#publishing error

[darkroomnerd]

I'm sorry, who? WHOMST?? 🤔

This edition of Crime and Punishment apparently did not have a copy editor lol

#Crime and Punishment #Dostoevsky blogging #Fyodor Dostoevsky #Raskolnikov #typo #copy editing #publishing error #nerd things #classic novel #classic lit #reading #reading Dostoevsky

[cultivating-saplings]

In honour of 4/13x15 I'm posting (a very slightly edited version of) the paper I wrote on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection for one of my classes last term. The language/tone is a bit more academic than what I would usually put up on here, but it's exam season so... 

Don’t Turn Your Back on the Body:

The Resurrection of Homestuck After the Death of Flash

Digital media is, broadly speaking, very difficult to preserve. The rapid pace of technological development means that obsolescence and decay present a consistent threat to the availability of natively digital works. Most computers produced in 2023 no longer have built in CD drives, and I feel fairly confident in asserting that none are being produced with floppy disk readers outside of hobbyist spaces. Issues with the accessibility of physically stored digital media can be mitigated (at least for now) by the use of external readers, but the preservation of fully digital media, born and hosted in its entirety on the Internet, is a different beast entirely.

This is, in part, an issue of pure volume; no one organization could ever hope to archive the vast amounts of stuff that the Internet is constantly producing, let alone organize it into a resource that could be used effectively. Like Borges’ cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,” to fully archive the Internet would be to replicate it in its entirety. Thus scope becomes a central question of fully digital archiving. 

The Internet Archive, which also operates the Wayback Machine, answers that question with a resounding and all-encompassing ‘yes’ — their stated goal is to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,” but even this comes with caveats. The organization freely permits members of the public to upload files to the archive and save pages on the Wayback Machine, but the work carried out by its official volunteers is more curated, and prioritizes webpages which have been identified as particularly important.

The Internet Archive is very effective within its own space, yes, but it has its limits. When the piece of work you are trying to archive is composed of not just static text and images, but longform animations and complex browser-based games, where do you put it? What do you do when the software necessary to access these elements of the work has been taken offline? And what happens if the people who were supposed to safeguard it fail to do so?

These were the issues that the fans of Homestuck faced in 2020 as the impending deactivation of Flash loomed on the horizon.

But first, before I properly explain what the Unofficial Homestuck Collection really is and why it is so effective as a digital archive, let me tell you about Homestuck. 

Frustrated with the poorly implemented official preservation of the comic, and with a lot of free time on his hands, one fan began the Unofficial Homestuck Collection as a personal project during lockdown, during the “depths of 2020.” As the project changed hands and more fans became involved over the following years, its true scope came into focus: the Collection would preserve not only Homestuck itself, in its entirety and with its Flash-dependent pages intact, but also as much of its contextual material as possible, thus making it a prime example of the effectiveness of fan-driven digital archiving and preservation. Because the people who created the Collection are long standing fans of Homestuck, they know which pieces of peripheral material will provide the context the comic demands. The Collection preserves Homestuck as a text in a way that would be impossible in an analogue format, creating an archive both of the work and of the experience of reading it in a serialized format.

Andrew Hussie began* Homestuck on April 13th of 2009, and published it serially on mspaintadventures.com, his personal website at the time, until its conclusion on April 13th, 2016. Prior to beginning Homestuck, Hussie had been publishing short webcomics and pieces of fiction for several years on his older website, Team Special Olympics, since 2004, which had gained him a small but very loyal following. This following was centered mostly around the forum attached to the TSO website, which hosted the first of Hussie’s ‘MS Paint Adventures,’ Jailbreak, in September of 2006. Jailbreak was a short comic which Hussie produced as a collaborative writing game on these forums, in the style of early text adventures.

Beginning with the prompt, “You wake up locked in a deserted jail cell, completely alone. There is nothing at all in your cell, useful or otherwise,” Hussie then wrote the rest of the comic according to the first comment posted after every page. This, perhaps predictably, resulted in a barely coherent mess of a story.

Following the conclusion of Jailbreak after a short 134 pages, Hussie would produce two more comics prior to beginning Homestuck: the unfinished Bard Quest (June-July 2007) and Problem Sleuth (March 2008-April 2009), which was his longest work so far at the time of its conclusion. Problem Sleuth in particular represented a substantial increase in production quality and general coherency over Jailbreak, as Hussie gained experience using the MSPA forums as tools for collaborative storytelling, reigning in the meandering narrative by allowing himself to be more selective about which forum responses he followed.

Hussie would continue this more controlled style of forum collaboration throughout the first three Acts of Homestuck, which followed a much more focused story than any of his prior work, thanks to his decision to use reader input only in specific parts of the comic. In the introduction to the print edition of the first Act, Hussie described his own role during the production of these first Acts as “dungeon master, a game engine responding to input, and an improv comic all in one.” During the process of writing Act 4, Hussie stopped taking prompts from readers entirely, and would construct the rest of the comic ostensibly as its sole author.

‘Okay,’ you might now be thinking, ‘you’ve given me the context, but what the hell is Homestuck? And what’s it about?’ Well, to wildly oversimplify a very complex piece of media, Homestuck is a webcomic about four young online friends who play a video game that causes the end of their universe and grants them the power to create a new one as they see fit. It is a story about growing up and realizing you’ve been forever changed by your experiences, a story about leaving behind the life you knew and constructing a new one. It is also a story about time travel and paradoxes, genetics and cloning, a large number of aliens, a possibly larger number of puppets (at least one of which is sentient), and an unfortunate amount of clowns. 

This story slowly unfolds over the course of 8126 pages, 817,929 words, and 166 animated panels, 95 of which contained some degree of interactivity and all of which total over four hours in length. Most of the comic’s pages consist of a main image, usually a short looping gif, accompanied by a text description or dialogue, which is almost always written in the format and style of online chat-logs between characters. As mentioned previously, however, these simpler gif-and-description pages are interspersed with longer videos, animated in Flash and soundtracked by one of Hussie’s several collaborators.

The first of these animated panels was uploaded a few weeks into Homestuck’s publication — an animated opening title-card for the comic, scored ominously with sounds of howling wind and windchimes. This first Flash panel was relatively simple, but the next would introduce a bespoke soundtrack (“Harlequin” by Mark Hadley), and the third would include simple interactivity. These soundtracked animations and interactive segments increased in scope and complexity over the course of the comic’s run; the final animated page in the comic, “[S] Collide,” comes in at nearly twenty minutes in length, and some of the larger interactive segments can take upwards of two hours to fully explore. 

While some of the later interactive pages were developed in an engine based on HTML5, most of Homestuck would be built using Adobe Flash, and would depend on the program for basic functionality. This would prove disastrous for the comic’s long term preservation. Flash was very popular, and had become ubiquitous by the early 2010s, but it had security issues which were easy to exploit, its range was fairly limited in terms of what kinds of animations it could produce, and, as its most fatal flaw, it couldn’t run on mobile. Thus with the expanding use of smartphones and tablets, Flash became less and less practical as a tool for web developers, and Adobe began slowly preparing to kill it. On December 31st, 2020, Adobe sent Flash off to the farm where it could frolic and play in the digital sunshine, leaving many online communities facing a crisis. How do you preserve a text when its foundations have crumbled?

With Homestuck using Flash in such an integral way, the issue of preservation was an important one. After the finale, Hussie would post some short post-credits stories to Snapchat from October 2016 to August 2017, as well as a longer epilogue in April 2019, before stepping away from any formal involvement with the comic in 2020. In 2018, Hussie had given the distribution rights for Homestuck to VIZ Media, which primarily handled the English-language publication of several manga series, and had left the rights to the IP and the freedom to produce new work to former collaborators. Thus it was VIZ who took on the task of officially preserving Homestuck against the death of Flash.

To say their efforts were unsatisfactory would, I think, be paying them too great a compliment. The complex and highly detailed Flash animations were replaced with embedded YouTube links to low-quality screen-captures of the originals. The hours-long walkaround games were not translated at all, replaced with ‘choose your own adventure’ style pages of text and links. The official version of Homestuck as it currently exists fails to capture a lot of what made the comic work, because it removes a lot of the gamified elements of the comic that are so integral to its storytelling.

There are many snapshots of the website from before the walkaround games were taken down on the Wayback Machine, but the Flash emulator that archive.org uses is very inconsistent, frequently becoming stuck on looping loading screens or failing to process assets correctly. While the dubious preservation of the long Flash animations is a real issue on its own, the lack of any attempt to replicate the format of these longform games represents the loss of something essential to the comic. Homestuck is, throughout the whole of its story, intertwined with the visual and cultural language of video games. The loss of the complex interactivity of these panels fundamentally changes how the reader is permitted to engage with them and, by extension, with Homestuck’s narrative as a whole. The official version of Homestuck that exists online is no longer complete. 

This incredibly poor preservation was the impetus behind the creation of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. In its most basic form, the Collection is simply a preserved and restored version of Homestuck, intact and in high quality, accessible through a downloadable client, rather than online — reducing the Collection down to this basic description does it a disservice. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection includes not just Homestuck, but all of Hussie’s prior work: Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth are in there, but so are the full contents of his first website, Team Special Olympics, alongside archived versions of his now-deleted accounts on various social media platforms, and copies of threads from the MSPA forums that he would later reference in the main comic. The Collection also includes material that Hussie released alongside Homestuck, like the in-fiction blog of one of the main characters, various short comics written by guest authors, and a full episode of an in-universe childrens’ cartoon.

These peripheral materials are interesting and provide context for some of the more obscure references throughout Homestuck, but many of them were not produced until well into the comic’s run, and assume an audience that is caught up with the most recent update, making them dangerously full of spoilers for the unaware new reader. This issue is solved by the appropriately named ‘new reader mode.’ One of a variety of useful accessibility tools included in the Collection, the new reader mode tracks which page a user has reached, and implements a universal spoiler cloak over the whole program, hiding all materials that were released after their most recent page’s publication. This tool is what transforms the Unofficial Homestuck Collection from an archive of a text, into an archive of an experience.

De Kosnik argues that fan-driven archiving serves as a way for fans to mediate their own temporal experience of a text, describing websites hosting fanworks as mechanisms which “maintain the possibility of individuals joining fandoms… long after a media text has ceased to air.” While De Kosnik’s focus is on archives of fanworks and their function in ongoing fan spaces, I would argue that this framework, which centers the impact of serialization on the dynamics of fan communities, fits extremely well when applied to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. Homestuck was published serially over the course of seven years, accompanied by blog posts, side comics, music, and other pieces of peripheral media that were released in tandem with the comic itself.

Updates were highly anticipated events, and fan communities were structured around them — one user on Tumblr found an unlisted part of the MSPA forums where Hussie posted new pages before they were published, and this “MSPA Prophet” became a fixture of the fandom for their ability to predict when the next update would come. The event that was an update (or upd8, after the typing style of a popular character) was a central aspect of the experience of reading Homestuck during its publication, and it is one that is very difficult to recover now that the comic exists as a static, completed work. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, through its new reader mode, functions as a solution to that absence. It does more than safeguard the reader against unwanted spoilers: it temporarily transforms Homestuck back into an incomplete text. 

Homestuck makes use of the assumed preexisting knowledge of the reader, and their “intuitive familiarity” with various types of digital media and culture, especially ones which are inherently participatory. The story’s use of narrative motifs and referential easter-eggs allows Homestuck to function, in Hussie’s own words, as “both a story and a puzzle,” but that “There [are] a range of ways to interface with it[…] Failing to grasp everything shouldn’t preclude basic enjoyment, nor is it a symptom of failure by either the reader or the story.” In the most frequent example of repeated symbology in Homestuck, Hussie peppers the text with references to the number ‘413,’ simplified from April 13th, the day the comic began.

The story follows four friends who are all thirteen years old, many of the songs on the comic’s soundtrack are exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds long, and the timestamps on chat-logs show that characters frequently begin important conversations at precisely 4:13, to name just a few of the number’s appearances. The combination of puzzle and story in Homestuck extends beyond these kinds of motifs, however, and into the way Hussie employs referential humour.

Some of these references are fairly easy to catch; in Act 4, one of the main characters is gifted the Warhammer of Zillyhoo — a brightly coloured weapon which originally appeared in Problem Sleuth. Others, however, are much more obscure. The older brother of another main character runs a business creating bizarre, semi-ironic puppet pornography. Most of the audience read this as an absurdist joke about the internet’s love for offputting porn; the subset of fans who had been following Hussie for several years, or those who looked into Hussie’s early activity on the MSPA forums, however, would find themselves with new understanding of a long-running joke. This element of the experience of reading Homestuck is something that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection not only preserves, but makes readily accessible to the comic’s readers in a way that would not have been possible during the comic’s publication.

On a purely theoretical basis, I would argue that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection is valuable not just in the context of contemporary fan activity, but as a potentially valuable resource for future research. Homestuck is a foundational piece of the current cultural landscape, its influences permeating both digital and analog media in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways.

