#this has been rattling around in my brain again so have it once more <3

[cookinguptales]

Oh, Nandor. Time to try and rattle your head around again so I can figure out that weird little brain of yours.

There are so many things to say about 4.04, and I feel like over the next week I will end up saying them, but what I keep coming back to is the very weird way that Nandor thinks of Guillermo here. Or rather... doesn’t think of Guillermo.

1. He does not think of Guillermo as a normal familiar. He just takes it for granted that Guillermo could kill any familiar there (and probably all of the vampires, too), and doesn’t seem worried at all that Guillermo might possibly lose or get hurt. He listens to Guillermo’s plans and worries (particularly when he has to fight the vampire champion) and he acquiesces to Guillermo’s initial refusal in front of other vampires until he gets all het up over the perceived insult towards him and Guillermo. Like he straight-up allowed his familiar to tell him no in front of other vampires! That’s crazy!

(Side note: He used almost identical phrasing here as he did when Guillermo killed Carol, saying that he wasn’t worried about Guillermo! He just didn’t want Guillermo’s murder to reflect badly on him! Here he’s not upset that they’re insulting Guillermo! He just thinks it’ll reflect badly on him! Yeah, okay, you can tell me you’re not being protective and reactionary all you want. I didn’t believe you then and I don’t believe you now.)

2. He does not think of Guillermo as a normal and mortal human. Now, this one has come up a few times in the past, most blatantly in the super slumber ep. It’s like his brain slides away from acknowledging Guillermo’s mortality. He knows Guillermo is a human. He knows humans die. But he will not think about Guillermo’s ability to die. He never once even considered that Guillermo might lose a fight and that Nandor might lose him. It’s just a non-starter in his mind... until he pushes Guillermo off that balcony and he doesn’t immediately get up. You can see it, that creeping knowledge, that slow realization, the mounting anxiety as he realizes -- holy shit. I may have killed my friend. Guillermo can die.

3. He does not think of Guillermo as a normal vampire slayer. He even says it himself -- he forgets that about him sometimes. He’s weirdly proud of Guillermo’s fighting abilities and he’s more than aware that Guillermo uses them to kill vampires. But it’s hard for him to conceptualize Guillermo as a vampire killer. Because, you know, Guillermo is... Guillermo. His familiar. His comrade. His soldier. His best friend. Guillermo would never hurt him, and vampire slayers would. Up until this episode, I’m not sure Nandor had ever fully accepted that Guillermo could hurt him. But he knows it now.

And that’s what I’m leading up to here. Nandor has all of these things that he refuses to think about with Guillermo, but those illusions have just been jarred severely, if not broken entirely. He’s assigned Guillermo this very nebulous role in his mind that he still calls familiar, but he obviously doesn’t actually think of him as a familiar anymore. Like... we almost never see Guillermo even doing familiar shit anymore. Nandor never even considered telling Guillermo to identify himself as his human familiar, despite human familiars obviously being welcome in the Night Market. He made up some weird lie about an orc instead. Weird move, Nandor!

So then Nandor gets into this familiar fight club and tries to push Guillermo into the most familiar-y role of all, though I’m not sure he’s consciously thinking of it like that. I keep joking about it, but it’s true. This man is trying to order him around like a goddamn pokemon! He’s trying to assert a vampire’s right to rule over his own familiar’s body, life, and death. And Guillermo takes that from him in a brutal and very public way. Nandor can no longer ignore that Guillermo is absolutely not subservient to him anymore. Guillermo is no longer a true familiar.

He also was forced to confront his weird illusions about Guillermo’s mortality. He went into this as weird as he always is about Guillermo’s perceived immortality (which he has neglected to give him, might I add, whole other essay there) and just... refused to even think about the possibility that Guillermo could die or even get seriously injured here. He really does seem to think of Guillermo as invulnerable... because he has to. His brain will not let him think about the possibility of Guillermo dying. 

Until Guillermo didn’t get up. Like wow, you could really start to see dark and potent reality starting to leak into that silly little brain of his. And like... for a second, there was real fear there. Nandor was no longer able to ignore Guillermo’s potential mortality, either. Guillermo can die.

Finally, Nandor had to confront the fact that Guillermo is a literal vampire killer, and he could kill Nandor if he so chose. Nandor seemed to be laboring under the delusion that he let Guillermo win last time, and Guillermo put that one the fuck to bed, didn’t he? Guillermo just proved spectacularly and without doubt that his tiny body is made for killing vampires -- Nandor included. Nandor can no longer ignore that Guillermo can -- but, and this is key, won’t -- kill him. Guillermo is a slayer.

Up until this point, Nandor has been clinging to the last vestiges of normalcy that they had between them. He was holding onto their old roles, refusing to acknowledge that it was a bit like grabbing onto the shed skin of a snake. That shit is brittle as hell, Nandor, and hell if it didn’t just break! I think it was sort of those broken illusions that had him so beaten down at the end of the fight. Yes, he felt embarrassed to be beaten by a “familiar”. But I think he was also upset to lose the illusions he’d been clinging to. The very foundation of his life has been rocked.

And sure, they managed to push past it for the sake of getting out of there. But Guillermo’s got to be mad at him, and Nandor’s got to be trying to figure out how to build those illusions back up. (He’s so fucking good at rebuilding mental walls.) I suspect he’ll just try not to think about it like he’s been trying not to think about it for years. But things are coming to a head, I think, and I don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to ignore it.

And, for that matter, I think he won’t be able to ignore what a bad fucking idea this wedding clearly is, either. All of Nandor’s carefully-built illusions are starting to crumble before him, and we all know how Nandor gets when he doesn’t know what to do with himself...

This is long as hell so I’ll cut myself off here but like! It’s so fascinating to see the world that Nandor has carefully constructed in his mind! The world he intends to live in! It’s so crazy to see him forcibly pulled into reality! Because Nandor is one of the worst characters at acknowledging reality that I’ve seen in a long, long time! And I don’t think he’s gonna have a good time with it!

*puts Nandor’s head down* okay I’m done

[lying-hyperion-jackass]

the odyssey of recollection

the dark urge x enver gortash

rating: mature | word count: 1701

warnings: durge typical violent thoughts

notes: i am not immune to durgetash. this has been rattling around my brain since my first dark urge run. hope you enjoy <3

You can rarely sleep these days. 

The darkness inside you roils and pulses the moment you lay down, in sweet anticipation of the nightmares that will overtake you.

Despite the assurances of your companions that they would prevent any further tragedy, the terror that you will lose control of yourself again hangs heavy over your head.

But tonight you find something else is keeping you awake. An itch in your mind demanding to be scratched.

So you creep from your bedroll and out into the darkness of Baldur’s Gate. Without much thought, your feet carry you to Wyrm’s Rock. The fort feels even more imposing shrouded in shadow, towering over both Rivington and the lower city beyond. 

The guards allow you to pass without so much as a glance, a fully staffed crew despite the hour. You marvel at the level of trust that has been placed in you. It only makes you more curious. 

You find him seated in his office, behind an almost comically large wooden desk, perhaps meant to make him look more official, more imposing.

He looks small. Weak. 

When he looks up at you, there is no change in his expression. “I must say I am impressed with your speed and efficiency as always.”

You raise an eyebrow.

“I told you not to come here until you had dealt with Orin and acquired her Netherstone. And here you stand, mere hours later.” He sits back in his chair, eyes traveling the length of you in a way that makes something inside of you shiver. 

“You know me,” you say simply in response, frozen in place halfway between his desk and the door. You can’t bring yourself to move closer. 

Gortash’s mouth turns up into the barest hint of a smile. “I do. I thought I made that quite clear in our earlier conversation.” His clawed gauntlet clicks on the desktop where his hand rests. “That does not explain why you are here. And without your compatriots this time.”

“I know that I am…” you begin, but the words turn to ash in your mouth. Monster. Murderer. Bhaalspawn. “I know what I am. But I don’t know who I am.”

He nods. “And you would trust me to fill in the gaps for you?”

The black pit inside you twists. Look how sure of himself. How smug. He thinks he has the upper hand. Remind him of who you are.

You swallow it down. “I don’t have a lot of other options.”

There’s a beat as you stare each other down, but eventually, Gortash rises, circling his desk and coming to lean on the other side, just a few feet closer to where you stand. “You are as I said. A companion in this little plot of ours. A reliable teammate, dedicated to the cause.”

Your mind wanders back to the letters you’d found in the Oubliette, letters you now recognized must have been written in your own hand. You had admired this man in front of you. Spoke of him with a strange kind of fondness. 

“Was I like Orin?” You ask instead. Wondering if you were the mindless, chaotic, cruel follower of your Father everyone expected you to be.

Gortash winces. “Gods no. I would never have willingly entered into this with someone like her. You were different. You understood strategy, timing. The importance of control,” he says, the strange fondness you heard in your writing creeping into his voice as well. “I like to think you appreciated those same things in me.”

“How long had we known each other?”

“Ten years.”

“How did we meet?”

“I sought you out. You had quite the reputation.”

You think carefully about what else would be useful to know. “Why does Orin want you dead?”

“I imagine for the same reason I want to be rid of her. Our visions of the future of Baldur’s Gate do not align,” he says, before inclining his head to you. “Not the way that ours once did.” 

You search his features. Just as it was before his coronation, you see no trace of deception. No reason not to believe what he’s telling you. You imagine that future. The Tyrant Lord and his Assassin. 

The urge inside you recoils again. Before you can realize you’ve done it, you’ve crossed the space. He’s taller than you, but that doesn’t stop your hand from gripping his throat and shoving him back against his own gaudy desk. 

“I do not share anything with you. I will be the one whose sword carves bloody the whole of the coast. I will be the one left standing,” you find yourself snarling at him. 

You’re disappointed to see no fear in his eyes. He does not shrink back from you as he should. Instead he takes one clawed finger and touches it to your chin. “There you are,” he says softly.

Your heart is racing and you blink, moving to step away from him, but he catches your wrist and holds you in place. “You seemed so different now. So righteous,” he says. “You and your little band of heroes. All along hiding away the deepest parts of you. How does it feel to be seen?”

Swallowing hard, you yank your hand away and this time he lets you. 

As if he could let you do anything. You could destroy him. His blood would paint the walls so beautifully.

Looking at him, something else turns inside you, pooling low in your belly. The question on the tip of your tongue feels like one that has already been answered but you have to ask. You have to know. “We were…” you trail off.

“Perhaps I know you more intimately than you anticipated,” he says, still relaxed against the edge of his desk. Before you can ask another question he continues. “Neither of us expected it. But it was a boon for our partnership, even if others disagreed.”

“Orin was terribly jealous of you. Of the power you held. The favor with Bhaal.” He looks down, almost contrite. “I fear that our relationship may have been what drove her over the edge.”

You narrow your eyes at him. “If we were so close, why didn’t you come after me?” 

The muscle in his jaw twitches slightly. “She told me you were dead. I had little reason to doubt her abilities.” 

Liar. Weakling. Coward.

You take a tentative step towards him again. “No. You knew.” The knowledge comes to you with absolute clarity. “But coming for me would jeopardize your position.”

The blackness inside of you writhes joyously, calling the violence to the surface again. This time you embrace it, you imagine ripping his throat out with your teeth, finally quieting his constant lies. “So you left me there. To. Rot,” you spit. 

“As if you would not have done the same to me,” he growls back, standing up to his full height. 

Your mouth splits into a wide, feral grin. Your body sings in his presence, free in a way you have not been since you awoke aboard the Nautaloid. Your companions, your lovers, they all hoped for you to be something else. Something new. The leader, the hero, the unflinching ally. 

It was exhausting. Constant rebellion against your nature.

Isn’t it easier to embrace what you really are?

His eyes search your face, frozen in anticipation of what you might do next. 

“Why aren’t you afraid of me,” you ask, staring up at him.

He doesn’t answer you. Instead he leans down and presses his lips to yours. It's a searing, violent kiss. His golden clawed fingers dig into your skin through your thin camp clothes. You’re pressed so tightly together that you can feel his rabbit heart pounding in his chest.

Prey so eager to be devoured by predator. 

You part your lips to bite into his and copper floods your mouth. He groans, but he doesn’t pull away. Instead he leans in, pulling you impossibly closer.

The urge screams at you to force him to his knees, slit his throat and bathe in his ichor. But some other part of you, tangled in memories that were stolen, aches for a different kind of submission from him. 

He reaches beneath you and lifts, turning to set you roughly on his desk, crowding between your thighs and pulling you into another kiss. Your fingers thread through his hair, tugging hard, earning you another pitiful moan.

“Gods I missed this,” he says against your lips, hands wandering underneath your tunic. The scent of him surrounds you, some kind of expensive, spiced perfume, and memories flash through your shattered consciousness. 

The two of you, tangled up in every conceivable way. The feeling of him around you, on top of you, inside you, Reverence and malice in equal parts every time he looked at you from his knees. The taste of his sweat, his blood, It’s overwhelming, intoxicating, the most you’ve been able to remember of your life before.

Before. Before Orin cast you aside like a broken toy to be tormented at the hands of Balthazar’s sadistic lackeys. Before this tadpole squirmed into your brain. Before the iron grip of your devotion to your father had slackened enough for you to taste freedom. 

You don’t need freedom. Kill the Lordling. Take his stone. Then claim your throne. 

Your eyes snap open and you shove him back, hard enough to send him stumbling. He looks at you with blood on his mouth. He doesn’t look upset, just curious. Mind working five steps ahead of whatever it is you might do next.

Pushing down the squirming darkness inside you takes considerably more effort than it did a few minutes ago, but you manage. You stand, and move carefully around him towards the door.

“I’ll take care of Orin. But after that we’re done,” you say sharply, turning on your heel and leaving the office before he can say anything else. 

Back in your bedroll you find sleep is no more within reach than it was before you went. Only now instead of your bloody visions, you find yourself plagued by hazy memories of yourself, and a desperate desire you know you cannot sate.

[everybodyshusband]

feeeliiiiiiix, i’m rattling the bars of my cage once again because i see that prompt list, baby!! >:3c

hehehe, what about 37. and 42. with some zephyr/cowbell because YES. i’m still thinking about them thank you very much

you should always be thinking about them >:D consider this as a way to tide you over until i finish The zephbell piece for you :> the prompts were "kiss me" and "so excited already..." i hope i did your request justice, love !! (and since it's been... a while, in case you're a little confused, this is the prompt list that the ever-wonderful leaff is referring to <3) explicit. | cw: semi public sex, edging | they/them zephyr, it/its cock-wielding earth ghoul cowbell. 1.3k words

"Cowbell!" Zephyr huffs indignantly, although having known the air ghoul for what feels like aeons now, Cowbell is well aware that they're not upset by its actions, not properly, at least. "Can you not see I am in the middle of a task?"

"Don't care." It presses the words softly into their mind, praying that its thoughts wrap as deliciously around the air ghoul's brain stem as they always claim. "Kiss me," it urges, wrapping long, skeletal fingers in Zephyr's tunic and pulling them as close as possible; somehow, the air ghoul manages to keep their fingers on the correct notes of the keyboard. "I need it."

"Mine erthe, you must learn to hold patience. Allow me to complete the music first. Lead me not into your frightful temptation whilst I am busy, foul demon." The smirk that dances across the air ghoul's lips and the spark in their eyes proves to Cowbell that there is no real venom behind Zephyr's playful words. Well, no more than there usually is, anyway. They grace the earth ghoul with a quick peck on the lips before turning their attention back to the task at their hand.

Their fingers press on the keys of their beloved keyboard with an elegance they refuse to comprehend, no matter how many times Cowbell tells them. The earth ghoul rounds the keyboard, standing behind Zephyr to read their sheet music over their shoulder; some classical piece they're rehearsing for next week's Black Mass that Cowbell knows for a fact Zephyr already knows by heart. The notes are a mess of ink on paper to the earth ghoul, so it can't help but admire the way Zephyr is able to translate a language so indecipherable to Cowbell into the haunting melody currently ringing through the chapel.

(Perhaps that's part of the reason the air ghoul is so hesitant to begin anything... lascivious with Cowbell; they are in public after all, and a sacred place at that. But that's never stopped either of them before.)

Before Zephyr can even begin to predict what's happening, Cowbell is pressing its body against theirs, wrapping its arms tight around their shoulders, and kissing and nipping up and down the length of their throat.

The air ghoul sighs and continues playing, attuned enough to Cowbell's antics by now that they're able to carry on with their business despite its bothersome interruptions. Cowbell's glad of that. It makes teasing them all the more enjoyable. Means it has to work harder to gauge a proper reaction.

Means that when the desperation for Zephyr to engage in its little game gets to be too much, it can start working even harder. Can start grinding its hips against the air ghoul with uncoordinated jerky motions, moaning softly in their ear as pleasure quickly spreads through its vessel. Means that the most impressive reaction it is able to garner from the air ghoul in response to its tomfoolery is a hitched breath and the faltering of fingers against the keyboard.

Alas, it doesn’t take long for Zephyr to regain most of their composure and continue working the melodies of the piece with unrivalled skill, seeming to no longer be affected by their mate using their back to get itself off. Cowbell wishes its acts would have more of an effect on the air ghoul, but continues chasing its pleasure nevertheless; it isn’t going to let a little indifference get in the way of its end goal.

It doesn’t take long for the earth ghoul’s quick-thinking mind to begin to wander. Switching from wondering what will be served at tonight’s dinner, to how it might be able to work the air ghoul up until they're just as desperate as it is, to thoughts about Zephyr’s hands so impure that it is sure even Terzo would be astounded by the depravity of its mind. With the kind of thoughts racing through its head, it doesn’t take long for Cowbell to find itself chasing a rapidly approaching orgasm.

Zephyr must notice the change in pace of its rutting or the newfound desperation in its whines against their throat because Cowbell feels the muscles in Zephyr’s neck pull as they smirk at it and open their mouth to tease. "So excited already, my dear? If I did not know better, I would say you have already found yourself close to an edge... Is that true, darling?"

Cowbell breathes raggedly into the junction between Zephyr's neck and shoulder, nodding shakily and moaning at the embarrassment of how rapidly the drag of its clothed cock against the air ghoul's back is ricocheting it to the edge of orgasm. This isn’t the first time Cowbell has been this particular type of menace to Zephyr while they’ve attempted to fit some practice in around their busy schedule, but by the extent to which its own actions are affecting the earth ghoul, it might as well be.

There’s a tension building and spreading through its entire body as it creeps closer and closer to the edge, and Cowbell can’t help but start begging. “Zeph– My sky, please.”

“Please?” Zephyr inquires, tilting their head to the side in mock confusion. Cowbell tries to pretend that the extra sliver of skin the action exposes doesn’t drive it crazy with need. "What is it you are begging for, mine erthe?”

Cowbell grits its teeth as it does its best to hold off its impending orgasm for a few moments longer; it dreads to think of the punishment Zephyr will dream up if it fails to hold itself back from its own pleasure for even a moment. “Need to cum,” it whines into Zephyr’s head. “Wanna cum, sky. Please? Please let me? I– I gotta– Fuck, I can’t–”

“Can’t?” Zephyr asks sharply. “What can’t you do, erthe?” Cowbell is sure the only time the air ghoul ever uses contractions is when they’re mocking it. Honestly, it can’t complain; it enjoys the harshness behind their tone as they wrap their lips around words so foreign to their unique way of speaking.

It whines in response to Zephyr's words, continuing to rut against Zephyr’s back even as it teeters dangerously on the edge. “Can’t hold back, gonna cum. Wanna be good for you. Lemme cum, please let me cum, Zeph…” It is almost sobbing by now, pressing its words into Zephyr’s mind with just a hint of its own tear-streaked desperation, praying to whichever deity feels compelled to listen that the air ghoul will show it mercy before it’s too late.

As Cowbell speaks, Zephyr shifts forward, effectively stopping the earth ghoul from thrusting against their back any longer. It really does sob this time, hips still desperately rutting forward in the hope that the minute amounts of friction of pants against its cock will be enough to finally let it spill its pent-up release. Shamelessly, it starts begging again, tears obvious in its voice even as it speaks only in Zephyr’s mind.

Its desperate pleas are cut off as the air ghoul turns around on their stool and pulls Cowbell’s face down to meet theirs, catching it off guard with a bruising kiss. It’s intense, meant to claim, to own, and that’s all the permission Cowbell needs in order to tip over the edge with a scream that surely must echo around Zephyr’s skull enough to give them a headache.

The earth ghoul sobs with pleasure and relief as Zephyr continues to stake their claim against its lips, wrapping its arms around them to pull them as close and physically possible in the position they currently find themselves as it shudders helplessly through its orgasm.

Despite Cowbell’s whine of protest, Zephyr pulls back just enough for their lips to barely graze Cowbell’s own. “Good pet,” they whisper softly, immediately pulling the earth ghoul back in for another kiss.

Cowbell pretends their words don’t make its spent cock kick valiantly and instead allows itself to be guided by Zephyr, falling into the kiss with the hopes of being given the air ghoul an opportunity to feel just as good as it does now.

[that0nebird]

So I've been really into acnh and our life so I started making a list of villagers I think the characters would have and here's that..!!!

So for Qiu I was going purely based on vibes I won't lie, I feel like their island be super normal but in a very charming way.

So for their two Smugs I chose Shep and Henry. I think Henry would for sure be their favorite villager like look at that frog he is so Qiu coded. Shep is Qiu coded too so he absolutely stays. I have a feeling Qiu would just in general have a soft spot for smugs.

For their peppy villagers I chose Cheri and BonBon. I chose both of them for the same reasons I think step 1 Qiu would think they look very fun. They'd always be active on the island, like they would 100% be the resident island troublemakers.!!

For their Jock I chose Roald because look at those big dumb eyes, that scatterbrained bird has not a single thought rattling around in there. He would have been a starting villager that was too cute to give up.

For their Normal I chose Goldie and I feel like the reasoning behind this is obvious, Qiu's favorite color is golden (and who doesn't love Goldie?) She would be on one of their first mystery island and they would invite her ASAP.

For their cranky I chose Wolfgang because he gives me such step 2 Qiu vibes it's not even funny. Look at h i m like oh my lord there isn't a world where Qiu doesn't have Wolfgang on their island. He would definitely be a lucky autofill villager.

For their snooty I chose Whitney because of vibes alone. She's so adorable They'd have 0 choice but to keep her. Also step 2 Qiu would love her imo. Once again she'd be a lucky autofill villager.

For their Lazy I gave them Beau because 1 he's orange, 2 he looks like he'd be right at home in golden grove, 3 and most importantly like Roald they're a silly little guy with worms for brains.

And finally for their sisterly (Who I definitely didn't forget to add and had to poorly photoshop her on.) Phoebe. She's a phoenix that lives in a volcano, she is literally so cool they would love her.

It's TamaTime™ I went in extra hard for my cottagecore queen!

For her normal's I gave her Molly and Stella. I chose Stella for multiple reasons;1, I think she's such an underrated cottagecore villager 2, Not only is she a cottagecore staple she also gives me major grandma vibes so Tamarack would definitely get Stella cause she reminds Tamarack of her Omi. 3, Stella is sooooo step 2 Tamarack coded oh my godddd. Besties for life I say. Now I chose Molly because she's the cutest little duck and reminds me of Tamarack in step 1 based purely on vibes.

Onto her cranky boys ofc I had to choose Dobie. Dobie is the grandpa villager and she would get him for a similar reason to Stella and that's because he reminds Tamarack of her Opa. He would have a home next to Stella and she'd use the Happy Home dlc to make his house a little office. As for O'Hare he was definitely an autofill she got too attached to.

