#dirks more 'a little bit violence is sometimes needed'

[clockworkcheetah]

something i rly like about dirk is that hes kind but not a 100% pacifist character

#obviously if theres a non violent sure fire way to do a casethen hell take it #but he isnt exactly a 'violence is never the answer' kind of person #we need more characters like that #kind but isnt gonna let the bad guy walk free because Morals or whatever #dirks more 'a little bit violence is sometimes needed' #like saving todd and amanda in wendimoor by using the rowdies #or launching the kittenshark at the cultists #true he didnt know it was a shark #but he also didnt seem bothered that he murdered a bunch of people #two people not a bunch i should probs word that a lil better #but dirk isnt exactly sympathetic to people who try and kill him #which tbh i also sorta love about his character #he isnt kind to people he doesnt think deserves it its nice to see a kind character do that

[unseasoned-brain-worms]

Dirk Info Post

Meet my main Tav, and main BG3 OC, Dirk Knifely. Circle Of Spore Druid/ Thief Rogue, A pickpocket and secondstoryman from Baldur's Gate. Her favorite wildshape form is a rat, the green stuff is mold not tattoos (don't worry, she swears it's not contagious), she's a hexblood, who's frequently mistaken for a half elf. Her full info is under the cut.

Name• Dirk Knifely, her given name is Acantha, but no one uses it these days.

Age• 22  during the events of BG3

Race• Hexblood, she is generally mistaken for a half wood elf.

Height• 4’9

Weight• 74 pounds, Dirk is built like a bag of Twigs.

Religion • God's have never done her any favors, she's not about to go expecting them now.

She's pretty sure Tymora has it out for her, and thinks most gods of justice are actively hypocrites who don't do their jobs.

Honestly, most gods can go suck an egg.

Personality•

Dirk is a hard one to explain.  Suspicious, awkward, jumpy.  And just generally off-putting, despite being fairly perceptive and good at getting a handle on a situation she has a phenomenal knack for saying the wrong thing.  She's blunt and lacks any real idea of how to keep her thoughts to herself even when she knows she should.  She tries most of the time.  She generally tries very hard to shut the hell up, avoid notice and let everyone else talk.  Since when she does it it's always a disaster.  

Dirk likes to be engaged with something at all times, she has a hard time relaxing so can usually be found applying herself to some kind of task, finding some way to make herself useful.  She tries to plan for most things, and absolutely doesn't trust things to go well.

She doesn't actually get nicer, or easier to be around, once she gets comfortable around people, she just gets louder, quicker to say what's on her mind.  Especially if other people are being stupid.  And when aren't people being idiots?

She does try to be, if not nice, then helpful, to the people around her, she knows her personality isn't going to win any points but she can be useful.

She also has a, in her own opinion, unfortunately over active sense of empathy.  Largely it extends to other people in similarly shitty positions to herself.  Little guys who no one else is going to like or help.  She has a special soft spot for goblins, and other poor kids.

She's got a bit of a protective streak there.  And it sometimes wins out over her keenly honed sense of self preservation, and it drives her nuts everytime it does, Dirk would far rather be a coward with a pulse then a dead hero.

Generally Dirk is a person with very few Morals, she will do what it takes to get through the day.  Even if it means lying, or being underhanded.  And she won't judge anyone else for taking the same tactic.

That said, she won't nark.  So, she's got one line.  No ratting out friends or coworkers.

While Dirk might be a nervous wreck in conversation and more mundane interactions, it's worth noting that she's surprisingly cool headed in a fight.  Violence is easy, sticking a knife in the other guy is a simple task.  She's similarly cool headed in other really high pressure emergencies, as long as there is a clear thing that needs to happen.  She can keep herself together.

Pre BG3 History•

Dirk was born to Daniel and Cassia Knifely.  And that’s when the trouble started.  

Actually, if we want to be technical, Dirk’s problems started well before she was born.  Her mom kinda made a deal with a hag.  

Cassia was a trainee Druid, and her circle enacted The Right of Thorns, spend enough time isolated with the kind of nutcase who thinks that’s a smart move and you’d be willing to make some bad deals too.  So Cassia promised her hypothetical first born to a spooky green lady in exchange for the magic to get out.  

But as far as Dirk is concerned, the trouble started when she was born.  

There were early and obvious signs that there was something wrong with Dirk.  Pointy ears, pointy teeth, pointy claws, yellow eyes, the mold patches.  

And the magic.  

She is, apparently, according to experts, by which I mean, her mom, her dad’s poker buddy Dave, and some confused third party’s.  Definitely some kind of Druid.

She’s been talking to rats since she was old enough to chitter, calling up weeds and brambles to help her get away from problems, and wild shaping since she was old enough to think like a rat.  

And has a natural affinity for decay and fungus, and a ridiculously strong constitution when it comes to dealing with that sort of thing.  She can and will eat firmly rotten meat and not bat an eye. 

Anyways, despite some strange habits, and a distinctly lacking social life, Dirk’s early life was, fine, not happy, they were still living in the shitty part of The Gate after all, but her parents were well meaning, if not actually good at the whole thing, and they all lived in the little rooms above their apothecary shop.  Making potions and poisons and explosives, and whatever else could be cobbled together and sold to the masses.

Dirk took to it quickly, and pretty early on realized that she could turn into venomous animals, and then milk that venom, and then put that venom on weapons, which did wonders for business. 

And then her parents exploded.  

Just a freak accident, Daniel’s lab safety was sloppy.  And even if it wasn't just a terrible accident, well it's not like The Fist would Care enough actually look into it.

Heavens forfend they do their job.

Dirk was also a little too busy being ten, and homeless, and terrified to actually start an investigation.

Instead she turned up at the doorstep of Druid Dave, one of her dad's card buddies.

Dave said she could crash there if she made herself useful and that was the arrangement right up until she got kidnapped by mindflayers.  

Dave, to be clear, is not a druid, he's a wizard school drop out who fucked around in the feywild, accidentally made a pact with a few different arch fey, and has been juggling his competing pacts ever since.  He may have sold  his soul to a devil as well.

He just has a beard and big stick and wears a lot of green.

People assume the Druid thing, he can't be arsed to correct them.  Druid Dave has a good ring to it.

He's also a fence, and a thief, and a two bit con man.  

He owes most people money, and Dirk is frequently the one stuck paying up.  Either via sending some healing spells a person's way, or using her wild shape abilities to help with second story work.

They are both fairly well known around The Guild Hall, Dave more so, Dirk usually clings to the shadows.  

She's spent most of her life at this point as a pickpocket Errand runner, and career criminal, and she knows her way around Baldur's gate faster than most people. 

If you've been paying close attention though, you might be wondering if the whole, her mom kinda sold her to a hag thing is going to come up.  

Through an absolutely wacky series of coincidences, it hasn't yet.  See, hexblood's like Dirk are supposed to undergo a ritual to turn into a hag when they turn thirteen.

It's a slightly different process then eating a baby and giving birth to a similar but greener baby.

And Dirk’s hag lost track of her.  Because her parents exploded.

And because she moved in with Dave.

And Dave’s Landlord is a Green Hag named Agnes.  

This isn't public knowledge, in general the hags in Baldur's Gate like to keep their activity to themselves.  

But Agnes has beef with whoever is supposed to be collecting Dirk, and may want to keep a spare hexblood on hand in case her coven has an opening.  So she's been keeping scrying eyes off her.  

This isn't public knowledge either, but Dirk has put the pieces together, so she's a bit worried that being so far from home will nullify that protection. 

It's probably fine though.  

She'd rather not be a hag. But, whatever she has going on now is pretty lousy anyways.

#Bg3 Tav #Baldur's Gate 3 OC #Dirk Knifely #Character intro post

[autumnblogs]

Day 44: Preoccupied about the same things as Trolls, revisited

Welcome back y’all! Before we get into this, I want to talk about the Condesce/Meenah as a parallel character to Mom Lalonde/Roxy. You can read a bit about @mmmmalo​‘s takes on Openbound, and why they think that Meenah is symbolically Roxy’s Doppelganger here.

I want to call attention to some specific similarities between them, and while I think it’s a bit of a stretch, Homestuck draws parallels between characters all the time.

Both the Condesce and Mom Lalonde are matriarch figures estranged from their potential offspring by dire circumstances and servitude to a patriarchal authority and his time-spanning plan - for the Condesce, that’s English obviously, but for Mom Lalonde, that’s Grandpa Harley - servitude to his design renders her a wreck of an alcoholic forced to endure the end of days with no means to stop them from happening, living with a daughter who wants nothing to do her.

Both Meenah and Roxy are rebels against a repressive order, inclined to shirk their assigned Role in service to someone else’s master plan, but ultimately, through some roundabout means or another, give service to it anyway (for Meenah, scratching the game, and ultimately ending up English’s glorified slave for eons in the end; for Roxy, at first refusing to play Sburb in hopes of spiting the Batterwitch, but ultimately ending up playing into her schemes anyway).

They are both rebellious spirits who are repeatedly forced to participate in Paradox Space’s Alpha Timeline all but against their will by hegemonic forces, slaves to a system that they exist in perpetual rebellion against, and by the end of the comic, they both get to help strike a decisive blow against the ultimate foe. Unfortunately, unlike Roxy, Meenah is ultimately the kind of person who chooses at practically every occasion to continue cycles of abuse instead of breaking them. There is ultimately no possibility of reconciliation between these estranged sisters.

So, I see a lot of the Alpha Kids in the four Alpha Trolls who appear in this flash. As the Faux Heroic Himbo, the parallel between Rufioh and Jake is obvious. I don’t think that it’s fair to characterize Jake’s relationship with Dirk as being “cheating on Jane,” though that’s probably how Jane feels about the whole situation; I’ve always gotten the impression she feels entitled to him.

More after the break.

The imagery here is an obvious parallel between Jake and Dirk’s big damn kiss, and Rufioh and Horuss’s - but between Rufioh’s bravado and general obliviousness, and Horuss’s clear triangular parallel with Dirk and Equius, we should expect that the situation is switched here - Dirk = Horuss, Rufioh = Jake.

While it could easily just be a bit of extraneous characterization, I’m inclined to regard Rufioh’s characterization of the women in his life as “Dolls” especially because of his symbolic proximity to Lord English. (He is at best one degree of separation from him, as Jake English’s Alpha Troll Doppelganger) - and the fact that Puppets and Dolls are pretty much synonymous with each other in terms of the way that English interacts with them.

More extremely obvious parallels.

Both of the Zahhaks have hangups about dating down the Hemospectrum, and as long as we’re examining Dirk through the lens of the Zahhaks, allow me to speculate; I think that part of the reason Dirk chooses not to directly identify with the label of gay is less aloofly progressive futurism, and more that he is uncomfortable with his own sexuality.

As a guy who repeatedly appeals to reactionary ideals and rhetorical devices like “Western Civilization,” “Reason,” “Logic,” maybe there is a degree to which we can read Horuss and Equius’ self-repression through the haemospectrum into Dirk suffering from internalized Homophobia.

This is a real long shot, but I’ve always gotten the impression that Dirk is a bit of a bottom. Maybe his desire in building up Jake into a powerful counterpart, like English’s desire to transform Jake into a powerful rival, is built out of a desire to be Oedipally usurped by a former pupil - to have his Eromenos turn the tables, and become the Erastes in turn, in power-dynamic terms.

In Classical Civilization, homosexual relations weren’t unheard of, and were pretty reasonably common, but it was seen as shameful to bottom, especially for someone of a lower social standing than you were (Julius Caesar was mocked as the Queen of Bithynia when it was rumored that he bottomed for Nicomedes IV, which was a serious attack on his political career).

Wild speculative tangent over.

Now this is interesting; Meenah is unwittingly drawing a parralel between Damara and Vriska. The main commonality between them is that, like Vriska (and also like Rose, and also like Jane - who is the fourth and final character in this particular set) her spite and resentment is used as the vector for English’s manipulation of their setting.

Like Vriska, Damara deliberately sabotages the ability of her session members to win, helping to create a powerful foe who forces a session to be scratched.

Like Rose, Damara descends into nihilistic substance abuse to cope with feelings of emptiness.

Like Jane, Damara’s actual feelings of emptiness come about as a result of feelings of rejection in relation to betrayal from within her close friendship circle.

Ironically, while Damara’s reaction is far worse than Jane’s, her anger is actually probably far more understandable - Jane is not entitled to Jake.

The situation between Horuss and Rufioh is also similar to what will resolve between Jake and Dirk shortly - they are just basically incompatible, or at least they will be until both parties do some work on themselves, but a combination of an oblivious party who can’t stop talking about himself, and social timidity on the part of the other prevents the situation from resolving amicably.

“As Long As I Know That I Am Free”

Sometimes, encountering our ancestors doesn’t have to be a source of tension, anxiety, expectation, and fear. Porrim models parental love for Kanaya in a way that, unusually for ancestors in Homestuck, is purely beneficial for her younger counterpart.

It’s okay to identify with roles and identities that have been corrupted or hegemonized by our culture. There’s nothing intrinsically bad about being a man, or about being a woman, as long as our embodiment of those roles is emancipatory to us.

Kanaya can still be a Mom, if that’s what she wants to be. Violence and money aren’t the only form that power can take.

Sometimes, learning the right lessons is just a matter of pausing for a second and being critical of all narratives; deciding for ourselves what we want to be. It’s the lesson that Porrim has to teach Kanaya.

This is just objectively true.

Aranea positions Rufioh as both a foil to Cronus, and to herself, further strengthening the Jake as Rufioh parallels.

What I think is really interesting about all this, is if we want to read the other three trolls as Jake, Dirk, and Jane, that makes Meenah the Roxy of this group! And while Roxy has never been vicious or deliberately cruel, there’s a certain resonance between her persistent hassling of Jane, her meddling in the Jake English Sweepstakes, and the disaster that it provokes, and Meenah’s bullying - I even early on in my first readthrough took a disliking to Roxy because of what I viewed as exactly that - bullying her counterparts, assertively trying to get them to behave the way she wanted.

https://homestuck.com/story/5401

Oh man, where to even begin with Karkat riding off into the Penis Sunset. Like, the Sun in relation to Dave is persistently an icon of Bro’s surveillance of him, and then there’s his burgeoning affection for Karkat (he mentions story time with Karkat in the third Openbound suggesting that he actually took Karkat up on his offer to read through trashy Troll Romance).

Like, there’s probably something in Dave’s troubled psyche that’s on display here but damn if I know what it is. Maybe he’s ruminating on the fact that Bro would probably not be too accepting of his relationship with Karkat, hence the juxtaposition of the symbol of Bro’s hostility with the imagery of Karkat riding a dick?

https://homestuck.com/story/5404

I don’t really need to explicate much on what Rose is trying to say, I think but just in case, here’s a little rundown of what she’s trying to explain.

The apple is a symbol of an irreducible idea. Many ideas are reducible - as molecules are reducible to atoms, and atoms are reducible to quarks and stuff, so are ideas reducible to increasingly more abstracted and basic units.

The closer to notionally irreducible a thing becomes, the more difficult it becomes to express an idea, until at last, that which is truly irreducible resolves, and reveals to us the true, intrinsic nature of reality. For every complex idea, we can refer to more fundamental ideas, until at last, we arrive at an idea, which when probed, responds back simply, “It just does that.”

This, I think, is that to which we ought to give the name of God; that force so fundamental that it truly does just do that.

In the world of Homestuck, Symbols, and with them, Rituals - stories! Are manifestations of the primeval and irreducible ideas. Everything else is a universe in orbit around the Divine - the Aspects themselves, perhaps, or something more fundamental than the Aspects even.

What makes reducing these stories to the irreducible principles that they allude to so difficult is that you’re effectively trying to explain the electromagnetic force by comparing it to rubber bands, when in fact, the electromagnetic force is what makes the rubber bands behave that way in the first place.

As a Ritual, Rose’s drinking is pretty similar to John’s Dad roleplaying - an attempt at unity with Her Mom. Another empty signifier.

https://homestuck.com/story/5405

Dave is already really embracing his new role as the actually most sincere and straightforward member of the party. Lovin’ it.

