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pinkanonwrites · 1 year

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Vash with a Courier!Reader

GN!Reader headcanons below!

Your job was far from an easy one, especially in the washed-out sandscapes of Gunsmoke where bandits and ne’er-do-wells could be lurking behind every dune and cliffside. You were a lone Courier, shuttling mail and packages in between the towns and major cities with the small herd of Thomases at your command. It was in one of those podunk towns where you met Vash for the first time, him squaring up against the bandits while you snuck about freeing hostages and recovering some of your stolen cargo.

Neither of you expected much past it, just a simple teaming up when it was easy and convenient. Yet somehow, whatever town you trotted into next, it seemed that Vash the Stampede was already there. Sometimes he was alone, sometimes he was flanked by two silly insurance agents and a so-called priest. But regardless of who he was or wasn’t with, he always had a smile and a few words for you.

You became an odd pair of friends, trading stories and knick-knacks whenever you happened to run across each other on your respective journeys. Vash was never the type to keep too much on him, he preferred to travel light. But he found himself getting more and more drawn to little baubles and curiosities he’d find in town shops, wondering if you’d like it, how you’d react if (when) he handed it to you. You gave him a feather from your head Thomas that he kept tucked into the inner pocket of his duster basically at all times.

Speaking of which, he’s obsessed with your Thomas herd! He’s constantly cooing and trying to snuggle with them, even as they gnaw on his coat and nibble at his spiky hair. You teach him about the massive bird-beasts and take him riding from time to time, your pair of Thomases careening up and down the dunes with your laughter bubbling through the rushing air.

You’d never once considered trying for the bounty on Vash’s head, something he was eternally grateful for though he never asked why himself. But he didn’t actually have to, because you ended up supplying the story yourself one night while sipping drinks under the star-speckled sky. As hard as it was, you truly adored your job. You liked helping people in need, making them happy, making sure they had what they needed. And 60 billion double-dollar bounty or not, you could tell that Vash was the same as you, he really just wanted to help. You really admired that.

It was at those words, that you admired him, that something finally clicked in place in Vash’s head. You weren’t even looking at him, staring up at the stars with this look of such contentment and comfort on your face, like you wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. That’s when he finally realized what that odd pull was whenever he saw something that reminded him of you, that bubbling excitement whenever he ended up running into you in the next town, the next city.

He liked you.

And god, he really had no idea how to feel about that. He knew that simply being near you would put you in incredible danger, yet he couldn’t find it in himself to fully distance himself from you. He’d gotten too attached, too comfortable. As strong as you were, compared to the kinds of people he was dealing with you were incredibly fragile, and the last thing he ever wanted was for you to get hurt because of his burdens.

And yet, he just cant help himself, he’s incredibly shameless. He flirts with you constantly but is flustered to the point of stammering with every compliment you give him, constantly toying at the idea of something more but unable to take the first steps himself. You’ll have to be incredibly patient and persistent with him to actually get him to be willing to enter a relationship with you.

Once you are though it’s so painfully obvious he’s smitten with you to literally everyone you guys ever meet. He bursts into delighted tears when you first tell him you’re going to be traveling alongside him from now on, not just wandering and hoping you bump into each other. You’re the first person he worries about when things go awry and the first person he celebrates with when he manages to pull it all together again. You tell his favorite travel stories to his other companions and he’s ecstatic with how fast you make friends with them too.

He’ll move to the ends of Gunsmoke’s most treacherous deserts and back to make sure you were safe and happy, and he can’t help but feel loved knowing that you’d do the same for him too.

