#just let me see the whole reblog chain with the post | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

Visit Blog

Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.

Fun Fact

The Tumblr office adopted Tommy, an 11-year-old Pomeranian.

#just let me see the whole reblog chain with the post

fullcustodyoftheautism · 11 months

Text

GIVE US BACK THE REBLOGS. I WISH TO SEE THEM. THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE WEBEDSITE

#reblogs #staff #leave it alone staff #stop trying to make Twitter #we already have Twitter and it fucking sucks #just let me see the whole reblog chain with the post

9 notes · View notes

thatonebabybat · 7 months

Text

Being Masc & Goth

This blog usually isn't fashion-focused, but I was thinking about alt fashion and how it's sometimes a struggle to figure out how to style things in a masc way if you're interested in darkalt fashion, but you don't want to go too casual or basic with it. So I thought I'd throw together some tips, link some DIYs, and maybe throw in a few moodboards. I want to preface this with one thing: You do NOT have to adhere to traditional gender roles. Fuck anyone who tells you that you do. If you're a guy and you want to get into alt fashion don't let anyone tell you that you can't pull off a skirt or a dress or a strappy top. Literally the whole point of being alt is Doing Whatever The Hell You Want Forever. However, not everyone feels comfortable in that (I made this post because I'm transmasc and sometimes the long gothic dresses make me dysphoric), and not everyone is safe to do that ( as much as it sucks ass, if you live in a conservative area sometimes it can be genuinely dangerous for guys to wear makeup and dresses in public, and your safety should always come first), so I thought I'd lay out some tips on how to dress alt and masc from my own experience. I'm still learning so feel free to leave your own advice in the replies or reblogs! General Styling Tips: - Jackets. Jackets, jackets, jackets. Something about a big jacket always seems to give an outfit a more masc energy, and adding a cool jacket to an outfit can be a great way to elevate it and add some extra visual interest. I like black blazers, leather jackets, and black denim jackets in particular, but vests (formal menswear ones or more casual denim or leather ones) can work well too, especially in hot weather. - Any basic black pair of jeans will look 100x more alt if you loosely attach some chains to the pockets or belt loops. Also, pants with wider legs tend to look more masc than tighter fits. not sure why. Slacks can also be a really good and underrated option. - If you want to find good headwear, cool sunglasses have never failed me. You may be able to take some inspiration from Ouji fashion as well, but that's just my personal taste. - If you have a basic piece around, you can add pins, patches, safety pins, etc for a more casual look, or if you're going for something more formal, trims and lace details and embroidery can really add interest and elegance to it. (if you can't sew, you can order iron-on embroidered patches online or find them in craft stores that'll do the trick just fine.) This can take your pair of slacks or plain black blazer and turn it into a piece of formal gothic menswear you can make a staple of your wardrobe. - Find inspiration in your favorite goth artists. There's a lot of really cool goth music out there and a lot of those bands get really innovative with their looks! Figure out what you like about their style and try incorporating a few things in, it's fun! - If you have an alt wardrobe already but it just seems like something's missing or it could use some interest, try switching up the silhouettes or adding an extra layer! Seriously, don't be scared of playing with textures and sleeve shapes! I see a lot of dudes who just wear a band tee and a pair of jeans all the time, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, that can be a great look! But I think a lot of dudes just genuinely think that that's their only option and that everything else just "wasn't made for them" and that makes me a little sad. shred up some shirts and layer them, wear some bell sleeves, throw some extra safety pins or studs on, have fun! No one said masc fashion couldn't be fun. Unisex/Masc DIY Videos I Found:

youtube

... And Some Inspiration!

[These are all goth music artists, I wrote the band/artist names in small text on the images that were not already watermarked for those who are curious]

1K notes · View notes

flwrkisses · 7 months

Text

boyfriend! jake.

just writing as inspo comes, all enha boys will get a bf headcannon post eventually— remember that likes, comments, and reblogs help me sm and tell me that you'd like to see more of my content!

genre: fluff. boyfriend au. established relationship.

warnings: slight mention of arguments. kissing & skinship.

❀˖° heeseung jay jake sunghoon sunoo jungwon ni-ki ..

- he's literally the dictionary's definition of "golden retriever boyfriend." you can look it up on google and he comes up fr.

- jake is so sweet and respectful when it comes to taking you out on your first dates and asking you to be his partner.

- he probably takes you on a casual date, somewhere you both feel comfortable like a picnic at the park, or riding bikes through the city, or maybe even an aquarium date.

- truly, he would wait a couple months into the relationship to admit how nervous he was first asking you out. and how he prepared himself for rejection.

- this man doesn't fall in love easily, however when he does finally realize he's in love he falls hard. he's so passionate about everything he's doing that it is only natural for him to be passionate about you.

- getting him away from you is hard, if you guys could be attached at the hip he would do it in a heartbeat he loves physical affection and is so extremely needy of your embrace. he's just so cutely clingy.

- he always remembers to text you "good morning" and "good night." and send you little cute texts throughout the day about how much he misses you.

- kinda like a real dog he would get pouty and whiny when denied your affection or feels like he's having withdrawals of your presence.

- he talks about you a lot, so much so that the enhypen members probably know more about you than you know about yourself.

- expect full princess treatment, he's opening every door for you, getting you things you show interest in, giving you his jacket regardless of his own needs and carrying you on his back if your shoes hurt your feet.

- you are so much to him, and regardless of the time that has past he's still so love sick and shocked that you happened to choose him out of all people to date.

- pda isnt too big of an issue with him, he likes holding your hand and maybe giving your cheeks or lips some quick pecks but he is mindful of other people as well. he knows not everyone likes to see a couple making out in public.

- his love language is definitely acts of service and quality time. he would do anything for you without question.

- with the enha boys, he takes the teases they throw at him because in his head he scored and they're just jealous.

- he obviously makes layla sniff test you, you passed it... obviously. and now he calls you her mom.

- if you didn't already know, he's extremely possessive and gets jealous easily. so, he will scream if someone comes too close to you.

- this man will pout if he hasn't heard from you all day. the second you call he's all smiles after annoying his members all day with his love sick whines.

- he thinks about you a lot, so he randomly shows up at your place with gifts and excuses the gifts as "this reminded me of you." or "this kinda looks like you."

- one thing he secretly likes is matching items, like phone cases, jewelry, or shoes. nothing too cheesy though, probably would get you something small like matching key chains or airpod cases.

- it's evident that he's a little clueless and gullible sometimes, so he believes everything you say 100%. you could probably prank him into thinking he's been showering wrong his whole life. he would literally go with it.

- unfortunately, as brave and tough as he wants to be for the love of his life (you) he's a little bit of a scardy cat so- expect to be the one protecting him from the dark, scary movies and bugs.

- he would die to take you camping and beg you every summer to let him take you out to camp until you finally agree and he gets so happy. he's finally able to show off his tent building and fishing skills.

- sometimes he might pull you into hiking dates, to explore the green landscapes and mountains. or have you ride ATV's or 4 wheelers with him for the thrill of it.

- although his life is extremely fast paced, he is so extremely patient with you. regardless of the situation he's never going to rush you or push you to make a decision.

- he makes playlist for you all the time, some of them with songs that make him think about you and others with songs he feels you might like. he takes pride in making and naming them. he hopes you listen to them all the time.

- fights are extremely rare with jake considering in his eyes you can hardly ever do wrong. he's a talker and would definitely want to talk out anything that might bother him.

- if you ever need him, regardless of the reason he would drop everything he's doing to be at your side. especially if you're out with friends and need a safe sober person to drive you home. he's the first one there for you.

- expect him to send you tiktoks of animals being cute and a text following it saying "babe this is literally us."

- saying "i love you" came naturally to him. he definitely said it first because he probably let it slip out without thinking. he probably doesnt even notice he said it until you point it out.

- "okay bye babe, i'll see you tonight. love you!— what's wrong why are you freaking out? was it something i said?... I SAID WHAT? no i didnt! ... did i? maybe i did... oh my god! damnit! i didnt want the first time to be that way!"

- he's so dramatic, he would literally pretend to pass out or die if you refuse a kiss.

- his one flaw... he's a little messy so you might have to clean up after him. however... he notices how you like to keep things and would actively work towards putting things where they go instead of just throwing things around.

- he also sometimes helps make meals with you. he's genuinely interested in cooking and thinks cooking together is a good way to spend time together. he makes the rice perfectly every time.

- of you go on his phone his photo gallery is filled with just pictures of you, and selfies you've taken of both of you together. pictures of you guys cuddling, kissing, making funny faces. it's all in there.

- probably has your contact name in his phone as "loml💗".

- he's genuinely convinced you guys will get married one day and have kids, and live in a nice house with a big yard and a dog.

- in his notes app he has saved a list of places you like eating at and your usual order for the place and randomly surpise you with food. even if he's on tour he'd order food to be delivered to you while in a different time zone.

- sometimes he worries about you eating or if you're drinking enough water. so he asks you all the time if you ate or if you've been sleeping well.

- he wears the things you get him all the time, it's so normal to him. and when he looks in the mirror and realizes he's wearing a necklace you got him he feels like he's carrying your love with him.

- jake really is just a love sick puppy boy who would drop anything and everything for you. he's so unbelievably in love it's so sweet.

hope you all enjoy! - happy to be writing again <3 !

masterlist. — requests are open!

- pls note that i have not yet made a masterlist for my enha writing. (i'm sorry engenes, it's coming soon!)

©flwrkisses ; please do not copy, translate, repost and/or reuse my work without my permission.

857 notes · View notes

darkficsyouneveraskedfor · 8 months

Text

Leader of the Landslide 1

Warnings: this fic will include dark content such as dubcon/noncon, alcoholism, and other possible triggers. My warnings are not exhaustive, enter at your own risk.

This is a dark!fic and explicit. 18+ only. Your media consumption is your own responsibility. Warnings have been given. DO NOT PROCEED if these matters upset you.

Summary: Life with your alcoholic mother is tough and you problems only mount when the local sheriff takes an interest in you.

Character: Lee Bodecker

Note: I'm so tireddddddddd.

As per usual, I humbly request your thoughts! Reblogs are always appreciated and welcomed, not only do I see them easier but it lets other people see my work. I will do my best to answer all I can. I’m trying to get better at keeping up so thanks everyone for staying with me <3

Your feedback will help in this and future works (and WiPs, I haven’t forgotten those!)

Love you all. Take care. 💖

The mobile home creaks with your movement. The tight walls of your room watch you dig around under your bed frame, retrieving the empty tea tin from under the slats. You pop off the lid as you sit back on your heels and slip out the small roll of bills. You keep cotton balls in the bottom to keep the coins from jingling, not wanting any listening ears to suss out your stash.

You take what you need and put the rest back. You snake your arm up to replace the canister in your hiding spot. You stand and dusty off your knees, the worn denim fading and thinning. You tuck the bills in your back pocket and grab your flannel jacket from the bed post.

You look around the cramped space, a modest and meagre dwelling place. You don't think too much about it, you’ve never known any better. Just like the big spenders in their shiny cadillacs don't give you much thought. You find that money can only bring trouble.

You go out into the living room. Your ma's sprawled on the couch, one leg over the edge, yesterday's newspaper over her head, and an arm dangling like there's no drop of life left in her. You go to the slender counter set under the narrow cupboards and put the kettle on the single burner. You pop open the cupboard door and grab the instant coffee, adding a healthy dose to an empty mug.

"Ma," you say in a crusty tone, throat dry from sleep, "coffee."

"Eh," she mutters but doesn't unveil herself from beneath the newsprint.

"I'm gonna grab some groceries on the way home tonight," you explain as you cross your arms and lean against the wall across from the short couch where she languishes, "why didn't you take out the bed?"

She grumbles and the newspaper slips off of her as she props her head up. She wobbles as she squints across at the dinette that converts to a cozy double. She shakes her head and lays flat again. You don't fail to notice the empty bottle beside her.

"Alright, then, I gotta head down to Ernie's. I'll make dinner tonight," you suggest.

She waves you off and pulls the newspaper closer to her face, hiding behind it.

"Think ya can grab more whiskey?" She croaks from beneath.

"You got whiskey money?" You challenge with a sigh, "ma, it ain't good for ya."

"Don't tell me what's good for me. I raised ya," she barks as she rips the newspaper away and sits up, nearly keeling over as she winces with her whole body, "urgh, what're you rilin' me up for?"

"Water's boiling," you say as you check your watch, the one with the silver chain your granny gave you before she passed. "If you gotta puke, do it outside."

"Aw, baby, please," she shakes and touches her temples, "don't leave me. I can't do it alone--"

"Ma, you just gotta pour the water and stir. It's that instant stuff."

She harrumphs but doesn't argue as you're already at the door. You pull open the door and let it close heavily at your back as you tramp down the front steps. You button up your wool-lined flannel as you come down to ground level, your boots kicking up dust.

You head up between the rows of mobile homes. Most of them are nicer than your own. The paint on the siding isn't all chipped and the doors don't creak so loud. Plus, there isn't a mess of dead plants rotting away in the garden plot.

As you head past Theo's picnic table with the bright red umbrella, the nose of a car pokes around from the next row. You stop and watch the cruiser roll by, a sheriff's star emblazoned on the brown paint. It's not that unusual to see a cop hanging around, they like to rove the area for vagrants.

The man in the front seat turns his head as he passes, meeting your eye with a nod. You don't know him, you've never seen him before, but his hat makes him seem rather fancy. He must be high up. You don't know why he's hanging around there if he is.

You wait until he's past you and cross the row and head up towards the entrance of the community. The place is an assortment of wealthy city slickers vacationing, comfy middle classers with their tots, and the dregs like yourself and your mother, living on pennies and nickels.

Work isn't far. You sit at the desk in Ernie's shop and tell the folks where to park their beaters and lemons. The men talk loudly over engines as you throw Rufus' bone and watch him bring it back to you. The place is quaint and a bit shady, but the only job that would have you.

You walk in and greet the old bloodhound as he raises his wrinkly face. He gets up, he rarely does that for anyone else, and follows you to the wooden desk where you perch and drink the burnt coffee they have on the burner. He lays at the foot of your stool as you say hello to the first mechanic through the door. Glenn doesn't seem to hear or see you as he pulls down his cap and ducks into the garage.