For her peppy(s) I chose Felicity and Tangy. Once again both of my girls are so Tamarack coded. Felicity I'm more of a general sense and Tangy is one again giving me step 1 Tamarack vibes which I love. Also semi-unrelated but step 1 Tamarack definitely would love peppy villagers as a whole.

For her lazy you know I had to go with Erik. He's a cottagecore staple, a sweetheart, he's a sleepy little orange antelope and I hate to repeat myself (not really) but LOOK. AT. HIM. He even has a snazzy lil sweater. Love him and Tamarack would too.

For her snooty I chose Willow because she's so bright, cute, she's a sheep 🩷, her catchphrase is "bo peep" and because shes a snooty ofc my girl is going to tell you exactly what she thinks at any moment. For the third time we have peak Step 1 vibes.

Her jock is Teddy not for any particular reason other than I think he'd be a starter villager she few too attached too and conveniently fit the island theme.

For her Sisterly I chose Deirdre because she's a deer, she has a forrest as her home, and her starter sweater reminds me of one you can choose in game for Franky.

I will be adding to this later but my brain will implode if I think about this anymore right now.

[fanby-fckry]

(As many or as few as you like 💜)

🍄, 🧭, ♻️,🤔,🛠️

An ask game for writers to procrastinate working on you WIP(s)

2. 🍄 Decriscribe your wip/one of your wips in the format of “___ + ___ =___”  

Child + Demon Summoning Ritual = Found Family???

(The question marks are a very important part of the equation, trust me.)

It’s for the same fic mentioned in this ask.

4. 🧭 An alternative title to your/ one of your WIP(s)?

A Far Cry From Eden had several alternate titles I considered, including The Fall of Eve, and Far From Eden.

8. ♻️ A scrapped idea for your current WIP

I already mentioned how Exorcist!Vaggie knocked a chapter off of my Survey fic, so to avoid repeats I’m gonna pick another fic.

I decided to change the setting in an UH3 smut fic because there were too many different elements going on all at once.

That entire fic is actually going to be based on a scene I had to scrap from Bloodlust and Butterflies. It was in the 2020 precursor fic, Tempting Entertainment, but I chose not to include it in the rewrite because it didn’t seem thematically appropriate.

They were going to be in an elevator, for no real reason besides the fact that that’s where they were in the old fic.

The more I was writing though, the more I realized that I wasn’t doing anything with that setting, and it was just taking away from the things I actually wanted to focus on.

9. 🤔 What’s a story you’d love to write but haven’t even started yet?

I typically get at least a few sentences down when I have an idea in my head, so I might have to rack my brain a bit to find something I haven’t started.

Oh, you know what? I’ve got a whole lineup of Women of Eden fics planned that I haven’t started yet. I’ll tell you one of those.

I want to tell the story of Lilith, Eve, and Charlie.

Eve is not just a mother, but the first mother. Eve and Lilith will have known each other for eons by the time Lilith considers becoming a mother, herself, and I imagine that Eve would be Lilith’s go-to confidant on all things motherhood.

I think Eve would become somewhat of an Aunt-figure to Charlie, and I’d love to explore the dynamic between all three of them.

There’s also a somewhat somber note in that, as far as Eve knows, she will never see her children again. She views all of the Sinners as her children in a way, because they’re all her descendants. She loves them, and she has mourned every year since the exterminations began.

But, they aren’t the children she raised, they aren’t the children she remembers.

There’s going to be some sadness there – some jealousy, even – when Eve sees Lilith and Charlie. I want to write it.

11. 🛠 Is there a scene or anything in the WIP you are struggling with right now?

About 3/4 of the way through my answer for this, I realized it had turned into a vent, so I’m gonna put it below the cut in case people don’t wanna read it.

No one, including @10moonymhrivertam is obligated to read this.

Thanks so much for the ask, Moony. Don’t let the vent fool you, I did genuinely enjoy answering these. I had a lot of fun answering the other 4 prompts, and I think I needed an opportunity to vent.

Hahaha, yeahhhh… I’m struggling with writing in general, lol. There’s some specifics about pacing and plots in a few fics and of course, not knowing Australian slang is a hurdle in writing dialogue for Cherri – specifically 1980’s Australian slang; like, how do I even find that?? – but my main problem is just…

I can’t seem to write. I’ve been burnt out and distracted since Husk’s chapter. I’ve had a busy week this week, and haven’t actually written anything at all.

Cherri’s chapter is currently all just dialogue that I wrote a while back, which is something I tend to do when I get an idea for a fic. I write some dialogue or some exposition that was rattling around in my brain and I fill in the rest later.

Well, it’s later. And I’m making fake tumblr dash posts, hyperspecific polls, and playing ask games.

[midnightcreator12]

Your “Lone Turtle and Hunter” story is rattling around in my brain again, and I am getting all sad about how Leo probably won’t get to meet any of the Clones that Chula fought with, as they are all probably dead or Order 66’d by now. The thing is, I feel like maybe some serious bonding could have happened, because the Clones were made exclusively to fight in a war, but so were Leo and his brothers!!!

If Leo got to interact with the Clones, it might force some interesting introspection about what his life might have been like if Splinter hadn’t thwarted Baron Draxum’s plans. What would the turtles have been like if they had been raised as soldiers? What would the Clones have been like if they weren’t? It might also raise some interesting comparisons between the Clones, who were mass produced, and the turtles, who were the first prototypes. If Draxum’s had held onto the turtles, would he have made more like them? Would they have been the template, or a rough first draft with MANY changes made to the next iteration (thus implying that they weren’t good enough)?

Just, I think if the Clones got to meet the turtles, there might be some recognition between them as manufactured life that was created solely to cause destruction. Given that the Clones probably won’t be around to do any of this, I wonder if Chula will start to have some of these thoughts if/when she finds out more about her Foundling’s origins?

I just really love your story! <3

Yeah, Leo is not going to meet the Clones anytime soon. But I agree that the Clones and the Turtles have quite a fair bit in common, in terms of their creation anyway.

If I DID have Leo meeting the Clones, then that definitely would have been brought up at some point. Like, Leo asks questions, of course, learns about why the clones were made and is like 'oh! me and my brothers were kinda supposed to be that too! But our dad kidnapped us so we ended up not doing that.' And that would probably mess with a few Clones a bit, with them being like, 'you can just...not be an instrument of war? even if that the whole reason you were born???'

I am gonna jot that down for the non-canon short stories I wanna write. So, not a full deep dive into that but a fun little story of 'what if Leo ended up in the Star Wars universe right after the Clone Wars started' kinda deal.

Chula kinda knows Leo was made with the intention of being a soldier (from bits and pieces of conversations the two have had) but she doesn't want to bring it up. Mostly because thinking about it makes her wonder if she should have just kidnapped Astra and the 244th and ran into Wild Space at the beginning of the war.

She see Leo, bright and happy and free to be himself and can't help but think 'I could have given that to my kids.' And she was already a bit mad at herself for not putting her foot down with Astra and saying 'Forget your duty to the Republic, they haven't done a thing for you. We're kidnapping the 244th and building a farm in Wild Space.' But she hates that she didn't even more when she sees how happy all the turtles are.

It solidifies her resolve to get her Clone kiddos away from the Republic once she gets home, and drag Astra away from it too, kicking and screaming if she has too!

.....I mean, we all know that's not happening, but Chula can have that little fantasy for now.

Anywho! Happy you like the story! And feel free to drop into my askbox anytime! Always happy to talk!

[nibwhipdragon]

Alright, Joseph for the character ask I wanna read an essay

You all really know who to ask for these character ask games don't you. Thank you I have. Written a lot. I apologise in advance if my writing seems to be discombobulated at times or if it feels like I'm going in circles, my brain has been like mush lately I cannot essay properly rn

Tagging @pey-no-attention-to-me as you asked for this too :3

It's all under the cut because I wrote SO MUCH.

Sexuality headcanon: Bisexual fr ❗️❗️❗️ Though I did see something abt Joseph being aro on here ages ago and it's been rattling around in my head ever since...him being aro/aroace actually kinda gives a reason as to why he's Like That imo, I like to dabble in it. Also it's really funny

Gender headcanon: Genderfluid 💥💥💥 It just fits, yknow? Though I am also open to other gender headcanons, I like to dabble in trans man and trans woman Joseph sometimes (I actually did do a screenshot edit with transfem Joseph once, and oh my god I hate hair so much) <3

A ship I have with said character: Caejose is my main ship with him, as you can probably tell. I also love joseq, they're such a sweet little couple, it's so wholesome (we ignore the cheating, though Joseph does have his selfish and bad traits he would NOT cheat, I hate Araki making him cheat just to get another Joestar for the plot). Hmm actually I should write some joseq I haven't written much and when I do it's sidelined by caejose...

A BROTP I have with said character: JOSEPH AND SMOKEY FR!!!!! WE SHOULD'VE GOTTEN MORE OF THEM AND THEIR SHENANIGANS!!!!! THEY WERE SUCH A GOOD DUO SMOKEY WAS THE FIRST FRIEND JOSEPH MADE HAUGHHHHH ARAKI WHY DO YOU DO THIS ALL THE TIME (I need to actually work on my full rewrite of jjba tbh)

Also I think there's probably something that can be said about Joseph having no proper friends before Smokey. Idk man but the way he always gets so aggressive over the littlest things, but it feels almost defensive in a sort of way to me? Like with the way he immediately demanded to know what was up with the Squid Ink Spaghetti, and the way he was really tentative with starting to eat it once he was told what it was. Yeah that could be chalked down to him just being wary of it as he's not used to the food and he won't know if he'll like it, but with him having no friends and also being arrested 3 times before hitting 20, I have a feeling something else is at play. Joseph was likely bullied in school, if I'm completely honest. That guy 100% did not have a good childhood I can guarantee you that.

And with that likely being the case, his first friend being Smokey kinda has a lot more meaning if you get what I mean. Like they first met because Smokey stole his wallet and ended up being attacked by the police for it. Of course yeah Joseph's not a racist so of course he wouldn't stand for that (ONCE AGAIN, WE IGNORE PART 3 BECAUSE ARAKI LITERALLY CANNOT KEEP HIS OWN CHARACTERS CONSISTENT. GOD.), but the whole arresting thing you'd assume he'd be fine with. And oddly enough he's not, he doesn't want Smokey to get arrested in the first place. You'd think he'd tell them to chill tf out with the racist stuff and leave it at that, but the first thing he tells the cops is that he gave Smokey the wallet – meaning there was no crime committed at all. And the police also only start doing stuff to Joseph after he tried to get Smokey off it scot-free (I feel that this change is more emphasised in the manga, where they straight up ask Joseph why he cares about Smokey as he's white and Smokey is black, I feel like they sorta bring Joseph down to Smokey's level in their minds after Joseph still stays on Smokey's side), so he definitely doesn't do this for his sake as it'd be better for him if he just left it. And with this being Joseph, with his selfish streak, that's quite notable. Personally I think that Joseph could recognise that Smokey wasn't in a good spot if he was stealing in broad daylight like that, he must've been desperate to do that. And once he saw how the police were treating him that just made him wanna make sure Smokey didn't get arrested more. I feel that if he really was bullied in childhood he'd understand the othering going on here (sure he can't understand completely bc getting othered by bullying and getting othered by racism is different. But the similarities ARE there) by the police to Smokey and that's what does cause him to have that REALLY violent outburst towards them (it was deserved, yes, but it didn't need to go that far to get the job done, ykwim). Actually the violent outburst is actually quite notable, seeing that kids that have been abused a lot – because bullying IS abuse – do usually tend to become aggressive and have behavioural and emotional regulation problems later in life as a result of it, sorta like a defence mechanism (and also because being bullied is not a good place to grow up in they also probably didn't have a chance to learn how to regulate emotions, especially if they were being teased and mocked for their feelings and that) and oh my god I'm going off on a major tangent I'll stop now

They also seem to have a sort of brotherly bond with each other, and I love that. They're just really awesome and cool and god I wish Araki had more screen time of them. Part 2 suffers from a lot of pacing issues actually now that I think about it. I'm Normal as you can tell

A NOTP I have with said character: Literally anything incestuous. There's so much incestuous stuff I come across it all the time it's so bad. I hate how Araki goes about writing jjba as he goes along if not for that we wouldn't have had the whole Lisa Lisa bath scene while also being his mother, which I think a lot of the incest stuff comes from. It's just...ew. You can't even get any interesting takes on the narrative with it the majority of the time. Just. 🤢

Also Josekars. Like I can see AUs where Kars ends up turning good and becomes friends or whatnot, Kars is a very interesting character for plots like that, but I simply do not like the ship for em both, it's just not my cup of tea.

A random headcanon: Whenever he had a nightmare as a child, he'd go and sleep in the same bed as Erina, as it'd bring him comfort. However, he still did this even when he was older, until he finally moved out with Suzi. Erina never minded, she'd do anything to make him feel better. (WAAAAHHHHH JOSEPH AND ERINA'S RELATIONSHIP...)

General opinion of said character: do i even need to say.

Well. I think he's very interesting due to his personality and morals being very gray in a way the other Joestars aren't, the other Joestars mainly have their negative traits be in what they do (steal, be a delinquent, etc.) and not their actual personality traits like selfishness and that. He's terribly underused by Araki and also mischaracterised in later parts because it's Araki of course that's gonna happen. I think about him every day for hours at a time he's at the forefront of my mind constantly I'm Normal about him and he's one of the main things keeping my mind tethered to jjba as Sonic's kinda dragging me away from it, hence why Sonic and Joseph are fistfighting in my mind, they both want all my autism RAM so bad you have no idea. Nobody gets him like I do. OK maybe not nobody else, Seaweed and Kirsten get him. Other jjba mutuals don't Josephpost enough/I don't know irl so I can't make a proper judgement on it. He makes me sick I hope he dies. Taking him out for ice cream. Kissing him sloppy (platonically). Detaching his penis so he can never have sex again. Joseph Joestar

[limabeans-babies-forthewin]

Interdimensional Crisis Pt 3

Hey! So! It's been awhile since I've updated this fic, hm? In my defense, I had like 3 massive events happen in my life within, like, a month. But this fic (and several others) have been rattling in my brain the entire time, so yeah!

Thanks to those of you who're reading! And if you don't want irregular updates, I'm more than likely going to combine them all into one. . . Really. . . Long. . . one shot? Who knows. Point is, it's going up on Ao3 when I'm done and you can read it there. With possible edits.

Thanks!

FIRST

Previous

The first thing that surprises Duck is the amount of security patrolling the streets, making them feel exposed even though they stick to the shadows and more abandoned locales. Overly armed guards loiter on every corner and stare at anything that moves for longer than Duck thinks is needed, eyes burning holes in every unlucky passerby that crosses their path. Cameras buzz and hiss as they rove and zoom in on everything they can. It’s honestly horrifying and reminds Duck of a particularly rough episode of a podcast they finished a while back. Being monitored and watched wasn’t something they worried about until that episode, but now they feel the anxiety sharply. They never really worried about being seen in their own universe given how everyone is so deeply involved in their own lives, so being surrounded by cameras and armed guards makes it feel like they’ve finally awakened that mutant instinct of fearing being seen.

A large hand closes around their wrist and Duck jumps as they’re dragged forward.

“Don’t stop moving,” Ronin hisses as he guides them around a corner. They hadn’t realized they had slowed. “If you stop too long, you’ll be seen. Keep your hood up, eyes down, and keep moving. Only stop when I tell you to.”

Duck nods and uses their free hand to tug their hood over their head, casting their attention to the ground they walk on as they speed up to level with the older turtle. So far, Duck has come to the conclusion that the best way to stay on Ronin’s good side is to stay quiet and follow instructions. So they do.

“Hold up.”

The short stop causes Duck to run into Ronin’s back, but he doesn’t even shift under the impact. Duck, however, rubs their face as their eyes water and attempt to peer around him. They’re barely allowed a glimpse of the pair of men passing by before Ronin shoves them back and pins them to the shadows against the wall behind him. He levels them with a brief look before he turns his attention back once again and waits. After the men move out of range, Ronin peels himself from the bricks and moves toward the manhole cover in the middle of the alley. He levers it open with ease and motions for Duck to follow, keeping his eyes on their surroundings as Duck climbs down into the sewers. Once their feet hit the ground, they take a few steps away from the ladder as Ronin clears them once again and follows them down, making sure the cover is secure before finishing his descent.

“How you feeling?” he asks once they’re safely away from prying eyes or ears. His tone is softer and teeters more on the edge of how Draxum used to behave when they first met. Almost awkward as he tests the waters of politeness after an initial rough period. “Still cold? Nauseous?”

Duck shakes their head. Then hesitates and waves a hand in a ‘so-so’ motion. “I have a headache,” they admit. “And I’m a little tired. But other than that, I’m pretty alright. You know, all things considered.”

Ronin looks at them for a long moment and for that moment, Duck feels like they did when they first met Donnie. Almost like they’re being studied or observed so their reactions can be stored away and referred to later. It’s fine, though. They’re used to being watched since they’re extremely young and fairly freshly mutated. Everyone wants to make sure they’re coping with sentience in a healthy manner they suppose. Which is great because sometimes they aren’t. Like right now.

In their defense, they have just been forcibly ejected from their own dimension, punched by a turtle over two feet taller than they are, and they’re pretty sure they were yanked between universes without eating dinner, so they’re very hungry. But they still find themself instinctively smiling to try to hide most of what they’re feeling. Why? Who knows.

It seems useless against Ronin, though, since his eyes narrow suspiciously. “Your lip is bleeding.”

Duck swipes a thumb under their mouth and frowns when it comes back red and wet. They hum and swipe their hand down the side of their pants. “You hit me in the face,” they counter.

Ronin’s expression softens further and he frowns in displeasure.

"I’m just saying. People usually bleed when you hit them in the face. There are a lot of veins and shit in the head area.”

“I know,” he says, turning around and heading into the sewers proper. “Sorry.”

Duck hurries to keep up and tugs his jacket tighter around their shoulders. Much like in their own dimension, the sewers are colder than aboveground. So when it’s already cold in the upper world, it’s freezing below. And it’s basically freezing up there, so who knows how cold it’s going to get down here.  

“Don’t worry about it, big man,” they say as they level off with him. “Instincts and whatnot. If it makes you feel better, I don’t think I’m going to have any more issues.”

“Good to know. And I’ll try not to hit you again if you do.”

It takes Duck a moment to realize the turtle made a joke and they bark a laugh when they do. If it were one of their brothers, they would take the opportunity to nudge him with their shoulder, or violently shove Leo, for the offense. But they don’t know if Ronin would be ok with that level of familiarity. So instead, they stick to the laugh and a friendly eye roll. “I can’t even say I’d fight you if you did,” they relent. “I’ve been told I’m basically incapable of doing anything that requires physical activity.”

This time it’s Ronin that snorts a laugh. “Really?”

Duck feels themself smile and nod. “Sadly, yes. I’ve tried parkour, karate, whatever the hell Lou Jitsu does, weapons training. All of it—” They blow a raspberry for emphasis. “So we’ve discovered I’m better at fleeing and hiding. At least for the moment. Allegedly there’s still hope for me in the future.”

“A true warrior knows when to beat a hasty retreat. Plus you do seem. . .”

He trails off in a way that makes Duck glance up at him. “Are you trying not to insult me? Because you can call me weak or small or fragile and it’s not gonna hurt my feelings. I mean, honestly, look at me.” They spread their arms wide and motion to themself for emphasis. “Not exactly battle ready.” Once the gesture is made, Duck quickly huddles back into the jacket.

A faint smile settles on Ronin’s face as they make their way through the tunnels. “I’ll say. I almost thought I killed you when I hit you.”

“Hilarious. My jaw still hurts.”

“I didn’t hit you to make you feel good, kid.”

The pair share a few seconds of laughter and Duck finally feels the rest of their tension ease from their shoulders. This is more like a turtle they would know personally. Friendly, jovial, almost younger than he actually is. Based on appearance alone, Duck would have to assume that this turtle was at least in his thirties or forties, if not older given the amount of lines, scars, and spots that litter his head and face. There’s bound to be more under his clothes, not that Duck is itching to see this guy strip. But they won’t deny they’re curious about the limp they’re starting to notice now that they’re examining him. It ages him in an unfamiliar way that doesn’t scream ‘turtle’ to them. Yes, they know everyone is bound to age and at least one of their boys will probably develop a limp given the nature of their whole situation. But seeing it happen now. . .

Plus he has a seriousness about him that’s utterly confusing to them. Yes, Duck is well aware that sometimes you can’t joke your way out of a situation, and they have seen all of their brothers turn off the humor for brief periods to accomplish something. But everyone was always quick to revert back to laughter and joviality to ease the tension once the occasion passed. But Ronin has a gravity that just hangs over his shoulders like a cape. It’s almost unsettling, but they’re more than willing to overlook it since he was clearly wary about them for good reason. Besides, they can’t honestly expect their own brothers to remain so lighthearted as they get older, can they?

Well, maybe Mikey could pull off being optimistic and happy all the time. They honestly can’t picture him serious about anything beyond when he summons Dr. Delicate Touch.  

“Didn’t your parents ever teach you starin’ is rude?”

Duck snaps their gaze back toward the dimmed tunnels ahead of them. “Sorry,” they say. They hear the nervous laughter pick at the edges of their voice and they cringe, clearing their throat and shaking their head to steady themself against the embarrassment that comes from being caught. “I didn’t realize I was. Sorry.”

Ronin shrugs. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “You’re going through a lot. Staring is an expected reaction.”

A surprised laugh pushes itself from Duck’s core and they nod. “You’re fucking telling me. I’m practically vibrating with. . . Everything!” They hold up their hand and laugh again when they confirm that they are, in fact, shaking. “Look!”

“Are you shaking from adrenaline, or are you shaking because you’re horrifically underdressed for this weather?”

The question catches them off guard, but the fact that they can see their breath curl in a cloud around their head speaks for itself. They quickly withdraw their hand and tuck it into the sleeve of the jacket. “Probably both.”

“Fair enough. It should be warmer in the lair, and I’ll see if we have any tea left so you don’t catch a cold.”

Duck nods. “And can I get some water, please?”

“Of course kid. . . Oh. By the way, when we get to the lair, cool it with the swearing, ok? I don’t want the kids to pick it up.”             “Of course, of course. . .” It takes them far too long to pick up on surprise number two. “Wait. The what?”

NEXT

[shingansoul]

That's How It Is (Trigun fic)

Sumary:

2023 Vashwood Week day 3, prompt: Scars

"I don't want to do this anymore."

This line has been rattling around in my brain for like 3 months so when I saw this for day 3's prompt i jumped on the chance.

@vashwoodweek

To read on AO3, follow the link below. To read here, continue past the read more!

“I don’t want to do this anymore…”

His voice had barely been above a whisper, but the only other sounds out here in the desert night was the wind around them whipping up loose sand out beyond the rocky outcropping they had made camp at for the night and the fire crackling beside them a small distance away at their little camp’s center. And yet, it felt like it had to be said quietly, a confession like any other sin meant only for the priest and God to hear.

Wolfwood paused from his actions, having been digging through Vash’s bag to dredge out some kind of canned food they had picked up at the previous town to heat over their meager fire. He waited, to make sure he didn't miss anything else from his companion but he was met with silence and a growing sense of unease in the air, his hackles would have raised if his body was truer to his name. He slowly turned to look over at the blonde, sitting on the ground not even a yard away with his legs pulled up to his chest and his face buried up to his nose in his crossed arms atop his knees. Today hadn’t been a bad one honestly, nobody had come to claim Vash’s bounty, nor in the town they had left that morning were they recognized. They were in a walking stretch, Angelina III giving out the week prior but it wasn't horrible or unfamiliar territory. They had not sustained any major losses or reminders at all that day, it had been nice almost frankly.