#trigun #trigun stampede #trigun x reader #vash #vash the stampede #vash the stampede x reader #vash the stampede imagines #vash imagines #trigun imagines

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fatehbaz · 11 months

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[S]and has acquired a conspicuous profile in contemporary urbanization over the past two decades. [...] [S]and but also gravel and crushed rock, are the fastest-growing category of extracted material. Their extraction has increased six-fold in the Asia-Pacific region over the last two decades. Singapore, a city-state in Southeast Asia the size of New York City and half the size of London, is the largest per capita importer of sand in the world. The city-state’s urbanization and never-ending construction [...] is partly responsible for its considerable appetite for sand, but this use pales in comparison to the amount it requires for its land reclamation project, which has seen the city-state expand its territory from 585 square kilometers in 1959 to 724 in 2022. Singapore’s construction of territory, and the sand it has imported from all over Southeast Asia to resource its geophysical projection of sovereignty, invites us to consider the implications of urbanization’s enrollment of greater and greater volumes of sediment, and the geopolitics of the global sand crisis. [...]

As sediment flows and locks into place, it expresses characteristics of all three states of matter, depositing and eroding [...]. A geomorphological errantry, sediment is always on the move [...]. In its multiplicity, sand becomes a kind of narrator for those elements [...]. In its modulation [...], sediment sutures together landscapes that are neither solid nor fluid, but the porous interplay [...].

---

Between 2006 and 2016, Singapore, with a population of less than six million, was the top importer of sand in the world four times. Land reclamation there truly began with colonization by the British East India Company, with Boat Quay in 1822, when three hundred or so convict laborers who were paid pittances chopped down hills and cut up stones to embank a swamp, lest it remain fallow. When Singapore became an independent city-state in 1965, reclamation projects initially cut down hills for fill material, flattening the interior and exterior of the main island alike. [...] As these projects grew more expansive and the city-state’s demand for sand intensified, Malaysia and then Indonesia banned sand exports to Singapore [...]. This [resulting] price spike shook the city-state to its core, prompting the opening of a series of construction sand stockpiles [...]. The government began purchasing sand through its web of contractors and subcontractors from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Myanmar. [...]

The securitization of sand in multiple stockpiles in Singapore eerily mirrors what happened in the extractive sandscapes of its origin: similarly sized dunes bloomed along the banks of mangroves in Koh Kong, Cambodia, like a dream herniating into reality, an invasive species of landscape bursting at the seam where the land met the water, still haunting riverbeds years after the dredging stopped. [...]

---

[T]he fantasy of reclaimed land through dubiously sourced rudiments of city-statecraft. [...] This kind of work is normally kept out of sight behind physical partitions as well as the labyrinthine contractual involutions of procurement arrangements, until it is seamlessly assumed by the whole, consumed by land as a homogenous legal entity [...] [B]ehind the mask, another mask. [...] [T]he sand barges and ships enter the maritime waters of Singapore from [...] legally undisclosable sources of its origin.

The eponymous proclamation [...] is the legal mechanism by which a piece of reclaimed land is “proclaimed” as state land proper by the president. A reclamation can only become state land by the text of a proclamation, a eucharistic procedure which purifies the land of its ambiguous sedimentary origin. Prior to that it is foreshore or seabed, but once it has been proclaimed, “thereupon that land shall immediately vest in the State freed and discharged from all public and private rights [...] over the foreshore or the sea-bed before the same were so reclaimed.” [...]

---

The limit to seeing like a state is that the state has a way of doing things that it can’t see, and of refusing to register that which does not meet its threshold of intelligibility.

It blinds itself through the loophole, the nondisclosure agreement, the handshake and its subtle para-political fission. [...]

Singapore’s continued economic prosperity depends on the speculative projection of its territory through unequal economic exchange, disguising it through fabulations of sovereign ingenuity like the Gardens by the Bay. [...]

[There is an] asymmetry between its curated artifice and the remote terraqueous landscapes this curation predates upon, unsettling the ground on which the city-state projects its most delirious fictions of sovereignty [...].

But those very spaces of nondescript hinterland are the logistical and industrial engines which make the Gardens possible. [...]

