#we know that the people enslaving them are doing something unforgivable. we know it is wrong when the pirates participate in the slave trade

[dashiellqvverty]

id forgotten a lot of details about black sails bc thats how i am with tv shows (and also i watched seasons 3 and 4 a couple episodes at a time over a long period of time) but something really fucking shitty im only being reminded of as im rewatching the first episode of season 3 is how the audience is meant to empathize with enslaved people specifically through the eyes of a white man

[corvuserpens]

Honestly though, but the way the show, not to mention Ferdinand Kingsley’s stupendous acting, makes us absolutely fall in love with Hob...

I was thinking about this yesterday at work bc monday nights are painfully slow, but stick with me. Throughout the centuries, we get to see different sides of Hob Gadling, both good and bad. 

We see the soldier-turned-mercenary, so we know he has killed and pillaged both to survive and for money - but we also see his child-like wonder at all the changes going on around him, no matter how small or insignificant they might appear to us in our technologicaly advanced future. And it’s impossible not to admire him for being so open and enthusiastic for new things as they come.

We see him in extravagant wealth, proud of the fruits of his labor from the past hundred years and how vapid, maybe even sort of shallow they’ve made him. But knowing his origins, how can we fault him for enjoying all the things he worked so hard for and boast them? For how he built himself from nothing and reached the blissful top where he doesn’t have to worry about food and shelter, where he can have everything he needs (and wants) only one short financial exchange away? I’ll be real with you guys, I was so damn proud of Hob in 1589, even if he was being a bit of a twat about it. He was so damn happy with his wife and baby boy, you could tell he was aware of what it took to get where he is and he is grateful for all of it. He ends up taking it all for granted perhaps, but I get the feeling that above all, he’s grateful. And to be rejected by Dream the way he was... I felt bad for him bc as a person of limited means, I know what it’s like to have to work your ass off to get a modicum of comfort.

Right afterward, as we come to expect right at the end of the 1589 sequence, we see him in extreme poverty - dirty, clothes good for the trash but they’re probably the only pieces he has left, down in the mud with nothing, starving to death over and over again, and we hear how the past hundred years have been the worst of his life, every tragedy laid out bare - yet, he still wants to live. Many of you likely know how fucking hard it is to go through harsh times when you just want to stop existing. I know I do. So, to see Hob smiling, despite all the shit he went through, and heartily say he has so much to live for despite his current circumstances?? I mean, the sheer stubbornness and bravery, knowing tomorrow will be just as bad as tonight but still looking forward to it, is downright charming. Not even inspiring, though it is, but most of all, it’s so charming. Sexy, even, like... OOF.

Oh boy, and then comes the elephant in the room: 1789. “Shipping business.” Actively participating in the enslavement of other human beings. Look, I’m a humanitarian at heart, even if I’m not exactly a “people person”, so let me make this clear: what Hob was doing was WRONG. What he was doing is UNFORGIVABLE. I can never excuse him for it, nor forgive him. I think it was downright despicable and he deserves to live with the weight of those sins and the blood on his hands for eternity. That being said - no matter how abhorrent his actions were, the fact that almost as soon as Dream calls him out on it, he is humbled enough to consider changing his ways (and eventually following through), while it does nothing to erase the suffering he was causing, at least it shows he is not completely souless either. There is some good in him that’s worth carving out and bring into the light, there’s something in him that’s worth preserving. Not saving, there’s no coming back from participating in slavery. Just preserving. It’s more explicit in the comics, where Hob says he will never be able to make up for this mistake, and it’s that humility and willingness to improve himself and do better in the future that’s worth appreciating. Imagine if all the evil people in the world woke up to reality and decided to change for the better and work to make up for what they’ve done, even if that will never undo their past actions? I think the world would be doing a lot better. We need to give people a chance to be better, not without proper punishment, mind you! But those who do repent and regret their actions need a chance to be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society, otherwise we are never moving forward. 

Anyway.

In comes my favorite iteration of Hob: 1889. It’s when we truly see the culmination of the centuries, the best version of himself he can be, a man who believes people are almost always better than we think they are, who is too modest to admit he’s changed for the better, where he is neither poor nor wealthy, just average - someone willing to admit that he’s made mistakes and will continuing to make them because he might be immortal, but he’s still a human being ridden with flaws. He’s just so bashful when he becomes vulnerable with Dream, when he opens himself up and shows his own insecurities and regrets. So beautifully human.

And finally, we get to see his devotion to his relationship with Dream from 1989 forward, and yeah, look, I’m a BIG Dreamling fan as you’ve probably noticed, but just put that aside for a moment. If Hob is this dedicated to his friendship with a creature he only meets once a century, imagine what he’s like with all his other friends? Even back in 1589, the way he talks about Eleanor and Robyn, with so much love and affection, like they are the center of his world. He’s one loyal son of a bitch. And quick to forgive, it seems. 

And that’s why regardless of all the awful things he does through time, I can’t... Hate him for it. I can fault him for sure, I can recognize his dark side and say “yeah, no dude, you were a shitty person for doing all that.” I think it’s the good things about him that balance it all out. By the end of episode 06, I feel nothing except a deep appreciation and affection for Hob’s character. He inspired me to be the best person I can be, to forgive myself for my slights and focus on the next day, the next moment, and strive to do better always, never to wallow in self-pity and self-hate because ultimately, it helps neither myself nor anyone else. Above all, he and Death inspired me to look at life under a different prism, a more positive one. Yeah, the world is all fucked up, there’s little we can do to change it and everything dies in the end, but if you look hard enough, there’s always something worth looking forward to. 

We aim for change. We do our best. And above all, we live.

And that’s how I’ve ended up falling head over heels for Hob Gadling.

[lord-explosion-baku]

Scourge

“Who do you think they’ll believe: you or us?”

Yandere!Erasermic x reader

Warnings: yandere, mentions of sexual assault, alluding to past violence, dark themes, law & order or whatever

A/N: Nothing fun or sexy or witty really happens. I just wanted to write something about like the aftermath of a yandere kidnapping scenario. It answers the questions that so many people ask when writing yandere heroes: “who will believe you?” I’ve got a ton of ideas for continuation, ideas containing the reader being in a healthy relationship with Midnight👁, but I’m slowly getting back into writing, and it’s a little tough trying to choke shit out even when I really want to. I hope you find this a little entertaining nonetheless. Also I don’t really know anything about the judicial system in Japan. All I know is that they have three professional judges and then six lay judges who act as jury.

On July seventh, late afternoon, rain began to pour down on the courthouse, right before the second half of a horrific pair got off for charges of kidnapping, sexual assault, and an inappropriate use of quirk.

The words ‘insufficient evidence’ and ‘burden of proof’ kept ping-ponging around in your head, echoing, chipping away at what was left of your sanity. Because you couldn’t look at the lay judges, the six pairs of eyes who scrutinize you more than the defendant, you kept your eyes glued to where the water sorrowfully washed down the window panes. It was almost nice, knowing that even if the court didn’t have any sympathy for you, at least the clouds did.

They always said it would work out this way. On several occasions, they had tauntfully asked, “who do you think they’ll believe: you or us?” It had to have been a scare tactic; something to keep you static, even if you managed to escape. Well, you managed to escape, and after months of this grueling process, judgement from all ends of the spectrum, and what little influence you had in your community cut away bit-by-bit, you realized that they were right to warn you.

They called you an attention-seeking whore. A money grabber. A pot-stirrer. Not them, not the defendants—they’d never. It had been the media. You’d seen your face on every news channel, plastered on magazines. People gathered stories about you, and about your past, and they twisted and contorted your truth until you were nothing more than a monster to the public eye. A villain. A scourge to be loathed.

There were whispers in the courtroom now. People were twitching, restless and waiting. Your left ear began to ring—something that started happening after your eardrum burst after a particularly nasty debacle. Insufficient evidence my ass.

One of the judges was speaking loud enough for you to hear now, but it was the storm outside you were listening to. You were on the outside looking in, and its spray started to pelt your face in warning. It told you to bolt. Leave before you get caught in its cyclone. For a moment, you considered it, because even after a storm caused destruction, after the chaos, it would always leave something fresh to build on. That was what you needed. A new beginning.

But before you could get your legs to listen to your brain, the unforgiving winds yanked you in.

“We find the defendant not guilty.”

Steel-hard tension melted in a moment’s notice. An exuberant sob warmed the hearts of the dozens of people in the courtroom. They were sighing with relief, thanking the heavens that a cherished hero will live free to work and entertain for the rest of his days.

“You’re a good man, Hizashi Yamada,” said one of the judges who failed to condemn the actual monster. “Be sure to be more mindful of who you let into your home in the future.”

The defendant stood up, slowly, as if something heavy on his back was rolling off his suit within this ascent, and bowed to the judges, and then the lay judges. His partner, the other transgresser who walked away scot free, placed a hand on Yamada’s back, stirring him to turn. Then, the two hugged, a big move for the two of them, since their personal relationship outside of being working heroes and faculty members wasn’t very well known. To the people, it was all very touching. To you, it was devastating.

Shouta Aizawa and Hizashi Yamada were getting away with your enslavement.

Hizashi tightened his hold around Aizawa, and for a moment, his sickly green eyes scanned the room, until they found what they were looking for. Your blood froze when Hizashi saw you. You stopped breathing. You were stone.

He peered at you from above the thick rims of his glasses. Tears stained his cheeks, but a glint livened his eyes, and with a wink, he told you everything he wanted you to know: this wasn’t over.

You were wrong to think that you hadn’t yet been caught in the storm. You’d just been stuck in its eye, and unfortunately, sympathy from clouds couldn’t save you. You had to save yourself.

[ohfugecannada]

Oddworld: Role Switch au

So a couple of weeks(?) ago, @oddest-worlds posted an idea for an au where mudokons were an evil cultist species-supremacist power because of the mudokon moon incident and the glukkons were the enslaved natives. I really wanted to pitch in ideas/headcanons, but was busy with coursework at the time.

Fortunately, I just finished my project and now have more free time so I got to writing some stuff.... a lot of stuff... mainly just some points on the main trio of eusocial races (Mudokons, Glukkons and Sligs) and their role in the AU. So strap in!

(Fyi if you have/had other ideas that contradict the headcanons bellow, feel free to ignore those. Or pitch in some of your own ideas, I’d love to hear them!)

Glukkons

Were once a spiritually oriented race who practiced black magic, occultism and alchemy and were allies of the Mudokons thousands of years ago

When the mudokons declared themselves as the supreme race because of the mudokon moon, they were, understandably, upset and concerned

Fearing their once allies were drifting further away into cultist, species-supremacist behaviour, the glukkons set out to disprove the mudokons declaration of supremacy though their alchemical arts and unify their species once more

It’s said that some glukkon alchemists were successful in finding the answers they seeked out, but what those answers were have long since been lost to time

Now becoming more industrialised and realising the glukkons were a possible threat due to their alchemical powers, the mudokons orchestrated a war against them, nearly wiping the glukkons out in the process before thier surrender

After the war, disillusioned, outnumbered and on the brink of extinction, the glukkons began working for the mudokons, who belittled, oppressed and eventually enslaved them

Now most glukkons are born into subservience to the Mudokons, oblivious to their spiritual past, true history and culture

Still native glukkon tribes out in the wild in hiding from the mudokon empire

I mentioned this before, but I personally imagined the glukkons of this timeline walking on thier legs, which are still somewhat short, and retained thier long arms. Basically, they have the same body type to gibbons and similar long armed apes

Because they walk with their legs and not on their arms, most glukkons stand at almost half their canon height, roughly around 4 or 5 feet tall or so

In industrial captivity, most glukkons tend to have a grey or pale skintone like the glukkons we see in soulstorm

Native Glukkons born outside of captivity are much more diverse in skin colour, with their base colours ranging from brown to purple, red, pink or green etc

Along with This, they have the ability to change their skin colour like octopuses (which makes sense given their closest relatives evolutionarily are the oktigi and other octopus/cephalopod-like creatures)

Notably, they flash different colours across their face and skin when feeling strong emotions like sadness, anger, excitement etc. Similar to the mudokons in Abe’s Exoddus

Glukkons from certain tribes also have bioluminescent markings and patterns on their skin that are visible in the dark. Though, this trait is not as common

Using this colour changing ability, some glukkons are able to copy the colours and even textures of their environment and become one with the scenery. Essentially making themselves invisible. Of corse, this particular aspect of colour changing usually doesn’t come as naturally or involuntary to glukkons as the emotional-based changes. In most cases it takes years of training to master the art of invisibility

Much like the Mudokons in canon, industrial-born Glukks are born into captivity from a mother queen and their eggs are shipped off to be sold into slavery

Baby or young slave glukkons are raised alongside their siblings and cousins over a mudokon master and are usually kept together as something akin to a demented orphanage where youngling glukks are sent to work as soon as they can pick up a rag and bucket

@oddest-worlds, You described the mudokons as being cult like. I personally imagined this would ya know aside from the moon worshiping mudokon supremacy stuff manifest itself most in the way they control thier glukkon slaves

Glukkons in slavery, much like people born into cults, are indoctrinated at a young age to believe their mudokon masters are perfect, all knowing and benevolent beings, that the outside world beyond the factories is a savage, unforgiving wasteland where outsiders will try to lead them astray, and that they are better off and safer dedicating their lives to loyaly serving the mudokons

Glukks who challenge these beliefs, defy their mudokon masters or try and escape to the outside are often severely punished. Either from being removed from their glukkon group, being held in a cell for hours or days where they are interrogated and for their “crimes” or getting severe beatings.

Native free glukkons have a similar tribal society structure as the native mudokons in canon, with each tribe having their own distinctive culture

As said before, they practice the occult, black magic and, most prominently among different glukkon tribes, alchemy

As well as living in tune with nature, Glukkon alchemists often practice the art of transmutation, turning one type material or substance into another, and joining certain substances and/or materials together. Which they do in order to better understand the natural world around them

Nowadays, though, native glukkon civilisation is far from what it once was millennia ago

Thanks to the mudokons and other industrial societies either enslaving or killing off their numbers as well as building over their sacred lands, most native glukkon’s main priority is to hide away from the rest of society and to protect what little of their culture and traditions still remain

From my research I learned the practice of alchemy (or at least the traditional western version of it) could be traced back to Egypt and Thoth, the god of arts and sciences, so I thought it would make sense if at least some individual native glukkon tribes culture and overall aesthetic would be loosely based on the ancient Egyptians as a callback to this, with some small echos of the architecture we see with the glukkon aesthetics of the canon timeline plus the more native looking early concept art of glukkons

Also while researching alchemy I noticed one key aspect of it involved change and transmutation, I.e. turning base metals like lead into noble metals like gold. I thought about how this could also connect to their colour changing. Maybe some native glukkons believe the colour changing to be a glukkons most primal form of transmutation. And view the ability to blend in with the environment as a way of being one with nature, both in the figurative and literal sense. Or something else along those lines

In industrial propaganda, native glukkons are painted as savage barbarians and alchemists as swindlers and charlatans that lead gullable slave glukkons astray, filling their heads with doubt, or with the promise of bestowing riches and immortality for a price

Enslaved glukkon’s clothes tend to consist of whatever textiles they can get their hands on in the factories and what little the strict dress code implemented by their mudokon masters will allow

The main item of clothing worn by most glukk scrubs is a shoddily cobbled together shirt and overalls. Sorta like an even shabbier version of the basic glukkon pud uniform in munchs oddysee

Like many things, native or liberated glukkons tend to have a lot more freedom when it comes to what they wear

The more traditional fashions often worn by glukkon alchemists include long, loose fitting robes, sometimes with these thick ribbed shoulder pads. Pretty much the same as outfit worn by glukkons in the very early concept art back when they were still called “Oldger” or “Ociti”

Mudokons

A once spiritual race that possessed psychic powers and were allies to the Glukkons thousands of years ago

When the shape of a Mudokon pawprint appeared on one of Oddworld’s moons, some mudokons took this as a sign from the gods that they were the chosen race

Blinded by their self imposed delusions of grandeur, the first believers of the mudokon moon sign set out to prove the mudokon race’s superiority over all other races of Oddworld

The moon believers did this by recruiting more mudokon members into their tribe, slowly converting the many tribes into one unified empire, increased consumption of the planets resources and began to isolate themselves from the rest of Oddworld

Building massive towers that reached the skies, they began to spend most of thier time indoors, only looking up at the night sky to see thier sacred moon, the symbolic reminder of thier divinity over Oddworld

Gradually abandoned thier spiritual ways in favour of a more industrialised way of life. Only a few powerful figures within the Mudokon empire still use their psychic abilities such as possession

Growing more paranoid that their Glukkon allies and thier powers of alchemy would prove to be a threat to their rising power, the mudokons orchestrated a war against the glukkon tribes, nearly wiping them out in the process

After the war, the mudokon empire gave the queens of the last remaining glukkon tribes an ultimatum: give away thier children to the empire where they would be “employed”, “sheltered” and “safe”, or let them be born into a “primitive” tribal wasteland at the brink of extinction

The mudokons were able to enslave their once Glukkon allies and quickly rose to become the most powerful, and power hungry, civilisation in all of Oddworld

In terms of architecture and aesthetic, I figured many of those motifs from their spiritual/tribal past would subtly carry over to their current society, I’ll be it more metallic and industrialised. Like larger, dystopian dieselpunk versions of the huts, buildings and structures we see in Monsaic Lines and other native mudokon locations

The buildings they live and work in are also incredibly tall, with some structures in their urban cities reaching above the clouds (basically the opposite of the canon glukkons subterranean cities)

The Mudokons are the main industrial society with a stronghold over the planet

Having essentially brainwashed both thier mudokon citizens and glukkon slaves, the mudokon empire is singularly concerned with proving their dominion over the planet oddworld. with no reguard for the native creatures and cultures that inhabit it

Mudokon society is extremely dedicated to the idea they are the best civilisation in all of Oddworld

As far as they’re concerned, their empire is the supreme civilisation, unparalleled in architecture, politics, philosophy, military and art

And they are dead set on proving thier superiority to the other races of Oddworld, no matter the cost

Any historical records that makes mudokons civilisation and society look bad or less then perfect are either deeply hidden away or destroyed. Through this constant revisionism as erasure, their true history has been long forgotten

Only consistent part of their history is the mudokon moon, which they hold as a sacred symbol and a reminder of their power as the “chosen race”

Now, the sight of the mudokon moon is rare for any industrial borns due to the sky being covered by air pollution from the mudokons buildings and factories

Young mudokons are born as eggs by their respective queen and sent to be raised by a foster mudokon worker and, if they’re rich or well off, their many glukkon slaves

As I said before in the glukkon bit, the way glukkons are taught how to view the world is very similar to real life cult indoctrination and brainwashing. Young mudokons get a similar treatment in terms of their education

At an early age, mudokons are taught by their elders that oddworld belongs to the strong such as them, that the other races that cannot compare to the mudokons, And that all mudokons which as them are perfect and destined for greatness. (Provided they work hard and follow the rules of the empire...)

For a mudokon, lacking this sense of superiority over other races and drive to prove themselves as exceptional is frowned upon in thier society, and such mudokons are often either outcasted or placed in the lower ranking job roles

Like the glukkon workers in canon, adult mudokon workers are often employed as powerful bosses and rulers in the mudokon industries of food production, science, politics and/or religion to name a few

While some individual mudokon masters value mollah and material gain over other things, mudokon society as a whole isn’t quite as obsessed with mollah the same way glukkon society in canon is. They do hold monetary wealth and riches in high regard, of corse, but mostly as one of many status symbols to prove their superiority over others

Due to their belief of being the superior race, some mudokons are known to be extremely arrogant and self centred, to the point they’re often compeating with one another over who is the better mud

In terms of physical appearance, I imagine mudokons having a lot more angular features, like more talon like claws on their hands/feet to evoke a bird of prey

While mudokons are still omnivores, teeth such as their canids are more pronounced due to consuming more meat products such as scrab, Meech, slig and elum meats

I also feel like the slight uncanny-valley elements the mudokons already have should be subtly accentuated in the switch designs for creep factor and everything

unlike muds of canon, muds of the switch au tend to be on the lean, average and/or slightly cubby side rather then underweight and slightly bony in terms of their weight. Mostly down to having relatively better diet and quality of life, at least compared to their canon counterparts.

Mudokons also have way more feathers on their heads! Though, due to the airborne pollution of their industrial lifestyle, feather growth is mainly restricted to their head and face

don’t tend to grow as many feathers on other parts of their bodies like arms, legs etc

On top of this, as mudokons tend to live in colossal tower-like structures, they’ve evolved adaptations to life in higher attitudes such as naturally taking shorter breaths.

One popular form of dress for most moderate or high ranking mudokons consists of a shirt garment with a v-shaped neck (kinda like a Dashiki) a medium length skirt and long ornate robes or feathered cloak. Think more fancy versions of the native clothes worn by the mud shamins in canon.

