#don't mind me I just like it when both halves of a ship would literally commit murder for the other

[utilitycaster]

I agree that Marisha building Laudna to not be romanceable is a big part of it. When she was talking to Bor'dor about Imogen in a more sisterly way it really felt earnest to me, and not about hiding any feelings. So leaning into the kiss and pivoting that hard must feel intuitively awkward in gameplay, where everything is so organic. Do you have any ideas on how they *could* stick the landing, in theory? It's a little harder for me to see that, admittedly.

Hey anon,

I agree - that line in the moment felt entirely honest and frankly it's a sign of how profoundly thick and distorting the shipping goggles must be in this campaign to see anything of note that both this and Ashton's later "sister" comment are being taken as genuine interest and not at face value.

I've outlined some of what would have made it good here (linking bc it might be of interest; I know it's hard to find discussion of this on my blog because I am not maintagging my criticism out of courtesy so you're kind of stuck with Tumblr's search capabilities and as such I don't mind repeating some things) but that's obviously retroactive. I do think the challenge has increased; it was on low with the gnarlrock fight and medium with the reunion of the two halves of the party and now we're squarely in hard mode but I think it's still doable.

The things to address are 1. Their friendship, such as it was, was never actually substantial; it was merely a constant empty yet incongruously clingy cycle of bland validation; and 2. Laudna genuinely seems to forget about it like, half the time.

Now, I if I were a script doctor coming in, I would leverage item 2 to fix item 1, ie, have Imogen say "hey, are you actually into this, because I feel like you're not," have Laudna admit she's not really prepared for romance and hadn't considered it before Imogen asked, make things awkward for a while, and basically do a slightly clumsy and a little weaker version of what would have happened in the reunion if Laudna had stuck to her guns and allowed herself to be upset, let that simmer and let them grow as separate people, and then have them reunite. Another option is to make that anger bubble up to the surface since she ignored it; have Laudna blow up and get mad that after her outburst Imogen's response was just to ask if she could kiss her instead of like, hearing her out; this wouldn't even require a breakup, just a fight that isn't smoothed over without a significant conversation. Both of these I think could be made excellent.

However, I am not terribly optimistic this would happen, because of how meaningless in its lack of confrontation the relationship has been the entire time, so I will admit I think the more likely options are "Delilah take the wheel in a spiritual successor to the gnarlrock fight"; "Imogen's slight lean towards the gods and the status quo and Laudna's slight lean away from them deepen into a proper divisive issue that they have to address"; or, to be honest, "one of them dies in combat and the funeral scene is really good."

Basically: introduce literally any form of conflict and actually play it out. "Stick the landing" might be generous and optimistic of me but at least I can see a way in which they do not roll endlessly and dully down this metaphorical flight of stairs and instead make the relationship, if not unmissable, at least not actively missable.

#answered #Anonymous #the lack of premise #<- considering this as a personal org tag but it might be a bit too obscure/unwieldy #cr tag

[wraithqveen-archive]

I was looking through SoC/CK to find every single bit in which kaz and inej react or think to react violently to the other being in danger (for science!). to no one’s surprise, kaz has the most I’ll murder this person violently reactions to her being threatened or hurt, with inej having one where we can see that’s how her thoughts and the others being more about her acting (or starting to) than thinking of it. not counting when they’re just fighting and there doesn’t seem to be an emotional reaction, it’s interesting that when it’s related to kaz in two out of three times she’s at her most quick to resort to violence/most vicious when it comes to pekka rollins. considering all that, the most notable moments she has of being ready to kill for kaz are

1. when he goes take the leadership of the dregs from haskell 

Inej was moving before she thought of it. She couldn’t just watch him die, she wouldn’t. They had him down now, heavy boots kicking and stomping at his body. Her knives were in her hands. She’d kill them all. She’d pile the bodies to the rafters for the stadwatch to find.

2. before he threatens rollins’ son, because the moment he suggest he’ll fight kaz she’s already readying her knives 

“I can admit I didn’t show you the proper respect, lad, but now you’ve got it. Congratulations. You’re worth the time it’s going to take me to beat you to death with that stick of yours.”

