#this part kicked my ass

[wafflebloggies]

10. a heap of broken images

back - next “So, Mark, this is Jared…”

Mark, it had to be said, did not look as if a large, near-invisible shadow-creature looming up out of the darkness and regarding him with a trio of eyes like the functional parts of a red-hot gas stove was a welcome addition to the list of concepts he was already struggling to grasp. He stared up at Jared in speechless silence, and when Jared’s eyes gave a friendly tilt, dropped several feet and whipped towards him, he sucked in a breath so sharp that Antonio was concerned he might have inhaled his own tongue.

“Look who it is! Double-M-hockey-sticks! It’s cool, we go waaaay back.”

“Uh?” managed Mark.

“Oh, yeah-yeah-yeah, I’ve been watching you for what, like, a year now?”

Mark made a noise.

“Gotta say, you’re taller IRL,” said Jared, happily. “Probably a perspective thing, right? Also way better res, which, like, no joke, literally every single cam in your house is ANCIENT at this point. Stone age. I kept bugging ya boy to replace them- no hate, ‘Tone- I was like, hey, I’m just your eye in the sky here, it’s not like I can just snap my fingers and your actual hardware gets upgraded with the power of heart or whatever. But he was always like... oh, hey, you good?”

This last, because Mark had just sat down suddenly with a thump, his knees having apparently decided they were even less keen on the way this conversation was going than the rest of him.

“It’s okay, Mark,” said Antonio, coaxingly. “Jared monitors all the hosts, twenty-four-seven. It wasn’t just you.”

When Mark finally found his voice, it was quite a lot shriller than usual. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

Antonio thought about it, reaching for Mark’s backpack, which had fallen off his shoulder as they’d scrambled inside the door. “I mean, yeah, it was, but I guess I can see why it doesn’t. Jared, hey, uh… I know this is kind of a big ask, but…”

Popping the inner zip, he upended the backpack over the nearest free desk. With a slithering scuffle of plastic wrappers, a small landslide of bright packages and baggies slid and tumbled over each other into a rough pile on the dusty melamine surface.

“We need a way out.”

Jared’s eyes gleamed. A long slender thing, like a steely finger with far too many joints, snickered indistinctly past Mark’s ear and pinned one of the little packets (a crowded graphic-design abomination, featuring sugegasa-wearing cows somersaulting cheerfully through flames), whipping it up into the shadows.

“Buddy, just call me Healthy Community, because I have got you COVERED.”

–-

Where there was a will- and an entire bodega rack’s worth of premium dried beef products- it turned out there was a way.

Jared called them dead zones. The cameras covered almost everywhere within the HR Department, Jared’s endless ranks of shiny black eyes, in corners, in ceilings, down blind alleys and empty rooms and well-trodden corridors, but with care and a little assistance to even out the odds, a path could be walked between them. The places between were cramped and confusing and nearly as difficult to travel as they would have been to find without Jared’s help. They were not the safest places, even within this hungry, malignant landscape, and they certainly weren’t the easiest to explain.

Here was a well of dank air, some fifty feet across, stirred in a slow, endless spiral by the movement of some enormous fan or turbine, deep enough below that it was far out of sight of any travellers along the narrow path that spanned it, a clanking catwalk of green steel. Condensation dripped from the pale heights, made the metal slimy underfoot.

Mark managed a couple of wobbly steps out over the void, then slid to his knees against the spindly safety rail, a sad arrangement of metal rods and chickenwire which overall came off as less of a barrier than a polite suggestion. Antonio, following with a surer step, resisted the urge to hook a fistful of the back of his sweater, just in case. He didn’t think Mark was likely to actually pitch himself over the railing, but he did appreciate that the last twenty or so minutes had been quite a lot for any human to handle.

“Hang in there, Mark,” he said, brightly. His voice echoed, a thin distant relay pattering back to them through the slow whirlpool of air. “Not much further.”

Mark forced his hands wordlessly through his hair, found a squashed fragment of delicate orange wing stuck somewhere over his ear, and flicked it away from him in disgust.