Undertale, titan of online culture that it is, was created by Toby Fox, who was the composer behind a large amount of the music in Homestuck and was, during the game’s production, living in Andrew Hussie’s basement. Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb tetralogy, began her writing career as a prominent figure in the Homestuck fandom on Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. Although the reach of her original work has thoroughly outgrown her fandom roots, Muir includes sly references to Homestuck in several places in her books. Hell, one of the animators working on Bluey, a cartoon aimed at very young children, included references to Homestuck in the backgrounds of episodes they worked on, as easter-eggs for the benefit of parents in the know. All of this is to say that Homestuck has its hooks deep within the culture of the Internet, and its impacts will, I think, be felt for a long time yet.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is certainly not immune to digital decay or link rot, but it is resistant to them, since it is hosted on a large and well established website (GitHub), and, once downloaded, can be accessed without an internet connection, and shared freely. For the hypothetical future researcher, the Collection contains resources to mitigate the frustration of trying to hunt down pieces of contextual or peripheral material by packaging them with the text itself — it functions like a sourcebook. 

Bibliography

Bamboshu, and GiovanH. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection. 2020. https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ 

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10248.001.0001.

Glaser, Tim. “Homestuck as a Game: A Webcomic between Playful Participation, Digital Technostalgia, and Irritating Inventory Systems.” In Comics and Videogames. Edited by Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noel Thon. 96–112. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003035466-8.

Hussie, Andrew. Homestuck. MS Paint Adventures, 2009-2016. https://homestuck.com. 

Nakhaie, FS. “Reproduce and Adapt: Homestuck in Print and Digital (Re)Incarnations.” Convergence, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221141961.

Read MS Paint Adventures. “Statistics.” Last modified April 7, 2018. http://readmspa.org/stats/.

Veale, Kevin. “‘Friendship Isn’t an Emotion Fucknuts’: Manipulating Affective Materiality to Shape the Experience of Homestuck’s Story.” Convergence 25, no. 5-6 (2019): 1027–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517714954. 

#ray speaks #homestuck #413 #the unofficial homestuck collection #andrew hussie #uhhhh #homestuck studies #i fucking guess #if you notice any errors in this don't hesitate to let me know! i always try to keep living versions of all my old essays #so that if something new comes along i can add it for future reference or easier editing if i ever want to get it published #also this is Fucking Long and i will not apologize

[cloudravine]

🪷 The Lotus Flower in Mysterious Lotus Casebook 🪷

i. Growing Deep Roots

As noted by difeisheng, Li Xiangyi is an image more than he is a person. He’s the “symbol” and “beating heart” of the Sigu sect; “he embodies everything [the sect] stands for” and “has become one with every person he represents” in his role as a leader. As such, one might say he doesn’t exist as an individual who’s allowed the luxury of flawed, fluid humanity. Rather, he’s fixed into an object: a shield protecting those under his care, a mirror reflecting those he’s taken upon himself to be the champion for.  

While a heavy burden to carry, this identity as image is also shown to be brittle, hollow, like a hazy mirage which is more dazzling appearance than substance. Even Fang Duobing introduces Li Xiangyi to Li Lianhua by showing him a painting of his shifu — ink on a page, a person turned into a hero to be worshipped and idolated. 

Li Lianhua, over the ten years that pass after the Great Battle of the East Sea, works to plant and cultivate a new identity in the same way one might grow flowers. Li Lianhua forms deep roots and grows out of the mythical hero’s shell he’d been carrying as Li Xiangyi, thus developing an identity which is solid and grounding in contrast — an identity which involves “walk[ing] within a crowd instead of [soaring] above it.”

This shift from image to person is itself rooted in the lotus mantra (written by Buddhist Layman Pang during the Tang Dynasty) which Li Xiangyi first encounters after monk Wu Liao rescues him:

一念心清净 莲花处处开

The heart attains peace with a single thought; Lotus flowers bloom all around.

Although the exact timeline is left to interpretation, it’s implied that the lotus mantra operates as a catalyst of change for Li Xiangyi and that he changes his name to Li Lianhua after reading it. Now what is it about it that speaks to Li Xiangyi so deeply in that moment? As noted in 《 人間福報 》, the lotus mantra teaches us that a pure heart will result in an open and enlightened mind. One subtle, profound thought rife with compassion is enough for a person to glimpse Buddha in a flower, a leaf, a grain of sand or a speck of dust. In short, “if you can find peace within yourself, then you will find peace everywhere.” Perhaps Li Xiangyi, at his lowest point, finds solace in the prospect of stripping his life down to its very core and searching for purity, wisdom and peace within his troubled heart.    

By renaming himself 莲花/liánhuā lotus flower, Li Lianhua takes his destiny into his own hands; he empowers himself into reshaping his identity and laying down the foundations for the person he wants to become. Similarly to The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity which tells us that “names are the shortest spells in the world,” Li Lianhua’s new name functions as a spell which speaks a new him into existence. It’s a deliberate choice, a conscious attempt at breaking free from the suffocating shell Li Xiangyi was trapped in and become a person of his own choosing. 

The act of (re)naming notably also extends to Li Lianhua’s abode which he dubs 莲花楼 “Lotus Tower.” In addition to this significant choice of name, it’s interesting to note that Li Lianhua starts growing vegetables inside Lotus Tower when he’s left with nothing after his demise at the East Sea and is facing starvation. As such, his home is quite literally a site not only of self-sustenance and survival, but also of growth — a growth which requires hard work, patience and faith and nearly brings Li Lianhua to tears when his hopes are finally rewarded and the seeds he planted begin sprouting. The act of physically planting vegetables and learning to cook those vegetables speaks of a refreshing and grounding simplicity — of something disarmingly vulnerable and human after playing the role of a god-like figure. Li Lianhua has sweat on his brow and hope in his heart; he plants seeds, watches them grow and keeps himself alive by his own hands.

It seems it’s not only Li Lianhus’a home, but also his very person, which steadily grow into a lotus flower. Li Lianhua wears a variety of hairpins directly linked to the lotus, and the colour coding of his garments moves from the red he used to wear as Li Xiangyi to a lighter palette filled with greens and blues — colours which are more obviously linked to nature.

ii. Life Borrowed and Given Away

The lotus, both traditionally and within the drama itself, is closely connected to the theme of rebirth. On a literal level, the exotic lotus flowers of Cai Lian Manor grow directly from the corpses of the victims drowned in the pond, thus embodying life born from death. thawrecka writes in their story that Li Lianhua is “nothing but a lotus nurtured by a walking corpse, a body that doesn’t realise it should already be dead.” On a figurative level, the lotus grows in muddy water but blooms unsullied every morning, thus symbolising rising from a dark place and growing into something beautiful and colourful despite all the odds. The different stages of the lotus’ blooming can be taken to represent the beginning, middle and end of a spiritual path in Buddhism — a parallel to the theme of 趟/tāng taking a journey which underscores the drama in various ways.

Li Lianhua’s journey, more specifically, is that of a lotus being reborn. The soundtrack piece 《 一壶莲花醉 》 “A Pot of Lotus Wine” emphasises this connection in the following lines:

问一句莲花的悲喜 断一柄弃剑入青泥

I ask about the joys and sorrows of the lotus; A broken, abandoned sword is thrown into the mud.

Not only does Li Lianhua keep stressing at different points of the drama that Li Xiangyi is dead and all that is left behind is Li Lianhua; he even breaks his own sword Shaoshi at the end of the story, thereby physically reenacting a process of destruction—death—and rebirth. As Li Lianhua writes in his farewell letter: 

剑断人亡

My sword is broken, and I will be gone.

The significance of Li Lianhua’s action is further intensified here by the fact that the sword in the song is said to be thrown into 泥/ní mud, the site from which a lotus flower grows.

Considering that Shaoshi operates as a device embodying Li Lianhua’s character development throughout the drama, the fact that Li Lianhua decides to break it in the last episode should be taken as a key moment in which he chooses how his own narrative is going to end. Li Lianhua decides to kill for good the glorious image of Li Xiangyi which has become sullied with pain and regret in his heart, so that a simple, fragile peace can begin growing in its place like a lotus flower amidst the mud.

However, the tragedy of Li Lianhua’s narrative is that the rebirth he works to achieve for all these years is not his own to enjoy and never was intended to be. After the Great Battle of the East Sea, as Li Lianhua is reborn from Li Xiangyi and starts planting seeds all around him, he has already accepted that he’s nothing but a ghost, “wandering in the jianghu to close his loose ends and finally [...] vanish without a trace, not even a body left behind.” As mx-myth remarks, even the shift in his garment colours to an overwhelming amount of white as the story progresses makes it clear that he’s resigned to go and has “already started dressing for his own funeral.” 

The lotus flower symbolism permeating the narrative accentuates this bone-deep, unshakable resignation. While imprisoned by Jiao Liqiao, Li Lianhua is full of an aching, bittersweet fatalism when he recites a section of Guan Hanqing’s《 窦娥冤 》“The Injustice to Dou E”:

花有重开日 人无再少年 不须长富贵 安乐是神仙

Flowers will blossom again, But a man can never be young again. Seek not eternal wealth; You only need to be content.

Independently from the original meaning of the lines written by Guan Hanqing, the words seem to take on a sad, wistful quality when spoken with a bitter smile by Li Lianhua. In this scene, while the speaker reflects that rebirth occurs outside of themselves in flowers, they acknowledge that their own reality is one inevitably bound to end in old age and decay. Instead of looking forward to a bright future, the speaker doesn’t express any dreams nor ambitions and is only grateful that they’re alive this minute, this second, without any future prospects awaiting them. Perhaps a similar sentiment is reflected in the following lines from 《 一壶莲花醉 》 “A Pot of Lotus Wine”:

了了心事只 不负众生 而已

After settling my worries,  I just want to live up to all sentient beings.

Li Lianhua’s connection to the lotus flower, in fact, was always meant to be one of non-attachment. While Buddhism believes desire to be the root of all suffering, the lotus symbolises non-attachment due to being “rooted in mud (attachment and desire)” while “its flowers blossom on long stalks unsullied by the mud below.” This explains in part why the lotus is considered pure and noble. For Li Lianhua, this non-attachment takes on sorrowful connotations: it means that he stubbornly refuses to reap the seeds he sows and focuses his purest heart and will into ensuring those around him get to reap them instead. Non-attachment means allowing himself enough (a roof over his head, food on his plate) to survive, but rarely letting himself indulge in the precious luxuries of reciprocated love and care — of carefree joy and thirst for adventure.  

The ten years he lives after his first death at the East Sea are, for him, only borrowed time he didn’t deserve — borrowed time not dedicated to himself, but rather dedicated to others.

In many ways, Li Lianhua’s path effectively goes full-circle by the end of the narrative. When he and Di Feisheng reminisce about the moon they remember from ten years ago, they conclude that today’s moon isn’t any brighter than the one alive in their memory: rather, it remains constant, unchanged, as though the past ten years never existed as anything other than a short pause in the story, a coma, long enough for wrongs to be righted but not  for an already-dead person’s fate to be changed.

It’s interesting and particularly significant that the Styx flower (忘川花, from 忘川 “River of Forgetting” in the original Mandarin) is said throughout the drama to be the only thing capable of saving Li Lianhua’s life. In traditional Chinese culture, the Styx or River of Forgetting is part of the process of reincarnation; only by crossing it (and forgetting everything they’ve ever experienced and everyone they’ve ever loved) can a person finally reincarnate. For Li Lianhua, salvation through rebirth comes at a high cost — a price he’s evidently been ready to pay since the beginning, even if it means turning him into a ghost who must vanish from the story in order for those around him to grow and thrive further.

When Li Lianhua breaks his own sword to allow for rebirth, it’s not himself he’s saving. His sole purpose throughout his journey as Li Lianhua is to use whatever meagre strength he has left, whatever passion and drive are still alive in him, to save the world in any small ways that he can. He becomes a doctor who heals people; he looks for answers and solves mysteries to atone for the sins he thinks he has committed and rectify the mistakes he thinks he has made, so that those he has hurt can finally find peace and comfort.

The most powerful legacy Li Lianhua intends to leave behind by the end of the story has nothing to do with himself and everything to do with the people around him who he never truly admits he loves — the messy, imperfect world that’s caused him so much pain but that he nevertheless insists on saving with everything he has. 

Most strikingly, Li Lianhua chooses—whether consciously or not—to leave the life and future he’s renounced for himself to his companions Fang Duobing and Di Feisheng. The only traces he purposefully leaves behind live in them: in the Yangzhouman coursing through Fang Duobing’s body; the home, dog and recipe book he passes onto him; the worthy opponent he leaves for Di Feisheng to fight in his stead after he’s gone… 

Fang Duobing, by the end of the story, has grown into more than a disciple and a friend to Li Xiangyi/Li Lianhua: he himself has become the lotus flower bringing renewed life after Li Lianhua has left the narrative, thereby taking Li Lianhua’s legacy into a hopeful, vibrant future. As mx-myth mentions in their colour analysis, Fang Duobing notably wears bright pastel tones including a large amount of green/blue — a colour coding which emphasises Fang Duobing’s connection to spring and, by extension, new life and beginnings. “Life will always go on if there’s spring”; and so Fang Duobing’s youth, vitality and optimism can grow in the empty space left behind by Li Lianhua after he fades into the autumn of his life.