---

[T]he sheer colonial and postcolonial history of geographic expansion and environmental transformation implies that there are still further worlds to extract for reproducing the global city. Urban form rewired by geo-economic fortune and political repression subversively enroll land and labor into its globe-spanning machinery: it needs to keep on expanding to stay ahead of whatever anticipated global economic movement will buoy it in the future. [...] The transmutation of Singapore’s development trajectory is not historical, but contemporary: Singapore is the global city as a centripetal conjugator of space-time, funneling either term through supply chains that pass through it to produce territory as a plasticity [...].

The calamity it visited on the population of Koh Sralao was first pioneered all over Singapore and its outlying islands in the name of necessity, modernization, and the nation, displacing Orang Laut and Orang Pulau communities, who faced a choice to either abandon their maritime ways or resettle further afield in Malaysia or Indonesia. Many of Singapore’s southern islands were grafted together and erased by land reclamation, with Jurong Island in particular becoming an agglomeration of eighteen different islands, their Malay names now lost, sunk together into the catacombs of a dedicated petrochemical refining and storage complex.

Instead of being haunted by the sediment it has reclaimed its land with, and the rhythms and ecologies this sediment subtended, the global city and its subcontracted tendrils haunt those vestiges of maritime and riverine life bound by sediment like a vengeful ghost, compelled to repeat its actions, and to forget them in the projection of another tabula rasa.

---

Text by: William Jamieson. “Extracting Sovereignty: Land Reclamation in Southeast Asia and the Emergence of the Global Sand Crisis.” e-flux Journal Issue #137. June 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#abolition #ecology #imperial #colonial

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agonzovi · 5 months

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[2] Dawn in the Rest

holy shit yellow gets to meet blue now haha i sure hope it doesn't end in a self indulgent wreck that I didn't suffer writing through oh golly.

(---)

Yannick glared at the steed with such ferocity it would have converted it to glue if she tried hard enough.

But she didn't want to, and she didn't need to give Mrs. Davis another reason to behead her. Right now, she was tipsy and really needed atleast some sort of civilization hospitable enough to take her in for now, but even that was proving to be frugal in barren sandscape.

Wine bottle in one hand and hat in the other, Yannick slicks her dirt-blonde hair back before dusting off her hat and readjusting it to her crown in manner so that it doesn't fall off as easily.

The white mare snorts at Yannick's misfortune, its velvet halter overlayed with the shades of dim under the blanket of the rising night. The horse noise was met with a withering glare that could only come from somebody who's ass came in impact with the ground at gravitational force.

And, as if the mount was challenging her, its head dropped to Yannick's eye level, tilting in a manner that said, ‘what will you do about it?’

“You’re funny thing aren't you? letting me ride you off as an escape and then proving you have your owner's personality. Just so you know, we're going to suffer the night’s cold if keep throwing me off.”

See, if talking to an animal you stole whilst slightly drunk was odd enough, it had quite the personality. The horse then proceeded to shove her and walk off idly.

“You little—”

Her grip on the lead rope tightened, but instead of halting the equine, she was dragged by the arm she was holding its lead with, like some cursed folktale where some horse carries around a dead body with a winebottle in its hand. Its actually impressive how the alcohol hasn't spilled a drop yet.

This horse and her is proving to be equally challenged in being stubborn, but in this state where she's not as sharp she'd usually be, the horse was winning this battle of wits because she was letting it drag her resigned figure.

Well she was resigned, until the surface beneath her transitioned from dusty fine sand into small sharp-

“ROCKS! FUCK!”

okay, now that woke her up, she sprang up from the ground and had let go of the lead, seeing in the dim night she was intentionally led into a small patch of rigid pebbles that was so proportioned to be avoidable and now she resents losing Jasper.

back hurting, and hat disheveled, she feels her spine in an attempt to soothe the stings, and then sees the horse staring at her blankly as if it was amused, “You smart little shit.”, she spat, the mare breaks eye contact and flips her mane at her and Yannick REALLY, really regrets losing Jasper.

At this point, the tipsiness wears off, and then Yannick still downs the rest of the wine anyway. Which—really wasn't much, as she had discovered that yes, the wine had infact spilled many times in her predicament; Maybe she might've been slightly more than tipsy.