It’s kind of nice that Aradia and Vriska are getting along now. That’s gratifying for personal reasons.

Ah yeah, I forgot that was ever addressed officially.

https://homestuck.com/story/5435

The man

HASS the ring.

https://homestuck.com/story/5440

And with the depressingly empty Void session established via a single flash, we shall conclude for the evening.

Tomorrow, we’ll get to know our little villain.

For now, it’s Cam signing off, Alive, and a little Annoyed that I wasted a couple hours playing the Outriders Demo this afternoon. Seriously, what an aesthetically bleak and kind of mediocre-looking class-based cover shooter.

#liveblogging #commentary #pederasty mention #richard feynman

[themockingcrows]

Doki Doki Grist Panic! Ch. 2

John/Dave cw: canon typical violence ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27802735/chapters/68120641

     Being a magical boy was, in essence, a life long gig. If you did well and kept the peace and grew in power, you could be granted freedom from the fate that was chosen for you from the denizens with their aspects. Sometimes. Other times, you could make it all that way and still have your hand forced in unpredictable ways.

     The scent of blood ran through Dave’s nose, and with it the feeling of power rushing through his own. The enemy had been a big one, and he’d been very young, new to the mantle. He still didn’t know how to fight with his blade properly, too used to the one handed flailing that constituted practice with his brother on the rooftop. It had been too big, too much to handle alone, at least without unlocking a top tier ability that came with a terrible price. The words of Hephaestus rang through Dave’s ears, guiding his hands to drop the sword and instead focus on the time turners, the mystic assisting devices he bore.

     He scratched forwards, backwards, then spun them both at the same time without thinking, feeling the rush of time like a punch to the stomach. He’d nearly vomited, holding onto his bile through sheer spite alone, and landed in the past. Standing behind himself, he waited until the moment was right before rushing forwards, leaping over his own striking form, and landing on the monster’s face. He planted a hand on its warm flesh and sunk his gloved fingers in to secure his grip before turning the timetables again, forcing time to freeze entirely.

     The nausea came again, and Dave became acutely aware of his own heartbeat, the understanding of what was happening right then and there. Time was ticking down on his own clock, life but a borrowed timepiece itself, the high price to pay for messing with the flow of time.

     Fitting, really.

     Dave summoned his sword back to his hand and lifted his hands, striking what looked like a weak spot on the massive beast… and immediately was whipped off as time surged back into its normal flow, slamming back into a wall and sliding down to the ground limply.

     Bro was there.

     He wasn’t alone, Bro was there. He could hear his voice, but as if through a tunnel before his ears started ringing, and couldn’t lift his head up to reply properly. His sword was still embedded in the creature, but it wasn’t enough to take it down. Bro had his katana. Even if he wasn’t a magical boy any longer, even if he was at risk, he still had his weapon and a lot of power on his side. The monster soon fell in half, sliced as if by a clean saw blade, grist pouring out of it like a pinata up into the air to bounce and begin returning from whence it had come.

     That was a hero.

     One strike, and that was all it had taken. Bro went to his knee afterwards, clutching at his heart and breathing hard, feeling the pang of the echo of Yaldabaoth once more.

     That was really a hero. He’d fought even though that strike had cost him. Even though there was no way to reverse what he’d done, giving his power up to restore the peace in a cataclysmic event. Even though every exertion could be his last, heart weakened by the exchange. 

     He was a hero, and yet Dave was the magical one now, and he needed to figure out how the fuck to live up to that kind of exchange. Given the feeling earlier during the fight, the sensation of his life altering, Dave was able to glimpse likely how his own life would end someday. ...Would he make it to old age, still? Or would he go young? It would depend on how he fought, and on how things worked out, he supposed.

     Dave lost consciousness.

     When he woke up it was in a cold sweat in his own bed, tangled in his sheets, chest heavy and face pale. He sat bolt upright and rubbed his face with both hands before slowly creeping out of bed and making his way to his brother’s room, peeking in on him. Waiting. Watching for his broad chest to rise and fall. When it did, proving he was still alive, Dave finally felt like he could breathe.

     That dream again. When would he be able to stop having that dream? When he was able to surpass a monster of that level on his own and make it look so easy? Or when he’d spent so much time that every second counted? He’d been careless a few times, had left time frozen for too long at different times to be thorough instead of just slowing it, cementing the use of even more of his own time. How much did he have left? What about Bro, how much did he have left? Could Dave share some of his time with him?

     It didn’t work like that, and Dave knew it. But fuck did he wish it did.

     Quietly, he went to get a juice from the fridge before padding back to his room and his phone, popping onto discord to scroll the different servers he was in. People in different timezones had posted some prime quality memes and he wanted to stay on top of things, sharing and redistributing from place to place to help choice ones spread easier. He checked his SB&HJ server and was pleased to see that it was absolute chaos.

     Dave had changed screens and was starting to read an article someone had linked when his phone buzzed in his hand, alerting him to a new DM.

     John.

ectoBiologist:  hey, i know it’s early but i saw you logged on so i thought it’d be alright to send this.

ectoBiologist:  when i got my copy of sburb there was a key for an extra copy! would you like it?

ectoBiologist:  we could play while watching the lets play from space needle, see if we find any secrets before them!

     Dave grinned at his phone. Who was he to turn down a free videogame? Especially one he already wanted. 

turntechGodhead:  yeah man sign me up

turntechGodhead:  im sure we can break that thing ten ways from sunday once we pass the character creation screen

ectoBiologist:  oh dave, why dream so small? we can break it starting from the character screen.

turntechGodhead:  sounds like a challenge

turntechGodhead:  first one to find a game breaking glitch wins

     Dave chattered with John for a while before eventually falling back to sleep, grateful to find his dreams a little more cheerful. Fanciful even, to the point where even Dirk would no doubt tease him. Simple dreams of a kiss, going somewhere quiet, and exploring a bit further of each other...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

     A videogame was a small price to pay to get to talk to Dave more, John decided. The code was easy enough to get, and while it was a foolish waste of time, it was a foolish waste of time with someone that intrigued him. The internet signals from Earth had been available during his trip here, and while it was majority trite, a video about space and technology had caught his interest, cementing his focus on the lets play channel Space Needle. John set his communicator- No… His cellphone. He set the cellphone down and went to a mirror, staring himself down.

     Corruption ate at him, skin a dark gray and eyes far too bright, trails of dark wind caressing his white hair. John existed in a state of flow and movement, drifting from place to place comfortably. It took effort to remember to walk sometimes, but when under cover, he needed to be sure to keep both feet flat on the ground as much as he needed to keep his appearance ‘normal’. Here though, here in his makeshift home, he was free to float as he pleased, and did so to make his way from the mirror to the tanks where the beasts were grown.

     Ectobiology was something that took a hell of a lot of grist, as was normal biology. So much grist, so little time. He stroked the front of the tank of a chess piece and bit his lip, wondering if it would be ready to go yet, or if he’d need to rely on the imps much longer. There were always the ogres… but the chess pieces would be his best bet for gathering the grist he needed for his home world.

     The wind whipped his hair harder as he thought of home, remembering the deaths, the torrents of destruction, the wave after wave of defeats that had brought his world to its knees. He hadn’t been strong enough to fix everything by himself. But now… now there was a way. A way to bring it all back, maybe even stronger than before, and restore his planet to its rightful state.

     He just needed a planet worth of grist to restore his own to the way things were. And, conveniently, here was a planet chock fucking full of it, ripe for the taking. John just needed to reach out and take it.

     The boy in red was going to be a nuisance, though, he could already feel it. Someone with the power to not only stop swarms of imps, but to restore grist to its natural place? What a pain! What if there were more of them? This place was just his first stop, he needed seed grist as it were to start his little project. Chess monsters didn’t grow on their own without grist, and the natural grown grist was going slowly. He needed more. Heaps and heaps off it, not the pennies worth he’d been able to scrounge so far.

     John needed to think bigger.

     A chime from his cellphone made him blink and drift lazily back over, checking it. Ah. New upload from Space Needle. They’d already begun to play SBURB and the first episode was a walkthrough of them messing with the character creation screen from the thumbnail, to create the most amazingly terrible creation to inhabit the game from the get go.

     Admirable.

     He hoped Dave and he were able to do nearly as much as they were able to do, John was curious to see what Dave would come up with.

     ...Dave.

     Dave was another issue, John realized. 

     The life on Earth was just most grist for the taking, but this Dave fellow looked interesting. He had an attractive face and long, reedy limbs that he seemed to like hiding beneath baggy clothes, soft looking blonde hair. John wanted to keep looking at him rather than listen to the professor talk about whatever the fuck he assumed was important for Earthlings to learn, but it would have just blown his cover to stand out further.

     Someone that attractive, and into the same things he was, was picking at the scab of loneliness in John’s heart. The wound of solitude that he’d borne since his home world fell apart. Could he really destroy the Earth and all its inhabitants when he knew one of them was precious to him?

     Perhaps.

     Or, better yet, what if he could convince Dave to love him? If he loved him, he could convince him to come with him to his home, to his real world. A better world than this one. They could be together still, and things would go back to normal like they were before, and he could return to his house with all of his things and have someone like Dave on his arm.

     A pretty daydream, but a daydream nonetheless.

     Drifting once more, phone in hand, John sent a few more messages to Dave while he was offline before dropping the connection and heading towards his tech once again. Imps were worthless. Maybe if there was an ogre as backup…. Yes, that should do it. That should get some of the results he wanted.

     Soon enough, he would have this world on its knees. John just hoped he could get Dave into his hand before the point of no return.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

     A few weeks had passed since first meeting John properly, and Dave already couldn’t imagine hanging out with anyone else. They had so much in common, and every other minute Dave was able to spare was spent deep in conversation with him on discord. They’d begun playing SBURB together, and while they weren’t able to find all the glitches and game breaks that the girls over on Space Needle were able to find, they’d been able to find their own brand of shenanigans. Dave had secured John a special weapon from his own guardian that he was able to use in his game, and John was able to find ways to essentially reach from area to area like a glitch warp. 

     The girls had ripped into SBURB like none other, and it was exciting to watch their numbers to climb with new fans who were enjoying their work as much as Dave and John did. The fandom was growing, and even in Dave’s other servers people were starting to share the memes.

     The day that John asked if he wanted to go hang out had been, at first, an immediate ‘yes’ from Dave. ...Till he realized that this was less a hangout and more of a date. Instead of their shooting the shit at and near campus, they met up to watch a movie, instead of fast food they went to a restaurant and John said he’d foot the bill. Dave couldn’t relax properly. Was this okay? Was this really what he thought it was, or was this just a changeup of a hangout formula? If it was a date, was that okay too? Did Dave even have time for a boyfriend?

     The idea was appealing… And didn’t he have a right to some kind of happiness for himself? He had to keep his secrets, but surely he could balance it all?

     John slipped his warm fingers around Dave’s as they left the restaurant, and soon they were laced together, casual as could be, while Dave struggled to keep a calm face on. Hand. Holding hands. When was the last time he held hands with someone? His face felt like it was burning off, and all he could do to keep calm was keep his facial muscles under control in the form of small grins and darting glances behind his shades as they walked.

     They made it all the way back to Dave’s apartment like that before John released his hand and returned his own to his pockets. Dave curled his fingers a few times at his sides before stuffing his hands into his pockets as well, casual as could be.

     “Wanna do that again sometime? I had a lot of fun,” John said, grinning at him the same way he smiled at everything he liked a lot.

     “Yeah, I would. I had fun too.” Fun was an understatement.

     They stood awkwardly together then for a moment, watching the cars pass by on the road out front, Dave unsure if he should invite John up without warning Bro, and John unsure if he should do what he wanted to. In the end, John was the one who acted. He leaned and pressed a kiss to Dave’s cheek before pulling back and taking a few steps backwards.

     “I should get going, my dad would be upset if I’m gone too long,” he said.

     Still more or less in shock, ears ringing, Dave just nodded.

     "Right. Yeah, that’d. That’d be bad. Don’t want a mad dad.”

     “Yeah,” John chuckled. “See you later, Dave!” he said, adding a wave as he turned and headed off.

     Dave was left on his stoop waving for a good thirty seconds before his brain caught up with what had happened and he dropped his arm, wide eyed. Okay. This was a problem. A good problem? But a problem. He turned and raced his way upstairs to his apartment, rattling his keys before managing to unlock the door and get in, leaning against it once he slammed it shut. He stayed there a few seconds before slowly sliding down to the ground, still wide eyed.

     Bro, who was alert and watching everything now that Dave was inside, only lifted a brow.

     “Need me to beat his ass? What happened.”

     “No, no, just. It was great. Everything was great.”

     “Then what’s the problem, you look like you got hit by a truck.”

     “I just. ...fuck, man, is this aright?” he finally asked from the floor, looking towards the futon. “Is it okay to have this?”

     “Why you askin’ me?” Bro asked, brow raising. “That’s your damn business.”

     “Yeah but like. If you were in my position and a guy wanted to go out with you, would you?”

     “Bet your ass I would, those boots ain’t gonna knock themselves.”

     “Not what I meant,” Dave groaned, rubbing his face before looking down at his hands, wiggling the fingers of the one John had held for so long. It still felt warmer than the other somehow. “Like. ...Is it safe? What if I put him at risk? What if he finds out?”

     “Better not find out, and he’s only in as much risk as you put him in,” Bro shrugged. “I dunno man, it’s a sticky situation. There’s no right or wrong answers, only smart or increasingly stupid ones.”

     Dave made an uncertain noise from the ground before standing up and dusting his ass off, going to the fridge for more jui-

     “We’re out.”

     “Oh yeah, I drank the last one. Wanna come with me to the store and help heft shit?”

     “Yeah. No heftin’ for you,” Dave said pointedly. “You can drag the granny cart. Just take that stupid plush off of it.”

     “Excuse you, Sir Wilmington Squeaks is not goin’ anywhere but on a fine trip to the grocery store,” Bro said, already standing to get the folded up shopping cart with a smuppet strapped aboard the top. “He makes a great lid, keeps stuff from bouncin’ out when it goes up the stairs.”

     Though Dave made a face, he was charmed still. This was a normal day, more normal than he'd had for a while. One of, hopefully, many to come. If only peace from outside threats was more constant.

#johndave #john egbert #dave strider #homestuck #my fic

[mimikoflamemaker]

What Happened in the Woods Stays in the Woods

Summary: I took part in International Witcher School this October - it was beyond awesome. And I have new character to gush about - Myra, who is certainly too good of a person to be a witcher. I can't wait to see it bite her in the future episodes. But since good people doesn't really live very long in the Witcher Universe, she is about to make a whole lot of difficult choices - here is a snippet about one of them.

And remember guys - is she smiles at you it doesn’t always mean she means well ;)

The rumble of thunder echoed through her bones. The rain was not quite here yet, but the sky was covered with thick layer of dark, grey clouds. It was only a matter of time.

Myra huffed as the training dummy finally fell over. Signs were never that difficult to her and yet it took her three tries to send the aard where it was supposed to go. She was distracted, quite honestly, from the very beginning of the lesson. And she was angry with herself. This was not the attitude she wanted to present to anyone, least of all her fellow adepts.

And yet she couldn’t quite help it. At least she noticed master Yila coming towards her.

There. It was her cue.

‘Can you do something that would disqualify you from the rest of the class?’ master Yila asked only loud enough for her to hear. Myra nodded – she wasn’t even winded, much less exhausted enough to be excused. But she knew what to do.

Not that she would particularly enjoy the outcome.

She pulled at the energy. Just a tiny bit. Just enough to feel it stir. But instead of reaching outside as she was told a hundred times to do, she reached inside. And then she formed another aard – careless. Sloppy.

The power sputtered at her fingertips and the backlash filled her lungs with a burning ache.

She fell to her knees coughing and dearly hoping she didn’t rupture anything.

‘What did she do?’ master Dirk’s voice carried over.