The smell of autumn creeps in from the open door of the garage, blowing into your little nook. A lady with tattered tights shows up with a rattling pipe and you call in Jethro to have a look. She gives him a look, the type that may get her a lower price on the second-hand part.

You pull out the book you keep lodged underneath the desk with the cup of pencils and receipt pad. You open it, the broken spine laying flat as you read and pet the lazy dog's snout as he leans his large head on your leg.

The day wiles by as usual. Not abnormal, nothing out of order. The mechanics hang up their overalls and leave oil stained rags in the crate. You take those down to the laundromat on Wednesdays.

Ernie locks up as you leave, offering you a drive to the grocer that you gratefully accept. There, you walk the aisles with your list, choosing between one staple and another to fit your budget. A bag of rice will go further than potatoes.

You leave with a paper bag full of goods. A good amount to stretch until your next pay. You take your usual path back, cutting through the path behind Alfred Horsk's stables.

You enter the park. A man rakes his front lawn despite the leaf fall being sparse. Nellie, the old woman who complains about your torn jeans, sends a glare as you pass, and you shoulder her out of your mind as you turn down the far row.

Your mother's dented mobile home beckons you forth. You have no illusions, you know what people think, you know what they've seen. Your mother is hardly the paragon of virtue. And your father, while you don't know who he is, you're certain he's a deadbeat.

You slow as you approach. A white and brown cruiser is parked at an angle, just in the space between your mother's trailer and the next. The siren on top is dulled but shiny. The car is well-kept. Shoot, you're not prepared to talk your mother out of another fine.

The scene is even stranger as there are no officers to go with the vehicle. There's usually at least one keeping watch or listening to the scanner. Just as peculiar, the trailer is shut up and there's not hollering coming from inside. Typically, the door's wide open for you to stumble in upon your mother's latest turmoil.

You balance the paper bag in one arm as you climb the low steps to the door and twist back the handle. The door opens easy and you step into a low dim, curtains drawn and lights all out. There's still light in the sky but it doesn't touch the place.

Your mother's cackle jars you and the deep rumble in response puts you on edge. You let the grim dim of the autumn in behind you as you feel around for the light knob. You turn it and light up the glass shade over the dinette.

You nearly drop your armful as you find your mother on the bench, giggling as a uniformed man pours whiskey past her lips, the dark brown neck of the bottle glugging loudly. You recoil and stammer. It's not the first time you've stumbled on your mother with a man, usually she leaves a scarf on the door to prevent that. You're only thankful they are fully clothed.

"Sorry," you back up and spin out the door, snapping it shut behind you.

You hop down to the gravel and sit on the bottom step. You put the groceries beside you and roll your shoulders, trying to escape that grimy feeling. Really, a cop? Well, that might keep her out of trouble. Or at least, make the law look in the other direction.

You try not to think about it but your eyes are drawn over to the round headlight of the cruiser. You frown. It can't be the same officer as earlier. You rub your cheek and think. You can't tell, he was missing that wide-brimmed hat.

You tear your attention from the nose of the car and watch some kids run by in a game of tag. You begrudge your empty stomach and heavy head. All day you only wanted to be home so you could get the groceries away and turn in. Nothing ever goes to plan with your ma.

You place your chin in your hand and blow a raspberry. What kind of lawman feeds liquor to a woman like that? It's plain to see that your ma has a problem. It's slimy, really. Barely preferable to him booking her. There's something nasty about him holding that bottle, laughing at her desperation to sate her bottomless thirst.

Their voices come clearer through the thin wall of the trailer. You get up and take the groceries, hiding them around the back. Hopefully no one stumbles on them. You go back around and set off down the gravel. He should be gone by the time you get back.

The kids run by you, puffing and panting in their game. You watch them, mourning the days when life was as simple as that. For you, the carefree era of your childhood didn’t last long. If it ever was.

You hear a parent holler and one of the children disperses. The others disappear around the next row as they continue on in their back and forth. You cross your arms as the evening chill nips at your flannel. You loop around, making a full lap of the outer path of the park.

You come back in sight of your mother’s trailer. The door is open as the officer sits on your former perch, sucking on a cigarette. You think of turning back. You’re tired and the sky is getting dim. You just want to eat and go to bed.

As you approach, he looks up and blows out a cloud of smoke. You cross your arms as he bows and gives a half-salute with two fingers. He looks up at you as he flicks ash from the cigarette.

“Must be junior,” he stands with a grunt, “sorry to chase ya out like that.”

You shrug, “officer.”

He smirks, “I’m off-duty.”

You nod and look away. There’s something about him, something slimy. Maybe it’s the way his stomach hangs over his pants or how he lets the bolo tie hang loose down his chest, his top buttons still undone.

“Gotta grab the, er, groceries,” you excuse yourself.

You sweep around the trailer and retrieve your haul, thankfully undiscovered. As you come back to the front, the officer remains, crushing the cigarette beneath his boot. You go to the steps and he stops you, stretching his arm in front of you.

“What’s yer name, girl?”

You shake your head, “does it matter?”

“Ma’s a nice lady, ain’t she? I’m only curious…” he says, “if I’m gonna be comin’ around.”

You hug the paper bag and bite down. You don’t want to tell him. If he’s anything like the other men, he won’t be back.

Your mother calls your name as he she clatters against the door from the inside. She manages to tear it open as you cringe. She’s in her underwear and a tank top barely clinging to her shoulders. You unthinkingly bull past the cop and rush up the stairs.

“Ma, it’s too cold out,” you usher her inside, “Christ.”

“Hey, you watch your mouth,” she sneers.

“I just don’t want you to get sick,” you say as you put the bag down. You turn to close the door but it swings inward from the other side. It’s him, officer slime.

“So, Molly,” he leers at your mother, “this your girl, then?”

“Yeah, that’s her,” your mother grumbles and falls against the couch, nearly missing as the man catches her and sets her right.

You exhale through your nose. She wouldn’t be like that if he didn’t bring her liquor. You grab the mostly empty bottle from the table and go to the sink. You hover it over the drain as you mouth shrieks like a hurt cat.

“Don’t you be wastin’ that!” She howls.

“Ma, look at you–”

“Now, now,” the man comes close and reaches to put his hand around yours, “I paid for that.”

“Great,” you turn to him, “you can take it with you.”

“With me?”

“Have a good night, officer,” you let him have the bottle, “I gotta make dinner.”

“Don’t be rude,” your mother slurs, “he stayin’.”

“Staying?” you sneer as you eye the man warily.

“Now I raised you right, we don’t send a good man off with an empty belly,” she snickers and reaches for his hand, tugging him towards her, “we make sure he’s nice and full.”

“Ma–” you begin.

“You ain’t even introduced us, Moll,” the man kisses her knuckles before wiggling free of her grasp. He hands her the whiskey. “Sheriff Bodecker,” he grins at you, “Lee when I’m off the beat.”

You look at him, then your mother. She gulps down the whiskey sloppily. You turn back to the counter and hide your chagrin.

“Hope you like beans,” you utter in defeat.

“I ain’t picky,” he drawls as he leans on the table, watching you.

You peek over your shoulder. Your mother is barely conscious as she leans back, letting the bottle rest on the empty space beside her on the couch. The quicker she passes out, the sooner this man can leave.

#lee bodecker #dark lee bodecker #dark!lee bodecker #lee bodecker x reader #fic #dark fic #dark!fic #leader of the landslide #series #the devil all the time

370 notes · View notes

jojo-oliver · 8 months

Text

my terf+transphobe blocklist

Every terf I've found. For your blocking pleasure! Under the cut

Oh fuck there's a terf in my notes! What can I do? 1. Flag on shinigami eyes browser extension. You've probably heard of this, but it's free, available on desktop. Also available on firefox mobile I think. Has been used to improperly flag people before. Trust but verify. 2. Look through "Blogs like this one" to break the reblog chains and effectively block a whole circle of them. You could also just look through who they're reblogging from. 3. Have a quick scroll for any posts that are reportable. This takes a lot more time than the other steps, but if enough people report them, and if you're reporting something that breaks tumblr's guidelines, then their account could get taken down. Win. 4. Lastly, block. OR Block first and save yourself the psychic damage. If you're on mobile, you could block first and go back later on desktop, finding them in your blocked tumblrs list, to do the rest. Do not interact! Do not send anons! Don't even give them that. Just flag, report, block, move on. Movements don't go anywhere in silence.

Please know that there aren't actually that many of them. I've noticed from going through so many, and from how they interact in my notes... I don't want to say too much because I'm starting to feel like someone's going to read this eventually. But it can be pretty clear that they have multiple accounts. Some of them are making this their full-time jobs. Just sitting on the computer and finding trans people to bully. It's pathetic and sad. If you block all of them, they just... stop existing. Because it's a small group of people. But they do make new accounts once too many people have blocked them, every... 3-9 months? Or, I imagine, once they start to notice that the site feels empty to them and they've been blocked by too many people? It's easy to block enough of them, but I do recommend setting aside some time to do this. I also recommend taking care of your mental health afterwards. When I encounter a block list from someone else, I always check out the blog before blocking, because tools like these can be used against us as well. Shinigami eyes has been used to incorrectly mark trans people before. Trust but verify. No tool is perfect. So I'm assuming you're going to check some of these blogs out too, because that's what I would do. Set some time aside to take care of yourself afterwards please. Love you.

How to put these in your blocklist quickly

The way I do it uses desktop and your phone at the same time. Or 2 tabs on desktop. The second part is to reference the usernames or look them up. Click on your own profile picture icon and on the right hand side of the screen should be this:

Click on "blog settings" at the bottom. You'll be brought to a new screen, where you'll scroll all the way to the bottom, and see this:

Click on the writing thing there and then you'll finally see your block list:

I'll find this post and reblog with more of them whenever I find them. I've never made a block list before, if I could do something better let me know <;3 If someone's changed their username DM me and I'll edit it Accurate as of 2023-10-04 ----------------------------------- -Row 1- prettyrad-ical thefemalejoker42069 sirona-ryan hard--headed--woman modernamericanbreakfast meowfem uter-us mala-santa-radfem nightdepthss radfemtiktok radfem-rage glitter-soda cordycepsfem burningtheroots meanevilandcruel floradfem radsplain terf-hands gougarfem freckled-radfem radrevoltz a-toast-to-womanhood radmista -Row 2- gentlyriseandfall acidbathcat chubbyraccoonman julzlex28 kweerphobique female-prince antiyourwokehomophobia2 quinntheestallion antiporn-activist blueipa angela-anaconda-was-a-lesbian ellaacadia opabiniawillreturn coochiequeens raccoonjesus redheddebeauty nonenosome2 gendiebrainrotreceipts cornedbeef101 kaleiddie bolshefem -Row 3- irresponsiblebirdowner 1-888-narcolepsy terfytingz strozzaprete raidenfem capricorn-season cloud-enigma-blog rad-fem-r-us butch-reidentified terf-tea antigender1 the-rad-menace paperlunamoth femailment patronsaintofvulvas goyangii femmessias2 chadradfem filianongrata -Row 4- i-eat-boiled-eggs-for-breakfast conmigonoeh daughterf radishpanda adult-human-gc-female nansheonearth ilistened2transwomen magnetictapedatastorage demonlizard noncompliantbi transmisogynyiscool goblinous radbutches radicalfembabey frankenawus femmesandhoney lavendertruffles etesienne lavendeerlesbian latina-and-rad punishthegods -Row 5- shes-unforgettable blackswallowtailbutterfly iceyrukia womantichrist faxroux femgoddess-hecate radicalitch radicalblunt chocobbunnii finnishrogue cheesyradfem the-land-of-women transwomenarestillmen catsthemewsical butchlesbianz sowhatnotcreative womens-suffrage-revival-squad -Row 6- back-not-broken friendlymathematician vulva-lacking-losers lilleisak misandristdiarist lookupmedicalmisogyny irisintel womenshallrise creatorisawoman mint-fem large-gamete-maker wordsfromthewick feministfairy libertarian-princess rad-claid-plaid cisthoughtcrime powerfem feral-radfem -Row 7- lizaganderson gynoids-over-androids localbisaster tubularfem there-are-4-lights realisticflyinglesbian femjerma earwigeater destroyerofgender scumbhag clytemnestra-was-right kronkk eternal-echoes kafkaesqueneet xrgl maleswillbemale aspiringfalseidol old-school-butch radafayscage -Row 8- makeyourownopinion gcdk ex-schizo zombierightsadvocate buildingmode2fromthesims1 sofuma feministclassicist radfemlands scumlafeccia son-of-hemera terra-feminarum natures-imperfection atmospherings belastrenchcoat sublimeobjectperson wawaenjoyer feministhetic sparklypinktutu1 -Row 9- kittens2000 spacemonkeyg78 princessterf hidetothink nobleelfwarrior ancientdriftwood 10reallybigants radfemsilv elfyprincess meetmebythe1ake genderatheist religion-is-a-mental-illness s34b4ss kurwaii zlatan-dreams radradmarivy impawsterette if-you-see-gay-me lethalyellowallele dyke-chytilova molagrunda gruncheon victoriassecretagent

-Yippee you made it to the bottom! Check to see if I've added more since, if you'd like. Practice some self care. Love you.-

#transphobia #transphobia cw #pinned #talky tag

173 notes · View notes

casualartisanninja · 2 months

Text

This was a long time coming.

So, first of all I’m sorry that this took me so long to make, but there was a lot of information to sift through. I’m not planning on coming back to Tumblr in any capacity beyond this but the truth needs to be out there. (And if you're curious about the profile picture/description/etc, I had to dress this blog up a bit so it didn't look like a bot and trigger any algorithms.)

Content warnings for this post:

Heavily discusses kinks and has screenshots of fetish art

References grooming/pedophilia accusations

References transphobia/harassment accusations

This is going to be an EXTREMELY long post with lots of screenshots, so the rest is under a cut.

Edit: Here is the end of the post so you can read it all at once. https://www.tumblr.com/casualartisanninja/747977941832613888/loose-ends

The incident in Hobqueer’s server

I think a good place to start would be the spark that set off this whole chain reaction.

