#that maybe they should just run away

[fishybehavior]

I have ideas that are stuck in my head

[tansypaws]

mmmmothwing and 15??? if no one has asked that yet

baby, though I've closed my eyes i know who you pretend i am i know who you pretend i am

washing machine heart ; mitski

[froschli96]

🗣️ Darlin', you give love a bad name

Found this in my old wip folder and it feels now more relevant than ever :)

Also these don't know why I never uploaded these they were just sitting there completely finished:

[pup-pee]

bart having 2 learn how 2 run again would ruin me

[non-un-topo]

Thinking about the sniper duo

[i3utterflyeffect]

anyway thank you @violetsquare111...... you're so right about human sticks. they'd be absolute terrors i think

[vqrkll]

I still want to spread my propaganda for them

Middle-aged yuri...save me middle-aged yuri...

[chaos-bringer-13]

Jazz's little. Her parents are super cool. They're ghost hunters! It sounds like something from a movie about future and scientists and supernatural beings and cool-looking tech. They have cool-looking tech at home. It's even cooler than tech in the movies.

Jazz also has a little brother. He's stupid but he's hers, and she will protect him from anything. Her brother is very small, he needs someone to protect him and teach him about the world.

She knows about the world. She understands their parents much better than him, and she can tell her brother when they shouldn't be distracted. She knows when they're upset and irritable, and she knows when they're too excited and being near them is dangerous because of all the inventions.

Jazz does a very good job keeping her little brother safe.

---

Jazz goes to school. Her teachers say that she's very smart, the best student in class, and very mature. Her parents are proud of her - when she manages to distract them from ghosts. Her brother is still kinda stupid and doesn't know how to properly fight food, but she's always there to protect him, because that's what older sisters do.

Her classmates seem to think that she's weird though. Some of them say mean things and call her a teacher's pet and a show-off. Jazz isn't sure why they think so because she's always trying to be friendly but maybe she's doing something wrong. She goes to the school library and finds a book about people and their communication.

It's a very interesting book.

---

Jazz is almost a teen. She's gotten better at communicating with people. The school library ran out of psychology books, and Jazz now has to go to the city library but that's fine. Human brain fascinates her.

She's been feeling like something is wrong about her though. She even thought that she was going crazy for a little bit. That probably wasn't true because she didn't match any symptoms but she was still worried.

Someone told her that being so good at lying and faking face expressions is not okay. That's probably not true, Jazz is pretty sure almost everyone can do that. Or maybe she's just being a prodigy again. It's a very good thing to be able to do after all. She can hide her emotions from her family when she's feeling sad. She wouldn't want to worry them, would she?

She'll have to research it.

---

Jazz is a teen. She now knows that her parents aren't actually that good. It's something that was really hard to accept but it did explain everything. Her parents are kinda bad at being parents, and they also don't really listen when she tries to explain it to them.

It's okay. She's almost an adult and Danny has her. She can take care of herself and her brother.

She learns everything she can about being a parent and a therapist and tries to use her knowledge. It's hard, but she's a Fenton, which means that she's very smart and determined. She pushes through, and trains on her classmates and herself.

In the evening she writes about her feelings in a journal. It's very important to be aware of her feelings because that's the first step to dealing with them.

She's experiencing sadness. And anger, actually, even though she doesn't like to admit that.

She writes "this family is a fucking mess" in her journal and then covers the paper with ink until the sentence is absolutely unreadable.

---

Jazz is sixteen, and her stupid parents opened the stupid portal, which means that they're even worse than usual. It's pretty much okay when they're just stuck in their stupid lab, making some stupid weapons. It's not that okay when they're out of the stupid lab, because they get their stupid inventions all over the stupid house, and stupid food comes to life, and she has to protect Danny from both their stupid weapons and stupid hotdogs, and oh god everything is so stupid.

She's experiencing anger.

She's also acting perfectly calm and almost cheerfully.

Jazz hates how perfect her fake smile is in the mirror.

---

Jazz is seventeen. She wants to put her headphones on and listen to some loud music. Jazz can't do that, because she gets anxious if she can't hear what's happening around her. She needs to be fully aware of her surroundings because she needs to be able to protect herself and her brother if weapons against ghosts become weapons against children again.

She thinks that it's not okay.

The house smells of ectoplasm, so she'll be extra careful when opening the fridge.

She thinks that she shouldn't know how ectoplasm smells.

Jazz should probably also warn Danny: her little brother's gotten better at fighting food but doesn't notice the smell of ectoplasm. Funny, considering his ghost sense.

Funny, considering that her brother is a half-ghost.

