just that Raph is good at strategy when he’s pushed to be more serious; the show characterizes him as passionate about creating plans, he enjoys doing it. Literally in the first episode, Mystic Mayhem, after the turtles’ initial plan failed of getting Splinter out of the living room to touch his Do-Not-Touch Cabinet, Raph immediately started devising a new plan that involved “ten chickens [and] a gallon of rubber cement” [9:35]. It was convoluted, sure, and they didn’t end up using it, but it was inventive and the opposite of reluctant. This is also shown in Bug Busters, where Raph planned out dousing Mikey in honey to attract the oozequitoes [2:52]; Snow Day, with the idea to freeze Ghost Bear like in Jupiter Jim Pluto Vacation 4; and Raph’s Ride-Along (and also Bad Hair Day), where Mind Raph created multiple schemes to get the criminals arrested. The show wouldn’t have made Raph be so creative with his plans if they were trying to characterize him as someone who didn’t like strategizing.

So does why Raph do stupid shit sometimes where he doesn’t think things through at all? Well, even though Raph is good at strategy and enjoys doing it, it’s clear his immediate impulse is still “punch the problem in the face”. In fact, all the turtle boys contain the fascinating dichotomy of being incredibly smart in some areas, and the dumbest teenagers alive in others. Just look at Donnie. It’s also how Raph is a loving protective older brother, and the guy who shoved Leo into a wall so hard he disappeared in one frame for shits and giggles (The Mutant Menace x). None of this means that Raph is bad at strategy though.

tldr: Yeah, Raph has a lot of dumb and, frankly, insane moments in the show, but he’s still an incredible tactician who’s plans consistently saved his family and sometimes the world. He's a great strategist.