While Li Lianhua’s predominantly light colour palette might appear to align him with other characters in the drama who have left the past behind and are looking towards the future, Li Lianhua made peace long ago with the knowledge that he’s destined not to belong in that future. Just as the Lotus Sutra teaches us that “the inner determination of an individual has great transformative power” and “gives ultimate expression to the infinite potential and dignity inherent in each human life,” Li Lianhua focuses all his transformative efforts on creating a future which, despite having no place for him, will be fertile ground for the entire martial arts world to grow deep, healthy roots. In Li Lianhua’s own words:

幼芽生枝 新木长成 武林也一样 这未来如何 谁又能说得清楚呢

The young sprouts and the new trees grow. The martial arts world is the same. What does the future hold? Who can say clearly?

Should we say, then, that Li Lianhua’s story is one of sacrifice, self-renunciation and resignation — of drifting inevitably towards death as a flower carried by a stream? As he disappears on a boat and is asked where he’s going, Li Lianhua gives a response which echoes his first death at the East Sea in a way that feels entirely deliberate:

小舟从此逝， 江海寄余生

From now on I would vanish with my little boat; For the rest of my life on the sea I would float. 

How are we to understand a person being reborn simply so they can pass on that new life to others, and being convinced that their only true value lies in their death?

Perhaps, in spite of it all, we can find some small comfort in the knowledge that, no matter how sorrowful Li Lianhua’s fate, it’s at least one that he chooses — one that he has full control over, even poisoned and robbed of his life force as he is. As the lyrics of 《 一壶莲花醉 》 “A Pot of Lotus Wine” underline, “it’s just a matter of picking an ending that you like.” Perhaps that’s all that truly matters. 

wuxia-vanlifer makes an excellent point when asking: “What would be more tragic? That he never believed he was loved? Or that he did, but vanished anyway?” While I don’t have an answer to offer, there’s one thing I can say. Li Xiangyi, Li Lianhua — they live and die by love. They can’t conceive of themselves as anything other than a sacrificial tool because, for all that they pretend to be aloof and untethered, they actually love others—and the world—in a bone-deep, profound way they’ve never loved themselves. That love is not only the true driving force behind Li Lianhua’s character and the fate he chooses: it’s the beating heart of the entire drama.

“In this life, I have loved and I have been loved. That is enough.”

Shoutout to the following authors and bloggers whose brilliant words and ideas inspire me, as well as this gorgeous video 💖

ao3: @extraordinarilyextreme @thawrecka

tumblr: @difeisheng @extraordinarilyextreme @mx-myth @wuxia-vanlifer @xinyuehui

#mysterious lotus casebook #莲花楼 #li lianhua #li xiangyi #cheng yi #fang duobing #di feisheng #it's sad nerd hours lmao 💕 now we can all suffer together 😘 #i'd apologise for shamelessly referencing yym every chance i get even when it's barely relevant but.... well i won't 😌💅 #also - please tell me if you notice errors or inconsistencies in any of my points ✨ #although i'm always very thorough with my research i don't have a native person's knowledge of chinese language and culture #no doubt i'll think of lots of changes and additions i want to make once this is out there ssdhds 🥴 why is publishing anything so hard?? #text: mysterious lotus casebook

[impossiblescissorspeachpaper]

The Heart of a Wanderer VII

Clifftop

Previous chapter can be read here

If you need a complete refresher or would like to jump into this story, the masterlist can be found here

4.4k words. Very light sexual themes.

Azriel had flown them back to the edge of Persepolis in silence before winnowing them the rest of the way home. His face had remained a stoic, stony thing. Hard hazel eyes scouting their path meticulously but always carefully remaining averted from her. 

She thought she felt his gaze burning the side of her face a few times, sensed his chest constricting as if he were about to say something, but then he’d stop himself. If he was going to apologise for his outburst then she would accept, but she wasn’t going to beg for it. Nor make it easy for him. He’d acted like an ass, and she was sick of letting people get away with it. The entire way home was such a stark contrast to their flight in.

They had stayed only one night in Helion’s palace, needing the time to rehash her vision with the High Lord and then devise a plan to assist in anything they may need to avoid allowing Beron to be successful in the matter of the looming Spring Court invasion.

Helion, graciously, had agreed to provide aide, in whichever way he could. And she and Azriel had played their parts well. They had agreed the citizens of Spring couldn’t be left to defend for themselves against the might of the Autumn armies, and that their safety would be of utmost importance, along with stopping Beron from successfully taking over the fraught territory. Impeding Beron’s triumph in turn seemed imperative in protecting the humans who inhabited the land just below Springs’ borders, too.

After all matters of importance had been decided upon and planned for, Helion had invited them to drink and dine with him in his private parlour that night. Elain accepted graciously, but Azriel had politely declined, claiming he had reports to complete that had become pressing. 

She tasted the lie in the air, knowing the Shadowsinger was avoiding her, as he had been since their argument in his room. She had been deflated that they had found themselves back in this awkward territory after seemingly coming so close to being friends again. But she decided not to wallow, not to let his broodiness seep into her own attitude. If she had just one night here, out from under the watchful eyes of all of those from the Night Court, then she would damn well enjoy it.

She had changed into a more comfortable but no less stunning dress for the evening. A flowing gown that still resembled the Day Court fashion, but less stuffy and embellished, the colour a deep jade. Its bodice still hugged her torso and the skirts billowed around her slender legs, but the added gold embellishments were stripped, leaving her more relaxed to eat and lounge with the High Lord’s company for the night.

There were perhaps two dozen High Fae gathered in Helion’s private parlour when she joined them that evening, the room dimly lit with flickering glass lanterns strewn across the marble floors. Males and females alike dressed in gowns and robes in a kaleidoscope of deep jewelled tones were lounging on puffy, cloud like cream-coloured cushions, or draped across low-lying, deep-seated settees. 

Some attendees were already entangled in varying degrees of lust and desire, whilst others merely enjoyed the view and ambiance or discussion around them. Swathes of fine gold organza draped and folded from the low ceiling, giving one the sense that they were nestled within a giant ornate nest, the delicate fabric muffling the sounds of neighbouring conversations and impassioned touching alike. 

Crystal decanters of ruby, sapphire and emerald held various wines and liquors. Females in billowing magenta pants and exposed bellies floated around the room offering trays of plump dates, rosewater and orange-blossom flavoured jellies, and a sweet flaky pastry treat called baklava. Brass platters of fresh figs, soft cheeses and olives were spread across the scattered tables around the room. 

It was all so decadent and lush. And although Elain usually shied away from such scenes of debauchery, she found herself once again drawn into the thrall of the Day Court customs. Emboldened by the absence of anyone who reallyknew her. 

Here she could be anyone, here she could enjoy something she would normally not care to want, if even just for just a little while. It wasn’t something she longed for often, not at all. But on the occasion, it felt like a refreshing change. Like she could slip on a different mask and play make believe for just one night.

She had spent that evening in Leto’s company, her sandals kicked off and strewn about on the floor before her and her legs tucked beneath her on a soft, cream loveseat. They had not spoken or seen each other since the last time she had been in Day, which had been months ago, and she had forgotten how easy he was to talk to. She had forgotten how charming his smile was, how his rich olive skin seemed to glow from within, how his pale green eyes peered so intently at her as she spoke. But despite all of this, of how truly lovely this male was, she found her thoughts wandering up to the room beside hers. The room that she knew was currently occupied with the brooding shadowsinger. 

After his outburst, she figured Azriel must have been jealous of Leto. That he had sensed something between them and surmised some sort of scenario for himself. Never mind that all that had happened between them was a few kisses and heavy petting when she had last spent time here. Having indulged in a few glasses of Day Court wine had left Elain feeling lightheaded and a touch rambunctious. 

Sure, they were very hot and heavy kisses that still made her blush when she remembered them; how she had brazenly straddled his lap, how his hands had grazed across her burning skin, how his tongue had traced wicked paths up her throat and along her collar bones. She had explained to Leto that she was just looking for some light-hearted fun, nothing serious. He had merely replied that she was a beautiful young female, and she was entitled to do as she pleased. That there was no judgement in the Day Court. 

She wasn’t sure if he knew the status of her mateship. Not that it meant anything to her. But she didn’t bring it up and graciously, neither did he. 

During that first visit, they had indulged in a night of laughing and drinking and passionate foreplay, Elain draped over Leto’s lap as he ravished her lips, chest and neck. She’d never done such a thing, her human sensibilities always holding her back- but she found the more time she spent with the fae, the less she cared about trivial things such as decorum and propriety. She was free to do as she pleased, and she’d be damned if she was going to let a couple of stubborn males dictate what or who she should be doing. She belonged to no one.

So, she had enjoyed herself this visit too, although she had refrained from partaking in anything physical with Leto this time. He didn’t push her and seemed genuinely happy to just enjoy her company, talking with her into the early hours of the morning. When people started dispersing; either retiring to their quarters alone, or to finish what had been started with one or several partners, they too turned in for the night.

Leto had walked her to her door and left her with a sweet kiss on the back of her hand, wishing her a restful sleep. 

Entering her room that night, Elain hadn’t heard a single sound coming from the occupant next door. And yet a restful sleep was far from reach.

~

Elain sat on a plush leather couch in the main library of the river manor, a small fire crackling before her as the weather had finally started to turn colder. The looming clouds outside had been foreboding enough to have her forgo any of her gardening duties today, instead opting to hunt down any books about Seers, controlling one’s powers, and how to strengthen one’s mind to the onslaught of various magics.

The books she had collected were currently sat in a stack beside her on a small brass pedestal, a heavy tome open in her lap, but the words before her swayed in and out of focus. Her mind was unable to fixate on the topic before her, ironically. The broody Spymaster incessantly floating into her mind instead.

It had been almost a week since they had returned from Day, and beyond their initial meeting with Rhys upon their immediate return to Velaris, Elain had not heard a peep from Azriel. She wasn’t even sure if he had been staying at the river manor, let alone if he was anywhere in the entirety of the Night Court. 

It seemed every time there had been some sort of conflict between them, they would choose to run away. Her to the far reaches of Prythian, Azriel to the Mother knows where. She hated it. And she was sick of having to tiptoe around males. It was bad enough when Lucien imposed his presence upon her during his seldom visits to Velaris, but the thought of needing to avoid Azriel too? She could no longer stand the thought.

Snapping the book shut with a loud thud, Elain stood, flinging the leather-bound pages behind her on the cushion she had previously sat in. A small groan of frustration left her lips as she paced, back and forth, her feet wearing a path across the plush rug along the face of the fireplace.

Elain was fed up, aggravated of this cat and mouse game, the unpredictability of this situation between herself and Azriel. They couldn’t continue avoiding each other forever, and further to that she had the nagging suspicion that there was something he wasn’t being completely honest with her about. She was tired of the restless nights and simply of not knowing. Of not knowing where he was, when he would return, if he was safe, how he felt, how she felt. It was growing tiresome and once again she decided that she couldn’t wait.

She couldn’t wait until an appropriate time to corner him, to speak with him. She couldn’t wait for him to come strolling through the door in his worn leathers, his face weary. She wouldn’t.

And so, she once again closed her eyes. Delving further and further into that mysterious well of power that rumbled deep within, she allowed the pull of the void to lead her along the path to Azriel as she winnowed.

~

Before Elain had even opened her eyes, she felt the cold, harsh wind whipping against her skirts, tangling in her long hair. She hadn’t thought to don a cloak in her urgency to go, and truth be told, the bite of the icy air only bolstered her resolve.

Cracking her eyes open to reveal the scene she had winnowed to, she learnt why the wind was so arctic here, why it so ferociously whipped about her. 

Standing near the edge of a rocky cliffside, she peered around her, spotting Azriel about twenty paces ahead. His back was turned to her, his mighty wings a strong dark force against the strong gale. He stood deathly still, the only movement was his raven hair that whipped wildly about his face, and a few lone shadows that swirled about his feet, caressed his neck.

Elain couldn’t help but stare, mesmerized by him, the mighty warrior on the edge of the jagged cliff. His strong thighs planting him securely to the ground beneath his feet, the two siphons upon those brutally scarred hands the only source of brightness in the otherwise moody scene before her. 

A shadow coiled about his ear before disappearing, and Azriel turned, a look of mild surprise lining his face as he beheld Elain standing in the knee length grassy meadow at his back. Before he could turn around completely, Elain’s feet moved. She was grateful she hadn’t winnowed to directly on top of him this time, but she didn’t let the insecurity of that dredged up memory show as she closed the distance between them.

His deep voice floated over to her on the back of a strong gust of wind. “How did you find me?”

