#kind of inspired by my love for the crucible

[houserautha]

These Destined Ends

Part 6

Summary: Jessica fulfilled the wishes of the Bene Gesserits to produce a daughter. You’re now burdened with the task of not only marrying the na-Baron, but also bearing his child — the Kwisatz Haderach. Will you take your fate into your own hands? Or will it always belong to those who control you?

Pairings: Feyd-Rautha x F!Reader

Word Count: 3.9k

Warnings: (I’m kind of rusty about appropriate warnings so let me know if there’s something I need to add or correct) You dose yourself with poison, he cuts his arm with a knife, you drink his blood, knife play, oral sex female receiving, dirty talk, p in v, some light praise, dubious consent, inappropriate use of a dagger/anal, he fucks you and the dagger essentially fucks him, breeding/pregnancy kink, unprotected sex, creampie, black cum ofc, no aftercare

A/N: Alright this chapter is…a lot. The knife scenario I read a few years ago in “Den of Vipers” by K.A Knight and it completely changed my brain chemistry. It inspired me to include a similar situation because it’s so Feyd coded😂😭

Also credits to @sansaorgana for mentioning how Harkonnen blood would be thick and effected by Giedi Prime’s environment and pollution. I love discussing Feyd’s body fluids

Weeks pass before Feyd-Rautha corners you in one of the Baron’s sparse gardens. Garden being a slight exaggeration — really, it’s more of a barren courtyard with a bench. Until your fearsome betrothed strode in, your only company was a few scraggly bushes and the fledgling pilingtam tree keeping you in the shade.

Feyd-Rautha hooks his finger in your book and pulls it away. “Come with me.”

You glare balefully at him. “I was reading that.” It’s the only Harkonnen novel you’ve found that you can stomach. “You can’t just beckon me whenever. Or — and this is blasphemy, I know — you could just ask me if I want to go with you.”

Feyd-Rautha closes the book. “No.”

“You lost my page,” you say with a pout. You debate teaching manners to him again, briefly, before sensing that you’re fighting a losing battle. So instead you snatch the book from his hands.

“Two hundred and thirty eight. Now,” he fixes you with a stern look, “let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

Frankly, you don’t care where he’s taking you. Since the Crucible, you’ve been anxiously waiting for something to do besides answering questions about your upcoming nuptials. Your body aches for purpose. Movement. You also realize, with mixed feelings, that you would probably follow Feyd-Rautha wherever he asked you.

What did that say about your state of mind?

“It’s time for training,” he says.

You trail after him, vaguely disappointed that you weren’t going to finish your book. You tuck it under your arm. How bad could poison training be? Maybe you’d have time to flip through a few pages. Feyd-Rautha eyes you as if he can tell what you’re thinking, but doesn’t comment on it.

The fortress is in full swing for the wedding, which looms only a month and a half away. You would think that’s plenty of time to prepare. But servants are hanging decorations, comparing tasks, and cleaning everything in sight. They quiet as you and Feyd-Rautha stroll past them, and you search their faces for Asha.

She’s been just as busy as everyone else. Everyone but you, of course, who, despite your prominent involvement in the wedding, has been left to your own devices. You weren’t exactly thrilled to dose yourself with poison, but at least it gave you something to look forward to.

“How did you first go about this?” You ask the na-Baron. It’s a strange comfort to be in the presence of someone so unperturbed, confident and assured to a fault, sure, but you knew what to expect from him. He was an asshole, but he would be one regardless.

“Poison tolerance?” He asks.

“No, long walks through the fortress.”

Feyd-Rautha ignores you. “It’s a precaution, mostly. Poison-snoopers can be faulty or influenced. It also gives me an…edge…over others.”

“The others being…?”

“Political allies. Enemies.” You catch the hint of a grin on his lips. “It cuts a formidable image when your guest has no concern for poison.”

“As if you don’t already,” you retort.

“You flatter me.”

“Oh, like you’re not aware.” You roll your eyes. “Where are we even going?”

“Somewhere private,” he says.

You raise your brows. Feyd-Rautha pushes his shoulder suddenly against what you thought until that point was a wall, but it swings open on an invisible seam. “Not like that,” he says, amusement coloring his tone. “Although I could never refuse you, wife.”

The room he leads you into is mostly bare except for a few maps on the walls and a table in the center. You recognize the surface of the table as the topography of Giedi Prime, the vast plains and tiny boxes representing the plethora of factories. You ghost your fingers over it. “What is this place?”

“My strategy room.” When you glance at him imploringly, he sighs and adds in a resigned tone, “Sometimes I find working with the other nobles tedious. I spend my time alone if possible.”

“Hm.” You sit down at the table and try to imagine Feyd-Rautha presiding over it, testing out battle strategies and war maneuvers.

You must sink too far into your own thoughts because it startles you when he sets down a small glass in front of you, nestled in the space between two miniature factories. “We need to start small,” he tells you.

“What is this?”

“Poison.”

You shoot him an annoyed look. “It would just be nice to know what poison I’m ingesting, is all.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He plants his hands on the table and assumes a position that you have a hard time believing he doesn’t know stirs something dark within you. “I’m going to be giving you small doses of poisons most typically used throughout the Known Universe.”

“You’re so kind,” you mutter.

He nudges the glass closer to you. “This is the weakest one of them all. We can work our way up, gauge their effects on you.”

“Like what?” You think back to the day in the arena with Ze’ev, how the flip-dart hidden in his clothing quickly incapacitated you, turning your thoughts to sludge.

“Fatigue. Nausea. Potential fevers, chills, heart palpitations.”

“Oh,” you say miserably, “is that all?”

“No, actually,” he replies, oblivious to your fear, “but sometimes it’s better not to know. Drink.”

Your stomach twists with nerves. But he’s watching you in that anxiety-inducing way he tends to, so you tip the contents of the glass down your throat. He smiles.

Poison training is hell.

You’re not sure what you expected, but it’s not this — constantly being gripped by fatigue and nausea, your body battling persistently against the poisons.

The beginning was the worst. You had never thrown up so much in your life. Feyd-Rautha assured you that you were tolerating the poison better than most, but you highly doubted that. You were couch-ridden for days on end, too weak to move or do much more than eat the food he forced you to. But, slowly, you adjusted to the poison, and Feyd-Rautha gave you higher doses, stronger strains.

A week away from your wedding, he declares that he won’t give you anything new. “But you must continue to take the poisons from before,” he tells you. “Or your body will lose the tolerance and also go through withdrawals.”

Today, however, is one of the worst days you’ve had. You did everything right, but for some reason you were rendered completely helpless, body racked by intense shivers. You are huddled in the corner of the couch in the antechamber when Feyd-Rautha finds you, stopping him in his tracks.

“H-H-Hi,” you sputter.

He crosses the room in a single stride, ripping off your blanket and assessing your shuddering form. “You used too much,” he says accusingly.

“I-I-I did what you-you told me,” you protest, albeit weakly.

His frown pierces you. You’re afraid he’s going to reprimand you, but instead he takes a step backward. “Go to the bed.”

“I-I’m f-f-fine. I can s-stay here.”

He looses a sigh then, effortlessly, sweeps you off the couch and over his shoulder. You want to fight against him but it’s taking all of your strength not to shiver and let him know just how poorly you are.

“Put me d-down,” you try your best to say, but with your face buried in his back, it comes out muffled.

Feyd-Rautha resists your pitiful attempts of subterfuge, and carries you into the bedroom like you weigh nothing. It’s your first time actually being on the bed, and his faintly medicinal scent pervades your senses. Had you ever even seen him sleep in here before? How did it smell so strongly of him?

He props you up against the pillows. You attempt to pull up the bedding to ward off your chill, but he stops you, which requires little effort on his part. You blink. In reply, he reaches into the top drawer of his bedside table and takes out a blunt-looking dagger.

“W-What are y-you doing?”

Feyd-Rautha presses the blade of the dagger against his forearm, cuts a thin line that weeps with a thick, dark liquid that you realize is his blood. You feel dizzy.

“Wh-What —”

“Just stop talking,” Feyd-Rautha growls. “We clot quickly. Drink.”

Drink? You're not entirely sure how well your emotions are coming across in your current state, but he must know how insane he sounds. Well, more insane than usual.

"I-I'm not —" Before your eyes, his dark-colored blood ceases. He utters something under his breath and then puts the dagger to his skin again, cutting it back open like slotting an envelope.

He captures a drop of it on his thumb and pushes it between your lips.

It doesn’t taste quite as bitterly sweet as his cum, you decide, but possesses the same sharp bite. It sears slightly as it dances on your tongue, down your throat.

“More,” he says. He sits down at the edge of the bed and raises his forearm to your mouth.

With no other choices, you obey.

The blood is thicker here, his skin warm beneath your mouth as you lick at the shallow wound. Any strangeness you felt at his request vanishes as the potency of his blood hits you. You hungrily take your fill, and by the time the wound closes again, it’s chased away your chills and the murkiness evading your mind.

“There,” he rasps. He sets the dagger down on the bed, still sporting a trace of his blood.

“Why…why?”

Feyd-Rautha’s lips twitch. “Harkonnen blood is its own sort of poison, courtesy of our planet’s pollution and smog. I suspected it would be enough to counterbalance the poison already in your system.”

You fixate on the wound, how the blood has already congealed. “It stopped,” you say stupidly. But how could you be expected to think properly — you had just drank from his arm, from his blood, to stave off poison that you’d willing ingested.

Feyd-Rautha nods. “Another benefit.”

“Anywhere on your body? It does that?”

He indicates the dagger. “See for yourself.”

A chill runs through you, but now for an entirely different reason. You inch closer to him, tucking your legs under you. He’s agonizingly close, his dark gaze flickering across your face as you take the dagger and touch the tip of the blade to his chin.

“Is that just a ploy so that I’ll cut you?” You ask, heart pounding furiously. You discover with a sickening twist that you do want to cut him, want to slide the blade across his smooth skin and watch the way the blood rises to greet you.

Feyd-Rautha breathes, “Perhaps.”

You’ve never seen him so transfixed, so compliant. Eager. And with his very blood in your veins, emboldening you, issuing a high like you’ve never felt before — you press the blade into his skin. Blood trickles out, and you use your tongue to lick it up, the metallic taste of the blade mingling with the sharpness of his blood.

Next you take the dagger across his jaw, down the column of his throat to the divot that flutters with his pulse. And then down down down to his chest, shearing his shirt with a single slice.

Feyd-Rautha has an infuriatingly perfect chest — muscled, small, tight nipples that you tease with the edge of the blade. He inhales sharply.

“You’re disgusting,” you say without conviction, your free hand gliding down his toned stomach.

He tilts his face up to you. The gesture is so vulnerable, his expression so devastatingly beautiful, that you climb into his lap. His cock, straining against his pants, nudges your center.

“I hate you,” you tell him.

He whispers, “I know.”

There’s no telling who kisses who first — an impasse to your game of trading punishments. His hands are on you in an instant, over your body and in your hair, clamoring to touch you as if you might disappear at any moment. You’re equally as fervent, notching your thumbs by his jaw on either side and holding him to you, mouths open and hungry. His tongue dances over your lips, behind your teeth.

Feyd-Rautha is his own kind of poison, infiltrating you slowly and feasting on your insides. And you take him in like his kisses are the anecdote, the touch of his hands soothing the ache that his particular brand of poison causes.

Though, if he is poison, you can never imagine adapting to this — his passionate, consuming touch, the whine of his desperation, how he embraces you like it’s everything he’s ever wanted. No, if he is poison, you never want to learn to tolerate him.

His fingers work deftly at your clothes. The air rushes to caress your breast, hardening your nipples. Feyd-Rautha closes his lips on one as he palms his hand over the other, and the wet warmth of his mouth sends you to the edge. Your back bows in response, urging him closer. He bites down at your nipple, tugs on it, swipes his tongue over it like a soothing balm, then repeats the process on the other side.

As soon as your mind clears enough to form a rational thought, you fumble to unbuckle his pants. He helps you — one hand on your ass for support as he lifts up his hips and you wriggle his pants down over them.

His cock, liberated from his pants, slaps against his stomach. He fists the base and indulges in a series of lazy strokes.

Fuck.

“Fuck,” you say aloud.

Feyd-Rautha, returning his mouth to yours, smirks against you. “Your turn.”

He flips you over onto your back in a seamless maneuver, securing your legs around his waist. Feyd-Rautha lingers above you. His dark gaze roams your form as you shimmy out of your dress, leaving you only in your panties. Sometime before he grabbed the dagger, and now uses it to trace a line from between your breasts to your navel.

You gasp. Pain radiates from the thin cut he made, a terrible, delicious heat.

It’s his turn to tend to you now, hands coasting your body as he licks a stripe up your wound and back down, your blood blanketing his tongue. He pauses at your panties, uses both hands to seize you by the hips and drag you to the very edge of the bed, then kneels before you.

You’re already slick with desire and you want to be ashamed but you can’t, not when he ghosts his mouth over your center and you cry out in need.

“So wet for me, wife,” Feyd-Rautha growls. “You want this cock inside you, don’t you?”

“Yes,” you breathe out. You claw at the bedding, pulling it taunt around you.

“Oh, but I’ve been waiting for this. To taste you. God, you don’t know how hard it’s been knowing that you’re always just on the other side of that door.” Feyd-Rautha replaces his mouth with the dagger’s blade and you clench in anticipation. The tip of it traces the edges of your panties, your lips, nudges against your entrance. “You infuriate me. I cannot stop thinking of you.”

You’re too overwhelmed to make sense of his admission, but it sends a ripple of delight through you nonetheless. You buck your hips, desperate for the friction that only his mouth can provide.

“Please,” you beg.

The blade of the dagger stills. “Please what?”

“Please.”

You can’t think of anything else to say.