I’m not sure how long I’d been in that server for when the NSFW in general incident happened. But one thing’s for sure - I didn’t start the conversation about NSFW topics. Like I mentioned on the Reddit post where someone had found me and started accusing me under my comment on the Janitor.AI post, I saw the people there discussing mpreg and oviposition. I looked at it and thought “wow the rules are a lot more lax than I initially thought!”. Yes, I know, looking back, that should’ve been a huge red flag. I also know that, looking back, I should never talk about NSFW in the general chat- even if everyone else is doing it. “If so-and-so jumped off a cliff” and all. I’m really sorry that I did that, and it was definitely a lesson for me. But I really wasn’t thinking about that at the time. It wasn’t my intention to hurt anyone, and I especially wouldn’t have done it if I knew minors would be there. I know it wasn’t an 18+ server, and it was just a frankly idiotic move on my part. I just saw “Sniper pregnant” and pictures of the mercs with big bellies, and let my better judgment and reasoning get clouded. However, the way that they’re portraying this incident is extremely intellectually dishonest. Gabriel failed to mention in his callout post that those minors were looking at and sharing fetish art of the mercs, leaving out most of the context for those. Thankfully one of my friends from Chipspeech (who I’ll leave anonymous) joined the server to check and see if the fetish art was still there. It was. Hobqueer and the moderators never deleted any of the discussion, and worst of all they left the fetish pictures up in full view of everybody. One person, who later admitted to being a minor in a dm, even gave a pretty graphic description of a tentacle hentai/mpreg comic. Be warned, this contains NSFW content. I blurred the names of anybody who isn't mentioned in this post.

I've run out of room for images, so I have to add the rest in another reblog. This will be a very long thread with a lot of images, so please bear with me.

#mavisposting #xxcherenkov-gremlinxx #allegations #accusations #explanation #debunking #tf2 fandom #chipspeech fandom

55 notes · View notes

rangercorpstherapy · 3 months

Note

To the latest fandom take:

I strongly disagree with the take "new posts are cringe and low effort". Brother (gender neutral), trust me, you shaming them is so embarrassing. Let people enjoy what they want to enjoy. You're not held down by chains with your eyes forcefully open to look at those posts. Just scroll past or block accounts you don't like. Instead of being joyful about new people joining in, you chose to be bitter about what they post. We were all at that age. Stop picking on younger teens. Hell, it isn't about age. Every post, as long as it is not harmful, is valid and as long as its author enjoys it and enjoys sharing, don't stomp on it. That way, we'll get less and less posts. So what that people keep posting headcanons or essays that are "obvious" or were here before? Those people weren't here before. Let them DISCOVER the wonderful RA world for themselves and share that excitement. And if those posts don't satisfy? WRITE YOUR OWN. Thank you, cheff.

However, what I want to draw attention to (now speaking to everyone), is the remark about fanartists. I know some that left or stopped actively creating for the reason that they felt not appreciated. It goes deeper than that. In the world built on capitalism and consumerism, amateur artists (who are also human beings who seek assurance and positive encouraging feedback) and who come to fandom to share their free artwork for fun and for interaction that gives them motivation to go on, are not some machines that come automatically giving content. Consuming their art and using it without even interacting, especially in this small fandom, can feel draining and this is not what the fanartists came here to do. If you look at it through their eyes, would you continue to do art if you felt it hasn't found its audience or if the audience felt passive about it? You do not have to like some art work. I get it, we all have our own taste. But if you do not support artists, especially beginning ones, it's really easy to lose the motivation. And you're robbing yourself. Imagine some artist who would have become great and eventually posted the art you like, is not sharing their art because they didn't feel motivated.

In conclusion. OP of the prev fandom take, I definitely do not agree with your opinion on ra tag and posts. I also don't like the tone in which you wrote your whole ask. But, everyone, I do believe there's a tiny thing that's worth giving a thought in the part about fanart.

All I see lately is people complaining there aren't good posts or that fandom is dying. Babes, if you're not gonna interact with things, either posts or art or fics or whatever, of course the activity is gonna die down. But also I do think that on the other hand, people who say stuff like "we don't have content anymore are the ones who purposefully ignore posts of the newer blogs just because it isn't entirely their taste and then say this fandom is desolated wasteland about to be hit by dinosaur killing meteorite. Valid, you don't have to reblog stuff that you don't want to. But then stop complaining about that fact there isn't stuff and either shut up and move on or contribute yourself.

Pessimism and toxicity isn't what this fandom needs and to be real I am tired of these fandom takes that what is actually bringing this fandom down. Complaints and call outs to toxic and harmful behaviour is valid and shouldn't be suppressed and please, everyone don't ever be afraid to do that. But these shaming takes and asks, is like chasing and biting your own tail and then complaining it hurts. I'd really appreciate it if some of you could refrain from shaming people who harmlessly enjoy stuff. Bye.

#rangercorpstherapy #rangers apprentice #ranger's apprentice

33 notes · View notes

headspacedad · 8 months

Text

so you're ready to socialize

You've got your blog set up. You've posted or reblogged something. Your icon isn't a faceless orange shape. You're no longer in danger of being blocked on sight as a bot.

Now what?

I recently got an ask in my inbox for help with this whole 'tumblr' thing. The person that asked me had a lot of the basics down so I focused on expanding your social circle - except it took me so long to write that I saved it in my drafts to add to and only then found out that once its in your drafts you can't reply privately.

so - Imma post it here without the actual ask so if the person didn't want to be mentioned they won't. Let's go!

First off, doing what you're doing right now by sending me an ask is a great way to get the ball rolling. Reaching out to other people and engaging them is a big part of how you can build a circle on tumblr.

You can do that with inbox messages.

You can do that with DM/PMs (the box that pops up to the side where you can have real time text conversations).

You can do that by reblogging other people's posts and leaving notes in the tags commenting about the post (most posters read these, though they're more for your followers to get your thoughts on a matter, like whispering in a movie theater except without the dirty looks)

reblog their post and add your own comments in the body of the post, basically chaining a response to their post, usually used when you've got something that adds to the original post like a continuation of the joke or more facts, etc.

and you can comment on the posts via the little speech bubble next to the reblog button, which is kind of like replying personally to the post (interacting with the poster themselves).

Not everyone will automatically engage in response. Some people are just here to chill and don't want to be social (some days I know I don't have the brainpower for it). A lot of people do want to be social though and so the more you comment outward the higher your chances of finding other people you can jive with. A good way to make your chances better at finding someone that will back and forth with you is over shared interests. We're a very interest based site. So find something you're excited about - maybe its a hobby like knitting, maybe its a streaming series like Good Omens, maybe its hamsters, maybe its Elizabethan neck ruffs! Whatever it is that you're interested in punch the words that will get those kinds of results into tumblr's search bar and look at the posts that come up. I tend to search by 'newest' instead of 'most popular' because it guarantees me people that are currently interested in whatever I am, who are actively putting their posts out there for others to find. Often if you start reblogging someone's posts, they'll see it and check out your blog. If you really want interaction though, the best way to go is one of the above bullet points, especially inbox or speech bubble commenting. It shows you want to talk about something they want to talk about too. A lot of times this is a great way to get more interaction with others and widen your circle (as well as find new stuff about something you enjoy). It might be slow going, I still haven't figured out what the magic is that gets someone a blow up of followers overnight, especially not the all important holy grail of Interactive followers but slow and steady still builds a good group of people you can enjoy sharing things everyone's interested in and it keeps growing over time.

This also works in reverse. A good chunk of my followers (friends honestly) come from my days in the Voltron fandom. I was VERY active making posts while the show was airing. Lots of fanfiction, lots of meta, lots of speculation, just lots of being loud and excited (and then loud and not excited). A lot of other people were interested in VLD too at the time and they found me and bounced off my ideas with ideas of their own and things really ballooned. To this day, a huge hard core of my social group are ex-VLD fans who have moved on to other things (mostly) but still hang around because we built that core and we enjoy seeing what the others in the group have moved onto and found to share with the team. So, again, find your interests and make posts about them so that other people with the same interests can find you. The more popular something is the more attention its going to get - but also the easier it is to get lost in the shuffle of everyone talking about a thing. Not every post is going to get responses. Sometimes I'll post something I think people will enjoy and get crickets. Sometimes everyone and their cousin jumps onboard. Don't get discouraged. DO use the tags. tumblr sucks when it comes to finding things in the tags but its still worth doing because sometimes, randomly and with no pattern, it doesn't suck. The first five tags are the really important ones. Make sure you put the biggest details there. For instance if you're making a post about the One Piece live action from Netflix your first five tags should be something like: one piece, opla, netflix, zoro, swords are cool. You want people looking for One Piece posts about Zoro and his swords to be able to find you easily. And, once they find you, hopefully to engage you about Zoro and his swords.

There are a lot of ways to find other people to interact with on tumblr. One of the pleasures of the site is you get to take things, for the most part, at your own pace and level of comfort. Just remember, the more active you are interacting with other people and their posts, the wider your circle will grow. Its not a 100% success rate, like I said, a lot of people are just here to vibe after a long day of having to be socially 'on' all day, but a lot of people are happy to find other people to get to natter about interests with. Do what you're comfortable with and before you know it, you'll have a group of people that interact with your posts, and you, regularly!

#tumblr #how to tumblr #getting started #lets get socializing!#answering asks #let's tumblr #finding friends #okay to reblog #feel free to add tips #and any help #or things that worked for you

66 notes · View notes

witchthewriter · 3 months

Text

𝐀𝐒𝐎𝐈𝐀𝐅 𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐞

From the lovely @agameofclothes. I thought I'd give it a crack - if anyone wants to reblog with their answers or make a separate post is all good! I would love to see your answers!

𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦?

I have no idea, honestly. Probably wouldn't be from one of the big Houses :'). Let's just say that I'm one of the main characters ... so I'd want to be from House Targaryen, a long lost cousin.

𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟓 𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 (𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐛, 𝐑𝐞𝐧𝐥𝐲, 𝐉𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐲, 𝐁𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧, 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐬) 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐟𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫?

... None. They're terrible for the role as leader. They're all ... old mean men. Except for Renly and Joffrey. Renly is young and quite hopeful but has no ambition. Joffrey is young and awful.

However, if I were asked who I was loyal to - I would just say whoever, depends on where I am.

𝐅𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫?

Cannot and will not choose just one. I love Sansa Stark so much. Her character development is absolutely admirable. From being a close-minded, manipulated young girl, to an adult who knows how the world works. It's amazing.

Dany Targaryen is the main character in both the books and tv series for me. She's the most interesting. From practically being a slave herself, she turned herself into a loved Khaleesi, and worked her way up from there.

𝐅𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤?

A Dance with Dragons. Characters have already been fleshed out, and now it's very plot driven.

𝐅𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐒𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬?

Okay so I found this here. Looking it up, somewhere it says it's semi-canon. But I believe it's real and I fcken love it.

House Plumm - Come Try Me

𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡, 𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰 𝐒𝐞𝐚?

Well, with the South being Beyond the Wall and the North being cold as fck. I choose across the Narrow Sea.

𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐫𝐨𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐝?

Dany deserves it and I genuinely think she should sit on the Irone Throne. Not because her ancestors created the title and united the lands, but because she has known pain, she wants people to be free -not to be slaves. She wants to liberate.

𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐠𝐠𝐲𝐝𝐨𝐠, 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐲 𝐖𝐢𝐧𝐝, 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫, 𝐋𝐚𝐝𝐲, 𝐍𝐲𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚 𝐨𝐫 𝐆𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐭?

GHOST! He is the MOST loyal?

𝐖𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐣𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐖𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡?

Abso-fucking-lutely not. It's full of awful men???

𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫?

Like the other question; I couldn't pick one favourite character, so I definitely can't choose just one I dislike. And so this will be in bullet form:

Obviously Ramsay, what an awful dickhead.

Joffrey, the little shit.

In the book, Euron Greyjoy is a big big bad. Very scary. Cruel. Not like in the show where he's kind of funny and amusing. No, Euron in the books is a villain villain.

The Mountain? Disgusting.

Walder Grey and all those who participated in the awful act of the Red Wedding. Terrible.

𝐊𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐞𝐬𝐢 𝐨𝐫 𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐞𝐧?

Both... but her true name is: Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains.

If it means for me, than I would rather be a Queen than a Khaleesi. I want a pretty crown and to have influence over the whole realm ... (I'm very humble...)

𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐫 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐰𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐬?

...dragons. I think that's pretty obvious... Imagine being a descendant of Old Valyria and being able to BOND with a DRAGON. A freaking DRAGON. A beast that would have your back no matter what???

𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐠𝐨𝐝(𝐬) 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐨?

The Old Gods of the Forest.

To me, a witch, this religion relies on believing in the world around you.

An excerpt from the GOT wiki page: "nameless spirits of each tree, rock, and stream worshipped by the Children of the Forest and later by the First Men."

It seems the most pagan-like, and I would be very comfortable with following this religion.

22 notes · View notes

claireunoia · 2 years

Text

EARLY GAMES ₊˚ ━☆* EDDIE MUNSON 𓍯

➹ synopsis ༄ you and eddie couldn’t help but to start the morning with some cute playfulness ♡.

➹ pairings ༄ eddie x fem!reader

➹ warnings ༄ FLUFF, just extreme fluff and cuteness, cursing, mentions of sex, that’s about it

╰► letter from author┊hi angels! this whole little piece is inspired by this scene from the movie “make up” with joseph quinn. it was so cute and i just couldn’t help but to write about it. REBLOGS AND COMMENTS ARE SO APPRECIATED <3

masterlist / nav

──── ੈ♡˳ ༘ ੈ♡˳ ༘° ੈ♡˳ ༘° ੈ♡˳ ༘° ੈ♡˳ ༘°────

the welcoming-ness of the yellow shining sun bled through the slightly opened blinds of eddie’s bedroom window. the natural light practically radiate and illuminate your boyfriend’s asleep face, lightening his beautiful features so perfectly.

his jutted out soft, slight chapped lips still a bit swollen from all of the kisses you both shared from the night before. the view of the skin around his neck and chest littered black ink and with little love marks and from the wild night you both shared yesterday.

his guitar pick chain handing down his exposed pale torso. his unruly locks of hair flowing about on the pillows and his messy bangs going in different directions as he slept there peacefully.

you’ve been up and awake for a while, and during that time you’ve been staring at your lover laying down on your right side. your hand holding the comforting blanket securely over your exposed body, your other hand coming up to sweep one of his curls away from his closed eye. smiling to yourself when you saw him slightly move at the gentle action.

the sounds of his light snoring and the children playing around in the trailer park was soothing. taking a second to indulge in this stress free, relaxing moment before you turned your head back around to eddie.