Once she was within a few paces of him, she halted, standing before him with her shoulders thrown back. Elain chose to ignore his question. She wasn’t sure how she had found him anyway. It was as if some part of her knew where she could find Azriel, where she could always find Azriel. But she wasn’t going to admit that. She’d never admit the pull she felt toward him, the bright, invisible thread that seemed to bind them.

“I winnowed,” she responded instead. A vague enough answer that perhaps alerted him to her hedging but provided enough information to the Spymaster that confirmed they remained alone. That no one had brought her here. That they could speak freely.

“Is everything ok?” he responded. She spied a few shadows darting away, no doubt off to gather information about any happenings he should be aware of, any danger.

“Everyone is fine. I just wanted to speak with you.”

His face gave nothing away, even as his eyes bore into hers unwaveringly, seemingly trying to read her expression in return. “What about?”

Elain scoffed at the question somewhat unkindly, his seemingly feigned naivety grating on her patience. “What about?You have been avoiding me since the day we arrived in Persepolis. Barely three words have been uttered. You cannot be that obtuse, Azriel.”

His eyebrows bunched together as a dimple appeared in the tan skin of his smooth cheek. She couldn’t tell if he was annoyed with her last remark or trying to hide his surprise.

“I haven’t been avoiding you,” he murmured adamantly, clasping his hands behind his back, a muscle in his neck twitching.

“Oh yes you have, you haven’t been home in over a week, nor present at a single meal,” she bit back, her muscles now tensed against the ice cold winds.

“I’ve been busy with the looming conflict in Spring. I…I’ve been coming home late and leaving before you rise.”

“So, you’ve been avoiding me.”

“As I said, I’ve been busy,” he bit out, not conceding to her inferences.

“Well, we’re here now, and I’ve had enough,” her temper was rising at his petulance.

“Enough of what?”

Enough of what? Elain heard her own heartbeat pounding wildly in her ears, her temper flaring with every passing word Azriel uttered. She exploded, her voice coming out louder than before, her arms splayed out wide. “Of running! Of you running, of me running. I’ve had enough!”

“I haven’t been running—"

“Oh, come off it, Azriel!” she shouted, cutting him off from telling more lies.

“What do you want me to say?” He too was growing exasperated now. Good. She’d had enough of his stoic composure. She’s gladly see him unravel if it meant he was honest.

“The truth! Tell me the truth! I know there is something you are not being honest about.”

Azriel’s jaw clenched, the only sign that she had said something with some certainty behind it. Even still, he seemed reluctant to speak his mind.

“Is it really that bad? The thought of kissing me?” She had uttered the words so softly; she couldn’t swallow them before they had come tumbling out.

His face cracked, his shoulders softening slightly, his hands flinching at his sides as if they ached to reach for her. It was clear he hadn’t expected such candor from her, nor had she expected to let that admission free from her private thoughts.

His voice came out as a croak, his eyes peering down upon her beseechingly. “No. it’s not that. Elain…”

His words drifted off, fading into nothing, but his chest was rising and falling rapidly, the scars on his hands stretched over his clenched fists. His eyes darted across her face, his expression giving nothing away, and yet something charged went taught between them. That mysterious thread once again pulling.

“Azriel…”

She started the sentence but truly wasn’t mindful of how she’d finish it. But no sooner had his name slipped from between her lips he was stalking toward her. His long legs ate up the space between them in just a few paces and in the next moment he had reached out with those beautiful hands and buried them into her hair. 

Before she could register his intentions, he had swooped down and captured her lips with his. Azriel kissed her so desperately, so passionately, that the air had been knocked from her lungs. He had utterly caught her by surprise and she couldn’t react, her body wilting in his arms. Melting hopelessly into his embrace.

Her arms hung limply at her sides as he pulled away slightly, his face still so close to hers, lips swollen from their kiss, his bright hazel eyes churning as they searched her face. In vain he searched for an answer, for a sign that what he had done was ok, that she too, had wanted this.

Before he could pull away, she had grabbed the front of his leathers, tugging him down toward her and this time Elain kissed him with back the same amount of gusto. The same amount of aching need leaching from every swipe of her tongue, every bite of her lips, every sweep of her hands dragging along his neck, asking a question she desperately longed to find the answer to. 

He answered, leaving no query as to what his intentions were.

His kiss consumed her, like flames licking languidly at her very soul, slowly devouring her until there was nothing left. Elain threw herself into the kiss, allowing her hands to wander down his hard chest, around his shoulders, the nape of his neck. He groaned in response, a bestial thing born from his gut, his very essence singing in answer to hers.

Her slight hands inched beneath the collar of his leathers, and he shivered as the pads of her fingers caressed along his hot skin. She was burning and burning and burning in his arms. So many months of longing, so many moments of visceral need, so many feelings pulling at her from every direction.

And yet… she still did not know. She didn’t know what this all meant, why he had pulled away all those months ago, why he chose now to act on his feelings. Did he in fact feel anything for her? Or was this merely a physical need? Did he care for her at all? He had, once again, ran away from a problem.

Before the fire burning low in her belly could completely douse the dwindling clarity in her mind, she tore her lips away from his. As painful as it was to do so, they couldn’t leave this conversation lingering once more.

“Azriel… Az— wait,” she gasped as he latched his lips onto the side of her neck, his tongue laving at the skin there, pulling and swirling across the length of her throat as if he couldn’t stop himself from tasting her. A groan escaped his throat as he continued sucking at her and she couldn’t help the flutter of her eyes at the deep sound, the vibrations against her neck shooting straight through her centre.

“Azriel,” she moaned at a particularly delicious swipe of his tongue against her burning skin, “stop—” she mewled weakly.

No sooner had that final word fallen from her mouth, Azriel had flung himself off her. Snatching his hands away from her body and dragging them roughly through his hair he panted, remorse etched painfully on his face.

“Elain, I— I’m so sorry. Please, forgive me,” he spluttered as he continued to back away from her as if she had bitten venom into his veins. Self-hatred lined his face, truly believing he had done something wrong, something she did not wish.

“Azriel, no- that’s not what I meant. Its ok, I wanted this. Just, stop retreating. Stop running away. I only mean— if you cannot speak openly with me, then you have no right to my body, either.”

He turned pleading eyes toward her, his face stricken, still believing he had done something wicked, had forced himself on her. Seducing her into something that she didn’t wish.

She knew no words would be able to lift him out of the spiral he was currently plunging into so instead she showed him. Showed him that she trusted him, that she longed for his touch, that she wished for it day and night. But before she could completely succumb to those desires, she needed an explanation. She needed an understanding of where they stood, what she meant to him, why he had left her so abruptly that Solstice. 

Stalking up to him and grasping his hands in hers, she looked up into his face, hoping to portray nothing but sincerity, trust, comfort in his near presence.

“Azriel, please. Just tell me. Tell me what it is. What it all means. Why you’re jealous of Leto, why you avoided me for all those months, why you called me a mistake…”

A chocking sound escaped his throat. He looked stricken, his shoulders sagging with the weight of a secret she knew not. His eyes had closed but as he opened them his hazel irises burned brighter than she had ever seen them, appearing almost golden in the light of the setting sun.

“You are not a mistake Elain. You have no idea how abhorrently those words haunt me. How my actions haunt me, just. Please. Please try to understand.”

“Understand what? Azriel, stop evading speaking your truth! Please, just say… something.”

“I can’t—” a rasping sound clawed its way to his lips, as if the words were chocking him.

“Elain, I’m sorry. You deserve better.” 

Pulling his hands from hers he inched backwards once more, edging closer and closer to that cliff.

“Azriel! Stop running!” she cried, her mouth twisting in pain despite her attempts at willing it not to.

His hazel eyes guttered at the sight; the same devastation she felt reflected on his handsome face.

As if his legs moved on their own accord, he stalked back to her, reaching for her like a man finding nirvana. He cupped her cheeks in his hands, tilting her face up to his, her doe eyes wide as she peered back at him. He held her tenderly as if he had possession of the most precious thing in the world in the palm of his hands. His thumb traced her jaw and he looked down upon her as if he wished for nothing more than to simply exist in her embrace. “I’m not running, Elain. But please, let me…let me fix something first. I’ll see you at home. I promise.”

With those words, he pressed his lips to her forehead for one long, pointed moment before he retreated again and stepped off the edge of the cliff. Elain gasped, forgetting herself before his wings shot out from behind him, catching a current and carrying him away.

Elain lifted her fingers to her lips, feeling they were indeed swollen from his passionate kisses. That this all just wasn’t a dream, a vision cruelly planted in her mind to torment her further.

She stood on that blustery cliff edge watching him fly away until he was but a dark speck upon the horizon in the far distance, high above the lights of Velaris, just winking to life as the sun set upon the city she called home.

~

Hours later Elain was being woken up by an urgent hand shaking her shoulder. She hadn’t realised she had fallen asleep, spending hours tossing and turning in her bed back at the manor. She had awaited Azriel’s return, straining her ears to hear any movement from his room down the hall, but such a thing never occurred. Her younger sisters’ tattooed fingers dug into her shoulder as her eyes adjusted to the first rays of morning light.

“Elain. Elain. Wake up. Beron has made his move. His armies march south.”

Elain bolted up in bed, the words clanging in her brain like a clapper pounding against the inside of its bell.

Elain scrambled within her bed sheets, fighting to free herself from the tangle of quilts and furs.

“I’ll get dressed immediately; I just need a minute,” she babbled, her voice thick from sleep.

“No Elain, wait. I need you to stay with Nyx, protect him,” Feyre instructed, the voice of the High Lady making its request. “Rhys and Az have already gone ahead. Cassian is gathering the Illyrian troops. Nesta and I are leaving shortly to meet them, and Mor is on her way too. Amren will stay behind with you to protect the city.”

Elain wanted to argue, wanted to insist she go with them. Help them in any way she could. But she knew why her sister asked her of this. She wasn’t a warrior. Was not trained in combat. Although no one could settle and care for Nyx outside of his parents like she could, something still twinged in her heart about being separated from them all during this time. But she knew this is where she was most useful.

Elain nodded her head just once, her sister seeming to sag in relief that Elain hadn’t put up more of a fight.

“Thank you,” Feyre breathed, “Send word with the twins if something comes up.”

“We’ll be fine, I promise,” Elain vowed. Feyre saw it for what it was; that Elain would protect Nyx with her life. Today and always.

Feyre squeezed her shoulder before turning away, her long braid swinging down her back against the leathers she had already donned. Time and time again her family had gone into battle, had been flung into conflict and danger and terrors beyond her wildest dreams. Elain couldn’t help but wonder when their luck would finally run out.

“Feyre?” Elain called from her bed, the urgency evident in her voice. 

Feyre turned; her blue grey eyes bright with concern. “Yes?”

“Please make sure you come home. All of you.”

Feyre nodded solemnly before she turned back, and Elain could do nothing but watch her sister retreating from her room for what she desperately hoped wasn’t the last time.

*******

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#elriel #t writes #elriel fanfic #the heart of a wanderer #elain archeron #azriel #acotar #elain x azriel #elriel fic #azriel shadowsinger #acotar fanfiction #my writing #sorry if this is fraught with errors #I couldn’t look at it any longer and just had to hit publish

[taidotonheiluja]

Käärijätober Day 2 - Fantastista I guess it's likely to get a hit by a sandal

#käärijätober #käärijä #käärijätober day 2 - fantastista #inktober #i missed the first day so I made myself sit down and draw something - this is what happened #i know the song was written in the mic mac era but i really wanted to draw the corduroy outfit #my art #and i need to brush up doing faster drawings - my initial sketches are always a bit messy #I published this through drafts but STILL somehow managed to put in a typo and the a version of the image with a slight error lmao oops

[all-mirth-no-matter]

Time After Time  |  Chapter Five

Pairing: Tommy Shelby x Reader, Tommy Shelby x Original Female Character

Summary: You report for your first day back in the Shelby household, but things aren’t what you expected.

Warning: language, drinking, smoking, the shelbys are wild, tommy is a soft boi

ao3 Link | Catch up on tumblr here

Chapter 5: Broken Crown

Well, touch my mouth and hold my tongue, I’ll never be your chosen one. I’ll be home, safe and tucked away. Well you can’t tempt me if I don’t see the day. 

The pull on my flesh was just too strong. Stifled the choice and the air in my lungs. Better not to breathe than to breathe a lie. ‘Cause when I open my body I breathe in a lie. 

And I will not speak of your sins. There was a way out for him. The mirror shows not, your values are all shot. But oh, my heart was flawed, I knew my weakness. So hold my hand, consign me not to darkness.

— Broken Crown, Mumford & Sons

Showers were another luxury you realized you’d taken advantage of in the 21st century. God did you miss showers. If you ever got back to your own time, you’d never take for granted the access to hot water on demand again. 

After a few months of living this way, you’d begun to get used to some of these daily adjustments. But on mornings when you had to hurry, the reminder of how easy your life used to be was painfully difficult to ignore.