Inej drew her knives. “No, no, little girl,” Rollins said warningly. “This is between me and this skivstain upstart.”

3. when she literally cuts up rollins’ chest and leaves the implicit threat she will cut his heart out if he goes back to ketterdam.

“You can scream now,” she crooned. She peeled back the fabric of his nightshirt, and then her knife was digging into his chest. He screamed around the gag, trying to buck her off.

“Careful now,” she said. “You wouldn’t want me to slip.”

Pekka forced himself to still. He realized how long it had been since he’d felt real pain. No one had dared lift a hand against him in years.

“Better.”

She sat back slightly as if to review her work. Panting, Pekka peered down but could see nothing. A wave of nausea rolled through him.

“This was the first cut, Rollins. If you ever think about coming back to Ketterdam, we’ll meet again so I can make the second.”

with the last one winning for most vicious ALTHOUGH I think the first one is the most emotional

#don't mind me I just like it when both halves of a ship would literally commit murder for the other #that said inej is just literally :knife emoji: @ pekka rollins #would she kill him? not if she can avoid it because it's kaz' vengeance #that doesn't mean she isn't ready to #* out of character: WHAT ABOUT THE NOBODIES AND THE NOTHINGS‚ THE INVISIBLE GIRLS? #* general: THE WRAITH. #* dynamics: kaz brekker / BETTER TERRIBLE TRUTHS THAN KIND LIES.

[old-long-john]

Gross Pirate Disgustoids for #3 please (I don't want your pity, I want your absence) 🙃🙃🙃

So this idea started out truly horrible, then became something a bit horrible, and then somehow morphed into something quite soft and only moderately sad. Turns out my brain didn’t want to cooperate with the idea of angst, despite this prompt begging for it, so you’re saved. ;)

3. ‘I don’t want your pity, I want your absence.’

He wasn’t sure what time it was. Late, perhaps. Or very early. The room was dark, at least, but then he thought he might have asked Madi to draw the curtains at some point. Or was that yesterday? It was so difficult to be sure. His skull felt as though it had been crammed with cotton until his skin strained at the seams and his temples throbbed. It made it impossible to hold onto his thoughts for long, losing his grip on them if he forgot to concentrate and finding that groping blindly into the dark recesses of his brain only chased them further out of reach. It was infuriating, whenever he suddenly remembered he ought to be infuriated, which was roughly every half an hour or so.

He was by turns hot and cold, and sometimes both at once, shivering and sweating and unable to do anything about either. Every once in awhile he would throw the blankets off, only to have to drag them back up around his ears when his damp skin puckered into painful goosebumps at the touch of the cool air. And again and again, ad nauseam. It was agonising and irritating and he wondered dimly whether it had been this bad that time in the maroon camp, when Madi had first held his hand and he had ranted and rambled about weakness and his men and one James Flint. At least this fever seemed to be a passing winter sickness, rather than the burning tendrils of infection creeping upwards from his leg.

Madi had been caring for him this time too, patient and calm, but his discomfort made him agitated and snappish, and there were limits to the unpredictable outbursts she was willing to endure. She was soft when he would tolerate it, but at each fit of ungrateful grousing she simply ensured that he was comfortable and left him to bark at himself. Once or twice the thought had occurred to him that he was yet again testing the bounds of her love and willingness to forgive, though in fairness not this time entirely by choice, and that when he recovered he would have to make it up to her in any way that she would allow. However, as with most of his other thoughts in recent days, each time he managed to pull it into focus he quickly found it drifting away to be forgotten again.

“That woman is a saint, you know,” said a voice somewhere nearby on his left. “I would suggest buying her a book when you’re feeling better, to apologise. That was usually my go to solution with Miranda, though I couldn’t say for sure how effective it ever was.”

Silver peeled his eyes open, his lids heavy and his eyelashes sticky. The room was darker than he had thought; it was certainly full nighttime then. There was just one candle lit, burned low, and the light it gave off was muted and golden and did not stretch more than a few scant feet. It was enough though to illuminate the soft orange hairs on the face of the man to whom the voice belonged.