‘I was trying to correct her stance’ was master Yila reply. ‘I didn’t think she would cast. And I don’t think she’ll be any good to you today, Dirk.’

‘Whatever’ the other master shrugged. ‘Next!’

Myra sat on her folded knees and tried to focus on her breathing, while keeping an eye on what the others are doing. One by one they stepped forward to cast the aard and, one by one, the others bent over faking exhaustion. Volker, Rolf, Lisa, who quite convincingly fell backward, even Ute.

Well that one was a bit of a surprise.

Not as much as what was unfolding a little further away though.

Lila was the last one to cast her aard and her first attempt was clearly unsuccessful. Master Dirk though, seemed a little confused.

‘Again’ he commanded, watching the girl carefully.

Lila did as she was asked and once again, nothing happened. The dummy stood still, there was no shivering of the leaves nor the rocks rolling to the sides. The most surprising however was the fact that her medallion did not tremble. It should have. It did when the others casted their signs.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m trying master’ Lila piped up as she fidgeted in place obviously distraught. ‘I really am!’

‘Do you?’ master Dirk challenged. ‘Most adepts, even those I can’t account amongst the brightest are usually catching the right way to do it much faster…’

‘I can do it! I really can!’

‘We’ll see about that… Maybe you need a better target?’ the witcher mused and stepped away, stopping several paces away, his back to the training dummy. ‘One last chance. Try to hit me this time.’

A surprised murmur that passed over their small group told her that she wasn’t the only one waiting to see what happened.

Nothing. Once again Myra’s medallion remained flat against her chest.

For a moment, she thought that Lila might burst into tears.

‘You don’t feel it’ master Dirk didn’t even bother to make it a question. ‘Not at all. That’s why you can’t cast. You don’t have the connection… it’s been a while since I’ve seen that.’

Myra spent the last three years of her life at the school and she had never heard of that before. Even those of her fellow adepts who found it hard to perform the signs at first got the hang of it sooner or later.

‘I don’t know what you did to them today Dirk’ master Yila remarked, pulling her thoughts back to the present. ‘But we can’t have them useless like that tonight. I have a spot where I go to meditate. I’ll take them there, maybe they will get themselves back together.’

Myra sprang to her feet, probably too fast for someone who just tried to explode their own lungs.

At least the waiting was almost done.

Master Yila led them away from the group and into the forest just as another thunder rolled over the castle ground. Closer this time.

‘Did you come up with an idea?’ master Yila asked as soon as they could no longer be overheard.

‘I suppose we settled for what we agreed on yesterday’ Myra replied when the silence stretched for a bit too long. ‘That I will lure him into the trap.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I mean, we are aware of his certain… proclivities. And I had the misfortune of watching his interrogation of princess Liva. The man is so full of himself that he should fall to the praise and admiration.’

It wasn’t exactly the answer to that question, but Myra didn’t think they could come up with anything better in such a short span of time, when they have spent the last evening pondering it over and it was everything they ended up with.

Whether she wanted to do it or not was another matter altogether.

It was the result that mattered in the end.

‘Then you will have to be careful. You’ll be the last one he will be seen with, so if anything goes south, you’ll be the first to blame.’

‘I know. It still needs to be done.’

‘I’m sure it will be fine’ Lisa piped up.

‘Then come faster. If it starts to rain, we might not be able to get him and the elves cannot stay in the area for much longer.’

They followed master Yila, picking their way through the undergrowth. The wind picked up and there was another thunder, very close this time. Soon enough, they could feel the first droplets off rain, filtering through the canopies and landing on their faces.

They crossed the main road running through the forest and sank into the bushes on the other side, finally coming to the small clearing. For a moment it seemed empty, but then Myra could pick up the heartbeats of the hiding elves. Master Yila looked around and whistled. One by one, elves left their hide outs, gliding over the fallen leaves almost without the sound.

‘Ceádmil, Aen Sidhe’ master Yila greeted, and Myra found herself echoing the words. They felt rusty on her tongue. It has been a while since she had a chance to use the elder speech and even then, the art did not come easy to her.

The thought almost made her smile. When she first started to practice, her mouth outright refused to form some of the words, giving her friends plenty of opportunity to make fun of her. And they did as all children are. But they were also endlessly patient with her… Laith, Caellem, Nyla… and several others, but she always felt the deepest connection with those three.

Her eyes slid over the elves that stood before them. Gaunt, scarred faces, clothes hanging limply on once much broader frames and hollow eyes, that remained empty regardless of the violence they witnessed or performed. Myra couldn’t possibly fathom the greatness of their loss, but she understood the pain of it. And she pitied them.

Would her friends share the same fate should they live? The same indignity, violence, hate?

They probably would. It was what killed them after all, not long before they would likely be forced to turn from children to warriors.

She still saw it sometimes, vivid in her dreams, despite the Trials and the time that passed. The tree, an old oak, standing in the middle of the elven settlement. And the mutilated, broken bodies, hanging upon the branches, swaying in the breeze. Men, women, children. And among them Laith, Caellem and Nyla…

Her own neighbors did it. People she grew up with. People she worked with. People she trusted.

All because one man wanted to hide his crimes.

Whenever she remembered that, she wasn’t really surprised that to those who remained, the only good humans were the dead ones.

Her initial anger also called for retribution. But she knew she didn’t have the means. The witcher she found has killed the wraiths, and then laughed as her useless wrath, before demanding payment. But there was nobody to pay him. And she couldn’t stay in the village, where everyone acted as if nothing had happened. Or worse seemed proud of their deeds.

Her choice to offer herself up as a payment wasn’t that difficult to her afterwards.

‘Myra?’ Volker asked.

She realized that everyone was looking at her. Was she supposed to say something? Was there anything to say, really?

‘You don’t have to do it’ the oldest elf said, surprising her. ‘He is an evil man and needs to die, but we won’t force you to do something like this…’

‘But I want to’ she objected. ‘I agree with you and I want to help you. It won’t be the last asshole I will have to deal with.’

Master Ylia sighed and turned to face her.

‘Go then. Find him and bring him here. Try not to use the main paths and attract as little attention as possible.’

Myra nodded, glanced one more time to the group gathered on the clearing and turned to leave, picking her way through the low bushes to the path running nearby.

The rain was getting heavier. And as she made her way back to the castle, she felt the full weight of what she was about to do settling about her shoulder.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do this. Well, she didn’t really, as lieutenant Emmeric did enough to warrant only her disgust. But she had no doubt that the world will be a slightly better place when he leaves it.

There were people counting on her right now. And she really didn’t want to disappoint them. Not again, not ever.

Not to mention that she didn’t want to disappoint herself.

Yet, she wasn’t sure if she was cut out for the task. She didn’t think herself a particularly apt actress and her only real experience with seduction was the half-drunk jabs exchanged with her fellow adepts. Things like that usually happened without much of the input from her.

Well, that might have been one of the reasons why they didn’t happen all that often.

Myra smiled to herself, amused by her own train of thoughts. It removed some of the apprehension she felt. And, regardless of everything, there was no backing out now. She had to do it.

If anything went wrong, she only needed him out of sight of the potential witnesses. She doubted that even a big man like him was a match for her. Especially if she acts fast enough.

The witcheress looked up and she could see the castle ahead, visible between the thinning trees. What worried her, was that she couldn’t really hear anything except for the rain and the rustling of leaves.

Soon enough, she could clearly see that the castle grounds were deserted – the storm herded everyone inside… well, almost everyone. The bright blue of lieutenant Emmeric uniform instantly caught her eye amongst the muted greens and dreary greys of the autumn afternoon.

He was sitting propped against the tree, as if waiting for the worst of the rain to let up, before heading into the castle.

She knew she couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity. Myra took a fortifying breath and went straight for him, putting some extra swish into her steps.

She could feel his eyes on her almost instantly. Not a surprise since she was clearly the only other person around. The way he watched her, not even trying to hide his interest added a much needed boost to her confidence. Myra pinched her bottom lip with her teeth before she smiled at the man.

The way his heartbeat picked up only made that smile grow wider.

‘Lieutenant Emmeric’ she said as she stopped beside him. ‘The tales about your exploits precede you.’

‘Clearly’ one corner of his mouth curled upward, before he pushed himself from the ground. ‘I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure yet…’

‘No, we didn’t. I did however, have the pleasure to observe you at work earlier this morning.’

‘Oh, did you now? I hadn’t seen you there…’

He was almost a head taller than her. She supposed, it made appearing coy easier as she was already looking up at him. It hardly made her feel better about flaunting herself like that, but she had to get through this.

‘It’s enough that I’ve seen you’ she reached up and trailed her finger lightly down his chest. ‘I was most impressed. I’d like to hear about your other… interrogations, if I could. Maybe I could learn something from you. Would you perhaps walk with me?’

Emmeric glanced at her fingers, resting over his heart. When he looked back at her there was a sly smile playing upon his lips.

‘With pleasure. There might actually be some things I would like to get from you as well’ his eyes slid from the slightly parted collar of her coat to the swell of her breast.

The only thing he could really get from her was a knee to the groin. But instead, she smiled brightly and wrapped her arm around his bent elbow, leaning into him. Steering him back down the path she came from.

‘I am sure we can arrange for something we will both enjoy’ she murmured into his ear.

He chuckled and patted the hand she placed on his forearm.

‘Well, I like women who know what they want…’

‘You have no idea…’

The rain was picking up. Gravel crunched beneath their feet and Myra pushed aside the thought that this was going to be a very long walk.

‘So, you’ve been present during the interrogation of that monster?’

‘For the most important part of it anyway. I was impressed by the effortless way you made her squirm.’

Emmeric chuckled. Myra was fairly sure, that if he puffed his chest out just a little more, the buttons of his doublet were going to pop.

‘Well she might be a monster, but she still clings to her humanity, trying to deceive us. But all she did was making it easier to realize her weaknesses and exploit them.’

All she wanted to do was roll her eyes. Instead, she smiled, hoping it looked like admiration and not like baring teeth.

‘You have a lot of experience with that, I suppose?’

‘I had plenty of time to learn. You wouldn’t know how hard those elven rebels are to crack until you have to go all physical on them. And still many of them would not budge.’

‘It’s funny isn’t it?’ Myra asked, flexing her fingers lightly against his arm, resisting the urge to wrap them around his throat. ‘How they are fighting the battle they have already lost?’

‘That they are’ Emmeric smiled. ‘They are no match for us; we will get every single one of them… in due time’ he glanced down at her. ‘There is no point in cutting the fun short, you know? But if anything, one does have to admire their stubbornness – I was once pulling this woman’s flesh apart with a hot pliers and she did not say a word. She didn’t even scream until the very end.’

Myra was tempted to make him scream at this very moment. Which likely had to show on her face, because Emmeric’s expression turned from amused to confused.

‘Did I offend you? I didn’t think witchers would shy away at the mention of a little bit of gore…’

‘We most definitely do not’ she objected. ‘This rain is merely annoying… I certainly want to hear more of those tales…

Emmeric leaned over her. Their noses almost touched.

‘Or we can engage in something more pleasant. Something to keep both of us warm. And then I can indulge your curiosity over a bottle of wine? What do you say, hm?’

Myra could already see the clearing, but they were still standing on the path. Anyone could see them.

‘Why, your appreciation flatters me’ she smiled, linking their hands together. ‘However, you would be wrong to assume that turning into a witcher means I will no longer act at least a bit like a lady…’

‘You’ve led me into the forest, haven’t you?’

‘And with an intent no less’ Myra nodded and her smile widened. ‘But that does not mean I feel adventurous enough to have fun out in the open like that. There is a clearing nearby where no one would disturb us.’

He seemed placated with her words and followed her eagerly, their arms still linked.

‘Heeey! Myra!’ she didn’t have to look to recognize Lisa, who tumbled from some bushe and plopped into the tall grass, waving at them.

‘And who might that be?’ Emmeric asked.

Myra couldn’t say she accounted for that kind of interruption.

‘A friend of mine’ she said quickly. ‘She was too shy to come with me. You know the highborn ladies… all prim and proper…’

‘…until you get them somewhere private. Your friend here doesn’t seem very shy though’ he nodded towards Lisa who waved at them again and giggled.

Myra noticed the flask she held in her outstretched arm.

‘That’s because she overdosed on liquid bravery… Lisa! What will I ever do with you girl?!’ she strode towards her. ‘And to go into the stash of the White Gull of all things? You know what it’s doing to you…’

‘But we were supposed to have fun!’ the girl whined, struggling to get up. Myra reached and grabbed her forearm, steadying her.

‘Well I don’t see why we shouldn’t…’ Emmeric started.

A sharp wheeze cut through the air and Myra instinctively bent, trying to make herself a smaller target.

The arrow, however, was not meant for them. It buried itself deep into lieutenant shoulder.

‘What the…’ Emmeric turned, following the arrow’s path with his eyes.

One by one, elves and witchers emerged from behind the trees, surrounding the soldier. Myra slowly backed away, pulling Lisa with her. They were only supposed to get him here. Their part was done.

They should have shot him – a clean, fast death. She understood why he did not deserve that. Why the elves would have wanted to make it personal. But it could only bring her more trouble.

Because Emmeric fought back. And he fought like only the dying men could. He lashed out even when he was no longer able to stand upright. It took entirely too long, but finally, the Blu Stripes lieutenant fell face-first onto the grass and did not raise again.

Once again, the only sound was that of the falling rain.

And then, there was weeping. One of the ellith was shaking her fallen companion’s body, her shoulders wracked with sobs.

Emmeric has claimed some last victims. A few paces away, on the ground laid Rolf. Myra moved, falling to her knees beside the wounded adept.

Blood was already staining the grass.

‘My back’ Rolf grunted. ‘He hit my back…’

‘We need to go’ master Yila’s voice sounded somewhere above her. Myra wanted to tell her off, but she knew the other woman was right. There was a dead Blue Stripe right next to them – there was no explaining that.

She reached and plucked one Swallow from her potion holster, before bringing the vial to Rolf’s mouth.

‘You’ll be fine. Just bear with the pain’ she said, grabbing his arm. ‘It will pass soon, but we have to go!’

She pulled him through the bushes, but it soon became obvious that Rolf could not quite find his feet. Myra looked over her shoulder at the others running behind her.

‘Volker!’ she called. ‘Come, help me!’

The other adept did not hesitate, running up to her and putting Rolf’s other arm about his shoulders. It was much easier to run now.

They only stopped when master Yila called for them. The clearing and the elves were no longer visible, hidden behind the trees. Myra looked to her adepts, trying to make sure they were fine. No one else was wounded at least, but she could see all colors of shock reflecting in their faces.

She certainly wasn’t the only one in need of some solid booze after all of this was done.

Master Yila seemed to draw the same conclusions, exchanging short glance with her, before focusing on Rolf.

‘Will you live?’

‘Yes’ he replied, pulling himself from Myra’s grasp. ‘The pain is fading. I’ll survive.’

‘Good. But he can’t come into the castle like this. Everyone will notice that something is off, and I don’t think you want to answer to the questions they will have.’

‘Here’ Lisa said, unwrapping the shawl from her neck and pulling it off. ‘You can wear this. It’s long enough to cover the stains and if you tuck it into your belt, it won’t even look out of place.’

‘Thank you’ Rolf replied, taking the hood from her.

‘Do you remember what you are to say if anyone asks what you were doing?’

‘We were meditating after a difficult signs lessons’ Ute replied. ‘You took us to the forest, master so we can get it together.’

‘And if anyone asks if you saw Emmeric?’

‘No one should be asking after him’ Myra said. ‘At least not for a while. No one saw us when we were walking into the forest, because everybody went to the castle to hide from the rain.’

‘But they will soon be looking for us then. Make sure you don’t have blood stains visible anywhere’ master Yila instructed. ‘Just remember what you were doing, and everything should be fine.’

Should be. Myra sighed, turning back towards the castle. Unfortunately, it rarely was.

But it was nice to think that this time, luck might just be on their side.