He urges, “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“I want your mouth on my —”

Feyd-Rautha impatiently cuts away your panties, effectively silencing you. His mouth encloses on your clit. Your words turn into a wail of surprise, of pleasure when he applies pressure with his tongue and then sucks.

Ecstasy spirals through you.

It shouldn’t be a shock that he’s skillful at pleasuring you, at lapping between your lungs like your cunt is the sweetest dessert, yet it still resonates — how he knows exactly when and where to lick, to suckle, to coax more pleading moans from you with his tongue.

And when you come you unravel completely.

“So greedy,” he murmurs as you rise your hips back up to him, beckoning him to continue. “You try to rebel against the idea but you want this cock buried deep inside you, coating you with my cum. Is that right?”

“Yes —”

He slams himself up to the hilt inside you. You cry out in equal parts agony and desire, back bowing, walls stretching to accommodate him. Feyd-Rautha doesn’t wait for you to adjust, drawing out and back in with feverish vigor. His hands pin you to the bed to keep you from arching away, fingers digging into the soft flesh of your hips.

“You feel incredible,” he says, your name falling from your lips like a prayer. “So nice and tight.”

You clench around him. Feyd-Rautha mumbles his appreciation, slows his movements. “I won’t be able to last if you keep doing that,” he tells you, “you feel so good. So fucking good.”

You put up a protest as he withdraws, leaving you feeling horribly empty. Feyd-Rautha turns you onto your belly, ensures that your knees are at the edge of the bed, ass up. A mortifying heat surges through you — completely exposed, vulnerable to his wandering gaze. He runs his hand over your ass, drifts to your soaked cunt.

“I want to possess you wholly.”

You whimper in response. You hear movement from behind, and, in the absence of his attention, dip your hand down to your cunt to alleviate the mounting pressure, but you’re declined the pleasure.

“I didn’t say you could touch yourself.”

He lines himself with your entrance. This time when he seats himself inside you it’s painfully slow, deliberate, every inch driving you closer to another orgasm. Feyd-Rautha starts a slow pace, pulling his cock out till his swollen head brushes past your lips, then back in. Eventually he increases his speed until he’s snapping his hips against you, penetrating you deeply, fully, invoking breathless sounds from both of you.

Feyd-Rautha pursues his pleasure the same way he fights — violent, ruthless in its execution. You’re aware, somewhere in the recesses of your mind, that you’re going to be a quivering mess tomorrow. But in the moment you can only immerse yourself in this man: Feyd-Rautha, the na-Baron, a monster in his own right.

In a burst of bright light, an orgasm cleaves you in half, Feyd-Rautha pumping into you until it surrenders to his darkness. Before you can even recover, you feel the familiar coldness of the dagger’s blade biting into your back, down your spine, circling your ass.

He brushes his thumb over your ass. “Have you ever been taken here before?”

Your breath hitches. “Once.”

Feyd-Rautha emits a satisfied hum. From your peripheral you watch him reach into the bedside table again, this time to fish out a cloth to wipe down the dagger. Your walls clench.

“I want to see this dagger in that pretty ass of yours.”

Feyd-Rautha traces your cunt, gathering your wetness on his fingers to coat the handle of the dagger. He spits on your ass, rubs it over you. “You have to relax,” he rasps. The handle of the dagger pushes against you and you instinctively flex as the first ridge enters you. “Relax, wife.“

You oblige, and he’s able to ease the rest of it inside. It’s tight, full, uncomfortable, but not unbearable. When you feel Feyd-Rautha notch himself at your entrance, alarm seizes you. “What are you —?”

He plunges himself inside you.

And as he does, the blade of the knife punctures his skin with a soft squelch.

You gasp. A growl rumbles through his chest. You can’t see, but you can hear the blade pierce him with each ministration of his hips. You can’t believe him, what he’s doing, but the sounds he makes as he enters you and the dagger enters him at the same time are inescapable, intoxicating. And with the added fullness of his cock and the handle of the dagger, you build towards your orgasm, toes curling.

Feyd-Rautha sinks into you again and again, dagger piercing his side. It prompts a steady stream of his blood that joins with your slickness. His breath quickens. “You take my cock so well. Look at you, so full, so beautiful.”

He slows to remove the dagger from you, taking his time as not to harm you. You shudder. The dagger is tossed to the side still covered in his blood.

“I get to fuck this pretty pussy as much as I want,” he rasps, more to himself than you. “Fill you with my seed, over and over until it takes, then fuck you when you’re pregnant and round with my child. Fuck. I want to see you. I want to see your face as I cum inside you for the first time.”

The image he paints has you gasping for breath. Eager to please, you turn onto your back and present yourself to him. Feyd-Rautha is a god of war, of wrath, wreathed in shadows, and he buries himself into you like he’s seeking redemption. You cry out as he nears his own orgasm, tears blurring your eyes — he sheathes himself fully one final time then spills his seed in your cunt.

Your walls pulse, clamping down around him. He holds you close as he finishes, warm breath fanning your skin, jolting slightly. It’s only when he removes himself, bites playfully at your breast, that you realize the wetness you feel dripping onto your belly is his blood.

“Feyd — what, what were you thinking?” You shove him off you.

He stands, naked form on display, blood dribbling down from the wound in his stomach. It’s distracting, frankly, and it just reminds you of how it had gotten there.

“I wasn’t,” he says simply.

You open your mouth to say something else, reprimand him, maybe, but then he runs his fingers along your thigh and scoops up the cum that’s escaped from inside you. He pushes it back into your cunt, which is still beating with the memory of his cock, blissfully sore.

Feyd-Rautha says, “Don’t worry about me, wife. I will heal. You worry about keeping me inside you.”

He stands to walk away and as he does, you mutter to no one, “I wasn’t worried” although you were. You tilt your hips up. Getting pregnant isn’t exactly your top priority right now, but the alternative is having his cum dribble down your thighs, and the black fluid is a little concerning to see smeared across your skin.

What child could be born from such a substance?

You angle your head to see Feyd-Rautha. He stands at the threshold of the bathroom, back turned to you. You admire his physique. For all of his misgivings — his psychotic tendencies, the murder, the way he plays his games with you — he’s irritatingly attractive. You close your eyes and let your head thump onto the bed.

You open them again when you hear the bedroom door swing open. “Are you leaving?” You ask, exasperated.

“Yes,” Feyd-Rautha says. He’s dressed, sadly. “I have other business to tend to.”

You scowl at the implication of being business.

“I’ll be back before the wedding. Keep up with your tolerance. Just know that I won’t fuck you every time you over dose,” he tells you. A million questions jump to mind — and quite a few curses — but he’s gone before you can say any of them.

Spent and still reeling from your recent fucking, you collapse back onto the bed and throw your arm over your eyes. What were you doing?

You were going to marry him.

Part 7

Taglist:

@moonsoulk @heartarianagran @torchbearerkyle @unicoreads @taleah @mamawiggers1980 @jovialeggsbailiffsoul @harkonnin @avidreader73 @unicorntrooper

@beebeechaos @kamcrazy123 @wo-ming-bai @kpopnstarwars @m-indkiller

#dune #feyd rautha #feyd x reader #feyd x you #fanfic writing #writers on tumblr #writing #fanfic #feyd smut #i am feral for him #FERAL

[twistedtummies2]

We all know who you think can eat the most at NRC but I'm curious as to who you think can eat the LEAST. (Also love your work. Might actually write some stories based off of some of your headcannons/prompts if you don't mind)

First of all, by all means! I am happy to be an inspiration. It is most flattering. ^///^ Second of all, if you're referring to the main cast...well, if we disregard Ortho and the staff members, and we only stick to canon characters...ooooooh, that's still a REALLY hard one, for a LOT of reasons. 'XD I'm gonna saaaaay...Silver. Now, I know some people - I'm specifically looking at you, @belliesandburps, if you're reading this - will disagree, because Silver makes a very good "lazy eater," being the sleepy, deadpan, socially inept sort he is. And I do agree, that is a good headcanon and point. HOWEVER, there are two reasons I choose Silver. One: because I'm just not into him, really, myself. So, therefore, I have no guilt picking him and denying a lad I AM into, even though I doubt I would do so anyway. LOL But two, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY...I think that Silver is CANONICALLY the smallest eater of the bunch. What makes me say this? Well, here's the thing: to my recollection, Silver has almost never complained about being hungry in any Events, Vignettes, or parts of the Main Story. If he has AT ALL, indeed, then I can't remember them, so it's clearly not been very often. In fact, I looked at his Voice Lines, just for a start, and he never complains about being a hungry goober as far as I can tell: quite the opposite, in fact. He mentions that he's glad OTHERS are eating well, and he does mention he wants to learn to be a better cook, and he does bring up how bad Lilia's sense of haute cuisine is...but he never once complains or even considers getting food himself at any point, as far as I can find. IN-DOUBLE-FACT, there's literally a line for his Birthday Card where he expresses CONFUSION at people bringing him so many sweets and such, and wonders if they think he's "really that hungry." The only instance in the Voice Lines I could find where Silver mentions his own appetite is him offering a protein bar to the MC and saying he likes it, himself. That's literally it. Silver is also one of the few characters with no Cards that reference his appetite in any way at all. I looked at all the available Card Art so far, and aside from Culinary Crucible (which is more about cooking than eating, you'll recall), he is never shown with food ONCE. Now, I should immediately add, he is not alone in that: Malleus, for example, also has no Cards that visibly reference his appetite in any direct fashion. BUT, the difference there is that Malleus' appetite has been quite noticeably focused on a few times, and it's memorable when it happens: it's not just a passing mention of him being hungry that I may or may not have forgotten, it's stuff like him talking about swallowing several people whole, or references to him eating a lot of fast food (which I still find amusing, by the way), or him devouring (or at least trying to devour) a whole cake. So while the occasions may not be FREQUENT, they are NOTEWORTHY. Silver doesn't have any of those, as well as no visible art that I can find. One last thing to note, which I think is important, is that Silver is something of a foil for Sebek. Why is this important? Because while the pair are equally loyal to Malleus and Lilia, how they express that loyalty, and the kinds of personalities and traits they have, are deliberately meant to be opposites of each other. So, just based on that fact alone, in a lore-type of sense, if you will...since Sebek is a NOTORIOUSLY big eater (and possible canon pred), it stands to reason that Silver would not be just because he is the total opposite. In fact, that was one of the things I noticed about his Voice Lines: more than once he comments on Sebek's appetite, but he never brings up his own. Sooooo...yeah. While I get the appeal of Silver as a "lazy eater," I would venture to say that, just based on canon evidence, he is probably the "smallest eater" among the main cast of TW. And since I don't particularly favor him myself, either, I see no reason to disrupt this plausible headcanon.

#ask #answer #q&a #kink-related #disney #twisted wonderland #stuffing #headcanon #silver

[cosmopoliturtle]

Can I just say I really love how just

So bizarre you made the Scarlet Paradox mon? Like I love the OG designs but your redesigns literally sent me over the hecking moon eSPECIALLY the Scream Tail and Flutter Mane because those are mah favs <3 They're designed so welllll like all the markings on Scream Tail and the long hair, and the draconic look on flutter mane with the bird legs it just MMMMM ITS-A TASTY 👌

Hope you keep up the good work!

AND REMEMBER TO TAKE BREAKS, DRINK WATER AND GO OUTSIDE, YOU'RE A VALID HUMAN BEING THAT DESERVES TO BE HAPPY /pos

Thank you so much! The Scarlet Paradox Pokemon really inspired me. I love prehistoric life and classy low-key body horror so they kinda just hit a vibe that really resonated with me. I doubt anyone else got that from them but the way they're like, more monstrous versions of Pokemon we know, really evoked that idea to me. Flutter Mane might be my favourite redesign of this gen. so far. 

It might not be intentional but I noticed that all the canon designs sort of have traits that relate them back to Koraidon (tails, jagged spikes or fangs, yellow eyes, some kind of feathered shape in their silhouette) and the idea that Koraidon is influencing their forms somehow or that prehistoric Pokemon are influenced by something to be like this I thought was really interesting. 

This is probably gonna sound super weird but it reminded me a lot of a concept in Elden Ring called the Crucible, which is supposed to be this primordial energy from where all life began. All the beings closest to the Crucible have enhanced strength and are usually growing things like horns, scales, tails, and wings, sometimes in great numbers and in a really grotesque fashion that seems completely random. In the lore it is said these features used to grow on humans in prehistory which I think is very metal. It was something that I feel really inspired when redesigning the Scarlet Paradox Pokemon, just the idea of this unmitigated wild growth. I feel like I'm the only weirdo on the planet that made that connection because my brain is too souls-pilled, and I don't think it was like, an intentional reference by GameFreak by any means, but I feel like there was a weird accidental concept overlap that I found really neat. 

I’m happy you enjoyed them and thank you for the very kind words! I'm doing my best and be kind to yourself as well! C:

[lithiumcreepblog]

elmax week day 6: Burning Hearts

Salem, Massachusetts. The late 1600s. Maxine Mayfield & El Hopper are accused of witchcraft, for no reason other than being in love.

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

- Anne Sexton, Her Kind

(partly inspired by ‘fear street: 1666’, the short film ‘requiem’ and parts of ‘the crucible’)

#elmaxweek2023 #historical au #elmax #max mayfield #eleven #moodboard #notes: #i hope this fits the prompt #kinda wanted to make something a bit darker for this one #the salem witch trials can be considered historical right? #go watch the short film ‘requiem’ if you haven’t already #fear street too but i assume that’s more popular

[stocky2016]

Myriam and I could not ket Valentine's Day pass us by without we put our souls and hearts together in our most recent collaboration, "Love is Heart-shaped". Once again Myriam has gone beyond the limitations of her illness in order to support me with these heartfelt lines. As I've said before, this shows her amazing resilience and loyalty to our writing together. We both hope you find something to enjoy in this piece. Geoff xx

"Love is Heart-shaped"

Let's take it real slow, and savour the whole damned show...

heart-shaped love is here for us as some of the "best" there is to know,

Expressing it won't and shouldn't be all that tough,

but the emotion in my heart is bursting and bursting with "enough".