That her brother died.

That she failed at protecting him after all.

Jazz stops breathing to prevent herself from crying, and doesn't need oxygen for a few minutes too long.

Maybe she failed at protecting herself too.

---

Jazz is turning eighteen next month. Her parents are all of a sudden more attentive and caring, as if that can change their almost-absence during her whole life. She doesn't like their attention because she doesn't know how to deal with it. She doesn't even really think of them as parents anymore.

She thinks of them as a threat.

Once she's eighteen, she's gonna try to move out, and she's going to take Danny with her because it's not safe to leave him here. Maybe after she gets a good job and saves some money, she'll even get into therapy.

Jazz thinks that she needs therapy.

She's been having Bad Thoughts lately, and she doesn't write them down in her journal. Jazz stopped writing anything in there ever since she found out that Danny is a ghost. She just couldn't risk anyone finding that journal.

Jazz isn't sure if she should call those Bad Thoughts intrusive. They scare her, and they're Bad, but it could be just her normal thought process.

It's still definitely not normal.

---

Jazz is eighteen. Her parents are very excited, whispering to each other about how they found a perfect present for her, some surprise that she's gonna love.

She doesn't care.

Her little brother is late from school, and it's weird, because he was also super excited about giving her his present.

She's worried.

Her parents brush off her concern, say that Danny probably just got distracted talking with his friends. They don't listen when she says that Danny wouldn't get distracted like that on her birthday because he's not them, he actually cares about her, he doesn't forget her birthdays, and something has to be wrong for him to be that late.

They don't listen to her at all.

She's angry.

Her parents are excited and talk loudly about how they wanted to find a perfect gift for their favourite daughter, and how they managed to do it because they love her so much. She hates when they're excited. It only leads to problems.

They bring her to the lab because of course they do, why would they make a gift that is normal and isn't kept in the lab, right? They usher her in, so obviously proud of themselves.

She hates them.

And she hates them much, much more the next second, because the gift is her little brother in his ghost form, strapped to a table, unconscious and injured, and the smell of ectoplasm is strong in the lab because of his green blood dripping on the floor.

There's a cold part of her that analyses her feelings and tells her what emotions she's experiencing, and that part is very aware of thick black smoke of wrath twirling and twisting under her skin. It's suffocating, and she stops breathing as it invisibly fills her lungs, scared of letting it out.

There's a perfectly fake part of her that keeps the smile on her face as her parents gush about how hard it was to catch the ecto-scum, and what they can do to it - together with Jazz because they wanted to share this with their amazing daughter.

Jazz is black smoke of rage under perfect glass of calmness when she grabs Fenton anti-creep stick. The smile she learned to fake under any circumstances doesn't falter when Jazz brings the baseball bat down on her father's head. It grows a little bit wider when she hits her mother, because Jazz learned to smile brighter when she's hurt or sad or scared or angry - experiencing any "bad" emotion actually.

Jazz is angry when she grabs her weapon.

Jazz is furious when she kills her parents.

Jazz is worried when she checks her brother's wounds.

Jazz feels nothing when she rigs the portal to blow, walks out of the house and presses the button.

She is her parents' genius daughter after all, and she did listen when they were telling her about their inventions. Maybe it would have taken longer to do, but she had Bad Thoughts, and they probably weren't just intrusive after all, because she did what they told her and made it very easy to make a bomb out of a portal. Just in case. Her parents were a threat, and Jazz was smart enough to prepare to dealing with threats, and she was smart enough to make it look like the threats dealt with themselves.

She really hoped she wouldn't have to use that button though.

---

Jazz is nineteen. Her sort-of-friends at uni offer to go to a restaurant, and she tells them that she doesn't celebrate her birthdays. There's a noise of all of them saying that maybe she should try, noise that she really should have expected, because humans are always so excited about any holidays, it's hard for them to understand that someone might not like them. It's not hard to stop that noise though. They shut up very quickly when Jazz says that she had "a very traumatic event" on her birthday.

Good. She doesn't like loud people.

Jazz goes home to her little brother. He's sad because his parents died in an awful explosion a year ago. He's still trying to smile because it's also her birthday, and Jazz is very happy that he's bad at faking a smile.

It means that he won't end up like her.

Jazz hugs her little brother, and he gives her a little present that she adores, and then they sit in silence and eat some takeout. It's very nice.

She never tells Danny that their parents died before the explosion, and that the explosion wasn't an accident, and that their ghosts did form after that because of all the ecto-contamination they had, but she made sure this wouldn't become a problem. She never tells him what she's done, because that would hurt her little brother, and she would never let anything hurt him.