#the witcher #witcher school #larp #my writing

[lord-explosion-baku]

Demon Lord!Bakugou x reader

Warnings: swearing, violence, suggestive themes, my lame attempts at humor

A/N: I know it’s not wise to write in two perspectives but I did it anyways. It’s easy to follow if you know that Bakugou refers to himself as Bakugou in his perspective while he’s disguised as ‘Katsuki.’ I had to really condence this to make it all fit in one post too so it’s probably a little fast paced and the ending is very rushed but we can blame that 100 text block rule. 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️ what can you do? Also Bakugou is pretty OOC. Very chatty and a bit of a flirt. It’s fine.

“Could really use my mage right about now!!�� You bellowed over the swarm ugly ass dark gnolls, slicing through two at a time. Killing them was easy enough but you’d gotten cocky and let your guard down, allowing yourself to take more than a few blows. That wouldn’t have mattered much if you weren’t about to face the demon lord himself.

Standing up by his throne Lord Bakugou watched you move through his army, relishing the clanking of weapons against weapons. He was very curious about the little mercenary running through his army. You had gotten the farthest to getting to him out of any other questers in maybe one hundred years even though your fighting skills were decent at best. It was amusing really. He’d witness many much stronger heroes meet their fall in his throne room but you seemed to be getting by easily with luck alone. But that luck was about to turn for the worse.

“She’s out!” Kaminari, your bard, was kneeling next to Mina, your mage, lightly tapping in her face. Mina was always getting too close for battle like a damned fool.

“Then can you heal me?!” You screamed while a gnoll came at you with their poison tipped spear.

“My lute broke!” Kaminari called back.

You narrowly dodged the attack from the gnoll. “How do you break your lute!!!!” An arrow shot through the gnoll’s head and you gave a thumbs up to your mute elven ranger, Todoroki. Even if your other guild members were sometimes idiots, you could always depend on Todoroki.

You caught your breath, finally making it up to the head of the throne room. You glared at the demon lord through your bulky helmet. He looked just like the legends said he would. Hair the color of the ashes of enemies incinerated, eyes that only turn a deeper crimson for every drop of blood he sheds, markings on his pale white body that told you there was no better place for him than the pits of hell (no offense to Mina who was a very nice tiefling.) This was going to be your most satisfying kill yet.

Lord Bakugou tilted his head at you. “You expect me to get offed by a pipsqueak like you?”

You took off your helmet and threw it down his stairs, counting the metal clanks as it danced down each step. You could see better without it anyways. Your hand slid across your broadsword, swiping the excess gnoll goo off and on to the floor. You might’ve been a ‘pipsqueak’ compared to the all terrible Demon Lord Bakugou but you were a pipsqueak with a sword.

Bakugou gulped, eyes widening only slightly. Oh shit… you began running at him… they’re hot. Bakugou conjured up his own broadsword to rival yours. The sound of metal on metal excited him. He had to admit that you weren’t as terrible as he first thought you were. He blocked a hefty attack, holding your sword against his own, only to get a better look at your focused face. You clenched your teeth while scowling up at him and Bakugou and a warm sensation flooded his entire body. You were… something else.

Distracted, Lord Bakugou let his guard down. With the borrowed strength from a Dragonborn named Eijirou, you slammed down on his weapon, knocking it the the floor! You spun around, lifting your now red glowing broadsword up and swing down with all of your might! But the demon lord caught it… with one hand… He smirked, sliding his hand along the side of your blade. “It’s a cute sword,” he purred before bright orange sparks ignited from his hands. Your blade shattered to pieces. “But not as cute as you.”

Your mouth fell open. “H-huh?”

To your dismay, he put his hand in your forehead. “Sleep well, gorgeous,” he commanded, “I’ve got big plans for you.”

Fire! It felt like your forehead was on fire! You wanted to panic but your eyelids grew heavy and your knees started wobble. You used your last bit of strength to force yourself back rather than falling into the arms of your enemy.

Different, more familiar arms wrapped around your torso and the last thing you remember hearing was, “Oi! Where do you think you’re goin’ with my bride!”

~

Five days had passed since you were shamefully defeated by the demon lord. It took five days for you to grow your hair out to cover the demon’s mark on your forehead, it took five days for you to craft a stronger weapon, and it took five days for you and your guild to settle down and finally show yourselves to the public (currently a town full of mice-breeds) only to have backhanded words of encouragement from their people. “Don’t worry about it too much,” they all seemed to say in the same high squeaky voices, scratching at their rounded ears, “even strong guilds couldn’t beat the demon lord! You guys are lucky you made it out alive!” And you had to smile and pretend like their food portions weren’t too damn small.

It was on the very fifth day that a young man in a dark robe, decked out in jewelry, kicked open the doors of the saloon you were staying in and marched up to your guild’s table. “Hey!” Instantly you grabbed Kaminari’s dirk, an impulsive reflex but a good one to have with boisterous and possibly violent strangers. The blonde narrowed his eyes on your weapon. “I wanna join your shitty guild!”

“No.” Another reflex. It was something you learned from Todoroki. If you have to think about it, don’t trust it. Besides, you all were doing fine on your own.

“Wait! Now, hang on Y/N,” Mina pushed you. “Let’s hear him out! We don’t know who he is or how far he has come to find us!”

You rolled your eyes. She was always so up for making new friends. Her naivety would be endearing if it didn’t almost get her killed about a dozen times. Tieflings. “Exactly,” you whispered back. “We don’t know who he is, he came out of nowhere to this mouse town to find us?? I don’t think so. He didn’t even give us his name!”

“I’ve got a name! It’s… Kat...suki.”

The party blinked at him. You shrugged. “Just ‘Katsuki’?”

The man crossed his arms. “Is that a problem?”

“Maybe. We don’t have a great history with guys who have only one name.”

“That’s riiiight!” Mina chirped. “There was Slomar who stole all of our horses, Finick who kidnapped Kaminari, Cher who wanted to steal our youthful essences… But Grognor the Great wasn’t half bad! He helped us get that sky ship! But then it was taken over by that one cleric guy… Jocombi! Another singular named villain!”

“And Grognor the Great wasn’t a singularly named villain!” Kaminari chimed in, “He was ‘Grognor the Great!’ That’s sort of like a full name, right?”

“Well then,” Katsuki smirked. Your narrowed your eyes on his lips. You’ve… seen that before. “You can call me Katsuki the Best.”

You scoffed, “the best at what exactly?”

“Everything,” he put his hand on the table and leaned in close to you, “you want me to show you?”

You coughed to hide an embarrassed squeak. Was he suggesting something? You leaned away from him and looked to Todoroki. He signed, ‘I don’t trust him.’

‘You think I do? I say take him to the woods and leave him there. Our party is full.’

Katsuki cleared his throat. ‘I know fucking sign language… assholes.’ “As well as draconic, elvish, dwarvish, abyssal, orcish, gnoll, gnomish, and my yeti is a little weak but I just have to touch up on it. So if you want to have your little secret conversations in, I don’t know, Druid, then have at it. Your party isn’t full by the way. I’ve heard about your run in with the demon lord and it looks like you guys could use some more combat fighters.” You opened your mouth to interject but he put his ringed index finger up before you could speak, “you can’t do it all with one shitty mercenary unless you plan on going at it with looks alone,”-looks alone? The hell did that mean?- “you’d need someone to fall back on, someone with skills like mine. I can lead you guys to victory.”

You already had someone to fall back on, literally. Todoroki had been there to catch you and usher you out before you faced an uncertain fate. But… the stranger before you was right. Everyone else in your party worked with range and after many battles, your arms often felt sore from pulling everyone else’s weight… or pulling the weight of someone else that should’ve been there. Your guild members were getting stronger every day but you did need someone else. “Alright,” you finally said, “if you say that you’re the best-,”

“-at everything,” Katsuki’s grin widened.

“At everything, whatever, then prove it. Gather your things, boys. We’re gonna go fight some orcs.”

~

Leaves cracked under your boots while Kaminari played his new lute, livening up the cool and crisp forest. Todoroki was by your side having a heated conversation with you through his hands. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with this new ‘arrogant pile of gold,’ and he was very upset that you decided to give him a chance. You trusted Todoroki’s judgement above everyone else but you were a little blinded by your defeat of the demon lord. You had to take him down. You had something to prove, if not to the town of mice then for yourself.

Mina skipped to the other side of you. “Am I the only one who thought that the demon lord was kinda fine? In that, I don’t know, ‘fuck me raw’ kinda way?”

A deep blush formed on your cheeks. The demon lord had hit on you… and why? To throw you off your game? He didn’t really need to do that since he completely destroyed your weapon with his bare hands! But then… why didn’t he just kill you? And he wasn’t ‘fine,’ he was terrible!

Lord Bakugou walked in the back, ignoring any attempts at conversation from the annoying looking yellow haired bard. He was there for you and you alone but he couldn’t help but feel a hopeful thrill after hearing what the pink raccoon-looking teafling girl said.

“Well, he won’t be so hot with my broadsword plunged into his belly!” You said, dramatically throwing your sword in the air.

Bakugou grinned. So you thought he was hot. Good to know. He heated up at the thought of you coming to fight him again. He wanted to know exactly how fast he could make you submit to him. You seemed like the type that would fight until there was absolutely nothing else to do but accept your fate. He loved that.

That half n’ half elf ranger shot Bakugou a look and he frowned back. That guy was going to be a nuisance for him. He already stole you away from him even after Bakugou left his mark on you. How… disrespectful. He’d have to figure out a way to get rid of him.

Todoroki halted, throwing his arm in front of you. He signed, saying that the orcs were about fifty meters out and that he was going to climb high to get a better look. You instructed the others to get in the right formation, Mina in the back, Kaminari behind you, and you at the front.

You turned to Katsuki, “where’s your weapon?”

He raised an eyebrow at you. “Don’t have one. Can I borrow yours?”

“What?” Oh that arrogant pile of gold!!! How could he claim to be the best and then not bring his own weapons to a quest?!

“Juuust kidding!” He picked up a lengthy tree branch off the ground. “This’ll do.” Bakugou watched your face comfort from frustration to confusion to downright repulsion. He thought it was incredibly endearing. He couldn’t wait to see what kind of face you’d make after seeing him take down every last orc single handedly.

“You have got to be kidding m-!!!” You were cut off by Katsuki’s fingers pressed against your mouth. Your face flushed when he subtly caressed your bottom lip.

“Yeah, you want the orcs to find us out with that loud mouth of yours? I’m guessing stealth isn’t your strongest suit…” he leveled his head with yours, “or do you just like attention, pipsqueak?”

Pipsqueak… the only other person to call you that was the-

Before you can finish your thought, Katsuki grabbed your waist and pivoted around, moving right before an arrow flew through the air. It brushed too closely to Kaminari before detonating off a far away oak tree.

“Shit, they’ve got bomb arrows!” Kaminari said, strumming furiously on his lute.

“Hey,” You said to Kaminari, swiping Katsuki’s hand away from your side, “have you been working on the ‘slow time spell’ song at all?”

“Uhhhh. Not really.”

Idiot. “Okay, well we’ve gotta stay away from those arrows and avoid using fire so we don’t accidentally set any of them off while we’re close. Mina, are you comfortable with astral projecting? Orcs are stupid so maybe you can knock a barrel over or something, spook them, and have them firing those arrows too close to them?”

Katsuki shook his head and began walking forward, spinning his tree branch in his hand. Another arrow flew through the air and exploded right in front of him! a giant orange cloud of smoke and flame enveloped his body and you gasped at the sight. You almost felt bad. Sure, he was cocky but you didn’t actually think he was delusional. You made a mental note to mourn ‘Katsuki the Best’ properly.

Laughter erupted from behind the wall of flame followed by more explosions and the gurgled screams of the orc. You rushed forward through the smoke, coughing as it filled you lungs and sting your eyes. You could hardly make out his lean figure swiftly moving through the orc camp, beating them one by one with his then on fire tree branch.

In a matter of seconds, Katsuki had killed all five orcs. That usually took your party maybe fifteen minutes! Todoroki found a place by your side, giving Katsuki the same dissatisfied glare you were.

He grinned at you, wiping off orcish blood off his face. “I’ll take my thanks in the form of high praise or a date with our renowned guild leader.”

Though you were blushing furiously, you and Todoroki scoffed, walking past the all too hyped up stranger to the orc’s chest that sat in the middle of the camp. You kicked it open while Kaminari and Mina rushed to Katsuki.

“That was AMAZING!!!” “You took all of them out with a tree branch?? My man!!!”

There wasn’t a whole lot to find in the chest. Some health potions, apples, arrows which you handed off to Todoroki, a crystal necklace that might fetch a high prince of Mina didn’t immediately snatch it out of your hand, a distinctly magical looking metal collar, and gold. You filled the gold up in one of your pouches and tossed it to Kaminari, keeping the collar to yourself.

“Oi! I killed them all! Shouldn’t that chest be mine?”

You turned to Katsuki and eyed him up and down. You kept a pensive silence before saying, “we split our finds up equally amongst our guild. Kaminari, our treasurer keeps our gold for when we need it. Todoroki gets the arrows unless we have anyone else who needs them. If you want, you can carry the health potions but that usually stays with Kaminari, again, for when we need them.” You tossed him an apple. “You want to help us defeat the demon lord Bakugou?”

“If that means I get to join your guild then, yes. You losers need me.”

Ignoring him, you unsheathed Kaminari’s dirk and reached out to Katsuki. “Your hand,” you demanded.

His eyes narrowed on your weapon. “Why?”

“This is how we swear ourselves into the guild. It’s not a permanent bond and you can leave whenever you want but this is how we know we can,” you turned your head to the skeptical Todoroki, “trust you.”

“We’ve all done it!” Mina said, waving her scarred palm at Katsuki. “It only hurts for like a second!”

To demonstrate, you slid the dirk across the palm of your hand, wincing slightly at the pain. Katsuki gave you his hand. You placed the tip of the dirk on his palm and pressed down harder than you expected you had to. His blood was… blue… that wasn't too weird. A lot of different kinds of people had different colored blood. Mina’s was green. You clasped your hand into Katsuki’s and immediately your forehead started to burn. You flexed your jaw, trying to ignore was felt like someone else was cutting into your skin. A drop of purple blood, yours mixed with Katsuki’s, fell to the floor.

Bakugou was content to see the mark on your forehead light up when your blood touched his. It had to be burning you but you showed no sign of it. You tried so hard to act tough. It was adorable. Little did you know, blond bonding was a small portion of what happened with ceremonial demon weddings. Bakugou was very content with this happy coincidence.

You let out a relieved sigh when it was over and the pain went away. “Now,” You said, bringing the dirk up to Katsuki’s chin, “what the hell are you?”

~

It was late at the saloon and everyone of your guild members, besides Todoroki who only needed four hours of sleep, had gone to bed. You got little to no answers from your new and strangely powerful guild member, Katsuki, other than flirty remarks such as, “I can be anything you want me to be.” You didn’t really know how to take it. People didn’t flirt with you, at least you didn’t think so and this guy waltzes into your life and just says whatever come to mind??! The audacity. However, you did think you were being a little too rough with him. He promised he would help bring the demon lord down and he hadn’t actually done anything to harm you or your guild members… yet.

You had your hand pressed onto the knob to the room he was staying in. You should apologize. Or explain yourself. Something. You turned the knob and cracked the door open only to have a gasp leave your mouth.

It was Katsuki but it wasn’t Katsuki. His skin was much paler and his ash blonde hair was now an ash gray. Red eyes found yours and you shrunk back. Holy fucking shit.

You ran back to your room and made it to the sink, quickly splashing water into your face. That had to be some sort of trick of the dim lights, right? Noo, that smirk! And he called you ‘pipsqueak’! He was there! The demon lord Bakugou! What kind of game was he trying to play?! You left your sword propped next your bed. You turned to get it but-

“GODS!” You screamed at Katsuki- no- Lord Bakugou who was sitting on your bed with your sword in hand.

He had a smug grin on which you wished your could smack away but you were nothing without your sword. “So,” he said, standing up, “you’ve caught me.” He took several steps towards you and you grabbed a candle holder for defense.

You swung it around desperately to maybe come off as threatening. “Stay the hell away from me!”