“Hello,” Flint said, as Silver’s gaze focused on him.

“Hmm,” Silver replied. He tried to smile, but he wasn’t sure his mouth had cooperated in realising his intention.  

Flint smiled back at him anyway, so perhaps the intention had been enough. He pulled up a chair and sat close by Silver’s side, one knee pressing against the blankets, forearms resting on his thighs. It put his face very near, and Silver wasn’t sure he could hold his focus on it. The shadows were close and deep and shifting, and it made him feel a little dizzy to look at. At least, he thought the dizziness was the fault of the low light, but being this close to Flint had always made him feel a little off-kilter even when he was in full health. Flint’s shirt sleeves were rolled up above his elbows and his collar was gaping wide. He looked relaxed and open, and it was a strangely comforting thing. If Flint was relaxed then everything must be alright. Silver was happy to take his cues from his captain; that much had not changed.

“What time is it?” Silver managed to croak out. His throat hurt. He needed water.

As though reading his mind, Flint poured him a glass from the jug by the bed and helped him to take a sip. “I’m not sure,” he said, placing the glass back on the table. “It’s after midnight though, I think.”

“Hmm,” Silver said again.

Flint smiled at his ineloquence. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

Silver scrunched up his face in response. “Not good,” he mumbled. “Can you move the blankets off my foot? It’s too hot. Did you know it’s harder to cool down with a leg missing? Less skin to lose heat through, I suppose.”

“I didn’t know that,” Flint said. He leaned down to lift the blankets up towards Silver’s calf, and Silver jumped at the brush of cool skin against his leg.

“Your hands are cold,” he said, and he jumped again when Flint wrapped his cool palm around Silver’s foot, fingers resting neatly under his arch. He shivered, but it felt oddly pleasant.

“I always had cold hands in London,” Flint said, eyes watching the point where their skin met. His thumb was rubbing Silver’s ankle just a little, the pressure barely there. “Before London, even. I think I told you once. My grandfather used to say ‘cold hands, warm heart’, but I was never sure how literally that saying was meant to be taken.”

“I’ve always had warm hands,” Silver said. “Does that mean I’m cold-hearted?”

“I don’t think so,” Flint said, with a small smile. “No matter how hard you might have tried to make it so, once upon a time.”

Silver hummed, and said, “Once upon a time. That’s a good idea. Will you tell me a story, Captain?”

Flint laughed softly. “How old are you?” he said, the pressure of his stroking thumb increasing slightly.

“Nobody’s too old for stories,” Silver said. “Can you use the voice?”

“Which voice is that?” Flint said.

“You know, the voice. The one you always used to tell your stories until you had people, right there in your pocket. That voice had me so many times,” Silver said.

“Is that right? And you’d like me to have you again?” Flint teased, sliding his hand a little higher on Silver’s foot to cool more skin.

Silver shivered. “Stop flirting. My brain’s too foggy to join in. Just tell me a story,” he said.

“Alright. Do you remember the last time you were laid out like this and I was trying to take care of you? In the cabin of that Man-of-War,” Flint said.

“Mm,” said Silver, his eyes slipping shut as he pictured the scene. “The fucking warship.”

“You were so young then. So naive in a lot of ways. Innocent, almost,” Flint said, and Silver couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking from the sound of his voice alone.

“Hardly innocent,” Silver whispered.

“Mm, hardly,” Flint agreed, his voice a soft rumble, “but all things are relative. There were a few moments while we were anchored at Tortuga, days before you finally awoke properly and lied your way out of my good graces, when you briefly came round and we spoke. In one of those moments I gave you some watered down rum, which you drank, but the bread that had been bought for you fresh from a bakery, you refused to take. You railed against any attempt on my part to show you kindness. In several languages you refused it, and in several more you cursed me and all of my ancestors, before finally you fixed your eyes on mine, focused and fervent, and said, ‘I don’t want your pity, I want your absence’. You hadn’t been making much sense up until then, even when your words were coherent, and I wasn’t certain you didn’t think I was someone else entirely, though who I could not say. But in that moment you seemed sure and clear headed, before your eyes slipped shut again and did not reopen until we were south of Inagua. 