Jazz will protect her little brother from anything.

[quibbs126]

I forgot Habanero’s first line about Peperoncino being the best sword fighter, but is this not just the kids arguing who’s dad is better?

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

examining your relationship with your art can be fun

but watch out

[tearlessrain]

seriously can catastrophes stop happening for five minutes my brain is already fried from the ones we're already experiencing

[daisychainsandbowties]

thinking a normal amount about a treasure planet au. Beatrice on her solar kiteboard, doing the daredevil flip sequence framed against the setting sun and then getting hauled kicking and screaming back to her parents’ house in manacles with a defiant expression on her perpetually dirt-smudged face.

climbing out the window at the first opportunity to go down to the dockside inn, making nebulous plans to steal her kiteboard back but ending up down at the edge of the dock staring past her boots and into the mists. gripping tight to the wood beneath her as she looks up at the sky and dreams of anywhere but here, of stealing a skiff to get off this planet. a reluctant twinge at the thought of going alone.

Bea with all her star maps and her intricate knowledge of spaceships and their solar sails and how to navigate out there where the artigrav net is all that stands between you and floating through nothing, forever.

startling when she hears the familiar sound of someone booking it down the pier on wooden crutches. night has already started to speckle the sky above, and as she listens to the thunk of the crutches on the pier, Bea thinks of the complicated metallic lattice she has on her desk at home, partly disassembled because she’s still trying to work out parts of the engineering. Ava’s birthday is in a month.

she has to stay that long, and then she’ll leave. she will.

turning to watch as Ava races towards her with soup stains on her shirt and messy hair jammed flat beneath a ‘pirate’ hat she bought off of a traveling salesman last year. the tricorn wobbles precariously on her head as she moves. Beatrice just waits, a slight smile on her face.

there are bruises high on each of her arms, from the pincer-like grip of the police bots, manhandling her away from her kiteboard to snap manacles around each wrist.

she rubs at the skin there, but ignores the bruises.

when Ava arrives, a little out of breath, Beatrice holds up a hand so she can help herself down onto the pier. there’s no water beneath them, only a few hundred meters of empty air and curling mist.

Ava keeps one hand on Bea’s and the other on her shoulder, letting the crutches clatter down between them as she sits.

“Mom says you got arrested again,” Ava says cheerfully. “She says they’re threatening to send you to prison.”

Beatrice shrugs, “I wouldn’t mind it, so long as my parents did not visit.”

Ava’s fingers are covered in bright red band-aids, from chopping vegetables all day with her poor hand dexterity. Beatrice watches the colours blur as Ava punches her in the arm, right on the bruises. “Liar, I know you’d miss me.”

her arm throbs painfully, but Beatrice’s expression is carefully neutral as she responds. 

“I might.”

she stays with Ava that night, both of them reading her old book with its floating images of ships and canons and pirates leaping from vessel to vessel. Captain Flint, materialising out of empty space to steal away gems and gold, “the loot of a thousand worlds.” Ava traces the projected lines of the solar sails with her fingers as they flicker into being. 

Beatrice has repaired the book over and over, making the colours brighter and sharper. the tiny shapes of pirates all made up of light. Ava has the book open on Bea’s chest as she lies next to her, legs all entangled in the sheets they’ve kicked off because the night is so warm.

she seems oblivious to how Beatrice’s breath hitches at almost every touch.

they’re almost asleep when they hear the explosion, a ship crashing into the cliff-side, tumbling over and over before they hear the pop and hiss of heated metal. a bloom of smoke outside the window.

Beatrice gives Ava a piggyback ride down the stairs just before Ava’s ‘mom’, Suzanne, emerges with her pulse-rifle primed, hair loose around her shoulders.

they stumble into the yard and discover a pirate, a robot, still bleeding from a wound in his abdomen, crawling from the wreck of his ship. Beatrice heaves a shard of twisted metal away from him and finds the surface slippery with blood.

behind her, Ava sways a little, shivers in the cold air, but she’s still standing when Beatrice turns back to her.

the dying pirate tells them almost nothing useful. he’s half-mad, cluching at Beatrice’s shirt until the seams tear at the collar, then turning to Ava. he fetches out a lockbox from his ship, blood spilling onto the ground at the movement. unlocks it and takes odd sphere from inside.

it drops into Ava’s palm as he rasps, “Whatever you do, don’t let them find it.”

then he wheezes, shudders, stills.

they stare at him, Ava’s free hand finding Bea’s, holding tight.

“Is he… dead?” Ava’s voice in the silence and the dark.