“eds” you so softly call out, and almost immediately you got a reaction out of him. you see him furrow his brows, the sound of a little groan emitting from him which you mimicked with a quiet laugh. a few milliseconds passed and you see him still sleep.

with a raise of your chin, you pucker your lips and blow a bit of air over his forehead. smiling when you seen his eyelids fluttering, eventually opening and finding your awaiting playful features right in front of him. eddie closes his heavy eyes once more with a quiet groan and a cute scrunch of his face.

you copy and do the same action, unable to hold in your giggle when you saw his blank face staring back at you from doing so. the sweet sounds of your laughs caused him to let a few chuckles out as well before turning his head a bit to rest his eyes from the sun, another guttural sound leaving him while doing so.

which you mimicked, the sound of you making the same noises cut him off guard completely. eddie stopped and turned to look at you with a incredulous expression. the metal head grins tiredly at your giggling body.

“why’re copying me-“

“why’re copying me” eddie shakes his head in disbelief with a laugh. “oh fuck off, how old are you” he murmurs teasingly to you, his ring clad hand coming up to rub at his eye.

“what’s the time?” you move your hand up to your eye like he had did and repeated his words. “what’s the time-“

eddie didn’t even let you finished your mocking sentence before an amused scoff left him and his hand came down to slap yours away from your eye with a laugh. the room was filled with both of your giggles and laughter as eddie turned his body and rested his face into the warmth of your neck.

“you’re so funny, aren’t you sweetheart?” he chuckles against you, his voice croaky from his rest. you then felt his lips press a delicate kiss along your skin, the feeling of his long untamed hair tickling you as he squeezed your body into his.

you giggled once more with a nod of your head.

“of course i am, eds”

*follow my library account @rileybinaalibrary & turn on notifications to know whenever i post a fic <3*

508 notes · View notes

fishing-lesbian-catgirl · 4 months

Note

genuine question: how can we use this website to be less annoying to others?

Glad to give my thoughts. Like I said, I’m very petty and most of this stuff probably isn’t as big a deal to most people. Anyway I’m bad at being brief so I added a readmore. Here are my personal rules:

1: Don’t add anything to the body of a post unless you have something that you really feel will add some degree of value, meaning, humor, context, or at least something to people further down the reblog chain.

This is the most important rule. Adding something to a post makes it longer, it makes it so everyone who reblogs it in the chain after you has to see it. If you have nothing to add but “wow” or “holy shit” you are lengthening the post for no reason. Those reactions can easily go in the tags.

This is also the reason I think gimmick blogs are so annoying. It’s one thing for a “heritage post” blog to reblog things related to its respective gimmick. Simply reblogging them puts that thing on their blog, so anyone looking at it or following them because they want to see “heritage posts” will see it. But they go a step further and add “X heritage post” for no real reason other than to brand the post as theirs.

When I see a post that I like that has useless additions that take up space while adding nothing I get mildly annoyed and go to the reblog of the person who reblogged it before they did just to trim the useless comments off. But if that person deactivated then I can’t trim the comment. Tumblr lets you trim to the original post without any of the additions regardless of if op is deactivated or not with the little X on the reblog menu, but only to the original post. It’s better than nothing though

This whole point is, to me, a bit of tumblr etiquette that makes it so you don’t have to see unrelated comments from someone you don’t follow just because they thought to add a pointless comment way up the chain. This definitely is petty, but if you remember how the old tumblr formatting worked, this was extremely important because each addition took up even more screen space with the line to the next persons url and squished the original post into smaller and smaller spaces. So that’s probably why I feel so strongly about it even though it doesn’t matter as much anymore.

2: The tags are mostly your free space to say what you want, BUT try and respect that OP will likely see them.

A LOT of communication done on this website is done through talking in the tags. That’s not what they were originally meant for but that doesn’t matter anymore. People will likely be looking in their notes to see tags by their mutuals.

The original poster can and will see every tag on a post, unless they delete the post or mute notifications. Mute notifications seems like it doesn’t work, but that’s because it only mutes future notifications on the post, the tags in your notes before muting will still be there regardless

This is to say that in most situations, if the op is someone like me who uses their notes to communicate with their mutuals and others in their communities, your irrelevant tags might also be there and annoy them. So use courtesy when tagging. Thankfully tumblr cuts off tags after a certain point on the notes page but still keep it in mind. I go overboard writing mini essays in the tags all the time, and while I do think that is a little annoying I do it anyway so I can’t blame people.

3: Keep blorbo tagging to a minimum if you can help it.

This is probably my most controversial stance, but blorbo tagging can be really annoying in certain circumstances.

The biggest offender to me are tagging make characters on posts about women. I don’t care that you think he’s your babygirl or whatever, I find this extremely annoying. I get it, sometimes a post fits your character really closely but the gender is wrong, but usually it doesn’t and they’re just doing this on any post even slightly related to a single aspect of a male character they care about. Often because most tumblr fandom people couldn’t be bothered to care about female characters if that was the only way to escape a saw trap alive.

There are other blorbo tag type things that annoy me, and again I’m a petty bitch, so take it with a grain of salt. But to me this one is a little personal (for lack of a better word). One of my first big posts on this blog was about wizard girls leaning in to kiss and having the brims of their hats get in the way. I didn’t mind the blorbo tagging about men that much, but they got less and less related to the post that it was annoying. The last straw before I deleted the post (back when I didn’t realize mute notifications actually worked. It might not have at the time) was a tag about their male blorbos leaning in to kiss and their belt buckles got in the way???

Idk I just find blorbo tagging in general mildly annoying and only do it when the post is an extremely perfect fit for on the characters I care about. I often block people for blorbo tagging about characters from things I dislike, I’m petty and the block button is fun for me to press, so I do that often. :)

4: NOT EVERY POST IS ABOUT YOU!!!

If you see a post that isn’t about you or your demographics or gender or whatever, you really don’t need to make it about you. That will very likely annoy op, especially because no one would have anything against you if you went and wrote your own post inspired by whatever the post in question said.

Not every post about lesbians needs to be made about gay men. Not every post about trans women needs to be made about trans men. Not every post about women needs to be made about men. And probably most important:

Not every post needs to be made about white people!

I know you might be thinking how writing something in the tags about your experience as a white person relating to what op is talking about, but I promise you they don’t want to hear it from us. They almost certainly are seeing tags from other white people because for some reason we can’t seem to see someone posting about issues of racism without having either the “I’m sorry for being white” or “white devils advocate” voices appear in our heads, just ignore it. Bite your tongue and reblog or move on for the love of god stop pestering the op.

Obviously the lesbian, trans women, and women ones are the ones I see in my notes that are annoying. But I can’t pretend I haven’t seen other white people say some really unnecessary shit in the tags / haven’t seen posts by nonwhite people who are clearly annoyed about how we always make everything about us.

Remember, you can always write your own post!

5: OP didn’t “turn off replies”

This feels like something that wouldn’t happen that often, but multiple times when I’ve made even mildly controversial takes about like video games or whatever, people will either add in a reblog or send me an ask complaining that I “turned off replies because I was afraid of hearing them disagree” usually followed by them calling me a coward. It’s very simple, I have reply settings so that people I follow and people who have followed me for at least like a week can reply, that’s it. I don’t have replies from everyone on because most people outside of those categories I don’t care about their opinions and they are annoying. If you can’t reply, that’s probably why. And if they actually did turn off replies, that’s because they don’t want replies, especially from people like the ones I just described.

6: I actually don’t have a problem with spam reblogging

This might seem backwards given my other stances on things taking up unnecessary space like useless comments, but I really don’t mind spam reblogs. I frequently do it when I see art I really like or when there’s a post that really resonates with me. Yes, it is annoying! No, I probably won’t stop. I do it so I can’t judge other people who do too. I am trying to keep it to like 5 times at most though, any more is just overkill.

7: OP is a stranger, not your friend

This one applies basically everywhere on the internet, but unless the person who made the post is someone who is like a mutual or someone that’s you’ve interacted with a lot before, they’re probably a stranger. Don’t try to be “playfully rude” or overly familiar. It’s annoying and weird and you will get blocked.

8: If you’re sending an anonymous ask, remember that OP is not going to take you in good faith most of the time

A lot of anon asks aren’t meant to be malicious, but a lot of others are. Bait, hate mail, insults, you name it, there’s a very good reason people like me assume every anon is sent in bad faith for some purpose. If you are going to send an anon ask, try to make it clear that you genuinely just want to ask a question and that you aren’t trying to trick op into saying something you can use to write a callout post against her or whatever.

You did that in this very ask thing and that’s why I’m writing out this long post instead of deleting it or letting it rot in the inbox.

9: Prev Tags etiquette / “Peer Reviewed” Tags

The usage of “prev tags” is controversial, a lot of people have different opinions on it. But with all the changes they made last year that made it harder to see the tags of the person before the person who’s reblog you are viewing, I think prev tags etiquette has changed.

My personal rules for prev tags are to copy the tags into my own tags, and then follow them up with a tag that says “<- prev tags”. Unfortunately tumblr tags convert dashes into spaces for some reason so it ends up looking like “< prev tags”. I’m stubborn and don’t want to like use an emoji arrow though. Anyway, tumblr mobile conveniently allows you to copy the tags of the person you are reblogging from surprisingly easily which I appreciate.

Unlike previous tags, which stay in the tags and don’t turn into an addition to the post, “peer reviewed” tags as they are sometimes called do get added to the post permanently for the remaining blog chain.

The unfortunate truth about this website is that some people have bad opinions on what qualifies as being meaningful enough to be cemented as an addition to the post via “peer review”. As such, the phrase “how could you leave this in the tags 🤣” has essentially become another “you sir have won the internet 🤣”

The shitty part about that is sometimes there are good and meaningful additions in the tags that are worth being added to the post as a whole. But you can add someone’s tags to a post without saying “how could you leave this in the tags”. Anyway this one is more subjective and hard to define so I hope I got my point across at least somewhat.

Anyway, there are probably a few other rules I personally follow that I’m not thinking about right now, but just follow general internet etiquette and try to keep in mind that op is a person who will likely read whatever you type, that covers most things tbh! Thanks for reading if you somehow read this far. Hope this helped! If it didn’t, oh well, I did try and warn you I’m petty and have strong opinions about things that usually don’t matter afterall

#Cordelia’s rules for blogging #anon ask #long post #long post.#we don’t stil need to add the . to make it not get filtered do we?

16 notes · View notes

thebradleybradshaw · 2 years

Text

boyfriend!rooster headcanons | b.bradley

synopsis: lil boyfriend headcanons about life with bradley bradshaw ft. fem!reader

notes: hi babies !! here’s some soft & sweet headcanons about boyfriend life with rooster !! just wanted a nice little post for my angels after today’s events. likes, comments, & reblogs are always appreciated. enjoy !! xx

Nicknames for him: Roost, Roo, Brad, Lee, stinky, honey, lovey

Nicknames for you: sweetheart, darlin’, baby, babygirl, my girl

Big spoon energy.... except the off chance that he’s being a big pouting baby and wants to be the little spoon

100% calls kisses ‘smooches’

‘Give me a smooch, baby’ ‘gimmie smooch’ ‘plant a big ol’ smooch on me baby!’

He’ll walk up to you silently with his lips puckered out and won’t go away until you plant one on him

He likes to place his hands on your cheeks and just hold you there while he gives you such a deep kiss you’re seeing stars

This man has a kissing obsession

He’s always placing kisses to your forehead, especially at random: shopping, cooking dinner, dancing at the bar, saying goodbye

He’s also extremely touchy. Every time he touches you, you swear you feel dizzy and lightheaded.

He loves to hold hands while you’re walking down the street and just swinging your arms

shared hobbies omfg

Hiking, couples’ walks, watching shows together, taking a painting or cooking class together

When the two of you got into cooking during quarantine, he had matching aprons made with your initials on it. he even had chef hats made, yours said head chef (it was also a major pun if you get the hint) and he was the sioux chef

The two of you have so many inside jokes it’s insane

You’ll look at each other while out to dinner with friends and try your best not to lose it while everyone stares at you wondering wtf is so funny

Meme King. He seriously has the perfect meme for every moment

Tiktok references

“That was too good, let’s get the bill....purr” is something Rooster says all the time, especially after a night out to dinner.

I 100% believe that Rooster would let you teach him Tiktok dances, but you could never ever actually post the video

He’s really good at the ‘Up’ by Cardi B dance

Speaking of Cardi B, Rooster will sing along to Meg the Stallion, Cardi B, Beyonce, and Lizzo at the top of his lungs.

His go to karaoke song is either ‘Kokomo’ by the Beach Boys or ‘Truth Hurts’ by Lizzo and let me tell you he crushes them both

Matching outfits

He looooooves to match your outfits together. ‘Babe what color are you wearing tonight? I’ll match it’. He insists that pink is your ‘couples’ color’.

He bought you a locket necklace with a B on it, and somehow managed to get his picture in it. You only take it off to shower and sleep.

You got him that gold chain that he also never takes off.

Baths together

We’re talkin bath bombs, salts, bubbles, the whole 9 yards. He’s got a special playlist for the occasion and plenty of tea candles to decorate the edge of the tub

He likes to lay back with you between his legs - you can feel his heartbeat on your back.

His hands are obviously holding your boobs, that’s a given. Just simple caresses. He claims they’re his ‘anti-stress balls’.

He’ll be softly humming the latest song in your ear, placing kisses to your neck and hair.

He’s got the loofa all soaped up and dragging it along your exposed skin

Obviously after bath sex ensues

Speaking of after the bath:

Rooster has you lay back, catching your breath from your session as he rubs lotion on your legs, helping you get dressed in your softest pajamas

God damn does this boy love to take care of you!!!

Brushing your hair, helping with your skincare, picking out your outfits, making you lunches for work

I believe Rooster is the most fun person to go shopping with. He’s pulling on crazy outfits just to make you laugh. He’ll do a dramatic twirl in the fitting room. He’ll randomly grab different pieces that he thinks you’ll look good in.

Beach days!!!