“Uh, yeah, sorry about the butterflies,” said Antonio. “Honestly, they’re usually pretty chill, I’ve never seen them just go for the eyes like that.”

Words weren’t evading Mark, but the ability to put more than two of them next to each other in a coherent sentence seemed to be. “That- the- why-” A struggle. “Why a horse??”

“It’s just a horse, Mark,” said Antonio, testing the railing before leaning his elbows on it, like a casual sightseer above Niagara Falls.

Mark clearly felt this wasn’t enough information. He made another struggle with his hands, shaping a sort of invisible sculpture on the theme of horror, bewilderment, and indignation, a shape that cut off sharply in the middle, and then squeezed both palms into his eyesockets, speaking indistinctly through his fingers.

“Just a- just- where’s the rest of it??”

“Do you think that’s really an important question right now?” asked Antonio. He meant it as a reasonable, honest query, but Mark only fixed him with a baleful eye through the gap in his hands, and said nothing.

They moved on. Through the empty hallways, through Jared’s dead zones, through a scorched and blackened sector where quite a mess had been made and the cameras still hung obliterated from the walls, Mark stayed silent. To Antonio, there was something puzzling- increasingly worrying- about this measured silence, and he didn’t think it was just the influence of his own quietly screaming nerves. He was good at reading Mark, even when he was at his most impenetrable, and he recognised this feeling of grim, plodding pertinacity that was coming off him in waves. This was Mark doing something he didn’t want to do- something he knew had no good object, no good ending- something he knew had to be done, regardless. He might as well have been making a video reading hate-comments, or cutting up raw liver, or any other uncongenial, unrewarding task demanded of him by the Muse. He looked as sullen and morose as ever, trailing along after Antonio as they travelled slowly through the safer zones of the HR Department. The nearest he got to an energetic reaction to anything on their long walk was a slight flinch and glance back as they heard the dogs pass distantly down a blind turning, the heavy patter of claws, the hungry, cheated howls.

Finally, the Long Egress. Jared had explained, in the vague way in which Jared tended to explain anything, that this seemingly endless grey concrete tunnel had been put in place as a sort of evacuation line, a last-ditch way back to the outside world. Walking it, Antonio wondered if the original architect might have planned on using it themselves, since it was quite clear that nobody else ever had. Whoever had designed the vast building that housed HR, if they had been human, it was a fairly safe assumption to make that they hadn’t done it entirely of their own free will.

It’s best to avoid asking questions or looking at things you aren’t authorised to see.

The bulkhead lights set into the walls every hundred yards or so created pale dim pools of light like so many oases, leading them from one to the next, all the way down the long last straight. Down here, even the lights were caged.

It’s all in my head, and I shouldn’t worry about it.

Antonio felt that they had been walking for years by the time they reached the end. His shoes had run out of moisture and left no prints on the scratchy poured concrete. Every step he took felt leaden, a further pull away from something dragging gently at him, something hooked into his heart-roots, difficult to ignore. They had been walking in silence, the only sounds the scrape and echo of their steps, the thick electric hum of the lights, a quieter low static buzz that seemed to live in the walls, and Mark’s difficult breathing and occasional hitching cough. Antonio didn’t mind these noises, as it made it easy for him to know that Mark was still behind him.

No ceremony, no fanfare, just a flat final wall that grew slowly from a pale dot to a short grey oblong as they walked towards it, a last pool of light, the long hallway terminating in a single pale grey door. Someone with a sense of humour had screwed a sign to it, an ordinary industrial yellow-and-black safety sign that read DANGER – KEEP OUT. Someone else had scrawled underneath; IT’S SCARY OUT THERE.

Antonio put a hand on the door, which had a thick push-bar, wreathed in old cobwebs and cranky with disuse. He looked back, and saw that Mark had stopped a little way back along the hallway and was just standing there in the last-but-one pool of light, looking at him.

“Mark? This is it, buddy, come on.”

Mark coughed, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and didn’t move.