“I think so.”

then, in a burst of light and sound, in a shockwave of displaced air, a ship plummets down out of the clouds, pulling up an instant from the ground.

this second ship looms down out of the sky, pirates dropping from it and suddenly Suzanne is screaming at them to “GET INSIDE” from an upstairs window as she takes potshots at the misshapen shapes swarming down lines of hempen rope.

the air lights up with orange and yellow as explosions ripple down towards the crashed ship, towards the inn. Bea flings one of Ava’s arms around her neck and sprints for the door, Ava holding the sphere (or map?) tightly against her chest.

she sets Ava down gently onto one of the bar stools, runs back to barricade the door. her face is flushed, streaked somehow with engine grease and robot blood, which is black and slightly acidic. 

they exchange a wide-eyed look, too much meaning in it to parse as explosions rock the floor. Ava has both hands clutched around the sphere. 

they both almost scream as Suzanne runs down the stairs in a blur of dressing gown and gun. she has Ava’s crutches in one hand and her rifle in the other. she kisses Ava quickly on the forehead, “Thank the tides you’re safe.” leaves her with the crutches and then goes to fetch an ancient-looking blaster pistol out from behind the bar, presses it into Beatrice’s hands. “You know how to use this?”

“No!”

“Aim it away from your own face.”

and then there are pirates all around the house, glass breaking and fire crackling. Beatrice takes up the rear, pistol pointed at the front door as it bulges under the pressure of pirates flinging their bulk into it again and again. 

they climb out of a window, Suzanne producing a kitchen knife and jamming it into the neck of a pirate loitering uncertainly outside the bolted shutters. there, covered by a tarp, is Suzanne’s old motorcycle with a sidecar attached. lantern-bugs scatter out from under it as Suzanne throws the old tarp away, gestures for Beatrice and Ava to climb in as she covers them with her rifle.

there’s a roar from somewhere in the dark and Suzanne fires a shot, hops onto the motorcycle and revs the engine. then they’re moving, pirates parting before them like the ocean neither of them have ever seen, the vast bodies of water that don’t even exist on this planet.

they seek refuge with Jillian, an archaeologist who frequents the old inn, claiming that she can’t make her coffee taste of anything but soap. she examines the orb, reluctantly passed into her hands by Ava, her and Bea wrapped in an old blanket, sitting by the fire in Jillian’s immense study.

Jillian fiddles with it for an age before sighing, looking almost angry with herself.

“I can’t… seem to make this work.”  

Ava holds out her hand, silent. “let me try,” and Beatrice makes a face at Jillian when she hesitates.

the pirate gave the sphere to Ava; it’s hers. 

it seems much larger in Ava’s small grip. she looks down at it for a while before her fingers start to move, slow but gathering momentum as she presses the little grooves and switches and indents on the sphere. 

until it lights up, showing a map of the known universe, and parts of it that are unknown.

“Is that-” Beatrice feels her words drop away, like the ground beneath the pier where she has passed so many hours sitting with Ava’s hand in hers.

Ava turns to Beatrice, eyes bright as a pair of stars, “It’s treasure planet.”

[flowercrowngods]

i don't know how to be merely acquaintances when we used to be friends. or i think we used to be. i don't know how to yearn for a simple hello when you've been heaping your affection on me months ago, and i don't know how to talk to you when you won't say anything. when suddenly it's all about me. you know i have nothing to say, you know my brain is void of everything but horribleness and i cannot tell you about my day because i don't even know about my day. i cannot tell you about my day when i know you won't listen, when i know you'll apply your philosophy to my world and don't believe me when i say that everything is terrible. i don't know how to be the person you seem to think i am, or the person you want in your life. i don't know if you want anyone else in your life now that you're in love and sappy, found another recipient for your affections, leaving me empty and wounded and yearning.

you said you missed me. said it many times, while i was gone. now i'm back, have been back, and i wonder how you missed me, why you missed me, when you won't talk to me. i think you mistook missing for worrying. i think you mistook caring for a feeling of obligation. i think you like missing me more than talking to me.

and i think i can't breathe with how much that hurts

[tommygettingwrittenoff]

i need them to put eddie in a coma so he can have his own little coma dream realization

[toytulini]

if you draw enough monster ocs, when you go back to drawing a human character, it feels like "sameface syndrome" everytime, by virtue of their face being. human.

[fullmetal-angelgrace]

damsel 2024 was pretty good, i really liked the setup of the elodie's increasing horror as she gets further into the dragon cave, but really I'm mostly annoyed because the ENTIRE movie i was just yelling at her to tell the dragon it was being lied to, they really spent for fucking ever dragging that out