You had reason to rush this morning, though. After alternating between pacing in your apartment and lying awake in your bed, you’d finally managed to fall asleep around four in the morning. Enough to get a full hour of sleep before your alarm clock started to chime. 

That’s when the rushing began. You felt the need to dress miles better than you normally did for your pub shifts, which meant putting in efforts to manage your hair and find something clean and professional to wear and did you still have that lipstick that Ada gave you —

And you felt ridiculous for it. 

It’s not like you were even starting a new job. It was the job you’d been doing for over a month now and you knew exactly what you were in for: hours of sitting cross-legged in Polly and Ada’s kitchen with books spread across the table with your back and neck bent forward. By the end of those days, your hair was a mess, your eyes were tired, and your spine was in serious need of a bulldozer to straighten your back out. 

Either way, you allotted yourself a double take in the mirror before you head out before the church bells rang, grabbing your own coat along with the one Tommy had left without the night before. 

You hugged the black cloth as you made the short walk down Watery Lane to the betting shop, your heartbeat rising the closer you got. 

Why were you so nervous? This was ridiculous — you were so stupid. 

But you knew why — you weren’t stupid. 

Your skin was still buzzing from the way he’d lifted his hand to your face and ran his thumb across your cheek, his pointer finger tracing your jaw line as his hand traveled down to your chin. You had tried to speak, you think you even managed to breathe out a pathetic “what?” before his thumb lifted slightly to catch the bottom of your lip. For a moment you were certain that he was going to close the gap between your breath when the air between you became a blur. But you watched his tongue dart out to lick his own lips before his eyes snapped back up to yours, his wrist flexing away from your skin like it’d burned him. 

He dropped his hand, then his head, before he retreated from your doorstep with a “see you in the morning” goodbye as if he hadn’t just dropped the bomb he had on you. 

Thomas Shelby had dreamed about you. 

In France. 

Months ago. 

He hadn’t even given you the chance to respond, to ask any further questions of clarity. Just touched your face and gave you that look that made you forget yourself — and then left. 

That bastard. 

You took a deep breath in attempt to steady your heart, shaking your head to knock some sense into you before knocking on the door. 

“Oi, who the fuck is it?” You heard an unknown man’s voice shout from the other side of the door. 

“How should I know?!” This time you recognized Ada’s voice, a smile tugging at your cheeks. “Open the bloody thing yourself and find out!”

You heard footsteps growing louder before the wood was flung open and a man stood in the doorway. 

“Who the fuck are you?” 

The man had a thick mustache with hair in the same undercut as Tommy’s, but styled slightly different. His hair was lighter, longer, and thinner, and styled with some grease, combed toward the back of his head. Just glancing at him: his weathered skin, sharp chin, and worried brow, you’d assume he was closer to two decades older than you. But his eyes gave away his youth, and you guessed he was just a handful of years older than Tommy. He stood with his back straight in the doorframe, jaw clenched and head held high as he looked down at you — he reminded you of every bouncer you’d ever handed a fake ID to. 

You suspected this was Arthur, the oldest of the Shelby siblings. Before you could answer, a shriek came from behind the man in front of you. Ada emerged, pushing him aside and pulling you into the house before giving you a hug. 

Despite your earlier nerves and trepidation, you melted into the hug and reciprocated. You hadn’t realized just how much you missed Ada’s kinship over the past few weeks. 

“Ada, who the fuck is this?” 

“Arthur, give it a fuckin’ rest, will ya?” Ada rolled her eyes, waving off her brother and confirming your guess. “This is Y/N” 

“Ah, you’re the Y/N, eh?” another man walked into the room. 

This one looked closer to your age, another similar hair cut as Tommy and Arthur, his hair shorter at the top than the other two, and his features were a little rounder, more boyish. John, you guessed again to yourself, noting that it wasn’t just his facial features that gave him an air of boyishness. He smirked and crossed his arms, his eyes looking you up and down without apology or shyness. He reminded you of some of the guys from your youth — cocky in an obvious, probably overcompensating, kind of way.   

He smirked, “We’ve heard a lot about ya.”

“Shut up, John.” Ada rolled her eyes again. “Ignore ‘em, they’re just cranky because they have to be here so early.” 

“‘s not right,” Arthur grumbled, grabbing the whiskey bottle from the mantle and pouring himself a drink. “Who even called this bloody meetin’ anyway? Pol?” 

“Aye,” Polly’s voice came from around the corner as she entered the kitchen, tea kettle in her hands. “Now sit down, the lot of ya.” 

And they did as she said, even if Arthur grunted between sips the entire time. 

“What’s this about, Pol?” John asked, making himself comfortable on a bar stool, pulling out a toothpick and placing it between his teeth. 

“We wait for Thomas,” Polly replied, pouring three cups of tea and passing one of them to you without giving you a second look. 

“Screw Tommy,” Arthur gruffed, throwing back the remainder of his drink. “And if this is a family meetin’, what’s this broad doing here, eh?

“She’s our newest employee.” 

Tommy’s deep voice turned everyone’s attention to the kitchen doorway, the man himself leaning against the frame, his eyes surveying the scene before landing on you. 

God, your stupid heart and the way it made your breath hitch even the slightest at just the eye contact. It would be really helpful if you could remind your hormones that you weren’t a fucking teenager anymore and to get a grip. 

You’d been in relationships before. Throughout high school you’d had crushes and boyfriends, you’d had your heart broken in ways only a teenager could understand. Then you’d gotten a little older, and had the more complex relationships that came with college life. Sex, commitment, betrayal — all things you were familiar with by this point in your life. Hell, you’d even been close to being engaged once when one particular long-term boyfriend after college had started talking about forever in a way that made your skin start to itch. 

There had just always been that feeling that this wasn’t it in the past. Maybe it was commitment issues, maybe it was chemistry, maybe it was something outside of your control. But right now, with Tommy’s blue eyes peering at you, you couldn’t help but wonder…

Stupid, you shook your head. It was chemicals in your brain, you tried to reason. Bad boy syndrome — excitement of the unknown, of something new. That’s what this feeling was every time those damn orbs felt like they were piercing right through your soul. 

You felt Polly rise from her seat next to you, causing you to turn your head away from Tommy. She moved to lean against the fireplace behind you out of your sight when Tommy began speaking again.

“If we agree to it, that is,” he added, tilting his head slightly as his eyes lifted back up toward his brothers. He cleared his throat and stood up straight. “You’ve already been informed of the ways Y/N has helped our family while we were in France. Polly has proposed that she continue her employment, and I agree. Do we have any objections?”

John and Arthur looked to each other before the former rose his hand. “She ain’t blood. We ‘ave a code. How can we trust her?”

“Come off it, John,” Ada groaned, rolling her eyes for the third time. 

“Ada I’m serious,” he insisted, looking back toward you. “We know nothin’ about her.”

“I’ve already vetted her,” Tommy replied. 

John scoffed, mumbling, “Yeah, I bet you ‘ave. How could she answer your questions with your cock in her mouth—“

“She is gonna smack you if you keep talking about her like she’s not sitting right here,” you finally spoke up, hating that everyone was talking about you like you weren’t sitting in the middle of the room. 

John’s brow creased as he leaned forward in his chair, obviously angry at your outburst to him. You held his gaze with your own before his moved to look over your head. He cracked his neck before settling back down in his chair, avoiding your eyes for Tommy’s. You realized Polly must have made a face or something to make him back off, and your heart swelled once again at the gesture. 

Ada poorly hid her chuckle in her fist next to you. 

Still, you felt pretty blind sighted by this entire ordeal, and you were sure your expression showed it. Tommy’s eyes met yours before he went on, yours doing nothing to hide the daggers shooting his way for setting you up like this. He knew you’d be walking into this place thinking you had the job, not having to prove yourself again to the rest of his family. 

Your eyes narrowed when you caught the muscle in his cheek flinch, the corner of his lip rising at your glare before he ran his hand across his face and went back to addressing his brothers. 

“You boys have seen the work she’s already done for us. Y/N is educated and perceptive.”

Whether it was the surprise of seeing Tommy (nearly) smile at your death glare, or the vote of confidence, you couldn’t help but feel your cheeks blush at the compliment.  

“We can trust her.” 

You began to smile. 

“And if we cant, she understands the consequences.”

And immediately the smile dropped. 

For a moment, you spotted pity in Ada’s eyes, like she’d seen exactly what those consequences have looked like. And she probably had. 

Imagining someone like Ada or even Polly being that way was difficult for you. They were a little rough around the edges, sure — but at their core, you knew they both had huge hearts and believed in what was fair. 

Tommy on the other hand — well, you were kind of conflicted. It was hard not to psychoanalyze him after your game. You tried not to, obviously a person was much deeper than their first (or second) impression. But he’d given you so much, you couldn’t help but begin to put the pieces together. He’d shown you a softness last night, one you believed wasn’t something he did very often or with the public. He made you feel safe, even when you’d been strangers in the cover of night — and he made you feel like you could be yourself for the first time since you’d awoken in this time.

On the other hand, the more logical side of your brain (the only part apparently that wasn’t affected by those damn hormones) knew that believing you knew everything about the man in front of you would be a massive miscalculation. You had to keep your wits about you no matter what, if you were to ever understand what you were doing here or how you could get back. 

You didn’t know Tommy Shelby, you kept reminding yourself, no matter what the Twenty Questions game had revealed. 

And you had no idea the kind of man he was. 

He had warned you, sort of, that the Peaky Blinders’ business got gruesome. You pictured a scene of blades slicing flesh and beatings in the streets, of lifeless bodies tossed into the Cut…

You swallowed before rising your chin and nodding, your eyes meeting the two men appraising you. 

“Shall we vote?” Polly finally said above you. “For?”

Two hands rose immediately before Tommy nodded. John exhaled through his nose before shaking his head, then raising his hand quickly. 

“Arthur?” Polly promoted. “This family does everything out in the open. State your concern.”

The patriarch leaned back in his chair. “I don’t understand why we need ‘er. Things’ve been going just fine as is!”

“Things have not been going just fine as is, Arthur,” Tommy replied, his voice still calm despite the hint of condescension. “Even before France, we knew we were going to have to diversify our efforts and expand if we wanted to increase our income. The war put a pause on that and while Pol ran the business without a hitch in the meantime, the world is changing. We have to change with it.”

“It goes against our code—“

“They’re fuckin’ with our code!” Tommy finally shouted, his hand landing with a bang on the table, causing you to jump. “Just like those bastards on the lines! We ‘ave to take back what’s ours and make it so they can never shove us in the mud ever again! Eh?!”

The room didn’t respond. John’s gaze had fallen to the floor while Arthur’s glared at Tommy. 

The middle brother exhaled, before straightening back up and running a hand across his face again. 

“Y/N can help us take our first steps into the world of professionalism. Legitimacy. That, paired with drumming up new ways to earn money — they won’t be able to touch us.”

Arthur grabbed the bottle and took another gulp before huffing in defeat. “Fuckin— fine. Agreed.”

“Excellent,” Tommy replied dryly. “Y/N, with me.”

You rose up, still unable to find your voice through the whole charade, and followed Tommy through the door. 

“She willin’ to whore for all of us, then?” Arthur yelled from the other room. 

Your feet rounded in their step and an actual growl left your throat as you went to confront the older brother—

Tommy grabbed your shirt and pulled you back toward him before you could make it to the door. “Ignore him,” he insisted at your resistance, pulling you along with him as he continued to walk. “He’s just a sore loser.”

“He could have voted no, then,” you replied, crossing your arms as you shrugged out of his grasp, following Tommy on your own again. 

“It would ‘ave been the stupid vote, and he knows it. He doesn’t like change, just needs some time to get used to ya.” 

You followed him into one of the offices of the empty betting den and stood in the doorway as he grabbed a couple books. 

“You can start with these. Catch up on what you missed starting with the oldest and work your way to today—“

“Why did you imply last night that I had the job if I didn’t actually have it?” you asked when your brain finally got a moment to breathe. 

Tommy exhaled as he looked back up toward you, obviously exhausted already with having to explain his actions. 

“That could technically qualify as a lie and we had a sacred handshake,” you added, his brow rising at the implication. You shrugged, “Was it just to catch me off guard? See how I’d react in the lions’ den.”

He hummed in amusement, moving to stand back in front of you. “I always honor my handshakes. I knew the vote was already three to two going in. They knew this was comin’, we just needed the formality of the family vote to sanctify.”

A reluctant breath left your nose as you considered his point. 

“You didn’t have to,” he nodded down to the coat in your hands. 

Without even giving it a second thought since you walked into the house, you realized you’d been clutching the article like a security blanket. “Oh, you forgot it last night.” 

“Didn’t forget,” his voice grew soft again as he took another step forward. “Winter’s here, it’ll get even colder with the new year. You’ll need it.” 

He peeled the coat from your hands, brushing against them softly as he did, before stepping away to hang it on the rack in the corner of the office. 