Well shit, now we really need to find a town now.

Preferably with a bar.

The moon was full. Enough light for Yannick to survey the inventory in her leather sling. She picks up a lamp, the frame rusting but otherwise usable.

“I can't believe I'm negotiating with a fucking horse.”

‘Shithead’, as she had named the horse, was looking at her with the most doe eyes a horse could do. Well— more like looking at the apple in her hand; which she definitely didn't steal a few hours before her altercation with Mrs. Davis and forgot about in her bag. Shithead tilted it's shit little head, a horse so majestically big it was dwarfing Yannicks height and yet it was still staring at Yannick like a sat puppy.

“Okay, here's a deal, you take us to a town where we can settle down for a bit, and I give you the apple, okay?” un—fucking—believable. She wasn't even under the influence of alcohol anymore and she's still talking to an animal that has further anthrmorphised itself with proven intelligence and a name. It wasn't a very good name, but It still applies.

The mare sprung up so fast Yannick was suprised she didn't get shoved and die; because well, look at that thing, its full height is a few heads taller than Yannick's full height.

It's tail was carried high, with a posture that giddily anticipated for her to saddle up and sHITHEAD EVEN LEANED DOWN AND PUT THE LEAD ROPE INBETWEEN ITS TEETH TO OFFER. WHAT THE FUCK MRS. DAVIS.

“Holy shit, uh— thank.. you..?”

Just as she had only just gained a firm grip on the reins, Shithead immediately went off to gallop, sprinting off so fast Yannick's hair escaped her hat and it was trying to attack her eyes.

With the speed of this Mare, Yannick swore her soul couldn't catch up with her body and got left behind. Strong equine legs moving so fast across the night horizon in a .. strangely controlled manner. Did this horse know where it was going?

Yannick couldn't confirm anyway, her front hair was still trying to find real estate property within her eyelids, and focusing on not losing your hat and being blinded simultaneously is pretty hard.

Soon the galloping pace decreased to a rate where Yannick could control her wild hair, ripping off her hat to her chest and letting her short locks flow behind her and not in her face.

She immediately sees a blur of warm light in the distance, and sees a very sizable town she hasn't ever seen or drifted through before. A glimmer of hope.

(---)

When she means glimmer of hope, she means walking into a loud warm-lit bar and seeing cheap brandy immediately displayed. And who was she to reject not obliterating her liver?

She left, uh, shithead to a local stable that immediately took her in because the stable master was in awe of how majestic and beautiful and gorgeous her horse was and— ‘really hope the news of a stolen horse doesn't reach them.’,

“And what's the name of this absolute gem? Look at her! she adores apples!”

Yannick was never good at social situations, nor was she good at making shit up.

“Uh, Shi— Horse. Yeah. Horse loves apples alot.”

The stable master just looked at her strangely before moving on back to marvel at shithea— Horse? Then he insisted that he'd take care of her in the meantime for free because ohh what an honor to have such a beauty like her to end up in his care—

Alright enough kissing horse-ass. Yannick did not need or care to remember the awkward encounter fully and frankly she just wants to purge it from her memories with alcohol.

As she walks through the rows of shabby tables, She adjusts her hat so her eyes are caught underneath its shadow, a precaution to avoid any stares of drunken rowdy men whose attention she'll catch. She sets her eyes on the cracked brick floor until she reaches the counter.

There's nobody there yet, but she sees a gold bell near the side and presses it, She slides over the cool surface of the wooden barstool and settles her hat in her lap, untying her bandana and flattening her collar.

“Well, you're new here.” a soft but smooth voice says behind the varnished wood pub table.

Yannick makes eye contact.

It is instant regret as her face heats up so fast she feels like a walking bomb fuse.

A pretty lady staring right at her with blue piercing eyes hiding away behind ebony hair, locks frame her face perfectly and holyfuckingshit her plump lips are stained maroon and freckles pepper her dark skin generously.