Yet with how small Vash looked curled up beside him, Wolfwood felt at a loss for proper words. He looked fucking miserable, to be honest. Not quite sad just… everything about him looked and felt run down. Part of Wolfwood thought it was about damn time he let himself feel as ragged as watching how he lived felt, but in this moment actually seeing it unguarded for once felt…off, wrong. Wolfwood plastered on a good naturedly smirk and offered a weak chuckle, trying to glaze over the moment, afraid something delicate would break if he didn't tread lightly here.

“Hey now, my cooking isn't so bad and we’ll be in a town again in no more than a couple days if we keep up a good pace.” 

He tried to keep his tone flippant and light, like he was distracted not as if his attention and body weren't both wired up now keeping attention to any actions or words the other had. In response, Vash merely shook his head, his arms hiding a grimace on his lips as he grit his teeth. Wolfwood waited a few beats before returning to root through the bag, looking to get his original target to at least give off the impression he wasn't stalling and really was casually setting up dinner. He squinted to read the label on the can once he’d drudged it out from the bag, tilting his head a bit to better catch the fire light. 

“Now let’s see…oh now this is a score, you found tortilla soup back there? See, that’s pretty nice right?” He was talking out his ass, he knew it was obvious. But talking felt better than the silence, it put a distance between what he didn’t know how to address and moving through the evening to tomorrow. Hell, maybe they just wouldn't talk about it, wouldn't that be easy and nice? Wolfwood was a coward, he knew that. When it came to things he couldn't use his hands or the punisher for he was at a loss, too carved sharp from the life he’d lived so long having lost most of the real gentleness he had in exchange for a pretty good cover act he usually reserved for women and children to get information and the odd favor.

He set up their little hanging cooking put on its sticks above the fire and dumped the can of soup into it. Stoking the fire a little, he moved to sit not quite next to Vash, but maybe a foot to his right and kept his eyes on their dinner instead for lack of better focus. Now with both his task and his companion, he was caught in a place of quietly waiting. And so he did. It could have been moments or minutes, but Vash had taken the quiet as some kind of invitation and had simply let himself slump to the side up against Wolfwood's shoulder and upper arm. His legs were still drawn in but he turned his foot to be planted so the priest didn't take his entire weight, but it was still more than he was expecting and he reflexively gave out an “oof!”.

Vash kept his gaze downwards, but his position no longer supporting his arms he made to hug himself, his face more visible as proximity didn't allow him to truly hide behind his high collar. Wolfwood, unable to avoid him now, finally looked over at his charge proper for the first time since his small voiced confession. He was quick to notice normally pale lips now looked red and rough, like they’d been bitten through or gnawed on. Wolfwood sighed, scooching closer to Vash so their hips grazed each other, making the lean for the blonde a bit less dramatic and uncomfortable. Vash let himself be adjusted, resettling higher up on Wolfwood's shoulder proper pressing his cheek against the other man, his hair now tickling at Wolfwood's neck but not enough for him to do anything about it.

“Nick?”

“Hm?”

A pause.

“What do you do when…when it hurts for so long that you just stop feeling it anymore?”

Wolfwood’s brows furrowed at the question, unsure how to approach. “Are your scars acting up again?”

Vash hummed noncommittally, “Kind of.” He sounded unsure of his own answer, and Wolfwood could feel him working his jaw back and forth against his shoulder.

“Needle Noggin?”

“I think… I realized how much it hurt, and how long I've been hurting and…,” he paused, taking a deep breath as he turned his head to press his temple into the harder edge of his shoulder. “God, Nicholas, I'm so old and it never stops. It’s just the same thing every day and I keep moving forward but it doesn't matter, does it? I’ve walked every step of this entire planet at least once and yet I still keep walking, the only other constant is-...Does he hurt like this? Do you humans hurt like this? Is it like dying stars for you all, more painful but much faster until you just die?”

Wolfwood felt utterly gutted, like he’d been cut open and everything he had was spilling out instead of one of the most earnest admissions he had ever gotten from his companion. His voice had sounded so damn tired, not in a way anyone like Wolfwood could understand he didn't think. No, he was reminded how much the man beside him wasn't a man but a being, a creature much older than anyone else on this planet aside from the one who completed his matching set. And oh how this creature had suffered, open arms and warm smile rejected endlessly and punished. Had it always been like that, had there been no time truly that humans had returned Vash’s love? No, Wolfwood supposed not, human nature wouldn't change just because of a new planet just like that, no maybe because they were it was like a return to the primal selfishness that humanity had within them. To act otherwise was an active choice, and who would do so in favor of survival even at the cost of others?

Wolfwood reached around Vash and twisted until he could get both his arms securely around the blonde. With his grip sure, he tugged until he had pulled him over into his lap and, once sitting there with long legs awkwardly tucking up to trap Wolfwood's arm around his charge, he pressed Vash against his chest. 

“Wolfwood?”

“Hush. Just sit here.”

He did not. “Ever since we started traveling together, I imagined it would be you who finally killed me.”

“Needle Noggin,” he warned.

“Would you? Kill me?”

“Vash!”

“Please? When everything is said and done, would you do that for me?”

Wolfwood screwed his eyes tightly shut, hugging the man in his arms probably far too tight for any comfort but he was never told to stop. “NO! I WON’T! I DON’T WANT TO!”

Vash smiled, a hollow gesture that made Wolfwood feel nauseous.

“Is that how it is…”

“It is! That is how it fuckin’ is, because we’re gonna live through the end of this and then im dragging your ass to December with me even if its kicking and screaming. And when we’re there, you’re not leaving anywhere without me to make sure you don't get your stupid ass killed just like it has been! This is how it is now!” His voice was grit through teeth in a harsh snarl, he could feel his lips peeled back and something guttural threatening to tear through his throat. He exhaled heavily through his nose, trying to keep it at bay before pressing onwards.

“You’re gonna love those kids, and they’re gonna climb all over you and beat you up until you cry. Miss Melanie is going to constantly scold you and you’re gonna duck your head and give her that stupid smile every time and then you’re gonna help us take care of all of the little brats we end up with and when it's over every day we-we’ll…we’ll just….we’ll do it again the next day, and the day after that.”

Wolfwood was losing steam; he had never believed he’d get far enough really do all that, he never believed either of them would survive this stupid mission, but he couldn't listen to this being who radiated hope and love for humanity just…beg him so softly to be killed just so he could finally rest. He wouldn't take any part in a mercy killing, he was the punisher and that was the killing he would do. And Vash….Vash had been punished for living more than enough. And so he firmly painted this picture of a future he didn't ever think could be real, willing one of them to believe in it as he spoke and not caring much which of them it was. He told him about the kids he could recall being there when he left, all the stupid chore they’d both be sent to do every day, how shit the beds were in the room they’d inevitably share to keep as much space for the kids available, he told him what December was like, he just kept talking until he ran out of things he could put into words. 

He resisted the urge to pant, feeling out of breath from his nonstop rambling about a life he had never hoped for before this very moment. As he sat there, clinging and breathing and just feeling, he idly thought how the soup he’d put on the fire was certainly burned. They’d still eat it anyways, of course. Lost in his scattered thoughts, he almost missed the oh so small voice in his lap, but he was quick to whip around to look down at blonde spikes and imagine what startling blue eyes looked like.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

He felt a nod against his chest.

“That’s how it is now…” It felt less like a response for Wolfwood so much as feeling words in his mouth, but whether giving in as a defeat or genuine belief and acceptance, Wolfwood didn't care. He would cling to it as fiercely as he clung to their owner in his arms right now. 

Yes, Wolfwood was a coward.

He was painfully human.

And oh how selfish he was.

To cling to the very person he was to lead into death, to refuse him release even in the inevitability of both their horrible painful miserable ends. Playing roles in a story neither wanted to tell, they had no real choices before them did they? But even still, Wolfwood wouldn't let Vash just give up and leave him. He didn't allow it in Augusta, and he wouldn't now either, and to say it was for simply his orders and contract and not the memory of surprisingly soft hair against his skin and a too light body in his grip? 

Well that would make Wolfwood a liar too wouldn't it?

[atherix]

Alright listen i wanna scream about the last three chapters but i do not have the brain for fully fledged thoughts so this is what you're getting.

I am FASCINATED by this creation myth for the fae, btw. If I had more brain i feel like i could probably pull on things i know or have read but as of righgt now just know i reall love it and eventually i will be returning to it because I have some Thoughts I cant get out of my brain.

Also. I am once again projecting onto Scar as someone who Has Been deathly ill a few times in my life. Genuinely there are periods of terrifying lucidity and long stretches of basically unconsciousness for me too so its like. I am. Looking.

Oh my god and then Mumbo and Cub. PRESIDENTIAL ALERT: THE GIRLS ARE FIIIIGHTIIIIIIIIIING. but also genuinely I think whether it stays Mumscarian or goes Mumscarvexian Cub's relationship to the trio is SO interesting. How he does to some extent know Scar but he knows a younger Scar who was less sure of himself. How Mumbo DOES know Scar but he only really knows the older and more confident Scar. God. they. MMMMMMMM. And the fact that Mumbo and Cub are like, two sides of the same coin here - Shadow magic of two different kinds. So so so close with Scar. God. AUGH.

F U C K AO3 WENT DOWN UHHHH But Also. The fact that there is definitely Something in there and I don't mean the Skeleton Archer while they are GOING AFTER HUNTERS. MUMBO! CUB!!! WAAAAAAAH

And then the NEXT chapter where Grian's fucking dumbass takes Scar's magic and is like 'SCAR AND MUMBO CAN NEVER KNOW *kills the lawn and a tree*" liike okay bird brain. GOD!!!! ALSO THAT SCENE WAS SO INTENSE I AM!!! AHHHHHHHHH GOD GRIAN YOU!!! DUMABASS I AM RATTLING YOU!!! AND SCAR AND MUMBO ARE GOING TO RATTLE YOU AS THEY FUCKING SHOULD!!!!

And then more of the Fae story I am!!!! WELL I WOULD BE LOOKING AT IT IF AO3 WASNT DOWN BUT!!! STARING!!!!

LMAO a lot has happened and I did not give anyone time to process <3

LOOK. I AM SO. I fucking love myths and legends and I've been sitting on this for MONTHS, trying to figure out the best way to piece it together to maximize Creation Story vibes, and I am loving how it's coming together <3 I love the Fae story I have created, it is near and dear to me. Also leave it to me to create a "monarchy with absolute power" but said monarchy has absolutely the most brutal burden and responsibility to carry <3 May slightly be influenced by Cost of the Crown. "Though I am the head of state, in truth I am the least." THIS LINE LIVES IN MY HEAD RENT FREE so it may or may not have influenced how the Fae royals (and Elves in general) carry a burden and obligation <3 BUT YEAH THE FAE STORY. I am absolutely in love with it I'm hjgjkhfkfd <3

jkfgdjk Ihope I'm presenting that well enough, I know it's not 1:1 with real life (because it's a fantasy illness that depends on magic production + how much magic is in your system so it's more cyclical than real life) but just the idea of being aware that you're slipping away (and knowing very well that you might never wake up again) just scares me and makes me feel absolutely helpless, so I hope I'm conveying that well enough </3

THEY'RE FIGHTIIIING. Regardless of what happens yes I think Cub is an interesting addition to the Coven group 👀 YEAH That is exactly what I wanted to highlight here- Cub used to know EVERYTHING about Scar, but that was a completely different time and a completely different Scar. And Mumbo knows Scar NOW, knows him in the way Cub doesn't anymore, and just hhhjjgf. PARALLELS BABEYYY you know me, I love me some parallels <3

AO3 SABOTAGED YOUR ESSAY HJJSKJFSK </3 IT'S OKAY THO WE SURVIVED!!! Hahaha oh yes <3 The sad thing is Mumbo KNOWS there's something else... but he's so focused on Scar that he just dismisses it.... oh Mumbo.... and Cub doesn't really know any better, this is his first time spending any extended time out here </3

HAHAHA YEAHHHH Like I said to Void, why take "Deus Ex Machina" when I can use "Fuck Around and Find Out" and have Grian being stubborn and overconfident and fucking suffer for it <3 GOD GRIAN IS GONNA GET SO RATTLED. I wonder how he's gonna try and hide the damage to the lawn :)

I LOVE THE FAE STORY. Also the fact that Scar is sharing this story in his moments of lucidity.... <3 And trying to keep going even while his focus and his mind are slipping I AM SO JKFSKLFS-

[knavestrolls]

There’s pain in her forehead she can’t attribute to anything she knows. Or really, nothing she has she can attribute to anything she knows. Syhren is taller than she’s ever been, and more dissociated with her body than she ever wanted to be. Though, could she even call this prison her body? She may be tied to it eternally, but she had no choice in this. Speaking of choices, there was one made as soon as she could get the screaming to stop. Beatrx and Harvey? Syhren would never speak to them again- and if she had anything to do with it, neither would her Vladdy. 

It takes her longer than she’d like to get used to walking in this new body. Harvey hovers around her like he’s trying to help but she’s had enough of his type of ‘help’. A blessing in disguise that Beatrx doesn’t even attempt, too busy arguing with the bastard that tied her to this body. There’s absolutely no way to describe the way that looking at her own dead body makes her feel. Syhren does her best to ignore every awful urge and just take her phone off her dead body. Surprisingly, it’s still got a little juice left. -beautifulFatality began trolling businessMan- [bF]: Vladir, something awful has happened. [bM]: How did you get this account? [bF]: Back closet, three rows down, you keep a set of earrings you’ve been too nervous to give to Harvey for the last three sweeps for Quadrant’s day. [bF]: You hide them in a briefcase that’s literally so empty it rattles with the box in there. [bM]: Sy? [bM]: I thought you said you were above haunting technology. [bF]: It’s so much worse than that. [bF]: Do you know what your matesprit has done to me? [bF]: I’m 2 feet taller than I’ve ever been. [bM]: No… [bM]: Harv wouldn’t- he knows what that means are you.. [bF]: Harvey apparently would to save his fucking moirail. [bF]: He had some deal with the bastard who did this to me. [bF]: I don’t even know what they’re doing with my actual body- I grabbed my phone from it and now they’re taking it away. [bF]: Come grab me. [bF]: I refuse to be around these assholes anymore. [bF]: I don’t even know what this means for me. [bM]: Is the necromancer still around? [bF]: Yeah. He’s talking to the fucking jade about something, I’m not listening to them. [bM]: I’m on my way. [bM]: I’ll talk to that bastard. [bM]: He’s the only one who knows what this means for you. [bM]: I’ll still be here for you through this. [bM]: Anything you need, name it. [bM]: I don’t care if it crosses quads. [bM]: You’re the most important person to me right now. [bM]: <3<

[bF]: <3< -businessMan is now offline!- Syhren let the phone fall. It was a burner and would erase its contents at the end of today anyways. Vlad was on his way, she just had to wait for him. Just had to convince him that this was her now. She went to pull at her hair as she’d always done when anxious, but this girl’s hair wasn’t long enough for it. Again her brain was absolutely shredded trying to put the two facts together. Who was this poor girl? What happened to her? What had she done to deserve this treatment? Was her own soul still around? Would Syhren have to fight another soul for control of an undead body she’d never wanted?

“Sy, you’re screamin’ again sweetheart.” Harvey’s voice had never been more grating. “I don’t ever want to hear your voice again.” She said firmly, nearly gagging around each word once she heard the new voice she had. It was deeper than hers had been, rougher. Almost as if it had barely ever been used. Syhren ignored Harvey’s further attempts to talk to her, moving closer and closer to the mouth of the caverns, careful not to squash any grubs. The grubs hadn’t done anything wrong just because one of their jades decided to do something so insane and against the laws of the world. She stayed at the mouth of the cavern until Vlad showed up with the other jade who’d introduced herself before Syhren had died. Died the first time? Would there be another death for her in the future? The mental spiral started again and she could do little but pull at the short hair that should have been longer. Who knows how long she was like that before Vladir gently pulled her hands away and guided her into a vehicle. “Did you know you have a tail?” He said, lightheardly and clearly teasing. It only took trying to sit down in the vehicle as she normally would to prove him right. A small tuft of fur made it impossible to sit anything but forward. “Just take me home. I’m tired, Vladdy.”

[styxnbones]

1, 2, 7, 9, 17, 21, and 24 for whichever characters you think would have the most interesting answers! (and feel free to do multiple if you want)

1.What memory would your OC rather just forget?

As much as Corin is endlessly thankful to Minerva for un-brainwashing him, and cherishes the ability to remember everything he had been forced to forget, there's a part of him that wishes he could un-see being forced to eat his fiancee immediately after his embrace. He feels incredibly guilty about it, because he remembers as well just how good it felt in the moment and because, even with all Minerva's effort, he still can't remember her name.

2. What's something about your OC that people wouldn't expect just from looking at them?

For Minerva: he looks like he's in his late teens and dresses like a thrift-store catboy. On first glance, "Mass-Murdering Emissary Of A Vampiric Death Cult" is not really what comes to mind. This is, of course, the point.

7. What's one way your OC has changed since you first came up with them?

I'm of the "reduce reuse recycle" school of character creation, so a lot of my ocs look very different from how they started. But, I'd say the one that's changed the most would be Harper- having switched from Monster of the Week to Vampire the Masquerade and consequently become what they once hunted.

9. Do you have a specific lyric or quote which you associate with your OC?

Not so much a quote but the whole concept for Minerva came into being bc my brain came up with the phrase "Reality in Triplicate" and wouldn't stop spinning it around.

17. What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise?

I think objectively the worst thing I've done to an OC is how I set up Minerva to be embraced. They were a long-term resident at a Troubled Teen Facility, which was bad enough on it's own before his future pack took over the place and turned it into a Fight For Your Life Black Hand Boot Camp- using the kids as both the recruits and the training dummies until Minerva was the last one standing and was then immediately put through even more shit as their Creation Ritae. All in all, horrifically traumatizing scenario that quite literally fractured their mind and left them trapped in the body of a teenager for the rest of his nights.

21. Does your OC have any illnesses or disorders? How do they handle it?

I mean, all of them are dead so illnesses aren't so much a problem- but ohhhhh boy do these vampires have disorders. Literally all of them are traumatized in one way or another, though I think Harper is the only one who actually got diagnosed w PTSD before they died. Historically they haven't dealt with it well (killing and eating people to embody the monster that nearly killed and ate them so that they never have to feel like prey again is... not constructive), but they've gained a lot of touchstones that have helped them get things under control. Cass, however, is just out there raw dogging unlife with the aftereffects of a neglected childhood, abusive relationship, supernatural NPD and fragments of an elder rattling around in their brain. I would say the one handling it best is Kellen, who's got the tism and is arguably a CSA survivor- they've got a steady job, a consensual workplace relationship, a decent connection with their brother, and they generally have their shit together as long as they can keep up their routine.

24. What is an alternative life path your OC might have gone down? How different would their life be if they'd made those decisions?

Harper could have very easily ended up in the Sabbat instead of with the Camarilla. When their sire killed herself they were hovering around Humanity 3 and if a Sabbat pack had found them first I have no doubt that they'd have ended up converting to a Path of Enlightenment and fitting right in. That, or just spiraling into wighthood. All in all, though, I think that their life would actually be much more boring- at least from a storytelling standpoint. The point of Harper is the repression, the tension in the denial of what they desire in favor of superficial things like status and duty. They are having an objectively much worse time trying to fit into the Camarilla's status quo than they would letting loose in the Sabbat and they hate every second of it but still choose it anyways and that's why its interesting.

[falsebooles123]

14 GAYS Later: A two week introspective - Diary of a Big Ole Gay 3/19/2023

Hey Whores, Long Time no see. I have been watching an absolutely slutty amount of gay shit. Also I may or may not have binged a bunch of television recently.

(This is the only gif I could find I also watched The Staircase and starteed getting through RE: MIND)

but I have been on a mission to make a dent in my gay watchlist. I'm going to take a bit of a break the next couple of days but I definetly will watch a few more the last two weeks of march, (dear god are there still two weeks left).

Lets see anything else I should add to this diary. Well my dad just got a new apartment and it looks great and my cars been making a rattle noise which honestly gives me anxiety but I have my mechanic looking at it next week so she just has to get through this week. Hopes and prayers folks.

I also have going over the catering work I'm doing next month. Its going to be a lot of work but I'm going to be making very good money.

(God Thats Cute)

anyway whores lets get into it.

First a Girl (1935) dir. Victor Saville

Once again I am not watching VICTOR/VICTORIA, (through also where the fuck is that half and half costume from cause I've seen most of these version of it at this point).

If you don't know what I'm talking about there is a french version called Georges et Georgette, A 50s german remake and of course the classic 80s VICTOR/VICTORIA. If anyone has links to the first two hit a bitch up.

This version is english and can I just say they shit the bed so hard. they add a lot of nonsense to this like she burns a dress? and it adds absolutely nothing to the plot. The other issue is that they either copy a scene from the original but with worse acting or they add what can only be deemed 1940s heterosexual nonsense.

(I was looking for that part of singing in the rain where the audio gets out of sink and the actors are going NONONO YES YES YES)

That being said the original idea of victor und victoria is amazing because its basically epitomizes this early queer cinema trope of dude doing "man tests" to prove that it is fact

... a masquarader..... a drager personer... a dress-crossinger...

Theres something thats just incredible hot about this like top going up to a twink and being like yeah you a dude huh, your one of the boys, huh. You gonna fuck me in my bussy oh what bruh. Huh you man enough or what???

It comes off as like very homoerotic flirting. This one bascially side steps all the best parts of the original and it just made me realize how good OG Victor und Victoria is.

Cat People (1942) dir Jacques Tourneur

Cat People is one of those movies that people talk about being like super queer and it kinda is. Like the whole movie centers around a woman whose afraid to get intimate with her husband because shes afraid that she will turn into a monster and she gets threatened with getting thrown in an insane asylum because of it.

Which while the movie isn't queer in its subtext. That kind of storytelling resonates with a queer audience especially a contemporry one this was right in the middle of the whole shock the gay away and scoop out are brains portion of medical barbarism.

That being said this is about as queer as something like Picnic at Hanging Rock or Carnival of Souls. Its more feminist then anything but you can definetly read or relate to it as a marginilized and queer person.

The Gay Deceivers (1969) dir. Bruce Kessler

OMG This is mandatory queer viewing. This is for the girls and the gays thats it.

tbf I had a hard time getting into the full on camp of it all and thats because I have to deal with my internilized truama and femmphobia.

I get a lot of interal validation from serving you slutty masc realness.

(GOd thats hot)

and going into this film I had a hard time accepting that this was not it fact an attempt to call me a limp-wrist no-dick hippie faggot queer.

(REFERENCES BITCH)

but about half-way through I realized that it fact I was being a big dumb dumb and that I need to embrace the Fae Gays as much as the butch ones. Ands its not that I'm one of those homos who are like ewwwww I don't like it when those faggots... dresss like faggots. But I also have to let go of my own pain of being treated as a sissy and recognize that people do get validation from that.

Dealing with queer gender baggage is a process and can I just say that if your like me once you get over your nancy boy truama this is an absolute queer delight hunty.

also we are getting Bisexual Realness! #Yaaaasssscar. to quote my letterboxd.