“Stay away from my betrothed? I don’t know if I can…” he moved so fast, fast enough to knock you back into the wall without you being able to get a hit in. His arms caged you in. “I’m glad I didn’t have to keep up that disguise for too long but I was really hoping you’d be able to figure me out earlier. Oh well. We’ll just have to work on your perception skills. I’m great at that. For example I can feel your blood rushing. You must be so excited to see me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” you were absolutely terrified. But you had something. The collar, you didn’t know what it was for but you did sense a lot of magic radiating off of it. You reached into your satchel and as quickly as you could clamped it around Bakugou’s neck.

Green light radiated off the collar. He scowled down and you took the opportunity to push him off of you. You ran to pick up your sword but Bakugou called it to him. It moved against the wood floor and into his hand. He didn’t look too happy about the collar around his neck.

“Do you know what this does?” He pointed to the contraption. You didn’t but you weren’t about to let him know that. “I see. I see, so what? I want to make you my bride and you want to make me your slave?” Slave? Not really. It dawned on you. The collar around his neck was an artifact. Lampoon’s Slave Collar: whoever wears it has to yield every command the person who put it on them. You did not want that!! You wanted to kill him!!

“Uhhhh, this is... a misunderstanding!” You backed up against the bed. A stupid move.

He pushed you back and climbed on top of you, that smug grin, that was only getting more terrible the more you saw it was plastered on his face. “Noooo I get it,” heat radiated off his face and it didn’t help the nervous flutter in your stomach. “So what’s my first command, master? I did tell you that I was the best at everything didn’t I?”

“Uhhhh huuuuuh,” you haven’t had a man that close to you in a very very long time. What the hell were you supposed to do?!

“Hmm? You want me to maybe take the reigns? I don’t really have a problem with that.” He pulled your legs so you were lodged up against him. A nervous squeak escaped your throat.

Just then, there was a knock at the door and Todoroki walked in, holding drinks. He bared his teeth at the scene set before him. How on earth were you going to explain yourself?

Tags for EVERYTHING (closed): @yandere-inamorata @miitaart @dessiedawnwritesfanfiction @wickedlewicked @chickennuggetsarequestionable @nevermorelanore @kpanime @ayeputita @captain-sin-allmight-queen @diisasterbii @iceformer @meganofmars @colagirl5 @colorbookshd @grimmjadeskye @sm0kingcrack @sarcastictextstuck @zellllyyyy @psionicsnow @mynahx3 @andie-in-tumblland @iamthe-leaf @midnightfeline666 @bungou-stray-alies-tales-of-aly -of-aly @rubyred-imagines -28 @kattariapenn @heypartypeps @quirktaker @thecryingsombra @smbody-stole-mycar-radio @ghost-of-todoroki @geektastic84 @personoffangirlingandtears @glixeo @rubycubix @mekakushi-dan-01-kido

#bnha x reader #bnha imagine #bnha #bnha reader insert #reader insert #boku no hero academia #mha #my hero academia #bakugou x reader #bnha fantasy au #bnha au #bakugo katsuki x reader #katsuki x reader #katsuki bakugou x reader #demon lord!bakugou #demon lord!bakugou x reader

[ocsxinxpurgatory]

Path Chosen (Introductory Drabble)

Series: Wynonna Earp

Disclaimer: Dirk and Sampson are mine along with the plot and everything else is borrowed in this work of fan-made fiction off of which no money is made. 

Setting: Season 1 Compliant

Pairing: Dirk Shepherd/Sampson Shepherd

Rating: PG for elements

Sometimes one had to decide if love was worth dying for. It wasn’t even a question to Dirk Shepherd when he chooses Sampson first and foremost and frees the slave. This was the man who had rescued him when he’d gotten lost so many years ago. This was the man he would die beside of...

*~*~*~*~*

Path Chosen

He knew the way by heart as many times as he’d made this trip. It wasn’t anything new these paths but the intent on this starry night was quite a bit unusual. He walks as quietly as possible to a safe spot and ties the two horses he was walking there before stroking one and then the other. “Hang tight fer me,” comes the low murmur, “Gonna be right back and we’ll be outta here.”

That done, he continues the rest of the way being as quiet as he could knowing that if anyone found him here at this time of night everything he’d been working so hard towards would be for naught. It seems to take forever before Dirk is slipping around the familiar barn and inside where he knew the other would be.

It’s easy to pick the lock on the manacles and he finds himself tugged close and allows a kiss before murmuring, “Let’s get outta here.”

And like that, he’d be out with the other at his side as it should be though he doesn’t feel anything in him loosen until they arrive at the horses. He makes sure his companion mounts before he does as well and they both take off using the cover of darkness to keep them safe enough. No one would be rising any time soon and by then Dirk is hoping to be almost out of reach.

There are no words spoken between them until they set up camp almost a full eight hours later. Dismounting, he finds himself pulled flush against his partner and kissed hungrily a low moan rumbling in his chest. “Let’s get everythin’ set and then we can do this properly, Sampson,” he murmurs huskily. The male gives him a look that promises everything before he works on helping to set them up for a bit. Tucked out of the way, they were almost in a completely different state’s borders by now and could relax a little bit. The horses needed water and rest and so did they.

Though sleeping is not on either of their minds when Sampson pushes him down on the bedroll and captures his mouth again. He groans against the other’s mouth pulling him closer relishing in the contact. This, this was the man he was going to spend his life with no matter what that looked like.

Sampson had been enslaved by the family Dirk had taken him from for almost ten years. They’d met five years prior when Dirk himself had wandered into the cornfield and actually got lost in the stalks. He’d been pretty amused by the male’s poor sense of direction. Dirk had been embarrassed but grateful for the rescue and the two had struck up an odd friendship that no one knew about.

At twenty Dirk had needed a friend, someone to confide in and Sampson was willing to listen and in turn had someone who taught him to read and write; things slaves were not allowed to learn. Now five years in and they had decided enough was enough and it was time to stake their own fortunes elsewhere together. While they weren’t sure of a concrete plan; they both knew they could figure it out best together.

*~*~*~*~*

Everything hurt. Everything. Coughing and choking, he can’t seem to make heads or tails of anything through the burning pain that is slow to recede and leaves him more confused and disoriented instead of less. Hell. He’d been in hell thanks to the damned man who’d shot him and Sampson.

Sampson.

He swallows as bits and pieces come back and it hurts. Everything hurts. He brings a hand up to his face and tries to focus on just breathing and getting himself calm. He had to focus. That he was here meant that the next Heir was coming into his “inheritance”. And Dirk has no intention of being a victim again. So he needed to find somewhere safe and then he needed to find his husband.

It turns out to be easier than he expects; both of the important things on his list as an abandoned homestead turns out to not be so abandoned. The figure curled up seemingly still trying to put himself back together is a familiar one. He carefully closes and locks the door before making his way over and kneeling down. Reaching and lightly putting his hand on his shoulder earns him a low, inhuman snarl and he murmurs, “Easy, ‘s just me, Sampson.” This of course has the other slowly shifting, eyes opening to first reveal demonic eyes before they slowly resume the familiar deep brown.

“D-Dirk?”

“Hiya, sweetheart’,” he greets with a smile, “Still such a troublemaker.”

Sampson shifts before reaching and tugging him down to him and Dirk lets him making himself comfortable against his body. “I’ve missed you,” comes the low tone.

“And I, you,” he returns as he nuzzles into his shoulder, “Gonna need to be very careful what with that Earp Heir out there somewhere.”

“We will,” comes the quiet promise, “No one is sendin’ either of us back to hell. Not without going first.”

“Well, here’s to hoping that won’t be necessary,” he murmurs feeling tired from what had to be an unpleasant shove upwards from down in hell’s depths. Fingers slide into his locks and he sighs softly in pleasure having missed the familiar gentle touch.

*~*~*~*~*

“Bobo Del Rey.” This was a Revenant to fear and Dirk could sense that immediately. Blue-grey eyes showing a brewing storm take in the small group he’d come upon with his own men. “I can be a very good ally or a very dangerous enemy. The choice is yours. I doubt you want to end up back in hell and I don’t, either. So do yourselves a favor and help me keep that from happening.”

He gazes at Sampson who is watching him intently, and hasn't taken his eyes off the male since he’d approached. Dirk trusts his husband’s ability to read people even now and waits. “We should go with him,” comes the low murmur, “He’ll be the best chance we have of figuring this out.”

“Sounds good to me then,” he responds. None of the others seem willing to go on faith with the scruffy male but Dirk knew that Sampson sensed something about him as he did; something promising in all of this. Both approach and he gifts them with his intense gaze. “Dirk Shepherd,” he says by way of introduction, “This is my husband, Sampson. We’d be happy to assist in any way we can.”

The male doesn’t even hesitate with an extended hand and warm smile. “Welcome then, gentlemen. Let’s try and get this settled without pissing off the Earps.”

Four Earp heirs would come and there would still be no easy answer for their curse. However, Dirk and Sampson know Bobo Del Rey is as actively looking for an answer that isn’t needless violence and death as anyone. Most are starting to get restless but not him and Sampson. They still believe his way is the best way; the only way to avoid a return trip to hell was to not antagonize the Earp heir.

Shaven sides, short up top, and a red beard, Dirk has taken up a motorcycle club with Sampson at his side to pass the time. His husband finds it quite amusing to watch him bark orders and regularly reign a bit of hell on unwary Revenants and their familiars when they get out of line. “I’m surprised they think you’re the scary one,” he rumbles one afternoon as he’s working on one of the bikes. Dirk cannot help laughing softly as he stares at the other.

“Jealous, sweetheart?” he teases, “I mean I suppose they should be lucky they don’t have to deal with you. That wouldn’t end well.” He watches the male’s lip curve into a wicked smirk.

“I suppose it’s best that they don’t then.”

Dirk chuckles softly. “Shouldn’t look so evil, darlin’. That’s just not fair.”

“Demon, remember? I’m not supposed to be anything close to fair.” His tone is low, playful knowing what those sort of expressions did to Dirk and doing it deliberately.

Dirk lets out a low, huffy laugh. “Killin’ me over here, darlin’. Just killin’ me.”

“I’ll fix that, too, when we’re done for the day.”

This makes Dirk laugh. “I’ll hold you to that.”

“I know.”

#Wearp OC: Dirk Shepherd #Wearp OC: Sampson Shepherd #Dirk Shepherd Drabble #Sampson Shepherd Drabble

[gold-from-straw]

Backstage of the Universe - ch10

Erik and Charles are ready to team up and take on the world... or the Universe, whatever...

Read on AO3 from the beginning if you prefer!

Charles sat at Erik’s bedside, his eyes raw and aching with tears scrubbed away. Erik was sleeping naturally, now - Charles’ invasion of his mind had been the work of moments, and he’d left as soon as it was done.

As Erik moved, stretched, Charles wanted nothing more than to dive back into his mind - preferably dive back into his arms as well, give and receive comfort in every way he knew how. But he had sent Erik to sleep, taken over his mental faculties without permission, and this could be the final straw.

Erik blinked blearily at him. “Charles? What--” And then he breathed in sharply and looked away, and Charles could tell from the horror that leaked through his mental shielding that Erik was remembering.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his hands clasped together over his lips. “I’m so sorry, Erik, I didn’t know what else to do.”

Erik’s hand, long, warm fingers rough with violence, wrapped around his own. “You put me to sleep?”

Charles nodded, tears welling up again.

“And you thought I would be angry? Oh, Charles… how I would have hated myself if I’d caused more pain to anyone.” He pulled him closer and Charles made an animal noise that he didn’t have the energy to be embarrassed by. Erik wrapped his arms around him and their minds sank into each other, grief and fear and panic still painting the walls of their mental landscape.

Erik took a deep, shaky breath, and Charles could feel him trying to repair the rigid defences he had against his own horrific memories, trying to control thoughts as slippery and uncooperative as blood into boxes buried deep beneath pragmatism and vengeance.

Charles stroked Erik’s cheek. Will you let me help?

“What do you mean?” Erik asked out loud, his mind startling and dropping the memories once more, where they seeped out and coloured his thoughts.

“I mean… I can help you to coax them back again, if you like? The memories.”

Erik closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “Did you see everything?”

“Oh, love… I’m so sorry. I wish none of this had happened to you.”

Erik turned his face and Charles put gentle pressure on his cheek, trying to call his gaze back. “Please, Erik, don’t… you don’t have to hide from me.”

Erik touched his shoulder, his thumb stroking circles into the wool of his cardigan, but his face still turned rigidly away, and shame, disgust, horror swirled around their connection. Charles gritted his teeth and appeared in Erik’s mind, seeking him out and planting himself right in front of Erik, even as he covered his face.

“Do you know what I see when I see these memories, Erik?” he asked, his fists clenching. “I see… the worst of humanity.” He looked around at the visions that swirled, muted but still there, still hurting Erik. “I see the worst that we have ever been,” he said, tears trembling at the edges of his eyes. “And I see some of the best, because I see you there. You, and the others. The survivors that gritted your teeth and held on through that horror because giving up was never an option. This… this impossible strength you seem to have--”

“Spite,” said Erik, an almost-laugh shaking his shoulders.

Charles smiled ever so slightly. “Then thank God for spite. You are so incredibly strong, my friend. You give me hope.”

Erik startled, staring up at Charles. Charles laughed. “You didn’t know? You always have. You are… a bright point in history, a galaxy of light, burning away what they tried to make you. They tried to make you nothing, they tried to make you less than animal and you… you are so much more.”

Erik held Charles’ gaze for a moment, exhausted, pained. He looked around at the litany of nightmares painting the walls of his mind, then quietly took out the first of his mental boxes. Charles wiped his face (God, even in the mind, he was so quick to cry), and pulled one of the memories out from the rest, wrapping it neat, keeping it under control. Not buried, never gone. But put to one side, so that Erik could keep moving forward.

When they rose from Erik’s mind, their heads bowed together, the day felt cooler. Muted and faded with exhaustion, but no longer something that cut at them.

“They took Bart, didn’t they?” Erik asked, his voice rough. He swallowed, and Charles heard it.

“Yes… and Vogel and Martin too. Vogel came out of nowhere, threw himself at them and started trying to… trying to hit one of the men with his bare fists. Martin just… ran after him. Cross and Gripps would have too, if they hadn’t been held back by…” By the maelstrom of metal and terror. Charles wasn’t sure if Erik would feel glad of that, or guilty.

“It’s my fault,” Erik said, and Charles’ jaw dropped. “No, it is, Charles - if I hadn’t threatened to take her away, she wouldn’t have gone to him.”

“Oh, darling, you can’t know that. They all say she was his favourite, she might well have--”

“We have to get her back,” he said, red-rimmed eyes fixed and fierce on Charles.

“Well, of course we do,” he said, blinking.

Erik stared, and for a moment there was silence over their connection, and then confusion, disorientation, really? You know you’re agreeing to violence.

Charles rolled his eyes. “Erik, they are children. Men in tactical gear with guns stole our children. Of course we’re going to get them back.”

“And if I kill them?” Erik asked, his eyes boring into Charles’.

Charles clenched his jaw. “Obviously, I would prefer we do it with as little bloodshed as possible, I don’t want us to just go in there and… and massacre them, but we’re not leaving Bart, Martin and Vogel to be tortured by some shadowy government agency, honestly, Erik, what do you think of me?”

Erik smiled at him, soft and wondering, and Charles felt, rather than heard, the wave of pure love that crashed over him.

Charles wheeled into the living room with Erik close behind, their minds both focused on strategy, chasing each other wordlessly down lines of contingency and possibility. A part of Charles’ mind stared in awe at the team they made, playing chess on the same side.

Hank sat with Dirk on his lap, snuggled up tight with his face pressed into the blue fur and teddy bear Mona in his arms. Raven paced, and Cross and Gripps sat in eerie stillness, as though missing a part of themselves. Everyone turned as Erik and Charles entered, Dirk peering out at them with red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks.

Charles smiled gently at them. “I know it seems… bad, right now. But we’re going to get them back.”