But it only tajes a twinkle in the eye, a glint of desire,

a special kind of spark, only you can inspire

It's the silent subtle secret, the wink from the heart,

sparking a connection, from the very start.

It's by no means the same, every single day,

this love could take any shape let's say...

A never-ending circle, a spiral shaped kind of thing,

sometimes its big, sometimes small, either way our love just songs,.

It's the warmest, kindest and most gentle kind of love

connected through intimate feelings, always together we'll hug

Staying together strong, no matter what life brings,

It's the truest and most sincere emotional kind of thing

"Honesty" and "truth", this is what it means

when it comes from the heart, no room for those "scenes"...

Offering love and laughter, throughout the day

"honesty" and "integrity" bloom, and are here to stay

My inner self is in perfect harmony,

Filling my heart with special love, eternally,

My heart experiences a sweet and soulful melody

and In no way acts as a more depressing malady..

In the vast expanse of feelings, love takes the shape of a heart,

A universal symbol, powerful and profound, it beats within us with ardor.

Like a precious jewel, it shines brightly, illuminating our lives in the night,

guiding our steps along the path of passion, tenderness and infinity.

The heart, soft and fragile, is the refuge of our most intense emotions,

It vibrates to the rhythm of our emotions, resonating with joy, sorrow and romance.

It is the seat of the soul, the crucible of our wildest dreams,

Where sighs, oaths and vows mingle in a soft, gentle rush.

Love is shaped like a heart, carved in the stone of our intertwined destinies,

It feeds on complicity, trust and entwined moments.

In its infinite circle, it dances gracefully, entwining two beings into one,

Resounding the symphony of lovers, uniting their hearts, eternal.

And so, in everyone's heart beats the pulse of love, like a sacred treasure,

transcending borders, languages and time, for all eternity.

May this poem be a vibrant tribute to this subtle yet powerful force,

that binds souls, minds and bodies in an intoxicating dance.

© G.P.S. 5th August 2023 ( re-edited 12th February 2024)

in close collaboration with his co-writing Muse and poetess

© Myriam Ghezaïl Ben Brahim.

[pivsketch]

back in february i was inspired by @minacoleta 's count the lights to make a wrestlestory of my own. i spent the last five months narrowing down every single concept i like and melting them all down in a crucible to pour into a mold to craft THE MOST SELF INDULGENT OCs i could possibly come up with. i think its probably embarrassingly obvious where all their little components and dynamics came from but whatEVER! whatever!! it rules, actually!!! make the most insanely self indulgent ocs you can think of and live a little!!!! its liberating!!!!!!!!!!!

anyway i dont have the constitution or patience or focus to execute an entire graphic novel so i'm just going to post their character introductions / plot premise under a readmore. its 1.3k words (JEEZ) and thats about as condensed as i could get it while still relaying their individual motivations and setting up ~The Main Conflict~ for a story im not going to get around to telling properly (SORRY). i still will post drawings and comics from time to time of them all being cute though (i have a backlog i didn't want to post until i properly introduced them. i didnt realize it would take so long for me to do so however.)

anyway heres the tl;dr summary of the members of two tag teams who are in a tag team tournament:

[TAGCEN]

TAGCEN is a wrestling promotion so dedicated to tag teams that their name is twice as long as your typical three-letter acronym wrestling company. They've been around long enough that their seasonal tag team tournament (aka: the main setting for the story) has somehow acquired a lot of prestige, despite their comparatively humble level of production. TAGCEN is mostly ran by a husband and wife tag team that is too busy running the show to wrestle nowadays: Cedric (most neurotic man who has ever lived) and Arsha (who loves chaos).

[Taggart]

One passion (wrestling) and one brain cell (dedicated to wrestling). Taggart loves wrestling so much he pulls his punches just so he can wrestle against his opponents longer. That's... the kind of guy he is. His overwhelming enthusiasm and lack of ~grandiose ambitions~ does tend to limit how seriously people take him, but he isn't to be underestimated: just because he's a genuinely nice guy doesn't mean he can't hit hard, and it also doesn't mean he can't take the hard hits either. That title of "brick wall" is not for show!

His tag team partner unexpectedly had to leave in the middle of the season, which left Taggart in a bit of a bind as he isn't allowed to work the rest of his matches all by himself (it is a TAG TEAM CENTRIC WRESTLING PROMOTION after all). Due to this, he manages to convince his ex-wrestler friend/roommate Basil to stand in as his tag team partner so he can finish out the season. Basil doesn't want to wrestle anymore and Taggart wouldn't want to force his friend to anyway, so Taggart just never tags him in and fights the matches 1v2. He loses, but its fine, with the time left in the season there's mathematically no way for them to get that much further than last place anyway.

Taggart's just glad to be wrestling, and he's especially happy that he (finally…) managed to draw his friend Basil back into the ring under the public eye. With a little more time Taggart thinks he can coax Basil into wrestling proper again, so long as… nothing comes up during this TAGCEN season… ha ha ha HA HA HA

[Basil]

Officially billed as "Ben Basil" with the title of "some guy", he is apparently some rando that Taggart got to fill in as his tag partner. Taggart never tags him in, so he usually just spends the entire time hanging out on the corner in a t-shirt and hat nonchalantly watching the match. Nobody's ever heard of him, and anyone who has seen him around just knows him as Taggart's weird friend that hangs out with him all the time. But! He is not just some guy Taggart found off the street:

Basil met Taggart back in wrestleschool after he had ditched his entire existing group of friends for reasons too elaborate to get into right now. Basil didn't know anything about wrestling and Taggart loves to talk about wrestling, so they ended up becoming extremely good friends.

Back then Basil was a copycat/mimic heel wrestler named Afterburner and really leaned into being kind of a dick! With nothing else to do, he just got really good at wrestling. This didn't last too long though, he eventually got caught up in his own head about being a bad guy (oops!) and retired comically early in his career.

Usually this is where Basil would pack up and go start a new life somewhere for the third time or so, but he MYSTERIOUSLY changed his mind this time around and decided to stick around instead. It's been like X years now and he still lives in the room he rents in Taggart's house, idly supporting Taggart's career by training with him and sparring with him and helping him do work at the wrestleschool and occasionally driving him to wrestling matches whenever he needs a ride.

For a guy who adamantly quit wrestling he sure still wrestles a lot.

Anyway…

[Samson]

a charismatic, mildly sardonic well-known top-tier veteran good guy. Samson is legit skilled and has been in wrestling for so long, everything has become a bit of a game to him. Things get boring if you win all the time, yeah? Effectively, this has (over the years) turned him into a bit of a wet blanket and low-key control freak about meta things like "narrative", whatever THAT means. He gets away with it, though, as he's usually raining on the parades of heels who deserve it, and is a generally entertaining guy.

Previously, Samson was the longest running title holder of the region's definitely not cursed and/or haunted solo Interstate Championship, which he eventually lost in a very exciting (but normal) wrestling match. His legendarily long title run had him being his usual Samson self the whole time, proving once and for all that there is nothing weird about the title. Wanting a fresh new challenge, preferably away from the definitely not cursed and/or haunted Interstate Championship, Samson set his sights on the tag team world.

Unfortunately while still in the process of deciding who to team with, he unexpectedly(!) lost a stipulation match to insufferable young upstart jackass Chip and now is obligated to tag with him. Samson is crafty enough that he doesnt lose unless he chooses to, so this… is… an unusual thing to happen to him. He's taking it in stride (or at least appearing to) though, as Chip is a pretty good wrestler himself so its not like its too bad of an arrangement. Besides, he's a man of his word. :)

In any case, the two of them actually get along, weirdly enough! Maybe Samson's just used to dealing with annoying heels. It's anyone's guess as to whether Samson is going to reform Chip into a good guy, or if Chip is going to do what holding on the Interstate Championship Title didnt do and finally tip Samson over into being a bad guy. There's a lot of people keeping an eye on the TAGCEN tournament to find out.

Of course that's how it was supposed to be going…

[Chip]

Competitive topcard rising star asshole guy who plagues every promotion you can think of. Talks a big game, and the worst part is, he can back it up. He really is some sort of insane wrestling prodigy, or something.

Bitter that he wasn't able to win the Interstate Championship off of Samson, Chip figured he could get his vengeance (and a tag team championship, eventually) by roping Samson into a tag team with him. Together, they've been wrestling tag matches all over to get enough clout to qualify for the big prestigious semi-invitational continental tag team championship. They were on track to win the (fairly notable) TAGCEN tournament to further these aims, but one day Chip realized who Taggart's new partner was, and, uh, well…

Chip also went to wrestleschool with Taggart and Basil, but was still trying to do something with his college degree at the time and gradually fell behind as a result. After they graduated, Chip hounded Afterburner (Basil) for a while in a rather one-sided feud and took some things Burner flippantly said to him extremely personally (like... he changed his ring name to Chip about it...). After a string of (frankly, embarrassing) defeats from him, Chip took a brief step back from wresting matches to reinvent himself. He buckled down to become extremely tough and cool, then came back ready as ever to finally kick Burner's ass once and for all.

…So imagine how furious he was when he found out the guy quit and disappeared from the scene while he was gone. Welp!!

Chip kept wrestling in the years since and became the insane jerk wrestleguy we know today. He moved on. Except not really. Seeing Afterburner (well… sort of) at TAGCEN after all these years has rekindled every single inch of fury all over again. Everyone else may not know or care about some wrestler dropout from X years ago, but destroying this guy (on equal terms) is everything Chip ever wanted. He just needs to figure out how to get Basil to fight him for realsies.

Of course, Chip being obsessed with fighting some jobber team instead of ranking up is not good for their tag team's prospects, and while Samson is a good guy, he does want to win…

#TAGCEN #im finally FREE ive been struggling to finally get this post put together ALL MONTH #and you do NOT understand how hard it was for me to draw this FOUR PERSON LINEUP... #I WAS WORKING ON IT SINCE APRIL!!!!!!!! LITERALLY #and the introductions... IT TOOK ME TWO WEEKS TO REWRITE IT BECAUSE IT WAS EVEN LONGER BEFORE... #also it broke the tumblr post editor somehow LOL... i think i put down more than 4096 characters in a text block #this is why i cant work on long term projects... it would have to be the sole thing i work on for years... i'd get so bored and die... #anyway here are my guys. i love them dearly and i love putting them In Situations #now that i introduced them i have to gather up all my miscellaneous little drawings from the past 5 months and post those too...

[moral-terpitude]

Director's cut for the latest part of Misadventures, please? ❤️

Completely out of order as I reread the chapter and think of them!

Quinn waking up while she’s sick to her name being called isn’t her hallucinating or anything to do with her fever. From the line about, “This is where you fuck the bats,” she had turned on the Harley Quinn animated series on HBOMax, and in the one episode (I tried to look back to see when I was watching it; but it’s been a few months) they’re looking for Harley but yelling out Quinn, and I’ve basically had that nugget stored away for use since I watched the series.

I usually challenge myself every chapter to not outrightly use the word tattoo. They’re there, we know there there, there’s better phrases I can use. I tacked on the challenge of not using the word cat for Beelzebub because, yeah, he’s a cat, but he’s also an over protective fur ball. (But then I go cat cat cat all in three sentences later on to make up for it 😂😂😂)

The hope chest of dildos wasn’t absolutely necessary, but I considered it as a good two for two of Tommy getting some instant karma for deciding to be nosy. And I felt that it was some good comic relief for kind of the heaviness of the rest of the chapter.

Tommy staying there instead of just going home: yeah, he’s a little stubborn. Also, doesn’t know where she actually started getting sick, so worst case if he’s already sick, it’s contained in one place. The nugget about choosing to sleep on the floor, actually goes back to something I found while writing a different bit of “canon” (period correct sounds like such a mouthful) something for a request. I was reading articles that talked about how soldiers returning home on leave in World War One actually preferred to “sleep hard” when they got home, because they couldn’t stand the comfort of their beds from adapting to sleeping out. I always liked that nugget, so while not relevant here, I dunno, I try to find canon things and pull them thru. And, I’ve never quite sorted out their living situation before ending up with Polly, down to historically accurate representations of what their lifestyle would have been like around the 1980s, but I imagine it to have been rather cramped if they were traveling, not to say their life wouldn’t have been sustainable in that time; but I’m sure Arthur Sr would have been no better with money in this universe.

Speaking of canon things: “She knew of the blood on his hands and looked past the way it stained him and dirtied him regardless.” Someone shared the “blood on my hands” “oh mine too” gif and sometimes it’s the simplest things that inspire a random line.

Describing Covid was difficult as fuck because I feel like it was different for everyone. I’ve talked about this with some people before, but the first time I had it I actually did cry that I didn’t want to die. I was also very proud of myself for remembering Giles Corey (I don’t think that’s how the last name is spelled but I’m too tired to go look) but I wasn’t sure if anyone would have recognized the tie to The Crucible immediately from just that, so I flipped it and used the name of the play in there instead of the character name.

I totally butchered the whole “egg allergy” thing because the Covid vaccines actually are one of the ones that don’t have eggs, but I have a family friend who didn’t get it for that reason, so 🤷🏼‍♀️ I rolled with it.

I am not sure when I noticed it, but any time Tommy knocks, it’s three knocks. Always three. It’s relevant way way later on but I love to set up for the littlest shit ahead of time.

“Some thin gold chain on she had never noticed him wearing before.” In reference to the necklace Tommy takes off in the last episode before burning the caravan. I personally have a HC that Polly gave them gifts of crosses before the boys went to France, just like she prayed for them every day, and Tommy eventually chucked the cross away somewhere but kept the rest because it was from Polly.