How intricate, layered, extravagant and/or customised etc these clothes are depends on how high the individual mud wearing them is on the power/wealth hierarchy. Kinda like the wealth hierarchy with canon glukkons. Most lower class muds tend to look closer to the muds we see in canon with a short loincloth-like skirt and simple vest.

While the majority of mudokon society tends to be more industrialised, there are certain elite and powerful groups within the mudokon empire that still practice their spiritual psychic powers

One example of such a group is an elite task force of mudokon agents specifically trained to hone their psychokinetic abilities.

Fed on an exclusive diet of mind altering spooce shrubs, they are granted powerful and dangerous abilities (provided they don’t die from spooce overdose first). Such as the power to possess the minds and bodies of other beings

They are employed as black ops-like operatives by the mudokon empire to manipulate the affairs of other Oddworld nations and races behind the scenes with their powers of possession, as assassins to take out highly dangerous targets from afar with death via red ring explosion or possession induced head explosion, or as bodyguards to protect highly powerful and elite clients, usually mudokon queens. Essentially taking on a similar role to the Glocktigi in canon

Sligs

Race of amphibious/semi-aquatic swamp dwellers

Society not as complex or “advanced” as others like the glukkons or mudokons, technology wise

Somewhat nomadic as they tend to move around from place to place in colonies, though their preferd environments are wetlands, marshes, swamps, lakes and bogs

Were never enslaved by Glukkons, Mudokons or any other societies of mudos for that matter. probably since Sligs are seen as useless and impractical for such tasks anyway. I mean, what kind of peanut-headed chumps would have a legless species who can’t use their hands do their dirty work for them?! lol!

While functional on land, they’re a bit more adapted for life in water, with webbed hands and seal-like tails for swimming as well as gills in their mouths for breathing underwater

Walk with their hands when on land (similar to pantsless sligs in canon but slightly less awkward)

Use the highly dexterous tentacles on their faces to pick up objects and use tools while they walk or swim

Covering themselves up with dirt, moss, mud etc is a big part of their culture. Not because they think they’re ugly like the Sligs in canon, but because it provides good camouflage from larger creatures and predators wanting to eat them

If a Slig is spotted or about to be caught by anything that would want them as food, they can use their arms to leap away from their attacker

In terms of actual clothing, they don’t wear much aside from a covering that wraps around the middle section between their abdomen and their tail mostly so their butts don’t get cold when they go up on land. These coverings are usually either made of soft reeds weaved together, a leaf held together by a stick going through both ends or whatever they can get their tentacles on in thier surrounding environment

Even without fancy covering or camo, Sligs are pretty diverse when it comes to their appearance

Depending on the environment, their skin tone can range from light green to yellow, dark green, blueish-green, teal, brown or black to name a few

Some Sligs also have tiger like stripes similar to the ones on big bro Sligs in canon

And, of corse, there’s albino Sligs. How they’re treated tends to vary form colony to colony

Some outcast or even kill albinos, fearing their bright colour could attract predators

Other colonies are a lot more accepting of albinos, though they tend to be more protective of them due to, again, being more easy targets for predators

Most albino Sligs either take extra care to cover themselves with as camouflage as possible to hide their bright skin, or stay under the water for most of their lives, rarely ever venturing up to the surface world

Queens are also never seen on dry land, as their birthing process is significantly less painful underwater

While none of the queens in this timeline are as cripplingly obese as queens like Skillya in the canon timeline, most healthy queens are still rather large. Sorta like the size/weight of an average male elephant seal, or a salt water crocodile

Also, while some queens can still be jerkasses, they don’t usually eat their own young, as they don’t hold as much resentment towards them due to the less painful birthing process. Plus, their many drones usually bring them smaller fish and swamp dwelling creatures to keep them well fed

Baby sligs (or sliglets, as I like to call them) are born underwater and later take their first peek up to the surface after a couple of weeks

Raised by either one of their drone fathers or their many older siblings

baby Sligs are also born able to swim and walk on instinct, sort of like lizards. They only need to stick with their guardians for protection and to learn valuable life lessons from them like camouflage, avoiding predators, looking both ways before they cross the rivers etc

According to ex-Just Add Water employee Will on the Oddworld forums, Lorne Lanning originally envisioned Sligs having pig like fur, but this was cut from Oddysee due to technical limitations at the time. I headcanon that native Sligs had fur in the canon timeline but lost this trait due to their industrial lifestyle, similar to mudokon’s feathers. Hence in this timeline, some native Slig colonies do have fur.

usually more common, much thicker and more prominent on Sligs from colder climates as it helps them stay warm

The fur is also good for collecting dirt and growing moss and algae on, adding to the Sligs camouflage

I also have this headcanon that the noises sligs make for the BS and S’Mo BS commands in Oddysee and Exoddus gamespeak are remnants of their old language before they were enslaved by glukkons in canon. This is how Sligs communicate to each-other in this timeline: through a series of frog-like ribbit and croak vocalisations.

They do have the ability to speak language in the same way Mudokons and Glukkons do, I’ll be it in a limited capacity since they’re somewhat cut off from these language speaking societies and not used to talking in words. Think of it how, in canon, Gabbits like Munch can speak language with characters like Abe but can also call to other Gabbits through a dolphin-like “song”

Though they were never slaves, that doesn’t mean industrial societies like the Mudokon empire haven’t caused trouble for them

On top of occasionally hunting them to make high protein meat products and for sport, the Mudokon empire has also put their glukkon workers to use digging up Sligs swamplands for iron ore, as water that carried flakes of iron accumulated and settled in those swamps. As well as gathering peat from mires for fuel

These practices have been encroaching on the Sligs natural habitats. driving them out and disrupting their usual migration patterns

In a lot of cases, Mudokons purposefully try to drive off or exterminate Slig colonies. Viewing them as useless, dirty pests getting in the way of the precious resources that, much like everything else on Oddworld, the mudokons feel a sense of entitlement to

Alright, that all the points I got down for the big three. I do have some ideas for the other races like vykkers, steef, oktigi, meeches etc but for now, I’ll just leave it here. Again, please let me know what you think of all this and feel free to make contributions.

@southern-forests

[padawanlost]

Jedi don't steal children. Ok. Anakin was a slave won in a rigged dice game but hey the Jedi can't be ethically held to getting Shmi out of slavery. Anakin grows up knowing his mother rots in slavery, but told to get over his constant, prophetic dreams of her death. The Tusken Massacre is all Anakin being Evil and the old Jedi are perfect (none of them know their mother's names).

Wow...there’s a lot to unpack here LOL

“Jedi don't steal children.”

To be fair, I don’t believe the Jedi steal children and, to be *really* honest, I’ve never seen anyone claim they did. I mean, there’s an actual ethical discussion about the Order’s recruitment procedures but this idea that the jedi are somewhat evil baby snatchers only exists in two places:

Canon: Some in-universe characters/cultures actually believe the Jedi Order steal babies.

Jedi hardcore fans claiming tumblr is overrun with Jedi haters who think the jedi are as evil as Palpatine. No middle ground. You either die a jedi stan or you live long enough to see yourself become a Jedi hater :P

When talking about the whole ‘baby snatcher’ thing, the discussion I’m interested in is the one about ethics and procedures. That’s what interests me. And when it comes to the jedi Order, it’s impossible to deny some of their procedures suffer from certain ethical shortcomings.

Look at it this way: imagine if your government passed a law that said a non-governmental, secretive, private funded organization had the legal right to access your newborn child and test them. In a world where parents throw actual tantrums at the suggestion of vaccinating their babies, can you imagine the shitshow that would happen if a similar law were even suggested right now? That’s what I’m talking about. If you look at the situation from a different perspective, considering the ethical and even cultural fallout of such procedures, it’s impossible not to think ‘hey, maybe there’s something wrong here’. that’s the nuance some people fail to grasp: it’s not about the jedi being evil, it’s about noticing some of their procedures needed improvement.

Tbh, I’m kind of tired of discussing the jedi because part of the fandom tends to completely mischaracterize the whole discussion. I’m too old to be constantly explaining that though I firmly believe shmi or the clones enslavement were unforgivable, I don’t hate everything and everyone connected to them. I’m tired of this fucked up tumblr mentality where you either love everything or hate everything, where you must be an anti or a stan.

Anyway, speaking of slavery:

“Anakin was a slave won in a rigged dice game but hey the Jedi can't be ethically held to getting Shmi out of slavery.”

Fuck yeah! It kills me how people are still trying to defend Shmi’s enslavement by claiming that trying to save her would’ve been unethical. I’m like…REALLY? It’s unethical for a sworn protector of the weak and abused to save a slave? this fucking fandom ¯\_(ツ)_/¯You know what else is unethical and an actual crime: child endangerment, like when you let a poor 9 years old kid subscribe to a known deadly race to save the *SHIP* of your wealthy, ADULT companions.

“Anakin grows up knowing his mother rots in slavery, but told to get over his constant, prophetic dreams of her death.”

Anakin is a whiny baby, I mean, who wouldn’t be okay with their only family being abused, enslaved, forced to work under two suns for a greedy, disgusting being on a desert planet? Anakin should just get over it. you know, let it go, man. Worrying about your mom is a pathway to evil and leaving people to rot in poverty, crime and slavery is how world peace is achieved. That’s why our real world is such a lovely, peaceful place filled with happy, healthy people…oh wait! Nevermind… -___-

The Tusken Massacre is all Anakin being Evil and the old Jedi are perfect (none of them know their mother's names).

The tusken massacre was an inexcusable, cruel action that no one should ever consider right. I mean, there’s a difference between understanding why Anakin acted that way and believing Anakin’s actions were righteous. I don’t believe the Jedi should be considered responsible for any of Anakin’s actions that night but I think we can look at the event as a symptom of a larger problem.

Responsibility is tricky, especially when your political/social duty is so ingrained in your own identity. I don’t blame the Jedi Order for *Anakin’s* actions because they were not directly responsible for those particular actions. However, they were responsible for Anakin himself, especially considering he was still a padawan. I mean, if the kid you taking care of kills someone on your watch you’re at least partly responsible. To put it simply, if a cop slaughters someone the entire Police Force should be put under a microscope. Not because they are ‘evil’ but because these kinds of events are usually a symptom of a systemic problem, especially when we are talking about recurring events (like padawans and jedi masters going dark side).

I don’t know believe we should go ‘oh tusken massacre was the jedi’s fault’ but we do have to recognize that Anakin’s ability to slaughter an entire community and get away it without any real repercussion shows their system was flawed. If we remember they had suspicions something had gone terribly wrong on Tatooine the situation becomes even more dire.

They suspected a member of their order had done *something* he shouldn’t have but somehow there was no investigation, no reports, no repercussions. That’s unethical and probably illegal behavior. People try to excuse it as the jedi being busy with the war but that’s like saying we shouldn’t investigate cops killing innocents because there’s a pandemic going on. It’s cruel. Not only it dehumanizes the victims and diminishes their suffering, it’s a behavior unbecoming of a group who exists to protect people from these very crimes.

Again, this is not about blaming everything on the jedi or ‘hating’ them. It’s about recognizing the situations where they could’ve done better.

[backofthebookshelf]

One of the nice things about the way the TMA fandom has reached full large-fandom levels of toxicity is that I no longer care if people get mad at me for my opinions on characters! So, some Georgie meta.

(Because fandom is and always has been Like That, I do feel the need to clarify here that I love Georgie, she's one of my favorite characters, characters are more interesting because of their flaws, and I have no investment in the idea that women or female characters are inherently better or more emotionally competent than men or male characters. If I talk a lot about her relationship with Jon, it's because Jon is our point of view character and also the person she interacts with the most. Also, this rambles, sorry.)

I've been thinking about the Season 4 Jon Trauma post and how much I liked the way it talked about Georgie, and it's convinced me that if Georgie could feel fear, she's the one who'd be most afraid of Jon out of all of them. She's the one protagonist we have whose only interaction with the powers has been as a direct victim of them. She doesn't know what they feel like from the inside, like Jon and Melanie; she doesn't know what they're like when they're someone you love, like Basira; she doesn't even know what they're like as petty middle management, like Martin and Tim. What she knows is that one time a monster ate her (only) friend and traumatized her so badly she spent a year in a suicidal depression.

And now her ex - and yes, Jon and Georgie have a remarkably comfortable relationship in the beginning of season three, but they're still exes and they broke up for reasons, even if we don't know exactly what they are - has turned up on her doorstep, shaking and possibly bloody, with nowhere else to go and no access to his home. He's clearly lying about what's going on. He repeatedly violates her house rules. And then he tells her that he's turning into one of those same kinds of monsters that traumatized her and ate her friend. It's clearly enough to override any remaining affection she had for him, and by any definition he has now positioned himself as a trigger.

(Through no fault of his own: the only real response he has to Georgie's statement is "I can't believe you didn't tell me." She's the one who assumes that he Knew, somehow, that she also had a statement; she's the one who suggests he had alternatives. Both suggestions are plausible but we don't actually know for certain that either are true.)

But Georgie isn't afraid of Jon because Georgie can't be afraid -at least, according to her. I'm not sure how much I believe this in the grand scheme of things; it seems like an extremely unlikely mechanism for one of the fears to have. It seems much more likely to me that she's just never met anything as terrifying as that encounter was, and her subjective sense of fear has been massively recalibrated. In which case not only meeting but having hosted in your home another monster who self-describes as similar to the one that was so terrifying that literal threats to your life are no longer distressing would...probably ping. But she's conceptualized herself as a person who doesn't feel fear; it's even possible that was part of her recovery, identifying this as a possible benefit of what would otherwise have been a universally terrible, soul-breaking experience. She looked existential terror in the face and survived, and came out of it a person who cannot be afraid of anything left on this earth. That's kind of a superhero origin story, and I can't blame her for it. I think anyone with a mental illness has at least tried to find ways in which their suffering has made them a better, stronger person.

But whether she's suppressing and rationalizing away any fear she feels or she genuinely doesn't feel any of it, she does frequently behave as though her lack of fear gives her a more objective view of the situation than anyone else. I don't believe she actually uses the word "just," but it drips from her every interaction with Jon after Dead Woman Walking. Why doesn't he just stop reading the statements? Why doesn't he just quit? And, in Zombie, I honestly can't interpret her reaction to Jon when he wakes up from his coma as anything other than, Why doesn't he just die? If he hates being this so much, if he really doesn't want to be a monster, why doesn't he just die?

I really would like to think that it goes without saying that this is, at the very least, a massive failure of empathy, but she's so explicit about it and fandom spent so much time basically agreeing with her that apparently it doesn't. Not only is Georgie not afraid of the situation, but (and this is the part that makes me wonder if she's not rationalizing, rather than being supernaturally unable to feel fear) she can't possibly fathom how afraid everyone else is, and she never tries. She persists in treating the whole awful situation, as @findingfeather's post says, like this is a mundane problem with people who are refusing to help themselves, rather than a supernatural trap that has been specifically built to be inescapable.

Now, let me be clear, even if she were talking to, say, a drug addict who nearly killed themselves because they were in denial about how much of a problem they had, her attitude would be unforgivable. But in this case Jon had no choice in whether or not to become addicted to statements; it was done to him in such a way that he didn't notice it was happening until withdrawal was already incapacitating. He also didn't have the option to leave, as Tim's extended vacation made clear. And, on top of all of that, the whole reason he was in a coma in the first place was that he was trying to save the world. (Neither he nor she knows at this point that he was doing nothing of the kind, so that's really not relevant.) And - look, when Jon came to her after the end of season two, he was asking for help. When he rejected the kind of help that she offered it was because he knew it didn't apply to the problems he actually had, but she treats that like it's his problem, which is something like offering a leg splint to a person bleeding out from a gunshot wound and getting offended when they tell you that won't work. He was very clear that what was happening scared him and he didn't know what to do about it, and her only suggestion was "walk away," which he literally could not do, for multiple reasons.

She's lucky Jon has pretty much precisely zero self-worth at this point, because anyone else would have cut her off completely for behaving like a fucking asshole.

I say "she's lucky" because frankly, even though she says that she wants nothing more to do with him, she turns up at least twice in the Institute after that, with the excuse that she's picking up Melanie to take her to therapy. I don't know about you, but I have never once gone to someone's workplace to pick them up and gone snooping around inside, and no matter how fascinatingly weird that workplace is, I definitely can't imagine doing so when I know that workplace also contains a person I have definitely decided I never want to speak to again. She goes into the Archives, for Christ's sake, and she listens outside Jon's office door for long enough to catch a bit of the recording before letting herself in (so it's very clear she knows who's in there).

Now I'm not trying to paint her as a monster here; Georgie would hardly be the first person to have second thoughts about cutting off someone they still care about, or to break that boundary that they set themselves when they realize they do still want to know how that person is doing. But the fact is that she positions herself as having the moral high ground in every single discussion they have and that's just not true. She is not literally a supernatural monster, true, but if season four did anything with the concept of monsters it was breaking down the difference between "supernaturally driven no-longer-human" and "person capable of caring and empathy." (That's a whole different meta, though, one that I will get around to someday.) Not that Jon is any better, in that encounter specifically, at dealing with a complicated and contentious relationship - he deliberately goads her, even if he doesn't use compulsion. But that's the thing, they're both exes who have had a falling out and aren't handling it very well. Neither of them is in the right.

All of which makes me really wonder what her relationship with Melanie is actually like. We don't actually see hardly any of it directly, and of what we do, well, Melanie sounds like she's still high on painkillers, so it's hard to take that as an indication of anything. But given that people (who are not intentionally trying to manipulate those around them) tend to, y'know, be fundamentally the same person in their various relationships, though it may manifest in different ways, we can probably make some guesses.

I have always been bothered by, and I really can't ignore, the fact that they were getting together at the same time that Melanie was doing what Georgie has been demanding of Jon since season three: she did whatever it took to get out. I have to wonder if Georgie knows about the nonconsensual surgery part of Melanie's process of getting out, and if she does, if she understands how vital it was. I certainly wouldn't be surprised, if she does know, that she's managed to compartmentalize it: Jon inflicted this terrible trauma on Melanie, Melanie escaped the entity that took her over. (Subconscious implication: Jon is a monster; Melanie is better than him.) I would be very surprised if Georgie is interested at all in the fine distinctions between entities; she's shown no interest in learning what is actually happening to anyone in this situation beyond "it's bad and they should get out of it." But it's relevant, because by the time Melanie makes the decision to blind herself, she's in a much different position than Jon, enslaved by an entity but not consumed by one. She herself admitted to Jon that she would never have voluntarily escaped from the Slaughter.

And given how difficult Melanie finds it to talk about any of this - you can hear her dragging the words out from behind her teeth in her conversation with Jon in Flesh, truly incredible acting by Lydia Nicholas, my god - if Georgie doesn't want to hear it? I can't imagine Melanie insisting. Yes, Melanie is going to therapy, but let me tell you, I've been going to therapy for twelve years now and I have yet to have several of the important conversations my therapists have insisted I have. That shit is hard. But I can imagine a scenario where, having been told by her therapist (who, remember, doesn't have the first idea what Melanie is actually going through, because Melanie isn't telling her about the supernatural so she has to leave out a lot of really relevant details) that she ought to tell her friend/potential girlfriend/new girlfriend about these things, Melanie attempts to bring it up, Georgie says kind and reassuring things and refuses to let her clarify any of the details, and Melanie gives up in relief, thinking, well, I tried. Super valid all around, but it doesn't mean that Georgie has any clearer picture of what Melanie's traumas actually look like, never mind Jon's. There's no world in which I can imagine Georgie actually internalizing the idea that Melanie loved the Slaughter when it had her, and she would gladly have stayed with it if Jon and Basira hadn't intervened.

In Georgie's eyes, Melanie is being a Good Victim. She was hurt but she was strong; she fought it until she won; now she's going to therapy and setting boundaries and trying to heal. She got away.

(Except, of course, she didn't, because as of The Eye Opens no one has gotten away, because this is the entire world now. We have no idea how this has affected Melanie. Presumably she's out of reach of the Eye, given that Jon can't see her or Georgie (and there's some evidence on the side of Georgie's encounter genuinely having stripped her of fear, if she's also invisible to the Eye), but she spent a long time under the influence of the Slaughter. It had her firmly enough that her attacking Jon was enough to give him his Slaughter scar. If nothing else, Melanie certainly hasn't had her fear removed, and talk about a situation bound to retraumatize someone who had such a visceral revulsion to being trapped that Elias chose it as his mechanism of control over her. Melanie probably doesn't look like a Good Victim any more, and I'd bet her relationship with Georgie is suffering some serious strain because of it.)

We don't know when exactly Melanie and Georgie got together; the last time one of them mentions the other is, I'm pretty sure, when Georgie tells Jon that Melanie is back from India. So we know that Georgie and Melanie were friends; that's good, that's a good foundation for a romantic relationship. At the very least they know each other, they have some idea of what to expect. I'd be surprised if they were dating during that season 3/4 hiatus period, though, or frankly any time before Melanie's surgery, just because Melanie seems much too consumed with rage to have room for any other emotions, and I can't imagine Georgie putting up with that.