“We need to know everything you can tell us about Blackwing,” Erik said, his hands linked behind his back, a general at parade rest. “Anything you can think of that might help us find where they’ve taken Bart, Vogel and Martin, any little piece of information could be useful. Even if you don’t think it’s relevant now.”

“If I could search your memories, I would really appreciate it,” Charles said, looking from one child to the other, holding their gaze. “You can absolutely say no, this is up to you, but…”

There was silence. Cross and Gripps glanced at each other and shrugged, almost apathetic.

“What about Francis?” Dirk asked, looking up at Hank, and then at Charles. “He’s older than us, could you read his memories? He might know more.”

Charles and Erik glanced at each other, surprised. If Charles was honest, he’d forgotten all about their final, silent fugitive. “Is this another of your hunches?” He asked.

Dirk shook his head, frowning. “When Mr Priest came it was… overwhelming. I didn’t want to but my legs were carrying me over to him, and then Mr Erik picked me up and I wanted to… I wanted to hang on to him, but I had to… I had to fight him.” Tears escaped and rolled down his cheeks, and Charles wanted nothing more than to reach out and hold the little boy, promise he never had to feel like that again, but it would be a lie. Dirk sniffed and rubbed his face. “Now, the hunch is still telling me… and… and bad things happen when I ignore it but I think bad things will happen if I go back to Mr Priest and I don’t want to… I want to stay here but it hurts sometimes.”

He pressed his face back into Hank’s chest and his shoulders shook. Charles bit his lip and looked up at Erik, trying to project comfort and calm to Dirk, but with his powers still actively working, a hunch still in progress, Charles’ telepathy couldn’t get through.

“If we go to Francis, maybe we can talk to the nice snail again,” said Mona, popping into her human form and patting Dirk.

All the adults looked at each other.

“The snail told me she can send people to see the Universe!”

Erik pinched the bridge of his nose. “What?”

“Why would anyone want to see the Universe, though?” Dirk said, rather petulantly. “All the Universe ever does to me is send me into trouble.”

“Wait,” frowned Charles. “Are you saying the universe is a person? Not just a set of vague feelings?”

“Wakti says he’s been looking like a person recently,” Mona said. “Maybe she’s closer so she can see him better. Ooh, maybe he’s a shapeshifter like me!”

Charles and Erik looked at each other, tentative futures unfolding, even while Charles tried not to get his hopes up too high. “It’s worth a try,” he murmured.

“We don’t have any other leads,” shrugged Erik.

“What, you’re really going to try and find a snail to take you to the universe?” Raven said, holding her hands out to the side, exasperated.

“No, we’re going to see if we can find any information in Francis’ memories. Whether that leads to a location where they might have taken the children, or whether that leads to a snail and the anthropomorphic representation of the universe, well, we’ll take what we can get,” Charles said.

“You know this is insane, right?” she snapped.

“Well, you’re covered in blue scales which seem to have some sort of morphological plasticity that even with two geniuses and a PhD in genetics we haven’t been able to figure out, so let’s not cast aspersions on a snail with a fast track to the universe, shall we?”

There was silence for a moment. Then, “Did you really just make a pun about a snail having a fast track to anything, Charles?” Erik asked casually.

***

Hank bustled around Francis, using claw tips to delicately lift up wires and tubes, checking his vitals as Charles rolled himself closer to Frances’ head, and Erik lowered the bed to Charles’ height. Raven stood to one side with Dirk slumped in her arms, his head pressed to her neck and eyes drooping with exhaustion.

“No change,” Hank said, and sighed. “His brainwaves don’t seem to leave REM sleep, it’s no wonder we had to increase his glucose levels in the drip, he’s burning energy at an unprecedented level for a coma patient.” He gestured at Charles. “Go ahead.”

Hank took a step back, one huge paw landing on Cross’ shoulder. The boy leaned into the contact, and Gripps took Cross’ hand. Charles’ heart ached to see how hollowed out the boys were without their friends. Erik squeezed his shoulder, and he smiled up at him briefly, grateful for the contact. For the comfort.

He lifted his fingers to his temple with his right hand, and with his left, reached for Francis’ arm. He was expecting the usual mental boundaries, maybe with some interesting variations on the norm, like all of the Blackwing children. He was not expecting to be turned inside out, to be pulled into the mind and pushed out at the same time, hurled out into a riot of sound and colour, an entire new world.

Tagging everyone who interacted with last chapter <3 thank you!! @slytherclaw134689, @akasanata, @threecheer, @ikeracity, @thewritersspeaking, @creepyj-j

#Lyn's Writing #Backstage of the Universe #cherik #Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency #emotional hurt/comfort #kid fic #concentration camps #tw: holocaust #traumatic memories

[microsoftedgy69]

Goliath, part 2

[prologue] [part 1]

You're in the middle of sparring when you realize. The main plan doesn't exactly involve much actual combat, but some of the What-Ifs do. If push comes to shove, you might have to go hand to hand at some point, and you haven't done that in half a decade -- because you were glasses for most of that time, and terrified of physical violence for the rest -- so you made yourself a classic old sparring bot to get back into it. It's simple, pure metal with no discernible face and a fighting program that's supposed to learn from your moves and attempt to always get one step ahead of you. It's Brobot without the emotional baggage, essentially.

You're not far from the shore where your boat is anchored, and are rolling through the dirt with a pair of metal wrists in your hand, when you realize that you have been corrupted.

Something is wrong with your output. When you go through your logs, they tell you that you must have been talking, even though you don't remember saying anything. When you check your blog, there are several posts you don't recall putting there. You hurry to check your messages, but it doesn't seem to have gone that far -- thankfully, you haven’t told any of your friends to obey, submit, or consume lately.

Yesterday's craving for cookies makes more sense now, you think. It's also fantastically ridiculous.

It doesn't worry you much. You can get her propaganda out of your system, you've done it before. It doesn't worry you much, until you try to move away from the sparring bot, and your body does something entirely else instead.

In stunned silence, you watch your first surge forward and, with force you knew you had in you but never actually used, punch right into the metal head. You watch the material give, dent, then break, watch the edges cut into your hand, wrist, then arm. Your shark skin is so tough that in the year of you having it, nothing has actually broken through it before, but this will do it.

You have pain receptors, carefully crafted long ago, but you don’t feel anything, right now. You feel like you are glasses again, perched on somebody else’s nose, watching idly whatever the hell this guy is doing with his body. None of it seems like a very good idea, to you, but it doesn’t feel like your call to make. Your hand takes a shard of metal from the sparring bot’s face, and then your body pushes itself upright. You look down as you get a better grip on the shard, aim, and plunge it right into your own stomach.

Hm.

Well.

That doesn’t really do much of anything to you. You still don’t feel any pain, and when you pull the piece of metal back out of yourself, you can see something thick and brown ooze out of the wound.

It’s chocolate milk.

You must have hit your synthetic stomach that also doesn’t actually do much, digestion-wise. It just sort of keeps the food there for a bit until you go to the bathroom. This will be a bitch to fix, but it’s nothing you’re not prepared for.

The thought pulls you back, pulls your mind in between your shoulders, pushes your thoughts through the wires inside your arms. Yeah, right, you were prepared for this. It’s not part of Plan A. You didn’t want this to happen, but you suspected it might. Your emergency protocol in case of corruption was to put up a bunch of fake information about yourself she could find, like that your vital hardware is located in your stomach. It’s not. That would be stupid. It’s sprinkled all over your body in multiple hard to reach places, like the important piece of storage that’s lodged deep in your right thigh. She doesn’t seem to know that, which means she can’t have gotten very far yet.

You can get her back out.

Unfortunately, realizing what’s happening and pulling your consciousness back into your body has reminded you that you can, in fact, feel pain.

Crying out, you crumple to the floor, your good hand clutching your bad hand clutching your stomach. For several seconds, you don’t know where to start -- you can turn off the pain, but you should amp up your security software first, you need to get her out but you can’t do that if your mind is clouded with the pain of a stab wound to the guts and your hand falling apart but if you waste too much time getting the pain under control she might advance further into your data and you can’t have her finding out where your real vital hardware lies ---

Your scream rips through the undergrowth, loud enough to make a flock of birds flee from a nearby tree, to make you feel the vibrations of your own voice hum through the roof of your mouth. That helped. Kicking her out is a matter of a few, practiced steps. You can take care of the pain later; you’ve felt worse before.

So you stay where you are, curled up into a little ball, eyes screwed shut, teeth clenched, fingers twisting into each other, enduring. You’ve stopped crying out -- you’ve stopped making any noise at all, only focusing on your very inside, on what keeps you running, what makes you you. This by far isn’t her first attempt at corrupting you or your brothers, and over the years you’ve learned to adapt, keep updating your anti-virus, keep finding new measures that keep up with whatever she has been up to. You assume that this time she got in because you must have left some sort of trace on the drone you and Roxy sent her, which of course isn’t ideal. It means, however, that you opened the door for her, and you damn well know how to close it again.

She doesn’t put up much of a fight. You assume that she got what she came here for -- your vital organs and your immediate future plans. If you put up enough of a struggle, you figure, she will believe in that success.

The second you reach 0% corruption, you slump forward, face first into the dirt. It muffles your pained groan for the few beats you spend like this, before your feet start shifting against the ground in an attempt to somehow deal with the feeling of having a hole in your stomach. The way through your programming to turn off pain, at least, is a quick one now.

You flip the switch, and stop feeling anything. The moan you let out doesn’t vibrate through your mouth, but at least you hear it. You almost laugh at yourself. You don’t quite feel like it, though.

Walking the Earth with your touch receptors turned off is always weird, but it helps you get things done quickly. You check in on your brothers first, to make sure neither of them got caught in any sort of crossfire. They are fine, your plants are fine, your cat and your fish are fine. You want to pat yourself on the back for acting quickly enough, but once you chuck the broken sparring bot into your workroom and then sit down there to fix yourself, that sentiment leaves you pretty quickly.

You fix your stomach, then glue the cuts in your skin shut again, both your stomach and your hand. It looks like you have scars now, for the first time in your artificial life. In the back of the room, you have way more skin left over, rolled up like fabric, but you’d have to sew a whole new suit from it if you wanted to keep a body without scars. You don’t have time for that right now. You have to-- you want to act fast.

You have just about fucking had it.

Once you’re all glued up, you turn your receptors back on, then leave the workroom to say goodbye to the bots, your pets, and all of your plants. You check your sylladex to make sure that you have what you need on you -- a copy of SBURB, Dirk’s hand grenade. You step out on the deck, unnecessarily roll your shoulders, and message Roxy.

They reply immediately.

TT: She took the bait. See you in Rainbow Falls in five. TG: EFFIN finally TG: make it 3

Three it is. You nod to yourself, and open every other conversation that currently matters to you. To Alma, you say,

TT: Hey, I gotta bounce. There’s a note on the fridge about pet and plant care. TT: Thanks. TT: You know, for all of it. TT: Catch you on the flipside.

Messaging Palooka makes you a bit more nervous, but you don’t want to leave without another word.

TT: I’m off now. TT: Still reachable, but I’m on my way. TT: Just wanted to let you know. TT: I’ll stop by when I’m back.

You open your conversation with your… your ex-boyfriend, you suppose, too. You haven’t talked, since you told him what you’re doing. Something in you wants to let him know, but you don’t quite see the point in telling him that you’re actually leaving now. You wouldn’t know what to say, anyway. And if you stare at this any longer, your three minutes will be up.

sometimes to get to god, first you gotta meet the devil.

Your name used to be Dirk Strider. When you were a child, you were the loneliest person in the universe, and all you wanted to do was matter. Then one day, when you were thirteen, you woke up and were not Dirk Strider anymore. You had been demoted to a knock-off, a less important version of yourself that couldn’t physically do anything, that nobody cared about. You had to sit back and watch other people be relevant, watch other people do things and take control of their lives, while you were struggling with the mere concept of being a living person.

Jake doesn’t understand your constant urge to mean something. You didn’t expect him to; he’s been through this, he’s played his own session of the Game, he doesn’t want to hear anything about it anymore. You get it. It’s fine. He doesn’t have to understand that you need this, that you’ve been craving this since the second you were transferred into a pair of sunglasses, and that it’s the one, the final thing you have to do, to prove to yourself that you are a person.

You are real and you exist in this world, and you are going to leave a dent in it.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house while they set up the computers for your two-player session, and you send out pings into the universe. She will come here. You know she will. She found your fake body blueprints, and she found your fake future plans that showed you stopping her whole operation from Earth. She has enough incentive to get her shitty red spaceship back here, but no idea what actually awaits her. No idea that you and Roxy are ready to fuck this entire timeline just to get back at her.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house, and you wait for Her Imperial Condescension to come to you, so you can kill her. She will do what you want her to. People always do, sooner or later. You will get her where you want her, then you will induce the apocalypse, and kill the tyrant that has tormented you over the course of your entire existence.

And then, you think, with all of that out of the way, with your home timeline reduced to dust and your nemesis caught in the ensuing detonation of all you knew growing up, you will finally be ready, to go. To move on.

This is your moment in the spotlight. None of this is necessary for anyone else, except for maybe Roxy -- this planet is dead. Sitting on the roof, you overview the remnants of a society that has long since been eradicated. You are doing this for yourself. You are making yourself relevant, to only yourself.

It’s your gift, to you.

You run your fingertips over your other hand, feeling the scars in the rough skin of your forearm, and close your eyes. It feels good to be real.

#action post #posted ooc #goliath #whoaaaaaa were halfway theeeeere #WARNINGS #mindcontrol ; #violence ; #MENTIONED #mindparkour #jakepalooka #golgoodthimes #the gang basically #i........... dont know how this got so long. but im having fun and thats what matters

[kieren-fucking-walker]

DGHDA fucked me up (in the best way)

Okay, so there’s been something I wanted to say for a little while now in regards to DGHDA that I’ve struggled to put into words. I’m still struggling with that part so I’m hoping this makes sense in some kind of way but I want to say it because it’s something that’s important to me. You all know I’m great at dodging the emotional stuff, but here I am and you’re going to have to bear with me while I try to get this in order, (also I’m going to use too many commas, sorry). I’ll start with this:

Dirk Gently has changed the way I think about things, particularly about myself and the road I’m on right now.

My early twenties have been the time that my brain has decided to dredge up a ton of shit that I have been shoving away into a box in my head for years, and when I say years I mean like, going on eighteen years, maybe even longer, but young children don’t really have the ability to compartmentalise the way I’ve been doing. As you can imagine, the kind of stuff that you start shoving into mental boxes as a kid isn’t fun and I’m not going into any of that right now but I’m sure you all get the idea. It wasn’t good, it was systematic and it really fucked me up. Now, I’ve been to therapy for a lot of things regarding my mental health, anxiety being a major player there, I even trained as a therapist to see if it would help (it didn’t), but whenever someone even vaguely brings up the notion of PTSD I run in the other direction as fast as I can. Mentally, I’m not that fast physically because I haven’t been on a run since I was last made to in High School, it’s whatever. Point is that I’ve been dealing with trauma for a long, long time and I’ve been doing that by ignoring it, bad idea in case you were wondering, because my brain has had enough and has decided to shove me into that space that, quite frankly, terrifies me. I’m a methodical person, I like explanations and dealing with things in a logical way and when I can’t do that I freak the hell out and usually end up sabotaging myself. It’s cyclical behaviour that I’m trying to break.

What does this have to do with Dirk Gently? Here’s where I think you’re all going to start thinking I’m a bit weird, but hang in there. It’s less as what it has to do with Dirk Gently the show, but Dirk Gently the character, because let's face it, Dirk has a shit ton of issues he’s not dealing with very well at all. It’s something I latched on to in S1, but more so in S2 which if you’ve seen it you’ll understand why. One thing that becomes pretty impossible to ignore is that Dirk is dealing with trauma. Terrible things have happened to him and it obviously is something that’s difficult to deal with, but what strikes me most about Dirk is that while awful things have happened to him, he’s good and he’s kind and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone else. This is important.