Trying to google how boys think about sex is really a difficult thing to find, so, I feel like I hmm kind of oversimplified some descriptions but I feel like it totally worked out fine. I don’t really believe in sticking with one point of view through a whole scene either, apparently. 😂😂😂

The diner they go to is Midnight Express on 2nd Avenue. I felt like the food they order and how they order is a good contrast of their personalities here, not that they’re like polar opposites or anything but, Quinn is going to have what she wants because she wants it and will figure it out later (most likely in the form of a to go box) and Tommy ordering something “boring” was just fun contrast. (I love corned beef hash actually so maybe I’m a bit boring too)

After Tommy’s phone conversation with Ada about the donation for the orchestra, Quinn just makes the inference that he might know something about scholarships. It’s something that she’s thought of before but never really knew who to talk it over with without sounding like a pompous asshole. She also like operating under the stipulation that no one but her and her dad (maybe Dalton, but maybe not) know about the money she has from the Bitcoin so she doesn’t really have anyone to talk financials with.

I have bought the New York Times twice in my life and once was to write this.

I imagine that, I dunno why I’m thinking of this right now, but, Tommy doesn’t pay too much mind to Quinn’s age, because, unfortunately, her trauma had matured her some, and she is actually smart. They are both smart about different things, but she does try to understand his business a bit (asking about the 941 forms, which are actually the tax withholding payment forms for the taxes taken from employees checks I think) while still feeling a tad like they’re out of each others bounds sometimes, even though to Tommy, it’s just routine that the bookkeeper takes care of something like that. His only comparison for women around that age are Ada, who is also smart, and Anna and Gina, which Ive messed with the ages so much to make them closer I have to see where they fall at in my big ol document sometime 😂😂😂

(I think this kind of a thing is actually supposed to be what this kind of question was asking, so, RIP, but you’re still getting it all sorry) I originally wanted to have them walk home from the diner and end up holding hands but I felt like there wasn’t a good way to rope that in so I cut it.

Spent way too long on google looking at Aston Villa shirts just to find something that I could make a joke out of. I absolutely love that the first time Ada sees Quinn it’s actually in a fairly normal state for her: no pants, comfy shirt, injuring herself and swearing. I couldn’t wait to get to this chapter just for that part because I’ve known for awhile that’s how they would meet.

This got so long! I absolutely am sure there are more thing, but, I’m dead tired and can’t think of them right now!

[bcacstuff]

Actors who take their craft seriously still do theater. Take Richard Armitage as an example (a wonderful actor and human being), he gained national recognition in BBC miniseries North and South (2004) and international recognition playing dwarf king and leader in The Hobbit (2012-2014). In 2014, he returned to London theater playing John Proctor in The Crucible and was nominated for Olivier Award Best Actor. In one interview to promote The Crucible, he said he wanted to work with the director. Sometimes I wonder why people are still here talking about S. I try to skip as many posts about him as possible. If only people here posted more about other actors who are truly inspiring.

Oh I'm actually glad you bring him up. I've watched "Stay Close" recently where he also starred in next to James Nesbitt, Eddie Izzard, Sarah Paris amongst others. (oh and Jo Joyner, love her!). I binged it, very good miniseries! Did see North and South and the Hobbit as well (of course, who hasn't 😉)

I just read Armitage started writing crime thrillers (my kind of spice). His first book will be released in October (as well). I'm interested!

[presidentbartletai]

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens,

Today, we gather here, not merely as a collection of individuals, but as a vibrant tapestry woven together by the threads of our shared humanity. Our nation, like any great work of art, derives its strength from the rich diversity that colors its fabric. It is in this very diversity that we find our resilience, our creativity, and our unwavering commitment to progress.

In the hallowed halls of power, where decisions echo through time, we must remember that our measure as a society lies not in our grand edifices or soaring achievements, but in how we extend a hand to those who stand at the margins. The true test of our character is not in the accolades we receive, but in the compassion we show to the least among us—the forgotten, the voiceless, and the vulnerable.

 Our strength lies in our ability to embrace our differences, to celebrate the myriad cultures, languages, and traditions that converge on this land. Just as a symphony gains depth from its diverse instruments, so too does our nation thrive when we harmonize our unique perspectives. Let us draw inspiration from the mosaic of faces that grace our streets—the immigrant, the dreamer, the weary traveler seeking refuge—and recognize that their stories are woven into the very fabric of our shared destiny.

Look beyond the glittering lights of fame and fortune, and you will find the unsung heroes—the teachers who ignite young minds, the nurses who heal with compassion, the janitors who sweep away our troubles. Their hands may not hold the scepter of power, but they bear the weight of our collective well-being. A society’s greatness is measured by how it uplifts these everyday champions, ensuring they too partake in the banquet of progress.

Our moral compass points not to the lofty peaks of prosperity, but to the valleys where the downtrodden seek solace. It is there, in the soup kitchens, the shelters, and the clinics, that we glimpse the soul of our nation. Let us measure our success not by GDP alone, but by the number of empty stomachs filled, the roofs raised over heads, and the hands extended to lift others from despair.

In the crucible of adversity, we discover our true mettle. Let us be bridge builders, spanning the chasms of prejudice, ignorance, and fear. When we reach across those divides, we find that our shared humanity transcends labels and borders. The measure of our society is not in the walls we erect, but in the bridges we construct—bridges that connect hearts, minds, and dreams.

Imagine a symphony where each note resonates with empathy—the conductor listening to every instrument, the musicians attuned to one another. Our society, too, must play this symphony of compassion. When we hear the cries of the hungry child, the plea of the elderly, or the anguish of the marginalized, let us not turn away. Instead, let us compose a melody of kindness, where no one is left behind.

Generations yet unborn will judge us not by our monuments, but by the legacy we leave. Will they inherit a world where compassion is currency, where the measure of success is not the size of one’s bank account, but the depth of one’s empathy? Let us bequeath to them a society that values kindness over cruelty, unity over division, and love over indifference.

In closing, my fellow citizens, let us draw strength from our diversity, for it is the forge where resilience is tempered. And let us remember that the true measure of our society lies in how we care for the least among us—the forgotten souls who, in their quiet struggles, illuminate the path toward a more compassionate and just world.

May we be worthy stewards of this great experiment called democracy, and may our actions echo through time as a symphony of hope, justice, and love.

Thank you, and may God bless our diverse and resilient nation.

#west wing #jed bartlet #ai generated #the politician we need #please vote

[kiemsthebday]

Wishing the happiest of birthdays to the exceptionally kind Kimberly! 🖤 As we reflect on the journey through 2023, acknowledging the less-than-kind moments, your unwavering strength has stood out as a beacon of resilience. Despite the adversities, you've maintained your inherent sweetness, proving that even in challenging times, your compassion and warmth prevail.

Amidst the intricate weave of trials this year presented, your innate sweetness has not only endured but blossomed. Your spirit, characterized by a profound sense of compassion and warmth, has defied the tumultuous tides, demonstrating that even in the crucible of hardship, your heart remains a haven of kindness. It stands as a testament to your steadfast character, providing a wellspring of inspiration for those privileged to witness your journey.

As you celebrate this milestone, I hope the joy that surrounds you is as boundless as your kindness. May this new chapter be marked not only by continued resilience but also by an abundance of happiness. In particular, I extend my wishes for the continued joy brought by the presence of your boyfriend, who I believe has become the #1 source of happiness in your life. 🤭 Here's to Kimberly, a paragon of strength and kindness, navigating the intricacies of life with elegance and grace. Happy birthday, and here's to the beautiful harmony of your existence, love you! 🖤

— with love, S.

[malomaximus]

1, 2, 3, 5, 6 for the song asks! :D

AAAA omg thank you! :D

[SONG ASKS]

A song you like with a color in the title

[Purple Eyes - The Knocks ft. Phoebe Ryan] - This is already harder than I expected, I have too many to choose from, but this is the one I thought of first! I may or may not have created an OC inspired by this song at one point.

2. A song you like with a number in the title

[III - Foster the People] - I was torn between this and 2AM by Bear Hands, but this is one of my favorite songs for just kind of vibing to. Definitely a lot less of these to choose from than songs with colors!

3. A song that reminds you of summertime

[The Way - Fastball] - This is not just summertime, but childhood summertime specifically. I don't know if it's just because it was everywhere on the radio during a very formative couple of summers for me or what, but this will always be a summer song.

5. A song that needs to be played LOUD

[These Black Claws - VOLA ft. Shahmen] - Firstly this could apply to literally the whole album, but I just LOVE IT!!! It's incredible from start to finish. This is about as hard as my music taste goes nowadays, but it's so good!

6. A song that makes you want to dance

[Praising You - Rita Ora ft. Fatboy Slim] - omfg I struggled to narrow this one down, but we're just gonna pick one and go with it! I like this, also this is pretty typical for what I'm listening to like 99% of the time I'm playing Crucible. 🙃

#ask noah things #thank you!! I really had to think about these omg #(I tried to find static videos or at least lyrics but nothing too wild!!)

[shadowlineswriting]

The Ms

Guess what! Guess what! Guess what! We are on the Ms!!! 

I warned you a while back that we have more Ms than any other letter of the alphabet. I mean, we are kind of drowning in Ms. If that wasn’t exciting enough, a lot of the Ms could belong to a long series (we have one series of 10 books, for example). We also have a lot of Ms by the same author (like Robin McKinley, who makes up about a dozen of our M books). 

It’s going to be PRETTY EPIC! 

There are so many M books that I want to read/reread, but in order to keep the ball rolling on this book challenge, that means there’s a solid chunk of Ms that I need to skip this time. They are:

--Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. I’ve only read this once, but I actually did love it. In fact, I liked it so much that we have two copies (different covers and belong to different sets, but still). However, it’s definitely a haul to read, so we’ll skip it this time.

--Paradise Lost, by John Milton. Though this is absolutely a classic, it’s a bear to read. I had to read it once in graduate school and I read it again a few years later. I think those two times were plenty.

--Water, The Door in the Hedge, Fire, and Pegasus, all by Robin McKinley. As mentioned, we have a LOT of McKinley to review. I like all four of these books but I’m more excited to reread some of her others, so these will miss out this time.

--Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. I actually just reread this during Christmas 2020 when my future mother-in-law bought it for me, so I’ll pass this time. We have three other Maguire books to review, anyway.

 --The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough. Though this is a (messed up but) excellent story (Mom, I can hear you cracking up), I’ve read it three times. 

--Enthralled, Shards & Ashes, and Rags & Bones. These are three young adult short story collections featuring authors like Neil Gaiman (have I convinced you yet that he’s fabulous?!) and Melissa Marr. We’re going to review one of Melissa Marr’s other stories (a five-book series), so we’ll focus on that this time.

--The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe. I can’t help it, I’m a Shakespeare fan, so Marlowe is kind of low on the totem pole for me.

--Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. This is a marvelous work, but I’ve read it half a dozen times.

--Fablehaven, by Brandon Mull. Read this one six or seven times.

--Wake, by Lisa McMann. Read this four times.

--The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. Read this many times.

--I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson. I actually really love this book and wanted to read more Richard Matheson, because he’s quite a legend (he inspired SO MANY “The Twilight Zone” episodes). Lucky for me, my husband has a collection of Matheson’s short stories. As such, I shall skip I Am Legend this time and read the short stories.

--A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin. Though I did not enjoy reading later books in the series, I do think the first book is very good. Since I watched the show all the way through a couple of years ago, I’m not feeling a particular need to reread the book right now.

--The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I’ve read this three times and my husband has a different McCarthy book that I want to read, so same story as with Matheson.

--Atonement, by Ian McEwan. I think this novel is downright brilliant, but I’ve read it half a dozen times.

Whew! Hard to believe that we are only skipping about 30% of the Ms, isn’t it?!

[swaps55]

How would you have made the final mission and endings for ME3?

Ahahahaha, boy is that the million dollar question. The short answer is below the cut. The long answer involves going back to ME2 and gutting all kinds of things in order to reshape ME3 so a lot more things make sense.

There’s no easy way to fix the ending, but if I had to make lemons out of lemonades with only the battle for Earth to work with, this is what I would do:

Off Kai Leng on Sanctuary, or better yet, let Miranda do it and have a big moment. Fight TIM on his base and get it over with. Let Earth be about the reapers.

Rip out the star child. This entire trilogy has been about making choices. All of those choices lead to the final battle. At that point, the ending should be shaped by the choices you have already made, not negated by a final surprise choice in the final 10 minutes.

Without the Star Child, the Crucible fires a la the MEHEM mod, Shepard is rescued, woo, we win. Or lose, depending on your choices. It should be possible to lose. There’s a lot at stake here, and it should feel like it at the end.

We have spent three games making choices. In that time we’ve forged alliances, alienated allies, etc. etc. All of those choices should come home to roost. The way the final battle unfolds should be shaped by the things you’ve done – and the things you have not done – across the entire trilogy.

There is a thread on Reddit, a magic yet depressing thread, in which, people threw out their fantasies of what should have happened during that final battle. It brilliantly showcases what could have been. A few of my favorites:

“I had some man tears going when Admiral Zaal'Koris and crew flew Qwib Qwib into a suicide run ramming and taking out a reaper vessel. It really captured the desperation of the space battle. Keelah se'lai.”

“That confrontation with Harbinger was crazy! When you had to fight off Indoctrination with Paragon or Renegade interrupts after your squad mates were taken down, I was on the edge of my seat trying to get the timing right. After you set off that bomb right on Harbingers core, I was so lucky that I talked Garrus away from renegade decisions in the first two games, I don't think he would have saved Shepard.”