Alright, calm the fuck down.

“Name, dear?”

Yannick steels her fluster, and refocuses on her main objective to abuse her liver, opening her mouth to answer and realizing ‘huh, revealing my identity would be pretty fucking stupid.’

“Ya—uh—Yani.”

good fucking job, if news ever arrives of a short-cut blonde lady with a hat who's named “Yannick”, she definitely won't notice. idiot.

“Charming name. What would you like?”

Yannick thinks this is the first and only time so far she's ever liked having her name asked for.

“..Brandy.”

The lady hums in response, Yannick glues her sight and tries tto trace the wood grain under the varnish, but she can't help but have her gaze wander,

The Lady grabs a bottle from underneath the pub, expertly grabbing a glass from a holder simultaneously. Moving with swift familiarity, she places the bottle down and grabs a cloth that was apparently on her and starts wiping the glass in fast motions, clearing away beads of water with one long swipe around its surface, her slender fingers move up to hold the glass carefully by the mouth to also, tediously wipe its short stem. Using two fingers controlling the cloth, the lady skillfully dips it into the inside of the glass and “FUCK.”

The barmaid stops what she was doing halfway, she looks concerningly at Yannick— whose forehead had kissed the pub table passionately— with a small upturn of lips and furrowed brows. “..Are you alright dear?”

“YES! I mean—yes, very alright don't worry.”

‘FUUUCK.’

Well, at least it was said silently this time, That was Yannick's fault, she observed and let herself wander,

Now her heart's racing and she's embarrassing herself in front of the pretty gal whose name she doesn't know. Already beet-red and hadn’t even drank the brandy yet.

She feels the barmaid's gaze linger unto her crown for a period of time and she's kinda glad she slammed her head into the countertop so she doesn't have to see that. After an extended amount of time, she can hear the barmaid resume in doing her job—which she got stupidly flustered about.— and Yannick drones out, focusing in the gruff laughter of men behind her and the drunken ranting of other people.

“Here's your drink, Yani.”

‘fuuuuck.’

the barmaid settles her glass in front of Yannick gently, it lands with a soft clink and Yannick holds it with a grip that has the intention of fully forgetting everything dumb she’s done for the rest of the night.

Yannick says thank you and pays— way more than the price the alcohol was up for and way more she'd usually spend. She's not sure if it's because the lady's so gorgeous it's making her tip this generously or if she's trying to compensate to her for being a fool.

“So, what has you visiting around here, Dear?”

Yannick doesn't want to admit, but she's been consciously counting how many times she's been called ‘dear’ in that sweet honey tone tonight. and she's been way more conscious than what's supposed to be not embarrassing.

“I'm just a drifter, miss.”

“You can call me Bonnie.”

“Bonnie?”

“Mhm.”

“It's a pretty name.”

“It sounds pretty good coming out of your mouth.”

Remember when Yannick was destroying her liver? Well, she's also destroying her lungs now too, who knew inhaling alcohol burns.

And also she's coughing vigorously.

“Oh dear, you poor thing, let me get you some tissues.”

Strike 4.

Bonnie moves swiftly as Yannick is busy expelling the insides of her lungs into her hands, how fun.

She takes the tissues when they are offered in front of her (with a very conscious effort to not grab Bonnie roughly; and also memorising the feeling when both of their hands slightly brush.)

Her lungs burn, her throat burns, And she forces her spluttering into a stop, Yannick really doesn't want to embarrass herself further at this point. and just mumbles a shy thanks, AGAIN.

Now, she doesn't want to assume—she’s never talked to a woman. Because there's really no time for that when you're a habitual crime-doer, But for her own sake she'll force herself to think that that exchange of words was completely normal between two women.

completely normal, between two women.

another soft clink.

“Oh, what's this for?” Yannick stares at the newly refilled glass of brandy.

Well, she did technically inhale her first drink instead of actually ingesting it like a normal person, but still.

“On the house, darling.”