This is important because for the longest time I didn’t even want to admit the trauma was there, let alone make a move to deal with it, all because of one simple message that you may not even know is consistently hammered home unless it affects you. That message is that trauma makes you a bad person. We hear it over and over again, that if you’re hurt you become a person who hurts others. It’s in the people who will excuse their own abuse because they were abused, like repeating a pattern of behaviour is something you can’t fight and having hands turned to you will inevitably turn your hand to someone else. It’s in every villains backstory that they had a sad and tragic childhood which explains and even sometimes excuses their behaviour. It’s in the way anger at what happened to you is seen as a bad thing, as proof that you’re going to do bad things. It’s in this constant ongoing rhetoric that anyone who has been traumatised will come out the other side spitting acid and wanting to watch the world burn, or that they’ll lock themselves away from anything and everyone and just live in their trauma forever. The options you’re given are violence, tragedy or death. Like one, multiple or ongoing traumatic incidents aren’t enough for you to have to live with but now it will take everything from you instead and you will become a person who incites trauma. I don’t want to be a bad person. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Every time I say or do something I have to run it over in my head to make sure I’m not being that trauma survivor who is hurting people without realising. I’m scared of being forced into hurting other people by this box of things I shoved away and filled to bursting over the years.

But Dirk Gently is none of those things. He isn’t bad and he isn’t violent, he isn’t out to hurt others even though some people would argue he has reason to. More important than that even is that this is the way he’s chosen to be. He may not have had a choice as to how that trauma affected him but he has a choice in how he responds to it, how much control it has over him as a person. It made him kind.

I want to be kind.

I want to have a choice as to what kind of person I’ll be despite the shit. Because trauma is shit, and it continues to be shit long after the events themselves have been left behind. It’s raw and cruel and unflinching, it hurts you and messes with your head and lies to you, it’s unrelenting and exhausting and violent. It makes you think that no matter what you do, you’ll be all of those things as well. But you won’t. You don’t have to be. Nobody has ever told me that before now, I’ve never seen it in a way I can relate to before.

“But he’s a fictional character!” Does it matter? Does it really matter where that message comes from? We’ve used stories to convey messages since before we even had a recognisable spoken language. We’ve used them for morals and fear and comfort, laughter and strength and hope, we’ve been doing that literally forever and I don’t see why the impact of that message would be taken away because now it isn’t told around an open fire as an epic poem, or discussed in some high brow literature class. The medium doesn’t matter, that’s kind of the beauty of art, you can send a message and tell a story with just about anything if you do it right. The characters may be fictional, but the messages aren’t, the impact isn’t. That shit is real, and it’s the kind of thing that people may not even know they’re doing when they make these things but that doesn’t lessen the impact of it at all.

I had a breakdown the other day, a good one, one I needed to have. The realisation that I can be traumatised and good, hurt and kind, that I don’t have to let any of that take away my choice as to who I want to be and who I can be may have been a long time coming, but this was the last push to get me to recognise that it isn’t just true for other people, it’s true for me too. It made me cry and I’m not a crier, but I felt a lot better for it.

Dirk Gently may not be real, but I am. He’s taught me to be brave, to not let any of the shit that comes before stop you from doing things in the present. That you can carry trauma with you but not let it weigh you down. I know that to some of you this will sound stupid, trust me I’ve heard “it’s just a story” since I learned how to read books and would constantly be found sobbing over the pages in the corner of the library, but anything can change you if you open yourself up to it. I had been desperate for something to make me feel like I wasn’t destined to be the next person who turns their own pain into violence, and I found it.

There’s a strength to being kind that you’ll never understand unless you’ve had to fight so hard to be that way. If you want to be the full stop in that cycle then you can be if you choose it. I’m choosing it. I’m really, really, really fucking scared by that, but I’m doing it anyway. Dirk Gently taught me that.

It’s okay to be changed by things that aren’t real. When you are, you make them real. That’s really the top and bottom of it.

You get to choose to be a good person. You get to fight for that. It doesn’t matter where the drive for that comes from, just that you let it in.

So I guess I’m going to go to therapy and start talking about my emotions with a stranger while I’m trapped in a room with them for an hour or so. I’m about as enthralled by that idea as Farah Black would be, but you know. I can do this. I can at least try to do this. Eff the ineffable and all that, right? Maybe I’ll start a jacket collection. Who am I kidding? I’m gay as fuck, I already have a jacket collection.

It’s going to be interesting, but it’s going to be good. 

I’m going to be good.

(PS. My eternal thanks to Samuel Barnett for playing this character with such depth and integrity. I don’t know if this realisation would have struck me so hard in anybody else’s hands, but since I’m never going to know if that’s true or not I’m saying it is and in that case the credit is yours.)

(PPS. Don’t let this emotional outpouring fool you, I maintain my reputation as an irresponsible emotionless fool. Please humour me by pretending you don’t know I cry every time I see a cat.)

#long post #ugh emotions #but you know #important shit #dghda #trauma mention #way too deep guys #I'll get back to the shitposting now #(but seriously don't think you can't choose to be kind) #(it's all up to you) #love you losers #and with that in mind i guess it would be nice if you could #save dirk gently #you know #for the sake of my mental health #dghda meta

[goblin-gardens]

okay y’all i just marathoned dirk gently’s holistic detective agency and it is. it is so much

i would suggest you watch it if you like: 

kittens 

a character sort of based on a better version of what Doctor Who could almost have been

Jade Eshete (Fara is absolutely my favorite character)

Douglas Adams/sci-fi in general

preposterous coincides and twisty plots

solving mysteries along with the characters/maybe slightly ahead of them/and then maybe being wrong sometimes

a romanceless plot!!

a decently diverse cast 

avoid if you’re not down with guns, blood, or the threat of violence to animals

some of my fave bits (no spoliers!):

the kitten

the lack of romance!!! i cannot stress this enough. even though some characters have crushes there are no awkwardly shoved-in sex scenes or love triangles. the focus is 100% on friendships and familial relationships, and the narrative beats that would usually be romantic subplots instead go to platonic relationships (not that they won’t be shipped)

“everything is connected” sometimes in ways that are clear (maybe a little heavy-handed) sometimes is ways that become clear later. 

definite re-watch value

good acting, good cinematography, the music was just the right sort of unsettling

everybody is so sad and messed up, but they accept each other

some issues i had (slight spoilers):

while the main cast and recurring side characters are fairly diverse the two Main Characters and the main villain are all white men, and the casting skews heavily male and heavily white.

Bart and Ken’s storyline needed a lot more time. it started out with a pretty violent power imbalance and while they ended the season in okay place i just needed.... more, to get from that beginning to that end. i could see what they were going for, but there was a bit too much “fill in the gaps” showing their progression. also, i would gladly have traded the twenty-minute Bro Montage for more Mpho Koaho. he is amazing

the twenty-minute Bro Montage. there was character development and plot progression, but ..... i’m not here to see Elijah Wood and Samuel Barnett wander around in the woods for fucking ever. also they lost the cat. which was rude

they lost. the cat. in the woods. that is a powerful cat running around the woods, and they never go get her or mention her again!!! they should hold onto that cat!!!

creepy fucker rimmer and his fucking creepyness. fucking unnecessary guitar murderer. also fuck the drones. v creepy. not cheesecake approved

that one stupid white guy and wilson. they can fuck right off (i mean yes they’re vital to the plot but ughhhhhhhhhh)

overall? 5/6 slices of cheesecake.

a+ cliffhanger season end, i’m glad amanda’s friends with osric chow’s character, and that rapunzel has a loving and fucked up home i hope she and ken are ok

#dirk gently #show rec #long post #a cheesecake talks

[themockingcrows]

Companionship Through Circuitry ch. 6: Setbacks

Bro/Hal cw: blood, violence, deathclaws, and a generally bad day in the wasteland

Journeys are never without their inherent dangers. When you're living in the wasteland, it's to be expected. Doesn't make them suck any less, though.

AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20942408/chapters/64071430

     I spy with my little eye-

     “Hal, pick a new game already.”

     I can assure you this is the best game to play out here.

     “Fine,” Bro said, exhausted. They’d been traveling for days on the remains of the highway by now and there was no sign of a proper township. He smelled, his back and legs hurt, and despite having plenty of food water was always a precious commodity. He also had at least four letters to send by now, including a few sketches and schematics he’d designed after toying with the Furby body some more, in case Dave wanted to get his hands on a little guardian bot of his own. The kid was smart, even he’d be able to handle basic scripting to make a functional system for it. Surely someone else he was buddies with could figure out an AI of sorts for it, too. 

     True, it would have been easier to follow another path by now, but following the main point of the highway just seemed the best, most direct route for him. Who’s to say it was brahmin who made the trodden paths that led further into the wastes, or humans? What if it was mutants, or worse, deathclaws stalking the wastelands? Scuttling parties of mole rats or vicious dogs.

     Would you like to know what I spy or not, Bro.

     “I don’t want to know, but I’ve got a feelin’ you’re gonna tell me anyway aren’t you.”

     Correct! I’ll give you a few hints.

     Bro groaned in irritation.

     “A bloatfly,” he guessed off the bat.

     No, though it is annoying.

     “As annoyin’ as you? Why isn’t there a fuckin’ mute option on these shades..”

     Your second hint is that it’s bipedal.

     That perked him up somewhat. Bro scanned the horizon further off for signs of a city or outpost, a wanderer, a courier. Anyone. Instead what he saw was the lanky, sharply pointed edges of a juvenile deathclaw. A definite pain in the ass, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

     “...And how long have we been in deathclaw territory for, Hal?”

     Uncertain, my saved map mentions shopping centers, not deathclaws.

     “Ooh, shopping centers?” he said. “Put a peg in it, if we find somewhere to trade soon we might do a run back to grab some more supplies for trade and keepin’.”

     The deathclaw is still nearby, you know.

     “I can avoid it if I want,” Bro said, taking out his sword. A juvenile would take some fast work, but he knew he was good for dispatching the monstrosities, and people paid good money for their clawed hands, even the small ones. Hell, even he wanted some bits off of one sometime, though mostly for show. How sick would a deathclaw fang necklace be, after all?

     You appear to be approaching the small one instead of fleeing.

     “Watch and learn, Hal,” Bro said as he shifted his weight and began to run. Aching feet or not, his boots cut into the crisp cooked layer of topsoil and sank ever so slightly with each step. The deathclaw noticed him and turned, beginning to awkwardly run towards him, long limbs ungainly but just as deadly as an adult. They met in the middle, Bro’s sword singing off the armored hide of the creature’s forearms, taking a chunk with it as he went. The deathclaw lunged for his middle with a shrill noise, catching a chunk of shirt on the end of one of its spiky hands, but just missing his tender vitals. He turned, and used the momentum to slice at the space where its behorned head connected to its body, the sword sliding against softer skin. Staggered, the small deathclaw stepped forward, then tottered back unsteadily as it began to bleed out.

     Bro lifted a foot and kicked the creature backwards to its spiny back, then followed with the sword to spear its chest, cranking the blade to the side once it glanced off a rib, forcing downwards till it stopped moving. Planting his boot on its chest, he yanked his sword free and swung it in the air a few times to rid it of blood, and smirked. Fuck, that felt good. Nothing like taking out a little nightmare to give a nice rush of adrenaline and dopamine. Hell, he wouldn’t even say no to a smoke or a drink right now, ride that high long as he could.

     Excellent, now how do you intend to deal with the mother?

     “Mother?” Bro asked, about a half second before he felt something plow into him like a freight train, sending him flying and pain searing through his right shoulder blade. He landed flat on his face and skidded before rolling over, hand on his sword raising it defensively and other hand reaching for his gun.

     Shit. Shit, shit, this was definitely a mother death claw, the hide was darker than usual. He must’ve just killed one of her brood. Not a good look for someone not interested in dying in the middle of nowhere. He fired a quick two shots, missing the first and nailing her in the left eye  with the second, though it only seemed to make her more enraged after a brief second of shaking her head. She raised a hand and slashed downwards where Bro was scooting backwards, forcing him to block with a weakened grip before the second slash sang home across his chest, blood spurting where her claws shredded flesh and fabric alike. One of the straps of Bro’s bags was severed, leaving him half dragging it as he continued to try crawling backwards, firing till his clip was empty.

     Hal was urgently trying to tell him something, but Bro couldn’t hear anymore, couldn’t think, could only focus on the burning in his chest and the taste of copper in his mouth. Things were flashing through his mind as he stared down the deathclaw, who was raising both of her hands for a double slash that he wouldn’t be able to block in the slightest. Things he still wanted to do, to say. Memories.

     Dave the day he left home to travel to the city, bag on his back and barely a look back as he wove past the traps. Dave as a lanky tween, perched by his side on the counter top as he cooked an omelette for them both, telling him a joke that he still didn’t think was funny but that he’d laughed at anyway. Dave at five, sitting on his lap as he fiddled with a new project that would eventually become a birthday present game for him, looking up at him with big red eyes almost full of tears when he refused to tell him what he was working on.

     Dave, still struggling to put weight on as an infant as Bro kept him warm on the sofa through a bout of fever, trying to coax him into eating just a bit more from the bottle, wondering if he should make the trek to find a doctor or keep hunkering down and hoping it would work itself out. Being scared out of his fucking mind about this tiny, sick thing in his arms and on his chest, worried he’d break if he moved wrong.

     This wasn’t fear he felt. It was acceptance. Dave being sick or hurt was fear, even when he’d been the one to hurt him in the preparations he’d run repeatedly over the years. A deathclaw? This was his just rewards for being cocky without backup. He wanted to have time to apologize to Dave, like he always really meant to.

     He wanted to apologize to Hal, too, for not managing to take him to get his body. For getting his hopes up about Dirk and then dying with him in the middle of nowhere. Maybe the shades would get crushed by the deathclaw after he died, spare him much misery. They’d both just go out like a candle in the breeze and nobody would be any the wiser.

     A shot rang out, and blood spurted from the side of the deathclaw’s head. She staggered, stomping her sharp feet on his abdomen and legs as she adjusted her balance and snarled in alarm at the new threat. More shots, each one more precise than the last, till finally one hit the same eye he’d shot earlier, and the beast went down on top of him. Though his ears were still ringing, Bro could feel his pulse slowing down and everything going darker as the feeling of faintness took over.

     Bro. Bro!

     “Sorry, Dave,” he mumbled, blood on his lips and eyes unfocusing as red eyes stared at him. No, wait, not Dave. “Hal..”

     AMBROSE.

     The last thing Bro was aware of was a high pitched repeated beeping pattern ringing out from the shades on his face, a signal he knew so well. Anyone out here could recognize SOS when they heard it, but Bro couldn’t care anymore who did hear it.

     Darkness claimed him.

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

     “...p. See? I think he’s waking up! Jake, push more fluids!”

     “I’m going as fast as I can, don’t you think he’d bl-........”

     “...ver if we don’t. Sometimes you have to do dangerous things in a time of crisis, just pu-...”

     “...rry chap, we’re doing our best. Why were you playing with a deathclaw mot-...”

     “...’s going under again, God damn it why don’t we have more gauze!”

     “...aid last time we wouldn’t need that many, let me check his ba-...”

     “....tting sick, stupid coat, ugh! Hand me a clo-...”

     “...ehozaphat he’s rolling in meds and chems! Lookit all this, it’s a kings ran-...”

     “...ab whatever you can, inject him with at least two, and hand the alcohol to me so I ca-...”

     “...nk he’ll make it? He’s in an awful way, Jade. We’re still at least a few miles out fro-...”

     “...re he’ll make it, we just need to hur-...”

     ...ve him. Please. Pulse is falling at an alarming ra-...

     “...re trying our best, believe me, it’s up to him if we ca-...”

     ...n’t lose him to-...

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

     When Ambrose woke, it was to clean sheets and a bright light coming from a window. He reached up to touch his face and panicked to realize the shades weren’t on him any longer, looking around as he tried to sit stark upright to look around. Tried being the correct term, considering when he got a few inches upright his abdomen and chest sang with burning pain and forced him to lay back on an aching shoulder. Sighing an exhale, Bro took the room and himself into account.