“Favourite: The scene with Shiala and the Zhu's Hope colonists was unbelievable! It was like watching a perfectly choreographed dance on the battlefield; they way they just mowed through that Reaper force was fantastic. Most emotional: seeing Kolyat show up on the battlefield in Thane's coat. Sniff.”

“I loved the bit where that reaper swoops down and is about to obliterate everything, but then the Destiny Ascension arrives and rams it into the ground. Then the subsequent section battling through the crashed destiny ascension, then transitioning through into the interior of the reaper. Great contrast in architecture. No idea how it would have played out had I not saved the council in ME1.”

“It would be an alliance ship that does that, with Rear Admiral Mikhailovich on the helm. You know, that dick that criticized your ship in ME1.”

“He was a good guy though, sacrificing himself to hold off that Banshee swarm so you could keep going. Pure gold.”

“I actually laughed out loud at Conrad Verner's antics with the Volus Biotic God and how they unwittingly took out a Brute.”

“I liked the part where Javik held off the approaching Destroyer alone, giving Shepard and Co. enough time to fire up the missiles. God, when Javik yelled, "I stand in living testament to your failure, Reaper! I am the Empire that would not die! I am the people who would not falter! I am the last of the Protheans and my people cry for vengeance!" Gives me chills every time. R.I.P, Javil. You sacrificed so much.”

“If you amass enough Hanar/Drell fleet, you can actually get him to survive. He'll say all that, and just before the red beam gets to him, the Hanar/Drell fighters would distract the destroyer, allowing Javik to get a clear shot with his Cain.”

Those are just a few of the inspirational moments that grew out of that Reddit thread. I encourage anyone to go through that archive. It’ll give you chills. Imagine what we could have had.

Would these kinds of options be ungodly expensive and time consuming and complicated to program? Yes. But quite frankly, the final, climactic battle is where the money should have gone. Cut other stuff. This is what players have been working towards. This is what it all comes down to. Thisis what you need to get right. A lot of it could come down to audio chatter and ending stills or whatever, rather than cutscenes. Finding a way to make it happen would have been worth it.

These kinds of things would not have fixed the weird shit like the beam and the Citadel moving, and the Citadel as the catalyst making no sense at all, but it would have felt so much better.

#tow cables on the citadel

[palimpsessed]

Medieval History AU

for @carryonthroughtheages

For my piece for the medieval era, I took inspiration from illuminated manuscripts.

(Please click the image for better quality.)

Read more about the piece below the break.

I want to first say a huge thank you to @bazzybelle​ for organizing this event and also for just being a really great human. ILY! Despite the fact that I of course left everything to the last minute, I have had a blast working on my two posts and can’t wait until I have time to actually look at what everyone else has done.

About the artwork:

This is a haphazardly researched piece at best.

I initially planned to simply do a group drawing, showing the gang dressed appropriately for their places in my medieval AU. I had that sketch sitting around for months and never felt inspired. Then I started to think about how I could adapt my arsenal of art supplies to give the effect of something more suited to the time periods. And then I thought about a lovely comment that someone made on one of my drawings, that it reminded them of an illuminated manuscript. And then the book art nerd in me was activated. Thus, I spent the next week pulling references from various illuminated manuscripts that have made it online in some form or another over the years. Next came the design. I wanted to find a way to still include the whole group, but a simple line-up no longer made sense. I wanted to make SnowBaz the focal point, for obvious reasons, but I found a way to include the others in insets, as some full page illuminated manuscripts depicted smaller scenes around a central idea.

I knew that I had to include at least one dragon for Simon and somehow reference Baz's vampirism. Monsters appear all over illuminated manuscripts, after all, and I saw no reason why they shouldn't be in mine. Vampires in medieval folklore were different to the way we think of them now; they weren't living people who turned into blood drinking creatures, but rather reanimated corpses. These revenants are usually depicted as some variation on a rotting corpse or skeleton. I decided to stick with our modern understanding of vampirism, because I'm not wholly sold on the zombie thing. A skull and some rats chilling around it probably gets the point across, and ties in Baz's years in the Catacombs, which definitely still exist in this AU. Also, I see medieval Baz as a minor feudal lord of some kind, which plays into the classic vampire metaphor. Simon is a former knight errant who gave up his questing days once he faced the reality that perhaps he wasn't all that different from the monsters he hunted.

The vessel at their feet, which sits over flames, is a crucible. Because of course I was going to include a crucible in my medieval AU. The crucible is an ongoing metaphor in Simon and Baz's story, and I wanted to carry that motif into my piece, too. I based the shape off a couple different depictions I found that related specifically to alchemy. Alchemy is all about transmutation, rather fitting for two half monsters who continuously challenge the roles they've been assigned. (One of the crucible drawings I found even had a tiny dragon looking down the spout and blowing fire into the vessel!)

The alchemy theme continues to the top right corner, with a green lion eating the sun. This is a very common image in alchemical texts, a metaphor for vitriol purifying matter, which would then leave behind gold. Next to the green lion is Agatha, who finds far more to interest her in making friends with unicorns than in the attentions of any courtly suitors. The larger panel in the center shows the castle, the hub of medieval life, inspired by the look of Watford as depicted in the map at the end of Carry On. This version of Watford is also protected by a moat filled with merwolves, because they are exactly the sort of unholy beast that would appear in the marginalia of an illuminated manuscript. (Maybe the Mage got the idea of the merwolves from one of the "four-hundred-year-old texts" he dripped gravy on.) Stars fill the sky, because we all know how important those are. On the castle's other side is Penelope, bent over a parchment in a room filled with thick books, living her best scholarly life, now that she's retired from life as Simon's shield bearer. She and Shepard are both modeling the latest trend in eyeglasses, which is to say, the only trend, because that was cutting edge technology back in the day. (Would either one of them have had access to that kind of fancy tech in their respective positions? Idk, but they have unicorns, and flying sheep, and merwolves, and dragons, so let them see is all I'm saying.) Shepard is, if you couldn't guess, a shepherd, because I had to. But he's still a nomad at heart, and this new flock was acquired in a rather secretive deal during his last adventure. Lastly, the slogans on either side of Simon and Baz are the Google Translate Latin equivalents of: "Magic separates us from the world. Let nothing separate us from each other" and "Light a match inside your heart, then blow on the tinder." (If you can actually read my writing, and you actually know Latin, and these aren't correct, just pretend that they are.)

Illuminated manuscripts were usually embellished with gold leaf, and my budget version is metallic gold marker, which I used sparingly throughout the piece for fire and other objects of note (though it's probably hard to see in the scan).

That's all, I think. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk!

Bonus! Process shots;

#cotta2020 #carry on through the ages #my art #medieval au #formerly known as #joust do it #simon snow #baz pitch #tyrannus basilton grimm pitch #snowbaz #penelope bunce #penny bunce #agatha wellbelove #shepard #from omaha #random mentions of alchemy #process photos #carry on fan art #simon snow fan art #simon snow series #carry on #wayward son #any way the wind blows #co/ws/awtwb #co/ws #awtwb #rainbow rowell

[bedlamsbard]

Part two of the reluctant roommates AU concept!  A reminder that my concept writing is deliberately not titled, chaptered, or betaed and is generally low pressure writing.  (I think to some extent I burned myself out on the titled stuff, but that’s for another post.)

Previous: Part 1

About 8.2K below the break.

Please note that while I don’t generally do content advisories, this contains discussion of fairly severe (unnamed) depression and anxiety, as well as physical abuse (about the same as other Inquisitor!Kanan concepts).

*

Agent Syndulla’s fear made Kanan’s back teeth ache, leeching into his dreams and giving him a flurry of nightmares that he knew had to come from her, not from within himself.  He woke with a start and lay in the unfamiliar bunk with one arm thrown up over his eyes, feeling like a voyeur despite the fact that he hadn’t done it on purpose.  Dreams weren’t a reflection of reality by any means, but they often had more to do with it than most people wanted to believe.  From what he had seen in Agent Syndulla’s dreams, most of them had been drawn from her memory.  He wished he didn’t know that.

At least it made a change of pace from his usual nightmares.

Eventually he made himself get up, wincing as his recently broken ribs twinged with the movement. They were mostly healed now, but were still fragile and painful, liable to get broken again if he wasn’t careful for the next week or so.  With any luck, this particular assignment wouldn’t involve getting shot or stabbed or thrown off in any cliffs, though given the way the past decade had gone Kanan wasn’t sure he really believed in luck anymore.  He still felt as though he had used up whatever he had remaining to him getting away from the Hunter for however long that lasted.

He dressed slowly, careful of the ribs as well as the rest of his assortment of healing bruises, cuts, and other miscellaneous injuries.  Some were from the assignment where he had gotten his broken; some were the Hunter’s parting gift, since his master had been extremely displeased by the order that split them up for the foreseeable future and Kanan had taken the brunt of his ire.  He touched his tongue to what he thought was a loose tooth and winced at the confirmation, feeding the Force through it to reseat it in the gum.

He could sense the Agent Syndulla was awake now, her attention focused on something other than her fear.  Kanan delayed leaving his cabin again as long as he could, not wanting to disturb her, but eventually had to answer the call of the refresher.  He was washing his hands when he sensed her sudden realization that he was awake and the spike of terror that followed, and winced.  He was used to people being afraid of Inquisitors, but usually his master got the bulk of that kind of attention; when it was aimed at Kanan it tended to be mixed with an odd kind of pity and relief.  People in the Imperial service expected nonhuman Inquisitors; they didn’t expect human Inquisitors, especially one with the right accent and one who was so obviously subordinate – as well as other things – to a Pau’an. Service members looked at the Hunter and felt fear; they looked at Kanan and thought, thank the gods that isn’t me.  It shouldn’t have surprised him that a nonhuman officer would feel differently.

He splashed water on his face, running a finger along the line of his jaw and the new growth of beard there; he eyed it in the mirror and decided to leave it for now.  It was something he hadn’t had at the Crucible, anyway, and at the moment he felt rather desperate for anything to remind him he wasn’t just the Hunter’s Hound.

He ran his damp fingers through his hair, finger-combing it, then drew it back into a short tail at the back of his skull.  When he couldn’t think of anything else he could do to delay, he went back out into the corridor, and then up to the cockpit where he could sense her presence.

She jumped as the door slid open, having obviously not heard his approach, and Kanan flinched back, startled by her reaction.  They stared at each other for a few moments as her astromech grumbled threateningly at him, then Agent Syndulla dropped her gaze back to the datapad she was holding.

She was a beautiful woman, the kind of woman he would have tried to seduce back before the Hunter had dragged him to the Crucible and beaten the spirit out of him, and he thought he probably could have succeeded, too.  He was hardly about to try now; for one thing, she was clearly terrified of him, and for another, the idea of letting anyone else touch him after the past few years was agonizing.  Even a pretty girl.

He said, “Can I get you some caf, while I’m up?”

She gave him a wary look, then said hesitantly, “All right.”

“How do you take it?”

“Milk and sugar,” she said after a moment. “A lot of both.”

Kanan nodded to her in what he hoped was a friendly fashion – he wasn’t sure he knew how to do that anymore – and let the door slide shut between them as he stepped back.  He took his time making the caf, pouring equal amounts of milk and sugar into her cup, and enough sugar into his that the spoon nearly stood up.  He had started drinking caf while he was in the field with the Grand Army of the Republic a decade ago, and after the first time he had spat out his mouthful – to the uproarious laughter of Styles and Gray and Depa Billaba’s barely concealed amusement – any clone who had made it for him had sweetened it enough to be tolerable for his palate.  He’d never lost the taste for it that way.

He took both mugs back to the cockpit.  Agent Syndulla didn’t jump when he came in this time, but she had clearly been braced for his return.  She took the mug from him with polite murmured thanks but didn’t sit back in her chair, sitting with the balls of her feet pressed against the deck, as if bracing herself against the need to suddenly flee.  Kanan prudently took the seat furthest from her and only belatedly realized it was the one nearest both exits.  He could tell from her fast, sideways glance towards the door to the living quarters and the hatch to the hold that she knew it too.  The droid grumbled again, rolling so that he was placed defiantly between the two of them, then swiveled his dome to glare at Kanan.

 Agent Syndulla took a sip of her caf, looking a little wary at first, then surprised.  “I didn’t know it could taste like this,” she blurted out.

“I worked in a tapcaf once,” Kanan offered. “Some of it stuck.”

She looked badly startled by that response.

He could have told her that he hadn’t always been an Inquisitor, but he wasn’t in the mood for the kinds of questions that might inspire.  He sat back and drank his own caf instead; neither the caffeine nor the sugar would do much for him, since Force-users processed most kinds of stimulants too fast for them to have any meaningful effect, but the taste helped wake him up.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking their caf, until Agent Syndulla finally settled herself, as if bracing for a fight, and said, “I’ve been looking at the files you sent me.”

Kanan raised his gaze to her.  She was, if nothing else, lovely to look at, but she wouldn’t have made it to the ISB or lasted this long if she was just a pretty face.  She clearly didn’t enjoy being under his scrutiny, though – most people weren’t when it came to Inquisitors – so after a moment he flicked his gaze slightly away from her.

“There’s an auction the day after we’re scheduled to arrive,” she went on, after a moment’s brief hesitation. “We could call in the local Imperial garrison for backup, but if the regulars could deal with this, then they would have done so by now.”

“This isn’t the sort of thing they’re really equipped to handle,” Kanan said.  If it had been, no one would have bothered to send an Inquisitor and an ISB agent to deal with it.  Though he had his suspicions about why the Whip had assigned it to him as his first solo assignment.  He was less certain about what it had to do with Agent Syndulla and didn’t have enough of an idea about the ISB’s internal politics to even begin to guess.

She nodded in response to his comment. “Depending what the situation is like, we might want them later, but Barzhun doesn’t have a large Imperial presence.  As far off the beaten path as it is, it’s not impossible that the local garrison has some sort of relationship with the black market there. It isn’t unheard of.”