“For a long while those words echoed inside my head whenever I looked at you or you looked at me. ‘I don’t want your pity, I want your absence.’ I felt them too. We were both of us drowning in our own ways, both of us railing against the idea of being pitied as we struggled to breathe, seen only by each other as we floundered in the depths of our own despairs. And then suddenly we were partners, two halves of some unquantifiable whole, and I started to think we’d never seek to be absent from one another again. How could anything drive us apart when we had seen all of each other in that way? I never wanted to be absent from you. And yet we were riven back in two, in a way that felt like self-mutilation and a defiance of all the natural laws of the world. There was deep pity, and there was long absence, and they were all the worse for having been so unthinkable for so long.”

“I don’t like this story,” Silver said softly. “I don’t remember saying those words. I don’t think. I don’t know. I just remember the way it felt as the ship rocked beneath me in that cabin, when I was so frightened and confused. God, I can feel it now.”

He opened his eyes again, one hand reaching out to touch the bedside table, trying to ground himself and settle the nauseating pitch and shift he could feel right down to his bone marrow. The candle had guttered out while his eyes were closed, and in the pressing dark he could not find a single point on which to focus his gaze; a horizon by which to distinguish up from down, or an anchor to fix him in place. But then he felt a hand on his face, cool palm pressed to his cheek and gentle fingers brushing strands of hair from his temple. It was comforting, and settling, and its weight slowed the rocking to almost nothing as he closed his eyes again.

“You don’t hate me, do you?” he said quietly to the dark. “For separating us in that way.”

“How could I ever hate you?” Flint replied, forefinger smoothing across Silver’s eyelid. “Do you hate me?”

Silver said nothing, but pulled his hand back from the table, sliding his fingers up Flint’s forearm, stroking the soft hairs there and needing no light to see their colour or that of the infinite freckles from which they grew. Two fingertips slipped round to touch the inside of Flint’s wrist, the softest of all, and Silver could’ve sworn he felt him shudder with it.

He stayed there like that for a long while, fingers pressed to Flint’s pulse, feeling it chime with the gentle throbbing that still pushed from inside his own temples, until he felt himself slipping away into sleep once more.

The door opened, and Silver jumped awake, eyes squinting against the bright intrusion of the candle being carried across the room.

“Captain?” he said.

“It’s me, John,” said Madi, pouring him a fresh glass of water.

“Where’s James?” Silver said, blinking hard.

Madi looked confused, frowning as she said, “He’s in Savannah, John. You remember? Did you dream about him?”

It was strange sometimes, how some emotions were simply too big to be felt all at once, and so they came out muted and difficult to identify, with the sharp edges cut off. This was panic, Silver thought. Dull panic, but panic nonetheless. Perhaps mingled with some despair, and horror, and regret. But most of all it was that feeling of panic that comes with the idea of time running out, and the need to make something right, quickly and at any cost.

“We need to go and find him,” said Silver, trying to keep his breathing calm as he pushed himself up to sitting. He needed to sound reasonable and rational, not delirious, because he needed Madi to agree with him. “It’s been too long. It’s been far too long. We need to go and get him back. Him and Thomas. I don’t know where they’ll be, I didn’t…I never thought for a moment he would be contained by that place, but it’s where we should start looking.”

Silver grasped Madi’s hand, eyes imploring, but she was smiling before he had even finished speaking.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “I quite agree. As it happens, I was beginning to get itchy feet myself. Once you are well enough, we will find a ship and we will go to Savannah and we will not stop looking until we have found them.”

“Do you promise?” Silver said, sagging back against the pillows.

“I promise,” Madi replied, tucking the blankets back around him and combing her fingers through his hair. “We will have our captain back, John Silver. However long it takes, we will have him back.”

#fic prompts #I'm still working through these! #silverflint #silverflintmadi #bedtime reading for El #<3