You rose your brow. “Then why the excuse? You already knew where I lived, obviously.”

“It was late,” he shrugged. “You need to be more careful in this city, especially now. Here,” he pulled out a seat at the small table in the room. 

“I thought you wanted to keep my employment a secret,” you commented, looking through the windows of the office. “Won’t people see me working in here?” 

Tommy pulled out his cigarette case, grabbing a stick, and running it between his lips the same way he had the night before. “Shop’s closed, it’s a holy day.” 

“Oh.”

He hummed, “We’ll have to figure out something more permanent for you in the future — Pol said she had you working in the kitchen with the doors shut.”

“Aye,” you felt the need to defend her for some reason. “No one ever bothered us.” 

“Things have changed, I’d imagine, since the last time you were here. The place is busier than ever, we’ve had to extend our open hours, and we’ve had to increase security. I’d bet even a holy day wouldn’t keep ‘em away.”

His reasoning seemed sufficient enough for you to finally take the seat he’d pulled out for you. You took the opportunity to scan the room, “Who’s office is this, anyway?”

“Mine,” he replied without looking up as he walked over to the desk. You watched as he lifted some papers up to read, then lay them back down. “I’ll go grab your tea while you get settled.”

He left the room with his fists shoved in his pockets and his head downcast. 

You took his absence as an opportunity to look around the office, curious what his workspace looked like. It was quite bare — a lamp, papers, and a bottle of something brown sat on the desk and a few pictures hung on the wall. 

You recognized the portrait of King George V. It was weird to see a picture or hear reference of the monarch that wasn’t about the Queen. It was even crazier when you realized that Tommy would have been alive when Queen Victoria’s reign was still going on, and had since lived through one other monarch between her and who sat on the throne currently. Meanwhile, back in your time, Queen Elizabeth II had already outlasted Victoria’s rule and had been ruling your entire life. 

Well, not your current life, you corrected. 

You shook the thought away and continued to look around. It felt very… unused, you realized. Like the boys were still settling back into everything. You wondered how often Tommy had even sat in this seat since they got back. 

On the desk laid the pocket watch you’d recognized from the night before, the name “Shelby” etched on the smooth side in cursive. There were papers similar to others you’d seen Polly write and review laid across the desk. 

You moved to walk back to the table when something different caught your eye — the edge of a weathered photograph was peaking out from under a stack of papers. Your hand reached forward to pull it out, pausing for a moment when you realized how invasive you were being. But curiosity trumped politeness as you carefully pulled it out enough to see a face in the photograph. 

A girl — a beautiful girl, with dark hair and full lips sat regally posed in the photo, a white hat on her head. 

You realized then that you hadn’t even considered if Tommy were involved with another woman. You knew he wasn’t married, Ada would have mentioned it along with John — but it could have been completely possible that he was seeing someone, even now. 

A part of you felt strangely betrayed by that thought. Tommy was not yours — you hadn’t even kissed — hell, you hadn’t even spent more than a handful of hours with him. So why did the thought of him and this woman in the photograph together leave you feeling more jealous than any other relationship you’d ever been in? 

There was writing on the photograph in the corner still covered by the papers. You pulled it out further and saw the date first: 1914. There was more writing under, possibly a name that could identify the woman —

The sound of a throat clearing caused you to jump. “Shit—“ you gasped, your eyes meeting Tommy’s in the doorway of the office, a cup of tea in one hand and a book in the other. “You scared me, again.” 

He looked down at his desk, and you knew he could see the photo. 

“I’m sorry,” you began. “I don’t have an excuse. I shouldn’t have been snooping.”

“No,” he finally said, walking into the office and handing you your tea cup. He rounded the desk and dropped the book. “You shouldn’t have.” 

He snatched the photo and shoved it into a drawer before sitting down at the desk and opening the book he’d brought in. 

Taking that as your cue to get to work, you felt like a little kid who’d just got caught stealing candy as you sat back down at the table and began to work. 

It was awkward at first, with your mind still lingering on whether Tommy was mad and who the woman was — but eventually you found yourself lost in the familiar books. 

Even though it’d been a couple weeks, and Tommy hadn’t been exaggerating on how much more business they’d been doing since they all returned, you found again the rhythm that you’d nearly perfected and fell back into it with ease. 

For the gambling business, it was mostly a matter of quality control. Half the time there weren’t even any issues with the books. The rest of the time it was just some mathematical human error or laziness of the notetakers part. And only a small percentage of the time was it actually something nefarious — someone thinking they could skim a little over time or using a pattern of betting that was trying to cheat the system. 

The family books had always been a bit more simple. Either people were paying, or they weren’t. 

But now you knew a little more. You understood the potential consequences that would happen to those who you reported. And while you had no love either way for the betting side of things (who were you to say how people spent the money they earned around here, especially since you’d come to realize that this, boxing, and soccer were some of the few forms of entertainment), you couldn’t help but ponder on the other side of the business. 

You thought about people like Harry and Mrs. Tully who were paying the Shelbys for… what, protection? Protection against who? you couldn’t help but wonder. And to those who decided they no longer wished to give the Shelbys their money, what happened to them? To that list of names Tommy had showed you the night before? 

You couldn’t help but wonder how Harry and Mrs. Tully had even began paying them for this service in the first place — did they go to the Shelbys for help, did they ask for this? Or was it something forced on them? A ‘pay us to keep you safe, or we’ll hurt you ourselves’ kind of business exchange?

Your eyes flickered up to look at Tommy for the first time in hours. He was in a similar position as you — back bent forward as he scribbled in that book of his. His hand thread through his hair as he contemplated something. 

You pictured what a Tommy Shelby of your day would look like, sitting in an office surrounded by the luxuries of 2018. You imagined his hair grown out on the edges, hair parted to the side and combed over in a fancy quaff, a tailored suit in a rich navy blue color with a gaudy gold Rolex on his wrist and a cigar between his fingers. 

Even like this, in 1918, Tommy still looked wealthier than most people in this town. He looked like a King amongst men — the King of Small Heath collecting taxes from the townsfolk for living there. You couldn’t help but wonder what contribution the Shelbys made in return — what did they do with the money? As far as you could see, it wasn’t going back into the community. At least taxes (sometimes) fixed roads. 

“You got something to say?” 

Tommy’s voice startled you, and you realized that you’d been staring at him as your thoughts consumed you. He was looking back at you, his brow rose in question. Part of you wondered if he could hear your thoughts — or if you’d accidentally said something accusatory out loud. 

“Well?” 

“No,” you answered quickly, before taking a deep breath. “I mean, yeah, but I feel it’s not my place to ask. I haven’t earned the right, I don’t think.” 

Tommy exhaled as he leaned back in his chair, grabbing the bottle and filling a glass. “That means you drink, right?” 

Your brain buffered for a second, realizing he was referring to your game from the previous night. “I believe we already reached our quota last night. Unless you’d care to start what you finished last night… or start again—“

“Does it have to be all or nothing?” He shrugged, ignoring your comment as he walked the glass over and took the seat across from you. “I quite liked the game. In my experience, it’s rare to ask a question and feel you get an honest answer.” 

You felt the muscles in your cheek tighten at the notion of a 1910s gangster enjoying the game of Twenty Questions. You wondered how he’d feel about Never Have I Ever…

“She was someone from before France.” 

Your eyes flickered back toward him, realizing that he’d mis-identified your musings. Not wanting to scare him off from sharing, you went with it, letting your curiosity win out once again. 

“I don’t talk about her.” 

You nodded, “Understood.” 

Tommy cleared his throat, “You, uh — you never mentioned if you were… If there was anyone…” 

“No,” you replied, your fingers on the glass.

He hummed in consideration. 

“I was, um,” you cleared your throat, trying to drum up the courage to ask what you’d actually wanted to know. “I was actually just wondering — the family business. I know people around here pay you for protection. But what other services do you offer?” 

His brow creased, “‘d’ya mean?”

You wished you’d thought through exactly what it was you were asking before you’d opened your big mouth. “For the town, I mean. For the people. I get the muscle aspect of it, but what’s the incentive for people to pay you for your protection?” 

Tommy took a drag of his cigarette as his brow furrowed. “And you think, what? We shouldn’t be charging ‘em? We should do it out of the kindness of our hearts?”

“No—“

“If we weren’t here,” he leaned forward, pointing his cigarette at you, “there would be others. There have been others. Worse.”

“I believe you,” you urged, leaning forward in kind to make sure he knew you were listening intently. “And no, I don’t think you should just give it away. But I think hoarding money turns people into something they never wanted to be. It has the power to corrupt in ways that could turn you into worse.” 

Tommy took a deep breath, leaning back into his chair before lifting the stick to his lips. “Pol always said to buy our popularity, if we can afford it. What do you suggest?” 

You exhaled, shrugging. “Cleaning the streets for a start. Providing jobs. Looking into charities or children’s homes, I don’t know… I just believe that ‘protection’ isn’t just making sure people are afraid of ya. It’s making them feel safe — to grow, to contribute, to add to the collective. The more you give, the more you get.” 

You threw back the drink, hoping that would put an end to your ramblings. 

“But strategically,” you added, your brain and mouth moving faster than your attempt to quiet them. “I’m not saying to give everything away over night. You need a plan, you need projections —“

“We need more income,” Tommy added. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’ve been doing some research on other businesses — the Birmingham Boys and other organizations in London. I think the key lies in the races themselves.”

“Fixing races?” 

“Aye, something like that. It’s dangerous though, we’d have to start small. And once we start, we have to be prepared. There would be no integration, it’d be domination.” 

You nodded, your mind running with the gambit of other possibilities. “What about factories? The BSA seems to be booming since the war end, maybe there’s some kind of opportunity in there? Or alcohol? With the prohibition in America—“

Tommy chuckled, “Fools errand. That’ll never pass.”

Your mouth opened to counter, but snapped shut, realizing you were about to say too much again. He watched you carefully as you did this. You waited for him to press you on it, but he put out the bud into the tray on the table and stood up. 

“I have someone I have to go meet,” he finally said. “Try to finish as much as you can by the end of the day. Ada will try to come in here and chat, but see to it that you don’t stray for too long. We have somewhere we’re going tomorrow.” 

“We?” You asked, your brow rising. 

He nodded, walking to the door and calling out behind him as he left, “Dress warm. I’ll pick you up in the morning.” 

>> next chapter << chapter masterlist

Tag list: @sidefanficaccounttohidemyshame @swordofawriter @sweetmilkshakeluminary (sorry if I missed anyone, I tried to list just the people who specifically asked to be added to a tag list - let me know if you’d like to be added to the next!)

#peaky blinders #tommy shelby #thomas shelby #tommy shelby x reader #thomas shelby x reader #tommy shelby x oc #thomas shelby x oc #tommy shelby imagine #peaky blinder fanfic #peaky blinder imagine #mine #time after time #fanfiction #next chapter is in the works!! #lolz I love finding errors after I publish #not the twenty million times I proof it beforehand

[infamous-if]

Hi! Where do we report typos? I found a few and screenshotted them but idk where to put them.

You can just send it through anon, if you are okay with copy and pasting the passage or anything! I’ll usually do a big post of errors I fixed a day or two after every drop instead of answering them individually. Or you can just dm me, if you’re comfortable with that!

I do know there’s two big ones in the prologue (that chapter…). No big ones in chapter 2 reported so far so fingers crossed 🤞

#inbox #chapter 2 errors #might find a bit more errors #my keyboard actually officially officially broke after publishing the update 😭 #I hate the prologue !! #it will never be error free!!

[evscribe]

Being a new addition to the ghouls’ polycule was definitely an experience. It was a relatively easy assimilation through friendship and what was now over a year spent knowing them all. It was rare to find Y/N in their own quarters so for Rain to find them shuffling out of Mountain’s room during early morning was no shock. Tour was sneaking up on them all and Y/N was taking up all the free time their partners’ had to offer. It was becoming more and more often Y/N and Rain would find each other in the wee hours when they both couldn’t seem to sleep. Rain’s dark eyes only briefly find theirs as they flop onto the couch in the shared space of the den. An almost dejected sigh leaves their lips as they curl into themself slightly.

“You’ve fucked up your sleep schedule bad, huh?” He comments knowingly, he only half heartedly tries to hide the knowing smirk on his face. A small nod of agreement from them was followed by a small frown.

“Cir, Sunny, and I stayed up until eight am playing video games a couple nights ago and that definitely made it worse, but it was completely wrecked before that.” They admitted. Y/N couldn’t keep eye contact with the ghoul out of shame. His hand came to rest on their thigh, his thumb rubbing their skin comfortingly.

“Sleep meds not working?”

“It’s still hit or miss right now while it’s getting back into my system regularly.” They explain with a sigh before they speak again, ”I hope it starts working before you guys leave.“

Rain’s chest started to ache at their admittance. It was hard to ignore the pain in their voice. This would be the first tour that the entire polycule would have a partner waiting for them back home at the Ministry and in Rain’s mind it was rather bittersweet. Mountain had talked about how he dealt with it when they were exclusive to him, but Rain was admittedly a little less independent.