What seems way more likely to me is this: Melanie comes back from India, arranges to meet Georgie for drinks. Probably they don't talk about anything serious; possibly they talk about Jon, honestly, since we know Melanie was looking for him and Georgie talked to him about Melanie, but very likely in the same "stuck-up pompous ass" way that Melanie talks about Jon in early seasons. (I bet Melanie's roasts are amazing.) Shortly after that Melanie joins the Magnus Institute and then, very likely, either she never tells Georgie about it and therefore they don't talk much or she does tell Georgie about it and Georgie tells her that place is bad news and she won't have anything to do with it and they don't talk at all, until, whichever way that went, the Unknowing happens and Tim dies and Jon winds up in a coma and everything goes to shit. We know Georgie visits Jon in the hospital; we don't know if Melanie does, but frankly it seems unlikely. If they did cross paths during this time, it was probably very brief and superficial. Then: the surgery, and Melanie's recovery.

I'll be honest, I have a hard time imagining Melanie deciding on her own that she should go to therapy. It's possible Basira suggested it, but it really does sound like a Georgie thing to do. So I picture something like this: from the way Basira talks it sounds like they've all been pretty much living in the Archives for a while, and on top of that everyone in the Archives has just badly violated Melanie's trust, so Melanie pulls up her Facebook DMs and talks to the only other person she has. You were right, she says, this place is terrible, I can't handle it, there's no one here I can trust and I'm so alone. And Georgie, who is generous with help and advice (so long as it's accepted) and (like anyone) weak to being told she was right about something, starts talking to her. We know Georgie's got good boundaries, and we know she doesn't want to hear details about what's going on in the Institute, so I can see her saying, I can talk to you, I would love to talk to you, but not about this. For that you need a therapist.

So Melanie gets a therapist, and the prospect of going out amongst the monsters they know are stalking the Institute without that protective shield of rage (never mind the emotional vulnerability of going to therapy in the first place) makes public transit an unthinkable option, so she asks Georgie to take her, and she does, and she keeps taking her to therapy, which is, as far as we know, the only time Melanie leaves the Archives in season four, until she blinds herself and escapes it completely.

And so they have this relationship that's built up almost entirely around Melanie's trauma - with a foundation of friendship, certainly, so I do think that if they are willing to work through it they could make it a working, healthy relationship, but (and again this isn't stated in canon but is my speculation based on what we know about these characters) it is a romantic relationship that's built around the process of Melanie recovering from multiple traumas. Ones that we know that Georgie a) doesn't know many details about, and b) more importantly, refuses to know any details about. Now, I have no experience with romantic relationships and serious trauma; I might be wildly off base here. But. I know that boundaries are important and I know that trust is also important. And if Georgie is holding similar boundaries with Melanie that she has with Jon (and, as I went into excruciating detail about earlier, she has very solid emotional reasons to protect herself with those boundaries), that's drawing a hard line around what's basically the past two to three years of Melanie's life, and undeniably both the worst and most important things that have ever happened to her. That seems...difficult to manage in the long term.

(This is a bit more of a stretch, more of the germ of a fic idea than an argument I'm prepared to defend, but I also would not be surprised if Georgie told Melanie that she wouldn't date her while she was still working at the Institute. That's a very reasonable boundary, and it's good motivation - and probably healthy motivation, I do like the idea that Melanie had something to reach toward in escaping the Institute, not just the desperate flight from - but it's also something of an ultimatum. Which is not inherently bad, but it is the kind of thing that can fester, given other problems.)

Now it's entirely possible that Georgie isn't that internally consistent. People aren't! (See: Basira's attitude toward Daisy vs her attitude toward Jon in season four.) Maybe she's more flexible about being willing to listen to Melanie, maybe she's starting to understand some of what was happening and how genuinely impossible a situation it really was. But that has to be a struggle for her, too; it's not a perfect, sweet, unconditionally good situation that teaches you that you've been unfair to the point of cruelty to someone you used to care about. And by the time the apocalypse rolls around, Melanie is, if she's lucky, just barely able to say she's healed from the plain physical trauma of blinding, never mind all the other baggage. They've got to be having a rough fucking time of it, at the very least, even if you assume that they're suddenly both the kind of people who will sit still and listen supportively and talk honestly about their own messy and complicated emotions, when neither of them have been that kind of person before.

(Another disclaimer because Fandom Is Like That: This is in no way a condemnation of or argument against fluffy What the Girlfriends fic; fic is for making fluffy things that you want to happen to your faves, or building fluffy content that you desperately need for whatever reason. Gods know there are plenty of unhealthy parts of Jon and Martin's relationship that I ignore in most of my fluffy fic. This is me attempting to work through my thoughts and feelings about the relationship I see in canon in the hopes of actually being able to write some fic about these girls myself someday, because I personally can't write fic until I understand canon, and so much of them happens offscreen because they're not main characters, and they're written with such depth and complexity that you can't just slap a stereotype on them and call it good. Which is awesome! But it means I gotta do the work, and I post it because a) it's work, and this is fandom, and I want validation; and b) I'm hoping other people have insights that might also help me clarify my thinking.)

[molluskwritesfic]

Where the Roses Grow Chapter Three

The compound on Arvala-7 didn’t house one bounty, but two. Elsi Nokk is an enslaved nanny with more than a few tricks up her sleeve. She’ll do anything to protect her charge, even if it means standing against - and then with - a certain Mandalorian. Rated M.

@kyjoraven​ @killtherandomness​

This story can be found on Ao3 and Fanfiction.net

CHAPTER WARNINGS: SMUT, slavery and associated themes, anxiety, dissociation, mild language. 

First Chapter - Previous Chapter - This Chapter - Next Chapter

Chapter Three

Elsi woke with a start. The baby was less than an inch from her face. He cooed and grinned toothily, reaching out with his little hand to pat her hair affectionately and showering her face with sand.

She huffed and pushed herself into a sitting position, biting back a groan of effort as her muscles screamed and ached in protest after the full day of grueling activity followed by a night on the unforgiving ground. The sun was just below the horizon, washing the sky in pink and red, promising another hot, cloudless day. 

The Mandalorian, of course, was already awake. He sat more or less where he had the night before - his cuirass back in place and in the process of collapsing the little lantern and returning it to his belt. The gash on his arm was still red and the cloth around it stiff with dried blood. 

Elsi imagined that, if she were closer, she’d be able to see that the flesh was twisted and singed until sealed. It would leave an ugly scar. But she doubted he cared about something as trivial as appearance.

His helmet tilted up at her. “We need to get moving.”

Elsi dipped her head in acknowledgment, easing herself to her feet and picking up the baby to place him back in the bassinet. The baby grumbled, his ears drooping when it became clear that today was to be another day of riding. He wanted to walk and explore, she was sure. She wasn’t particularly thrilled either.

The Mandalorian stood and shouldered his rifle, but waited while Elsi paused to dig through her russack bag. 

She found a strip of fabric that she had been saving in case the baby needed something new made. It was cream colored cotton, thick and tough. She shook it out and wrapped the widest part over the top of her head before tying the ends under her chin - resulting in a makeshift bonnet. Despite having spent the majority of the day before in the shade of the canyons, her cheeks were tight and warm from the sun. The bonnet wasn’t perfect, but she was hopeful that it would at least help a little.

Seeing that she was ready, the Mandalorian gave her a curt nod and led the way farther into the endless expanse of rock and sand.

. ~0~0~0~

The baby wasn’t getting better. 

If anything, she worried he was getting worse. All he did was sleep, and it was getting harder and harder to wake him. When he did manage to wake up, he simply gazed at her through lidded, foggy eyes. Sometimes he would whimper or grumble, but otherwise he stayed deathly silent. 

Even worse, he wouldn’t eat. Elsi tried everything. Milk. Fruits. Vegetables. Soups. Meats. Grains. She had the best luck with a hearty meat stew made in the house kitchens. When she smeared some of the grease across his lower lip, he stirred just enough to lick it off, then proceeded to swallow down one small chunk of meat and chewed at another for a while before drifting back to sleep with it still between his teeth.

Elsi did absolutely everything she could for him. She dipped a clean cloth in water and wet his lips to try and entice him to drink; she regularly cleaned and medicated his diaper sores; she talked to him; held him in her arms at all times.

Nothing worked. She feared he was slipping away.

With the baby swaddled tightly to her chest in a sling, she brought him with her into the gardens, hoping some sunlight and fresh air would do him good.

They sat together in Elsi’s spot by the stream, basking in a patch of sunlight while Elsi’s nimble fingers worked on mending and patching the holes and worn spots in the baby’s overcoat. 

While she worked, her conversation she’d had with her Master earlier that morning rang through her mind: 

~0~

“Will he recover?”

“Like I said before: I’m not a doctor.”

“You’ve cared for sick children before.”

“Human children, mostly. Some Devaronians. A few Zygerrians. I’ve never seen anything like him before.”

“But if he was a human child, would you expect him to survive?”

“No, I wouldn’t.” Silence fell between them. 

She went on. “But he isn’t a human baby. Human babies are relatively fragile when you compare them to other species. He could be stronger.”

“Or weaker.”

“Yes.”

He heaved a sigh. “When will we know for certain?”

“I can’t really say. From experience, though, if he is going to die, it’ll probably happen in the next 24 hours. If he makes it to nightfall tomorrow, I’d say he has a pretty good shot at pulling through.”

~0~

Elsi tied off the thread and snipped it with her tiny sewing scissors. The patch was smooth and almost indistinguishable from the rest of the coat, which had been religiously cleaned and disinfected. It was good work, but there was a certain point where a garment would look worn and ratty no matter how much love her talented hands poured into it. 

It would have to do for now. She wasn’t sure if there was any point in going through the trouble of making him an entirely new coat. 

Elsi pressed a kiss to the top of his fuzzy head. 

“I’ll make you a deal,” she murmured against the wrinkled skin. “Make it, and I’ll make you a dozen new coats. Fine, black market fabrics. The best. People will think you’re the son of a king.”

The baby stayed silent. 

~0~0~0~ .

The baby was singing to himself. 

It was tuneless, and despite the lack of a pattern or rhythm, it was unmistakably a song. 

It was something he did when he was happy, and Elsi couldn’t bear to ask him to stop, especially since it didn’t seem to be bothering the Mandalorian, who was either amused by it or tuning it out. 

As long as he wasn’t annoyed, everything was fine.

They walked until the sun burned high above their heads. It was hotter than the day before, but Elsi was feeling decently better after resting, and their little group was able to cover more ground in a shorter amount of time. 

The dry flats melded into rocky hills. Elsi’s thighs burned as they picked their way up a particularly steep slope. Her head was down, focusing on placing one foot in front of the other so she didn’t slip on the loose stones, so she didn’t realize that the Mandalorian had stopped until she walked straight into him.

He paid her no mind, taking another step forward and kneeling, swinging the rifle around from his back. Taking the cue, Elsi crouched low beside the bassinet and surveyed the scene before her.

In the valley below sat a great, hulking sandcrawler. Although they were still a fair distance away, Elsi didn’t need the Mandalorian’s scope to recognize Jawas when she saw them. They swarmed the area like termites, picking apart the dried bones of what had once been a ship.

Elsi’s heart sank. She had been banking on the Mandalorian to get them off-world, but now that didn’t seem like it would happen. She was so annoyed that she didn’t feel much in the way of pity when a few of the little menaces vanished in puffs of smoke, meeting their untimely ends at the end of the Mandalorian’s rifle. 

The Jawas’ screams of alarm echoed through the air, carried to Elsi’s ears by the scant breeze. They scrambled to return to the safety of their fortress under the inadequate cover fire of the few that had blasters. They were firing at random, so none of the shots came close.

Another disintegrated on the spot. 

The crawler roared to life, crushing the little pole structure the scavengers had set up to catalogue the parts as its massive treads churned up the ground beneath it. 

The Mandalorian didn’t say anything, but Elsi could see the outrage in the set of the bounty hunter’s shoulders. 

Realizing what he was about to do - however illogical she thought it to be - Elsi scooped the baby from his bassinet and held him while the Mandalorian took off down the slope, skidding and sliding on the loose dirt and sprinting headlong after the crawling fortress, the now-empty bassinet trailing behind.

Elsi patted the baby’s back. Together, they watched as the crawler ate up the distance until both it - and the Mandalorian - disappeared from sight.

The baby tilted his face up at her and chirped. A question.

“No idea,” Elsi sighed, more to herself than to him. “He’s crazy-crazy, huh?”

The baby waggled his ears like he understood.

~0~0~0~ . . ~0~0~0~

Elsi sat on the open ramp of the Mandalorian’s ship, watching as the baby shuffled around the wreckage, hunting for bugs. He caught one every now and then, and Elsi’s stomach turned uncomfortably every time he popped up with one in his mouth, and again when he crunched it between his teeth.

She had no idea if the bizarre little creature’s choice in snacks was good for him or not, but was willing to assume that it was probably fine. He’d eaten much, much worse than a few beetles and never seemed to suffer any ill effects.

The time he ate a baby snake was probably the worst - to her, if not to him. Just thinking about it still made bile rise in her throat. It had been small; nose to tail, the length of a human palm. The child had held it up in his tiny three fingered hand… crunched its skull between his teeth… 

Down it went, slurped down like a noodle, still wiggling in its death throes. 

Elsi had been too horrified to stop him. By the time she realized what was happening, the snake was gone and the baby was grinning up at her with all the innocence of a cherub that hadn’t just killed and eaten something that probably should not have been.

She’d panicked, worried that it had been venomous and would bite him or something on the way down. But nothing ever came of it.

It was times like that she wished she knew at least something about his species - at least whether or not his choice in diet was normal.

She shook those thoughts away, instead forcing a smile when the baby toddled up to her, waving a rather large winged bug around in his fist for her approval.

“Good job!” She praised, though her smile transformed into a grimace when the half-dead insect met the same untimely end as the dozen or so others the baby had consumed in the last half hour.

The Mandalorian had been gone a while. Elsi was starting to worry. They were already screwed without a ship, but she was hopeful that the bounty hunter would have a better idea than ‘wander around in the desert and hope you find someone kind enough to take pity. 

Which was what Elsi would be forced to resort to, should the Mandalorian get himself killed.

Then again…

More bounty hunters were probably on their way. But relying on them was a gamble. The Mandalorian had made it reasonably clear that he meant to keep them alive, but she knew that there were others who would kill them both to save themselves the trouble.

She could also probably track down the Jawas. Maybe they would be interested in some kind of trade. She didn’t have much to offer, but a ride to the nearest settlement shouldn’t be too much to ask. Jawas could be fairly accommodating, if you knew how to get on their good side.

And… well… if the Mandalorian was dead, then she felt that it wasn’t too calloused to bargain with his armor. Needs must, and all. At least a few pieces of it were bound to be real beskar, which would be more than enough to see her and the baby safe passage to civilization - hopefully further - if she could keep at least some from the Jawas. All she would have to do was hope that she found the body before they did…

All those thoughts were dashed when the Mandalorian rounded the end of the hull. She could help but be a little impressed at how quiet his approach had been - she wasn’t easy to sneak up on. 

Although still alive, he’d definitely taken a beating. He was favoring his left leg and carried a stiffness in his back and shoulders - only partially due to frustration.

He said nothing to Elsi when he reached them, his helmet turning briefly to locate the kid before climbing the ramp and vanishing inside what was left of his ship. 

Wise from experience, Elsi made sure to stay out of his way. She took the baby a little farther away from the hull, sitting on an empty box and amusing him with his stuffed frog, which had returned with the Mandalorian and bassinet, all the while listening to the distant clangs and curses as the Mandalorian examined the damage firsthand. 

It wasn’t pretty. Everything that was worth having was gone. She was by no means an engineer, but she didn’t have to be to know that the vessel wasn’t getting off the ground, let alone off the planet.

She needed to figure out the Mandalorian’s Plan B before coming up with her own.

She was both frustrated and relieved when the Mandalorian finally stomped back down the ramp, still angry, but moving with purpose.

“We need to move,” was the only explanation he offered. His tone was terse. Clipped. Absolutely no room for discussion or questions. 

He barely waited for Elsi to put the baby back in the bassinet and shoulder their belongings before he was striding back out into the desert.

The baby groaned, giving voice to the sentiments that Elsi would never dare say out loud.

More walking. 

~0~0~0~ . . ~0~0~0~

They arrived just as the last of the sun’s rays were slipping below the horizon. The destination turned out to be a small homestead. It was a meek little farm: moisture collectors, a few of the small rounded patchwork metal huts that could often be found on desert planets, a work shed, and a few paddocks containing some large, bizarre reptilian beasts that Elsi had never seen before.

The walk there had been grueling. Out in the open desert, they hadn’t had the benefit of walking in shaded canyons, and while it was only three, maybe four hours of travel, the Mandalorian hadn’t exactly been accommodating in terms of breaks. The pace he’d set was brisk, and Elsi had gotten the distinct impression that if she was left behind - then that was her problem. 

He hadn’t spoken once the entire trip, but that was fine by her. She’d needed to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, anyhow. 

The baby, blessedly, had been good. As much as he didn’t like riding, he was content to sit quietly and watch the scenery and - when he got bored with dry, cracked rocks - the Mandalorian, who seemed to be his new role model. He would tilt his little head to survey the landscape as the hunter did, and when there were no behaviors to mimic, he would sit and watch, his eyes moving with the sway of the Mandalorian’s cloak. 

The little traitor. 

Under different circumstances, it might’ve been cute. Elsi didn’t see the appeal. But, then again, she hadn’t been asked. 

The Mandalorian seemed familiar with the homestead. He didn’t hesitate to stride straight in, bypassing the main hut and making for one of the moisture collectors. Elsi was quick to see why. Up on the collector’s rickety maintenance platform was a short man. He had his back to them, but she assumed that he wasn’t human.

“I thought you were dead,” he addressed the Mandalorian without turning, managing to sound wholly indifferent and paternally disappointed at the same time. 

The Mandalorian came to a stop at the base of the collector. The bounty hunter’s helmet tilted, but he didn’t respond.

Elsi stayed to the side and slightly behind - out of the way without hiding, her hands folded politely in front of her and settled her eyes just below the average eyeline - submissive without cowering. 

The man turned to level the strange little group with a scowl. He was an Ugnaught, she realized, noting the squat stature, deep set eyes, and somewhat squashed face through the filter of her eyelashes. The Ugnaught’s frown deepened when his eyes flickered across Elsi.

“And you’ve brought another guest,” the Ugnaught added, starting to climb down the ladder to greet them. 

“Meeya! Muu? Eh!” The baby, a tad over excited about a toad hopping about the base of the collector, scrambled out of his blankets. He clambered over the edge of the bassinet, much quicker than he had any right to be.

Elsi lunged to catch him, but the Mandalorian was closer and faster. A gloved hand flashed out, snagging the child by the robes the same instant he tumbled into thin air. 

The baby dangled there for a moment, suspended by the back of his overcoat. The Mandalorian stared down at him, expressionless mask angled in such a way that it gave the impression of mild bemusement. The baby laughed, clapping his little hands like this was the best game and kicking his feet as if he hoped to swim in midair. 

Carefully, the Mandalorian eased him to the ground, making sure to set the little creature on his feet and steadying him when his balance wavered. The baby giggled and waddled after the flopping toad. 

The bounty hunter shot her a glance, as if confirming that setting the child down had been the correct thing to do. 

Elsi, having regained her composure, remained expressionless as her eyes trailed after her charge. She didn’t trust him to not wander through the wire fence of the nearest pen. Although they looked clumsy, the beasts were big and had the long, jagged teeth of predators. It would take very little for the baby to get crushed underfoot or eaten.

Upon the lack of rebuttal (like she would dare to offer one), the Mandalorian turned his attention to his right vambrace, which had been sparking with electricity off and on throughout the day. It had already been damaged before Elsi had met him, but based on the aggravated way he’d been fiddling with it, she assumed that the jagged, twisted gash in the rust red steel was fairly new. 

By that point, the Ugnaught had made it down the ladder. He waddled by, movements stiff with age, bypassing them in favor of adding a bucket of water to the trough just inside the giant reptile’s pen. 

The baby was still shuffling after the toad. The  Ugnaught looked down at him appraisingly.

“This was what was causing all the fuss?” He scoffed, sounding baffled, but not unkind. 

“It’s a child,” the Mandalorian explained offhandedly. 

The Ugnaught nodded gravely, looking between the hunter and Elsi. “And its caretaker, I presume.”

Elsi inclined her head to confirm, but stayed silent.

The Ugnaught grunted in acknowledgment before addressing the Mandalorian, passing him a delicate screwdriver for his vambrace. “The bounty you seek is for both child and slave?”

The Mandalorian didn’t look up from his vambrace. “Yes.”

That was news to Elsi. The child was the valuable one, she was just an extra commodity - the thing the child’s new owners decided to buy/appropriate so they didn’t have to care for him themselves. She was useful and convenient, but never valuable enough for any bounty. 

“Better to bring them in alive, then.” The Ugnaught concluded. He took a few of his shuffling steps to stand before Elsi. 