“Mark?” Antonio stepped away from the door. As he moved towards Mark, Mark stepped back, mirroring him. He put a hand to the strap of his backpack, gripping it like a rosary, and suddenly Antonio felt a cold and eerie twinge of deja vu, of a week ago, of standing in the soft-lit hallway with Be Joyful Always, Pray Continually over his head as Mark begged him in a quiet, frantic monotone, pleaded, promised anything for his freedom.

I've done everything you've asked. You can have my channel, my house... just let me go.

Just now, it looked as if nothing could have been further from Mark’s mind.

“You must think I’m pretty fucking stupid,” he said.

Antonio stopped. The bug in his middle, which had been quiet for a time, stirred restlessly as he looked across the distance between them into Mark’s sharp, careworn face.

“So what is it?” Mark put out a hand and rested it against the concrete wall, either to take some of his weight or to reassure himself it was there. The flat light cast stark double-shadows, Antonio’s own falling across the door at his back and stretching down the hallway towards Mark, Mark’s slanting away as if it was shrinking from his. “What’s the trick? Because this whole ‘super secret escape’ thing is getting really old now. Maybe I’d have fallen for it when I was five but if you think I believe you’re just going to let me walk out of here, that sludge in your head must be way past expiry.”

“Mark, you have to trust me,” said Antonio. “I’m- I’m just trying to help you.”

Mark blinked a couple of times, grinned at him, in the same way skulls grinned, nothing behind it but a vacant stretch of teeth. Whether Antonio had struck a nerve, or Mark had just reached some internal breaking point, he dropped his hand from the wall and started walking forwards.

“Trust you. Trust you? You, and that- that thing in my basement- my muse-”

The sheer amount of pure spitting venom he managed to inject into one syllable was astonishing.

“-you’re the same. You’re the same thing, you’re just a- a part of that fucking blob that can walk around and look like a person. I knew that as soon as you first showed up- you think I’m going to trust you now?” He stopped, almost face to face with Antonio, his fear and aversion and bitter anger struggling with each other in his face, his hands curled around his backpack in front of him as if it was a shield.

“Mark, I- I’ve felt- I’ve been-”

Now it was Antonio’s turn to struggle. His chest was crawling, the heat in his face and hands rising, the difficulty squirming under his skin pushing him not to shut Mark up or stop him being a problem but to explain, to try to dispel the terrible disdain in Mark’s eyes. He stumbled on, aware his voice sounded choked and strange, terribly afraid to keep going but far, far more afraid to stop.

“When you were gone, I… I started to feel... different. I’ve been feeling... really weird. Mark, I have… thoughts that don’t make sense- sometimes I don’t want things to happen even though I know I should, I don’t want to do things I know I have to do- I think there’s something wrong with me. No, I- I know there is.” He held out his hands, open, pleading. “I don’t know what happened, but I- I know somehow, it started because of you.”

He swallowed.

“I’m different, I’m different to how I was, because of you. And I want to- I want to be a good friend, Mark. I’m doing this because I… I want to help you.”

“Bullshit,” said Mark.

Oh, it felt cold, it felt freezing cold in his guts and it hurt, and maybe this was how come humans could hurt each other so easily, that Mark could take every honest, vulnerable word he’d pulled painstakingly out of the core of him, these fragile little things ripped out of their shell new and raw and utterly defenceless, and hurl them so easily right back in his face. Antonio felt them start to shrivel and die in the chasm between them, but he kept quiet and just looked at Mark, who was knotting his fists in the fabric of his backpack, his jaw set hard, mouth slightly open, eyes hot and full of contempt.

“Mark,” he tried, “please, you have to-“

“No, I don’t. I actually fucking don’t, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to believe a single word you say. I listened to you for a year. I let you manipulate me, I danced like your fucking puppet, I did everything you wanted, for a year. I let-” He bit the word off.