I also want to shoutout Elliot in this film, who I'm sorry thats a bisexual honey. He wants dick. This man is walking around his "husband" shirtless with his pajamis bottoms unbuttoned. Ok Fag. fucking his sister to get to him, I see you. Going to gay bars unprompted. Showing up at the queer party wearing nothing but a jock. homo.

Like lets be clear, if this was remade Elliot would've made a pass on Danny. Ok there is a literally a scene were after Elliot fucked this MILF and he was like. Well she was paying my rent I had to say thank you. And Dannys like. Well I'm paying your rent now and Elliot looks him up and down and is like Bet.

What I'm saying is that Elliot was 100% ready to suck Dannys dick if he asked.

Iconic We stan it is on TUBI right the fuck now. Pls watch.

Daughters of Darkness (1971) dir. Harry Kumel

God for fuck sake step on me mommy.

This is one of the first Lesbian Vampire films on this watchlist that features Elizabeth Bathory, the countess who bathed in all that virgin blood you know the one. EB is a motif in a lot of Lesbian Vampire films but we have to remember that this is Pre-1971 which means that we are only getting the earliest Vampire films not the sexy ones like Nadja or Vampyros Lesbos, (there on my general watchlist just not this specific one.)

This one is hot as shit. We're talking just a lot of tittys and fucking and hot people making out. We have dommy mommy, we have toxic lesbian relationships, we have said dommy mommy being a lesbian who enthralls hot women to do there bidding. And can I just say. Mommmmmmy what about me. I want to be your thrall no fairrrrr.

This movie is giving us The Hunger vibes in the sense thats its horny, beautiful, slow, problamatic, and there are lesbians in this that you would just die for.

god women are so pretty, (I say as the bisexual fag who writes about early queer film).

The Wild One (1953) dir. Laszlo Benedek

So fun fact I posted a clip on this on Snapchat with the caption, "Dear god I am so gay" because marlon brando can fuck this bussy

(POV: what this man looks like as I am sucking him off)

and one of my friends, is like "Gay for this Pussy" and the answer is no Sir I am a faggot have you met me. Have you seen how much I suck dick. and yes I am gay for that pussy but not in this context sir. not in this context where marlon brando can and should tell me to get on my god damn knees like the little slut I am. OK.

(honestly we're kinda JO buddies but hes been really weird about it lately and been making it gay. And its like dude I don't want to fuck you. C'mon)

What I'm saying is that this movie has also inspired me to become a faggot biker and I need to buy leather pants. This film is pretty straight but like in a hot way so i'm into it. This was on youtube and while its not neccesarily super queer, (mostly on this list cause Fashion Fag Marlon Brando turned all the boys gay and into leather with this one. Thank you daddy), it is a pretty fun teen movie.

Castle of Blood (1964) dir. Antonio Margheriti

So this is one of those random 60s movies that were going through a po-essence??? Like they really liked Edgar Allen Poe, think tales of terror.

(god I love tales of terror and poe stories in general)

In this one Poe goes to a castle and just witnesses a lot of toxic polycule sheninigans. Honestly I couldn't hold onto the plot. I like it but I had a headache. Theres some lesbian vampires who, its suggested, kiss off screen but then the closeted one stabs the other. Rude.

Also the closet vamp is constantly trying to ride dick to prove how straight she is, and we've all been there honey.

Twelfth Night (1955) dir. Yan Frid, A. Abramov

so there are a lot of different versions of this but luckily for my poor gay ass theres only like 3 or 4 made before the 1970s. Theres a bunch from like 80 and 90, Theres of course the teen dramas like Shes the Man, One of the Boys, Motorcrossed and I am spared that missery.

It is also at this point that I have realized that while Twelfth NIght is pretty gay it is not in fact gay enough. Check my recent text post of ideas to make it gayer.

so let me just say that this was in russian I don't speak it and I was using Youtube Auto-Translate which is like if you went to a foreign country with a shitty friend and they kept forgetting to translate it for you because they were to busy making out with this hot chick they met at the bar.

that being said the tom-follery carried the plot for me. and since 80% of twelfth night is just a B-plot about a ever-growing bunch of assholes pulling a prank on some snob it works. I will also say that this has the most iconic Yellow Stockings reveal out of any of the versions I've seen so far. They were garish and iconic and we stan.

oh also I forgot to mention this does feature on on-screen kiss between two women but the second women is playing a canonically male character in the scene. Real life v V gay narratively techinically straight

Twelfth Night (1969) dir. John Sichel

Yet another version of this story. It was in english so I could here the dialogue but it was pretty poor showings. Honestly this sounds weird but watch te 1955 USSR version its a lot better.

Masculin Feminin (1966) dir. Jean-Luc Godard

God I hated this movie. Paul is a little bitch baby and the only thing that makes this somewhat tolerable is the fact that Godard was like HON HON HOMOSEXUALS en la TOILET.

Yeah this was a two hour sludgefest. Also apparently his girlfriends roommates were LESBIANS??? but let me just say that this film focused on the painfully straight sophormoric pawing of Paul the ur-incel.

Fuck this bitch

Everything Else I Watched

Honestly not much I just watched Life Without Dreams over on Le Cinema Club which was pretty good and a bunch of TV which I mentioned above. I will probably get into a bit more gay films before the end of the month so stay tuned. I'm trying to just get it out from under me so I have room to breathe. On that note I really need to finish filming and editing my new youtube video. Anyway sluts and slatterns. love you bye.

[kshira]

🥺👉👈 Bryce I have Hanma corruption and my brain won't shut up

I humbly and kind request for Hanma still being a virgin and being kinda ashamed of it but he boasts around that he's had so many women, and then he comes clean to you and you take him on his first (of many) wild rides

Okay, I love you thank you so much! Mwah!

— virgin! hanma

tw. fem!reader, virginity loss, reader has some experience, praise, pussy drunk hanma (whiny too) fingering, creampie, cockwarming mentions, sweet ending (duh it’s me) soft dom hanma!w/ sub reader

wc. 1k

an. virgin hanma plagues my mind, head empty just hanma. i love you!! i hope you like my love!! <3

“have i ever slept with someone? yeah” you reply, flipping the card down and reaching for the shot glass near you, you grab it tittering the tip between your lips, glancing over at hanma.

“you’re going to drink too aren’t you?” you hold the shot in your hand watching him avoid your gaze, he nervously fumbles for his pack of cigarettes “yeah ‘course, i’ve just had too much to drink and you know, i need to get back home.”

“but this is your place” you wave your arm around the empty room that once was covered in people of all sorts, hanma rolls his eyes “i’ve fucked over twenty people, i just don’t feel like drinkin’ anymore, okay?”

hanma steps up from the table you’d been sitting at, shoulders dropping “why’re you getting so defensive shuji?” you ask, waiting for answer but instead his footsteps clear the silence “goin’ to bed, you can see yourself out” hanma finally speaks out, closing the door behind him.

the answer is obviously masked in insecurities and anger, you ponder thoughts of leaving but instead your feet talk walking to his door and slowly bringing your hand to his door, you knock.

a low deep voice answers back allowing your hand to open the door to his room, it’s lowly lit with smoke clouding the area—posters splayed across the room and hanma sits on the bed, hands holding his face.

the mattress dips with your weight as you sit down beside him, cautiously pulling his hands away “i’m a virgin” he chuckles, eyes covered in shame when he finally meets your gaze “so?” you cock your head to the side, examining the way he tries to escape your stare.

“what do you mean? i’m a virgin, a fuckin’ virgin” hanma retorts, he shivers feeling your fingers intertwine with his “i think it’s cute, honestly.”

“you’re cute” he smiles, taking the space shared between you and cutting it in half “h-how cute?” your voice stutters, for him to claim to be a virgin; he sure doesn’t act like one.

“so cute that i’d like nothing more than to press your pretty legs to your chest and fuck you sensless but—” hanma releases his fingers from your grasp, bringing them up to ghost your lips “what do i know? i’m a virgin.”

it felt like eternity getting clothes off of hanma, his lips were made of affluent gold, playfully melting with your own as his hands just toyed with each fiber sewed on the fabrics.

hanma was inexperienced, clumsy and embarrassingly good at it, he pinned you down to his bed—smile spreading to his cheeks when he leans up from the hickeys, bites and stains on your skin “i’m supposed to be—ah! t-teaching you” you meekly whisper, hanma hand slipping inside your pants, tips reaching into your panties.

“is that right? well, c’mon pretty girl, show me~” hanma coos, fingers sliding between your folds and pressing down on your clit, your chest rattles—choked moans caught in your throat “oh, you like that? so i guess i must be doin’ somethin right.”

hanma circles your clit and you take the opportunity to switch the playing fields, dominating in an area of activity you know pretty well—palming at his strained jeans “hah, f-feels good” hanma echos out, the high pitched whine reverting back into his lungs when he realizes, he falls so quickly to your touch.

“yeah? want more?” you whisper through his lips finding yours again, needy fingers rolling down your bottom half—taking the time to snap your bra loose and pull your shirt over your head, hanma flickers his eyes over your bare body “i want all of you.”

“you—you can have me” shocked from his blunt words thrown through the silence, you gulp feeling his eyes linger on your body, his hands pulling his shirt off and the sounds of his pants unbuckling and hitting the floor.

it’s a sense of susceptible laid out in front of you, hanma tries tittering the two personas— but ultimately alters his faults when he hovers back over you, “gotta—gotta make me wet shuji” you comment, spreading your legs further apart from between his body “r-right, like this?” hanma lingers his hand down back down, fingers easily gliding through your wet folds, and hanma can feel his spin hit a shiver.

your moans push him to move faster between your legs, once your juices coat his fingers hanma sinks a finger in and unlike the many things he’s done in life—it’s unimaginable.

“you’re s-so wet and—” hanma pauses, holding his trembling jaw intact “t-tight, pussy s-so tight.”

“shuji please, more” you moan out, stifling the moans short circuiting his brain, hanma is on the edge already, cock pulsating at every drag of his thick fingers in your cunt, throb becoming more unmanageable while he keeps thinking of the next moments—before he’s even there.

hanma catches a rhythm, pounding into your hole with the lewd noises coloring the walls—his pants drifting through the air, he crashes his lips with yours, tongue slipping in your mouth and cries of his name pushes him off the ledge—gasping into your mouth when he feels you gush around his fingers, strings of your slick catch his attention when he finally gets the chance to pull out from your warm cunt.

you’re left breathless, the wind knocked out of your lungs “let me—let me touch you” you manage to whimper out, watching hanma engrossed by the wetness dripping from his fingers. “no, need to be inside you now” hanma groans, fisting his cock and aligning it with your hole, he glances up from his swollen cock slowly submerging in your messy hole “kiss me”

your lips lock and hanma throws his head back “oh fuck, oh fuck” he shuts his eyes shut, hips quivering to keep a steady pace, lip tucked between his teeth when you clench around him “i already wanna cum, it’s too much.”

“shuji look at me” you raise a hand to his warm cheek, pulling his face closer to yours “kiss me” he smiles at your words, lips connecting once again and hanma body feels hot, embers flickering in his stomach as he pumps faster, fingers finding your own and intertwining them, grip growing harder when hanma moves faster inside you.

he devours your moans, blending his hips with your own, hanma feels how warm you are wrapped around him, your slick dripping down his balls at every pound inside your hole, it’s so much—hanma just can’t take it, he wants to cum so bad, he wants more, and he’s going to take it.

“angel, wanna cum inside you—can i, please?” hanma cries out, eyes screwed shut again when he feels his cock beat at the same tempo as his heart, your half hearted moans reply an answer, slithering your hand down to connect with your clit, circling the bud—the clench of your cunt and hanma is lost in pleasure, unable to hold back he stills—filling your hole as you unravel before him, nails dig in his chest, cries of his name.

your hands wrap around hanma as he stays put, not wanting to leave the warmth, you pull him into another kiss, his hot breath fluttering through your lips “is this the part where i leave now?” you ask, worried thoughts settling in your chest.

hanma exhales, snuggling past your head and into your neck, whimpers filter the air at his sensitive cock settling between your legs, he laughs into your skin.

“when i said i wanted all of you, i meant your heart too.”

[turnpage]

send me a ✐ for a random sentence starter from my muse (1-1500) — tw: profanity, mild nsfw, long list

generator here quotes compiled from here inspired by

feel free to change to fit your preferences as need.