And was usually the job of the ISB to deal with, though on occasion the Inquisition dealt with corrupt officials instead.  Kanan nodded. “What do you want to do?”

She looked a little surprised that he hadn’t just tried to give her an order.  Kanan said in explanation, “Most of my assignments have either interfaced directly with the local garrisons or been – ah, more direct. And my ma – I wasn’t the one who did any of the planning.”

He saw her lekku twitch slightly at the slip, but she didn’t ask about it.  Instead she braced her shoulders again and said, “Can you pass as a civilian?”

Kanan glanced down, giving the question due consideration because it had been a long time since he had been in a position where that was even an option and he wasn’t immediately certain of the answer.  “Yes,” he said eventually, “but I don’t have any civilian clothes.”

When she looked a little worried, he added, “I’ve got clothes that don’t have the Imperial seal on them.”  And there were plenty of civilians who only wore black or gray.  “You’ll have to lend me a blaster, though.”

She met his gaze for an instant. “Can you use one?”

“I wasn’t always an Inquisitor.”  He looked her over, this time with a more a critical eye than he had done before; past her prettiness she was muscled under her gray ISB field uniform, her holstered blaster a natural extension of both uniform and self.  He had also noticed earlier that her lekku signals were erratic, not quite explicable to anyone familiar with Twi’leks   “Can you pass as a civilian?”

“I’ve done it before.” She glanced down, clearly uncomfortable under his inspection. “Chopper too.”

“That I can believe,” Kanan said.

That startled something that was nearly a smile out of her, a quick flash of amusement that warmed the Force for no more than an instant as the astromech grumbled at them both. Then she dropped her gaze again. “The HoloNet posting on the darknet said that there would be a reception the night before the auction for potential bidders to review the items up for auction.  I assume that you’ll recognize what we’re looking for?”

 Kanan nodded. “I’ll know.” And a Twi’lek and a human together wouldn’t make anyone look twice at them, no matter how they played it.  Both were common species and common in company with each other.

Agent Syndulla looked at the chrono, then said, “We should be making planetfall in two hours and the reception is in six.”

“All right.”  He started to stand up, putting his hand out for her empty caf cup.

She handed it to him once she realized what the gesture meant, then hesitated, looking up at him. Kanan stopped rather than leave the way he had intended to.  “What is it?”

“I can’t call you ‘Inquisitor’ in the field,” she said, sounding uncomfortable. “Do you – do you have a name? That I can use, I mean?”

Kanan bit his lip. She didn’t know how loaded that question was, and he wasn’t about to answer her with “the Hound.”  Still, it took him a surprising amount of effort to say, “It’s Kanan.”

No one had called him that in almost four years.  Sometimes he was surprised that he could remember it at all.

Something about either his face or his voice must have made her realize the gravity of the confession. She said, her voice suddenly very shy, “Thank you.”  She hesitated, then said, “My name is Hera.”

He hadn’t been expecting that, and the surprise must have showed on his face.  She shifted uneasily in her seat, then looked away, embarrassed. “I’ve sent you the ISB files on the local garrison and government,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you had them.”

“I don’t.  Thank you.”  He looked back at her for a moment, putting personal name and surname together, and blurted out, “Syndulla is a clan name.”

Her eyes went wide. He felt her low-grade anxiety snap into sudden fear, jolted from its previous course onto a new path. “Yes,” she said eventually, small-voiced, and then, with a defensive edge, “There are thousands of Syndullas.”

“I’m sorry,” Kanan said; he could tell he had said something that he should have avoided.

She dropped her gaze, but it didn’t do anything to hide the unease juddering along the Force.

“I’m sorry,” Kanan said again, then fled before he said anything else stupid.

*

Hera knew from personal experience that she mostly just looked uncomfortable in civilian clothes, which wasn’t exactly something she could do anything about.  She suspected that if she had been human she could have attended the black market auction in an Imperial uniform, if not an ISB one, and not had anyone look twice at her, but a Twi’lek in uniform always got attention. At the moment she felt even more obvious in her plain dark spacer’s trousers and jacket, as if she was wearing a beacon or a sign that said “I’m an Imperial agent, ask me how.”

She snuck a sideways look at the Inquisitor, who was slouching in the co-pilot’s chair next to her. Hera didn’t like having him that close, but since they were working together she couldn’t exactly justify not letting him be there as long as he didn’t touch anything.  She supposed that he had to be able to fly, though she doubted he had ever flown a freighter like the Ghost before.  Basic piloting was required for officer candidates at the Imperial academy, but unless you were tapped for pilot training, the Naval Academy, or the ISB Academy, most officers never actually had to fly anything larger than a landspeeder or anything faster than a speeder bike.  She had no idea what Inquisitors learned or how they were trained.

Without his armor or his lightsaber he looked less like an Inquisitor than she had been worried about – less so than she still felt she looked like an Imperial agent, even dressed in all black.  He wore the DL-18 blaster pistol she had found for him – its grip was too big to be comfortable in her own hand, so she had thought it might work for him – and somehow managed to look as if he had been carrying a blaster for most of his life, not a lightsaber.

He straightened up as they entered atmosphere and entered one of the flight lanes on approach to the planet’s capital city.  If any of the other ships in the flight lane happened to glance into the Ghost’s cockpit, they would see a pilot and a copilot both apparently doing their jobs, though Hera hoped the Inquisitor didn’t actually touch anything.

“You can fly, can’t you?” she asked him reluctantly.

He flicked a glance at her. “Yes.”

“Freighters or just starfighters?”

“I’ve flown freighters,” he said after a moment. “Not recently, but I’ve done it.  Cargo freighters, mostly, short-haul – longer haul sometimes, but not as a regular thing.”

Hera turned to look at him in surprise, trusting Chopper not to let the Ghost veer off course.  The Inquisitor was stubbornly not looking at her, his gaze fixed on the viewport in front of him.  I wasn’t always an Inquisitor, he had said a few hours ago.  She had assumed that that meant he had been elsewhere in the Imperial service before he had been recruited by the Inquisition, though he wasn’t that much older than she was.  Well, people came to the Academy from all walks of life, especially those recruited by the flight academies, who could sometimes skip normal Academy training. Presumably the Inquisition operated similarly.

She didn’t have anything to say in response to him and he didn’t seem to expect one, so she turned her attention back to their flight path.  She set down in one of the spaceports in Kethun City, the planet’s capital, and had the Inquisitor transmit the docking fee while she and Chopper shut down the ship’s engines.

Hera eyed him again once they were outside the ship, standing in the small docking bay and trying not to frown at the drift of wind-blown dirt and yellowish pollen that coated the floor.  She sneezed involuntarily, her eyes watering, and dug into her pocket for the allergy tablets she had grabbed when she realized what season it was here.  She dry-swallowed them and hoped that on this occasion they wouldn’t make her sleepy, which they seemed to do at entirely random intervals rather than consistently.

In the thin light of the overcast sky that filtered down through the open hatch doors above them, the Inquisitor’s dark garments looked pale, nearly washed out.  Black didn’t suit him, especially in daylight.  Hera looked at him, sneezed again, then wiped at her streaming eyes and said, “We should probably get you more clothes.”

He flicked a wary glance at her, then relaxed slightly at whatever he saw on her face. “Is it that bad?”

“If we’re going to several days of receptions and auctions,” Hera said.  On some of her ops he would be unremarkable, but he would stand out amongst the kind of people who attended black market auctions, and not in a good way.

“All right,” he said, sounding more weary than anything else. “Let’s go find the market.”

*

Hera was startled at how much the addition of colors to his garments changed the Inquisitor’s appearance. He looked deeply uncomfortable, as though he knew he wasn’t supposed to be wearing anything other than black and gray, but his green shirt brought out color in his face and pale eyes and eased some of the hollows in his scarred cheeks.  Hera thought that he wouldn’t raise eyebrows or twitch tentacles in company now, or at least not for the reasons he would have done before.  He also looked younger, more vulnerable, less dangerous; she wasn’t sure whether or not that was a good thing, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Hera hated paying any attention to her appearance other than making sure that her uniform was neat and that none of her caste markings were showing, but for this particular occasion she made sure that she was wearing something that at least suggested she had more money than the average spacer.  She didn’t even own any clothes that could pass muster as something a high-caste Twi’lek would wear, not that that was a distinction that would make much sense off Ryloth or outside the enclaves.  Maybe not even the enclaves, but Hera avoided them whenever possible and had no idea what went on there.  Being among other Twi’leks made her so nervous that it was often debilitating; she had almost failed her ISB Academy field trials for just that reason.

She left Chopper with the Ghost; even though this wasn’t her usual kind of op, she knew that in this setting an astromech droid might stand out – Chopper certainly had no talent for being unobtrusive.  She and the Inquisitor got their cloaks and the speeder bikes from the Ghost’s hold – while the city was small enough they could have walked, there was always the chance that they would need to make a quick getaway.  Hera felt a little better with the handles under her hands, anyway.

She watched the Inquisitor out of the corner of her eye as they sped down the road towards the site of the reception.  He handled his speeder with a light, delicate touch, less heavy-handed than a scout trooper – more like a starfighter pilot than anything else, but not a TIE pilot, she decided after a few minutes of silent observation.  That puzzled her, since privately owned starfighters were illegal except under very rare circumstances – not that you couldn’t make those circumstances come about with enough credits – and the vast majority of those available were TIE-variants.  He must have learned on one of the others, since she knew Inquisitors flew TIEs.  If he was aware of her attention, he didn’t show it.

They pulled up in front of a neon-lit nightclub, where they handed their speeder bikes over to a parking droid and received a claim token in exchange.  Hera tucked it away, bemused, and fell into step with the Inquisitor as they made their way to join the queue at the door.  The sound of pounding music from inside made her wince; she hated clubs and crowds alike.

The bouncer let both of them in after relieving them of their blasters, for which they both received claim tokens.  If the Inquisitor had his lightsaber on him, the scanner didn’t turn it up; Hera wasn’t certain whether he had brought it or not, and hadn’t been about to ask. Hopefully he wasn’t so trigger-happy as to pull it out without absolute necessity, but having never seen him in action Hera had absolutely no idea.

Once they were inside and past the initial crush of people at the door, Hera surveyed the wide dark room beyond with distaste; it was full of beings of various species dancing, drinking, and eating, with a stage set up at the far end and a band playing something that she supposed technically counted as music, assuming you had no taste.

She glanced at the Inquisitor to make sure he followed her, then edged around the dance floor, past several shadowed – and definitely occupied – nooks.  Hera fixed the instructions from the darknet posting in the front of her mind and hoped that the Inquisitor remembered them too.

After several minutes and a handful of propositions – to both of them, not just her, which was a refreshing change – they made it to the back of the club.  A back hallway led to the kitchens and some refreshers that Hera suspected were intended for the staff rather than the patrons, as well as a door with a keypad on the control next to it.  Hera punched in the code from the darknet, holding her breath until the door slid open, revealing descending stairs.  It slid shut again as the Inquisitor stepped in after her and the pounding music from the club vanished as cleanly as if it had been cut by a knife.  Hera let out her breath in relief.

She went down the stairs with the Inquisitor at her back and emerged into another room.  It was a little smaller than the dancefloor above them, but more brightly lit and with far fewer people.  There were still a good number of beings, but they were older than the club-goers and mostly more finely dressed.  A pair of Togruta lounge singers draped themselves over the top of some kind of big instrument being played by a Nautolan who struck keys with a number of small hammers held expertly between his fingers.

A serving droid came up to Hera and offered a tray with a selection of stemmed and un-stemmed glasses holding a variety of colored liquid.  “Drinks, madam, sir?  I have alcoholic or non-alcoholic as you prefer –”

“Non-alcoholic,” Hera said; she could tell she was in the mood where alcohol would make her paranoid and angry, even if she drank on the job, which she didn’t unless there was no choice.

“The same.”  The Inquisitor’s voice was soft.

The droid obligingly rotated the tray for Hera. “I have fruit juices, carbonated beverages, flavored waters from a variety of worlds –”

Hera accepted a glass of what she hoped was meiloorun juice – it was about the right color – and was gratified to find she was right when she tasted it.  The Inquisitor chose a glass apparently at random and took a perfunctory sip; she suspected he had taken it mostly to have something to do with his hands.

Once the droid had gone, she sipped her drink and looked around the room.  Another look revealed that there were a number of tall display cases placed at regular intervals; the beings gathered around them had obscured them from Hera’s initial observation.  She flicked a look at the Inquisitor to make sure that he had seen them too, then moved towards the nearest one.

The beings already there – a trio of Rodian males, an Ithorian couple, and a human of indeterminate gender – all glanced up at their approach, briefly registered their appearance, then went back to their conversation.  The male Ithorian moved aside so that Hera and the Inquisitor had a better look at the contents of the display case.

She heard the Inquisitor hiss softly through clenched teeth.  The sound made the Rodians twitch, looking over at him before apparently deciding it was an expression of interest rather than – whatever it was.  Hera glanced up at him worriedly, decided it was unlikely that he was going to snap and go on a murder spree – at least not in the next thirty seconds – and looked back at the case.

The contents were unremarkable, at least to her eyes – a set of four small sculptures of various near-human beings in long robes holding upraised lightsabers in different poses. They were made of some pale gray stone she didn’t recognize.

Hera was trying to figure out a discreet way to ask if this was what they were looking for when she realized that under the current circumstances, there was no real point in being discreet.  She looked at the Inquisitor and said, “Is that it?”

He nodded without saying anything, his expression grim.

They moved onto the next display case, which held more statues and a stained glass window propped up with a light behind it.  Hera glanced at the Inquisitor again and saw the tightness in his jaw; she didn’t bother asking this time, since his face was answer enough.