When he stuck out both of his gloved hands to take hers, Elsi complied just a tad bit too quickly. No hesitation. Instinctual obedience. After doing it, she knew that it was a mistake. The Ugnaught’s eyes glittered knowingly - with sadness and understanding. 

She knew what else he saw that others might not. The slight crookedness in her once-straight nose from where it had been broken more than once. The thin, silvery scars around her right eye and cheekbone where a mistress had thrown a broken glass in her face. Her hands, too. They also bore a thin scattering of scars under the thick calluses worn by a lifetime of labor. She knew that if he removed his gloves, his would look the same. 

She didn’t like it - being known. It hurt.

The Ugnaught squeezed her hands in what was supposed to be reassurance. She knew he meant well, but Elsi had to grit her teeth to keep from pulling out of his gentle grasp. 

“I am Kuiil,” he declared. “You are my guest. Here, you are slave to no one. I have spoken.”

She’d met people like Kuiil before. She appreciated them - the ones who’d made their own freedom. But slavery wasn’t something that could be turned on and off at will. It just was, or wasn’t. 

Elsi was saved from having to scrape up a faux heartfelt response by the Mandalorian.

“Hey… is that…” 

Elsi whipped around just in time to see the toad go into the baby’s mouth. This time she wasn’t able to mask her distaste as he swallowed it whole, flailing legs and all.

“...normal?” The Mandalorian finished, radiating the disgust that they couldn’t see on his face.

Elsi didn’t stop the sigh that hissed between her teeth. “Yes.”

Kuiil chuffed, waving the scene away. “You will rest here tonight. You are weary from your travels.”

The Mandalorian stabbed at his vambrace with the screwdriver moodily while Elsi went to scoop up the baby. “My ship has been destroyed by Jawas. I’m trapped here.”

Kuiil gestured them along. “Stripped. Jawas steal. They do not destroy.”

“Stripped or destroyed, makes no difference to me,” the hunter groused, ducking into the doorway of the main hut. “They’re protected by the crawling fortress. There’s no way to recover the parts.”

Kuiil’s home was what you expected a desert-dwelling hermit’s space to look like. The ceiling was low, so low that even Elsi had to duck down to keep from banging her head. It was utilitarian and cramped, every available space covered with spare tools and appliances that could prove useful to someone who only had himself to depend upon in the desert. Despite the clutter, everything was neat and organized, and Elsi found it homey. 

Elsi ducked in behind the two men, keeping a respectful distance from them both. The baby let out a little trill, full and content in her arms. She hushed him, tucking him against her chest as she took in their new surroundings. The Mandalorian had already moved to sit on a low stool along the wall. 

Elsi wavered for a moment, wanting to be out of the way and not take up anyone else’s space. She elected to sit on a storage box a short distance from them, content to rock the dozy baby and listen as the two men continued to talk.

“You can trade.”

“With Jawas? Are you out of your mind?”

“I will take you to them,” the Ugnaught declared, moving to the stove and starting the beginnings of a meal. “I have spoken.”

Elsi actually heard the Mandalorian’s teeth click as he bit back a retort. She knew as well as he did that there weren’t any better alternatives. 

Silence fell between them as Kuiil made them a simple, but wholesome meal of porridge and meat. The baby decided that he wasn’t ready to sleep just yet and insisted on being put down. Elsi fetched one of his toys - a length of yarn tied to a small wooden ball - out of her bag and he was happy to sit by her feet and roll it back and forth across the toe of her shoes. 

Kuiil served Elsi first, another considerate gesture that made her extremely nervous. She had already been uncomfortable watching their host prepare a meal and doing nothing to help. She hid it the best she could - which was extremely well - thanking him and moving to sit at the small table against the wall. 

The Mandalorian didn’t seem to notice or care that he’d been slighted, standing up to accept his meal and taking it with him to the back of the hut, vanishing behind a threadbare curtain that separated the front room from the back. 

“Mandalorians value their privacy,” Kuiil commented as he settled across from her at the table. 

“Yes,” was all Elsi had to say. 

“I’m curious about the child,” he said, direct and to the point. “How is it that he fell into the care of a slave woman?”

Elsi swallowed her food politely before answering. It was both sweet and savory. Absolutely delicious. It had been a long time since she’d eaten anything outside of the ration packs that were thrown in her direction and she had to school herself to keep from scarfing it all down at once. 

“The master I was serving was part of an Underworld chain,” she explained, honest but near emotionless. “I was the head-childminder of the household. The child was ill and in need of nursing. When it was time for him to be moved again, I was sold to his next keeper, and so on.”

Kuiil nodded seriously. “I’ve paid out my clan’s dept. I too know what it is to be bartered and sold.” An indentured servant. She wasn’t at all surprised. “What is your name?” 

It had been a long time since anyone had asked that. After leaving Lord Burkisn’s household, she hadn’t needed one. 

“Elsi Nokk.” It sounded strange to her own ears, like it belonged to someone else. 

“Elsi Nokk,” the Ugnaught echoed. “How long have you lived in servitude?”

“Always.”

“Your parents, then, as well?”

“My mother.” Elsi was long past feeling awkward about speaking about her history. It was pathetic, she knew, and it made others uncomfortable. But it was her past, and she didn’t want to live ashamed of her entire life. “I never knew a father.”

“Is your mother still alive?”

“Doubtful.” In truth, her mother was long dead. There were channels through which slaves could communicate. Elsi had used them when she was in her teens - hoping to locate her long-lost mother, only to find heartbreak.

“You don’t know?”

She did, but she didn’t really want to talk about it. “We were separated when I was small.” 

“How many masters have you served?” Even though she didn’t mind being asked such questions, she felt that Kuiil was leading up to something. Trying to make a point, one that was important enough for him to have forgotten about his porridge, which was growing cold.

“Many.”

Kuiil nodded again. Dead serious. “And what master do you now serve?”

There it was. It was the same question that had been nagging at the back of her head since they’d left the compound. 

The answer? The Mandalorian. He had her fob.

Technically.

But Elsi sensed that that answer was the wrong one. She hadn’t missed the way the bounty hunter acted around her. He would scarcely look her in the eye. Wouldn’t address her unless absolutely necessary. 

She made him uncomfortable. 

He would never claim a slave. 

The other technical answer? Whoever the Mandalorian was delivering them to. But that wasn’t solid, either. It was doubtful that they were necessarily expecting a slave to be delivered. She was a fairly pricey utility, but not near expensive enough to negate hiring a bounty hunter to find her, especially not a Mandalorian.

No. They wanted the child and his caretaker. Not a slave. 

Kuiil wouldn't be asking that question if he hadn’t already weighed all the available options. She didn’t doubt that he’d come to the same conclusions she had. 

The Ugnaught was waiting for her answer so he could pick apart her train of thought - to push her to make a bid for freedom. 

She wanted to scream at him. Wanted to tell him that it didn’t matter whether she wore a collar or not, because her fate was the same - care for the baby. His captors would be hers - slave or not - and he shouldn’t dangle the concept of pseudo-freedom over her head. 

She’d done the mental math during the walk across the desert. After considering the things she’d overhead in Lord Burkisn’s house and the things she’d learned since, she had a pretty good idea of who wanted the baby. 

Everyone was a slave in the eyes of Imps. 

But she didn’t say any of this, of course. She stayed honest, though, both to herself and the kind Ugnaught.

“I’m the child’s caretaker,” she said evenly. “I go where he goes.”

The baby sat his butt down heavily on her foot. He leaned back against her leg, rubbing his face into her skirt and cooing. It was almost time for bed. 

Kuiil grunted, but it was hard to tell if it was in disappointment, aggravation, or something else entirely. Instead of pressing the point, he nodded to her now empty bowl.

“You are finished,” he narrated, sticking his hand out for the dish. “I will clean it. You will tidy yourself and your child in the bathhouse. Then you will rest.”

“Please,” Elsi added as she stood, mindful of the sleepy toddler still attached to her ankle. “Allow me to tidy away the meals. You’ve been such a gracious host.”

“You are my guest. I have spoken.” 

That ended that. She’d wanted to argue, and if it wasn’t for the exhaustion creeping in her bones, she might have. Another time, maybe. Instead, she took directions to the bathhouse and picked up the baby, who squeaked and buried his little face in her neck. 

Night had fallen across the desert, velvet and deep. Stars glistened overhead like ice crystals. The security lights were warm and soft, but lit the homestead well enough to see where everything was. The giant reptiles snuffled around in their pen, no more than great shadows hulking in the dark.

The bathhouse was exactly that - a shed with a tub sized basin, a sink, a sonic shower, a vac-tube, and an overhead faucet for showers. 

Elsi couldn’t make herself use enough of Kuiil’s limited water supply to take a bath or a water shower, so she placed the baby on the counter beside the sink while she stripped and allowed herself to stand under the sonic shower just long enough to rid herself of the dirt and sweat of the past two days. The child was sleepy and was content to sit and wait the five or so minutes it took for her to wash and redress. 

Then she filled the sink partway with water and bathed the baby. He whined about it quite a bit, but knew better than to fight it.

“I know, baby. I know,” she murmured sympathetically. “You can sleep soon.”

“Eep!”

“That’s not my fault. You could’ve napped today.”

“Merwlp. Muu? Gah!”

“I don’t know. Maybe you can play more tomorrow. We might be traveling again.”

“Eee.”

“Maybe it won’t be too bad. You might see some Jawas.”

“Oohwah. Buurrr!”

“I’m sure Mando will be around. And Kuiil.”

They talked like this a lot. It was as much for the baby’s development as it was for her sanity, as it had been a long time since she’d had anyone else to talk to. She’d missed adult conversation. Perhaps her next talk with Kuiil would be on a more pleasant topic. Maybe she would ask about the giant reptiles...

But for now, baby talk would have to do. Their conversation continued as she finished toweling off his ears and redressed him before stepping out into the night, not letting the rusty metal door bang behind her. 

“Mmmwah!”

“Yeah, I saw that toad you ate. It was disgusting.”

“Mmmmm.”

“As long as you liked it. It would’ve been awful if you hadn’t.”

They were rounding the side of the main hut. Elsi froze at the sound of voices drifting through the rounded walls. The tones were tense. Clipped. Elsi held her finger to her lips to silence the child and leaned in to listen. She’d long given up any moral aversion to eavesdropping. To her, it was a survival skill. 

“They’re bounties,” the Mandalorian snapped. “It’s a job. I follow the Guild Code.”

“You're a man of honor.” Kuiil tried to placate, but his frustration bled through his words. 

“But?”

They were talking about her and the child. She clutched him tighter to her chest and inched forward to peer through one of the foggy glass windows dotting the hut’s patchwork steel walls, using the darkness to her advantage. She could just make out the shapes of the two people inside. The Mandalorian was standing, hunched against the low ceiling with his hands fisted at his sides. Kuiil stood before him, gesturing for emphasis.

It was the tail end of the argument, but there was more than enough left to guess what the rest of it had been.

“You possess a slave.”

“I don’t deal in slaves,” the Mandalorian bit. His shoulders were squared. Offended. 

“Is that not her fob attached to your belt?”

The Mandalorian stiffened. 

Silence fell, thick as tar and twice as sticky. Elsi’s blood roared in her ears. She was flustered - maybe just a tad bit angry. Kuiil hadn’t been able to convince her to make a bid for her freedom, so he’d taken it upon himself to do it on her behalf.

The Mandalorian’s hand went to his belt. Elsi braced for the pain she intellectually knew wouldn’t come. He held the control fob carefully in his palm, considering it. 

When the Mandalorian didn’t fill the silence, the Ugnaught did. 

“I assume her previous masters now lie dead in the compound. Deliver her to your client, and she will belong to them,” he elaborated, gentler now, but stern. “Until then, she obeys the one who controls the collar around her neck.”

Another beat passed.  The Mandalorian placed the fob gingerly on the table, like it might blow up in his face if he wasn’t careful. 

“I… I didn’t…” When the Mandalorian found his voice, it came rough through the vocoder, barely audible through the metal wall. “If I’d realized… It's been two days. I would never...”

Elsi was surprised at how shaken he sounded, but not as surprised as how distant she felt from herself and their conversation. Her emotions didn’t swirl in her gut. They were packed away and thrown out, leaving her fuzzy and numb.

So Kuiil’s next sentence didn’t affect her as much as it should’ve.

“If you have no complaints, I can remove it.”

“Would she then be free?” The Mandalorian asked sharply. 

Kuiil picked up the fob with great care, turning it over in his hands and studying it. “I believe that the collar is the only physical bind. But I will ask.”

“Aren’t slaves normally chipped?”

“Many slaves are chipped,” Kuiil explained. “Those who aren’t are often collared. House slaves, mostly - those of wealthy masters who pay to send the slave to conditioning facilities to train them and increase their value. At that point, chips are considered unnecessary.”

If you have to chip your slaves, they haven’t been broken properly.

Elsi shoved her “Councilor’s” cruel voice out of her head. It had been many years, but she could still hear her mocking laugh. 

“She’s my bounty, not my slave,” the Mandalorian said firmly. “If you can remove it, feel free to do so.”

She’d heard enough. Elsi was confused. Confused by her own emotions. Confused about why they thought it would make a difference. But most importantly, upset that the conversation and subsequent decision had taken place without her. 

Despite her buzzing mind, Elsi knew better than to be caught eavesdropping. Silent as a cat, she slunk back to the bathhouse. She opened the heavy door again, but this time let it close with its full weight. The resulting slam echoed across the small farm. From there, she ambled back across the lot, picking back up her conversation with the baby like the last five or so minutes had never happened.

“Oh, so now you’re not tired?” She asked loudly, layering on the fond annoyance. “Are you gonna keep me up all night?”

It wasn’t an exaggeration. Although he didn’t understand the importance of what they’d overheard, he’d picked up on the intensity and was now wide awake.

He gave her a petulant look that demanded, ‘what did I do?’ “Muuu? Ehh?” 

She flashed him a smile and pressed a placating kiss to the top of his head. “I’ll tell you a story first. Will that help?” 

“Burrr!”

The Mandalorian ducked out of the hut as they reached the entrance. He stopped in front of them, looming between them and the doorway like a duraplast wall. 

Elsi waited, the perfect image of pleasant ignorance while she pretended that she hadn’t heard as much as she had. Her eyes stayed respectfully low even as the baby babbled and reached for the hunter with grabby hands. 

The fingers of the Mandalorian’s right hand played at his side. She noted it as a nervous tick. He looked like he wanted to say something. 

He didn’t. He gave them a curt nod before walking off in the direction of the bathhouse. 

She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Elsi liked Kuiil, but didn’t know if she wanted to face the oncoming conversation alone. Any presence would be welcomed.

The baby burbled up at her, grinning. He would be there for her, at least. 

She bounced him for a moment to steady herself before stepping into the hut. 

Kuiil was waiting for her. His face was as grumpy as ever, but his eyes sparkled with renewed determination. 

“I will remove your collar,” he said, straight to the point. “The Mandalorian has approved. I have spoken.”

. ~0~0~0~

Days had passed with no change. Every night when Elsi tucked her and the child into her bed, she thought the next morning would be the one where she woke to him dead on her chest. 

She prepared for it mentally. Ready for the feel of his cold, lifeless flesh against her own skin. For the bitter disappointment and howling grief. 

It had happened to her once before. Still and stiff and empty. 

Elsi thought it would kill her when it happened again.

This tiny green baby was not her own, but she knew that it’s loss would destroy her regardless.

When the baby’s condition changed, it WAS in the morning, but it wasn’t the change she’d anticipated. She woke up and found herself looking deep into a pair of massive, deep brown eyes.

The baby grinned. He reached out to pat her cheek affectionately. And then he laughed. 

It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.

~0~0~0~ .

The lock on the collar was not complicated - a fact Kuiil reminded her of more than once. All he had to do was trigger the release on the fob and then pick the lock. 

Simple.

It still took a few minutes. A few moments after Kuiil had informed her of the decision and caught her up on the things she’d missed while bathing the child, the Mandalorian had reappeared, making Elsi believe that he’d hadn’t really needed to visit the bathhouse and had been lingering outside instead. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to avoid the conversation, though. She wished she could’ve avoided this whole situation altogether. 

He made up for it by making himself useful and offering to hold the baby during the procedure. The little goblin stood on his thigh guard, laughing uproariously with the delight of finally being acknowledged by his stoic new friend.

Elsi couldn’t see his face, but she could gather from the Mandalorian’s body language that he was caught somewhere between uncomfortable and charmed. 

“Waadar ke'sush',” the Mandalorian told the child when he wouldn’t sit still. “Ibic cuyir jaon'yc par gar buir.” 

Elsi wasn’t familiar with the language, but could glean the gentle rebuttal from the tone. 

First Kuiil picked apart the fob, checking and double checking for any nasty anti-escape measures. Finding none, he had Elsi sit in one of the low stools while he stood beside her, giving him easy access to the lock.

Elsi could feel the steel pick scraping around against the iron mechanisms. She was being freed, but the only emotions she could find within her were fluttering anxiety and icy dread. She knew how she was supposed to feel, but knowing something didn’t mean shit if it wasn’t true. 

Despite her feelings, she didn’t once resist or argue. They were trying to do her a favor. She didn’t want to throw that kindness away. It was also worth mentioning that the Mandalorian and Kuiil were still calling the shots, and if they wanted the collar off, it was coming off. 

With a collar, without it, it didn’t make much difference to her. She would still be at the whim of whoever was in possession of the baby. She would still be a slave, by nature if not by name. 

Especially if they fell into the hands of the Imps, she would either be recollared or chipped. 

Or killed. 

But the lessened risk of being electrocuted at a whim sounded nice. So that was something.

She’d worn a collar as long as she could remember. Most slave children that were sent to conditioning were collared at age five, as she had been. After that, the only time she’d been without it were the handful of times where she’d outgrown one and had to get it resized. 

Resizings were uneventful. It had been at least two decades since her last one, but she could remember how naked she’d felt without the cold metal band holding her together.

The lock clicked and the collar went slack. 

Elsi wondered if she’d feel naked all the time now. 

Kuiil carefully maneuvered the metal band from around her neck. She swallowed hiss of pain when the end scraped against the tender flesh beneath. 

Then it was gone. 

Elsi was free.

It didn’t feel any different. 

Kuiil nodded his satisfaction and the Mandalorian dipped his head in what was probably congratulations. They both looked at her expectantly, which only served to vamp up the sensation of being naked by topping it off with feeling like an animal on display.

What was she supposed to do? Did they expect her to laugh? To cry? To run? She wished she knew so that she could distract herself by having a reaction to fake. Her heart was racing, and the only impulse she had was to curl up in a dark corner and hide. 

She would never do that, though. She felt vulnerable enough as it was. 

Instead, she reached out to take the baby. He went to her gladly. As novel a concept as the Mandalorian was, the child seemed to sense that his caretaker needed the familiarity of him in her arms. He cooed at her softly, one of his little hands coming up to pat the now bare place where her collar had been. The skin was raw and it didn’t feel nice, but she didn’t stop him. 

He chirped.

“Yeah, that’s weird, isn’t it?” She murmured quietly, brushing the peach fuzz on his head with her lips. “It is to me, too.”

“You have had a long day,” Kuiil declared, dropping the now useless collar into a box of other junk. “You will rest now. We leave to find the Jawa at first light.”

~0~0~0~ . . ~0~0~0~

In one of the two back rooms within the Ugnaught’s home, Elsi sat on the thin straw-stuffed mattress Kuiil had provided. It was lumpy and the fabric was rough against her skin, but it was eons better than the ground or the stiff mat she’d been allotted by the Nikto. 

The Mandalorian had been given a similar sleeping pallet, which he’d picked up and carried to one of the storage huts for the sake of privacy. He probably needed some helmetless time, and Elsi couldn’t find fault in that.

Elsi’s mattress lay on the floor against the wall, wedged in a gap between two shelves. The baby, totally wiped out from the day, finally managed to drift off in her arms. She held him longer than necessary, needing to touch him and know he was okay. She tried placing him in his bassinet twice, only to reopen the shutters because she’d started to panic as soon as they closed and he was hidden from her sight.

He was fine.

He was safe.

She was safe. 

Fine? Not so much.

What she was was exhausted, but her mind wouldn’t let her sleep. All of her systems were on high alert and wouldn’t shut down. 

The faint lowing of the reptiles outside was too loud, the feeble light from the single lamp too bright. 

In the next room, she could hear Kuiil’s slow, steady breaths as he got the rest she so desperately craved. 

Elsi twitched when a toad - one that had been lucky enough to avoid the little green predator sleeping in her lap - started to croak somewhere outside. 

She fidgeted, rubbing the comatose baby’s ears like a worry stone. All she could think about was the air on her neck. The collar - the thing that had defined her for nearly four decades - sat in a box in the other room, buried under other useless trinkets. 