”You can always crash in my room while we’re gone, if you want.“ He offers. A small smile cracks their face causing his heartbeat to pick up.

”I appreciate it. I don’t know if I will though.“ They admitted as their brows knitted for a second as if in contemplation. Rain couldn’t help but tilt his head at their words. “Any specific reason?“ He asks. A small sigh leaves Y/N before they rest their head on Rain’s shoulder.

”I think it may make me miss you more than I would in my own bed. When it was just me and Mountain tour was still a challenge, but now it’s even harder. I know Aeth will still be here now that he’s been reassigned, but that still leaves the rest of you guys to miss. Plus I think if I’m caught in the den without you all here I’ll catch hell.“ They admit

”When has that ever stopped you from coming to the den? I remember when you would sneak in here to convince me or Swiss to go on late night walks with you in the garden. I think you used to get caught in here once a week or more at one point“ Rain tells them with a fond smile on his face. Y/N lets out a chuckle at the memory followed by a playful roll of their eyes.

”There’s less incentive to risk it without you guys here.“ They explain. Rain nods, understandingly before speaking again.

”Well, the offer stands either way.“ He tells them before snaking his arm around their waist to pull them into his side. ”I appreciate it,“ Y/N tells him as they place a kiss on his cheek, before curling into him. ”I might borrow a hoodie while you’re gone since my bed will be so cold and empty.“ Their feign melodramatic tone making Rain laugh. He rested his head on theirs as he turned his attention back to the TV that had earlier served as white noise.

To Rain’s surprise it didn’t take long before their breathing slowed and they fell asleep cuddled into his side. He couldn’t help the warm feeling in his chest at the realization. Y/N rarely slept, much less slept well, so he couldn’t help but be a little elated at the thought of comforting his partner to this level. Only when the other ghouls started to wake and come out of their rooms did Rain speak again. First was Sunshine who per usual was a notoriously early riser. She went to greet Rain good morning before she was shushed by him.

”Y/N finally fell back asleep.“ He whispered to the ghoulette. Sunshine silently walked over to the couch where Rain and Y/N were, giving Rain a kiss and placing a soft one on Y/N head, before whispering a farewell and leaving the den. A similar pattern repeated when Sodo, Aether, and Cirrus woke up. Sodo and Aether both went about their business after a brief explanation of shushing, but Cirrus decided to cautiously settle on the couch beside Y/N, who only stirred for a second then buried their face in Rain’s chest causing Cirrus to let out a quiet ‘aww.’ Cirrus gently cuddled up to Y/N's sleeping figure making them let out a quiet content sound. Rain couldn’t help but admire the scene before him. Cirrus smiled at him lovingly before resting her head against Y/N. Rain once again turns his attention back to the TV only to soon after be pulled into the warm lulling pull of his partners

#rain x reader #mention of polyghouls #smidge of cirrus x reader #and sunshine x reader #idk what else to tag #pls have mercy #this is my first published ghost x reader fic #i'm out of practice #so pls forgive me for errors #rain ghoul x reader

[gringoths]

"Snape?" Harry asked before he cleared out of the man's office.

"Professor," he hissed.

Not wanting to fight, Harry turned around and swallowed his pride. "Professor Snape, did you know my parents?"

His nostrils flared in poorly guised rage as he slammed the quill into the inkwell. "Mr. Potter, did I or did I not just lecture you on the importance of minding one's own business?"

"You did, then? I-"

"Leave my office at once unless you want to suffer the full effect of a face-swelling charm."

That sounded... Unpleasant. Harry was half-way tempted to just turn 'round and be done with it, but the burning in his chest wouldn't let his feet move. As it was, they seemed to be firmly glued to the dungeon floor.

"Was my dad a bully?" he blurted out.

Professor Snape snarled like he always did when James Potter was brought up. His eyes flashed with a hatred so bright Harry flinched backwards. "Your good-for-nothing father was not a bully. He was the bully, Potter." He spit out the word like venom and his face twisted harder for it.

With a flick of the man's wrist, his office door slammed into Harry and sent him sprawling to the cold stone below. He took a second to process that he was, in fact, not victim to sudden puffiness, before he scrambled to his feet and ran out of the dungeons.

He had a lot to think about.

#Severus Snape #Snape #Harry Potter #Harry #Severitus #Slither.doc #Forcing myself to publish this instead of waffling about #Maybe I'll gain a bit more confidence #I do like it after all #Reposting this to fix a formatting error #Plot bunnies

[thetimelordbatgirl]

So I watched the teaser for Red and I have lots of questions:

Why Cinderella’s hair and Chloe’s hair blue?

Isn’t the actress for Chloe half white?

Why there’s a Merlin Academy hall of fame in Auradon?

Why Queen of hearts have a beef with Cinderella? Isn’t that supposed to be Lady Tremaine?

Why Uma is principal?

Why didn’t they change Beast’s statue to Ben’s?

Isn’t Wonderland an imagination in Alice’s head?

Why the Villains are considered VKs?

Why the heroes are in school with the villains? Especially Jasmine, Aladdin and Cinderella?

What’s going on with this?💀

Answering in order here:

*Honestly no fucking clue- I assume its because they want their main characters to have colorful hair like the prior main characters in Descendants 1-3, but even their hair looked better then Cinderella's, both young and old, and Chloe's blue hair. I really don't get why they were allergic to just, letting Brandy and Malia keep their normal hair instead of shoving ugly blue wigs onto them, but... *I do not know about Malia Baker's ethncitiy, I just know with the ugly blue wig and the lighting on that photo shoot, she looks light- not as light as Audrey did at times in D3 with her blonde hair, but you know, its up there. I do know Descendants fucked up when announcing this whole film, aka implying Dara Renee was casted as Chloe, but nope, turns out Dara is playing Ulyana, Ursula's latest younger sister, and Malia Baker is playing Chloe...so don't know what the fuck happened with Descendants there but....and if Malia is half-white...yeah I guess I wouldn't be surprised with Descendants and their track record with POC....or actually Hollywood in general, sufferer of Fate the Winx Saga here... *I can only assume its because Auradon Prep took Merlin Academy's place when Beast established it and such. How it affects what Ben said in D1: "Auradon prep, originally built over 300 years ago and converted into a high school by my father when he became king." can only be described as contunity/timeline breaking....aka Descendants favorite past time- but because of this, I just guess they count Merlin Academy students as ones to honor, since they learnt here once as well. *I have zero fucking clue WHY Cinderella and Queen Of Hearts have beef beyond someone in the Descendants writing room likely threw darts randomly and whoever they landed on would be parents of main characters and also have random as fuck beef- though bold to assume they'd allow Tremaine and Cinderella to have beef, D3 basically at the end was pro-forcing victims to forgive their abusers so like...

*Uma's teaser established that she was asked by Mal (no D*ve means get used to Descendants finding ways to mention Mal in this film) to become principle of Auradon Prep, so uh, that's why- no clue where Fairy Godmother is but she is confirmed to be returning in the movie so like- personally, I don't think Uma as principle makes sense character wise, but I do also see the reasoning other's have used for this character decision so like...its not the worst thing in this film. *I'm pretty sure the statue is less of a current ruler thing and more of a founder thing, since Ben said his father wanted it to remind people anything is possible when Beast founded Auradon Prep. I also don't really see Ben caring much for a statue of himself, since he doesn't give me the vibes of that. Plus, bold of you to assume Descendants films would give Ben a statue, they'd give Mal one over him with how Ben was treated in D3 in comparison to Ben, the actual ruler, during the meeting scene. *In terms of the animated film only? The vibes are that yes, Alice imagined Wonderland after dozing off, since she wakes up back in reality just as shit is hitting the fan. But let's be real, Descendants stopped caring about keeping to the animated films a while back, so they just gonna make Wonderland a real place and roll with it basically. *Answering those two together really on the VKs thing and the school thing: because Descendants is now entering EAH/SFGAE rip off terrority really, aka the idea of future fairy tale heroes and villains attending school together basically. Therefore, all animated films stuff and Descendants contunity/timeline is thrown out the window in favor of this. Like Jasmine and Aladdin logically should not be meeting at this point because they meet first time in animated and Jasmine was kept inside the palace her whole life?? Cinderella at this age would technically be being forced to be step-family's servant and therefore not likely allowed to attend school even? FUCK IT- rip off time! Not like EAH can do much since Mattel basically killed it in the end and SFGAE is doing god knows what right now...

And to that last question: "What's going on with this? 💀" Good question! I do not fucking know. I just know I wish someone would put the dumpster fire out already, but when this movie was announced, it was two movies, so god help us if they go ahead with the second one...

#disney descendants #descendants #descendants the rise of red #the rise of red #again i need to emphasis on the malia thing i have zero clue what her ethnicity is #i just know shes definitely looking light in that wig and shit #also like if your curious if im watching...i dont really plan to #while i joke i torture myself with shit like this i really have no reason to want to check this mess out beyond maybe uma #but china confirmed her part in the film is small so like #i manage to avoid watching the mcu nowadays which i used to watch for torture in the end so like #for the weird space all i can say is ask tumblr why i kept getting an error when publishing before i decided to put the space in

[butchriptide]

genuinely really frustrating that people will like. choose to accept the age mistake made in assassin as canon for deathbringer when it actively contradicts older material. like. sorry idk if this is me being unfair here but genuinely like. why would you think it's intentional when deathbringer is described in main series as maybe a year or two older than glory at most, and can canonically not be any older than 9 due to stated timeline facts in the main series.

like. I get not liking glorybringer, i really do. no ship is for everyone. hell, even if assassin specifically makes you feel weird about it, so be it, to each their own. i can undertsnad that too. and yes, the glorybringer fans who think the age gap are canon are also in the wrong. they're being really gross, i don't think it's necessary to disclaim that, that feels given, but like... that only comes to my point still of like, i really don't understand taking a spin-off as canon over the main series. i don't really understand prioritizing later content as canon as opposed to the main work over spin-off as canon. why should a spin-off take jurisdiction just cuz it's newer? i feel like the older the canon is, the more likely it is the newer stuff will make mistakes. to me, in the case of a contradiction, the main series should be taken to? a spin-off is meant to supplement the main series, so shouldn't it only supplement canon that doesn't contradict?

like also, i get being frustrated it isn't fixed, but also. like. i obviously have not worked with a publisher before, but if I was writing for fucking scholastic books, no matter how well fucking beloved my series was, I don't know if I could risk being like "hey. can you pull my books from shelves and e-stores for me so that I can edit one line?" Like. I really don't think there's any reality in which I can make a corporation agree to that kind of thing, no matter what that one line may fuck up about my main story. like it's not even the only mistake she makes in the winglets. she calls deathbringer a rainwing in the flip book, but we're not hailing that as canon in retrospect, right? I don't know. I think it's unfair to presume that she's choosing not to fix it as opposed to it being an improbable to downright impossible thing to ask of a publisher. like yes tui is an incredibly successful author but i really don't know if we can presume she has that much actual sway on her publisher.

it's just really exhausting as a deathbringer enjoyer to feel like if I want to talk about and enjoy his character, and yes, that includes context given in the assassin winglet once you ignore the timeline error, i feel like I constantlyyy have to be saying "yes I think the timeline error is an error. no i don't think deathbringer is 13." like. every time i bring him up. i'm a riptide fan I'm used to it but also it's sooooo tiring to go into a character tag for a guy i like and be swamped with hatred for him and it's so much worse for deathbringer than riptide because in the deathbringer tag I have to deal with being actively accused of excusing gross shit for liking him instead of people just saying that my blorbo is boring.

#by nightwings standards deathbringer isn't even a fucking adult. like even when I was first reading the books he never read as an adult to #me. and the assassin winglet only further adds to this for me not lessens. he reads so much as #teenager/barely in his 20s guy who grew up #way too fucking fast for his own good but fully buys into his own narrative that he's got everything sorted and together #the way the age system works as I've always interpreted it is that like. each age up to 7 covers a wide but decreasing number of human #maturity years every time and then slows to the years being one-to-one by the time they're 7 #with 7 corresponding to 18 #which makes the nightwings not counting dragonets as fully grown until 10 the equivalent to how 21 is kind of like being an Actual Adult #law wise in America at least i mean to say #deathbringer can't even legally buy beer yet is what I'm saying. some hotels wouldn't let him check in without an accompanying adult #deathbringer #misc #wings of fire #wof #sorry for complaining in main tag but I'm so fucking tired of being made to feel gross for liking a character over material that #no casual fan of the series is even going to know exists or read that is so clearly a timeline error based on everything in the actual #series that I read #does my joke about him not being able to buy beer make up for it #do you guys still think i'm cool #on the note of publishing too #there's no reason to think scholastic could even make it happen in a timely fashion even if tui did ask for the change to the books. like. #looking up working with scholastic reviews some of the most common negative reviews are about poor management #i'm not trying to white knight for her or anything i think she's a flawed human being like anyone else I just think if ur gonna critique he #you should do it about stuff that's like actually poorly handled in her series. not a timeline error in a spin-off. like. come on.