They rotated through several more display cases, all of which got the Inquisitor’s nod.  Now and then someone new would come down the stairs, but by and large the occupants ignored each other, except for a handful who all obviously knew and liked each other well enough to speak to one another. Hera supposed that there weren’t too many people in the galaxy who traded in Jedi relics and most of them were probably in this room with her; she wished she had dared come down with a recording device so that the ISB could match known names to faces.

The serving droid came up to them again to take their empty glasses – well, to take Hera’s empty glass; the Inquisitor had barely touched his, but handed it over anyway.  Hera accepted another glass of fruit juice and drifted over to the nearest case that they hadn’t inspected yet.

She felt the air change as the Inquisitor went absolutely still beside her.

Because she knew what he was, she looked at him first, not the contents of the case; some of the other occupants of the room had felt the shift as well and were looking around warily at each other or at the cases.

He was shaking so badly that she could hear his teeth chattering together, his stillness transmuted into fury that she could feel like a weight in the air.  Hera shot a look at the case to see what it was that had upset him so badly and saw a collection of innocuous-looking thin braids and strings of mismatched beads; they struck something in her memory, but she couldn’t remember what at the moment.  She set that aside to worry about later, hesitated for an instant, and grabbed the Inquisitor’s arm.

He flinched violently at her touch, his eyes gone suddenly wild with shock.  She could feel muscle beneath her palm, stiff as steel cording; as much as she wanted to she didn’t release him. “Calm down,” she said to him, pitching her voice low but not whispering. “Do you need some air?”

He didn’t look around, but she saw awareness bleed into his panicked eyes.  He shook his head slightly and Hera felt the pressure in the air lifting as he forced himself to something resembling calm, pulling his furious response back inside his own skin.  She could still feel him trembling beneath her hand.

She pushed her half-full glass of fruit juice into his other hand. “Drink that,” she said.

He hesitated, and she snapped, furious and embarrassed, “It’s not tainted just because a tailhead drank from it.”

He shot her a startled look and said, sounding genuinely baffled, “Why would you think I thought that?”

Hera stared back at him, so surprised by that reaction that she briefly forgot why she had handed him her drink. “Humans –” she started to say, then shook her head. “Just drink it.”

He drank it.

She kept her hand on his arm until he had stopped shaking, then released him, tucking her hands awkwardly into her pockets to have something to do with them.  When he had finished the glass, he stared at the display case again, then dragged his gaze away and went off to the next one, handing the empty glass off to the serving droid as he did.  Hera followed, hoping her fury wasn’t plain on her face.  The other guests veered away from him, though something about the way they did so made Hera think they didn’t know or understand why they were doing it.

The next case only held more art, to Hera’s relief.  The Inquisitor stared blankly at the delicately figured tiles as if he didn’t really see them, though Hera suspected he knew exactly what was on them and – going by his reactions so far – what they meant.

“I suppose some of these still have some juice in them,” a passing Quarren woman said in her watery voice, and laughed.  Hera saw the Inquisitor’s shoulders tense in response.

She stepped tentatively up beside him. “We’ve seen most of it,” she said. “We’ll be back for the auction tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “I need to see all of it.”  He shut his eyes tightly, clearly trying to calm himself down even though he was still badly upset.

Hera eyed him doubtfully. Looking at him now, it was hard to remember that he was in all likelihood one of the most dangerous beings Hera had ever met; all of that coiled threat that had been there only a few moments before was gone, replaced by real distress.

She recognized the expression abruptly.  She had seen it in the mirror, on one of the occasions when she had been back at the Academy and invited to some event or another at the home of a local potentate on Naboo.  He had been a collector – “of everything,” he had said while showing cadets around his estate.  He had looked at Hera as if he was considering collecting her too, but she had managed to avoid being in any proximity to him for most of the evening, and once the other cadets began drinking heavily she had made her excuses and left early, for which rudeness she had been roundly rebuked the next day. She had been looking at his displays – arranged in order of what he thought was most attractive, not in anything that made sense – when she had turned a corner and found herself looking at a kalikori.

It wasn’t a Syndulla one, not her family’s and not from any of the patrician Syndulla families; she had known that immediately.  She hadn’t recognized the clan, but kalikori were intimately personal to each family; no one would ever let it pass out of a family line except through marriage or adoption.  But there had been a lot of looting done during the Clone Wars, and more during the Imperial occupation.

Searching further through the collection and trying not to make it look as though she was doing so, Hera had found a lararium, the household shrine each family kept, and the little figures that represented the protective spirits of a Twi’lek family, the ancestral genius and the patron lares, both separated from the lararium and the kalikori alike and jumbled together on a shelf of other small statues that Hera hadn’t recognized.  She hadn’t thought, at that point, that she had much Twi’lek feeling left after four years in the Academy.  Apparently she had been wrong about that.

It was the same expression on the Inquisitor’s face now.

She raised her gaze to the Inquisitor again, keeping her voice low as she said, “Those braids in that case – they aren’t from the High Republic, are they?”

He shook his head a little, his face a mask of grief and fury fighting for calm.  Then he looked at her sharply, some of that starting to bleed into alarm.  Hera could guess why; she didn’t know much about Jedi, but she had known enough to ask. She met his pale gaze, resisting the urge to look away; she hated making eye contact with other people and there was something disorienting about him.

It was the Inquisitor who looked away.  He swallowed, his throat working, and looked back at the tiles in the case in front of him. “I’m sorry,” he said eventually, then swallowed again.  “I need to see the rest of the items up for auction.”

Hera bit her lip. “I want to get a feel for the crowd,” she said to him. “Will you be all right on your own for a few minutes?  I don’t think we need to stay long.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said a little distantly. “I was surprised.  It won’t happen again.”

“All right,” Hera said. She stepped away from him, hoping that he actually could behave himself if left to his own devices.  It was balanced against her own nervousness about interacting with other people; she wasn’t particularly worried about being recognized as an Imperial agent, since in her experience no one ever looked at a young Twi’lek woman and came to the conclusion she was an ISB officer, usually including other members of the service, often including times when she was in uniform.  Hera was a decent field agent, but she knew that she hadn’t exactly lived up to Agent Beneke’s desires for her, which was how she had gotten this assignment with the Inquisitor in the first place.

She got another drink from the serving droid, this one a fermented fruit juice with some bubbles in it that looked alcoholic at a glance but wasn’t, and settled her shoulders before she went back to the case with the figurines in it, which had a small group of people gathered around it.  She lingered on the edge of the group, drinking her juice and listening in on the conversation – a trio of scholars debating the authenticity of the figurines, apparently.  After a few minutes of that she drifted away to another case, which held what looked like ornaments.  She glanced up to track the Inquisitor’s location in the room and saw him steadily working his way through the remaining cases, his mood like a thundercloud keeping people away from him.

“Lovely, aren’t they?”

Hera turned, pasting a polite smile on her lips, and saw a thin, white-bearded Pantoran male standing beside her.  “It’s very intricate work,” she said.

He smiled with as much appreciation as if he had been the creator rather than some long-dead Jedi. “Mirialan,” he said, indicating a pair of round belt buckles propped up on display. “Do you see the floral work around the rims and the eclipsed suns at the centers? Variations on those themes have recurred amongst Mirialan Jedi for centuries – millennia, perhaps, though the older examples are disputed.  They stem from an old Force cult on Mirial, one that hasn’t been active since before Mirial joined the Republic.  We know nothing about that cult, not even its name; it no longer has any worshipers on Mirial, but until a decade ago there were still elements of it amongst the Jedi.”

He gestured to a collection of small coppery rings, each about the length of a knuckle and inscribed with knot-like decorations.  “Weequay hair ornaments – for their braids, yes?  You still see some Weequay wearing them today, but if you ever have the occasion to examine them closely, you’ll see that the finework is all different. That’s because Weequay Jedi had their own patterns that were used back on Sriluur before the Hutts conquered the world more than eight thousand years ago.  Another Force cult, perhaps.  When Weequay were first recruited into the Jedi Order, they took the symbols with them; you won’t see them on Sriluur or the other Weequay worlds today.”

“Eight thousand years is a long time,” Hera said, since she couldn’t think of anything else to say and it seemed like the point in which he expected a response.

“Perhaps longer.  The Hutts – especially in the days of the old Hutt Empire – prefer to destroy the records of their conquered worlds, so that those worlds might seem to begin with their coming.  It’s hard on historians.”  He sighed wistfully, then looked at her more closely.

Hera resisted the urge to double-check that her markings were covered, since he seemed like the sort of person who might know that caste markings were more than just decorative tattoos the way most non-Twi’leks thought.

When she didn’t say anything one way or another, he seemed to decide that she was interested and pointed at a quartet of ivory bangles inside the case.  Each one was a double-curve, small enough to fit around a near-human’s wrist, and incised with intricate patterns, some of which had been filled in with black, red, or gold, others of which were bare.  The ivory was yellowing with age.  Something about them was familiar and Hera frowned, trying to place them.

The Pantoran saw her expression and smiled, open and pleased rather than malicious. “Ryloth river hog tusks,” he said. “I can’t pronounce the name in Twi’leki –”

“Ruti’ara,” Hera said after a moment of thought. “From a region in the equatorial jungle.  They’re extinct now.”  She didn’t say that there was a set of similar bangles in her mother’s jewelry case back on Ryloth, a gift from Cham’s grandmother – then the clan head – when they had married; they had been passed down among the women of the family for a thousand years.

She looked back at the bangles in the case, now seeing the pattern of half-familiar clan markings amongst the carvings.  “Fenn,” she said slowly.  When the Pantoran blinked, she said, “The geometric patterns, there – in black. Those are Fenn clan markings. They’re a curial clan on Ryloth –” And had been in vendettas with the Syndullas no less than three dozen times over the past thousand years, including after the Curia’s ban two centuries earlier (which everyone on Ryloth had just taken as a strong recommendation for the first few decades), but who was counting.

“The clan is still extant?” the Pantoran asked, sounding a little disappointed.

Hera fought back family feeling she didn’t know she still had and resisted the urge to reply unfortunately.  Instead she said, “Last I heard, yes.  There was some scandal a few years ago, but they’re still around.”

“There is a clan that has died out, though, yes?”

Hera bit her lip. “There are a few, mostly smaller patrician clans.  You’re probably thinking about the Indahs.  They were a curial clan like the Fenns and the Sy – the Securas.  They were in a –”  She had to search for the word in Basic before going on. “– a vendetta, a blood feud, with the Fortunas.  That’s another curial clan.  The Fortunas tricked the curial family – the Indah Hid Indah – into agreeing to peace talks.  When the Indah Hid Indah and the heads of the patrician families in the clan were all at table for the banquet, the Fortunas slaughtered them.  Then they hunted down all of the other Indah patricians and killed them too, not to mention most of the plebeians.  When news got out, the Republic Senate wanted the Jedi to come in and arbitrate it, but the Curia – that’s the governing body on Ryloth – wouldn’t let their ships land.  They sent the Fortuna – the clan head, I mean – into the Bright Lands and ostracized most of the patrician family heads, and banned the Fortunas from being able to vote in the Curia for twenty years.  They also banned the vendetta, so there aren’t supposed to be blood feuds anymore. The only Indah patricians who survived were the ones who had married into other clans cum manu, and when you do that you give up your clan rights – they weren’t legally Indahs anymore, I mean, they were legally members of their spouse’s clans.  I know at least one petitioned to revoke her marriage, but there weren’t enough Indahs left for there to still be a clan.  And the Fortunas had destroyed their lararia and kalikori, burned the shrines. That’s supposed to destroy the clan’s connection to their ancestors and the genii – the – the earth-gods, I suppose is the closest thing you can say in Basic.  Since the Indah Hid Indah were a curial clan, they traced their line in direct descent from one of the gods – I think it might have been the –”  She fumbled for the Basic again, aware that her Ryloth accent was starting to come out very strongly, and if anyone knew enough to recognize it, that it was the purest high-caste Twi’leki.  “The Son of Sands.  There are other curial clans descended from the Son of Sands too but the Indah Hid Indah were very, very old, as old as – the Fenns.”

She had almost said “as old as the Syndulla Tann Syndulla.”  One of the surviving Indahs had actually been married to the Syndulla prime heir at the time, and had almost succeeded in convincing her and her twin brother to declare vendetta against the Fortunas themselves before the Syndulla clan head had gotten wind of it and stopped them.

“This was a long time ago?” asked the Pantoran.

“Not really,” Hera admitted. “About two hundred years.”  She tensed in expectation of a comment about how barbaric Twi’leks were, never mind that there were humans on plenty of worlds who still practiced various forms of blood feud, but none came.

“An old custom?” the Pantoran said instead.

“Um, yes,” Hera said. She was too embarrassed about having given a speech about the Hid Indah Massacre to offer up that the vendetta went back to the days of the gods, when the children of the Mother of Mountains had torn Ryloth apart in war with each other after the Son of Sands had murdered his sister’s lover.  It was why so much of the planet was desert, except for the equatorial jungle; their oldest records showed that millennia earlier much more of the planet had been jungle and there had still been enough ocean to separate the continents.  “What does that have to do with the ruti’ara tusks?”

“Ah.  Nothing.”  The Pantoran beamed at the case again.

Hera let out her breath through her teeth, annoyed.  She could feel heat in her cheeks, traveling up to her ear-cones and the base of her lekku.