Without it, she felt adrift. Throughout her tumultuous life, it had been her only constant. Her anchor. It wasn’t just metal - it was her. She’d seen it in the mirror as many times as she’d seen her own face. She’d carried its weight, bore the marks that it had carved into her skin, learned to work and fight around the limitations it represented and even turn them to her advantage. Had it all been for nothing? 

Elsi was tempted to go and get it from the other room. Maybe if she held it in her hands - placed it under the sack of a pillow - she could sleep.

But, no. She wouldn’t do that. 

If she were caught with it… nothing would happen… but she felt that others knew too much about her as it was. Unveiling a weakness was unacceptable. 

Trembling, she dug the heel of her palm into her forehead. 

There had to be another way.

An idea sparked in the recesses of her whirring mind, bright and shining. It wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had; she was more than aware of all the ways that it could go wrong. But now that her brain had latched onto it, there was no letting go.

She didn’t have much to lose, anyhow.

Elsi placed the sleeping baby into the bassinet, closing the shutters and firmly telling herself that she wouldn’t open them again until morning. Trusting that the baby would sleep until then, she slipped back on her worn shoes and padded silently out of the room. 

The night was at its deepest. Cool desert air caressed Elsi’s sunburned cheeks and batted at the loose strands of hair that had fallen out of her braid. The stars were brighter than ever, flourishing with the lack of competition in the moonless sky. 

She took a few steps out into the murky shadows of the farm. She paused. Listening.

She had a hunch that she wasn’t the only one that couldn’t sleep. 

The faint tinkle of fine metal tools told her that the assumption was correct.

Elsi followed the sound to the Ugnaught’s outdoor workshop. It was a sort of stall of wood and metal with a rusted tin awning to protect the tools and storage containers from the weather. 

The Mandalorian stood at the workbench jutting out from the shelves, evidently still trying to salvage some of the connections in his damaged vambrace. He looked up from the sautering tool as she approached. 

He didn’t seem bothered by her presence, but he didn’t seem to understand it either. 

“The kid?” He asked, indicating the hut with his chin.

“Asleep.” Elsi rubbed her arms to ward off the chill. She wondered if a storm front was on its way. Usually a drop in temperature on Arvala-7 precluded a rainstorm. 

The Mandalorian grunted, returning his attention back to his work. “You should be, too.”

“As should you,” she reminded him. It was the first time she’d given him even a hint of attitude beyond compliance. She held her breath to see if he would react.

He didn’t, not really. There was a shift in his shoulders, but it seemed to stem from curiosity. 

“I should,” he admitted, his voice low and soft. He nodded at the damaged vambrace. “But I need to get this functioning properly before tomorrow.”

“For the Jawas?”

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I like to be prepared.”

Elsi agreed, but continued to feel him out. She raised an eyebrow. “Then you should prepare for negotiation, not battle.”

His scoff was little more than a burst of static through the vocoder. “You can’t negotiate with Jawas. Not well, at least.”

Elsi fixed him with a deadpan expression.

“Well, your last method was so successful,” she drawled. “I’m not surprised you’re hesitant to try another. Stick with what works, I say.”

There was a beat of silence, followed by another burst of static through his helmet. For a microsecond, she thought she’d annoyed him, but the set of his shoulders had loosened. Amused, then.

He shook his head in good-humored disapproval, dropping the sautering tool back into an open toolbox. Elsi stepped closer, closing the cushion of distance between them. The Mandalorian turned to face her as she entered his space, but his body language told her that she wasn’t unwelcome.

The Mandalorian was about half a head taller than her. The helmet tilted down to look her in the face. 

“Why are you out here?” The question was firm, but the tone his deep voice used to ask it was pure velvet. 

She blinked up at him with bland innocence. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“So you come to me?” She could practically feel his raised eyebrows. He was world-wise enough to recognize that she had ulterior motives - and enough to probably have a pretty good guess as to what that motive was.

“Yes,” she said simply. She stood close enough to him now that she could feel his warmth radiating from his body.. 

“To…” He cocked his head. “...chat?”

Laughable. He thought so too. This was the longest conversation they’d had. 

But he still didn’t move away. Elsi took it as an invitation.

She placed her hand flat over his abdominals - just below the cuirass. Although there were several layers of thick fabric as well as a Kevlar pad between him and her hand, she could still feel the muscles beneath twitch in response.

With the same amount of innocence, Elsi responded, “Yes.”

The helmet tilted to the side. Intrigued. Her hand wandered lower, tracing the edges of the metal buckle of his utility belt, and then lower still. 

He grunted when she pressed against the space between his legs. She watched the helmet closely, checking for any signs of discomfort. His breath had quickened, his chest beginning to heave. 

He didn’t ask her to stop.

Elsi palmed him through his pants until she felt his body start to respond. Then she found his zipper, pulling it down slowly for effect. 

Once given access, she pushed her fingers through the gap and was pleased with what she found. 

He was already half-hard, and his cock twitched as she ran her thumb across the head.

The Mandalorian grunted, shifting his stance almost imperceptibly wider, like he wanted to give her better access, but knew that he probably shouldn’t.

When his hand finally came up to grip her wrist and stall her movements, she started to move away, biting back disappointment.

Except he didn’t let her. He kept her in place, her hand still loosely wrapped around his erection. It took him a moment to find his words, but when he did, it wasn’t to send her away.

“It wouldn’t change anything,” he warned. 

Elsi understood what he was trying to say. It was unnecessary, but she appreciated it all the same. She and the child were bounties, and they still would be no matter what. 

If he was going to fuck her, it wasn’t going to be under any false pretenses. 

She didn’t expect any special treatment to come of this. Not really. It wasn’t what she was after right now, anyway. She wanted the release. To be touched. To forget; even if it was for just a few minutes. 

If nothing else, maybe it would at least help her get to sleep.

She held the gaze behind the visor unflinchingly. “I know.”

He cast a look back towards the hut, seeming to pause and listen for any sign of Kuiil or the baby before turning back to face her. “What about—”

“Implant.”

There was a beat of silence; of stillness - save for the heaving of the bounty hunter’s battered cuirass. For that moment, neither of them looked away, pale grey eyes locked on the tinted black T, and vice versa. It was an odd sort of stand off - like two fighters in a cantina, each waiting for the other to draw their weapon - except with very different stakes.

The Mandalorian moved. His hand went to the blaster in its holster and drew it, his gaze never leaving Elsi’s. 

She didn’t so much as blink.

Without looking, he dropped the blaster almost carelessly on the workbench, just out of his - and therefore Elsi’s - reach.

Then went his vibroblade. He brought his boot up so he could grab the handle without breaking eye contact. The impeccably polished steel flashed in the light before it too was gently tossed alongside the blaster. 

Then his utility belt. There were explosives on it. Tools. Sharp objects. It unbuckled with a soft click before being added to the growing pile, landing with a clatter. 

The last to go were his gloves. Elsi watched, intrigued, as he picked them off almost daintily by the orange leather tips, one finger at a time. The hands underneath were large and rough. Strong and naturally tan. Human hands. A small, circular tattoo was etched into the soft flesh beside his thumb in dark ink. Elsi wondered what it meant.

The gloves were tossed away carelessly, and his hands dropped to his sides. Not in an uncertain way. Not hesitant. Just… thoughtful. Non threatening.

The helmet ticked sideways, emphasizing the sentiment.

Double checking.

Elsi’s body language remained open and relaxed. She shifted her weight back a smidge so the edge of the workbench pressed into her lower back. Inviting him closer.

He stepped into her space. The tattooed hand slowly lifted, coming up to her face, knuckles tracing her jaw. Careful. Exploring. 

Her chin tilted up, encouraging. He responded by brushing his thumb across her lips. She parted them, let him do it again. Poked out her tongue to taste his skin, then took his thumb playfully between her teeth. 

The Mandalorian’s breath seemed to stutter. Emboldened, he closed the remaining distance between them. The metal cuirass pressed flush againt her breasts. His hand wandered down. Down her throat, finding the sweet spots below her ears.

He was VERY good with his hands.

He’d done it like this before.

Elsi wondered how it would feel if he used his mouth - if he’d ever used his mouth like that before. She imagined not.

The Mandalorian hesitated on the rough band of flesh at the base of her throat. The scars were old and deep, twisting the skin into another collar - one that could never be removed. 

Elsi knew what it looked like. She’d seen the marks left by over three decades of wearing a collar. Knew it was ugly. When Mandalorian’s thumb brushed delicately across the reddened welts left by yesterday’s electricity, she shifted away, suddenly unreasonably concerned that he would grab her by the collar etched into her flesh and drag her around by it.

The offending hand moved away at once. He didn’t try to touch her there again. 

The Mandalorian paused, checking to make sure nothing had changed. 

Elsi was tired of waiting. She went back to his cock, this time not hesitating to reach in and free it from where it had been tenting up his pants. She pumped it a few times, but there really was no need. He was ready.

The Mandalorian grunted. His hands flew to her shoulders, gripping her tightly for a moment, seeming torn between pulling her closer and pushing her back. 

He settled on pushing her back - back into the table, where he encouraged her to jump so he could lift her onto the work bench. She did, pleased that it was the perfect height to position her hips level with his. 

In one fluid motion, the Mandalorian swept the tools on the workbench to the furthest edges of the surface, clearing enough space for her to sit without being perched precariously on the edge.

Elsi spread her legs, and he stepped into the cradle of her body, slipping his hands underneath the hem of her dress to check her readiness - finding the source of her impatience, but not her undergarments, which she’d removed before she left the hut in anticipation of this exact scenario. A growl rumbled in his chest.

That was the end of foreplay. 

Finally seeming to understand what she wanted from him, the Mandalorian flipped up her skirt, bunched it at the tops of her thighs, closed the gap between them, and grabbed her by the hips.

Elsi gasped when he pressed his flesh roughly into hers, her hands snapping up to grip the unarmored part of his shoulders. The Mandalorian groaned, using one hand to brace himself against the workbench and the other to hold Elsi in place by tangling in her hair. The moment he was in all the way, he started thrusting.

It wasn’t slow.

It wasn’t gentle. 

The Mandalorian was strong, and he had his own frustrations to vent. 

His grip on her hair was tight enough to hurt. The sensation was enough to wipe Elsi’s mind blissfully blank. 

The only things even remotely worth considering were of the here and now. The slide of his cock. The way he smelled; of dirt and sweat and metal; she buried her face in the fabric covering his collarbones, fascinated by it. The cold press of metal against the side of her head, where his helmet rested - digging in almost painfully as he tried to get closer, get deeper. 

She’d never fucked someone while they were helmeted, but couldn’t find cause to complain. It was uniquely erotic. She could hear him - each quiet modulated grunt, pant, and groan - each tiny sound given to her through the cold kiss of steel against her ear. 

Really, she liked it. Liked the contrast between the heat of his cock and the chill of the armor. Liked the impersonal aspect of the helmet. Liked how she got goosebumps everywhere her flesh touched metal. 

That being said, Elsi’s hands still roved, seeking out all the soft parts of him she could find. The small of his back. Biceps. Buttocks. The back of his neck. Although those places were covered with thick fabric, she dug her fingers in to ensure he felt every bit of it.

He’d groaned his approval of her exploration, so she continued, going as far as placing a bite on the side of his neck. The fabric tasted of sand and sweat, but it was more than worth his reaction.

Suddenly, he pulled out. Before Elsi could protest, he lifted her bodily off the table and flipped her around so that her back pressed hard against the steel covering his chest, then bent her over the edge and carried on with renewed vigor.

The hand that Elsi wasn’t using to brace herself against the bench groped blindly around behind her, jamming her finger against the thigh guard before she found the back of his thigh, which she then gripped tight enough to leave behind bruises. 

He was close. The snap of his hips was jagged and cramped. One of his hands went down her front to rub roughly between her legs while the other clutched desperately at one of her breasts. 

Her release was quiet, spent by shuddering where she stood trapped between the steel cuirass and wooden table, biting back her cries so they were no more than a few strangled whines and gasps. 

He followed soon after. Not remotely loud, but deliciously vocal. His helmet rested heavily against the back of her neck as he gritted his pleasure into the space between her shoulder blades.

They stayed like that for a few minutes. Elsi listened to his modulated breaths, enjoying the weight of him keeping her pinned to the table while he rested against her. The hand that had been groping a breast through fabric dipped down under the neckline and into her bra, where he fondled the flesh beneath almost lazily. 

“...you good?” His voice was somehow even more gruff than usual, but in a disheveled way that was undeniably sexy. 

Elsi hummed contentedly. Her hands curled around his elbows as she melted back against him. He chuckled breathlessly and nuzzled the front of his helmet against the back of her head, giving her a tight squeeze as he did.

He was soft by the time he finally left her, but even after he’d tucked himself away, he stayed close for another few minutes. The Mandalorian turned her back around and encouraged her to lean against his chest. His strong arms looped around her, taking the time to slowly rub up and down her back and massage her neck with his still-naked fingertips. 

She never would’ve pegged him for a cuddler, but here they were. 

It was unexpectedly nice - but all things end. The glass of his visor pressed briefly against her cheek, giving her the approximation of a kiss, then he was moving away. 

They didn’t exchange any words. There was no need to. When they were done, they went their separate ways - him to the storage shed, her back to the house. No goodbyes. No second glances. No hesitation. Although their brief intimacy had been thoroughly enjoyed by both parties, they were back to their previous relationship of bounty hunter and bounty. 

Exactly as it should. 

Unbothered, Elsi sneaked back into the house. She checked on the baby and was relieved to find him still asleep. The rush of endorphins had numbed her frayed nerves and the pleasant ache of her core distracted her body from the emptiness around her throat.

Feeling much more grounded, she was finally able to curl up on her makeshift bed and slip into a dreamless sleep.

~0~0~0~ .

*Mando’a Translation: ‘Pay attention. This is important for your mother.’*

[mayfriend-archive]

Totally understand if you're not up for it and fully recognize the ronald mcdonald dom/sub anon vibes which is an AMAZING post btw but like...now i'm curious, what the hell did Lord of the Flies anon DO that got him blocked for the discourse? like...i just can't wrap my head around high school lit being...uh...that inflammatory i guess?

Okay so, I'll start by saying I've had a new anon from apparently the same anon saying they are NOT the person I blocked, just a rando making the same points, but I'll answer your question anyway just to set out why this person in particular got blocked, out of the several thousand who reblogged/commented on that very successful addition to the LoTF post I made.

First off, I added the 'real life Lord of the Flies' story because I thought it was a good story. I had read about it only a couple days beforehand in Humankind and, after reading out the entire chapter to my parents who weren't very interested, I was excited that there was not only a post where it would be relevant to post, but that I wouldn't be hijacking it, as it was already rejecting the widespread interpretation taught in many schools, that humanity is inherently savage.

When making the addition, I a) did not think it would get more than a couple reblogs, because the post was already at 50k notes and I figured anyone that might be interested would already have seen it, and b) I did not know the very specific context that prompted William Golding to write the book; all I knew was that he had been a teacher at a public school (basically, the poshest schools in the country - think Eton, Harrow, very 'old money' places that pump out Conservative politicians by the bucket-load 🤢) who hated his job and the boys he taught (which, valid), and new information I'd been given in Humankind - that Golding had said to his wife one day, "Wouldn't it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave?" - which had no mention of The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, which I have since learned was the text that Golding loathed enough to write an entire novel in refutation of - and included what I considered a very telling letter from Golding to his publisher, in which Golding wrote of his belief that 'even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it.' Another Golding quote that I believe portrays his belief in humanity's 'innate savagery' is that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey."

Obviously, the author of a book putting forward the case for humanity's inherent goodness was going to oppose Golding's hypothesis; Bregman not only noted Golding's literary accomplishments and beliefs, but his personal life.

When I began delving into the author's life, I learned what an unhappy individual he'd been. An alcoholic. Prone to depression. A man who, as a teacher, once divided his pupils into gangs and encouraged them to attack each other. "I have always understood the Nazis," Golding confessed, "because I am of that sort by nature." (Humankind by Rutger Bregman, p. 24-25)

I have bolded the part about him as a teacher, because it is incredibly relevant to the original post that I commented on, which begins with a comic of a teacher locking her class in to see them 'recreate' Lord of the Flies, something which the follow up comments before mine staunchly reject as both misunderstanding the point of the book, and the fact that it took the kids in Lord of the Flies a significant amount of time without adult supervision to go 'savage'. This misreading of the text is widespread enough that when Golding won the Nobel Prize for Lord of the Flies, the Swedish Nobel committee wrote that his book 'illuminate[s] the human condition in the world of today'. Whether or not they misread it is beyond my expertise - they do at least mention the factors of the outside world neglected by many when analysing the book, but still seem to believe it says something about human nature as a whole rather than just, to quote thedarkbutbeige 'British kids being rat bastards' - but Golding quite happily took his Nobel prize on this basis. Which, in fairness, I would too. It's a fucking Nobel prize.

It was with this knowledge, and this knowledge alone, that I stated in my now very, very widely read comment that Golding 'wrote the book to be a dick', in response to the tags of the person I reblogged from. As I said, I now know that Golding did not write the book (solely) because he hated the kids he taught, but as a response to The Coral Island and the general idea that clearly the British were inherently civilsed, whilst the people they colonised and enslaved were inherently savage. So. That's the background.

The anon - or rather, the person I thought was anon - was the sole exception out of dozens of replies, who instead of telling me about The Coral Island politely decided it was time to go ALL CAPS and regurgitate points already made by thespaceshipoftheseus, and implied that the only reason that the real life Tongan castaways didn't go all Lord of the Flies was because they weren't British. Not because they weren't surrounded by violence like the boys in Lord of the Flies, or there wasn't a World War ongoing, or that they weren't the upper, upper, upper crust of a class-obsessed society like Britain - but because they weren't British. A complete inversion of the concept that Golding was trying to get across - now, instead of all of humanity being equally prone to savagery in the right conditions, it was solely nationality that determined it. As in, the British were inherently savage, but nobody else was.

I, trying for humour, made the terrible mistake of replying to them.

I won't lie, I was absolutely blown away that this was real life. What I think they were trying to do was be that Cool Tumblr Person who, after somebody's been shitty on a post, goes to their blog and sees something Damning in their about/description. In an ideal world, I imagine I'd have gone nuts or done something Unforgiveable. In what I can only call the rant that followed, they stated several times that I needed to go back to high school to get some 'proper literary analysis' skills and that the story of the Tongan castaways was completely unrelated to the point at hand which. I mean, I disagree, considering that I made the addition, but I couldn't get my head around how commenting on a post that was already rejecting the thesis that the 'point' of Lord of the Flies was that humanity was inherently savage and was, in fact, about how kids - British or otherwise - learn how to function from the adults around them, and that traumatised, terrified children aren't going to create a mini-Utopia, and put forward a real life example of how without the key additions of an ongoing world war, a colonial Empire and the subsequent mindset of thinking you are 'inherently civilised' and therefore can't do anything wrong, actually, people just want to take care of each other.

A friend has since asked me why I even have 'england' in my description. To be honest, it's a timezone thing - I talk to a lot of people online who don't share my timezone, and it generally makes me feel like if I don't reply immediately because it's 3am, they have the tools to see that I'm not in their timezone and not just ignoring them. I did consider changing it to 'british' or 'uk' after it was... 'used against me', I guess, simply because I didn't want to deal with it, but you know what. No. Not gonna do that. I am from England, and I have never hid that fact. I have a tag called 'uk politics', during Eurovision I refer to the UK's act as 'us' (even if I really, really don't want to. Because James Newman slaughtered that song and it was downright embarrassing), I regularly post stuff in my personal tag about where I live (and mostly complain about this piece of shit government). If people really think my nationality makes every point I make null and void, then they don't have to follow me or interact with my posts; tumblr is big, and I am one medium-small blog very easily passed over.

I did reply to them, trying to explain the above, but their next response really just doubled down. Because I used the word British instead of English - foolishly because the posts above mine focused on Britishness, and also because although Golding was English and taught English kids, the pro-Imperialism author of The Coral Island, R. M. Bannatyne was actually Scottish so, ding ding ding, falls into the 'British' category - they then decided that I was somehow trying to pretend I wasn't English and made all the same points, before ending with this doozy:

At this point, I knew there was nothing to be gained from replying, because if we're whipping out conditions like they're pokemon cards then there's no actual conversation anymore, and I'm not going to start mudslinging like an identity politician. They made up their mind, and I figured there could be no harm in letting them think that they 'won' by blocking them instead of replying.

Until the ask. INNATE ENGLISH SAVAGERY did, I'll admit, make me think it was them, back again. I even thought up a really good response approximately 12 hours after I replied, I was that sure. Until the second message came in, and said they were just someone who came from the post and made the same point by chance. So the saga draws to a close... for now.

It may have been them, it may not have been - the anon feature makes it impossible to be sure, but as the second message I got said, we're in a heatwave. It's too hot to argue. And I've just written a goddamn essay about a book I dislike anyway.