He loves to take you to the beach and have some fun in the sun

He’ll make sure you have all the SPF coverage that you need, sometimes lingering on putting it on your chest so you have to swat his hand away

Getting to massage his back, abs, and shoulders as you put it on him

The absolute power move it is to watch him getting out of the water, muscles glistening, skin tan and knowing that that is all yours

Laying on towels and sun tanning

Getting to watch the guys play football

Having that swooning romantic moment of Rooster chasing you, grabbing you by the waist, and running into the ocean together (punching the floor rn)

Long walks on the beach of course. He’s holding your sandals in one hand, the other hand is holding onto yours. Hair blowing in the evening breeze

He is truly the most honest, caring, and loving boyfriend on this planet

He’s holding you close at night, brushing hair out of your face as you talk about the struggles of the day

He is always, always there to listen. He’ll hold you in his lap on the couch, nod along as you go on and on.

A supportive King!!! No matter what it is you want to pursue he is there right behind you, cheering you on. He is truly head over heels in love with you and would lay down his life to ensure you get everything you want in life.

Even if that means letting you paint his toenails powderpuff blue

#we love some good fluff #and boyfriend rooster #rooster bradshaw #rooster bradshaw x reader #rooster bradshaw headcanon #rooster bradshaw imagine #rooster bradshaw fic #bradley bradshaw #bradley bradshaw x reader #bradley bradshaw headcanon #bradley bradshaw imagine #top gun fic #sfw #headcanon

723 notes · View notes

redhoodinternaldialectical · 2 months

Text

Chapter 21 of Chained: To Wield The Blade We Have Forged

A/N: This chapter is stephcass focused enough that I think people might enjoy this as a standalone thing, so I'll be posting the chapter both on AO3 as usual, and right here in this post! This also connects to the reblog I wrote up the other night gushing about Batgirl (2000) #19 and the potential in a Cass vs Jason confrontation!

For this chapter only, NOT the whole fic: Rated T for Teen Ships are Stephanie Brown/Cassandra Cain and vaguely hinted at Jason Todd/Tim Drake There's gonna be a LOT of plot points that don't seem to go anywhere, cause they're parts of much bigger arcs, but there's some really sweet talk about deep stuff towards the end and the start is Steph handling a deescalation scenario Hope you enjoy ^w^ !

Dear War Diary,

You know, some days I don't even think Ivy should be in Arkham. Logging, pollution, hair spray tearing a hole in the ozone layer, pesticides - if I could feel plants' pain as they were broken apart, I'd want to feed people to ambulatory venus fly traps too. Heck, back in high school I was sure tempted to let her have at some of my more obnoxious classmates.

Unfortunately, today was not one of those days.

We knew something was weird this time around when the docs at Arkham called warning us that she woke up screaming and her powers went out of control. Usually when this sort of thing happens she goes towards a clear goal. Like, there'll be a construction site or a factory or something damaging the land and drawing her out.

Thing is though, the more we chased her, the clearer it became that she wasn't running towards anything.

She was fleeing, and seemingly had no clear place to bolt to. First she fled to the meat packing district. Then she ran down to the water, and like, we expected her to follow the coast? But she just swam right in! Left huge algal blooms in her wake too; like the lacy train of a queen's dress. She even left Gotham altogether for a hot minute only to turn back again for no reason. She was very obviously out of her mind frightened of something, but we had no idea what it was, and frankly, we still don't.

Tonight had real big 'predator running from the wildfire' energy, is what I'm saying.

It took several days, but eventually she gave up on running and bunkered down in one of the parks. The concrete storage shed she picked as her new home was so overgrown by the time we got to it that it was impossible to see a single square inch of the structure. The hardwood and thorn vines covering it had to have been at least a meter thick.

And that little backstory finally brings us to tonight's patrol.

I tapped my earpiece, "We getting anything on the seismic, O?"

"Nope. If she's digging she's doing it slow enough we're not gonna get any warning. Good news though, I finally got an answer back from Waller. Harley Quinn can be on the line within ten minutes notice."

"Awesome. Speedy, you good to cover me?"

"Yup! Got a whole quiver full of tranquilizers and frog crotch arrows ready for her."

I snort-laughed, "God, what a name!"

"I know right?! But yeah, you're good to go. I'll be aiming from the East, so gimmie a sign if you think you'll need me at a different angle."

"Got it. Alright O, give that ten minute notice and I'll start the approach."

Step one: Get the cops to back up the perimeter by at least ten feet all around. Frankly they were gonna be useless in a fight if it came to that, and the whole goal here was to get this done without bloodshed.

This part was pretty damn easy. I knew one of the cops there by name and she was more than happy to back her fellow officers out of the negotiation zone.

Step two: Establish a desire for peaceful communication.

I spoke through a megaphone into the general direction of the tree-bunker, "Doctor Isley? Would you be willing to come out and talk?"

The woods creaked and groaned, shifting minutely. My heart pounded in my chest, waiting, watching, every leaf bud an acid spitting behemoth in the making.

Nothing came out.

I called out to her again, "Okay. Doctor Isley, you seem really upset, and we don't understand why, but you haven't hurt anyone yet so we're not going to hurt you."

I glanced around surreptitiously at the cops. Lucky for me they all seem to be on their best behavior tonight. No one was grumbling about wanting to hurt her loud enough for me to hear, and I just had to trust that meant the grass couldn't hear them either.

"If you don't want to talk to me, that's okay. We want to get you some help, so we're going to try and get Harley on the phone so you can talk to her."

Against my ear, the phone crackled to life.

Time for step three: Get negotiation partner on board.

"Which bat-brat do I have the displeasure of speakin to today!?"

"It's Batgirl; we need your help getting through to Ivy."

"HAH! Well fat fuckin chance, asshole! I ain't talkin her inta anythin she don't wanna do!"

"And we're not asking you to! She hasn't even hurt anybody, and she's not making any threats, but she is clearly terrified. We think there's something or someone after her, and it's not us."

I gave her a moment to think it over. She's got to know we wouldn't let Ivy die, but there's always the chance we're just lying.

"Fine. Alright, what's the plan here?"

"Thank you! I'm gonna hold the speaker up to the megaphone, and you let her know you want to talk, then I'll slowly approach and once in speaking range I'll take the megaphone off of the phone to give the two of you some privacy."

"An you'll still be listinen the whole damn time of course."

"Yeah, sorry about that, but at least the cops won't be."

Harley sighs, "Turn the lights down in the house and start the music then. Lets get this show rollin an' over with."

Step four: Negotiate and deescalate.

Through the phone megaphone combo she said, "Hey Sweetpea, mind lettin me hear yer pretty voice again?"

The protective wall started growing again, getting thicker. I chance a few slow steps forwards anyway, since nothing offensive starts growing either. Or at least I hoped there wasn't something offensive in there.

"I've missed ya. Not the same kickin ass with these bozos in here, ya'know?"

As I got closer, the smell of ozone got stronger, breathing started to feel weird, and every drop of sweat evaporated off of me, leaving me parched. Her hypergrowth vegetation was stripping the carbon dioxide and water out of the air so fast that the atmosphere around it was going haywire.

Just as I thought she was waiting for me to get close enough for her tree's roots to just use me as a nutrient bag, an opening formed over the doorway to the storage unit, and she shakily poked her head out, calling for Harleen.

She was messed up. She clearly hadn't been able to take care of herself and

I'm not writing the next part down verbatim. Just seems too... invasive. They said a lot of sweet an

I don't feel great about this, but just in case I need it, I am going to record what I remember of how Harley talked her down.

Harley said, "Pumpkin, I'm so sorr

Okay. Third time's the charm?

This was not a criminal wrecking havok for profit. This was not a terrorist making demands. This was someone having a breakdown due to forces outside her control and her girlfriend comforting her as best she could. I shouldn't even have been hearing it, really, so yeah I think I'd feel too skeezy to keep dinner down if I wrote it all out 'just in case'.

Informationally speaking, hopefully the only part of their conversation I'll ever need to know again is that Ivy said "The green is dying" and "She's made the world barren; the flowers will never bloom again" and basically made it really clear that the damage was already done and no one was after her.

If you're reading this Future Me and you desperately need to know exactly what happened, sorry not sorry, get a time machine or something.

Anyways, after it became clear that there was nothing we could do for her other than get her back to mental help, I gave Speedy the signal to take the shot. The tranqs hit her before she realized anything was up, and there were only a few seconds of scuffle, then she was down for the count.

I picked up the phone again to cut the line and Harley said, "So that's it, huh? I talk her into openin' the treeline, you drug her up, and that's curtains?"

"There clearly wasn't anything else we could do for-"

"Fuck off you insufferable, controlling, shitty, furry knock off cops! I shoulda told her ta mulch ya!"

There were the muffled sounds of the phone being taken out of her hand, and then a voice I didn't recognize, "Well, I hope that clown to plant heart to heart was worth the favor."

"Zero injuries, zero deaths, zero horrifying poison scares: I'd say it was."

She, whoever she was (I assume it was Waller) chuckled, "Well you aren't the one picking up the tab. Tell Oracle it was a pleasure doing business again."

The line went dead.

"You get that O?"

"Loud and clear. And hey, don't let what Quinn said get to you. You did great."

"Thanks," I kinda didn't feel it, but the sentiment was nice.

The rest of patrol was a long and boring ride on the top of a police van, making sure that no one ambushed her on her way back to Arkham, and then a short conversation about what they're going to do to keep her there this time.

They've had a couple different ways to cut her off from whatever The Green is for a while now. Every method has nasty side effects, and half her breakout attempts were in direct opposition to using them. At this point their policy is to just help her manage being connected. Considering what I saw that connection putting her through tonight? The docs rubber stamped cutting her off from The Green again, at least temporarily, and I'm pretty okay that.

So yeah. We won. Yippee. And all it took was arm twisting a woman held prisoner by a shadowy government agency in order to trick the love of her life into making herself vulnerable to us...

God this job sucks sometimes.

And the suck was not over yet, not by a long shot! And the suck was not only reserved for me either. Uh, okay obviously since Harley and Ivy, but also!

Oracle called to tell me this: "I need to give you a heads up before you return to base, and Speedy needs some time to handle a private phone call so I'm telling you this now. Black Bat got into a fight that upset her pretty bad. She's been on the training sims and dummies for over three hours, and I'm kinda worried she's not gonna sleep unless someone helps her untangle her head."

"I thought everything went smooth on her end, what the heck happened?"

"Easier if I just show you," Oracle said and fed a video taken by one of the Bat-House's internal cameras into my HUD.

It showed Ca (gah trying not to write anyone's names is a mess) Black Bat in civilian clothes, standing in a doorway. She's staring at the Red Hood from across the room with an expression of frustrated determination.

He ignores her for a while, continuing to read, curled up on the couch in a posture so terrible I have to wonder if he's trying to give himself back problems.

She just... kept staring. And staring.

Finally he asked, sounding very snarky and annoyed, "Can I help you?"

"Why did you pull the trigger again? You were better. You did better for so long. Why?"

"I don't owe you that shit," He narrowed his eyes at her, "And you don't get to decide I was better just cause you liked it more when I was docile."

She marches over to him, "I know how it hurts. I see it hurt you! I want to help. I want to know why."

"No," He said, standing up to loom over her, as though she couldn't kick his ass five ways from Sunday with a hand tied behind her back, "You want me to get on my knees and sob and beg for forgiveness. As though any of you shitheads ever even deserved my forgiveness!"

"No! I want to see you get better! I wanted another little brother!"

"Well congratu-fucking-lations, you got one! Don't worry, Dickie hates it just as much. I'm sure he can give you some pointers on how to go fuck yourself about it."

My jaw started hurting from how tight I had my teeth clenched as I watched her face twist in open rage-hurt-sorrow, "Why won't you stop burning our house down!? You're in it!"

"I. Don't. Owe. You. That."

She glared up at him defiantly, "You owe someone."

"No. I don't."

"Sheezus!" Black Canary said as she entered the room, "I leave you alone for five minutes and you're already picking a fight with her? Seriously?"

Black Bat's anger simmered below the boiling point again, "Not a fight."

"That sure looked like-"

"Not a fight." She declared bitterly, storming out of the room.

BC raised an eyebrow at Hood.

He smiled all teeth and irritation, "Not a fight!"

She rolled her eyes and took her post back up as the video ended.

I sighed, "Well. That'd do it. Thanks for the warning, I'll see if I can talk to her, take her mind off it."

"Appreciated. I tried but... I dunno. You'll probably have more luck."

"We'll see I guess! So, am I good to check in with Speedy, or is she still on her phone call?"

"You're good."

When I grappled up to the roof she was on, Speedy looked pretty damn unhappy. So, like, clearly tonight was sucking complete ass for everyone. Mercury in retrograde or some shit, idk.

"You got news I take it?" I asked.

"Mhm, great news! By which I mean totally shit news. Apparently the lab I get my bloodwork done at broke, as in everything is giving false negatives. So yeah, all my bloodwork for the past who knows how long might have been wrong!"

"Oh shit. You want us to test you in the Batcave? Guarantee the lab down there could handle whatever you need!"

"I appreciate the offer, but I'll need to fast for twelve hours beforehand no matter what, so it wouldn't really be any quicker. Also my civilian GP would be pretty leery of a Bat-Diagnostic, especially since they already got me an appointment with the closest available people."

O cut in over comms, "That is suspiciously fast..."

Speedy shrugged, "I've got a feeling Green Arrow might have pushed me up the list somehow. He might not be (secret identity stuff I can't write down here :P ) anymore, but he's still got some pull."

"Hmm, well, both of you get back to base and we can figure out the logistics once you're here."

"Roger."

"Aye Aye Captain."

Once she cut off I offered, "Grapple line tag on the way there to take your mind off it?"

"You know what? I could use something to stretch my legs out after all that sniper crouching. Fuck it, let's do this."

Swingy swingy swingy over the buildings, across the bridge, to grandmother's imposing, minefield-surrounded cave we went!

We got into the cave, changed out of our gear, and sure enough, Black Bat was still in the training section, running herself ragged. Speedy went up to get some sleep since she couldn't eat dinner now anyways (do NOT envy that). So I went straight into an attempt to pry Black Bat off the training mats.

"Heads up!" I called out and tossed a bottle of water at her head.

She caught it without even looking, swapping to kicks and using her other hand to demolish her sandbag opponents, "Been drinking enough just fine."

"Sure. What'll it take to convince you to take a break and drink it with me anyways?"

She paused, leg still raised to kick, perfectly poised like gravity wasn't even a factor. It always makes my legs hurt looking her like that. Makes the rest of me swoon too.

"Would um..." She frowned, like she expected me to think less of her for making the request, "You bring dinner down here? For us both?"