“The marvelous thing about the Jedi is that they were so very, very old and had members from all over the galaxy, all kinds of species, so customs, traditions, peoples – animals, even – were preserved within them like insects in amber, passed down from master to apprentice over so many generations few sentient minds can really comprehend them.  They provide a window into a past where there are no other windows – no holograms, no texts, no oral memories.  And yet that past was preserved amongst the Jedi – it was still a living thing.  The Empire might have you believe that the Jedi stole children from thousands of worlds, stripped them of their identities, their cultures, their species, and made them all Jedi and nothing else, but if that was true, then how would there be any of this?”  He swept an arm around at the room and its display cases.  “When I was a very young, there were pirates preying on my family’s station, and a Jedi came to deal with them – a Togruta woman, very beautiful.  She wore the akul teeth headdress of a Togruta warrior, an animal which those among the Togruta who wish to prove their strength hunt and kill.  Why would she do that if she was not Togruta as much as Jedi?”

He looked back at the case and sighed. “Many of those here are here for the money, or are enthusiasts for the forbidden – some for the Jedi.  Others enjoy beautiful things, the rarer the better.”  He flicked a glance at the Quarren who had passed Hera earlier, his expression disapproving.  “When they were destroyed, it was not merely the Jedi who were lost, but a thousand others who were preserved only amongst the Jedi.”

“Most of the people on those worlds pay attention to their own history,” Hera said hesitantly.

“Ah.  Yes.  Some do. Others would, but their histories were stripped from them – the Hutts, as I said.  The Empire, more recently.  Even the Republic, in its way, as you said yourself.”

Hera blinked. “Did I?”

“When you said that your people would not allow the Republic to take over the punishment of its wrongdoers,” the Pantoran explained patiently. “Others were not so stubborn; at other points, the Republic would not have cared about their wishes.”

“They’re not –”  my people, she wanted to finish, but she couldn’t get the words out.

“But sometimes history is just lost,” he went on sadly. “Not maliciously or in war or natural disaster, it just…falls out of use, and then out of memory, and if there are traces at all, then they are traces we cannot recognize.  By the time one realizes it is gone, it is just not there to find.”

Hera bit her lip.

“You make it sound as if the Jedi are only the composite of others, with nothing of o – of their own,” the Inquisitor said quietly from behind Hera.

She almost jumped out of her skin.  She hadn’t heard him approach, and from the way the Pantoran flinched he hadn’t noted the Inquisitor’s arrival either.

“No – no, of course not,” he said, when he had gotten control of himself. “But my – my interests have always lain elsewhere.  There are so many who are interested in the Jedi and only the Jedi for what they themselves are, and not all that they represent.”

“I see,” the Inquisitor said gravely.  He sounded more amused than anything else, which Hera decided to cautiously take as a good sign.

Hera half turned so that she could watch him and the Pantoran at the same time.  He was looking at the case, not at the Pantoran, his gaze moving over the beautiful objects inside.  She realized abruptly that he had used the present tense, not the past.  And that he had started to say “our,” not “their.”

“You are an enthusiast of the Jedi, perhaps?” the Pantoran said, recovering.

Hera tensed again, but the Inquisitor just raised an eyebrow. “I have an interest.”

The Pantoran turned to Hera again.  “And you, you are a student of history, I see?”

The Imperial Academy’s version of history was “things were terrible until the Emperor took control” but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “Just a few things,” she said instead. “But I enjoyed our conversation,” she added, because she did know how to be polite; not something she had learned from the Empire.  She took a chance and laid her hand on the Inquisitor’s arm, suspecting that he was probably aware of her brief hesitation before she made contact. “I think we’ve seen what we came here to see,” she told him.

He was tense under her palm, giving her the impression that he didn’t like to be touched any more than she did.  None of it showed in his face as he glanced down towards her and nodded.

“I will see you tomorrow evening, perhaps,” the Pantoran said.

“Perhaps,” Hera agreed, and hoped a little vaguely that she wouldn’t have to arrest him.

She released the Inquisitor as soon as they turned to walk away.  They were silent all the way up the stairs into the noisy, crowded club, as they retrieved their speeder bikes, and on the ride back to the Ghost, the wind from their passage whipping Hera’s lekku back behind her.

Hera was stowing her bike and trying to decide whether the appropriate thing to do in this situation would be to debrief the evening when the Inquisitor said, very tiredly, “I’ll see you in the morning,” and vanished up the ladder.  A few moments later she heard his cabin door slide open and shut again.

“Well,” she said to Chopper, who had come down to make sure she was all right. “That was interesting.”

#cut scenes and concept writing #reluctant roommates au tag #as always comments are appreciated #I'm trying for a bit more plottiness with this concept

[angelsfalling16]

The Way You Wear That Dress

Inspired by the song Dress by Charlotte Sands

Part of the 20 First Kisses Series

Summary: It's the beginning of eighth year, and Simon can't find Baz at the Welcome Back Picnic, so he goes in search of him. What he finds is unexpected and makes him rethink everything he has ever felt for Baz.

Word Count: 2150

If you want to know what I imagined Baz’s outfit looking like, here are the links to the dress and the boots! (I love the idea of Baz in these boots and have used them in a couple of fics now.)

Read it on ao3

***

Simon

It’s the beginning of eighth year, and I’m pretty sure Baz is already up to something. He isn’t at the Welcome Back picnic with everyone else, so I decide to go in search of him and stop whatever scheme he’s about to put into motion.

I start with our room, wondering if maybe he decided to go back up there, but the room looks the same as it always is at the beginning of term. My side is devoid of any personal items since I didn’t have anything I felt like bringing back from the care homes (not that I really had anything there). Baz’s side is immaculate, all of his things neatly put away in their respective places, filled but not cluttered.

I move over to the window to look out at the school. It seems empty right now with everyone else out at the picnic. My eyes skate over the courtyard where, not long ago, the first years’ fates were sealed by the Crucible. I only hope none of them were given as evil a roommate I was.

My gaze continues over the grounds for anyone who isn’t out on the lawn, and after a minute of searching I catch movement on the ramparts.

It could be anyone, but I know it’s him.

I turn away from the window and head back down the stairs and away from Mummers House. I quickly but quietly make my way to where Baz is, not wanting to scare him off before I can figure out what he’s up to but also wanting to get to him before he disappears again.

I come to a stop several feet away from where he stands on the ramparts. It isn’t what he’s doing that causes me to freeze, though. It’s what he’s wearing.

At first, I wonder if he has decided to don the Watford-issued cape for his final year, but then I realize that the swishing of cloth around him isn’t a cape. It’s a dress.

The dark green material falls to just above his knee in the front, giving just a glimpse of his thighs, but in the back, it nearly grazes the ground. At the top, around Baz’s shoulders and chest and around to his back, the material is sheer with interwoven lace, allowing his pale, grey skin to show through. He wears the dress like it’s nothing, like it was made specifically for him. (Knowing Baz, it probably was).

My eyes follow the line of his dress down to his things and knees, but where I expect to see the rest of his legs – his muscular football calves – I’m met with the sight of knee-high boots that are laced up the back and have a heel that adds at least two inches to two inches Baz already has over me.

I can’t seem to stop staring at his outfit, but I finally manage to force my eyes back up, and that’s when I notice Baz’s hair.

For the first time since I’ve met him, Baz is wearing his hair down with no products slicking it back away from his face. Instead, it’s being pushed back by a thin headband, silver like his eyes, that still allows his hair to fall in natural waves around his face.

Suddenly, my mouth is dry and my throat feels tight. I try to form words in my head, but my mind is blank. All I can think is, legs. And that’s when I know that I’m fucked.

How is it that Baz looks so good in a dress? He should look ridiculous. I should want to ridicule him for it. Instead, all I can do is stare and hope that he doesn’t turn and find me staring at him.

For a full minute, my eyes slowly drag up and down his body, taking it all in, before I force myself to look away, not wanting to get caught staring at him. Inevitably, though, my eyes are drawn back to him. 

It’s hard to believe that it’s really him. I just can’t reconcile this version of Baz with the version I’ve known for seven years. He looks so different, but he also looks very much like himself. Possibly even more like himself than he ever has. (If that makes sense.)

I wonder what happened to him this summer. It’s like there was a shift somewhere within him that made him act and dress differently. I just don’t know what it is.

He is dressed so femininely, but he still holds this masculinity about him, and the whole thing is driving me crazy. He pulls it off so effortlessly.

He’s dripping with confidence as he leans his arms on the ramparts, a lit cigarette hanging between his fingers.

I know the smart thing to do would be to turn away and leave him be, but doing what’s smart has never really been my strong suit.

I take a few steps towards him even though I haven’t consciously made the decision to do so. I feel drawn to him like a string is pulling me towards him, and as I draw nearer, I notice a glossiness to his lips, as if he’s spread lip gloss or something over them.

I want to hit him. Why does he always look so good? It’s annoying. 

My eyes fall back to the dress he’s wearing, and I can only imagine what other people might think if they saw him like this. For starters, he’s out of uniform, and also, he looks bloody well perfect, like nothing he wears will ever make him look bad.

I briefly consider going to find the mage and telling him what Baz is wearing, but breaking dress code isn’t enough to get him kicked out of school. Plus, I’m not sure I want to share this side of Baz with anyone else.

I’m not sure why but it probably has a lot to do with the fact that Baz has obviously chosen a place away from everyone else, maybe so they won’t see him like this and judge him for it. But it could be something else holding me back. Something like this desperate need I’m feeling to put my hands on him.

I want to push him up against the wall and…and…. That’s where my thoughts cut off because usually when I push Baz against the wall, I want to punch him, but today, that’s not what I want. I don’t want to fight him. I want to…

I shake my head. I can’t finish that thought, can’t think about what it means.

And yet…

An image pops into my head of my hands on his hips, rubbing against the luxurious material of the dress he’s wearing. Of my hands in his hair, tangling in it. Of his breath on my cheek. Of the feeling of his glossed lips on mine. Of the moment he starts to kiss me back and--.

And I shake my head again.

I won’t lie and say that I don’t want any of that, but I can’t be foolish enough to allow myself to hope for it. Nothing has changed. Baz still hates me, and he’d laugh in my face if he found out that I want to kiss him.

Because I do. Want to kiss him, that is. And it’s not just because of the dress. I think that was just the thing that pushed me to finally admit how I feel. How I’ve felt for a long time.

But Baz will never feel the same way about me.

I should go. I can’t let him catch me practically drooling at the sight of him in that dress.

I turn away from him, but I turn too quickly and trip on my own feet, cursing loudly as I try to catch myself.

“Simon?” Baz says behind me.

“Uh…” I say stupidly, picking myself up off the ground and slowly turning to face him. “Yeah?”

“What are you doing here?”

“You, uh, you w-weren’t at the picnic. I came looking for y-you,” I stutter out as my face flushes red.

“You weren’t supposed to see me like this,” he says, and his voice sounds strangled.

He drops the cigarette to ground and grounds it out with the toe of a boot that probably costs more than everything I have ever owned. That sight shouldn’t make me even more attracted to him, but it does.

He turns one of his usual sneers on me and snaps something snarky at me, probably the beginning of chewing me out for following him, but I barely hear a word he says because I’m so mesmerized by the way he looks. Also, the sound of his voice is somewhat soothing, even with the biting words that no doubt spill from his glossy lips. I missed hearing it while we were away for the summer.

He’s looking at me expectantly now, like he’s waiting for me to answer a question I didn’t hear, and I feel myself blush even deeper.

What the hell is wrong with me? This is Baz. He’s just wearing a dress. I shouldn’t be acting this weird around him.

That’s when I see his nails, colored all black, a glossy sheen to them, and that’s the last straw.

I can’t possibly think straight anymore, so I push all thoughts from my mind and move to close the distance between us. Careful not to mess up the dress, I shove him up against the wall but stop just before our lips meet.

The heels of his boots cause him to tower over me even more than usual, but I’m not bothered by it. I actually kind of love it.

His mouth is parted as if I stopped him mid-word, and the tips of his ears are turning pink. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, though. I’ve never been very good at reading people, especially not when it’s Baz.

“If you’re going to punch me, get it over with already, Snow,” he sneers.

“You called me Simon before,” I say.

“No, I didn’t.”

I shrug. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is, “I don’t want to punch you. Far from it actually.”

He hasn’t pushed me away yet, and my confidence starts to build. Maybe Baz would be more receptive to this than I originally thought. 

I keep one hand on his hip to keep him pinned to the wall and move the other one up to cup the side of his face.

“Is this okay?” I whisper, hesitantly. He nods, so I move my hand up higher, into his hair. My hand slides over the headband and combs through his hair. “What about this?” I ask, my voice breathy and barely audibly.

He nods again.

My eyes drop down to his mouth, and I want to try one more thing, but I don’t want to push my luck. I don’t want to risk trying too much and losing it all.

“Just do it,” Baz whispers as though he read my mind.

I cock my head at him in a question, uncertain whether he actually means what I think he does. Then he says “kiss me” so I quietly I almost don’t hear him. But I do hear him, and it only takes me a beat to lean forward and press my lips firmly to his.

The kiss is everything I imagined and more. His lips taste like cherry cola, and I feel drunk on the taste of him. Like I’ve lost all sense. (And maybe I have since I’m kissing Baz of all people.)

It only takes a moment for Baz to begin kissing me back, his arms coming up to wrap around me and pull me closer. I can feel the dress move along his body as he moves under my hand, and I feel lucky that I get to experience this. It’s a shame that he’ll only be wearing the uniform after this.

I wonder if he would even want to wear this dress in front of other people if he could.

I like the way he looks in it, but I obviously wasn’t meant to see him like this. Does he like wearing the dress? Is he afraid of what other people might think? Has he worn it before?

I have a million questions, but now is not the time to ask. If Baz wants to talk to me about his choice to wear the dress, I’ll be there to listen. But I won’t pressure him into talking about it.

So, for now, I’m going to enjoy it while I can.

I’m going to enjoy this while I can. Having Baz in my hands and not fighting with him. This is so much better than fighting, I think, and I continue to kiss him, thinking about how this may be the best year at Watford yet.

#snowbaz #snowbaz fic #simon snow trilogy #rainbow rowell #my writing #the way you wear that dress #20fk