“Mark, I haven’t even known you for a y-“

“Shut up,” said Mark, his voice deadly and as flat as the lights. “You can’t hurt me anymore. Not with my- my mom, not with-” He stopped himself again, his mouth working. “There’s nothing left, the only thing you have on me is this- this shit inside of me, this-” He let the pack dangle to the bruised fold of his elbow and held out his arms, wordless, the flat bulkhead light ghastly on his darkened veins, the black splatters of the dog’s blood and his own still staining the front of his ruined sweater. “This- this infection, this mold, I- I can feel it, I hear it in my head-” He shuddered, furiously, helplessly. “If- if you wanted to help me you’d get rid of it but you won’t, you won’t because the only thing you want is to keep me, keep stringing me along for whatever sick fucking plan-”

“Okay, but I’d need to touch you.”

“-shut up- whatever sick- whatever-” Mark seemed to hit a kind of a glitch, sticking like a scratched-up record and stopping in place. He blinked a little volley of dazed blinks, a rapid-fire Morse code message of utter confusion. “What?”

“Here,” said Antonio, holding out his hands. “I think I can do it, at least I can try. It’s just, you told me not to touch you.”

Mark stared at him in disbelief, his hands falling to his sides. He looked poleaxed. The backpack slipped gently down his arm, dropping to the ground at his feet, but he made no sign he even noticed.

“And you listened??”

For the first time, Antonio saw with stark clarity the shape of himself as he must have appeared to Mark through the past almost-year. A looming shadow, a threatening, suffocating, hounding, malicious, grinning thing that never rested and never relented, if the deal Mark had made with his Muse was a poisoned spring, Antonio had been the hand forcing him under the rank surface, forcing him to drink until he drowned.

Months too late, without words to even form the idea, he was desperately sorry. The thing in his chest- bug, alien, sickness or mistake- it was his, his guilt, his to fight and deny or accept, and for once, the choice was his own.

“I know I don’t have any right to ask you to trust me.” He kept holding out his hands, palms up, looking into Mark’s face where incredulity was fighting a pitched battle with something else, something Antonio wasn’t sure he’d ever seen there before.

“Please, Mark,” he said, quietly. “Just let me try.”

The lights hummed, the walls buzzed. Mark stood still in silence for so long that Antonio started to wonder if he’d frozen again, but at last he started to move. There was no great change in his expression, no lessening of the fear in his eyes or the clear mistrust in the thin downwards line of his mouth. As he moved, it seemed to be in spite of himself than out of any thinking, reasoning decision.

Slowly, without looking away from Antonio’s face, Mark lifted his hand and reached out.

[demaparbat-hp]

She will (and he'll let her)

[solisevart]

closing out pride month with one of my most anticipated dynamics for next season 🥹🏳️‍🌈 the community & solidarity they have in the 80s means so much. they need a duo name 👏🏽

also on insta

[ramshacklerumble]

i had come across some housewarden ace fanart and i originally hadn't really known what to make of it outside 'hell yeah ace rock that outfit'.

but when i brought it up to my friends, i ended up talking MYSELF into liking the idea wayyy too much.

the way i bought into the idea was that riddle "nominated" ace to be housewarden for his junior year. and by "nominated" i mean, riddle went: 'my last order before my reign as housewarden of dorm heartslabyul comes to an close is that you-- ace trappola-- are to become housewarden in my stead.'

and ace went: "HAH???"

in book 1 he wanted to be housewarden entirely out of spite, but i feel like after that blew over he wouldn't have wanted to touch the title with a ten foot pole. that's so much work.

so when junior year comes along, people figured he'd just ignore the order-- himself included. but when someone challenges him for the title, ace finds himself unable and very much unwilling to hand it over.

riddle drove him up the wall, but ace respects him as his former housewarden, riddle as a person, and as a respectable mage. if riddle said the next housewarden was gonna be him, it's gonna be him.

[earlycuntsets]

I swear this interview contains 80% of our lore

[ask-queen-arti]

"Damage Control" [ part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4 ]

(OOC: she is back! sorry for the inactivity, and thank you for being patient)

[starfr00t]

sunny is stronger than any us marine 😔✊

[critter-covenant]

Class is in session!