I gave her a smile, "Yeah, of course. Mind saying how come?"

"Because Hood's up there and I want to fight him more. If I fight him, have to look at him. Have to watch him feeling and thinking and..." She finally put her leg down, and fidgeted with the cap of her water, "And I just don't want to."

"Didn't realize you hated him that bad."

"Not sure I do? Messy."

"Yeah, messy for me too."

Translation: I still don't know how to feel about him taking grisly revenge against Black Mask 'in my honor'. Still also super don't know how to feel about his welcome home gifts of a gun and an offer to come murder criminals with him.

Then I add, "But I'll have you know I'm a first class mess messer with-er! So if you want to talk about it, I'd be happy to."

She very briefly smiled, then her face feel again and somber moment passed before she said quietly, "Yeah, okay. Bring food down and... we can talk."

"On it."

"Um, wait!"

"Huh?"

She caught my arm and reeled me in for a kiss on the cheek, "There."

I laughed and gave her a proper kiss, "There! Love you."

Diary, have I ever told you about how she looks when she blushes? Because I seriously think I'll need to pull out the old poetry textbooks in order to do it justice.

Upstairs took me passed the dining room, where Red Hood and Red Robin were talking.

"The fuck is that?" Hood asked, leaning over his shoulder.

"Blueprints. I'm having a section of my house renovated while I'm stuck here."

"Wwwwhy?"

"I am swiftly being driven mad by boredom and saw a really neat indoor garden set-up on pinterest."

"An indoor garden? In Gotham? Do you fuckin want to get strangled to death in your sleep by vines?"

RR does the little 'tch' thing he picked up from Robin, "Whatever, it'll be fine, these are tiny little arboreals and I'll have reinforced airlocks leading in and out."

"That does fucking nothing for attacks in your sleep."

"Which is why I'll have the whole lockdown system automated. I was already going to do automation for the plant care stuff anyways, cause lets be honest here, there was no way I was ever going to keep them alive on my own."

"...The speed and ease with which you oscillate between self depreciating paranoia and megalomaniacal hubris is fascinating."

And even as pissed off as I am with both of them, that still almost made me friggin lose it laughing, RR seemed so offended too, it was great!

And speaking of pissed off? Yeah, seeing RR acting so chummy with Hood was kinda making my blood boil! Like, maybe he didn't even know they fought. But he's supposed to be her friend too, and it's still sticking in my craw, and I'm busy with the whole damn city needing patroled, and so bottom line: I didn't talk to him tonight, and I'm probably not gonna talk to him tomorrow night either!!

Agent A had several plates set to the side already when I got into the kitchen. I think he assumed at least a few of us were gonna go off in our separate corners after the argument. Made it nice and easy to snag two and bring it down.

She had clearly been pacing, waiting for me, back down in the cave.

We sat together and she held my hand while we ate - pretty awkward, but super worth it. We stayed quiet, me cause I wanted to give her the space to start talking, and her probably because she wasn't sure where to start.

Once all the peas and mash were gone and she was pushing her drumstick around the plate she asked, "Ready?"

"Go for it. All ears."

"It's a guilt thing I think? Least a little?"

"Kinda always figured you were uh, how to put it, I guess invested in him, cause of that sort of parallel between you two?"

She nodded, "Not all of it's that, though. Different guilt," She gives me a rueful smile, "I'm layered in it, huh?"

"Like a lasagna of angst," I told her solemnly.

She huffed a quiet laugh, fidgeting with my hand, "Am I um. A tasty lasagna?"

"Oh yeah, you're delicious," I said with a cheesy wink.

"Terrible," She laughed a bit more, running her thumb over the back of my hand, and the nervous sad crept right back in, "You know about um... One day, I rescued a man? Murderer. From the gas chamber?"

"Yeah. Not well, you've never said much, but I've read a bit about it. Was kind of a big news thing."

"On the way out I met the mother of his victim. She demanded justice. She demanded his death. I didn't know how to- to reconcile her grief. Still don't. But back then... I put him back in the gas chamber. I look at Hood. Wonder if he's the murderer or the mother or the executioner. Wonder what the mother was. Wonder what I was. Wonder if the distinction matters at all."

"Hood's trying to cut all the bad people out, trying to bleed the world better. You're trying to keep it all alive, trying to keep everyone growing. Maybe the other distinctions don't matter, but I think this one has to."

She squeezed my hand tight and kissed every one of my knuckles delicately, "I hope so. Trying to believe so."

"I kinda think you already do. You may be an angst lasagna, but you don't do what you do just out of guilt, yeah?"

"Guess so... I wanted so bad to find out that they'd been replaced by aliens or something. Find out that wasn't him. Not now and um. Not on TV all those months ago. At the very least I was hoping to find regret."

"I really wish I had something better to say than, you know, his determination to be an asshole isn't something we can fix. Just gotta keep growing our garden and hope he decides to join us for real sometime."

"Yeah..." Another round of knuckle kisses, "Yeah, you're right," She wrinkles her nose, "Sucks you're right."

"Yup."

She pressed her forehead against our intertwined hands for a while.

Then she asked, "Tell me about one of your shows?"

"Sure."

So I chattered about some light stuff she nodded along to until we were both ready for bed. It was honestly really nice, and I think I needed it too, a lot more than I realized.

So yeah, here's hoping tomorrow is less of a complete shit show from start to finish.

- Batgirl IV

#jaytim #stephcass #cassandra cain #stephanie brown #damian's tomfoolery #chained fanfic #chained: to wield the blade we have forged #jason todd #tim drake

8 notes · View notes

indeedcaptain · 4 months

Text

Regulatory Relations, chp. 13: The Children of Tarsus Redux

Hello everyone!! I hope you're having a happy Threshold Day!! Here is the big ole honkin monster of an installment for Regulatory Relations that has taken over my whole brain.

social media dry january was so much easier last year when i wasn't actively in a fandom. i just want to look at star trek memes so badly. see you all in two days!!!

Some things:

thank you so so so so much for reading. the response to this fic has been so joyful and supportive.

this story has gotten deeper and darker than originally planned, so I've officially changed the rating from "archive warnings not needed" to "graphic depictions of violence".

on that note: this is The Tarsus Chapter. content warnings for descriptions of violence, starvation, and death.

i wrote a song about Kirk and Kodos post-Tarsus :) if you're into that sort of thing I've reblogged it to this blog and the link is available here.

☆☆☆

At first, everything was dark. His room, the bed beneath him, even Spock’s hand in his--- all of it had vanished, replaced by the warm black nothing. He could not feel his body. He was not sure if he had one, here. But then he heard his name.

Jim?

Hello, Kirk said, or thought, and he sensed something that felt like Spock out in the darkness. It felt like his dry humor, his curiosity, the fierce energy of him coiled into waiting stillness. Can you hear me?

Yes, Spock said, and he sounded--- felt--- closer now. Are you in discomfort?

No, Kirk said, after a moment. But it doesn’t feel like the other times we’ve melded.

I guided your mind through what was necessary in previous circumstances. Here I have created space for you instead. Kirk felt the gesture of Spock’s mind, sweeping out around them. What you show me, I will see.

Cautiously, he thought of somewhere to start. Kirk cringed in anticipation of the nausea, the choking panic, but it did not arrive. He was uncomfortable, unhappy, flayed out and vulnerable, but he could physically continue. The Iowa farmhouse appeared, rippling out in vibrant color from the point that he thought he inhabited in this strange in-between space. The faded white wood paneling, the wide porch with the swing and its rusty chains, the windbreak row of trees, and the cornfield, stretching out as far as Spock’s mind allowed, were replicated as faithfully as if they were physically there. And then they were; Spock materialized at his side as his own body appeared beneath him.

Spock looked around. Is this where you were raised?

Yes, Kirk said, and as they watched, a child with sandy brown hair flung open the screen door, flounced down the stairs, and vanished into the cornfield. An older boy came out more slowly, accompanied by an adult woman with the same sandy hair. They talked on the porch, staring in the direction that the younger one had gone.

That was me, he said quietly. This is the beginning, I suppose. He had laid out in the cornfield for hours, watching the clouds pass through the sky as tears leaked from the corners of his eyes into the dirt beneath him. Kirk closed his eyes and pushed the memory forward, and when he opened his eyes again the sky had darkened and Jimmy was trudging out of the cornfield back to the farmhouse. He wiped the back of his nose with his forearm and let the screen door swing shut gracelessly behind him.

Akin to the strange logic of dreams, Kirk and Spock stood in the kitchen of the farmhouse without having moved. Jimmy sat at the wooden table, arms crossed protectively across his chest, as Winona Kirk pulled brochures out of a Starfleet-issue duffel bag.

“I don’t want to go to Mars,” Jimmy said.

“You don’t have to,” Winona soothed.

“I want to go with you and Dad.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” Winona said. “For this posting, that’s just not an option.” Jimmy crossed his arms more tightly across his chest.

“Can’t I stay here?”

“Not by yourself.” Winona found the brochure that she had been looking for, the glossy paper reflecting the warm light and fluttering with the movement of the ceiling fan, and pulled the chair out next to Jimmy. “Look at this one,” she said quietly, and placed the brochure on the table in front of him. He turned away, staring out the window over the sink. “It’s not like Sam’s school. It’s all hands-on, all learning by doing. You’d get to be on a farm, just like here, with other kids. Dad and I could come visit you when we get leave.” Jimmy kept his gaze locked on the window, and Winona stood after another silent minute. She kissed him on the forehead and exited. When she was gone, Jimmy turned to the brochure. He frowned at it, but he picked it up and opened it.

Kirk knew what came next. He had been enchanted against his will by the promise of the experiential Farm School, and it would become his home for two beautiful years.

I wish I could just show you the good things, Kirk said. There were good things, too.

I believe you, captain, Spock said. Show me whatever you need.

Kirk crossed to the table where Jimmy--- his younger self, and it was hard to remember that he had ever been so young--- sat, flipping through the brochure. He looked down at the shiny pictures. They didn’t do it justice. I just need--- I need you to see what I saw. I think that’s what all this is about. Spock crossed to him, standing next to him, and even in the meldspace Kirk felt the comfort of his presence.

Kirk laced his fingers through Spock’s and remembered.

☆☆☆

Tarsus IV was the fourth planet in a small system in the middle of nowhere, Beta quadrant. It was Class M, with mostly mild seasons, and by the time Jimmy arrived, it was populated with eight thousand others, entirely human. It was not a highly developed colony; humans had only been there for twenty years, and it was technologically delayed--- no replicators, no transporters, only one government-owned high-speed comms relay to the rest of the Federation. Those who lived there were agriculturalists; scientists and farmers looking to conduct their research or make a living selling crops to the traders who passed through on their way to the further-flung starbases. After Jimmy had set his narrow shoulders, gritted his teeth, and taken the brochure upstairs to his parents, they had bought him a physical copy of a traveler’s guide to Tarsus IV. He read it back to front, over and over, until the spine crumbled in his hands and they replaced it with a digital copy on his padd. Six months after he had stormed from the kitchen and into the cornfield, the shuttle containing a newly twelve years old Jimmy Kirk touched down on Tarsus. He was met at the shuttle pad by two women in their twenties. Their names were Madeleine and Natalya, and, as Starfleet Academy graduates who had elected to take elementary teaching posts instead of a commission on a ship, they were impossibly cool and rebellious to a child whose parents rarely spent more than eight months anywhere. They took him to Farm School, where he was given three rough-spun jumpsuits to wear on outside days and a tour of the grounds. There were fields, a big house that doubled as a cafeteria and dormitory, a school building with classrooms and a gymnasium, and a contingent of laboratories built for little scientists with child-sized hands.

“Do you know what you might want to study?” Natalya was tall, blonde, and strong, and she and Madeleine both had been science track at the Academy. She led Jimmy through the different buildings, wandered through a wheat field with him, and then took him to the highest point on the campus so he could look out and see the sprawl of Farm School and the town beyond.

“Everything,” Jimmy said. For the first time in his life, Jimmy was judged by his own actions and interests and not by the reputations of his family. He could raise his hand in class and be called on by a teacher who had never taught his brother. He could take extracurriculars in engineering and make mistakes without being asked, “Didn’t your mom explain this to you?” He could shadow his tutors and tell them that he wanted to be a scientist without any of them assuming that he would be a captain, like his dad. For almost two years, he learned and grew and made friends with kids who cared more about his first name than his last.

For almost two years, he was happy.

Jimmy’s second summer on Tarsus IV was the driest on record. The swimming hole where he and a few of his friends spent most afternoons after their classes were over had shrunk considerably since the spring. The sudden thunderstorms that he had grown accustomed to the previous year were few and far between.

In late August, when they were on a break from their classes, Jimmy snuck into the patch of field that they had given him for his summer project to check on his crops: a small growth, only a few square yards, of yellow corn. He had hoped to have enough to make cornbread for his classmates once it had all reached peak sweetness. He walked slowly though the fields, brushing his palms carelessly over the purple amaranth that was his friend Laika’s project, one eye on keeping his feet in the walkways and one eye on the clouds above him. The formerly teal-blue sky had darkened considerably, and though he didn’t mind the rain, the teachers got nervous when any of them were out in a storm. The soil of Tarsus had a considerably higher metallic content than Earth, and they weren’t keen on testing the survival rate of lightning strikes on the children in their care. He walked faster.

His corn had grown to the right height, but as he brushed his hands against the stalks, they bent in a way that was unfamiliar. He frowned. He had spent the first twelve years of his life running through farm fields; he had long understood the way that the laws of physics exerted themselves on the stalks of late-summer corn. The stalks moved ponderously, with less structural resilience than he was used to. The ears swung heavily and drooped down more than he had expected. Jimmy reached out and grabbed one, thinking to pull it off the stalk and peel back the silk to peer inside, but he froze when it landed in his palm. Rather than the bumpy firmness of corn, it felt as though there was goo trapped inside the shell. He hefted the mushy ear in one hand and poked at it with a finger. His finger left an indent, meeting virtually none of the expected resistance. A single drop of a deep, metallic, mercurial blue liquid oozed out of the top and dropped to the soil below. He dropped the ear, and it hung morosely from the stalk, dripping blue ooze onto the dirt.

Jimmy turned and ran for the safety of the main house as the sky broke open above him. By the time he got inside, Natalya was standing in the foyer with a towel for him.