My pasty English ass is going to go melt. If there's Disk Horse, do not tell me. I am Done™

[snusbandxknifewife]

Sticky Ficky 8

Hello everyone! Since Jurdannet Christmas in July is coming up, I thought I’d celebrate a lil family tradition. In my family, the 23rd of December is Elf Night. Basically, if you’re good, the elves will leave you one gift to occupy your time until Christmas. As it is now July 23rd, that makes this Elf Night in July, and I believe that’s as good an excuse as any for some Sticky Ficky!

So awhile back @slightlyrebelliouswriter23 helped me out with something and I wrote a pillow for hc for her in return and I thought at the time “this has Sticky Ficky potential” so we will now take a break from our scheduled worm chapter to have pillow fort Sticky Ficky! Hope you enjoy!

~~~~~~

Wssssh

THUNK

Jude Duarte Greenbriar, Hugh Queen of Elfhame and wife to Cardan Greenbriar, dove to the side at the very last moment, just barely avoiding the glow-in-the-dark suction cup dart as it flew past her head, sticking comically to the groin of a satyr statue in the office she shared with her husband.

She swerved onto one knee, taking aim directly at Cardan’s pretty black eyes and letting fly a dart of her own, this one pink and with a soft tip. Like most things in her life, she was right on target, her timing impeccable and her aim unfailing.

Why Cardan insisted on doing this when he was so obviously set up to fail always confused her, but she was never one to back away from a surefire victory.

Using the disorientation caused by her near-perfect hit, Jude scrambled to her feet and careened out the office door; headed for their destroyed sitting room. She was out of bullets and needed to restock. Luckily, she knew the sofa fort like the back of her hand, and she had hidden an extra gun in the hollow of the underside of a sofa cushion for just this moment.

But she always underestimated just how fast her husband could move. Cardan was a man well practiced in getting others to forget he could be lethal. Hidden behind the near-constant dullness of intoxication and the ever-present serving of indifference, Cardan always payed attention. He was a dangerously advanced student of the Court of Shadows, and he’d been raised in an insanely cutthroat royal family.

She needed to stop forgetting that.

“Jude, villain and darling,” he purred in her ear as he captured her by the waist, hauling her up over his shoulder and back away from her stash. “Leaving so soon? I was having so much fun.”

“Let go of me!” Jude squealed, going for threatening as she wiggled like a petulant puppy in his arms but unable to hide the mirth in her voice. “I said unhand me!”

Beneath her stomach she felt him chuckle as he ignored her, spinning towards their bedroom and keeping one hand firmly on her ass to make sure she didn’t successfully squirm away.

If their sitting room was a disaster, their bedroom was a war zone. The mattress was completely off the bed frame, angled like a lean-to and hiding a pile of pillows for ample cuddling. The vanity that Cardan used to use as a place to hold his wine was in the middle of the room, hooked to other pieces of furniture by fine silken sheets as they spread across the chamber.

Forts had become a topic of conversation after Jude drunkenly admitted to loving them in childhood. One night, as she and Cardan were deep in their drink and basking in one another’s naked company, she’d gotten to talking about how little Jude had always loved Friday nights.

Friday nights meant no school the next day, no sports and no homework for the following week. Friday nights meant staying up and gorging on microwaved fish sticks with a dessert of cosmic brownies. Friday nights meant reruns of Scooby Doo and pajama parties with her whole family.

Most importantly, Friday nights meant pillow fights and forts in the living room.

Forts in the living room meant family sleepovers in the living room.

Family sleepovers meant she had her parents with her, meant she was safe, that she was nothing more than a child.

A child with no knowledge of real war, of Faerie, of bloodshed and suffering and sacrifice.

Cardan had confessed to her, after she’d described her coveted purple unicorn pajama pants and her favorite mortal soda, that he’d quite like to know what it was like to have a pillow fight and a fort in one’s living room. He hadn’t expected her to follow through. Hell, he hadn’t even expected her to remember. But then, after nearly a week had gone by and he was aching after an infuriating meeting and a ridiculous revel, he’d returned to their chambers to find the sitting room turned over and a pile of sheets by the door.

That night was the first of what would become their weekly ritual. What began as a little fort in the sitting room turned into nerf gun fights and feasting on only the most mediocre of mortal cuisine, sheets hanging from every viable surface in the royal apartments and Homeric descriptions of cartoons from Jude’s childhood, relaxing in one another’s embrace and having a little fun—between, below, and above the sheets.

It seemed like every day they’d find some memento of their Friday nights, a sticky hand that Cardan had used to smack Jude’s ass, a pillow from their bed in their bathtub, or—Cardan’s favorite—Jude’s stash of good wine hidden in the skirts of the dress she was due to wear the following day. Each little thing made them grin and made their hearts go weak with love for their partner.

And that’s what it was, love.

After all this time, after all the teasing in school and the suffering so early in Cardan’s reign, after Madoc and the Undersea and exile, they loved each other. It surprised Jude every day to realize it, but she couldn’t deny it was there. No one who saw the way the king looked at the queen could deny it was there.

Cardan shocked Jude back to reality by none-too-gently throwing her atop a pile of pillow. When she gave him an offended gasp, he turned his nose high and said: “I have no sympathy for prisoners.”

“Am I a prisoner now?” Jude asked, a sly smile overtaking her face as she watched her husband stalk around the room like the cat he just barely wasn’t. Sure, she didn’t have a functional weapon and she was pretty winded from the fall, but she knew she could take him without too much trouble.

He stopped cold, his back turning rigid as he stared at something she couldn’t see. Jude felt her stomach clench and she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d said something wrong. She and Cardan had gotten a lot better at communication over the years, but they still had their moments.

Unable to convince herself to open her mouth to ask what was wrong, she watched in horrified silence as her husband flexed his hands once, twice, three times.

Then, when he turned to face her, something had changed in his eyes.

“Of course you are,” he spit at her with a vitriol he hadn’t used in years. “Isn’t that what you’ve always been? All you’re good at being?”

Her brow furrowed and she felt a furious blush rising to her cheeks, but as her husband fully turned towards her, his boots angled directly at her outstretched legs and his face dark in a way she didn’t like to remember, she couldn’t bring herself to ask him what he was talking about.

Jude was unable to verbally defend herself as he took a step towards her. In fact, she was unable to do anything but scramble awkwardly onto her hands and feet.

“Poor little Duarte, a human child stolen away to Faerie,” he hissed at her, advancing. Jude felt a lump in her throat that she was unable to swallow around and she began to crab-walk backwards as fast as she could. Still, he gained on her.

She successfully dislodged herself from the pile of pillows, the cold stone floor biting into her hands as she continued to move away from her husband. He seemed so angry, so hateful where he’d once been so loving.

“Cardan—“

“Shut your filthy human mouth!” Cardan shouted, so suddenly and so loudly that she couldn’t help but flinch. And then she was against a wall with no way out and he was only fifteen feet from her.

Jude was looking for something, anything to defend herself. She tried to reassure herself that she was the better fighter, that she was protected against geases and that she had the land on her side just as much as he did, but, in the face of that evil look in his eyes, it did nothing to calm her.

“Jude fucking Duarte, the scum of the gentry,” he spit as he tilted his head, inspecting her the same way a troubled child would inspect a beautiful butterfly right before they ripped the poor thing’s wings off. “Did you honestly think you’d ever be anything more than a prisoner?”

She blanched and he was ten feet away.

“Did you think you’d ever stand a chance against a people so undeniably better than you?”

A cold tear dripped down her cheek and he was five feet away.

“Did you think anyone, much less someone like me, could ever love the likes of you?”

He gripped her by the throat and yanked her off her feet, slamming her against the unforgiving stone wall and glaring into her eyes, his nose a hair’s breadth away.

“Jude Duarte, Seneschal to the High King of Elfhame. Jude Duarte, Hugh Queen of Elfhame,” he sneered in a voice so high-pitched that it was obviously making fun of her. “Did you think it ever mattered? Did you honestly believe that those titles made you safe?”

She opened her mouth to try to speak, but she couldn’t force any air out, not with how his long, delicate fingers were so easily crushing her windpipe.

“You were a prisoner to mortality in your childhood,” he leaned forward to whisper in her ear, “and they you were a prisoner of Faerie in your adolescence.”

Her vision blackened around the edges as her mind reached weakly for a memory of when Cardan held her sweetly. She couldn’t quite grasp one.

“You willingly enslaved yourself to my brother and then you went and made yourself into my prisoner when you engineered my rule,” he laughed, pulling away just enough for her to see his cold eyes once more. “Surely you knew that’s all you were? Bound to my word in public and stuck cleaning up all my messes. God, you make a good little servant.”

She tried to kick at him, but her whole body felt week and she wasn’t able to bring her leg up. Panicked, she looked down to where her hands clawed at his and she found that her nails were broken and bloodied, the beds caked with sea salt.

“You were a prisoner beneath the waves.”

Seaweed rose from the floor and wrapped around her ankles, pulling down like it was trying to pull her under the water once more.

“You were a prisoner, bound to the bidding of Balekin.”

She felt the ghost of his lips against hers and she gagged, gasping for air and unable to get any.

“A prisoner to your own desires,” he smirked. “That’s why you stupidly chose my hand over my control.”

She couldn’t get a word in edgewise, couldn’t correct him, couldn’t even really remember why she’d done it. Was he right?

“And now you’re once again locked in the world of the mortals, a prisoner in your little bedroom cell,” he sneered at her. “It’s where you belong, don’t you agree? I’m sure all of Faerie does.”

Memories of exile came flooding back to her. She could see, almost as if she were a fly on the wall, a disturbingly sick Jude. Clothes were falling off her and her normally tanned skin was deathly pale, the only real structure in her life coming from the rat’s nest that has cemented itself in her hair.

“Let me tell you a secret, Jude,” he leans back in, lips ghosting against her ear. “That’s where you’ll stay. In that tiny room in that hellish world, wasting away to nothing and waiting for your inevitable death. You’ll go quietly, without a fight and with no one to remember you. Do you know why, Jude?”

Her mouth formed around his name.

Cardan

But she couldn’t say it.

“I’ll tell you why,” he continued, smirk evident in his icy voice. “It’s because, above all else, you are a prisoner to your own fear. You will always be your own jail cell.”

Tears gushed down her face and she wanted to beg him to stop saying such hurtful things. But she couldn’t, because when Cardan next pulled away, it wasn’t Cardan at all.

One cold, rotted hand gripped her by the throat as she stared in horror at the decaying body of Balekin Greenbriar, fresh blood still oozing from the fatal wound she’d inflicted.

She woke screaming.

Jude Duarte, exiled High Queen of Elfhame, woke screaming.

She didn’t know the day or the time, where she was or why she was there, all she knew is that she could still feel the cold hand of death wrapped around her throat.

Cardan wasn’t there, he’d never been there. They’d never built forts or had pillow fights and they likely never would.

She was blind to the world as she heaved herself out of bed, flying towards the shower to try and wash the stench of death off her skin. She didn’t notice that Vivienne was awake, Oak sitting next to her at the kitchen bar.

The siblings shared a horrified look and Vivi didn’t give herself the time to hesitate. She picked up her phone, dialed, and prayed.

It rang three times.

“Listen, Vivi, I really don’t have the time for th—“

“It’s not about us, Heather,” Vivi rushed to say, taking the sudden silence on the other end as a sign to continue. “It’s Jude. Please, I need your help with Jude.”

More silence, and then:

“I’ll be right over.”

~~~~~~

What? I didn’t say it would be fluffy pillow fort Sticky Ficky,,,,,all aboard the angst train lol

Hope y’all don’t hate me too much I promise I will have more funny/stupid Sticky Ficky but I gotta get this exile angst in!

Tag list: @cardan-greenbriar-tcp @hizqueen4life @slightlyrebelliouswriter23 @thewickedkings @aelin-queen-of-terrasen @cheekycheekycheeks @queen-of-glass @b00kworm @doingmyrainbow @andromeddea @jurdanhell @thesirenwashere @sweetlyvillainous @courtofjurdan @clockworkgraystairs

[buckysforeverprincess]

Let The Games Begin Ch. 3

Dark!Viking James Barnes x Reader, Steve Rogers

Words: 1911

Warnings: James still being an asshole.

A/N: Welcome back! I hope you’re all enjoying this fic as I have many plans for it. The entire thing is written in my head I just need to get it down and I promise to post it once a chapter is complete. In this chapter reader starts to put some things together. Let’s see just how this plays out. Enter Steve Rogers. Enjoy!

You sat on the bed staring out into the space that had become your home, looking at something and nothing all at the same time. You hated this room. It was the main room of James’ home and was where normal people ate and entertained guests but not this heathen. Civility had eluded him and had no hope of finding its way back to home to its master.

 When you arrived, James had moved his bed from the other room and set up camp in here. You watched as he pieced everything together and demanded you get used to it. This bed in this room was to be your chamber of torture and he your proud captor. It doesn’t matter how many days you spend trapped in this twisted version of hell, you’ll never get used to this life or the scum enslaving you. He could fall into a pit of acid for all you cared.

 “I’m leaving,” James says as he comes from the other room and heads over to the table where his knives are kept, breaking you from your thoughts. A glance in his direction sees him in dressed in some clothing you haven’t seen that appears to be a lot nicer than usual. Hopefully he’s going to ride himself off a cliff and chose to dress up for the occasion to look decent for the people sent to retrieve the mess at the bottom. A woman can always dream, can’t she?

 “I’m leaving Steven to keep an eye on you today and Wanda will bring your lunch,” James says, his body half turned, and you can see his profile.

 “Your whore?” The words were out of your mouth before you could stop them, and you honestly didn’t care.

 James side eyes you and you can see his lips turned up in a grin. “Ahhh… so you’ve heard the talk, huh?” He looks to you, the grin now a full-on smile. “It’s a wonder you’ve heard anything. To my knowledge, you’ve never once left the house.”

 You scoff and shrug. “We all have our secrets, don’t we?”

 James clicks his tongue and nods. “That we do.” He turns his attention back to his task at hand.

 Watching him, you see him place several of his knives around his body, a few of them concealed where they can’t be seen to the naked eye. The last one he grabs is the one you know well, the one you used and failed to take his life with. His most favorite knife with the long blade and thick handle.

 James pulls it from his sheath and assess the blade, putting it up to his eye, carefully inspecting it for god knows what. Once he’s determined it’s worth, he inserts it back into its holder and makes his way over to where your sitting on the bed, holding the knife out to you.

 “Here. This is for you.”

 You look up at him, your eyes blinking in confusion. “What is this?”

 “A peace offering, for now.” He urges you to take the knife from his hand.

 “I don’t understand.”

 James rolls his eyes and sighs. “I’m leaving for the day and in these unusual circumstances I figured you’d feel a little more secure in my absence if I left you something that could offer you protection.”

 Your brows furrowed, still confused by his actions. “But isn’t that why Steven is staying? To protect me?”

 “Yes…,” James nods, “but he can’t be here every second.”

 “Why not?” You question, not buying his reasoning. “Natasha is here every second of every moment you’re gone. Why should Steven be any different?”

 “Because Steven has a village to care for in my leave and they trust him. He’ll come check on you periodically, but he cannot stay the entire time I’m gone.”

 This was so unlike James to offer this to you, so you know there’s more to this than he’s letting on. With a huff, you reach out and snatch the offered knife from his hand and set it in your lap. “Be careful, James. I’m not as daft as you think. This isn’t you showing you care because you and I both know you don’t. There’s something at play here… let’s hope for your sake the game ends and the pawns move as you’ve hoped.”

 James’ eyes go wide and you’re the one to smirk, the ass giving something away you believe he never intended. He recovers quickly and shakes his head. “I don’t know what you think you know, but I can assure you my intent is selfish and not about you but the child you’re carrying.”

 “Smart. Way to backtrack.” You grin and James turns to walk towards the door.

 “Don’t wait up for me.”

 “I’m missing you already.” The sarcasm is heavy on your tongue as you watch him leave, shutting the door behind him.

 Your eyes move to your lap and stare at the knife that’s taken up residence there. This is his most prized possession and something he wouldn’t just willingly leave but he did, and he changed things up. Did he think you were totally naïve? You’ve been here for three months, you’ve learned how to play this dangerous game. So, why? What’s the game and how will you come out the victor? Hmmm… what are you up to, James?

 “Princess.”

 You look up and see a tall blond muscles man standing in the doorway. Steven. Apparently, you were lost in thought and had no idea how much time had passed but here he was. The man that’s size rivaled James, but his face was softer, more trusting. If he wasn’t James’ right hand man, you’d find yourself in a position to confide in him but that wouldn’t or couldn’t be. You’d suffer in silence and keep the man at arm’s length. Nothing to be gained from becoming friends with this brute.

 “Steven. I’m still here, if that’s why you came.” Your tone is dry and without any sign of emotion.

 Steven chuckles and smiles, shutting the door and making his way into the room to stand in front of the bed. “I trust all is well?”

 “Why are you here?” You ask, not up for small talk or formalities.

 “To make sure you have everything you need, your highness.” Steven lowers his head, bowing to you like so many had before.

 It’s the first time since you’d been forced into this life that anyone has addressed you in this way and you're totally taken aback. His actions are very suspicious but there’s nothing that screams do not trust him. Hmmm… what piece of the game are you, Steven? A pawn or a knight? And how can I get you to show your weakness?

 “Drop the act and tell me why you’re here.” You grip the knife and unsheathe it, pointing the sharp blade in his direction, the man still bowing before you.

 The blond stands up and shakes his head. “Really? Is that any way to treat an ally?” Steven uses his hand to brush the blade out of his way and sits down on the edge of the bed. “I’m not James.”

 “Maybe not, but you're his best friend and I’d be a fool to trust you.” You raise the knife back up, holding it steady in his face.

 Steven’s eyes lock onto yours, and for the first time you’ve noticed just how beautiful the blue is staring back at you. “That blade isn’t meant for me, your highness. It really is to protect yourself.”

 At his words, you lower the blade and place it in your lap, still out of its sheath. “Why do I need protection?”

 Steven sighs and looks down, taking the knife and running his thumb across the blade. “Good… he sharpened it.” He puts the blade back in the holder and lays it down on the bed. “Because, your highness… you never know when someone might want to use James’ absence as an opportunity.”

 You furrowed your brows. “An opportunity for what?”

 Steven grins and leans in close, his lips brushing up against your ear. “An opportunity to bleed you dry,” he whispers, making you gasp in shock.

 “Don’t worry…,” Steven sits back with a grin on his face, “I’ll keep you as safe as I can but in the worst case the knife should be used to hold anyone off until I can come around.”

 You sit in silence as you study his words, the man still sitting across from you, watching your every move, which gratefully is nothing at this point. The knife is meant to protect until Steven comes and now it all makes sense. You were the pawn and Steven the knight. Guess it’s time to let the games begin.

 “Thank you, Steven.” You reach out and place a soft hand on his leg. “I’ll make sure to keep the knife close and I promise to scream loudly should any harm come my way.” You give him a genuine smile, something you haven’t given anyone since you came to this wretched hell.

 Steven glances down at the hand resting on his leg and then back up at you, his mouth turned up in a soft smile. “That’s all I can ask. Your safety is my priority.”

 “Again, thank you. Now, you should go…,” you remove your hand but never break eye contact, staring into those ocean blues, “...James is cruel and unforgiving and I’m not sure I could survive anymore of his wrath if he found out you were in here instead of out there preventing any tragedies.” You lay it on thick, hoping to gain a soft spot within the tall Viking.

 The blond nods in agreement and stands up from your bed. “As you wish, your highness.” And once again, bows and lowers his head for the second time since he arrived. “I’ll see you soon,” Steven says as he stands straight, the full extent of his muscular body on display.

 “Bye, Steven.” You smile bashfully at him.

 “Enjoy your day, Princess.” Steven finally makes his way to the door after several moments of stalling, opens it and exits, the large door closing behind him.

 You stare at the door waiting for him to come back but he never does. Good. Steven’s presence frazzled you a bit towards the end of his visit but for the most part you were able to understand enough of what treachery lies ahead. Whatever their plan it involved you, Steven and James’ knife.

 Oh, what a tangled web we weave, you thought, looking down at the knife at your side, the same one you tried to impale into the chest of the beast you share a bed with. The same one you’re positive he used when he slit your father’s throat with a laugh. It was now willingly given to you without so much as a fight or a peep of dissatisfaction, so maybe you should do what’s intended and protect yourself at all costs.

 Whoever is coming won’t find the same woman that was dragged here unwillingly, kicking and screaming along the way. No. They will be met with a much-changed Princess. One who’s new mission includes protecting the life growing inside you. Come hell or high water this child would not grow up with James’ influence. You’ll burn this village down to the ground before you let that monster shape and mold the child his seed fertilized.