Idea inspired from this that I've been meaning to draw for the past few days

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I was *not* longing, I swear.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[flintbian]

There's a disabled angel in good omens 🥺

[kitamars]

i have nothing for halloween so take some yokai ginhiji doodles so you know im not dead ndnjvjd

[fullychaotichell]

someone stop Alastor from self-medicating, he's not as good at it as he thinks 😔😤

But yes, no, all these doodles were an excuse to draw Alastor in pyjamas, and also to figure out how to draw his hooves (and ofc angst in general pff)

Also, these were heaaavily inspired by this specific drawing @notherpuppet did! I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it, so you could sorta call this fanart of fanart pff

[fatedroses]

Finally I can post the comic for Adventurer!Zenos that has taken hold of my brain for the past week.

AKA a man who is currently running off the fumes of the literal souls of the damned being very desperate to be out of the void he was stuck in (and for the first time actually being able to just enjoy something mundane), only to get absolutely overwhelmed but all the stimuli he had just... ignored until now.

[gonnadosomethingwmylife]

White collar handles angst in such a great way because 3/4ths of the characters are emotionally mature, well-regulated people so when things like El getting kidnapped for the treasure go down, Peter doesn’t blame Neal or Mozzie, and even hears out Neal’s side on how he got the treasure. El doesn’t hold any resentment either because she recognizes Keller is to blame even though he was after their treasure.

I wouldn’t have blamed them for being more mad at Mozzie and Neal, but the fact they understood where they were coming from and never misappropriately assigned blame (Peter even tells Mozzie to stop blaming himself, because it was Keller who kidnapped El) is such a huge indicator of their maturity.

Also, Peter being able to see Neal be willing to confess and go to jail for his part in stealing the treasure allowed him to see that his good influence WAS changing Neal too. Peter recognizes that Neal is genuinely trying to be better, even if he can’t fully kick his habits, so even when Neal fucks up, he always keeps that in mind.

There are other examples, but how they handled the treasure fallout really stood out.

[intotheelliwoods]

They are on a mission :) Should note: this takes place about 3ish days after the invasion! They have just gone far enough out to reach places that were not effected by the Kraang!

Also no Leo does not have the prosthetic on- he just stuffed the sleeve there with shirts

This is part 1! Part 2 can be found here~

Context, and more comics can be found on my blog!

[mewtwo24]

Not to be That Guy but like.

Am I the only one that can't stop thinking about how Tianlang-Jun says about Luo Binghe that he pretends to be cold-hearted like his mother. The hint of fondness there, the heartache in that utterance.

Like it drives me absolutely insane. Imagining her putting on a front of strength, cold and driven and unrelenting. Why does TLJ say that about her. Did she secretly look for solutions that meant reconciling with demons instead of hurting them when her sect wasn't looking? (I wonder this because I feel like his weird fondness for SQQ would lowkey track if it's connected to the woman he once loved.) Did he mean that she was tasked with basically assassinating him and she fell in love with him instead (re: failed step one)? Did he mean that she was fond and doting in her own way (e.g. conceding he was attractive, paying for his exploits and humoring him)? Did he mean that, like LBH, she thought that power would be the thing to protect her--and that it was disguising a person who was deeply and privately wounded? All four????? I don't need sleep I need a n s w e r s

Did she know about the Huanhua Palace Master's skeevy ass intentions before she met TLJ? Or did those only come to significant light after she fell in love with TLJ? Is that why she never anticipated that level of betrayal, because initially she had no intention of being with anyone romantically? And HHPM just assumed she would be under his thumb forever?? Was she furious at her own indiscretion or did she try to use the pregnancy as a bargaining chip, a way to try to stop the immortals of Cang Qiong Mountain from attacking TLJ (plus the bonus of marriage entrapment no takesies backsies this is where LBH gets it from)? Did she try to use that claim on her to dissuade HHPM from his covetous advances, framing herself as tainted so that she could finally escape? Did she dream of a life by TLJ's side, far away from Cang Qiong Mountain?

Like. Literally every single permutation of what this could mean guts me to hell. Do you ever just cry about tianxi because I--[loud bawling noises]