❨1❩ ❛ They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over. ❜
 ❨2❩ ❛ Sometimes human places create inhuman monsters. ❜ ❨3❩ ❛ I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in. ❜ ❨4❩ ❛ Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win. ❜ ❨5❩ ❛ The world's a hard place. It doesn't care. It doesn't hate you and me, but it doesn't love us, either. ❜ ❨6❩ ❛ The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge. ❜ ❨7❩ ❛ Pull your act together and just go on. ❜ ❨8❩ ❛ I had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there is nothing physically wrong. I hurt all the time. ❜ ❨9❩ ❛ Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly, you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty. ❜ ❨10❩ ❛ Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford? ❜ ❨11❩ ❛ Truth comes out. In the end it always comes out. ❜ ❨12❩ ❛ Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are. ❜ ❨13❩ ❛ No matter where you go, the same asshole gets off the plane. ❜ ❨14❩ ❛ We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives. ❜ ❨15❩ ❛ That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. ❜ ❨16❩ ❛ Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. ❜ ❨17❩ ❛ God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you. ❜ ❨18❩ ❛ Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you. ❜ ❨19❩ ❛ How many times, over how many years, have I—a grown adult—asked for the mercy of another chance? ❜ ❨20❩ ❛ I was suddenly so sick of myself, so revolted. ❜ ❨21❩ ❛ You listen to me. I’m going to talk to you about it this once and never again this same way. ❜ ❨22❩ ❛ But those pieces, they’ll never fit just the same way again. Never in this world. ❜ ❨23❩ ❛ Dying is a part of living. You have to keep tuning in to that if you expect to be a whole person. ❜ ❨24❩ ❛ Officious little prick. ❜ ❨25❩ ❛ I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. — The plants are moving under the rug. ❜ ❨26❩ ❛ How I wish you were fear. ❜ ❨27❩ ❛ But it was a dreadful kind of curiosity, the kind that makes you peek through your fingers during the scariest parts of a scary movie. ❜ ❨28❩ ❛ All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. After all, we're missing the party. ❜ ❨29❩ ❛ We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones. ❜ ❨30❩ ❛ The way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. ❜ ❨31❩ ❛ Got to be regular if you want to be happy. ❜ ❨32❩ ❛ But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. ❜ ❨33❩ ❛ He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none. ❜ ❨34❩ ❛ Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep. ❜ ❨35❩ ❛ It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness.  ❜ ❨36❩ ❛ If I had ever believed it, I no longer do. ❜ ❨37❩ ❛ I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. ❜ ❨38❩ ❛ I cannot bear this world a moment longer. ❜ ❨39❩ ❛ I have a better idea. I will do as I please. ❜ ❨40❩ ❛ All my life has been murk and depths, but I am not a part of that dark water. I am a creature within it. ❜ ❨41❩ ❛ You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see. ❜ ❨42❩ ❛ When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world. ❜ ❨43❩ ❛ When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist. ❜ ❨44❩ ❛ But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. ❜ ❨45❩ ❛ I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. ❜ ❨46❩ ❛ This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. ❜ ❨47❩ ❛ You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you. ❜ ❨48❩ ❛ Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me. ❜ ❨49❩ ❛ If now I am wise, it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes. ❜ ❨50❩ ❛ You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite. ❜ ❨51❩ ❛ Give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for. ❜ ❨52❩ ❛ I have been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that is only a shape I’ve been poured into. I do not have to keep it. ❜ ❨53❩ ❛ I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. ❜ ❨54❩ ❛ Understanding the world is a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. ❜ ❨55❩ ❛ Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two. ❜ ❨56❩ ❛ The truth is, men make terrible pigs. ❜ ❨57❩ ❛ My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it. ❜ ❨58❩ ❛ This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh. ❜ ❨59❩ ❛ Witches are not so delicate. ❜ ❨60❩ ❛ Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats. ❜ ❨61❩ ❛ I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. ❜ ❨62❩ ❛ There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too. ❜ ❨63❩ ❛ The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them. ❜ ❨64❩ ❛ Life is warped. I'm just in sync. ❜ ❨65❩ ❛ Now it's a whisper from the past. ❜ ❨66❩ ❛ But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more. ❜ ❨67❩ ❛ Why is it always such a surprise? The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush. ❜ ❨68❩ ❛ Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it. ❜ ❨69❩ ❛ What is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?  ❜ ❨70❩ ❛ I have scars, inside me. ❜ ❨71❩ ❛ The dead are not entirely dead but are alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. ❜ ❨72❩ ❛ However dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void. ❜ ❨73❩ ❛ Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. ❜ ❨74❩ ❛ It is another way of saying tough luck. To people you aren’t going to help out. ❜ ❨75❩ ❛ I'm waiting, far off in the future. ❜ ❨76❩ ❛ The only sure camouflage is unpredictability. ❜ ❨77❩ ❛ There are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. ❜ ❨78❩ ❛ First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled. ❜ ❨79❩ ❛ I long to swim in liquid moonlight. ❜ ❨80❩ ❛ That's right, I don’t like to be summoned on trivial matters. ❜ ❨81❩ ❛ The part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. ❜ ❨82❩ ❛ Cut that part out of us: the grinning, elemental malice. Begin us anew. ❜ ❨83❩ ❛ Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot. ❜ ❨84❩ ❛ At last. It's you. ❜ ❨85❩ ❛ No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish. ❜ ❨86❩ ❛ Take what the moment offers. Don’t close doors. Be thankful. ❜ ❨87❩ ❛ How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. ❜ ❨88❩ ❛ Is it disapproval or extreme lust? With some men it’s hard to tell the difference. ❜ ❨89❩ ❛ My hair was driving me crazy, but then … I died. ❜ ❨90❩ ❛ Seek and ye shall find, eventually. And you found. You’re right, I don’t dispute that. Sorry. ❜ ❨91❩ ❛ Everything digests, and is digested. ❜ ❨92❩ ❛ My head was once a filing cabinet. Now it’s a flurry of papers, floating on a draft. ❜ ❨93❩ ❛ You cannot keep bumping your head against reality and saying it is not there. ❜ ❨94❩ ❛ I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about. ❜ ❨95❩ ❛ And if I don’t want to die, I’ve got to start living. ❜ ❨96❩ ❛ The world is a beautiful place. Don’t forget that. And don’t miss it. ❜ ❨97❩ ❛ I was fighting for my life. So I must not want to die. ❜ ❨98❩ ❛ Something’s happening to me, through me, something dangerous and new. ❜ ❨99❩ ❛ It’s taken root, a poison tree; it’s grown, fanning out, vines winding round my gut, my lungs, my heart. ❜ ❨100❩ ❛ We’re interpreters. We’re translators. ❜ ❨101❩ ❛ You’ll notice I’m not asking what made you this way. ❜ ❨102❩ ❛ No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other. Tolstoy was chock-fullo’shit. Remember that. ❜ ❨103❩ ❛ We lived in monochrome those nights. ❜ ❨104❩ ❛ You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? ❜ ❨105❩ ❛ Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? ❜ ❨106❩ ❛ I stand here in the dark: cold, utterly alone, full of fear and something that feels like longing. ❜ ❨107❩ ❛ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. ❜ ❨108❩ ❛ Not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye. ❜ ❨109❩ ❛ Selective emotional detachment. ❜ ❨110❩ ❛ Not for me, or at least not today. ❜ ❨111❩ ❛ Dead but not gone, watching life surge forward around me, powerless to intervene. ❜ ❨112❩ ❛ Do I sound like a hillbilly saying that? ❜ ❨113❩ ❛ Remember, you’ve got your secret weapon. ❜ ❨114❩ ❛ The dream drains away like water. The memory, really. I try to scoop it up in my palms, but it’s gone. ❜ ❨115❩ ❛ My shadow stretches along the carpet, as though trying to detach itself from me. ❜ ❨116❩ ❛ It curls away from me, like blood in water. ❜ ❨117❩ ❛ It’s been so long since I felt the rain. Or wind—the caress of wind. ❜ ❨118❩ ❛ But snow I never want to feel again. ❜ ❨119❩ ❛ Through adversity to the stars. ❜ ❨120❩ ❛ No hero. No sleuth. I am locked in. I am locked out. ❜ ❨121❩ ❛ Thinking hasn't gotten me anywhere so far. ❜ ❨122❩ ❛ The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you. ❜ ❨123❩ ❛ Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. ❜ ❨124❩ ❛ Women get consumed. ❜ ❨125❩ ❛ Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them. ❜ ❨126❩ ❛ A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort. ❜ ❨127❩ ❛ Safer to be feared than loved. ❜ ❨128❩ ❛ I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence. ❜ ❨129❩ ❛ It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wish I could stop trying. ❜ ❨130❩ ❛ I always feel sad for the girl that I was. ❜ ❨131❩ ❛ Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes. ❜ ❨132❩ ❛ How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. ❜ ❨133❩ ❛ See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was. ❜ ❨134❩ ❛ Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. ❜ ❨135❩ ❛ To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting. ❜ ❨136❩ ❛ I'm here. I don't usually feel that I am. ❜ ❨137❩ ❛ I'm tired of dying. ❜ ❨138❩ ❛ What if you hurt because it feels so good? ❜ ❨139❩ ❛ How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow. ❜ ❨140❩ ❛ Do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait? ❜ ❨141❩ ❛ Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own. ❜ ❨142❩ ❛ Everyone has their own version of a memory. ❜ ❨143❩ ❛ Isn’t a smile a girl’s best weapon? ❜ ❨144❩ ❛ My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past. ❜ ❨145❩ ❛ Do what I want; I might like you. ❜ ❨146❩ ❛ I feel sorry for Persephone because even when she’s back with the living, people are afraid of her because of where’s she’s been. ❜ ❨147❩ ❛ She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. ❜ ❨148❩ ❛ The sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. ❜ ❨149❩ ❛ It infects you. It ruined me. ❜ ❨150❩ ❛ Your health is not a debt you just cancel. The body collects. ❜ ❨151❩ ❛ Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? ❜ ❨152❩ ❛ We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. ❜ ❨153❩ ❛ Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women. ❜ ❨154❩ ❛ The strongest of all warriors are these two — time and patience. ❜ ❨155❩ ❛ If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. ❜ ❨156❩ ❛ There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. ❜ ❨157❩ ❛ The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness. ❜ ❨158❩ ❛ Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy. ❜ ❨159❩ ❛ It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. ❜ ❨160❩ ❛ You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. ❜ ❨161❩ ❛ If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed. ❜ ❨162❩ ❛ We are asleep until we fall in love! ❜ ❨163❩ ❛ I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. ❜ ❨164❩ ❛ Everything I know, I know because of love. ❜ ❨165❩ ❛ Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. ❜ ❨166❩ ❛ If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ❜ ❨167❩ ❛ Yes, love, but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. ❜ ❨168❩ ❛ How can one be well...when one suffers morally? ❜ ❨169❩ ❛ Kings are the slaves of history. ❜ ❨170❩ ❛ God is the same everywhere. ❜ ❨171❩ ❛ Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. ❜ ❨172❩ ❛ One must be cunning and wicked in this world. ❜ ❨173❩ ❛ We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them. ❜ ❨174❩ ❛ When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair! ❜ ❨175❩ ❛ For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed? ❜ ❨176❩ ❛ He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died. ❜ ❨177❩ ❛ Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps. ❜ ❨178❩ ❛ Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible. ❜ ❨179❩ ❛ The distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable. ❜ ❨180❩ ❛ How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? ❜ ❨181❩ ❛ The wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe. ❜ ❨182❩ ❛ When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. ❜ ❨183❩ ❛ My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: the parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely. ❜ ❨184❩ ❛ Would it be worse to love someone who is no longer there, or not to love someone who is? ❜ ❨185❩ ❛ Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness. ❜ ❨186❩ ❛ It is not that I was credulous, simply that I believed in all things dark and dangerous. ❜ ❨187❩ ❛ Sometimes you do things you regret, but there's nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on. ❜ ❨188❩ ❛ Love will be an impulse that will inspire and ruin in equal measure. ❜ ❨189❩ ❛ He died alone. It don't matter a rat's ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone. ❜ ❨190❩ ❛ It was love, I knew, and it tasted like champagne in my mind. ❜ ❨191❩ ❛ The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck. ❜ ❨192❩ ❛ She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble. ❜ ❨193❩ ❛ Daylight is always safe. ❜ ❨194❩ ❛ If not for death, they'd be content to simply exist, but with death, well, their lives will have meaning. ❜ ❨195❩ ❛ You want to know the future, love? Then wait. ❜ ❨196❩ ❛ There are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm. ❜ ❨197❩ ❛ Fairy tales are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated ❜ ❨198❩ ❛ But sometimes you leave blood on your instruments. ❜ ❨199❩ ❛ I'd like to be a wolf. Not all the time. Just sometimes. In the dark. I would run through the forests. ❜ ❨200❩ ❛ You've seen them. They have mouths that twitch, and eyes that stare, and they babble and they mewl and they whimper. ❜ ❨201❩ ❛ They are not mad, or rather, the loss of their sanity is the lesser of their problems. ❜ ❨202❩ ❛ Good a reason for writing as I know: releasing demons, letting them fly. ❜ ❨203❩ ❛ That miserable state in which everything seems flat and of equal importance; when nothing matters, and in which reality seems scraped thin and threadbare. ❜ ❨204❩ ❛ Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: JUST DIE, it said. Like it is easy. ❜ ❨205❩ ❛ Winter started today. The sky turned grey and the snow began to fall and it did not stop falling until well after dark. ❜ ❨206❩ ❛ Memory is the great deceiver. ❜ ❨207❩ ❛ Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. ❜ ❨208❩ ❛ I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control.  ❜ ❨209❩ ❛ If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. ❜ ❨210❩ ❛ I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other. ❜ ❨211❩ ❛ But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. ❜ ❨212❩ ❛ I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other would have borne it. ❜ ❨213❩ ❛ There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves. ❜ ❨214❩ ❛ One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. ❜ ❨215❩ ❛ Better be without sense than misapply it as you do. ❜ ❨216❩ ❛ You must be the best judge of your own happiness. ❜ ❨217❩ ❛ Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing ; but I have never been in love ; it is not my way, or my nature ; and I do not think I ever shall. ❜ ❨218❩ ❛ Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise. ❜ ❨219❩ ❛ If I have not spoken, it is because I am afraid I will awaken myself from this dream. ❜ ❨220❩ ❛ If a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. ❜ ❨221❩ ❛ Faultless in spite of all her faults. ❜ ❨222❩ ❛ A heroine whom no one but myself will much like. ❜ ❨223❩ ❛ There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart. ❜ ❨224❩ ❛ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on the desert air. ❜ ❨225❩ ❛ I pity you. I thought you cleverer. ❜ ❨226❩ ❛ Evil to some is always good to others. ❜ ❨227❩ ❛ I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. ❜ ❨228❩ ❛ She is loveliness itself. ❜ ❨229❩ ❛ Time does not compose me. ❜ ❨230❩ ❛ A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her. ❜ ❨231❩ ❛ I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice. ❜ ❨232❩ ❛ I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be any more. ❜ ❨233❩ ❛ I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment. ❜ ❨234❩ ❛ I examined my own heart. And there you were. Never, I fear, to be removed. ❜ ❨235❩ ❛ With all your little faults, you are an excellent creature. ❜ ❨236❩ ❛ You have another long walk before you. ❜ ❨237❩ ❛ The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. ❜ ❨238❩ ❛ What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? ❜ ❨239❩ ❛ Out of the frying pan into the fire! ❜ ❨240❩ ❛ We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity. ❜ ❨241❩ ❛ She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. ❜ ❨242❩ ❛ And, oh, God . . . how frequently I weep! ❜ ❨243❩ ❛ From the coffin of your madness there is no escape. ❜ ❨244❩ ❛ I am feeling supernatural tonight. I want to eat diamonds. ❜ ❨245❩ ❛ All the same there is a chance that if we keep on shaking our chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles will part. ❜ ❨246❩ ❛ It was sad music fit to make you cut your throat. ❜ ❨247❩ ❛ Nothing is more boring than being forced to play. ❜ ❨248❩ ❛ Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest? ❜ ❨249❩ ❛ Wherein does a woman’s honour reside? In her vagina or in her spirit? ❜ ❨250❩ ❛ Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment! ❜ ❨251❩ ❛ Have you ever stared stark failure in the face? The trick is to outstare it. ❜ ❨252❩ ❛ Sometimes it seems that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the one who will wear them, who will bring them to life. ❜ ❨253❩ ❛ I have the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet I exist. ❜ ❨254❩ ❛ I felt myself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea. ❜ ❨255❩ ❛ She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right. ❜ ❨256❩ ❛ The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind. ❜ ❨257❩ ❛ I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs! ❜ ❨258❩ ❛ I love to hear my bones rattle. That’s how I know I’m alive. ❜ ❨259❩ ❛ I learnt, first, as the birds do, from the birds. ❜ ❨260❩ ❛ Inside and outside match exactly, but both are badly wrong. ❜ ❨261❩ ❛ During the less-than-blink of time it took the last chime to die, there came a vertiginous sensation. ❜ ❨262❩ ❛ I fear a wound not of the body but the soul, an irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of humankind. ❜ ❨263❩ ❛ I fear the proof of my own singularity. ❜ ❨264❩ ❛ Still nothing could calm the fearful storm in my erupting skin. ❜ ❨265❩ ❛ Petersburg, loveliest of all hallucinations. ❜ ❨266❩ ❛ A breathless second between black forest and the frozen sea. ❜ ❨267❩ ❛ I'm beginning to feel totally cut off from the world. ❜ ❨268❩ ❛ What does this all mean? Where are we? ❜ ❨269❩ ❛ Sometimes I bleed. ❜ ❨270❩ ❛ If you see a ghost, you say "hello". ❜ ❨271❩ ❛ The war is not over. ❜ ❨272❩ ❛ You're not going. You left us once already. ❜ ❨273❩ ❛ You can’t go! ❜ ❨274❩ ❛ I loved you, but that wasn't enough, was it? ❜ ❨275❩ ❛ If you're dead, then leave me in peace. ❜ ❨276❩ ❛ The only thing that moves here is the light, but it changes everything. ❜ ❨277❩ ❛ I won't ask for forgiveness for something I didn't do! ❜ ❨278❩ ❛ Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead. ❜ ❨279❩ ❛ Death of a loved one can lead people to do the strangest things. ❜ ❨280❩ ❛ Sooner or later, they will find you. ❜ ❨281❩ ❛ They're everywhere - they say this house is theirs. ❜ ❨282❩ ❛ You're always teasing me, and telling lies. I'm sick of it. ❜ ❨283❩ ❛ Others will come. Sometimes we'll sense them. Other times, we won't. ❜ ❨284❩ ❛ No crying now. No crying. Stop that. Here. Look what an awful face you've got when you cry. ❜ ❨285❩ ❛ You listen to me. I've seen them too. ❜ ❨286❩ ❛ You'll see. There are going to be some big surprises. There are going to be... changes. ❜ ❨287❩ ❛ Why did you go and fight that stupid war that had nothing to do with us? Why didn't you stay like the others did? ❜ ❨288❩ ❛ Your place was here with your family. ❜ ❨289❩ ❛ So you say you know this house well? ❜ ❨290❩ ❛ I wasn't expecting you so soon. ❜ ❨291❩ ❛ What's the matter? Has the cat got your tongue? ❜ ❨292❩ ❛ You mean they just vanished? Into thin air? ❜ ❨293❩ ❛ No door must be opened without the previous one being closed first. ❜ ❨294❩ ❛ Here, most of the time, you can hardly see your way. ❜ ❨295❩ ❛ Whatever you do, don't open the curtains. ❜ ❨296❩ ❛ Now, come on. Eyes closed. ❜ ❨297❩ ❛ We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. ❜ ❨298❩ ❛ By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be. ❜ ❨299❩ ❛ I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. ❜ ❨300❩ ❛ And the reasons? There are no reasons. ❜ ❨301❩ ❛ Love does not exist, it's like religion, made to control you. ❜ ❨302❩ ❛ After all, we're not fucking stupid. At least, we're not that fucking stupid. ❜ ❨303❩ ❛ You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt. ❜ ❨304❩ ❛ Everything in the street today seems soft focus. ❜ ❨305❩ ❛ What does that make us? The lowest of the low. ❜ ❨306❩ ❛ Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you're still fuckin’ miles off the pace. ❜ ❨307❩ ❛ It’s as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the way things are in a dream. ❜ ❨308❩ ❛ It’s all okay, it’s all beautiful; but I fear that this internal sea is going to subside soon, leaving this poisonous shite washed up, stranded up in my body. ❜ ❨309❩ ❛ It cuts me up. It confuses me. ❜ ❨310❩ ❛ It's not funny laughter. This is lynch mob laughter. ❜ ❨311❩ ❛ Protect me from those who wish to help us. ❜ ❨312❩ ❛ They mean well, and they mean well to me, but there's no way under the sun that they can appreciate what I feel, what I need. ❜ ❨313❩ ❛ The pit of melancholy is a bottomless one, and I am descending fast. ❜ ❨314❩ ❛ Living like this is a full-time business. ❜ ❨315❩ ❛ I’ll stand or fall alone. ❜ ❨316❩ ❛ We are no wiser now than at the start. ❜ ❨317❩ ❛ This is pathetic, and fucking boring. ❜ ❨318❩ ❛ Death is usually a process, rather than an event. ❜ ❨319❩ ❛ We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? ❜ ❨320❩ ❛ We are all acquaintances now. ❜ ❨321❩ ❛ The problem is that this beautiful ocean carries with it loads of poisonous flotsam and jetsam. ❜ ❨322❩ ❛ Life is beautiful. I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm going to have a long life. ❜ ❨323❩ ❛ The grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. ❜ ❨324❩ ❛ There must be more to life than this. ❜ ❨325❩ ❛ We all see what we want to see. ❜ ❨326❩ ❛ Statistically speaking, you're more likely to be killed by a member of your own family or a close friend, than by anyone else. ❜ ❨327❩ ❛ What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. ❜ ❨328❩ ❛ Maybe that's what love is: it's being pissed off. ❜ ❨329❩ ❛ You can forget who you are if you're alone too much. ❜ ❨330❩ ❛ Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God. ❜ ❨331❩ ❛ Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.  ❜ ❨332❩ ❛ We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing. ❜ ❨333❩ ❛ Everyone wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing. ❜ ❨334❩ ❛ We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young. ❜ ❨335❩ ❛ How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. ❜ ❨336❩ ❛ Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering: Mine! Mine! ❜ ❨337❩ ❛ All creatures know that some must die ; that all the rest may take and eat. ❜ ❨338❩ ❛ Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? ❜ ❨339❩ ❛ Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance. ❜ ❨340❩ ❛ Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy? ❜ ❨341❩ ❛ Love is useless, it leads you into dumb exchanges in which you give too much away, and then you get bitter and mean. ❜ ❨342❩ ❛ Maybe sadness is a kind of hunger. Maybe the two go together. ❜ ❨343❩ ❛ Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody -- a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules. ❜ ❨344❩ ❛ If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time. ❜ ❨345❩ ❛ You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them. ❜ ❨346❩ ❛ I'm fine, for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in. ❜ ❨347❩ ❛ Because if you can't wish, why bother? ❜ ❨348❩ ❛ It's better to hope than mope! ❜ ❨349❩ ❛ Reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows. ❜ ❨350❩ ❛ In any case, time is not a thing that passes, it’s a sea on which you float. ❜ ❨351❩ ❛ I know I’m deceiving myself, but I prefer to deceive myself. I desperately need to believe such pure joy is still possible. ❜ ❨352❩ ❛ Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered. ❜ ❨353❩ ❛ Behind my eyelids I saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned. ❜ ❨354❩ ❛ ‘Why can't I believe?’ I asked the darkness. ❜ ❨355❩ ❛ Everyone’s too sad for everything. ❜ ❨356❩ ❛ If you can’t stop the waves, go sailing. ❜ ❨357❩ ❛ I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. ❜ ❨358❩ ❛ Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. ❜ ❨359❩ ❛ In the end, we'll all become stories. ❜ ❨360❩ ❛ I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. ❜ ❨361❩ ❛ If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. ❜ ❨362❩ ❛ If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. ❜ ❨363❩ ❛ Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results. ❜ ❨364❩ ❛ Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been. ❜ ❨365❩ ❛ Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? ❜ ❨366❩ ❛ We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly. ❜ ❨367❩ ❛ If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon? ❜ ❨368❩ ❛ You fit into me like a hook into an eye. ❜ ❨369❩ ❛ Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened. ❜ ❨370❩ ❛ Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. ❜ ❨371❩ ❛ Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. ❜ ❨372❩ ❛ This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons. ❜ ❨373❩ ❛ Get rid of death. Make it be spring. ❜ ❨374❩ ❛ You are innocent as a bathtub full of bullets. ❜ ❨375❩ ❛ I am the space you desecrate as you pass through. ❜ ❨376❩ ❛ Favour me and give me riches, destroy my enemies. Save me from death. ❜ ❨377❩ ❛ She is a raw voice loose in the rooms beneath me. ❜ ❨378❩ ❛ Isn't the moon warm enough for you, why do you need the blanket of another body? ❜ ❨379❩ ❛ This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn. ❜ ❨380❩ ❛ If you look long enough eventually you will see me. ❜ ❨381❩ ❛ I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head. ❜ ❨382❩ ❛ I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief. ❜ ❨383❩ ❛ But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling. ❜ ❨384❩ ❛ How else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin? ❜ ❨385❩ ❛ What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. ❜ ❨386❩ ❛ Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything. ❜ ❨387❩ ❛ We loved with a love that was more than love. ❜ ❨388❩ ❛ Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ❜ ❨389❩ ❛ The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? ❜ ❨390❩ ❛ There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion. ❜ ❨391❩ ❛ Never to suffer would never to have been blessed. ❜ ❨392❩ ❛ Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear. ❜ ❨393❩ ❛ And all I loved, I loved alone. ❜ ❨394❩ ❛ Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute. ❜ ❨395❩ ❛ The best things in life make you sweaty. ❜ ❨396❩ ❛ There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. ❜ ❨397❩ ❛ Anything is better than this agony. ❜ ❨398❩ ❛ You fancy me mad. ❜ ❨399❩ ❛ I hear all things in the heaven and in the earth. ❜ ❨400❩ ❛ Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? ❜ ❨401❩ ❛ Leave my loneliness unbroken! ❜ ❨402❩ ❛ A more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrills every fibre of my frame. ❜ ❨403❩ ❛ The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. ❜ ❨404❩ ❛ Let my heart be still a moment. ❜ ❨405❩ ❛ You call it hope —  It is but agony of desire. ❜ ❨406❩ ❛ Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? ❜ ❨407❩ ❛ To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths! ❜ ❨408❩ ❛ The beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. ❜ ❨409❩ ❛ Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. ❜ ❨410❩ ❛ I have been happy, though in a dream. ❜ ❨411❩ ❛ Nevermore. ❜ ❨412❩ ❛ The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life. ❜ ❨413❩ ❛ I am convinced that every thing is going wrong. ❜ ❨414❩ ❛ The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls. ❜ ❨415❩ ❛ And if I died, at least I will have died for you! ❜ ❨416❩ ❛ It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. ❜ ❨417❩ ❛ Hurt and humiliation — But this, I can not take. ❜ ❨418❩ ❛ The walls in there have ears. ❜ ❨419❩ ❛ This is for your ears only. ❜ ❨420❩ ❛ What is it? You have me scared. ❜ ❨421❩ ❛ Whoever isn’t for us, is against us. ❜ ❨422❩ ❛ You are just a body; to be dumped, disposed of like a carcass, left out for the birds to feed on. ❜ ❨423❩ ❛ The dead will have to forgive me. ❜ ❨424❩ ❛ From now on and no matter how your mind may I change, I will not accept your help. ❜ ❨425❩ ❛ If death comes, so be it. There will be glory in it. ❜ ❨426❩ ❛ Live, then; and live with your choice. ❜ ❨427❩ ❛ I am doing what has to be done. ❜ ❨428❩ ❛ Nothing is going to stop the ones that love you from keeping on loving you. ❜ ❨429❩ ❛ Worst is the man who has all the good advice, and then because his nerve fails, fails to act in accordance with it, as a leader should. ❜ ❨430❩ ❛ Only a loony would walk himself into this. ❜ ❨431❩ ❛ Why do you need such fences and defences? ❜ ❨432❩ ❛ Enough. Do not anger me. ❜ ❨433❩ ❛ The gods, you think, will side with the likes of him? ❜ ❨434❩ ❛ Watch it. You are over stepping. ❜ ❨435❩ ❛ I warn you. You should keep a civil tongue. ❜ ❨436❩ ❛ There is no such thing as an oath the can not be broken. ❜ ❨437❩ ❛ Every now and then, the things you’d hardly let yourself imagine, actually happen. ❜ ❨438❩ ❛ And you stand over this? This is the truth? ❜ ❨439❩ ❛ The bigger the resistance, the bigger the collapse. ❜ ❨440❩ ❛ Iron that’s forged the hardest, snaps the quickest. ❜ ❨441❩ ❛ Even the wildest horses come to heel when they are reined & bitted right. ❜ ❨442❩ ❛ That’s how guilt affects some people. They break and everything comes out. ❜ ❨443❩ ❛ Will it be enough for you? To see me executed? ❜ ❨444❩ ❛ So you know something no one else knows? ❜ ❨445❩ ❛ They know it too. They are just too afraid to say it. ❜ ❨446❩ ❛ If you die, how will I keep on living? ❜ ❨447❩ ❛ There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'. ❜ ❨448❩ ❛ How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. ❜ ❨449❩ ❛ Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body. ❜ ❨450❩ ❛ I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me. ❜ ❨451❩ ❛ For this moment, this one moment, we are together.  ❜ ❨452❩ ❛ Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. ❜ ❨453❩ ❛ I am as neat as a cat in my habits. ❜ ❨454❩ ❛ Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me. ❜ ❨455❩ ❛ I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room. ❜ ❨456❩ ❛ We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe ❨457❩ that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie ❨458❩ asleep. ❜ ❨459❩ ❛ These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom. ❜ ❨460❩ ❛ Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. ❜ ❨461❩ ❛ The moment is all; the moment is enough. ❜ ❨462❩ ❛ I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given. ❜ ❨463❩ ❛ I am not one and simple, but complex and many. ❜ ❨464❩ ❛ And if you are dead, I shall weep. ❜ ❨465❩ ❛ But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful. ❜ ❨466❩ ❛ But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love. ❜ ❨467❩ ❛ I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams. ❜ ❨468❩ ❛ Life is a dream surely. ❜ ❨469❩ ❛ I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. ❜ ❨470❩ ❛ Oh, I am in love with life! ❜ ❨471❩ ❛ I have been knotted; I have been torn apart. ❜ ❨472❩ ❛ There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death. ❜ ❨473❩ ❛ I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. ❜ ❨474❩ ❛ I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me. ❜ ❨475❩ ❛ I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. ❜ ❨476❩ ❛ I see it all. I feel it all. ❜ ❨477❩ ❛ Death is woven in with the violets. Death and again death. ❜ ❨478❩ ❛ We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember. ❜ ❨479❩ ❛ If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged. ❜ ❨480❩ ❛ When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass. ❜ ❨481❩ ❛ Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word; - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase.  ❜ ❨482❩ ❛ Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor. ❜ ❨483❩ ❛ If the world treats you well, you come to believe you are deserving of it. ❜ ❨484❩ ❛ If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go. ❜ ❨485❩ ❛ It’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength. ❜ ❨486❩ ❛ There is no fool like an educated fool. ❜ ❨487❩ ❛ There are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. ❜ ❨488❩ ❛ I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened. ❜ ❨489❩ ❛ Underneath it all is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. ❜ ❨490❩ ❛ And underneath all that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but ripe and splitting open of its own accord.  ❜ ❨491❩ ❛ The small details of life often hide a great significance. ❜ ❨492❩ ❛ Guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you. ❜ ❨493❩ ❛ I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once? ❜ ❨494❩ ❛ It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between. ❜ ❨495❩ ❛ Some call this "Eve's curse," but I think that is stupid because the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam. ❜ ❨496❩ ❛ I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again. ❜ ❨497❩ ❛ I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely. ❜ ❨498❩ ❛ If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one. ❜ ❨499❩ ❛ It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent. ❜ ❨500❩ ❛ Today you wear your habitual expression of strained anxiety; you smell of violets. ❜ ❨501❩ ❛ Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude. ❜ ❨502❩ ❛ I wonder what would become of me, and comfort myself that in a hundred years I will be dead and at peace. ❜ ❨503❩ ❛ For it is not always the one that strikes the blow that is the actual murderer. ❜ ❨504❩ ❛ There is a “do this” or “do that” with God, but not any “because”. ❜ ❨505❩ ❛ If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything. ❜ ❨506❩ ❛ They say, why don’t you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won’t bend in that direction any more. ❜ ❨507❩ ❛ I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out. ❜ ❨508❩ ❛ I see what you’re after. You are a collector. You think all you have to do is give me an apple, and then you can collect me. ❜ ❨509❩ ❛ If you want to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before you have made the same life choice. ❜ ❨510❩ ❛ Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo. ❜ ❨511❩ ❛ Nature is to zoos as God is to churches. ❜ ❨512❩ ❛ After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? ❜ ❨513❩ ❛ There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive. ❜ ❨514❩ ❛ These things sneak up on me for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency. ❜ ❨515❩ ❛ Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast. ❜ ❨516❩ ❛ You can’t buy it, but it has a price. Everything has a price. ❜ ❨517❩ ❛ As a species were doomed by hope, then? You could call it hope. That, or desperation. ❜ ❨518❩ ❛ I am not my childhood. ❜ ❨519❩ ❛ Human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else and live on forever. ❜ ❨520❩ ❛ “I'll make you mine”, lovers said in old books. They never said, “I'll make you me.” ❜ ❨521❩ ❛ How much is too much, how far is too far? ❜ ❨522❩ ❛ Expectation isn't the same as desire. ❜ ❨523❩ ❛ Why not cut to the chase? ❜ ❨524❩ ❛ Maybe there aren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. ❜ ❨525❩ ❛ I thought you didn’t believe in God. ❜ ❨526❩ ❛ I need at least the illusion of being understood. ❜ ❨527❩ ❛ What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much. ❜ ❨528❩ ❛ You are only looking at the dirt under your feet. It's not good for you. ❜ ❨529❩ ❛ I like to keep only the bright side of myself turned towards you.  ❜ ❨530❩ ❛ Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition. ❜ ❨531❩ ❛ So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. ❜ ❨532❩ ❛ Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain? ❜ ❨533❩ ❛ When the water’s moving faster than the boat, you can’t control a thing. ❜ ❨534❩ ❛ Don't be so fucking sentimental. ❜ ❨535❩ ❛ Wrong, as usual. ❜ ❨536❩ ❛ Why do you want to talk about ugly things? ❜ ❨537❩ ❛ I understand why serial killers send helpful clues to the police. ❜ ❨538❩ ❛ Take your time, leave mine alone. ❜ ❨539❩ ❛ You will hear thunder and remember me. ❜ ❨540❩ ❛ If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly. ❜ ❨541❩ ❛ I seem to myself an accidental guest in this dreadful body. ❜ ❨542❩ ❛ Call me a sinner, mock me maliciously. ❜ ❨543❩ ❛ I, from the very beginning, seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium. Or a reflection in someone else's mirror. Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. ❜ ❨544❩ ❛ I knew the list of crimes that I was destined to commit. ❜ ❨545❩ ❛ The future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future. ❜ ❨546❩ ❛ You are untranslatable into any one tongue. ❜ ❨547❩ ❛ I was hoping my silence would fit yours. ❜ ❨548❩ ❛ See, we were never about butterflies. All about us is unearthly and radiant. ❜ ❨549❩ ❛ You do not know just what you've been forgiven. ❜ ❨550❩ ❛ I need to slaughter my memory.  ❜ ❨551❩ ❛ Forgive me that I appeared to you in waking dreams. ❜ ❨552❩ ❛ I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy. ❜ ❨553❩ ❛ I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death. ❜ ❨554❩ ❛ Wild honey smells of freedom. But gold smells of nothing. ❜ ❨555❩ ❛ You are three times more beautiful than angels. ❜ ❨556❩ ❛ I will kill you without spilling your blood on the ground, not touching you with my hand, not giving you one glance. ❜ ❨557❩ ❛ You invented me. There is no such earthly being. ❜ ❨558❩ ❛ You’re late. Way too late. I’m glad to see you, nonetheless. ❜ ❨559❩ ❛ Forgive me that I felt forsaken. Forgive me that I kept mistaking too many others for you. ❜ ❨560❩ ❛ Real tenderness can’t be confused, it’s quiet and can’t be heard. ❜ ❨561❩ ❛ What else lived in that house besides us? ❜ ❨562❩ ❛ How unhappy we are together! ❜ ❨563❩ ❛ I defend not my voice, but my silence. ❜ ❨564❩ ❛ Without love, I'm more at ease, I'm sure. ❜ ❨565❩ ❛ I've got no more tears or explanations. ❜ ❨566❩ ❛ I’m not complaining. Happiness is not for me. ❜ ❨567❩ ❛ Are you not the only tie between good and evil, earthly pits and paradise? ❜ ❨568❩ ❛ In the morning we shall find out who has died in the night. ❜ ❨569❩ ❛ I was not a lovable child, and I've grown into a deeply unlovable adult. ❜ ❨570❩ ❛ The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it. ❜ ❨571❩ ❛ I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark. ❜ ❨572❩ ❛ I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don't even ripple. ❜ ❨573❩ ❛ I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way. ❜ ❨574❩ ❛ I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen. But the meanness usually wins out. ❜ ❨575❩ ❛ I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone. ❜ ❨576❩ ❛ Everyone who keeps a secret, itches to tell it. ❜ ❨577❩ ❛ Coffee goes great with sudden death. ❜ ❨578❩ ❛ I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite. ❜ ❨579❩ ❛ “Smile, it can't be that bad!” Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad. ❜ ❨580❩ ❛ Everything bad in the world already did happen. ❜ ❨581❩ ❛ You’re going to find peace? Like knowing is somehow going to fix you? ❜ ❨582❩ ❛ Instead of asking yourself what happened, just accept that it happened. ❜ ❨583❩ ❛ Homesick for a place I've never been. ❜ ❨584❩ ❛ Worries find you easily enough without inviting them. ❜ ❨585❩ ❛ It is always consoling to think of suicide. It's what gets one through many a bad night. ❜ ❨586❩ ❛ Do you understand this is serious? ❜ ❨587❩ ❛ Sometimes it feels good to fuck with something. Instead of always being fucked with. ❜ ❨588❩ ❛ How could you kill something you cared enough to name? ❜ ❨589❩ ❛ Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs. ❜ ❨590❩ ❛ We have the same chemicals in our blood: shame, anger, greed. Unjustified nostalgia. ❜ ❨591❩ ❛ I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. ❜ ❨592❩ ❛ The phrase fuck you may not rest on the tip of my tongue, but it’s near. Midtongue. ❜ ❨593❩ ❛ Nothing to it but to do it. ❜ ❨594❩ ❛ There are a lot of people who deserve a lesson, deserve to really understand, that nothing comes easy, that most things are going to go sour. ❜ ❨595❩ ❛ If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we’d all have a very Merry Christmas. ❜ ❨596❩ ❛ Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. ❜ ❨597❩ ❛ What does it do to a girl who knows her mother is a murderer? ❜ ❨598❩ ❛ That mean old bitch across the street bit it. ❜ ❨599❩ ❛ Survival is a talent. ❜ ❨600❩ ❛ Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. ❜ ❨601❩ ❛ Who has the courage to burn themselves? ❜ ❨602❩ ❛ Is insanity just a matter of dropping the act? ❜ ❨603❩ ❛ Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? ❜ ❨604❩ ❛ You need to be well fed, clothed, and housed to have time for this much self-pity. ❜ ❨605❩ ❛ When I am supposed to be awake, I am asleep; when I am supposed to speak, I am silent. When a pleasure offers itself to me, I avoid it. ❜ ❨606❩ ❛ There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same. ❜ ❨607❩ ❛ In a strange way we are free. We've reached the end of the line. We have nothing more to lose. ❜ ❨608❩ ❛ The world won’t stop because we aren’t in it anymore. ❜ ❨609❩ ❛ I can't answer the real question. All I can tell you is, it's easy. ❜ ❨610❩ ❛ I am lighter, airier than I’ve been in years. ❜ ❨611❩ ❛ I am not dead, yet something in me definitely is. ❜ ❨612❩ ❛ You meant that as an insult but I am taking it as a compliment. ❜ ❨613❩ ❛ What life can recover from that? ❜ ❨614❩ ❛ It's a fairly accurate portrait of me. It's accurate but it isn't profound. ❜ ❨615❩ ❛ Pull yourself together! There's nothing wrong with you. ❜ ❨616❩ ❛ It's quiet. It's like― I don't know. It's like falling off a cliff. ❜ ❨617❩ ❛ Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots. ❜ ❨618❩ ❛ I lost him. I did it on purpose. ❜ ❨619❩ ❛ It’s a mean world. There’s nobody to take care of you out there. ❜ ❨620❩ ❛ Reality is getting too dense. ❜ ❨621❩ ❛ I'm ambivalent. In fact that's my new favourite word. ❜ ❨622❩ ❛ I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions you raise. ❜ ❨623❩ ❛ A spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather. ❜ ❨624❩ ❛ Twenty-five chocolate chip cookies would be the perfect dinner. ❜ ❨625❩ ❛ A thought is a hard thing to control. ❜ ❨626❩ ❛ Life demands skills I don’t have. ❜ ❨627❩ ❛ Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful. Most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them. ❜ ❨628❩ ❛ It never stops, even at night, it’s my lullaby. ❜ ❨629❩ ❛ Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. ❜ ❨630❩ ❛ This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes. ❜ ❨631❩ ❛ I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. ❜ ❨632❩ ❛ Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. ❜ ❨633❩ ❛ Hatred is easier. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. ❜ ❨634❩ ❛ Potential has a shelf life. ❜ ❨635❩ ❛ Don’t move. Stay like that, let me have that. ❜ ❨636❩ ❛ I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. ❜ ❨637❩ ❛ Never pray for justice, because you might get some. ❜ ❨638❩ ❛ It disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional. ❜ ❨639❩ ❛ We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something. ❜ ❨640❩ ❛ This is what I miss, not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. ❜ ❨641❩ ❛ I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly. ❜ ❨642❩ ❛ You are amazing. Amazing and agonising and almost lethal. ❜ ❨643❩ ❛ In my dreams of this city I am always lost. ❜ ❨644❩ ❛ I don't know where these feelings have come from, I don’t know what I've done. ❜ ❨645❩ ❛ I am not the centre of your story, you are.  ❜ ❨646❩ ❛ I’m mad because you’re an asshole. ❜ ❨647❩ ❛ It's enormously pleasing to me, walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will. ❜ ❨648❩ ❛ There is never only one of anyone. ❜ ❨649❩ ❛ I can't do this without feeling I'm acting. ❜ ❨650❩ ❛ I am prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence. ❜ ❨651❩ ❛ I’m losing my appetite for strangers. ❜ ❨652❩ ❛ You wear your cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. You want it all. ❜ ❨653❩ ❛ Knowing too much about other people weakens you. You are forced to understand their reasons for doing things. ❜ ❨654❩ ❛ I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now. ❜ ❨655❩ ❛ Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by. ❜ ❨656❩ ❛ Whoever cares the most will lose. ❜ ❨657❩ ❛ Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defences.  ❜ ❨658❩ ❛ Time has gone on without you. ❜ ❨659❩ ❛ Don't let the bastards grind you down. ❜ ❨660❩ ❛ Who can remember pain, once it’s over? Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind. ❜ ❨661❩ ❛ Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some. ❜ ❨662❩ ❛ There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. ❜ ❨663❩ ❛ Remember that forgiveness too is a power. ❜ ❨664❩ ❛ I am not your justification for existence. ❜ ❨665❩ ❛ I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. ❜ ❨666❩ ❛ If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. ❜ ❨667❩ ❛ All you have to do is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard. ❜ ❨668❩ ❛ Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. ❜ ❨669❩ ❛ I want everything back, the way it was. ❜ ❨670❩ ❛ You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave. ❜ ❨671❩ ❛ Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. ❜ ❨672❩ ❛ To want is to have a weakness. ❜ ❨673❩ ❛ There isn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. ❜ ❨674❩ ❛ The past is a great darkness, filled with echoes. ❜ ❨675❩ ❛ Ordinary is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary. ❜ ❨676❩ ❛ I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilised. I wish it showed me in a better light. ❜ ❨677❩ ❛ The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. ❜ ❨678❩ ❛ By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you. ❜ ❨679❩ ❛ Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard. ❜ ❨680❩ ❛ Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. ❜ ❨681❩ ❛ Keep the others safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. ❜ ❨682❩ ❛ The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand. ❜ ❨683❩ ❛ The world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. ❜ ❨684❩ ❛ Nobody's heart is perfect. ❜ ❨685❩ ❛ One false move and I'm dead. ❜ ❨686❩ ❛ Watch out. I've got my eye on you. ❜ ❨687❩ ❛ Fear is a powerful stimulant. ❜ ❨688❩ ❛ I couldn't afford to lose you. ❜ ❨689❩ ❛ Name one hero who was happy. ---- You can’t. ❜ ❨690❩ ❛ I feel like I could eat the world raw. ❜ ❨691❩ ❛ We are like gods at the dawning of the world. ❜ ❨692❩ ❛ I could recognise him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world. ❜ ❨693❩ ❛ There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw. ❜ ❨694❩ ❛ You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature. ❜ ❨695❩ ❛ He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. ❜ ❨696❩ ❛ Some men gain glory after they die, others fade. ❜ ❨697❩ ❛ I am made of memories. ❜ ❨698❩ ❛ Will you come with me? ❜ ❨699❩ ❛ I wish I had let you all die. ❜ ❨700❩ ❛ It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after. ❜ ❨701❩ ❛ Bury us. Let us be free. ❜ ❨702❩ ❛ Go. He waits for you. ❜ ❨703❩ ❛ Nothing could eclipse the stain of this dirty, mortal mediocrity. ❜ ❨704❩ ❛ I know I have told you of this. ❜ ❨705❩ ❛ I don't know how you remember them all. I swear they look the same to me. ❜ ❨706❩ ❛ Perhaps you should get some new stories, so I don’t fucking kill myself of boredom. ❜ ❨707❩ ❛ I yearn for the darkness and silence of the underworld, where I can rest. ❜ ❨708❩ ❛ There is no honour in betraying your friends. ❜ ❨709❩ ❛ There is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong. ❜ ❨710❩ ❛ Divine blood flows differently. ❜ ❨711❩ ❛ How is there glory in taking life? We die so easily. ❜ ❨712❩ ❛ This is what I will miss, I think. I will kill myself rather than miss it. ❜ ❨713❩ ❛ How long do we have? ❜ ❨714❩ ❛ Do you think we fight hopeless wars? ❜ ❨715❩ ❛ There is no law that gods must be fair. ❜ ❨716❩ ❛ I do not fear ridicule. I never have. ❜ ❨717❩ ❛ You were always better with words than I. ❜ ❨718❩ ❛ Who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? ❜ ❨719❩ ❛ When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. ❜ ❨720❩ ❛ That's how the madness of the world tries to colonise you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality. ❜ ❨721❩ ❛ The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear. ❜ ❨722❩ ❛ Silence creates violence. ❜ ❨723❩ ❛ Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough. ❜ ❨724❩ ❛ There are certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of it inside you. ❜ ❨725❩ ❛ Nothing that ever lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth. ❜ ❨726❩ ❛ We all live in a kind of continuous dream. ❜ ❨727❩ ❛ You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you. ❜ ❨728❩ ❛ What can you do when your five senses are not enough? ❜ ❨729❩ ❛ We will neither be what we had been nor what we would become once we reach our destination. ❜ ❨730❩ ❛ Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable. ❜ ❨731❩ ❛ When you are too close to the centre of a mystery there is no way to pull back. ❜ ❨732❩ ❛ I long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no. ❜ ❨733❩ ❛ I look not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I try to imagine what kind of life lives in those celestial tidal pools so far from us. ❜ ❨734❩ ❛ I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, I think. If so, it was a very small part. I ran. ❜ ❨735❩ ❛ I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. ❜ ❨736❩ ❛ All of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. ❜ ❨737❩ ❛ We don’t have real answers, because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish. ❜ ❨738❩ ❛ This part I will do alone. Don’t follow. ❜ ❨739❩ ❛ People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control. ❜ ❨740❩ ❛ Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead? ❜ ❨741❩ ❛ I loved them, but I didn’t need them, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. ❜ ❨742❩ ❛ Places can impress themselves upon me, and I can become part of them with ease. ❜ ❨743❩ ❛ There is no one with me. I am all by myself. ❜ ❨744❩ ❛ Pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic. ❜ ❨745❩ ❛ I think you're confusing suicide with self-destruction, and they're very different. Almost none of us commit suicide, whereas almost all of us self-destruct. ❜ ❨746❩ ❛ What did you eat? You had rations for only two weeks. You were there for nearly four months. ❜ ❨747❩ ❛ Something here is making giant waves in the gene pool. ❜ ❨748❩ ❛ I need to know what’s inside. ❜ ❨749❩ ❛ These aren't decisions. They're impulses ❜ ❨750❩ ❛ What do you think I do when you’re away? Do you think I’m out in the garden pinning, looking up at the sky? ❜ ❨751❩ ❛ If I know what’s happened I can save their life. ❜ ❨752❩ ❛ They either went crazy or something in here killed them. ❜ ❨753❩ ❛ Something is coming through the fence! ❜ ❨754❩ ❛ Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny. ❜ ❨755❩ ❛ People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. ❜ ❨756❩ ❛ Happy endings are still endings. ❜ ❨757❩ ❛ We believe in all sorts of things that aren't true; -- we call it history. ❜ ❨758❩ ❛ Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? ❜ ❨759❩ ❛ In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realise it is far more common for men to turn into rats. ❜ ❨760❩ ❛ Girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise.  ❜ ❨761❩ ❛ Love makes hunters of us all. ❜ ❨762❩ ❛ There is much to hate in this world and way too much to love. ❜ ❨763❩ ❛ You confuse not speaking with not listening. ❜ ❨764❩ ❛ As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention. ❜ ❨765❩ ❛ The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say. ❜ ❨766❩ ❛ Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. ❜ ❨767❩ ❛ We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. ❜ ❨768❩ ❛ The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness. ❜ ❨769❩ ❛ I know you don't want to hear this but someone has to say it! You are out of control! ❜ ❨770❩ ❛ Even at the very worst - there is always choice. ❜ ❨771❩ ❛ Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven. So you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it. ❜ ❨772❩ ❛ Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on -- or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the entire universe is changed. ❜ ❨773❩ ❛ That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness. Life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same. ❜ ❨774❩ ❛ I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without. ❜ ❨775❩ ❛ It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new. ❜ ❨776❩ ❛ Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Always the godfather, never the god. ❜ ❨777❩ ❛ The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew. ❜ ❨778❩ ❛ Evil is an act, not an appetite. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal. ❜ ❨779❩ ❛ How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table?  ❜ ❨780❩ ❛ Even God used silence as a strategy. ❜ ❨781❩ ❛ I learned failure early and mastered it. ❜ ❨782❩ ❛ It isn't whether you do it well or ill, it's that you do it all. ❜ ❨783❩ ❛ This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is a very wicked distraction. ❜ ❨784❩ ❛ Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery. ❜ ❨785❩ ❛ Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience. ❜ ❨786❩ ❛ Such brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly. ❜ ❨787❩ ❛ I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can. ❜ ❨788❩ ❛ Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to go fuck myself, to piss off, go on, say it, but don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. ❜ ❨789❩ ❛ The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on. ❜ ❨790❩ ❛ One can't make peace with another by force. ❜ ❨791❩ ❛ I am a forgettable leaf on a tree. ❜ ❨792❩ ❛ That's all I want; --- to do no harm. ❜ ❨793❩ ❛ I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is. ❜ ❨794❩ ❛ Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. ❜ ❨795❩ ❛ You’re too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to that we manage to endure the burden of the past. ❜ ❨796❩ ❛ Love, no matter what else it might be, is a natural talent. You are either born knowing how, or you never know. ❜ ❨797❩ ❛ Whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life. ❜ ❨798❩ ❛ There is no God worth worrying about. ❜ ❨799❩ ❛ The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love. ❜ ❨800❩ ❛ Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. ❜ ❨801❩ ❛ Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the very end in itself. ❜ ❨802❩ ❛ Only God knows how much I love you. ❜ ❨803❩ ❛ There is no greater glory than to die for love. ❜ ❨804❩ ❛ Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies. ❜ ❨805❩ ❛ Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life. ❜ ❨806❩ ❛ Today, when I saw you, I realised that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion. ❜ ❨807❩ ❛ I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century. ❜ ❨808❩ ❛ I want to be myself again, to recover all that I was obliged to give up. ❜ ❨809❩ ❛ The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name. ❜ ❨810❩ ❛ This soup tastes like windows. ❜ ❨811❩ ❛ Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist? ❜ ❨812❩ ❛ One has to live a long time to know a man's true nature. ❜ ❨813❩ ❛ No, not rich, I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing. ❜ ❨814❩ ❛ My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse. ❜ ❨815❩ ❛ That may be the reason he does so many things, so that he will not have to think. ❜ ❨816❩ ❛ Love if it exists, is something separate: another life. ❜ ❨817❩ ❛ Things did not go as badly for me as they would for you. ❜ ❨818❩ ❛ There are things you do only for love. ❜ ❨819❩ ❛ I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I die. ❜ ❨820❩ ❛ There is no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age. ❜ ❨821❩ ❛ You treat me as if I were just anybody. ❜ ❨822❩ ❛ The symptoms of love are the same as those of cholera. ❜ ❨823❩ ❛ There is no law, human or divine, that you have not ignored. ❜ ❨824❩ ❛ Why is it that I feel I've known you so many years? ❜ ❨825❩ ❛ Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. ❜ ❨826❩ ❛ It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. ❜ ❨827❩ ❛ We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real? ❜ ❨828❩ ❛ There must be something, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing. ❜ ❨829❩ ❛ If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. ❜ ❨830❩ ❛ If you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore. ❜ ❨831❩ ❛ You can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. ❜ ❨832❩ ❛ It was a pleasure to burn. ❜ ❨833❩ ❛ I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? ❜ ❨834❩ ❛ Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? ❜ ❨835❩ ❛ Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays? ❜ ❨836❩ ❛ Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? ❜ ❨837❩ ❛ I don't talk things. I talk the meaning of things. ❜ ❨838❩ ❛ I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning. ❜ ❨839❩ ❛ I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. ❜ ❨840❩ ❛ That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want. ❜ ❨841❩ ❛ Someday we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up. ❜ ❨842❩ ❛ You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. ❜ ❨843❩ ❛ You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. ❜ ❨844❩ ❛ When they give you lined paper, write the other way. ❜ ❨845❩ ❛ The sun burnt every day. It burnt time. ❜ ❨846❩ ❛ We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing. ❜ ❨847❩ ❛ I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago. ❜ ❨848❩ ❛ I'm not afraid. Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last. Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you. ❜ ❨849❩ ❛ Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life! ❜ ❨850❩ ❛ How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you? ❜ ❨851❩ ❛ It must be right. It seems so right. ❜ ❨852❩ ❛ To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. ❜ ❨853❩ ❛ It's my game. And no one can help me. Not even you. ❜ ❨854❩ ❛ What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. ❜ ❨855❩ ❛ Death is a long process. Your body is just the first part of you that croaks. Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. Your anger and memories must die. Your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope. ❜ ❨856❩ ❛ Help me give up my addiction to hope. ❜ ❨857❩ ❛ Life is short, death is forever. ❜ ❨858❩ ❛ Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break. ❜ ❨859❩ ❛ If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes. ❜ ❨860❩ ❛ We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired. ❜ ❨861❩ ❛ All the demons of hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures. No it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. ❜ ❨862❩ ❛ I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful. ❜ ❨863❩ ❛ It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. ❜ ❨864❩ ❛ You fucked up. Game over. So just relax. ❜ ❨865❩ ❛ The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul. ❜ ❨866❩ ❛ If killing you will end my existence as well, be it. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living. ❜ ❨867❩ ❛ I might be a touch of a sadist and a little bit jejune but at least I'm not a victim, not any longer. I hope. ❜ ❨868❩ ❛ Dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw. ❜ ❨869❩ ❛ Any concept of right versus wrong, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. ❜ ❨870❩ ❛ To prove that I exist I must kill you. ❜ ❨871❩ ❛ I'd say that my life has been a way-too-long case history of chasing rainbows. ❜ ❨872❩ ❛ The world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard. ❜ ❨873❩ ❛ Every garden looks beautiful in May. ❜ ❨874❩ ❛ When we neglect to fear such brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless. ❜ ❨875❩ ❛ My taste for power continues to grow, as does my ability to accrue it. ❜ ❨876❩ ❛ Such language! Why don't you just take a dump in my ears? ❜ ❨877❩ ❛ You’d be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. ❜ ❨878❩ ❛ Depending on her mood, she can be more frightening than any demon or devil you might ever run across. ❜ ❨879❩ ❛ Cross your fingers! Maybe death won't happen to you. ❜ ❨880❩ ❛ Do not die while wearing cheap shoes. ❜ ❨881❩ ❛ Old habits die hard. ❜ ❨882❩ ❛ It's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us. ❜ ❨883❩ ❛ What do I think I am? In a thousand words; I don't have a clue. ❨884❩ ❛ If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me. ❜ ❨885❩ ❛ All I wanted was to be loved for myself. ❜ ❨886❩ ❛ I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. ❜ ❨887❩ ❛ Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? ❜ ❨888❩ ❛ You have a heart that can hold the entire empire of the world. ❜ ❨889❩ ❛ Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you. ❜ ❨890❩ ❛ Tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead. ❜ ❨891❩ ❛ You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked. Love me and you shall see! ❜ ❨892❩ ❛ Are people so unhappy when they love? --- Yes, when they love and are not sure of being loved. ❜ ❨893❩ ❛ Your soul is a beautiful thing. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept tonight. ❜ ❨894❩ ❛ Blood!...Blood!... That's a good thing! ❜ ❨895❩ ❛ Now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a life like everybody else. ❜ ❨896❩ ❛ You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight. ❜ ❨897❩ ❛ I should be as gentle as a lamb; and you could do anything with me that you pleased. ❜ ❨898❩ ❛ I am going to die of love, I am dying of love. That's how it is. I loved you so. I still love you so. ❜ ❨899❩ ❛ I am dying of love for her, I tell you! If only you knew how beautiful she was when she let me kiss her. ❜ ❨900❩ ❛ He fills me with horror but I do not hate him. How can I hate him? ❜ ❨901❩ ❛ Holy angel, in Heaven blessed, my spirit longs with thee to rest. ❜ ❨902❩ ❛ Nothing is colder or more dead than my heart. ❜ ❨903❩ ❛ I had loved an angel and now I despise a woman. ❜ ❨904❩ ❛ Our lives are one masked ball. ❜ ❨905❩ ❛ Why do you condemn a man whom you have never met, whom no one knows and about whom even you yourself know nothing? ❜ ❨906❩ ❛ He would commit murder for me. ❜ ❨907❩ ❛ If I don't save her from the hands of that humbug, she is lost. But I shall save her. ❜ ❨908❩ ❛ We will go from here together or die together. ❜ ❨909❩ ❛ Your fear, your terror, all of that is just love and love of the most exquisite kind, the kind which people do not admit even to themselves. The kind that gives you a thrill, when you think of it. ❜ ❨910❩ ❛ Destiny has chained you to me forever. ❜ ❨911❩ ❛ You must never ask me that. ❜ ❨912❩ ❛ Are you afraid that you will change your mind? ❜ ❨913❩ ❛ You must come and fetch me in my dressing room at midnight exactly. ❜ ❨914❩ ❛ The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps. ❜ ❨915❩ ❛ I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. ❜ ❨916❩ ❛ There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home. ❜ ❨917❩ ❛ I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head. ❜ ❨918❩ ❛ It’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to even mourn for it. ❜ ❨919❩ ❛ There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion. ❜ ❨920❩ ❛ When did you become so weak? ❜ ❨921❩ ❛ I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it. ❜ ❨922❩ ❛ Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers. ❜ ❨923❩ ❛ Sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. ❜ ❨924❩ ❛ I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. ❜ ❨925❩ ❛ I’ve just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don’t, if I keep numbing it, it’ll never really go away. ❜ ❨926❩ ❛ I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move. ❜ ❨927❩ ❛ Who was it that said following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all. ❜ ❨928❩ ❛ It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. ❜ ❨929❩ ❛ Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches. ❜ ❨930❩ ❛ I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. ❜ ❨931❩ ❛ How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn? ❜ ❨932❩ ❛ Now look -- Now look what you made me do. ❜ ❨933❩ ❛ It’s okay, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness. ❜ ❨934❩ ❛ They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be. ❜ ❨935❩ ❛ You broke me and I broke us. ❜ ❨936❩ ❛ I’ve been the fool. If he does it with you, he’ll do it to you. ❜ ❨937❩ ❛ I’d never realised, not until now, how shameful it is to be pitied. ❜ ❨938❩ ❛ Sometimes, I don’t want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again. ❜ ❨939❩ ❛ I don’t believe in soul mates, but there’s an understanding between us that I just haven’t felt before, or at least, not for a long time. ❜ ❨940❩ ❛ There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end. ❜ ❨941❩ ❛ Being the other woman is a huge turn-on, there’s no point in denying it: you’re the one he can’t help but betray his wife for, even though he loves her. That’s just how irresistible you are. ❜ ❨942❩ ❛ I feel a rush of gratitude so strong, it feels almost like love. ❜ ❨943❩ ❛ You don’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with. ❜ ❨944❩ ❛ The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be. ❜ ❨945❩ ❛ You don’t have to be afraid of being alone. It’s not the worst thing, is it? ❜ ❨946❩ ❛ I have felt this way before. On a larger scale, to a more intense degree, of course, but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it. ❜ ❨947❩ ❛ If he thinks I’m going to sit around crying, he’s got another thing coming. ❜ ❨948❩ ❛ I don’t like to lose. It’s not like me. None of this is like me. I don’t get rejected. I’m the one who walks away. ❜ ❨949❩ ❛ I don’t remember anger, raging fury. I remember fear. ❜ ❨950❩ ❛ I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in days. I hate it, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. ❜ ❨951❩ ❛ Maybe the courage I need has nothing to do with telling the truth and everything to do with walking away. ❜ ❨952❩ ❛ I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless. ❜ ❨953❩ ❛ Failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under and I gave up hope. ❜ ❨954❩ ❛ It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time; I don’t feel bad enough. ❜ ❨955❩ ❛ Some battles aren’t worth fighting. ❜ ❨956❩ ❛ I never felt guilty. I pretended I did. I had to. ❜ ❨957❩ ❛ I never meant for any of this to happen, we fell in love, what could we do? ❜ ❨958❩ ❛ What bothers me most is that I haven’t got to the end of my story, and I can’t start over with someone else, it’s too hard. ❜ ❨959❩ ❛ A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended. ❜ ❨960❩ ❛ It isn’t only wickedness and scheming that make people unhappy, it is confusion and misunderstanding. ❜ ❨961❩ ❛ Falling in love can be achieved in a single word—a glance. ❜ ❨962❩ ❛ Though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you. ❜ ❨963❩ ❛ I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. ❜ ❨964❩ ❛ It might hurt, it is horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but it is what it is to be in love. ❜ ❨965❩ ❛ It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. ❜ ❨966❩ ❛ Come back, come back to me. ❜ ❨967❩ ❛ In my thoughts I make love to you all day long. ❜ ❨968❩ ❛ The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence and I don’t think I can blame the heat. ❜ ❨969❩ ❛ Beauty occupies a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, has infinite variation. ❜ ❨970❩ ❛ Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? ❜ ❨971❩ ❛ However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve always been. ❜ ❨972❩ ❛ Hate is a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational. ❜ ❨973❩ ❛ I’m going mad. Let me not be mad. ❜ ❨974❩ ❛ Is everyone really as alive as I am? ❜ ❨975❩ ❛ Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone teaches you something about yourself. ❜ ❨976❩ ❛ Something has happened, hasn’t it? ❜ ❨977❩ ❛ I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness. ❜ ❨978❩ ❛ Is it possible that I am, in the modern term, in denial? ❜ ❨979❩ ❛ How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect? ❜ ❨980❩ ❛ Not everything has a cause. Some things are simply so. ❜ ❨981❩ ❛ I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m torn between breaking your neck here and throwing you down the stairs. ❜ ❨982❩ ❛ How old do you have to be before you know the difference between right and wrong? ❜ ❨983❩ ❛ It was never meant to be read. ❜ ❨984❩ ❛ If I fell in the river, would you save me? ❜ ❨985❩ ❛ That was an incredibly bloody stupid thing to do. ❜ ❨986❩ ❛ I want to thank you for saving my life. I’ll be eternally grateful to you. ❜ ❨987❩ ❛ I’m very, very sorry for the terrible distress that I have caused. I’m very, very sorry. ❜ ❨988❩ ❛ Don’t call me that! – Please don’t call me that. ❜ ❨989❩ ❛ It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it’s mine. ❜ ❨990❩ ❛ Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer. ❜ ❨991❩ ❛ No one ever really gets used to nightmares. ❜ ❨992❩ ❛ I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. ❜ ❨993❩ ❛ Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila. ❜ ❨994❩ ❛ Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it. ❜ ❨995❩ ❛ Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful. ❜ ❨996❩ ❛ The ruminations are mine, let the world be yours. ❜ ❨997❩ ❛ You will fulfil a promise I made years ago but failed to keep. ❜ ❨998❩ ❛ Darkness never satisfies. Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does. ❜ ❨999❩ ❛ I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore. ❜ ❨1000❩ ❛ What can I say, I’m a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff. ❜ ❨1001❩ ❛ Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you? ❜ ❨1002❩ ❛ It’s just silent, no sound at all. It’s like something’s waiting. ❜ ❨1003❩ ❛ I guess I’m hoping the weapons will make me feel better, grant me some kind of fucking control. ❜ ❨1004❩ ❛ Oh and something else: – Fuck you. ❜ ❨1005❩ ❛ God I’ve never been afraid like this. ❜ ❨1006❩ ❛ I miss you. I love you. There’s no second I’ve lived that you can’t call your own. ❜ ❨1007❩ ❛ I’m so tired. Sleep’s been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose. ❜ ❨1008❩ ❛ Not seeing the rip doesn’t mean you automatically get to keep clear of the Hey-I’m-Bleeding part. ❜ ❨1009❩ ❛ These days fantasies flourish and die like summer flies. ❜ ❨1010❩ ❛ Yeah I know, I know. This shit’s getting ridiculous. ❜ ❨1011❩ ❛ ‘Fuck’ and 'fall for’ have very different meanings. The first one you do as much as you can. The second one you never ever, ever do. ❜ ❨1012❩ ❛ It’s a nice idea but it reeks of hope. False hope. ❜ ❨1013❩ ❛ It’s, well…one thing in two words: fucked up…very fucked up. Okay three words, four words, who the hell cares…very very fucked up. ❜ ❨1014❩ ❛ Do you think I could spend the night at your place?  ❜ ❨1015❩ ❛ Any fool can pray. ❜ ❨1016❩ ❛ I feel like I haven’t slept in months. My neighbours are scared of me. ❜ ❨1017❩ ❛ I’ve lost my mind? Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe I’m just really drunk. ❜ ❨1018❩ ❛ Perhaps by cleaning out my system I’ll come to a clearing where I can ease myself into peace. ❜ ❨1019❩ ❛ I should be dead. Why am I still here? ❜ ❨1020❩ ❛ Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine. ❜ ❨1021❩ ❛ You are my flesh. You are my bones. I know you too well. I read you too perfectly. ❜ ❨1022❩ ❛ Not all complex problems have easy solutions. ❜ ❨1023❩ ❛ Do you believe in God? I don’t think I ever asked you that one. ❜ ❨1024❩ ❛ We all create stories to protect ourselves. ❜ ❨1025❩ ❛ Are you kidding me? This place is scary. ❜ ❨1026❩ ❛ These days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. ❜ ❨1027❩ ❛ You like that crap because it reminds you of you. ❜ ❨1028❩ ❛ You may suddenly realise things are not how you perceived them to be at all. ❜ ❨1029❩ ❛ The two hardest tests are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter. ❜ ❨1030❩ ❛ People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves. ❜ ❨1031❩ ❛ Be crazy! But learn how to be crazy without being the center of attention. Be brave enough to live different. ❜ ❨1032❩ ❛ You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. ❜ ❨1033❩ ❛ God chose you to be different. ❜ ❨1034❩ ❛ Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude? ❜ ❨1035❩ ❛ You have two choices, to control your mind or to let your mind control you. ❜ ❨1036❩ ❛ Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to. ❜ ❨1037❩ ❛ Haven't you learned anything, not even with the approach of death?  ❜ ❨1038❩ ❛ If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem. ❜ ❨1039❩ ❛ Nothing in this world happens by chance. ❜ ❨1040❩ ❛ I want to continue living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to be. ❜ ❨1041❩ ❛ Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains. ❜ ❨1042❩ ❛ Collective madness is called sanity. ❜ ❨1043❩ ❛ Consider each day a miracle - which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences. ❜ ❨1044❩ ❛ You say they create their own reality, but what is reality? ❜ ❨1045❩ ❛ Many people don't allow themselves to love because there are a lot of things at risk. A lot of future and a lot of past. ❜ ❨1046❩ ❛ Death frees from the fear of dying. ❜ ❨1047❩ ❛ The danger of an adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort. ❜ ❨1048❩ ❛ The happier people can be, the unhappier they are. ❜ ❨1049❩ ❛ Life is always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act. ❜ ❨1050❩ ❛ It's best to accept life as it really is and not as you imagined it to be. ❜ ❨1051❩ ❛ You don't seem mad at all. ❜ ❨1052❩ ❛ We’re allowed to make a lot of mistakes in our lives, except the mistake that destroys us. ❜ ❨1053❩ ❛ You’re what you are, not what others make of you. ❜ ❨1054❩ ❛ Am I cured? ❜ ❨1055❩ ❛ Real love changes and grows with time and discovers new ways of expressing itself. ❜ ❨1056❩ ❛ A lot of people think something is right, and so that thing becomes right. Is that it? ❜ ❨1057❩ ❛ They think they're normal, because they all do the same thing. ❜ ❨1058❩ ❛ I didn't know that other ‘me’s existed inside me, ‘Me’s that I could love. ❜ ❨1059❩ ❛ I have no idea what's awaiting me. ❜ ❨1060❩ ❛ What will happen when this all ends? ❜ ❨1061❩ ❛ I know that you are capable of great deeds. ❜ ❨1062❩ ❛ A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. ❜ ❨1063❩ ❛ The truth is that everyone is bored. ❜ ❨1064❩ ❛ I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. ❜ ❨1065❩ ❛ If there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love. ❜ ❨1066❩ ❛ Who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for even a single moment's suffering? ❜ ❨1067❩ ❛ It's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. ❜ ❨1068❩ ❛ While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. ❜ ❨1069❩ ❛ People are more often bad than good. ❜ ❨1070❩ ❛ I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned that it can be murderous. ❜ ❨1071❩ ❛ What interests me is living and dying for what one loves. ❜ ❨1072❩ ❛ In fact, nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. ❜ ❨1073❩ ❛ Nothing in the world is worth turning one's back on what one loves. ❜ ❨1074❩ ❛ Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ❜ ❨1075❩ ❛ There are more things to admire in men then to despise. ❜ ❨1076❩ ❛ It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence. ❜ ❨1077❩ ❛ What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this? ❜ ❨1078❩ ❛ Your code of morals? What code, if I may ask? ❜ ❨1079❩ ❛ I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding anything. ❜ ❨1080❩ ❛ No doubt our love is still there, but quite simply it is unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. ❜ ❨1081❩ ❛ I’m not happy to go, but one needn't be happy to make another start. ❜ ❨1082❩ ❛ I am incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that I am incapable of anything really worth while. ❜ ❨1083❩ ❛ I should have found the words to keep her with me. ❜ ❨1084❩ ❛ We can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. ❜ ❨1085❩ ❛ The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. ❜ ❨1086❩ ❛ There are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live. ❜ ❨1087❩ ❛ The best protection against anything is a good bottle of wine. ❜ ❨1088❩ ❛ There is no peace without hope. ❜ ❨1089❩ ❛ It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment. ❜ ❨1090❩ ❛ There is always something left to love. ❜ ❨1091❩ ❛ A person doesn’t die when he should but when he can. ❜ ❨1092❩ ❛ Things have a life of their own. It's simply a matter of waking up their souls. ❜ ❨1093❩ ❛ Tell me something: why are you fighting? ❜ ❨1094❩ ❛ I've come to realise only just now that I'm fighting because of pride. ❜ ❨1095❩ ❛ One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship. ❜ ❨1096❩ ❛ It's better than not knowing why you're fighting. Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone. ❜ ❨1097❩ ❛ Holy Mother of God! ❜ ❨1098❩ ❛ A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground. ❜ ❨1099❩ ❛ I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. ❜ ❨1100❩ ❛ Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. ❜ ❨1101❩ ❛ I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance. ❜ ❨1102❩ ❛ Get those bad thoughts out of your head. You're going to be happy. ❜ ❨1103❩ ❛ Children inherit their parents' madness. ❜ ❨1104❩ ❛ I'll turn to ashes in here but I won't give this miserable town the pleasure of seeing me weep. ❜ ❨1105❩ ❛ You would be good in a war. Where you put your eye, you put your bullet. ❜ ❨1106❩ ❛ Men demand much more than you think. ❜ ❨1107❩ ❛ Even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth. ❜ ❨1108❩ ❛ If we’re alone you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of. ❜ ❨1109❩ ❛ You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty. ❜ ❨1110❩ ❛ We have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect. ❜ ❨1111❩ ❛ What worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death. ❜ ❨1112❩ ❛ What worries me is that you've ended up as bad as they are. ❜ ❨1113❩ ❛ It is characteristic of men to deny hunger once their appetites are satisfied. ❜ ❨1114❩ ❛ Dying is much more difficult than one imagines. ❜ ❨1115❩ ❛ If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself! ❜ ❨1116❩ ❛ We have still not had a death. ❜ ❨1117❩ ❛ How awful, the way time passes. ❜ ❨1118❩ ❛ You may be in command of your war, but I'm in command of my house. ❜ ❨1119❩ ❛ I missed you every hour. ❜ ❨1120❩ ❛ You know what the worst part was? It caught me completely by surprise. ❜ ❨1121❩ ❛ I’ve risked my life for you. ❜ ❨1122❩ ❛ The problem with wanting is that it makes us weak. ❜ ❨1123❩ ❛ I love you, even the part of you that loved him. ❜ ❨1124❩ ❛ I’m sorry it took me so long to see you. ❜ ❨1125❩ ❛ I never really belonged anywhere. ❜ ❨1126❩ ❛ Thanks for being my best friend and making my life bearable.  ❜ ❨1127❩ ❛ Thanks for finding me. ❜ ❨1128❩ ❛ You and I are going to change the world. ❜ ❨1129❩ ❛ I’ve been waiting for you a long time. ❜ ❨1130❩ ❛ I’m not used to people trying to kill me. ❜ ❨1131❩ ❛ You’re shaking. ❜ ❨1132❩ ❛ There's nothing wrong with being a lizard. Unless you were born to be a hawk. ❜ ❨1133❩ ❛ Make me your villain. ❜ ❨1134❩ ❛ Just you and me. It’s always just you and me. ❜ ❨1135❩ ❛ Do you blame me for every mistake I made? For every dumb thing I’ve said? ❜ ❨1136❩ ❛ Well, if it gets too bad, give me a signal. ❜ ❨1137❩ ❛ Did you tell him what I showed you in the dark? ❜ ❨1138❩ ❛ Did you miss me when you were gone? ❜ ❨1139❩ ❛ What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men. ❜ ❨1140❩ ❛ You’re interfering with my plan. ❜ ❨1141❩ ❛ Too much champagne? ❜ ❨1142❩ ❛ I hope you don’t expect fairness from me. It isn’t one of my specialties. ❜ ❨1143❩ ❛ There is something more powerful than any army. Something strong enough to topple kings. Faith. ❜ ❨1144❩ ❛ All you said was that I had to kill you. You didn’t say how. ❜ ❨1145❩ ❛ What is she? She’s everything, you dumb son of a bitch. ❜ ❨1146❩ ❛ She’s an ugly little thing. No child should look like that. Pale and sour, like a glass of milk that’s turned. ❜ ❨1147❩ ❛ I wouldn’t make that mistake again. ❜ ❨1148❩ ❛ It’s a great honor, to save a life. You saved many. ❜ ❨1149❩ ❛ In this world, there are things you can only do alone. ❜ ❨1150❩ ❛ What seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else. ❜ ❨1151❩ ❛ If you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price. ❜ ❨1152❩ ❛ Why should you be interested in me? ❜ ❨1153❩ ❛ I have been told I've got a darkish personality. A few times. ❜ ❨1154❩ ❛ It's not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There's shadowy middle ground. ❜ ❨1155❩ ❛ I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel. ❜ ❨1156❩ ❛ The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish. ❜ ❨1157❩ ❛ The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.  ❜ ❨1158❩ ❛ So once you're dead there's just nothing? ❜ ❨1159❩ ❛ If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality. ❜ ❨1160❩ ❛ Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action? ❜ ❨1161❩ ❛ Nobody can shake off their own shadow. ❜ ❨1162❩ ❛ The silence is so deep it hurts. ❜ ❨1163❩ ❛ I may not look it, but I can be a very patient guy. ❜ ❨1164❩ ❛ Killing time is one of my specialities. ❜ ❨1165❩ ❛ You can't fight it. ❜ ❨1166❩ ❛ Tell me something,—do you believe in reincarnation? ❜ ❨1167❩ ❛ I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it. ❜ ❨1168❩ ❛ I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner.  ❜ ❨1169❩ ❛ I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. ❜ ❨1170❩ ❛ I can't take it any more, I can't go on any more. ❜ ❨1171❩ ❛ You don't really have it together. ❜ ❨1172❩ ❛ Is it against the law for me to know it? ❜ ❨1173❩ ❛ I keep having the same dream. ❜ ❨1174❩ ❛ Are you asking because you really want an answer? ❜ ❨1175❩ ❛ I hate this! I don't want to be changed this way! ❜ ❨1176❩ ❛ No contradictions, no irony. They do everything according to numerical formulas. ❜ ❨1177❩ ❛ Want to hear the rest? If you’re not interested, I can stop. ❜ ❨1178❩ ❛ If I didn’t have these memories inside me, I would’ve snapped a long time ago. I would’ve curled up in a ditch somewhere and died. ❜ ❨1179❩ ❛ I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend. ❜ ❨1180❩ ❛ What are you doing here, honey? ❜ ❨1181❩ ❛ You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets. ❜ ❨1182❩ ❛ You don't understand me. ❜ ❨1183❩ ❛ All wisdom ends in paradox. ❜ ❨1184❩ ❛ It is love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. ❜ ❨1185❩ ❛ I have lost my gift. ❜ ❨1186❩ ❛ Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair. ❜ ❨1187❩ ❛ The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us. ❜ ❨1188❩ ❛ They're just memories now. It’s time to forget. ❜ ❨1189❩ ❛ The time has to be right and the heart willing. ❜ ❨1190❩ ❛ The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season. ❜ ❨1191❩ ❛ Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy. ❜ ❨1192❩ ❛ Grief is natural, overcoming it is a matter of choice. ❜ ❨1193❩ ❛ I want out of that decorating scheme. ❜ ❨1194❩ ❛ With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. ❜ ❨1195❩ ❛ You never get over it but you get where it doesn't bother you so much. ❜ ❨1196❩ ❛ Don't waste your time on life. ❜ ❨1197❩ ❛ I'm a teenager. I've got problems! ❜ ❨1198❩ ❛ Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it. ❜ ❨1199❩ ❛ Obviously, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl. ❜ ❨1200❩ ❛ It was a mistake. ❜ ❨1201❩ ❛ It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever. ❜ ❨1202❩ ❛ Buffeted but not broken. ❜ ❨1203❩ ❛ Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? ❜ ❨1204❩ ❛ If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh. ❜ ❨1205❩ ❛ I can't wait until I get out of here. ❜ ❨1206❩ ❛ When she jumped she probably thought she’d fly. ❜ ❨1207❩ ❛ I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help. ❜ ❨1208❩ ❛ You're a stone fox. ❜ ❨1209❩ ❛ It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. ❜ ❨1210❩ ❛ Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. ❜ ❨1211❩ ❛ He broke my heart. You merely broke my life. ❜ ❨1212❩ ❛ I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is. ❜ ❨1213❩ ❛ Words without experience are meaningless. ❜ ❨1214❩ ❛ I loved you. I was a monster, but I loved you. ❜ ❨1215❩ ❛ Come just as you are. ❜ ❨1216❩ ❛ If a violin string could ache, i would be that string. ❜ ❨1217❩ ❛ Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again. ❜ ❨1218❩ ❛ What's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own. ❜ ❨1219❩ ❛ Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me. ❜ ❨1220❩ ❛ You took advantage of my disadvantage. ❜ ❨1221❩ ❛ I walk in a maze I cannot get out of. ❜ ❨1222❩ ❛ Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses. ❜ ❨1223❩ ❛ Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me. ❜ ❨1224❩ ❛ There is no harm in smiling. ❜ ❨1225❩ ❛ There is no point in staying here. There is no point in staying anywhere. ❜ ❨1226❩ ❛ There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. ❜ ❨1227❩ ❛ I am so tired of being cynical. ❜ ❨1228❩ ❛ Come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me. ❜ ❨1229❩ ❛ This is the only immortality that you and I may share. ❜ ❨1230❩ ❛ I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. ❜ ❨1231❩ ❛ I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! ❜ ❨1232❩ ❛ Years of secret suffering has taught me superhuman self-control. ❜ ❨1233❩ ❛ Solitude is corrupting me. I need company and care. ❜ ❨1234❩ ❛ I've missed you terribly. ❜ ❨1235❩ ❛ I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you. ❜ ❨1236❩ ❛ It doesn't matter a bit, because you've stopped caring anyway. ❜ ❨1237❩ ❛ What makes you say I've stopped caring for you? ❜ ❨1238❩ ❛ Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. ❜ ❨1239❩ ❛ The sun climbs high in the sky, then starts down. People come, then go. ❜ ❨1240❩ ❛ Tell me, have you ever thought of killing me? ❜ ❨1241❩ ❛ I can not believe you are the same human being. ❜ ❨1242❩ ❛ Just how urgent is it? ❜ ❨1243❩ ❛ It is time for you to be going. ❜ ❨1244❩ ❛ How is it you know something like that? ❜ ❨1245❩ ❛ I don’t mind. Your mess is my mess. ❜ ❨1246❩ ❛ Everybody has one thing they do not want to lose. ❜ ❨1247❩ ❛ I’ll be late tonight, so don’t wait up for me. ❜ ❨1248❩ ❛ Nothing I’ve tried to do by myself has ever come off. ❜ ❨1249❩ ❛ I am not catching you in the middle of anything important, am I? ❜ ❨1250❩ ❛ Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. ❜ ❨1251❩ ❛ My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. ❜ ❨1252❩ ❛ To get irritated is to lose our way in life. ❜ ❨1253❩ ❛ A friend to kill time is a friend sublime. ❜ ❨1254❩ ❛ I don't really know if it's the right thing to do. ❜ ❨1255❩ ❛ Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it? ❜ ❨1256❩ ❛ Most of everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories. ❜ ❨1257❩ ❛ Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer. ❜ ❨1258❩ ❛ You’re loads better than you think you are. ❜ ❨1259❩ ❛ You’re only half-living, the other half is still untapped somewhere. ❜ ❨1260❩ ❛ The song is over. But the melody lingers on. ❜ ❨1261❩ ❛ You are extraordinary. ❜ ❨1262❩ ❛ We tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on. ❜ ❨1263❩ ❛ It could be five years or ten years or one month. It's all the same. ❜ ❨1264❩ ❛ I’m forever realising things too late. ❜ ❨1265❩ ❛ I’m not complaining when I say my life is boring. ❜ ❨1266❩ ❛ Weakness is something that rots in the body. ❜ ❨1267❩ ❛ Coming from your mouth, it has the ring of truth, but I doubt anyone would believe me if I told them. ❜ ❨1268❩ ❛ You can't expect something unreal to last anyway, can you? ❜ ❨1269❩ ❛ A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat. ❜ ❨1270❩ ❛ So, kill me. Tell the others I attacked you so you killed me. ❜ ❨1271❩ ❛ Should never have come here. ❜ ❨1272❩ ❛ Hard to guess my tastes. ❜ ❨1273❩ ❛ Can’t it wait until the morning? ❜ ❨1274❩ ❛ You’ll find temper tantrums won’t help you here. ❜ ❨1275❩ ❛ It must have taken courage to return. ❜ ❨1276❩ ❛ It all sounds grimly dystopian. ❜ ❨1277❩ ❛ I am not afraid of you! ❜ ❨1278❩ ❛ All this could be avoided! ❜ ❨1279❩ ❛ You consider me a murderer? ❜ ❨1280❩ ❛ Gross way to die. ❜ ❨1281❩ ❛ What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. ❜ ❨1282❩ ❛ My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops? ❜ ❨1283❩ ❛ Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others. ❜ ❨1284❩ ❛ I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there. ❜ ❨1285❩ ❛ You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human. ❜ ❨1286❩ ❛ Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible. ❜ ❨1287❩ ❛ Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty. ❜ ❨1288❩ ❛ Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths. ❜ ❨1289❩ ❛ Dreams are all I have ever truly owned. ❜ ❨1290❩ ❛ Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. ❜ ❨1291❩ ❛ I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. ❜ ❨1292❩ ❛ By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. ❜ ❨1293❩ ❛ The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken. ❜ ❨1294❩ ❛ Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right. ❜ ❨1295❩ ❛ The weak are meat the strong do eat. ❜ ❨1296❩ ❛ Do whatever you can't not do. ❜ ❨1297❩ ❛ What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. ❜ ❨1298❩ ❛ I remain thankful to God for all his mercies. ❜ ❨1299❩ ❛ You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power. ❜ ❨1300❩ ❛ Power. The ability to determine another man's luck. ❜ ❨1301❩ ❛ Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong. ❜ ❨1302❩ ❛ Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively. ❜ ❨1303❩ ❛ Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions? ❜ ❨1304❩ ❛ You can’t lie to your soul. ❜ ❨1305❩ ❛ Why would I want to do a thing like that? ❜ ❨1306❩ ❛ We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. ❜ ❨1307❩ ❛ Better to make life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be. ❜ ❨1308❩ ❛ I’m not running away, I’m moving on. ❜ ❨1309❩ ❛ The reasons? There are no reasons. ❜ ❨1310❩ ❛ Some people are easier to love when you don’t have to be around them. ❜ ❨1311❩ ❛ Love does not exist. ❜ ❨1312❩ ❛ Fuck that ‘regrets’ bullshit. ❜ ❨1313❩ ❛ How does it make you feel? ❜ ❨1314❩ ❛ It’s horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone. ❜ ❨1315❩ ❛ Choose us. Choose life. ❜ ❨1316❩ ❛ You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt. ❜ ❨1317❩ ❛ I’m more of a warrior than you’ll ever be. ❜ ❨1318❩ ❛ What does that make us? The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. ❜ ❨1319❩ ❛ You don’t have to run away.  ❜ ❨1320❩ ❛ I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn’t. ❜ ❨1321❩ ❛ I’m not going to get crushed. ❜ ❨1322❩ ❛ I love doubt in a woman. It’s nearly as sexy as determination. ❜ ❨1323❩ ❛ Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty. ❜ ❨1324❩ ❛ You’re a mess. ❜ ❨1325❩ ❛ I know that it’s never left you alone. ❜ ❨1326❩ ❛ Are you asking me or telling me? ❜ ❨1327❩ ❛ You just get used to all the shit. ❜ ❨1328❩ ❛ You can’t afford a conscience in this life. ❜ ❨1329❩ ❛ None of us are saints and scapegoats are always handy. ❜ ❨1330❩ ❛ Doing things doesn’t hurt you; you get hurt by avoiding them. ❜ ❨1331❩ ❛ What was that? ❜ ❨1332❩ ❛ Protect me from those who wish to help us. ❜ ❨1333❩ ❛ You can’t love yourself if you want to hurt things like that. ❜ ❨1334❩ ❛ What happens when people open their hearts? ❜ ❨1335❩ ❛ Nobody likes being alone that much. ❜ ❨1336❩ ❛ I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.” ❨1337❩ ❛ Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that. ❜ ❨1338❩ ❛ You need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. ❜ ❨1339❩ ❛ I want you always to remember me. ❜ ❨1340❩ ❛ Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. ❜ ❨1341❩ ❛ What stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish. ❜ ❨1342❩ ❛ All I want in this world is you. ❜ ❨1343❩ ❛ I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning. ❜ ❨1344❩ ❛ No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. ❜ ❨1345❩ ❛ What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously. ❜ ❨1346❩ ❛ If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark. ❜ ❨1347❩ ❛ I’ve had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy. ❜ ❨1348❩ ❛ People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die. ❜ ❨1349❩ ❛ Stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. ❜ ❨1350❩ ❛ When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you’re in big trouble. ❜ ❨1351❩ ❛ When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it. ❜ ❨1352❩ ❛ If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. ❜ ❨1353❩ ❛ Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven’t answered me. ❜ ❨1354❩ ❛ People are strange when you’re a stranger. ❜ ❨1355❩ ❛ The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living. ❜ ❨1356❩ ❛ You don’t get it, do you? ❜ ❨1357❩ ❛ I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you ❨1358❩ realise. ❜ ❨1359❩ ❛ At least let me know whether or not I hurt you. ❜ ❨1360❩ ❛ All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. ❜ ❨1361❩ ❛ I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die. ❜ ❨1362❩ ❛ So I’m not crazy after all! ❜ ❨1363❩ ❛ I miss you terribly sometimes, but in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster. ❜ ❨1364❩ ❛ Will you wait for me forever? ❜ ❨1365❩ ❛ I don’t want our relationship to end like this. ❜ ❨1366❩ ❛ When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least. ❜ ❨1367❩ ❛ It hurts not being able to see you. ❜ ❨1368❩ ❛ I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. ❜ ❨1369❩ ❛ The world is an inherently unfair place. ❜ ❨1370❩ ❛ Life frightens me sometimes. I don’t happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. ❜ ❨1371❩ ❛ I’m a real bargain, don’t you think? If you don’t take me, I’ll end up going somewhere else. ❜ ❨1372❩ ❛ We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning. ❜ ❨1373❩ ❛ Don’t you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don’t know a soul? ❜ ❨1374❩ ❛ You’re not telling me anything I don’t know already. ❜ ❨1375❩ ❛ He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. ❜ ❨1376❩ ❛ If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. ❜ ❨1377❩ ❛ We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness. ❜ ❨1378❩ ❛ Until they become conscious they will never rebel. ❜ ❨1379❩ ❛ Power is not a means; it is an end. ❜ ❨1380❩ ❛ They are not interested in the good of others; they are interested solely in power, pure power. ❜ ❨1381❩ ❛ Now you begin to understand me. ❜ ❨1382❩ ❛ In the face of pain there are no heroes. ❜ ❨1383❩ ❛ Big Brother is watching you. ❜ ❨1384❩ ❛ Power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. ❜ ❨1385❩ ❛ It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. ❜ ❨1386❩ ❛ The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. ❜ ❨1387❩ ❛ Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind. ❜ ❨1388❩ ❛ Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. ❜ ❨1389❩ ❛ We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them. ❜ ❨1390❩ ❛ How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? ❜ ❨1391❩ ❛ You must try harder. ❜ ❨1392❩ ❛ Confession is not betrayal. ❜ ❨1393❩ ❛ What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. ❜ ❨1394❩ ❛ If they could make me stop loving you —- that would be the real betrayal. ❜ ❨1395❩ ❛ Of pain you can wish only one thing: that it should stop. ❜ ❨1396❩ ❛ To die hating them, that will be freedom. ❜ ❨1397❩ ❛ No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. ❜ ❨1398❩ ❛ What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself? ❜ ❨1399❩ ❛ To keep them in control is not difficult. ❜ ❨1400❩ ❛ So long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. ❜ ❨1401❩ ❛ The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. ❜ ❨1402❩ ❛ The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. ❜ ❨1403❩ ❛ Stupidity is as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. ❜ ❨1404❩ ❛ I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones. ❜ ❨1405❩ ❛ The past is dead, the future is unimaginable. ❜ ❨1406❩ ❛ You know the answer already. Everyone knows it. ❜ ❨1407❩ ❛ You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself. ❜ ❨1408❩ ❛ It is not easy to become sane. ❜ ❨1409❩ ❛ No emotion is pure anymore, because everything is mixed up with fear and hatred. ❜ ❨1410❩ ❛ They say that time heals all things —- they say you can always forget. ❜ ❨1411❩ ❛ The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. ❜ ❨1412❩ ❛ I sold you and you sold me. ❜ ❨1413❩ ❛ You do not exist. ❜ ❨1414❩ ❛ How does one man assert his power over another? By making him suffer. ❜ ❨1415❩ ❛ Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? ❜ ❨1416❩ ❛ Everything else we shall destroy – everything. ❜ ❨1417❩ ❛ Two and two makes five. ❜ ❨1418❩ ❛ Facts, at any rate, can not be kept hidden. ❜ ❨1419❩ ❛ The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. ❜ ❨1420❩ ❛ So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing. ❜ ❨1421❩ ❛ If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then? ❜ ❨1422❩ ❛ The lie became the truth. ❜ ❨1423❩ ❛ It is like swimming against a current that sweeps you backwards however hard you struggle. ❜ ❨1424❩ ❛ Turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. ❜ ❨1425❩ ❛ It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. ❜ ❨1426❩ ❛ I don’t want to die without any scars. ❜ ❨1427❩ ❛ This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time. ❜ ❨1428❩ ❛ You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways. ❜ ❨1429❩ ❛ You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. ❜ ❨1430❩ ❛ You are not special. ❜ ❨1431❩ ❛ You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. ❜ ❨1432❩ ❛ The things you used to own, now they own you. ❜ ❨1433❩ ❛ Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you. ❜ ❨1434❩ ❛ Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. ❜ ❨1435❩ ❛ Only after disaster can we be resurrected. ❜ ❨1436❩ ❛ Everything is evolving, everything is falling apart. ❜ ❨1437❩ ❛ We’ve all been raised believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. ❜ ❨1438❩ ❛ Don’t you have other things to do? ❜ ❨1439❩ ❛ Prove you’re alive. If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. ❜ ❨1440❩ ❛ You have been warned. ❜ ❨1441❩ ❛ If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t. ❜ ❨1442❩ ❛ It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you, too. ❜ ❨1443❩ ❛ If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person? ❜ ❨1444❩ ❛ Why did I cause so much pain? ❜ ❨1445❩ ❛ The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly. ❜ ❨1446❩ ❛ Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer. ❜ ❨1447❩ ❛ May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. ❜ ❨1448❩ ❛ Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head. ❜ ❨1449❩ ❛ We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. ❜ ❨1450❩ ❛ The girl is infectious human waste. ❜ ❨1451❩ ❛ I want to destroy everything beautiful I’ll never have. ❜ ❨1452❩ ❛ On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. ❜ ❨1453❩ ❛ If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? ❜ ❨1454❩ ❛ It is like you’re never really awake; but you’re never really asleep. ❜ ❨1455❩ ❛ Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave. ❜ ❨1456❩ ❛ A moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection. ❜ ❨1457❩ ❛ The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. ❜ ❨1458❩ ❛ You have to give up! ❜ ❨1459❩ ❛ Reject the basic assumptions of civilisation, especially the importance of material possessions. ❜ ❨1460❩ ❛ Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. ❜ ❨1461❩ ❛ You have to realise that someday you will die, Until you know that, you are useless. ❜ ❨1462❩ ❛ A tiger can smile. A snake will say it loves you. ❜ ❨1463❩ ❛ Lies make us evil. ❜ ❨1464❩ ❛ If you died right now, how would you feel about your life? ❜ ❨1465❩ ❛ You always kill the one you love. ❜ ❨1466❩ ❛ Maybe we should always assume the worst. ❜ ❨1467❩ ❛ Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. ❜ ❨1468❩ ❛ Which is worse? Hell or nothing? ❜ ❨1469❩ ❛ A minute of perfection is worth the effort. ❜ ❨1470❩ ❛ You’re going to die, tonight. You might die in one second or in one hour, you decide. ❜ ❨1471❩ ❛ Lie to me. Tell me the first thing off the top of your head. Make something up. ❜ ❨1472❩ ❛ I don’t give a shit. I have a gun. ❜ ❨1473❩ ❛ I know who you are. I know where you live. ❜ ❨1474❩ ❛ Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your life. ❜ ❨1475❩ ❛ My philosophy of life is that I can die at any moment. And the tragedy of my life is that I do not. ❜ ❨1476❩ ❛ Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. You can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you. ❜ ❨1477❩ ❛ There are a lot of things we don’t want to know about the people we love. ❜ ❨1478❩ ❛ We just had a near-life experience. ❜ ❨1479❩ ❛ If people think you are dying, they give you their full attention. They listen instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. ❜ ❨1480❩ ❛ I am nothing, and not even that. ❜ ❨1481❩ ❛ This isn’t really death. —- We’ll be legends. We won’t grow old. ❜ ❨1482❩ ❛ Stop trying to control everything and just let go. Let go. ❜ ❨1483❩ ❛ The amazing miracle of death, when one second you’re walking and talking, and the next second you’re an object. ❜ ❨1484❩ ❛ Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved. ❜ ❨1485❩ ❛ I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn't have one. ❜ ❨1486❩ ❛ Dreams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they're never real. They're never real, and I hate them because they aren't. ❜ ❨1487❩ ❛ Power isn’t control at all — power is strength, and giving that strength to others. ❜ ❨1488❩ ❛ A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger. ❜ ❨1489❩ ❛ A leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own. ❜ ❨1490❩ ❛ In the end, we are alone. ❜ ❨1491❩ ❛ It is like a piece of my soul is lost, empty. ❜ ❨1492❩ ❛ If my life on Earth must end, let it end with a promise. Let it end with hope. ❜ ❨1493❩ ❛ Sorry? Sorry isn't enough. ❜ ❨1494❩ ❛ Every single thing I ever loved is beyond my reach now. Everything I ever wanted. Everything I ever was. ❜ ❨1495❩ ❛ Will you stay with me? ❜ ❨1496❩ ❛ A leader doesn't make pawns - he makes people. ❜ ❨1497❩ ❛ Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. ❜ ❨1498❩ ❛ It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. ❜ ❨1499❩ ❛ There is nothing between us but rain. There is nothing between us at all. ❜ ❨1500❩ ❛ I like a little chaos. ❜