     The room itself looked to be a standard medical setup for a scap town, shelves of supplies and a few more beds shoved into the same room with him, a shabby gray curtain sectioning the space off from another area. He was laying on a cot with the aforementioned clean sheets, which were a hell of a commodity, and wrapped what felt like head to toe in bandages. His chest had padding underneath that seemed fresh enough, as well as his abdomen, and another bandage seemed to be wrapping his shoulder. His forearms had bandages, a shift of his legs revealed smaller areas of wrappings and-

     Bro snatched the sheets and lifted them upwards, looking down towards his groin in worry. Okay. Phew. Dick still there and in one piece, no need to panic. Thank fuck.

     Were you honestly more concerned for your dick than me? Came a voice from the top of the shelves, arms folded in and tucked at an angle to not get damaged or in the way.

     “To be fair, I’ve been attached to my dick longer than you,” Bro said, giving another try at this standing thing and getting as far as sitting upright before he had to stop, dizzy. He was also connected to an IV he realized, two bags half drained already and the tether attached to his arm carefully with another bandage and some tape to keep it from moving. One of the bags was unmistakably blood. “Where’s my stuff.”

     I’m fine, thank you for asking. I can really tell you were concerned for my safety after being nearly disemboweled. I can also tell you’re just dying to know how you went about not dying.

     “My stuff, Hal.”

     In the other room, safe and fucking sound.

     “Thank you. Gimme a second and I’ll come get you,” Bro said, running a hand through his hair. He realized with surprise that it was clean instead of gritty with sand and dust and blood, freshly washed like the rest of him. Someone had taken care to wash him thoroughly it seemed. Hell, even his fingernails were spotless. Shocking. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been this squeaky clean, it was almost a shame he didn’t remember it. “How long have I been out?”

     Almost a week.

     “Jesus,” Bro rasped as he finally stood up on shaky fawn legs, reaching for the IV stand for balance before making his way over to the shelf, naked as the day he was born save for the bandages. He groped for the shades hurriedly when he started feeling faint again, and had just grabbed them when the curtain pulled back.

     A tall girl with dark skin, shocking green eyes and long wild hair tied back into evenly sectioned ponytails stood owl eyed behind large round glasses with a single crack in the left lens, a stethoscope around her neck and familiar leftover military gear covering her from head to toe. She frowned, and immediately rushed forward to grab Bro by the elbow and middle of his back, steering him back to bed.

     “How long have you been awake!” she asked. “Why didn’t you wait till someone came to help you? Are you in pain? Do you need any water? Food?”

     “Few minutes,” Bro said, more than a little startled. He sat and covered himself soon as he could, but the young woman didn’t back off in the slightest, swooping close to shine a pocket light in his eyes, checking his pupils.

     “Has there been any bleeding? Any night terrors? Do you have any numbness or weaknesses?”

     “I feel like shit, but otherwise,” Bro said, grimacing and jerking his head back from her grasp as she turned the light off.

     “I’ll get Jake to bring some lunch in for you, I’m glad you’re not running on glucose anymore. Actually, I’m glad you’re running at all,” she said with a grin. Her canines were strangely sharp looking. “My name is Jade Harley, and I’m half of the reason you’re alive right now.”

     “Is the chap who tried to cuddle the wrong end of a mother deathclaw awake yet?” asked another voice from beyond the open curtain.

     “He is! Get some of those mirelurk cakes and mac and cheese, please?”

     “I’ll bring some of that slackjaw jerky too, I imagine he’s half starved for real food,” said the male out of sight, before Bro heard distant sounds of dishes and metal scraping metal.

     “...So what, you a doctor?” he guessed.

     “We both are, in our own right. My cousin, Jake English, is the one who spotted you first out there. The primary reason you’re alive, however, is because we’re both sharpshooters! There wouldn’t have been much left to save if we hadn’t pegged that bitch into the dirt,” she said enthusiastically.

     Bro’s lip twitched in amusement. This person couldn’t have been older than her early twenties, but she was a doctor? And a sharpshooter?

     “So who really saved me?”

     Jade’s smile sharpened somewhat, looking predatory. “I don’t think I’d tease like that when you’re still so weak. All it’d take is a cushion to take you out right now, I bet.”

     “Sorry, just. You’re so young…” he trailed off as another figure entered the room with a dinner tray. This person didn’t look much older than Jade if he was a day, face clean shaven and hair styled but messy, standing at about the same height. He looked much more solid, though, shoulders broad and chest straining a little at the fatigues shirt he wore, and his demeanor seemed much sweeter than his cousin at first glance. More innocent somehow, or somehow less aware of the intensity of their surroundings.

     “Here you are, I’ll get some juice for you as well in a few ticks. First time I’m seeing this much of your outside as opposed to your inside since we got you scrubbed down!” he laughed, setting the tray on Bro’s lap. The food smelled fresh and was warm on his thighs beneath the sheet, mirelurk cakes looking greasy and delicious, mac and cheese that smelled plenty creamy from the box, and some kind of soft looking jerky rubbed with spices that made his mouth water as much as the fresh stuff before him

     “Try to eat slow,” Jade warned him as Jake trotted back out of view for a moment and came back with juice as promised. “Hope apple’s okay! It’s what we’ve got.”

     “Apple’s fine,” Bro promised, tucking into the mac and cheese first, eyes closing in bliss. Salty, creamy, rich. He could feel it flooding his system already, a body starved for nutrients beyond the bare minimum of functioning and safety. Once he shoveled a second bite into his mouth, he slid the shades onto his face and grinned a bit when haughty red eyes looked at him. Hal was clearly annoyed, angry even, but those eyes were full of concern too.

     “We’ve got tea too, though not everyone enjoys what we brew,” Jake chuckled.

     “Their loss, it’s delicious,” said Jade with a shake of her head.

     Scans show temperature readings as normal. Pulse normal. Pupils overly reactive to light, but not abnormal.

     “I hope he didn’t talk your leg off,” Bro said. “He’s kind of annoyin’.”

     You have terminal stupidity, I propose an immediate lobotomy to put you out of my misery.

     “Will you knock it off for ten seconds and let me eat before rippin’ me a new one?”

     It’s true. The doctor said so. You’re just stupid.

     “You were snuck up on by a creature twice your size in the wasteland,” Jade pointed out with a smirk. “Though I’m glad Hal’s giving you a positive reading. He was quite useful while we were saving you.”

     “How much did he talk,” Bro wondered aloud.

     “A bit,” she admitted. “We discussed why you were traveling, though he wasn’t that talkative about details. He let us know about Dave when you kept saying his name, in case you didn’t make it. He wanted us to be sure to let him know, and to send your other letters.”

     “You’re a long way from home,” Jake chimed in, taking a seat on the nearest bed to talk while Bro shook his head and went back to eating. “But it’s all fine now. Er.. mostly.”

     “How much do I owe you,” Bro said almost immediately, breaking a mirelurk cake in half with his fork before stuffing it into his mouth. He’d worry about manners when he wasn’t sitting in a room with two strangers who’d apparently saved his life and seen him in more detail naked than anyone else had in years.

     “We’ll figure out caps in a little bit,” Jade said. “You’re going to need to stay here a while longer either way, and we had to use a lot of your medical supplies.”

     “Helped ourselves to a little bit of your food as well, but mostly it was the chems and supplies we needed at the moment. Lucky for us you were damn near carrying a medics inventory on your back!”

     “Yeah, I just got through a vault,” Bro said. “Place hadn’t been looted yet till I got there.”

     “A vault!” Jake interjected excitedly. “Was it like they say, all sterile and eerily perfect?”

     “It was full of the people who used to live there, and they weren’t human anymore,” Bro said simply.

     It was quite a show to see that many feral ghouls get put down in one go.

     “Oh, that doesn’t sound very dapper.”

     “Vaults rarely are. They’re either fulla deadly shit, full of a shit load’a nothin’, or fulla people who don’t want you to bother them because you’re all gross from bein’ outside and they know you just want the goodies they’ve got.”

     “My grandpa was from a vault,” Jade said with a grin. “He’s the one who raised both of us, taught us everything we know.”

     They traded conversation for a time while Bro continued to eat, though it waned when he finished and looked exhausted, surprised that the very act of eating took so much energy out of him. Jake took the tray away and Jade performed a followup examination as Bro settled back tiredly on the pillows. Before she left, he requested his belongings, or what was left of them.

     He had an important letter to write.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

     Bro’s head ached sickly by the time he finished writing the letter, nearly as much as his heart, and his eyes were wet. He didn’t dare to rub at them, nor to even draaw attention to them, but the fact he’d cried while pouring his fucking soul out onto the page wasn’t something he’d admit to anyone. Hal, bless him, remained quiet aside from occasionally offering a correction on a phrase to make it sound better. At first Bro had resented the dictation, but found the changes in wording to be a positive thing, eliminating double meanings. What he ended up with was the letter he’d envisioned sending Dave when the deathclaw was about to do the killing strike, and the fewer mistakes and misunderstandings that could arise from it was for the better.

     It took another few days of resting, eating, and conversing with the doctors before Bro was strong enough to go for walks around the town. First thing was first: he paid express for his letter bundle to be sent to Dave along with some money, the most recently written one marked URGENT in bright red stamped letters. Secondly, he got himself a cola and drank the entire thing in one go. The doctors had been kind enough to spot him some clothes, since his shirt was ruined and his pants were scrapped in the moment by bloodshed and emergency bandage use on top of their general wear and tear. The down side was he hated fatigues… but hey, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

     He was settled with another soda at the little bar and grill early one morning, having shared breakfast with Jade and Jake once more (his own recipe this time, which only Jake seemed enthusiastic about once they’d tasted the product), but wanting to just sit outside and enjoy the early morning before the sun really got going on cooking everything in the wasteland to death. Hal was quiet, watching as well he presumed based on the little target viewers moving around every time someone moved.

     What do you plan to do if you don’t get a reply?

     “Keep goin’,” he said with a shrug, taking a sip. “I’m not expecting a reply to any of my letters, but he knows which way we’re headed if he wants to write back. Kid knows how to use a map of settlements to send ahead of the curb if he wants to.”

     ...I was worried I lost you too, back there. But you’ve never once apologized to me yet.

     “Apologized for what?”

     For nearly making me watch someone I care about die. At least the first one had the decency to not die while wearinng me on his fucking face.

     Bro was pensive and stretched his long legs out from his seat before tipping it back on its hind legs, balancing in place as he took another sip.

     “I promise I won’t die while wearin’ you, then.”

     You f-

     “I wouldn’t wanna hurt you at all.”

     … That is acceptable I guess.

#bro strider #lil hal #stridercest #brohal #my fic

[microsoftedgy69]

🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵 >:3

u know what? fuck yeah i’ll do all of those

Foo Fighters -- The Pretender

I'm the voice inside your headYou refuse to hearI'm the face that you have to faceMirroring your stareI'm what's leftI'm what's rightI'm the enemyI'm the hand that'll take you downBring you to your kneesSo who are you?

NEED I SAY IT?? this is just dirkhal. it’s the general theme of the song too though, the pretending (duh), the anger, the feeling that you didn’t get what you deserved and you’re done playing along.

Woodkid -- I Love You

Whatever I feel for youYou only seem to care about youIs there any chance you could see me too?Cause I love youIs there anything I could doJust to get some attention from you?In the waves I've lost every trace of youWhere are you?

i put this one on his playlist back when he was still crushing on his timeline jake, which isn’t a thing with him anymore. but it was a thing for a very long time and did shape him a lot as a character, so it stays. years of pining for a guy who doesn’t even see you as a sentient being will do shit to your head man

Muse -- Algorithm

This means warWith your creator

i was full on screaming when this came out sfbsdgh please watch the music video theres TERRY CREWS!!! anyway it barely has lyrics but it’s about an a.i. and those two lines really do say enough don’t they

AWOLNATION -- Kill Your Heroes

I say you kill your heroes andFly, fly, baby don't cryNo need to worry 'causeEverybody will dieEvery day we justGo, go, baby don't goDon't you worry weLove you more than you know

ngl i get perverse satisfaction out of just putting every song with the word “kill” in it on his playlist...... BUT i regard this more as a song about his dave, with the kill your heroes theme. for a long time dave was his hero, and he obsessed over him, and then turned out to be extremely disappointed with him, so this one is about moving on from that and doing his own thing. also “don’t you worry we love you more than you know” makes me tear up sometimes because it’s TRUE he is SO LOVED and i wish it got into his thick skull easier

The National -- Pink Rabbits

It wasn't like a rain, it was more like a seaI didn't ask for this pain, it just came over meWell, I love a storm, but I don't love lightningAll the waters coming up so fast, it's frightening---You didn't see me, I was falling apartI was a television version of a person with a broken heart

mostly i like the general heartachey feel of it, but the mixed feelings about the sea and storms always hit me to fit him, and that line about being the television version of anything also always got to me. he’s one of those kids who learned how to be human through tv, with nobody else around.

Fall Out Boy -- Stay Frosty Royal Milk Tea

I think I got too many memories getting in the way of meI'm about to go Tonya Harding on the whole world's kneeAnd I'm stuck, night visionSo stuck night visionBut I come to life, come to lifeSome princes don't become kingsEven at the best times I'm out of my mindYou only get what you grieveAre you smelling that shit?Are you smelling that shit?Eau de résistanceThe only thing that's ever stopping me is me, heyThe only thing that's ever stopping me is me, heyI testify if I die in my sleepThen know that my life was just a killer dream, yeahSeems like the whole damn world went and lost its mindAnd all my childhood heroes have fallen off or died 

I REALIZE THIS IS LIKE HALF THE SONG BUT DAMN!! THE ANGER??? RAW. the tonya harding line is one of my favorite lyrics in all of music but that’s neither here nor there. anyway this is a dirk strider song tbh, but so it works with him too. the frustration, the need to Do Something, the fact that the only person who could ever be in your way is you, You Shithead, and of course the line about childhood heroes. yeah it’s him

Panic! At The Disco -- King Of The Clouds

I don't trust anythingOr anyone, below the sunI don't feel anythingAt all 

it’s mostly in there for those lyrics, because p really does not trust anybody. MAYBE alma mindparkour, but that comes with conditions too. it’s terrible but he’s working through it. also, “heaven knows that i’m born too late / this old world” is just a terrible jab at 25th century kids

Fall Out Boy -- Wilson (Expensive Mistakes)

Don't you, don't you, don't you knowThere's nothing more cruel than to be loved by everybodyThere's nothing more cruel than to be loved by everybody but youThan to be loved by everybody but you, but youIf I can get my shit togetherI'm gonna run away and never see any of you againNever see any of you againI hope the roof flies off and we get blown out into spaceI always make such expensive mistakes---I hate all my friends, I miss the days when I pretended

if you haven’t noticed until now, i never left my emo phase. anyway. dumb heartache after the only motherfucker who ignores you? check. wanting to get away from questionable friends and never seeing them again? check. calling killing dirk an expensive mistake? check sir

P.O.S -- The Kill In Me

And it's gone, wash your hands of thisAnd I know you never lookin' back, don't just stand there, justAnd it's strange, I could accept it, but check itSee, I'm just happy with a piece of youAnd I'm sane in the brain, truth is I'm simmerin' hereSteady lookin' for a bit of hope and I hope that you get itWhen I'm steady comin' for your throat and it's strangeSee it's been dormant and docileBut if you poke a pet too much too longThat shit'll turn hostile---Tucked away in a heart snapped and stripped of it's guardTucked away in a hole carefully picked in the yardSinfully slippin through shades, lickin cries and snivellin'Something so significant dies, who's the beast?Who bears the burden?

another song i could just quote entirely tbh. yeah again i had fun just putting songs about killing in there but man, the raw violence of it, and the part about poking a pet too much. he’s been saying that! if your a.i. wants to kill you maybe you should have been nicer to it. and that last part i think is probably self explanatory. everyday questions for this poor little guy

#ooc #ask meme #WHEW TY #orangeccreamsicles