“My corn melted,” he said, confused, dripping rain onto the pale wooden floor.

“We can check it out when the storm is over,” she said, scrubbing his drenched hair with the towel. But it was movie night, and one of the littlest kids got overtired and set off a giggling fit that derailed everyone’s attention, and by the time Jimmy laid down in his bunk bed he had forgotten about the corn entirely.

Ten days later, during their first class after the break, Madeleine took them outside to check on their summer projects. Jimmy had fallen to the back of the group, play-fighting with Tommy, when they heard a dismayed scream from the front.

Laika wailed, “What happened?” She knelt in what remained of her amaranth. The proud purple bushels had veered decidedly towards blue and lay in mushy puddles, the flower heads shedding off the stalk in her hands.

“Laika, don’t touch that, get out of the mess,” Madeleine said, and stepped away from the group to flip her comm open. She said something quietly into it, out of Jimmy’s hearing, but her face, normally split by her wide smile, was pinched with concern. Laika stood, wiping the remnants of her summer project off her hands and the knees of her jumpsuit, and frustrated tears glinted in her eyes.

“My corn,” Jimmy realized, remembering, and took off running. He heard Madeleine shout behind him, but he couldn’t hear what she said and therefore didn’t have to listen. He skidded to a halt in the dirt after a few more seconds anyway, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. The stalks still stood, half-bent, and the ears were still attached, in the loosest sense of the word. But whatever might have been growing inside had melted out, dripping down into the soil into noxious blue puddles.

Madeleine appeared over his shoulder and gaped at the oil spill that had been his summer project. “Let’s go, Jimmy,” she said, and steered him away, back towards the main house. They passed Natalya, standing with their biology teacher, Mr. Park, and the chemistry teacher, Mr. Lopez, talking next to the remains of the amaranth. Madeleine took them all inside and they played dodgeball in the gym until they were released for the afternoon. After dinner, Jimmy and some of the older kids played cards in the dorm until Madeleine called for lights out, and even Laika was pulled out of her mournful shell to play with them by the end of the night.

That was the last normal day.

One of the best parts of Farm School had been the food. There were no replicators on Tarsus, and Jimmy didn’t like the fake chemical aftertaste of most replicated food anyway. They bought food from the town and the other farmers, and got shipments from the traders that stopped through every month or so, but the majority of what they ate came from the farm itself. Over the next two weeks, the farm-grown food stopped appearing at mealtimes. Halfway through September, Natalya pulled all of the older children, thirty or so out of the one hundred at the school, aside before dinner.

“I think we all know that it was a very dry summer,” she said, and one of the boys started sniffling immediately in the back of the classroom. They had known that something was wrong after all their summer projects had died horribly, but Madeleine still showed them old Earth movies when they scored well on math tests and Natalya had taught the more flexible kids some of her gymnastics moves. The school schedule had marched on, and so, they had reasoned, things couldn’t have been too bad. But now Madeleine was here, her wide smile replaced by an unfamiliar strict line, talking to them without the littles present. It became impossible to ignore the changes that they had silently agreed not to discuss.

“Please, do not worry. We will take care of you. We’ve already talked to the governor, and help is coming, but until it arrives things are going to have to be a little different.”

The older kids voted to join the teachers in hiding the worst of the situation from the littles, and though it was not mandatory they joined the teachers in accepting limited rations to give the littles the last of the fresh produce. Jimmy sent a holo of his lab station to Sam with the caption, “still cooler than math school!!” and a message to his parents that said, “i miss you.” Over the slow civilian comms relay that the school had, neither of his messages would be received for a month at least. By then, Madeleine had said, Starfleet or one of the trade ships would have arrived and things would be back to normal. But it made him feel better to know that his messages were out in space, soaring from beacon to beacon towards his family.

“Summons from the governor,” Madeleine said cheerfully when she woke up the boys in Jimmy’s dorm room on a morning in late September. “Personalized invitations, too! Jimmy, your parents aren’t in the quadrant now, are they?”

Jimmy yawned, stretching, the morning sun warming the room through the white linen curtains. “Nope,” he said, half-asleep. “They’re still in Delta for a while, I think.”

Madeleine hummed, but she tapped something on her padd. “You and Tommy are coming with me and Natalya today.” Tommy hung his head down from his place on the top bunk.

“Me, too?”

Madeleine ruffled his hair, fluffy with gravity. “Better dress nicely. No holes in your jeans.”

“But they’re cool!”

“You say that now,” Madeleine said. “And in thirty years you’ll look back at holos of yourself and say, why was my clothing falling apart all the time?” She chucked him on the back of the head gently and left them to get ready. They rose, and dressed, and breakfast was sparse but Natalya snuck them each a cup of coffee and it helped to cut the hunger.

Farm School was on the side of a mountain, set above the main town, and its farmland was surrounded by forest. Someday, Jimmy thought, more people would live here, and there would be less forest, and Tarsus would feel less isolated from the galaxy as a whole. But he was glad to live here now, because Mr. Lopez sometimes led them on hikes deep into the woods to identify each of the birds by their song, and it was easy to forget that there was anyone else in the universe at all. Madeleine and Natalya led their parade of fifty down the hill, down the packed dirt road from Farm School that would meet the paved road that led into town. It was a familiar road; when there were holidays, or after the harvests, the governor’s office would put on festivals and the students would run down the road in packs of four and five to spend their credits on sweets and new books and clothing. The littles skipped between them, holding hands, but Jimmy and the other older kids didn’t want to waste their energy, not when they’d have to walk back up the hill in the autumn sun later.

They followed Natalya and Madeleine to the town hall. There was an auditorium there, in a drafty old hall towards the back of the brick building, where sometimes the local players would put on shows or traveling troupes would stage concerts. Today it would be nearly at capacity--- it sat almost five thousand people, and it was over half-full already. Madeleine narrowed her eyes at the presence of the governor’s security force, wearing their forest green uniforms, lining the walls and standing at the entrances, but she led them into a few rows near the back of the hall where they could all sit together. She and Natalya talked quietly with their heads close together while Laika pulled a deck of cards from her back pocket and dealt Jimmy and Tommy into a game of ratscrew. One of the littles, Kevin, stood over Tommy’s shoulder and asked too many questions, and two others, Ellie and Mira, slid themselves into Laika’s lap when it became apparent that Madeleine and Natalya would not be distracted from their conversation by their pleas for attention. The game devolved quickly from there, but the littles could be convinced to play Go Fish instead of the faster slapping game as long as the older kids pretended that it was cool. The other kids had distracted themselves similarly; a padd with books, a holofilm between two girls sharing a set of headphones, one of the younger kids with his ever-present sketchbook. The auditorium filled up around them, until the enormous wooden doors banged shut and Madeleine pulled them all to their feet to pay attention. The crowd fell silent.

A small door to the right of the stage opened, and the governor stepped out, flanked on either side by his green-shirted guards. Jimmy had seen him before, at the winter festival and harvest celebrations. He had wavy silver hair, and uncannily light brown eyes that Jimmy could see flashing in the stage lights even from where he stood in the back. Governor Kodos climbed the stairs to the waiting podium, and with a nod to someone offstage a microphone buzzed mechanically to life.

“Good morning,” he said, and gazed solemnly at them. “I appreciate every one of you taking the time to join us here today. It was short notice, but the community we’ve built here never shies away from pulling together for each other, does it?” Madeleine and Natalya exchanged glances over the heads of the kids lined between them. Madeleine rolled her eyes. Kodos continued, but Jimmy had a hard time focusing on his words. The auditorium was hot with the trapped body heat of four thousand others, and he wished that they had all sat before Kodos started talking. His attention drifted.

“...grateful for the sacrifices you have made thus far, and grateful for all those to come,” Kodos said. Madeleine’s head snapped up, and her eyes met Natalya’s. Jimmy saw, in the laser-focused line between them, that they had heard something that he had not, and the skin on the back of his neck crawled. Around them, the quiet listening stillness of the crowd shivered into an animal intensity, a predatory waiting. Natalya glanced around, and a muscle twitched in her jaw. She and Madeleine passed something invisibly, silently, through the air between them.

In the space between one breath and the next Jimmy watched as his teachers shed their masks of civility to reveal iron ferocity beneath. They might have been science track at the Academy, but they were still soldiers. The crowd’s discontented energy began to boil over. Natalya grabbed one of the littlest kids, hefted her into her arms, and marched straight at the nearest guard, standing in front of an exit. Madeleine swept backwards as she shoved Jimmy towards Natalya and the door.

“Start walking,” she hissed. “Get the littles, get to the exit, and get out!” Jimmy turned, on autopilot, and shoved at Tommy’s shoulder. Madeleine doubled back to push the second row of students towards the door, putting herself between them and the guards lining the back wall.

“Move,” he whispered to Tommy, and they shuffled towards Natalya and the guard.

“She had an accident,” Natalya said, smiling. “Excuse us. I need to change her before it starts to stink.” The little girl in her arms hid her face in her neck under the scrutiny of the guard. Their line bunched behind Natalya as the crowd behind them started to yell out.

“Quiet!” Kodos’s voice boomed out through the auditorium, and for a moment everything went perfectly still. “I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered, signed Kodos, governor of Tarsus IV.” There was one heartbeat of pure silence.

A phaser whined and discharged on the other side of the room. Someone screamed. Then five, seven, twelve other phasers fired. Bodies dropped to the ground. The crowd surged forward, out, away from the guards or towards them, yelling and crying out. Natalya kicked her guard in the knee, grabbed for his phaser as he fell, and shot him point-blank. Even as two other guards from the back of the auditorium ran towards her, she shoved the auditorium door open, revealing the cement hallway beyond.

“Go!” Natalya roared in pain as she staggered forward, a phaser burn eating through the shoulder of her jacket and revealing the muscle fiber beneath her scorched skin. She shoved the little girl in her arms at one of the older kids pushing by and turned, raising her phaser. As Jimmy passed through the doorway, running after Tommy, his heart in his throat and the cacophony of phaser fire filling his ears, he turned back--- to look for other kids left behind, or to look for Madeleine and Natalya, he wasn’t sure. He saw the bodies of his classmates, unlucky enough to have been in the last row and in the direct line of fire of the guards lining the back of the hall, curled together on the floor by their seats. Madeleine was sprawled over them, covering them, unmoving. There were piles of people, twisted together in awful ways, in front of the guards still holding phasers. And at the head of it all, Kodos onstage, hands clasped together, watching over the scene with a terrible calm.

The last time he saw Natalya, she stood in the open doorway between her fleeing students and the advancing guards with a half-charged phaser in her hand, blood dripping down her useless arm from the hole in her shoulder.

She screamed, “Close the door!” as she fired at one of the guards. Jimmy grabbed the door and slammed it shut, and he felt the reverberation of impact as something--- phaser discharge or Natalya or both--- hit it from the other side. He backed away, watching the door, but Natalya held the line. The door didn’t open. He turned and sprinted in the direction that Tommy and the others had gone as muffled screams faded behind him.

The backstreet behind the town hall was bizarrely, unsettlingly quiet. Natalya was gone. Madeleine was gone. Half of the students that they had come down with, maybe more, had been lost to the chaos in the auditorium. As Jimmy pulled the last door shut behind him, he saw Laika’s little gasp of relief. There was a question in her eyes, but he shook his head. There would not be anyone coming out behind him. They were on their own. Jimmy wound through the crowd to stand with her and Tommy, brushing his hand over the head or shoulder of a sniffling little as he passed through them.

“We can’t stay here,” Laika whispered, and she glanced nervously over her shoulder. “Where…?”

“We have to get out of the town,” Tommy whispered back. Jimmy stared at the plain white door that separated them from the slaughter in the theatre. He saw Madeleine sprawled protectively, uselessly, over the bodies of his classmates, Natalya’s broad shoulders filling the last doorway like she could protect them all. His heart thudded painfully against his ribs. Inside his head, he was screaming and screaming and screaming, but it didn’t come out. He felt his soul splitting into two. One part of him shrieked and beat his hands bloody against the white door. The other part was as cool as porcelain, utterly disconnected from everything he had seen, unfeeling but for the desire to stay alive, to keep the last of his friends alive.

“We’ll go through the woods,” he said. Laika and Tommy looked at him, but he couldn’t meet their eyes. The white door burned in his vision. “We probably know the forest around Farm School better than anyone else. If we get into the trees we at least won’t be seen. Then we can go home and find Mr. Park and he’ll know what to do.” He finally looked at his friends, and when he met their eyes, they nodded.

“Hold hands,” Laika said. She raised her voice slightly. “Ten and ups, grab a little. Buddy system.” Their little crowd--- only thirteen of them left, out of so many more--- shifted, reaching for each other. Jimmy felt like his bones were vibrating with the effort of keeping himself steady, but a tiny hand slid into his, grabbing onto three of his fingers with a chubby grip and anchoring him. He looked down.

Kevin stared up at him with enormous brown eyes, and it was the first time that Jimmy had ever seen him at a loss for words. He squeezed, feeling the fragility of the younger boy’s hand, and settled his shoulders back, the way he’d seen his dad do, the way Sam did. If they could get back home, then Mr. Park or Mr. Lopez would be able to fix this--- whatever was still fixable. All they had to do was get home. They could do that.

“Ready?” Jimmy’s mind shut everything else out--- his own screaming, the white door, Natalya’s bloody braid, the bone of her shoulder--- except for the only thought that mattered, singing through him in time with his heartbeat: get home, get home, get home. Laika nodded. Tommy nodded, gripping the hands of twin girls who had only arrived on Tarsus a few months prior. “Let’s go.”

They ran down the back alley that stretched along the back length of the auditorium, and their footfalls echoed eerily in the silence after the deafening phaser fire. Laika, who had arrived on Tarsus before any of them and knew the town better, took the lead. They followed her sure, quick steps, and she zigged down another alley that would take them out of the town, away from the main road, into the forest. Jimmy could feel the effects of a month of rationing in the burn of his lungs and heart, the empty energy of his cup of coffee making him jittery on his feet. When Kevin lost his footing on the uneven stones, Jimmy hauled him up onto his back and stumbled on.