Viking Tags:

@ellallheart @sebastianstansqueen

Forever Tags:

@jamesbarnesappreciationclub @kruscht @palaiasaurus64 @breezy1415 @sarahp879 @supernaturaldean67 @averyrogers83 @scarlettsoldier @lovely-geek @titty-teetee @geeksareunique @peaceinourtime82 @leosandbuckysgirl @the-goddess-of-mischief @mychemicalimagines @awkwardfangirl2014 @collette04 @notyourtypicalrose @onebatch--twobatch @miraclesoflove @kcd15 @xxloki81xx @death-unbecomes-you @thatfanficstuff @hotoffthepressfics @chuuulip @unlikelygalaxygiver​ @lancetuckershairgel​ @babypink224221​ @mybabe-buckybarnes​ @shield-agent78​ @the-real-kellymonster​ @caplanreads​

[inviouswriting]

Lich’s Puppet AU

It goes without saying this one is going to be a bit darker.

Mentions - @snow-covered-moon​ ‘s Shuri and polyship with her.

Warnings: I won’t cut these ones because there are some themes here. Mostly forced to drink something, and paralysis, mind control, and body modifications.

Perhaps she was careless, she tends to think she can’t be harmed, yet she still has weaknesses. She is a spirit, and a spirit can still be lured under greater magic to be enslaved. She had thought she had great immunity, that nothing would control her the way Vanth did.

Yet she can’t remember the last time she couldn’t control herself. While conscious of everything she is doing. She knew better than to leave Vanth unchecked, the necromancy in Tam-Tara should have warned her of a presence. That the worse of her nightmares to come again was happening.

His magic still has deep roots within her, there will always be that stain in her as much as her right wing. Her entire body is on fire, it feels like acid slowly eating away at her, the flames of the undead were something she hated. They burned the very soul and scarred it. Her eyes and hair matched the form Vanth wanted.

Skin almost greenish to her brown, lime green eyes and white hair. She isn’t even sure how she was snared. All she remembered was going on another mission for the scions. To check a tower in Coerthas, she could get close without alerting others. Or so she thought.

She had been chased down by a lunar Garuda. She knew the primal was fast, but given the alterations, the lunar alone caught up to her in no time. Kivera looked away from in front of her, till she flew pass the threshold of a tower. She had never been inside them, she felt dread from being in vicinity. Like Vanth’s magic scared her years ago. 

Inside she had seen Ixal trapped to the walls, being used to empower the lunar primal. She keeps her feet from the ground, seeing it as fleshy matter more than an actual ground. She likens it to one of Vanth’s creations. Every part of her screams to leave, but she couldn’t with her exit closed. 

“What a surprise. Who would have thought you would be here.” Kivera freezes down to her spine, her feathers stand on end, bristling at the voice. She knows this voice, deep, hollow and raspy. It does the same thing regardless in chilling her to her soul. 

“What are you doing here...” She keeps her hover even more for fear of what would happen if her feet connect with the ground. She had forgotten about Garuda, it seems the primal disappeared from her entirely, or was laying in wait. She was no longer her worry. What was, is the lich who she had thought she rendered deep in the pit she had made. The furthest deep of Tartarus that she had named it Agitazione, land of the unsuffering dead. 

“Why are you so surprised, you knew you can’t kill me. Even with your awakening. Not even the power you command from above could do anything. I will always come back. It took a bit of time... you left me in ashes.” Kivera turns to see the being. Vanth. He had taken a form that allowed him to blend in with others. An older elezen, with graying hair. He looked like a holy man, but Kivera knew him as far from that. What he did was horrid to both heavens and underworld.

He enslaved the dead as puppets. He led the slaughter on hundreds if not thousands of women and men during the Salem trials, one that she remembers as her first cleanse to end an entire city. She couldn’t touch the souls after Vanth took over their minds. Thanatos had instructed her, nothing good comes from a necromancer, and they did not want the souls tainted by a lich. They could not rest, nor would they ever. They chose blood magic and a great taboo together. Raising the dead is an unforgiveable sin among the underworld, tied in with enslaving the spirits was something that she was specifically trained to take out without hesitation.

Vanth was the reason she had lost two dear to her. Divinity at first when she was human, then Damien. Kivera realizes how in over her head she is. Yet she knows her loved ones, and the allies she has gained would not be able to fight someone like him. Not yet, Kan-E-Senna could, she was blessed in holy and light.

Kivera was not either of those, and she could feel her nerves on fire the longer she is lingering. In her shock she fails to notice the fleshy tendrils that creep up seeking aether energy. Kivera being full of it. All the bits had to do was connect with skin and start leeching her. How lucky would Garlean be if they score her as an ally. A powerful destructive force would raze everything. Vanth knows this, he always knew of her location, she is still a creature of habit, she clings to those that show her love.

Kivera remembers herself, and looks down to see the floor moving, arcing up towards her feet. The ends resembling a swarm of worms, making the reaper feel sick at seeing them move like this. She moves higher, and it is there that Garuda shows herself slamming full force into Kivera from the side, sending her into the nearest wall. 

Kivera is fast to rebound but the walls have that same fleshy material. When she connects many tendrils surge to coil around an arm. Kivera burns them off and kicks her feet on the wall to get away from the, rubbing the others off her arms as they break apart. 

Vanth just stands back to watch, keeping his control on the matter around. The imprisoned ixal reach to grab Kivera whenever she was close. The reaper not having a place to stand or rest without something trying to snare her. It will take one careless mistake on her part. One moment of weakness. Something Vanth knows every being to have. He just had to figure out where she will land to think she is safe.

Kivera fights more with Garuda, sending bursts of fire, while Garuda sends wind. They scrap together, talons and claws ripping at feathers, Kivera burning wings and biting her. Garuda using her feet and claws to grasp her target. She snares Kivera and soon pins her to a wall.

Vanth sees his chance, and swarms the tendrils onto Kivera. Each touched with a bright lime flame. Kivera feels something she hasn’t felt in ages. Pain. Pure pain. The tendrils leech life while replacing with lich flames. The color in her skin greenish but stays brown, the black of her hair turns white, and her eyes that convey her emotions stays a pure bright lime color with a glow to them. She looked the same but altered in her appearance.

Kivera couldn’t scream with the claw around her neck keeping her still. All she could even think was sparing those she loves. She rends her connection to Shuri, Estinien, Divinity and any of the children. Scions, she will never forgive them for sending her on this mission. 

Vanth claps and Garuda lets Kivera down, he tests something snapping his fingers for Kivera to raise her arms. She does, there is a look of horror to her eyes at being controlled. Vanth approaches her and lifts her head. The elezen face he had chosen gives a sneer at such a prize he obtained.

“There we are. What should have happened all those years ago. If only Damien was more compliant, you could have had both, him and this life.” Kivera only glares at him, her face the only thing she has control of. Garuda leaves disappearing now that the threat is over.

Vanth circles around Kivera keeping her standing straight, he notes her glaring. He needs her more compliant. Two ixals approach Kivera from behind and take an arm while Vanth gets her to kneel down. Ignoring the hissing under her breath. She doesn’t take her eyes off of Vanth, unsure of what he is planning to do. He fishes an elixir like bottle off a belt he has, one he has safeguarded for the rare occasion he captured Kivera. 

Kivera tightens her mouth knowing the liquid is for her. It is black in color, and she has seen it work once. When he used it on a maid girl back in Salem. It is to control her, it erases the mind, leaving it blank. Kivera is prided in her strong mind, but even she won’t be able to do much if it is in her system. He brewed it specific for her. A catalyst potion.

“This will go smoother if you comply. Not like anyone is going to come save you from this. By the time they even get news of you missing, you are aware they’re use to you going off and doing your own thing. They also know how powerful you are. They wouldn’t think you would be overcome so easy. Yet you did put up quite a fight against Garuda. But it shows even a god slayer like you can still slip up against them.” Vanth raises Kivera’s head, and she attempts to bite him, he uses the opportunity to hook his thumb into her mouth to keep it open.

Quickly he presses the bottle already opened with a flick of the cork off. Kivera wants to turn her head but can’t from his control and the ixal. The liquid burns, like liquid fire in her body, searing from the inside out. With the bottle emptied and cast off to break somewhere. Vanth waits.

He kneels in front of her. He was always a tall man, he might have chosen a roegadyn for their height better. But they didn’t fit the elegance he still holds. And would have raised suspicions. He had been around since Thordan’s end, leading people to follow him from the outskirts of Coerthas, those that disapproved of Aymeric still to the day.

How easy it is to lure people with the idea he can change things back the old way. Even more when he came across Fandaniel, giving him an idea of how to snare Kivera. Earning an ally through the ascian if it meant she would be dealt with.

Kivera feels white hot through her head, like everything she thought and knew was disappearing. It hurt to think, and it pained her to swallow, she tasted that bitter potion and she wanted to drag her tongue across the dirt. Though the only thing available would have been the fleshy floor of the tower. That disgusted her more. 

Her last thoughts were to her loved ones. Sending apologies through the links as she burns them, her last chance to make sure they are safe.

“I am sorry... for what I am about to do. I have no choice. Please know... that the being that you will face.. is not me. Kill her.” Her laments to Divinity, she relays the same to Estinien, then too to Shuri. She ends the link before she loses herself, severing them entirely. They will feel it, like a piece of them is ripped out. She can see Divinity collapsing into tears, and the confusion on Estinien and Shuri following Divinity. 

Kivera has told them endlessly, that things that a lich touches must be destroyed. That includes. Herself. It means a new cycle of spirits to begin, more tragedies to unfold. Kivera wishes even more that she could have used her former abilities. She lets her last thoughts be of the loved ones.

When she opens her eyes again, she looks up to Vanth. Her voice hollow and echoes in the tower. 

“I am at your command.” One final touch to her, a bone wyvern rests on her. A gift but also a symbiote parasite to keep her under his control. Vanth folds his arms.

“Good, I won’t have you attack yet. We need to wait a little bit per Fandaniel’s request for a better opportunity. Now come with me. We have much to do.” 

[bibliocratic]

TMA and Babylon 5

Also known as a babbling treatise on how two mildly similar five season shows with serious commitments to character and narrative arcs from episode one can actually be so personal.

Ok, but that gifset got me thinking – Babylon 5 and The Magnus Archives actually have SO many similarities.

(spoilers for TMA and B5 – yes, yes that one, the 90’s space opera about a space United Nations, no, not the Star Trek one, the other one. )

I MEAN, firstly, both universes are based on the idea that there are vast and ancient entities which are directly interfering with reality. TMA has the Powers, and characters who are actively changed by their alignment to these - Jon’s evolution into the Archivist, Daisy’s loss to the Hunt. B5 has the Vorlons and the Shadows, two ancient races who are directly involving themselves with younger races in order to have a proxy war which has been ongoing for millennia over what fundamentally boils down to irreconcilable worldviews, and their squabbling alters the geopolitics of all the races in the Alliance.

Both shows are about choice, but DEFINITELY about how they are rarely, if ever, black and white decisions. That some choices are unfairly weighted, or made through known or unknown coercion, or made without full knowledge of what your choice will cost you. Oliver Banks did everything he could to avoid it and still became an Avatar of the End. Jon’s choice to become the Archivist wasn’t a choice at all – it was Avatar or death. His decisions to find out more about the role and world he’s inherited from Gertrude in S3 consistently hurts him, but he thinks that knowledge will help him, that they’ll ‘save the world’ from the Unknowing, but the end of S4 shows that while his actions 100% mattered and made a difference and that Tim didn’t sacrifice himself for nothing, he’s just been playing right into Elias’ hands – Elias, who has been working behind the scenes this entire time, who’s leveraged Martin in a petty game between Avatars in order to push Jon into getting his last mark. Morden asks three ambassadors on B5 “What do you want?”, but it’s only Londo’s answer that he wants to see the glory of the Centauri Republic restored to greatness that damns him into increasingly unforgivable choices. The choice of Delenn and Kosh to keep most people in the dark about the true nature and machinations of the Shadows allows them more time to prepare to fight them, but their silence is complicit in the occupation and enslavement of the Narn people.

Even deeper though, it’s about choices ‘made in the dark’, so to speak. Choices made knowing the cost, knowing there’s no glory in it, that no one will know what you fought for or how long you fought, or how much you gave up to achieve something. S4 has most people thinking Martin’s made a deal with the devil and sided with Peter Lukas even though it’s done to protect the others, to protect Jon, because he feels he has nothing left but sacrifice. One of the tragedies in the Apocalypse is that Jon fought so hard to stay human, to not give in to what he obviously needs to survive even if it’s starving him, and Jonah uses him to doom the world anyway. Vir Cotto cannot stop what his people are doing, cannot change what Londo did and he didn’t stop, but he actively tries to save the lives of a people who justifiably hate him, however few of them he can, knowing if he gets caught he’ll be branded a traitor and killed.  Sheridan’s legacy as the Commander of Babylon 5 is vilified during his lifetime (by a despotic authoritarian regime) and after (by academics reading into history and coming to their own conclusions without compassion for the difficulty involved in the choices made). Delenn’s intervention to correct this is heartbreaking because she was there, she has to listen to people speak about things they know nothing about, and ultimately her speech might not make any difference.

Both shows are about identity. The person you are is not the person you will be forever. Melanie’s working on her anger, and it’s hard, and she slips up, but she’s trying. Martin doesn’t have to give pieces of himself away just to be of value to others, and he’s not lonely¸ and he has friends and he’s in love and he’s finally in a place where he’s allowing himself to be honest about all the good and bad parts of himself. G’Kar’s warmongering and desire for revenge on behalf of his people in S1 has tempered despite everything the Centauri do to him, and his final act is to show mercy to a sworn enemy. 

The world you live in is not static, and it can be changed, and that’s both good and bad.  The Powers in the Magnus Archives can be beaten – not without cost – but there are happy endings possible – you can live and thrive in a corrupted world. For Martin and Melanie, they nearly lost themselves to their respective powers because, in part, it offered things they wanted, things they thought might help them. The noble intentions of Earth in making Babylon 5 as a diplomatic gesture for unity after a brutal interstellar war they were going to lose slides rapidly into xenophobia and isolationism under the application of political propaganda. The Vorlons and the Shadows are set up as a good/evil dichotomy, but it’s revealed that’s oversimplified, that both sides are so trapped in their rigid ideologies that neither of them know who they are or what they want outside of each other, and they have to leave all they have ever known to find out, no matter how frightening that is.

And arguably, in their own way, both shows are about philosophy. You’ve got Martin’s ‘I think our experience of the universe has value, even if it disappears forever’ – your choices may not be fair, you may be trapped in a system you have no control over, and there is compromise and sacrifice and love might save you or it might damn you, but your existence will always have meaning. You’ve got Delenn’s ‘we are star-stuff, the universe made manifest’ – everyone is trying to work out their place, there is no singular right answer but it is your responsibility to stand against actions that are wrong, that infringe upon the freedoms and dignities of others, and you must live with your choices and learn what you can from them because to do so otherwise is to allow them to perpetuate forever.

Also, I think Vir Cotto and Martin Blackwood might get on. Add Guillermo De La Cruz from WWDITS and you’ve got a triumvirate of men who have survived belittlement and humiliations to be the unsung heroes of their franchises, whose initially mild-mannered or timid appearances absolutely hide a rock-hard centre of bravery and competence.

[catsnuggler]

I identify with Anakin and Darth Vader a lot. Yes, I know, they aren't figures to idolize. That's... That's why I identify with them.

I know I've been brainwashed since birth, and Anakin was brainwashed since, well, his childhood, anyway. And while Anakin is a child of the force, he is specifically a child created through the dark side of the force, spawned by Palpatine, my own existence is also owed to an authoritarian cult, though no kind of magic was involved in conceiving and birthing me, lmao. We were both raised to believe authorities were right, that what the world needed were wise and just leaders making decisions so others wouldn't have to worry about that, and so the "sinful" wouldn't be elected (I wasn't a full-on theocrat, but I had brainworms back when I genuinely believed in the cult; obviously, my stances have changed considerably since then). We both lost our mothers, and we both grew up in worlds with rules we couldn't in our right minds obey, raised by and alongside people who couldn't understand us.

Anakin fought a literal war with which he became disillusioned, just as he cane to be with those in his own community. Mormons are drilled into believing they are fighting a spiritual war against "The Adversary" and "The World", though the way to win this war is to convert rather than physically kill. I also became disillusioned with the "war" I was raised in. I also grew up during the War on Terror, as 9/11 happened only about 4 months and a week after my 3rd birthday, and I was tempted to one day join it, myself (thank fuck I didn't).

In a nutshell, the point where Anakin and, particularly, Vader and I split off, is on whether we chose to at least believe in liberty, or authority. Now, even Vader hates slavery, but he supports an empire which still deals in slaves, as Anakin supported a republic which tolerated slavery. Putting that aside, Skywalker chose to bend the knee, literally, to tyranny. He did so by degrees, but there obviously came the make-or-break, final choice, and he chose the side of tyranny. Well, he eventually rescinded that, once and for all, but you know what I mean. On the other hand, though I hypocritically don't do shit for anarchism yet, I chose to at least follow anarchism in my heart and mind, instead of fascism, in no small part thanks to my friends, and one in particular.

Doesn't mean I'm a paragon of morality. I've made mistakes. I've hurt people. Not Order 66 level, by any means, but... like Vader, I believed for a long time that I was guilty of something unforgivable, even though I wasn't guilty of it, it was just something that happened, that I thought I did, but didn't actually have the ability to do. However, because of the conditioning I've gone under from cult authorities, I was inclined to believe I had done it, and it deepened, for years, the belief that I still struggle with today: that I'm barely helpful, if helpful at all, with anything good and worthwhile, and am only good at hurting others.

Like me, Anakin, and later Vader, wanted to lead others, but found himself becoming nothing more than a follower. Now, a difference is that I've embraced the "kill your idols" philosophy of anarchism to an unhealthy extent; while I don't worship figures like Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Zinn, Bookchin, viewing them as figures who had good ideas, but also faults, some rather major, I also find it hard to view anyone as a role model, which leaves me rather directionless. Despite my rejection of a figurehead, however, I am still subjected to the follower mentality; I view myself as a follower, not an agent, of anarchism. I have replaced following individuals with following movements. It's certainly not wrong to believe in something, at least depending on what that something is, but to reduce oneself to a mere follower, while only granting the freedom of agency to other people, is hypocritical, and actively, universally harmful to oneself. This is also a result of conditioning. America told me I have agency. My father told me I have agency. The cult told me I have agency. With their words, they reminded me I have agency. But they also told me I don't have agency. My father called me a slave, sometimes playfully ("We're going to work like slaves on this house!"), sometimes angrily, even going so far as to say he is "The GOD of this house!". America is authoritarian in ways that are probably already manifest to you if you've been following me all this time. The Mormon/LDS cult emphasizes we have agency to "choose the right", essentially whatever the prophets tell you you have to do. You also have agency to sin, but "to know God and turn your back on him" can and will, without "repentance", lead to "apostasy", and from there to "outer darkness", essentially Mormon Hell.

Anakin and Vader were what the Jedi and Sith told them to be, and, having been enslaved, so to speak, in one way or another, since childhood, when he was literally a slave, he eventually lashed out and betrayed those who had raised him in some cage or another, but he didn't do so in a healthy way. Anakin rebelled and became Vader in a way that enslaved the galaxy and killed countless innocents, while also scarring and disabling himself. Vader's rebellion, which returned him to his original identity as Anakin Skywalker, was ultimately - immediately, in fact - an act of rebellion which cost him his life. It was justified, but it was nonetheless harmful to himself, even if he had finally restored his self, his individual existence, and his moral agency, in his self-sacrifice. I was what I was told to be, until I eventually rebelled, and it's been nowhere near as costly, but it was also harmful to myself.

Again, I know Anakin's/Vader's tale is one of caution, and not a path to idolize and follow, save for the belief that it is never too late to restore oneself, to heal, to choose to be good. But I know this because I also lost my way. In some ways, I was lost from my first breath. This is why he is close to my heart; I'm lost, because I was misled, and I need to find my way. I hope I will be more successful than he was. More successful and without facing nearly the same costs.

[dramioneasks]

Can you pretty please recommend some of your personal favorite dark!fics (like anything with either non/dub possessive!Draco ect?)

Here are some of mine (Warning: Some of these stories contain graphic depictions of rape):

Her Shoes by margaritama - NC-17, 19 Chapters - Draco Malfoy has demanded Hermione Granger head up an important new Wizard and Muggle venture he’s funding. They’ll be working at his home. Why would he do this? It’s clear he can’t stand her. Isn’t it?

Out of the Silent Planet by ianthe_waiting - NC-17, 39 chapters - Hermione Granger fulfills Severus Snape’s final wish, to journey to Japan to ‘retrieve’ something of importance.

A Slow Cruel Descent by SenLinYu - M, 2 Chapters - The war grinds on and Hermione Granger, the lead intelligence for the Order of the Pheonix, is captured. Unable to crack her through interrogation without risking her mind, Voldemort conceives a cruel method of breaking her that involves a reluctant Draco Malfoy.

The Unbreakable Bond by MrBenzedrine - M, one-shot - One Shot. STRONG THEMES. Very Point? What Point? Hermione forms an unbreakable bond with Draco- Smut to follow! ANGST 3Plus,Abuse,Anal,Angst,BDSM,Bond,COMPLETE,Contro,D/s,Dom,F/F,Fingering,H/C,HJ,Humil,M/s,Oneshot,Oral,Other VERY DARK.