[phoneycam]

The brainrot is winning

I'm having a strong soulmates phase and seeing that my codywan obssesion isn't going anywhere either... Let's get creative.

Soulmates AU: Everyone has life point/years left and people can people can give their soulmate their own life points/years.

So imagine!

It's the middle of the first year in the war. The 212 is send to a random planet to protect the people from the separatist atack and as always, it all goes to shit. The information is incorrect, the comms don't work properly and as a result, they are being rapidly overwhelmed. They fight for several days waiting for backup but while they wait, the provision keep running lower and lower. It get's to the point where people from the planet start helping with local medicine and shelter for the injured because there is no other options. Obviusly is in one of these desperate moments that it happens.

Everyone is tired; they've been fighting for days with no chance of a break and when one is tired, they make mistakes more easily. Obi-wan and Cody are aware of that and they do the best they can to allow rotations in the front long enough to get a break to the poor troopers, but it's almost impossible when there is less and less with each day.

Cody is in the front shooting to any droid that dares to come near his sight, his general on the other side of the fild protecting the troops only recognizable for the blue flashes that came through the heavy cloud of dust that seems to never disapear in this goddamn planet. Maybe is the lack of sleep and rations, maybe is the hyperfocuss that comes everytime his in the battlefield, maybe to many explotions have made his hearing weaker, either way, somehow a droid gets past his comfort zone and the alarmed shout of one of his brothers is the only thing that makes him realize his mistake.

They manage to bring down the droid but not before Cody get's shot a couple of times. He doesn't even notice it until he tries to go back to his original position to continue and he fucking collapses.

Obi-wan, on the other side, is making the best he can to not loose more clones, destroy every droid that crosses his way and ignore the force exsaustion. It's after defiting a massive tank with aparent flawless effort only to end up tripping with air that he admits defeat and let Bones drag him to one of the shelters.

inside the shelter you can find multiple clones in diverse states of pain and injuries, a mix of medics and locals running around with bacta patches, bends and many types of plants based balms. Obi-wan tries his best not to flinch with every clone he passes by, getting more and more distressed with every wave of pain his man shoves his way unintetionally with the force. By the time they sat him on an empty suplly box, he is so overwhelmed he doesn't react to anything untl he recognizes the clone stationed on his side.

"Cody!" he shouts unwittingly of the people around.

The commander is lying on a pile of age-corroded blankets, surrounded by diverse bowls full of leafy concoctions, without his top armor and covered with different leaves in several places. When Obi-wan cruches next to him, he gets to smell all the different balms and oils from the leaves, but also, underneath it all, he can sense the pains and struggles exuding from this man, how breathing is getting more labored with every second, how dangerusly warm the skin feels.

How close to death he is.

Obi-wans heart aches. There are not the supplies needed for his type of injuries and he is too tired to do anything to help his commander, the force barely helping him stay knelt by his side and this is enough to make his vision blurry. Barely a month ago he had managed to gain enough trust from this man to get his name and now here he lies... Obi-wan shakes his head refusing to drop tears for someone who wasn't gone. And will not be gone. If there is something he is known for is being stubborn and if he says his commander will live another day, then he will. If he says he has enough force energy to help Cody, he will have it.

Nodding decided to himself, Obi-wan grabs carefully with both trembling hands Codys arm and brings it close to him. He is about to take a deep breath when a shocked gasp leaves him breathless instead.

Something happens for a second, it feels like a zap of energy crossing his boddy and then there is nothing.

Obi-wan stays there for a couple minutes breathing heavily. Slowly he turns Codys arm around. There, he sees a number in the upper arm and is suddenly reminded of one of the deepest mysteries of the force. A choked sob leaves him involuntarily when another zap crosses his body and synchronously the number that had almost becomed 0 goes up again.

He doesn't even think about it before handing year after year. He knows that him himself had at least a hundred years on his counter and althoug it had been a long time since he checked it, he didn't care.

He stops when the number gets to 45 years.

Obi-wan takes a deep breath and open his eyes slowly, he doesn't remember closing them but he doesn't really care because the first thing he sees is his commander sleeping peacefully. He smiles and hesitates before releasing the arm. He takes some of the bowls and after verifying with the forse for danger, he aplies some over the number to cover it.

He hopes no one notices before Cody. That thought reminds him that he is in a very public place at the moment and he look around suddenly aware of his surroundings. Everybody is too rushed and preoccupied to even notice the miracle that just happened. A little bit of shame invades him at the thought that someone would be watching him in this kind of situation.

"General!" A troopers call startles him in the direction of the shout. He sees Waxer struggling with the amount of people running in different directions to get to him and the scene of him almost tripping makes him smile involuntarily.

"Waxer, how can i help you?" He asks when the poor trooper is finally by his side.

"Reinforcements are on their way, sir! We've recived a transmission from General Skywalker to be attentive of his arrival" Waxer responds barely holding himself of jumping happily while various troopers on earange start cheering.

"That's a wonderful new, that's honestly... a kriffing relieve..." Obi-wan release a relieved sigh that overlays the collective gasp of the troopers and starts to get up. "I'll go help some more before Anakin arrives, I'm feeling better either way" He says making his way outside the shelter and unaware of the several gapping clones he's left behind.

It takes three days to stop the separatist. Cody wakes up on the second day and only entertains Bones with a couple of tests from his 'miraculous' recovery before shaking of the dried leaves with some help of the locals and getting inmediately on his blacks and then his armour. He doesn't realize the soft gasp from the person cleaning his arm and then whispering to his friends when Cody basically escapes to the bettlefield followed by a frustrated Bones that insists he needs to atleast eat a ration bar.

When general and commander find eachother, there is too much going on the battle field to have a conversation, so after seeing one another from the distance and sharing a nod of acknowledgment they go back to the task in hands.

By the time they get to the Negotiator on the end of the third day, exhaustion, grief and hunger are the only things on their brains. They had lost so many and even though they wanted to do anything more than to fall asleep on the spot, they still needed to keep going until everybody else was ok.

"General!" Or at least that was the idea before Helix started walking menasingly towards them. "Bones told me to take you to medbay the moment i see you"

Obi-wan grimaces before sighing resigned. He turns around to see Cody already smiling at him with pity and some baddly hidden humor.

"Don't you think you are safe either commander" Helix remeinded Cody of his conditional release. "Go get yourself clean before making presense on the medbay. I've already noticed your absense to the rest so there is not escaping."

"And why can't I-"

"Because Cody smells like he decided to wallow on a garden and that's an allergy magnet if I've ever seeing one, better get that out of the way quick. You on the other side, I can see you favoring your right side"

"..."

"..."

When Cody arrives to the fresher he is not surprissed to find other troopers already using them, it's normal after a battle, so he just gets out of his armour and blacks and just waits for his turn. He can hear some troopers chatting on the side that he tunes out while he starts inspecting everyone for injuries. Most of them are not heavily injured, some bad scratches here and there but nothing life threatening. He hums to himself when he sees the number on one of the troopers.

Clones had this unspoken rule of never mentioning the soulmate counter. Most of them didn't even get to the second digit and every battle only reduced that number to the inevitable day. Finding their soulmate wasn't even something they could look upon, with most of the time spend in battle or traveling, weirdly interacting with other individuals and the ankward situation that all the being a clone implies.

"All yours commander!" the call from one of his brothers exiting the fresher brings him back to reality and shaking himself out of that path of thoughts he goes to the fresher.

The unavoidable happens when he is getting himself back on a new pair of blacks.

He is thinking of his batchmate Bly, one of the only lucky ones to have found the impossible, in non other than his general. He remember the hysteric call he recived at an unholy hour not even two days after his departure. The memorie makes him smile fondly and unconsciously he goes to see his own number.

45 years.

...

..

.

Eh?

#codywan #obiwan my beloved #obi-wan kenobi #commander cody #cody my beloved #codywan au #soulmates #soulmates au #clone troopers #the clone wars #codywan fic #or at least the idea of one #i haven't revised this before publishing it #if you see an error #my bad yall #i just needed this out of my brain quickly #the brainrot is strong #send help

[pop-squeak]

since i’m taking so long to finish that damn comic, have secret chapter three of Grave Error snippet that i couldn’t figure out how to finish lol

#still tryna figure out if this is worth publishing #bc it’s kinda ass #lots more cats too 💀 #guys i have an issue #my writing #my fic #a grave error #jeeves and wooster #bertie wooster #reginald jeeves #jeeves #jooster

[mantisgodsdomain]

Fun fact about us: we really, really like doing crossovers, whether between different Things or just between different AUs of the same Thing. We deeply enjoy throwing things into each other and seeing the relative "normal" interact, tinkering with different potential outcomes of the same general thing, fucking around with culture clash and alternate realities, and all of that fun stuff.

Unfortunately, we also get into flavors of media that isn't quite finished a lot, and we often really want to throw together AUs that we have to write ourself together with things, which means that we're nearly constantly running into the same handful of roadblocks: it's really hard to write about stuff when people have no idea what you're talking about, and it's also really hard to write about stuff when you don't know half of what's going on.

This means that a decent chunk of our writing that is finished tends to stay in drafts - fics based on information that needs to be revealed in stuff we haven't yet written, fics based on media where half of the things we need to know aren't yet revealed in canon, and similar situations easily make up our second most common category of "finished but unpublished" and "finished except for That One Thing" fic (our first most common category is "we need to come up with a decent opening and writing a good hook is hard")

This is, of course, a hell of our own creation. A problem of our own authorship, that we still consistently fail to escape because of our sense of pride and unwillingness to turn out anything that isn't at least half-decent. Similar to the way that we force ourself to reread any media that we write fic of for the sake of accuracy before we can publish it. It makes things take longer, but allows us to ensure quality - though it may hold us back from a certain degree of self-indulgence, mischaracterization is the thing that bothers us most, and if we release a misreading or mischaracterization, that'll haunt us more than any level of soul-baring ever count.

Anyways, all of this is to say that peak self-indulgence for us looks like an isekai Dungeon Meshi/Runaway to the Stars crossover where we stick a handful of characters into the dungeon and let them just kind of cope with that for the forseeable future and the only thing stopping us from doing this is a sense of pride and the fact that Runaway to the Stars doesn't actually have finished & published books right now.

#we speak #writing #no clue if thisll go in the tags for either of those pieces of media. tag search is very inconsistent on that. #if you're looking at this from a fandom tag then hi #this is the same force that keeps 99% of our hbg fic in development hell and the same thing that keeps our multichapters in limbo #if you see us say “we're writing something” and then we don't post it then theres like a 80% chance that its one of three things #either we couldn't make a decent intro we ran into a “need to post this before this” error or we ran into a missing info error #assuming that we didn't get stuck on the reread ofc #sometimes this will also make us into a massive hater because we put large amounts of effort into making things Consistent and Functional #and then we run into authors that Don't do that and we're like “what the hell dude why is your world so sloppy theres holes in here” #the problem is that we unfortunately probably thought it through more than you and now we're in the pit again #anyways. do you guys think that the dungeon could spawn monsters that are edible for talita if she got hungry enough in there #can the dungeon manufacture centaur macromolecules. could talita eat dungeon meat. could the dungeon make centaur safe meatplants #we answer this question in twenty years when rtts is done and published and we can finally write fic for it

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

I love that you started writing for this fandom, thought "there's not enough trans man Ed content in here," and then decided to fix that single-handedly

#average ofmd fic writer publishes 3.5 trans ed fics a year actually just statistical error #atticus who publishes a million trans ed fics a year is a statistical outlier adn should not have been counted

[fallevs]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Glee Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel Characters: Blaine Anderson, Kurt Hummel, Santana Lopez, Isabelle Wright, Sam Evans (Glee) Additional Tags: Mutual Frustration, neighbors!klaine, Vogue!Kurt, Fluff and Crack, Some Humor, A little bit of angst, Eventual Smut, Anal Sex, ambientalist!blaine, My First Smut, inspired by an italian movie, blink and you'll miss it blood mention, blink and you'll miss it kurtbastian, vegetarian!blaine, Betaed, Antarctica, they can't stand each other, until they do, Saving the Whales, saving the turtles, Falling In Love, Idiots in Love, Alternate Universe, Manhattan, Nurse!blaine, i swear i don't have a nurse fetish, Stress Relief, Stressed Blaine Summary:

Kurt and Blaine are neighbors and could not be more different. One is a humble nurse who, in his spare time, loves to make the world a better place; the other is a free spirit with a very particular hobby. One of them believes that love is something unique and rare, as he is used to read in his novels, while the other just wants to have fun without putting his heart and feelings into it. An amusing clinical problem will bring them closer and they will discover that maybe, after all, they don't hate each other that much.

#does it also happen to you that you publish a story and reread it fifteen more times to find errors? #no? #just me? #okay #it is actually cringe #but the story is funny and light #at least for me #😭