[artistfingers]

There’s one ~silver lining~ of my iPad being broken: I’ve had loads of time to think about my many half-formed undercover phantom au ideas! Since I have no idea when or what will make it to comic form, here’s the lowdown…. AKA, everything that’s been rattling around my brain recently :P

For context: Danny, Sam and Tucker have never met, and nobody knows Danny is Phantom. When Vlad’s newest bit of tech gets Danny stuck in ghost mode (with the rest of his powers on the fritz to boot), he meets Tucker and Sam—who instantly see through his disguise and lend a helping hand. (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4!!)

So. After that, Danny—no, Phantom—becomes friends with them. It’s exciting! He was invisible at school even before the ghost powers; he was pretty isolated and lonely and being Phantom for the last year hasn’t exactly been a social boon. Kid’s lonely, ok?

But now… two human friends? Who’re his age & share his interests? It’s like a dream come true! If only they weren’t exclusively friends with his ghost self… and if only they didn’t wanna be so involved in his dangerous ghost hunting things…Uhhh. Hm. Could be a problem.

Danny angsts about the danger he’s putting his new friends in, and about not being able to befriend them as a human. He plays with the idea of telling them Everything but that’s… risky to say the least. He’s only known them a few weeks! ugh….!! it’s too much. maybe he should just throw the towel in.

Buuut Sam & Tucker don’t take no for an answer. Especially after they rescue him a third time.

Thus… Phantom friendship shenanigans!!

Sam filched some parts from the Fentonworks Lab when Phantom took them there, and later convinced Tucker to help her build a custom mini ectogun in case of emergency. They didn’t tell Phantom.

Danny is really sentimental about that DP hat he wore when he first met Sam & Tucker. He wore it as Phantom for a while but it got singed in a fight. He still wears it when he hangs out with Tucker & Sam but otherwise keeps it squirreled away for Sentimental Reasons.

“So Phantom, how old are you?” “I’m 15.” “15 now? Or 15 when you died?” “Yes.”

Tucker has a bunch of awful 90s button up shirts, and gives one to Phantom

They aren’t able to convince Sam to wear one too, but they sure do try.

Phantom won’t tell them when he died, so once he starts wearing 90s shirts they start using terrible 90s slang with him

“I am NOT from the 90s!!! They didn’t even SAY that then!!!” “methinks the lady doth protest too much…..home slice” “NOOO!!!”

“Phantom I have an extremely important question. Like, life or death. SHIT is on the LINE here. Are you listening?? I really need to know…. Do ghosts play video games”

The answer may surprise you (no it won’t)

Sam is completely convinced they can ACTUALLY get a good working guess of when Phantom lived and died based on the fact he liked Nasty Burger when he was alive, since NB’s a regional chain with a not-so-distant past. Tucker meanwhile thinks Phantom probably has a good reason for keeping them at arm’s length—but regardless of method, they can agree: they want to break down Phantom’s walls.

The next arc is less “Undercover Phantom” and more “Undercover Fenton” because the juxtaposition of him having to do hidden identities squared (squared again) is too good for me to pass up. It boils down to this: during a ghost attack at school, Danny finds himself stuck being “protected” by Sam and Tucker.

Sam and Tucker take their new jobs as Phantom’s ghost hunting companions too seriously to let this skinny stranger they just met run TOWARDS the danger. WHY does he keep trying to run TOWARDS the danger

NO YOU CANNOT GO TO THE BATHROOM THE SCHOOL IS ON G H O S T L O C K D O W N

Sam pulls out her ectogun.

Danny: WHERE DID YOU GET THAT?!

Sam does not tell him.

“Wait, your last name’s Fenton? Like Fentonworks Fenton?” “No, the other Fenton.” “Oh… well, that’s too bad…” “YES LIKE FENTONWORKS FENTON”

Sam is initially wary of Danny because of his parents’ super strong anti-ecto views. Danny is clueless as to why she isn’t very friendly to him-as-a-human when she’s great with him-as-a-ghost. but she warms up after he helps resolve the ghost issue in a way that shows he doesn’t subscribe to his parents’ views.

afterwards you get this excellent situation where Danny is now friends with Sam and Tucker as Phantom and as Fenton, and they’re not connecting the dots as quickly as they did when it was just “that’s Phantom wearing a hoodie and a cap with his own logo on it”.

the potential here? *chefs kiss* here’s a few things but honestly? the possibilities are limitless

Danny pretending to not have a cell phone because he already gave them his number as Phantom

Tucker: *dials Phantom*

Danny, standing directly next to him: *frantically attempting to silence his phone*

Sam & Tucker try to introduce Danny and Phantom. Danny has to make excuses to avoid this happening in both forms.

Danny takes Sam & Tucker down to the Fentonworks Lab to get them some real equipment. Sam & Tucker pretend (very badly) that they’ve never been there before

Rooftop chill sessions as Phantom, late night teenage hijinks as Fenton, plus school AND fighting ghosts does not do any favors for Danny’s sleep deprivation. Tucker introduces him to caffeine pills with… mixed results.

Tucker and Sam teach Phantom some sign language. Later Danny slips up and uses it casually with them as Fenton

…. And many other silly mixups that I’ve yet to think of because I live for that shit

Sam & Tucker have theories about the Fenton-Phantom connection and they’re all wrong but somehow also plausible and that freaks Danny out just a little bit if he ever overhears them

Ultimately, I see this AU having a final arc where a New Situation occurs in which Danny-as-Phantom has to—once again—pretend to be human. This time, he’s with Sam & Tucker as Phantom from the get go, and can’t disappear or transform, even if being Phantom is extremely dangerous at that moment. Somehow this scenario would lead to the Fenton-is-Phantom (or, in this case, Phantom-is-Fenton) reveal…. But the details still escape me :P

so in short………… I really like hidden identities