Crumple by MissiAmphetamine - M, 11 chapters - As the war rages on two years post-‘final battle’, Hermione is captured by the other side and Malfoy is the only hope she has of surviving. [“Granger?” His voice is urgent, but she just sits there and breathes for a moment, feeling violated and still radiating pain, her eyes staring blindly at the cell wall opposite her, her brain frozen in what she thinks dully might be shock.]

Pieces by Kyra4 - M, 5 Chapters - Can the same person who broke you into pieces, be the person to put you back together again?

Voices by Kyonomiko - M, 3 Chapters - Hermione has long accepted she might not make it through the war alive, but after years on the battlefield, she never expected to be at the mercy of Draco Malfoy. Not untouched by his own experiences, his manic behavior leaves her living in constant fear of the unknown, suffering both affections and afflictions at his hands.

Stone Dragons by gravidy - R, 3 Chapters - Sometimes there are no right decisions. There are only actions and consequences. Hermione’s only choice now is who to betray.

And So No One Else Can Have You by flipflop_diva - E, one-shot - Hermione may be Draco’s slave, but she is not quite as controllable as Draco would like. And that is something that Draco needs to put a stop to. An AU world set after Deathly Hallows. Based on the prompt Hermione is a war slave. Not only that, she is Draco’s war slave. Draco is a cruel master, but he is also in love with her. She grows to love him back.

The Beggar-Thief by gravidy - NC-17, 8 Chapters - Hermione Granger doesn’t believe in things that have never been seen. But then, she doesn’t believe in a lot of things anymore. Hermione Granger has enough problems without worrying about Pureblood kidnappings and techno-geeks. The last thing she needs is Draco Malfoy breathing down her neck.

The Lions of December by Gravidy - NC-17, 2 Chapters - She calls me Goliath and I wear the David mask. I’d like to believe we could reconcile the past. Resurrect those bridges with an ancient glance. But my old stone face can’t seem to break her down. She remembers bridges and burns them to the ground.–Excerpts from 7Mary3 “Cumbersome”

Uncoffined by lady_of_clunn - E, 13 Chapters - When all is lost, we are willing to do whatever it takes to survive. 2nd place in the category ‘Best WIP’ in the 2009 dramione_awards on LJ.

Cold Side of the Moon by RZZMG - M, 10 Chapters - Released from Azkaban & tossed into the Forbidden Forest, Hermione Granger must escape the predators & survive for 8 days to earn her freedom. She doesn’t expect to make it knowing Werewolf!Draco Malfoy is somewhere in the forest, too, just waiting for the next victim of The Games to arrive. Dramione. 2013 HP-Darkarts Fest entry. Nom’d HPFanficFanPollAwards-Best Dark Fic. COMPLETE!

The Fool, the Emperor, and the Hanged Man by ianthewaiting - M, 28 Chapters - Ten years after the fall of the Dark Lord, Hermione Granger leads of life of self-imposed obscurity, that is, until the day Headmistress Minerva McGonagall is murdered and a certain ‘hero’ is responsible. DM/HG, written originally in 2007-2008, and finally making its debut here! AU, DH-EWE, non-canon elements, time travel, character death, etc.

Utterly Despicable by camnz - M, 24 Chapters - The death of both Voldemort and Harry Potter let the pureblood elite build the world they wanted. One that leaves Hermione in a vulnerable state, which Draco Malfoy is prepared to take full advantage of.

Manacled by SenLinYu - M, 77 Chapters - Harry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret locked away in her mind. She is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve, to be bred and monitored until it can be accessed. COMPLETE

The Gift by RZZMG - M, one-shot - After imbibing too much on Christmas Eve, Draco Malfoy decides to give himself a gift: Hermione Granger, his war prize slave. Can her gift of love tame the darkness in his heart? One-shot. Dramione/dark Draco x Hermione. A/U,Post-Hogwarts,EWE. COMPLETE!

Every Way You Look At This by tamlane - R, one-shot - Sometimes it’s difficult to tell who is indebted to whom. Which really has little to do with the means of collection, when you’re a Malfoy.

Save You, Save Me by flipflop_diva - R, one-shot - For five years, Draco Malfoy has kept Hermione Granger hidden away from the Dark Lord’s wrath. In exchange for her life, she’ll do what he says. But Hermione is about to find out that not everything is how it seems.

Worth The Risk by scarletladyy - M, one-shot - The world is a dangerous place for Hermione and other Muggleborns, and when she meets the Death Eater’s most infamous torturer in a dark alleyway, she thinks her life is over, until it turns out that this Death Eater may have a conscience after all.

His One Unforgivable Sin by DramioneInLove - M, 8 Chapters - In a world where Muggle-borns are the “lower class”, Hermione Granger works for Madam Malkin’s as an apprentice. When pure-blood women who have bought dress robes from Madam Malkin’s die mysteriously, Draco Malfoy starts the investigation, and Hermione is his first suspect. DramioneLove fest submission. Winner of Mod’s Choice: Best Dystopian Universe Fic. Warnings inside.

Master by AkashaTheKitty - M, one-shot -The war drags on and Hermione Granger is caught and then bought by her old enemy Draco Malfoy. But why did he do that when he obviously isn’t really interested in using her for anything? AU, very ugly themes, ONESHOT!

The Slow Thaw by camnz - M, 21 Chapters - Hermione is serving at Malfoy Mansion after the war was lost. In her bleak existance, she manages to find ways to cope. Contains nonconsentual. COMPLETE.

Subsistence by ratherbsailing - NC-17, 3 chapters - In times of war, people find different ways to survive.

Squirm by MrBenzedrine - M, 28 Chapters - Written for Halloween, 2016. Dramione. Rated M for non-con themes, as well as implied horror. TRIGGER WARNING. Draco Malfoy falls into a strange obsession with Hermione Granger. But it’s a risk -he holds a dark, sinister secret, and if he becomes too close, she just might find out what it is. Dark Fic. WIP. **WINNER: Best WIP 2017 Winter Dramione Awards** *Complete*

Crimson with a Silver Lining by Lady Cailan - M, 78 Chapters - It is six years since the fall of the Ministry to Voldemort. Those other than purebloods are deemed less than human. When Ginny’s daughter ends up in grave danger, Hermione sells herself to the Death Eaters to save her life. Draco/Hermione. Not fluffy.

His Beautiful, Haunting Eyes by thecellarfloor - M, 14 Chapters - Draco pushed her to the wall, kissed her roughly on the lips, then punched the glass window beside her head. It smashed into pieces and the crowd who had parted for him seconds ago gasped. Hermione couldn’t. She couldn’t even breathe. What have you done?

- AgnMag

[earthspirit10]

Ninjago Angst Week: Day 1 - Past

@ninjago-angst-week Day 1 of Ninjago Angst Week.

Alright, this is my first time ever writing for Ninjago Angst Week. Probably might mess it up, but... I’m just doing what I love. Though it’s kind of short compared to what I usually write and what I’m used to.

This scene has always been stuck with me ever since Cole’s flashback with Wu in Season 8, but then it just got stronger after Season 13. (Spoilers for Season 13 if you haven’t watched it yet.)

Also, I’m not entirely satisfied with the ending... at least, compared to the first part. But anyway, without further ado, here it is!

Trigger Warnings: Mention of death, grief, slight mention of slavery.

---

Cole stared at the doctor, not yet processing her words. “What?” he whispered, dread slowly filling his soul. No, that couldn’t be true, they still had time. They still had so much to do, so many things to experience, so many memories together. Didn’t the doctors say that they could help her? She couldn’t be gone, not yet, not— not ever.

The doctor, a woman by the name of Dr. Alderwood, lowered her head. “I’m sorry. Your mother has . . . passed away.”

His father made a strangled sound at the back of his throat. A few stifling seconds passed before Cole took a step back, then another, shaking his head slowly. “No—” his voice cracked. “No, that—”

Dr. Alderwood tried reaching out for Cole to comfort him, her eyes sympathetic, but he pulled away. His dark eyes glared into her, harsh and unforgiving.

“You lied,” Cole seethed, his voice quiet, but the sheer force that he said it sent both his father and the doctor reeling back in shock. “You told us that she’ll survive, that she’ll get better, that— that everything will go back to normal and—” He turned his head away, wiping furiously at his eyes.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, but he shoved it away. He didn’t need anyone to pity him. It wasn’t like it was going to bring her back anyway.

“Cole—” he heard his father say.

Cole snapped, “Leave me alone!” And almost immediately, he regretted it. Because seeing his father’s heartbroken expression, he realized that he wasn’t the only one hurting. He wasn’t the only one who lost someone—his father, his dad, lost his wife, and stupid Cole had to go and break his father’s heart even more by yelling at him as if he didn’t even care.

Without waiting for a response, he turned and ran. He ran like his life depended on it, pushing through the doctors and nurses and visitors and patients who were well enough to walk and then he burst out of the hospital, gasping for much-needed fresh air, his fists clenching tightly at his chest. A few worried glances shot his way, but Cole ignored it and stumbled to a random direction, even as hands reached out to him in concern.

He wasn’t sure how far he ran, but the next thing he knew, he was ducked in a bush, emptying out his stomach. His body shook with sobs as hot tears ran down his face. Eventually, he collapsed onto the ground, curling into himself, pressing his palms to his eyes.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that his mother, of all people, had to be cursed with an almost incurable disease. And maybe Cole should’ve seen it— should’ve seen the light slowly fade from her eyes as time passed by, because even as she seemed to act like everything was okay, even as she tried to be brave for him (and because of him, she kept delaying the inevitable, she kept decreasing her chances of survival, and it was all because of him), her body was still failing and she was still dying.

But that didn’t mean it hurt any less. In fact, it hurt even more to see his mother slowly die inside from the effort of delaying, before her body crumpled with her.

Cole felt something shift, and then footsteps, long and heavy, came his way. Immediately he knew that it was his father, and he only hugged himself tighter. Honestly, he was surprised that Lou actually came and looked for him. It wasn’t like they had the best relationship. And yet, Cole felt a small stab of guilt as he remembered how he’d yelled at him before.

His father sat down beside his pitiful, curled form. He heard him sigh. Before his father could say anything, though, Cole mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

“What?” his father jolted in surprise. “What are you sorry for?”

Don’t make me say it, Dad.

“Cole . . .” he tried, his voice pained. “Whatever it is you’re thinking of, you have nothing to be sorry for.”

A sob escaped from Cole as tears mercilessly cascaded down his cheeks.

“I’m not mad at you for yelling, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re young; it’s only natural that you would grieve for your mother, even if you have to be . . . loud and violent about it. But this is—”

“It’s all my fault!” Cole blurted, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “It’s my fault that Mom’s gone in the first place, that she was sick, and now she’s dead and she’s never coming back and it’s all my fault!”

Silence followed his outburst, long and stifling. Cole shifted nervously and lifted his head to meet his father’s eyes, which were—

Oh, no. His father was giving that look, the one that said a million things and yet one thing at the same time, the concerned one that demanded an explanation. Cole cringed. That wasn’t— he didn’t mean to say that out loud, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Stupid, stupid Cole, always messing everything up, blurting out his problems for the world to be bothered by—

“Cole, what makes you think that it’s your fault?” his father asked quietly, sounding tentative, as if he was almost afraid of Cole’s response.

Cole swallowed, turning his gaze away and burying his head in between his knees. He didn’t want this conversation, he didn’t even mean to say anything at all. But his father was his father; he always got what he wanted.

“Cole, please, answer me.”

Cole stubbornly remained silent. His father didn’t need to know. He didn’t need to be burdened with Cole’s problems that he could certainly take care of himself.

“I need to know, Cole.” A pause. Then a shuffle. A sigh. “Just, please. Stop blaming yourself. Cancer is something that can’t be prevented. There was nothing we could do to save her.”

And though his father was right, Cole couldn’t help but still feel that it was his fault. Maybe if they had found out sooner, maybe if Cole hadn’t insisted on going on all those childish trips, if Cole would just notice how much his mother was in pain, then maybe she could still be saved. Maybe then it wouldn’t be too late to save her.

“Cole.” A hand was placed on his shoulder. Cole was tempted to shrug it off, but he allowed it to stay. “It’s not your fault, alright?”

But it’s all my fault.

Still, Cole nodded. Slowly. He uncurled from his tight ball and leaned his head on the wall behind him.

What were they going to do now? His mother was the only one who actually cared for what he wanted, the only one who actually noticed how much he hated what his father pushed him through. This was just one of the rare times that his father really showed that he cared. But now . . . Lilly was dead.

How in Ninjago were they ever going to fix that?

“Come on,” his father said gently, interrupting his depressing thoughts. He stood up, brushing away some dirt and twigs. “Let’s go home.”

Cole didn’t answer.

“Cole?”

Cole breathed out a shuddering breath, closing his eyes. A moment passed before he nodded numbly and stood with him, wiping away already-dried tears.

The walk to the car was a tense and quiet one.

⸺

“I want you to promise me, Cole, that you will always stand up to those who are cruel and unjust. Always.”

Years later, Cole stared at Shintaro Mountain, which was slowly moving out of sight as the Bounty sailed through the air. Miles and miles below the earth was his mother’s statue. It was hard to believe that the warrior who had once saved the underground creatures from Grief-Bringer had been taken down by cancer of all things.

His mind trailed back to the day— the day his mother died. Tears pricked at his eyes as they closed, and he remembered the crushing despair that had followed when the doctor delivered the terrible news, the anger and grief that washed over him, drowning him in it until he firmly told himself, No more. Mom would want me to move on.

Way earlier than that, back when he was still a child, Cole remembered that day when he made his promise. To always stand up to those who are cruel and unjust. Was she looking at him now? Was that even possible in the Departed Realm? He hoped she was proud of him. He wished he could talk to his mother, even if it was for one last time. One last time was all he wanted.

He guessed it was a proud and impressive feat, defeating the Skull Sorcerer. Ever since he found out that the Geckles and Munce were being enslaved to work, Cole had felt a fiery rage in him that he thought only existed in Kai, but the sight of someone being so cruel as to force creatures to work for them brought on an almost uncontrollable fury that threatened to burst. Cole was glad, gleeful even, that Vangelis had gotten the punishment he deserved.

But . . . was his mother proud of him? She must be. He tried hard, so hard to make both his parents proud. If only he could see her now, hear the confirmation that she was proud.

Opening his eyes, Cole whispered to the drifting wind, “Are you proud of me, Mom? I hope you are.” A shuddering breath followed. “Because I’m proud of who I am.”

“I— I promise, Mom. Always.”

[drunklander]

Drunj!Der Yells About Outlander

Thoughts on Ep. 510

This show is like, here’s some deeply problematic and shittily plotted source material, what if, instead of adapting it and telling a compelling story that isn’t basically just constant violence against women, we just lean in to that. Because clearly what modern, primarily female audiences want is to be reminded that women can only be victims or have their stories be defined by their relationships with men, because the world was and is always out to hurt them and without men, what’s the point of them. Really groundbreaking and compelling stuff. *eye roll so hard it hurts*

I couldn’t even muster up anger while watching this. Feeling anger would mean that on some level, I still cared and was invested in the show. But I really just felt resigned. Like yup, this is a bad show and while it might have a fluke good episode or scene every now and then, overall it’s rull not good.

*pours one out for what the show could have been*

Y’all, did you know that Stephen Bonnet is a bad guy? I know it hasn’t been subtle with just the raping and murdering, but just in case you didn’t pick up what he’s putting down, let’s throw in some sex trafficking. Because, you know, the past is dangerous for women.

*already wants to stop watching this show*

Lowkey judging all the men in Wilmington who do business with Bonnet tbh. Like, there’s more than one smuggler in the world. Why work with the one who is a raging sociopath?

In the tradition of there only being a grand total of 4 names in the Outlanderverse, even the aliases are repeated. Alexander Malcolm is the dread pirate Roberts of whisky.

Can we please have a whole series about Claire just being a doctor? Because I liked the scene of her getting a syringe tube made more than most other things in the whole season tbh.

But of course, it’s the past. And that’s dangerous for women. So clearly something bad is about to happen to them.

*eye rolls for days*

GIVE ME ALL OF CLAIRE AND BREE SCAVENGING. GIVE ME ALL OF THEM CHATTING ABOUT MEDICINE AND NON-FRED STORIES OF THEIR OLD LIVES. CAN WE PLEASE HAVE JUST AN HOUR OF THAT PLEASE AND THANK YOU?

Omfg I cannot with Roger being like, I’m not good at fighting, but I am going to be the one who kills the man who is very good at fighting. Because “Brianna’s yer daughter, but she’s my wife.” So clearly that means I get to do the murder. And we’ll each do some murder if the other dies.

Oh I’m sorry, did I hit my head and wake up in patriarchal bullshit land?

Yeah, Outlander isn’t political, but here’s a scene about the damage humans do to the environment and the animals we share the Earth with.

Also, we call it the Cape. We go down the Cape. We see things off the Cape. Cape Cod is for the tourists.

LOOK AT MY PRECIOUS BADASSES BEING ALL CUTE AND RUNNING ON THE BEACH. Welp, that’s over. Can’t go more than thirty seconds without a woman being in danger. Those are just the rules of The Past.

Also like, of course Bonnet didn’t show up for the deal. These dumbos are like expecting the rape and murder champion of the Carolina’s to play by normal rules of business. Like, have you met this dude? Idiots.

Jamie letting Roger almost get killed is A Mood.

Gonna ignore the Bonnet bullshit and just point out that this Claire lewk is maybe my favorite of the season. Love the dress, love the hair.

This story line is hot garbage, but at least we’re spared him keeping his fucking testicle in a jar.

Yes, she hates you because you forgot her name in the jail. And violent rape is totally a bygone that can be whistled past.

Lol at Brianna, or anyone really, giving a shit about the enslaved people at River Run only when she’s trapped with a psycho.

This whole thing is annoying af. Like he’s clearly not capable of keeping up his fun game of the week of being a doting husband and father. Like, in no reality is this a real thing he can be. I like was getting a stomach ache just thinking about how stressed Brianna is during all of this. And then they’re like oh well let’s talk about his tragic past. Like nope, stop right there, plenty of people have tragic pasts and don’t end up being rapists and murderers. This doesn’t make him a deeper character or sympathetic in any way.

Fucker doesn’t really want a family and son or whatever. He fleetingly likes the idea of having them. Ditto with being accepted and recognized in society.

“There are two sides to every story” is dangerous bullshit. There is no excuse for raping someone. None. Zero. There is one and only one story and it’s that raping someone is wrong and an unforgivable act. No trauma or struggle in someone’s past mitigates them raping someone.

No one gives a fuck about your nightmares, Bonnet. But sure, let’s give shittons of screen time to this.

“I could never think any less of you.” I see what you did there, Bree.

I can’t stand that literally Bree’s entire story is about her rape. But, you know, ThE pAsT aNd ThE bOoKs, so clearly a woman can’t have a story line outside of trauma or supporting a man.

Also, like, Bree? This whole playing along survival tactic? Bonnet’s not stupid. No judgment or anything, she’s in an impossible position, but like there was zero chance this wouldn’t blow up.

Hi viewer, are you bummed that there isn’t *more* rape in Outlander? Well do we have a treat for you! Rape by Proxy! If you thought we were running out of main characters to rape, don’t worry! We’ll force characters to watch as their rapist fucks someone else to make sure they know that more rape is on the horizon!

Also, guessing Eppie isn’t a sex worker because she wants to be. Survival sex work, just another hit on the never ending The Past (and Present) Is Dangerous For Women list.

I still do not understand the point of Duncan. Like, at all. It’s the most pointless BeCaUsE tHe BoOk thing ever and therefore more annoying than it should be.

Forbes is annoying af and also like Jocasta isn’t dumb. Her not picking up that he’s a weasel seems...not believable. And if she’s intentionally fucking with him, her not having someone in the room as backup is also dumb.

Oh and with Ulysses using her name and kissing her hand, I swear to fuck if they do the they were banging the whole time thing next week, I’ma...not be at all surprised. Because of course they would. Le sigh.

Rape and kidnap isn’t enough trauma for one person, let’s also try to sex traffic her! I can’t. I just cannot.

I am so tired, y’all. So. Fucking. Tired.

At least this crap is wrapped up no and we’re not subjected to another season of it like we were subjected to another book’s worth.

It’s getting so hard to find silver linings, yo.

They spend a disproportional amount of time showing Bonnet tied to the pole. Just again centering the rapist instead of the survivor. Seriously on brand for the show and seriously fucked up that they’re cool with this being their brand.

Brianna shooting him is like a rare instance of her having agency. Good for her.

And fuck Roger for being like is that mercy or so you know he’s dead? It can be fucking either or both, you tool, and be a valid af choice either way. Or is it only ok for you men to kill him? Because I remember not even an hour ago you being like nope, my dick’s bigger, I get to kill him.

And of course it ends on a shot of Bonnet and not Bree, lest we forget who the show cares about centering.