‘FUUUUCK.’

similarly with her ‘dear’ talley, that's her 4th exasperated totally non-homosexual ‘fuck ‘from Bonnie today. Wait— Let's reword that.

That's her 4th completely homosexual absolutely gay fuck from Bonnie today.

much better.

There's a lot of things Yannick notices as she downs her 3nd glass.

Bonnie speaks like her tongue is covered in melted sugar, her voice is smooth like ivory and her eyes are narrowed like a hawk sifting below the landscape for prey. Perhaps, Yannick is just on the verge of being drunk and she gets weirdly poetic, or perhaps Bonnie is just, really, extremely, absolutely gorgeous.

When Bonnie talks to her about the history of this town, How she's explored every alley and backside, How she's familiar with the locals and the places little know about, it feels like Yannick's being spoiled with divine information; or was that just Bonnie's voice? She's not sure.

Another thing she's also noticed, is that she’s getting bolder the more she drinks. Her usual personality that doesn't mirror the reserved display Bonnie had seen earlier starts to really show when she nearly barks out clever retorts to Bonnie and is further encouraged when she hears the angelic song of Bonnie's laugh.

the melody is cut short when a group looms beside Yannick.

It's a group of men.

They posture like they demand Bonnie's attention, chuckles like gravel among eachother. Bonnie idly stands infront of them, the wooden countertop dividing beauty and asshole.

“5 glasses, the usual.” A Man with dark hair leans on the counter, there's smoke escaping his lips as he speaks, And his face is way too close to Bonnie's to be comfortable.

“I don't know your usual.”

Bonnie replies, deadpan.

The group howls like a pack of rabid wolves, they're laughing at the man, who was really trying to make it seem like he was impressionable.

“Nice jokin’, Missus. I've been here lots of times before, ya’ really can't remember what I usually ask for? I'll give you an extra dime if you get it right. But looking at that pretty face, I bet you get lot's of those already..”

brazen laughter rings above the bar’s loud ambience, Bonni’s expression remains cool as ice and monotone. Yannick has realized how hard her own hand is gripping the glass of little brandy left, It might shatter.

“Mister, It’s not that hard to say what you'd like.”

Bonnie says, flat.

“C’mon dollface, no need to get so mad. What gotten you so pricked? Before we arrived you were giggling to goldie over here.”

“her corsets probably too tight.” somebody behind the group blurted. The laughter is even louder this time— Yannick’s eyebrows hurt from how much tension is in them. Bonnie still looks unfazed.

“I know somebody who could loosen it for her.”

They all guffaw cockily this time, and Yannick decides; the glass WILL shatter.

dogfight.

She got kicked out and landed on her ass. Again.

theres a nick in her cheekbone she's sure will bruise, and she has alot of aching ribs. But that's not what's making her feel bad, it's the fact she embarrassed herself infront of the pretty lady again, to a much more severe extent.

She beat the shit out of all them, yes. But a one person fight versus five jacked men doesn't mean she comes out unscathed.

She forgot her bandana too, and she shattered the glass Bonnie gave her into some guys temple. Yay property damage.

Luckily, she has the hat and the sling. And before some guys dragged and threw her out, her hands managed to snag an alcohol beverage from a random table. Hasn't been opened either, Jackpot.

She's staring at the brand on the bottle, her bruised fingers wrapping around its neck, it's too dark to read.

After getting kicked out, Yannick did some loitering (writhing in pain) around the front of the bar, she never saw those douchebags get kicked out. Which means Bonnie probably had to serve them; or worse, deal with them bugging her about some man-looking gal beating the piss out of all of them and Bonnie apologizing for something she did

‘Yeah, I was never really good with people.’

Bonnie was nice, but Yannick would rather hide away into this town's crevices now; She really doesn't want to get into an altercation for walking around freely in public.

in a few hours, Morning will rise and she'll have to go and collect shithead to get resources.

#cowgals #white diamond #bellow diamond #blue diamond #yellow diamond #steven universe future #steven universe #su au

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