It was as Laika led them onto the narrow plain between the edge of town and the start of the forest that they heard shouts behind them. Jimmy whipped his head back, searching for the source, and the flash of a hunter green uniform made his stomach leap into his throat. “No, no, no, no, no,” he whispered, in time with each footfall, and sprinted as hard as he could after Laika and the others. Kevin’s arms were clenched around his neck, and he could hear the younger boy’s muffled cries against his neck. He was almost across the plain, almost to the safety of the trees, when he heard the whine and discharge of phaser fire. He flinched to the side, but he was still on his feet. He was still running. Phasers discharged again and again, and the dry grass around him caught fire as he ran haphazardly towards the trees, trying to make them both a moving target.

Jimmy flung himself and Kevin behind the trunk of the closest tree. Pieces of bark exploded around him as phaser fire hit the other side. Jimmy slid Kevin from his back, pressing him to the ground.

“Are you okay?”

Kevin nodded, eyes wide and face completely blank. Jimmy thought that his own face might have looked the same. He wanted his parents--- but, no. If he thought about them, or the farmhouse in Iowa, he would never survive. He couldn’t think about anything but getting to Farm School with the littles and finding Mr. Park. Far-off phasers fired again and again, but his tree still stood. He looked up, and Laika was there, and Tommy and two other littles.

“Where is everyone else?” Jimmy’s voice was hoarse, scratching against his dry throat. His lungs still burned from the exertion of their flight. Laika’s eyes flicked reluctantly over his shoulder, out to the bare stretch of earth behind him. He dared one look over his shoulder. There were a handful of the guards from the auditorium, their pursuers, pacing the outskirts of the town with rifles in hand, and a trail of seven little crumpled bodies between the last of the buildings and the first of the trees.

Jimmy’s stomach heaved, but nothing came up. Stomach acid burned his throat. Tears stung his eyes. He heard a thin wailing, coming from Laika. He didn’t think she was aware that she was making noise. He closed his eyes and let the stony, unfeeling half of his brain take over.

“Get home,” he said, and Laika stopped wailing with a hiccup. “All we have to do is get home. We can do that.” He took Kevin’s hand in his again and held Laika’s gaze, before holding Tommy’s. “We’ll get the littles home. Mr. Park will know what to do.”

For a moment they stared at him, and Kevin sniffled. But then they nodded, and Laika turned to look at the sun before turning back to the woods.

“You know the way best,” he said. Laika loved to go birdwatching with Mr. Park. She had spent almost every weekend wandering through the woods, even when it was cold or rainy. “You can do this.” She nodded again, and she took the hands of one of the littles, and she led them up the mountain. Far from the main road, every step took them deeper into the trees until they couldn’t hear any sound but the wind through the reddening leaves and their own unsteady breathing.

They walked for two hours, taking a meandering route as Laika cast nervous glances in the direction of what Jimmy thought was the main road. As the sun started to slide down towards the opposite horizon, Jimmy caught her eye.

“All good?”

She chewed her lip nervously, glancing over his shoulder, but then her eyes snagged on something. She nodded decisively and pointed. Behind him, high up in an enormous tree, was the Farm School treehouse. “We’re close,” she whispered, and she led them on.

Farm School was as silent as a grave when Laika led their pack of six through the back entrance to the campus. They glanced around, but there was no one in sight.

“Maybe they’re hiding,” Tommy said. “Should we split up to look?”

“No,” Jimmy and Laika said, in unison. Jimmy shook his head as Laika said, “We should stay together.” Tommy nodded, and redoubled his grip on Mira and Ellie’s hands.

“Big house first,” Jimmy said, and they scuttled across the campus, through the empty fields. The grass had been trampled down, and any remnants of the ill-fated summer projects had been ground underfoot. They slipped into the main house silently, through an unlocked backdoor. The big industrial kitchen was empty, with the cabinets and closets thrown open like someone had rummaged through.

Jimmy pushed ahead to cross into the cafeteria, but Laika slowed, considering the empty shelves. “Someone took everything that was left here,” she said. “I don’t think the teachers would have done that. There’s not even salt left.” She was right, but there was nothing else they could do. They continued on.

There was no one in the big house. Not even bodies. Half the students had stayed behind that morning; those who hadn’t received a specific invitation to the day’s event. Jimmy’s brain reared back from the implications of that idea, and he put it from his mind. One thing at a time. They had gotten home. Now they had to find Mr. Park.

But he wasn’t in the big house, and he wasn’t in the classrooms or gymnasium. Jimmy turned in a circle under the dying sun, considering the shadows sinking over the campus. “The comm system is in the labs. It was in Mr. Park’s office, I think. Maybe he’s there.”

Laika nodded. She and Tommy looked at each other, and Tommy said, “I’ll stay with the littles in the big house. We’ll be in our room. You guys go look.”

Jimmy opened his mouth, ready to stop them from separating, but Laika shook her head, almost imperceptibly. They left Tommy with the littles and stole across the darkening campus to the laboratory building.

“I thought we said we weren’t splitting up,” Jimmy hissed, as they pushed open the door into the building. Laika considered him for a minute before she said, “Just in case there’s something we don’t want the littles to see.” Jimmy’s stomach dropped.

The labs were as silent as everywhere else was, but Jimmy’s ears still rang with the echoes of the phaser blasts. They tread carefully, fearfully, but every lab was empty. Mr. Park’s door, at the end of the central hall, was ajar when they reached it, and they exchanged uneasy glances. Mr. Park was quiet, and private, and his door was never open. But the comms unit--- an enormous, outdated, clunky thing compared to the sleek Starfleet one that Jimmy’s parents had kept in their Iowa house--- was on a table within.

Laika pushed the door further open. Jimmy crept in first. There was no one visible, but the comms unit was on. The front screen emitted a soft green glow. Jimmy approached it and tapped the playback button.

Mr. Park’s voice, harsh with his labored breathing, filled the room. They both jumped. “This is Lieutenant Commander Ashton Park, retired, sending an SOS from Tarsus IV. Something--- ah--- has gone terribly wrong. At first it was just a food shortage--- they said it was some fungus, but it was nothing I’d ever--- god! I’d ever seen.” Mr. Park’s breathing grew heavier, his breath hissing between his teeth. “Kodos has the only real comms relay, and he said he called for help, but I don’t think--- I don’t think he did. I don’t think anyone’s coming. And they took the kids. God, his guards took the kids. They had a list.” Jimmy turned to look at Laika, horror building in his chest, stealing his breath, but she wasn’t looking at him or the comms station. “He’s doing something. Kodos is up to something.” Mr. Park wheezed horribly, something wet rattling in his lungs. “This is it for me, but if anyone’s out there, monitoring any of these frequencies… get to Tarsus as fast as you can. While there’s still anyone to save. Park out.” Jimmy turned around to look where Laika was looking. A pair of dirt-stained work boots and two denim-clad legs poked out from behind Mr. Park’s desk. Laika shook her head, mouthing, “No, no, no, no,” and Jimmy grabbed her by the arm, towing her backwards.

“We have to get out of here,” he said, and she let him turn him from Mr. Park’s body and away from the office. Jimmy left the comms relay on but shut the door behind them.

“We can’t stay here,” he said, as they crossed back to the big house. “Some of the guards saw us running. They’ll come back for us.”

“The treehouse,” Laika said. “We’ll take the camping stuff and stay there. We can--- there’s probably some stuff we can still forage, at least for a few weeks, and drink from the streams. We can stay out there until help arrives.” Jimmy nodded.

“We can keep the littles safe. That’s what Madeleine and Natalya would do,” Jimmy said, and Laika’s lip trembled, but she nodded too.

The sun had set by the time they returned to the big house. They told Tommy what they needed to do, took all the camping supplies that they could carry, and left Farm School behind. As the six survivors headed back into the woods, towards their treehouse, their former home receded into shadow and was gone.

The four in-between weeks were fuzzier in Kirk’s memories than the beginning and the end. Most of the days blurred together in a mess of hunger and sleep, of stripping the bark off of trees with a knife and digging out the soft wood inside to eat; of telling the littles that collecting acorns was a game and whoever found the most would win; of the bright sharp days after stealing something worth eating from the town when they were brave or dumb enough to risk getting caught by the guards who still hunted runners on the streets. Kirk let most of those memories spin by them in blurry streaks, waiting for the memories of the days that mattered.

There was the day that the littles were too weak to climb the rope ladder anymore, and the big kids were too weak to carry them up. Jimmy packed up their sleeping bags and iodine tablets and tossed them down out of the treehouse, and Laika led them to an old animal warren that she had found while scavenging. Whatever large creature had created the den in the roots of the tree was long gone, and they crawled down into it gratefully. If Jimmy was honest with himself, he wasn’t sure how many more times he could have made it up the ladder before eventually falling--- the exertion made him dizzy, and his hands were too weak to grip the rope ladder. The den was more dangerous than the treehouse had been--- closer to town, closer to the ground, and every once in a while they heard deep voices of adults echoing through the trees. But they didn’t say so out loud.

In the beginning, before there was only the hunger and then the numbness, Laika and Jimmy and Tommy had harsh, whispered conversations about trying to save their classmates. What had they been taken from Farm School for? If terrible things were happening to them, shouldn’t they try to help them? They had no weapons, no help, no way to fend off an army of Kodos’s murderous guards if they tried to free their classmates, but talking about taking action kept away the urge to lay down and die.

Then, three weeks after the massacre, Laika came back with one expired can of sweet potatoes and a haunted, ragged look that Jimmy hadn’t seen on her before. He dragged her down into the den, catching her when she stumbled on her feet. Tommy leapt up to grab her other arm, and even with both of them holding on she trembled so badly that Jimmy thought she would vibrate out of her skin and into a puddle. They set her on the ground, used one of their hunting knives to wedge the top of the can off, and split the meager amount between the six of them.

“I saw Gemma,” she whispered, later that night. Jimmy sat, back against the wall of the warren, watching the tunnel entrance. Tommy lay with his back to it, one of the littles curled up against him for warmth. Laika sat cross-legged between them, no longer shaking but with a thousand-yard stare that seemed to burn through the wall of their safe hidey-hole, like she could see all the way back to the town. “There was a house with all the doors open, and I could see the kitchen… I thought I might get in and out, that there was no one inside.”

“Gemma was in the house?”

“Her parents live here,” Laika said dully. “Or, lived. They were all dead.”

Tommy closed his eyes. Jimmy said, “Starved?”

But Laika shook her head. “I don’t think so. They didn’t have food either, like I thought they might, but there was something else wrong with them. Their skin was all gray.” Jimmy shivered. “I looked everywhere, but that was all they had,” Laika said, lifting her chin at the now-empty can. “But they weren’t going to eat it.”

They sat in silence, listening to the quiet rustling of the trees outside, until Tommy unscrewed the lid to one of their bottles of stream water and offered it to Laika. She shook her head. “I drank enough out of their faucet,” she said.

“Fancy-pants,” Jimmy said, and he took the bottle when Tommy passed it to him. Laika laid down where she had been sitting, between Tommy and the wall, and Jimmy squeezed both of their hands before moving to lay between the littles and the entrance to the den. His bones pressed uncomfortably against the ground, but he curled up next to Mira and Ellie and fell asleep.

Jimmy woke up a few hours later. It stunk of warm skin, of sickness and rot. The earth was hard beneath his body. It felt like his hip bones, his tailbone and shoulder blades, each of his knobby vertebrae, were pressing a bruise against the inside of his skin where they rested heavily against the ground. It was mostly dark out, no sunlight to illuminate the rabbit-warren tunnel, only the faint light of a waxing moon providing any visibility. The shadowed bodies of his pack lay alongside him in gentle repose. He counted them off: one was him, two was Ellie, three was Mira, four was Kevin, five was Tommy. At six, he jerked to a halt. Something wasn’t right. Before he was aware that he was moving he had scrambled across the dirt to her: Laika, her brown hair a rat’s nest of dirt and leaves, unmoving.

“No, no, no,” he whispered, and shook Tommy’s shoulder. “Tommy, wake up!” Her unnatural stillness had caught his attention: now that he was next to her, he could see more clearly the graying waxy pallor of her cheeks and lips, the immobile smoothness of her eyelids. Tommy woke with a jolt, rolling over immediately. He pushed himself up with one hand and shook Laika with the other.

“Hey,” he said, his voice growly with sleep. “Wake up.”

Jimmy grabbed her other shoulder, shaking her, the other hand coming to rest against her gaunt cheek. “Hey. Laika. It’s not funny. Wake up.” But Laika did not wake up. Her eyes did not open. Her chest did not rise.

“Jimmy, what happened?” Tommy whispered.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said, disbelief raising his voice high like one of the little’s. “I just woke up, and I saw that---” He gagged, overwhelmed by the smell of dirty skin and death, sickness and rot. “Laika, wake up!” God, he was so tired, and so hungry, and there were only five of them now, and what would they do without her? She had been so brave, had stolen for them, had known the woods and the way around town better than anyone, and now she was so still and silent, and they couldn’t drag her back from wherever she had gone without them. He closed his eyes, and the cold, analytical half of him rose up and drowned the half of him that cried out at how unfair it all was.

“We have to move her,” Jimmy whispered as Tommy whimpered to himself, hand still mechanically rocking Laika’s shoulder.

“What? No! Why?” Tommy whispered back.

“We can’t let the littles see her like this,” he said.

“Where are we going to put her? We can’t bury her!”

“Down the mountain. Near the town. They won’t notice another body.” Jimmy hated the words as they came out of his mouth: practical, useful, awful. He wanted to lay down next to Laika, close his eyes, and follow where she had gone. But he couldn’t--- not with Tommy and the littles still here. Not with his last holo to Sam and his message to his parents still soaring through space. Tommy sniffled, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and nodded. Jimmy nodded back and shoved Tommy gently. Tommy got up, stepping carefully around the sleeping littles, and gingerly picked up Laika’s ankles. Jimmy wormed his hands under her shoulders and bent his arms under hers, picking her up off the ground. They backed up to the entrance and Jimmy went as slowly as he could, arms burning with the strain of Laika’s weight, until he felt the cool air of the night outside of their den on his back.

Together they carried her down the mountain in the worst parade of two Jimmy had ever been a part of, and they left her on the outskirts of the town. Tommy kissed her forehead and cried. They held hands as they stole quietly back to their safe hole. They crawled back inside, each refusing to let go of the other’s hand, and fell asleep curled together.

When the littles woke up the next morning, and Jimmy pulled them all into the circle of his arms and told them that Laika wasn’t coming back, they were too tired to cry. But he felt their shoulders deflate, sinking further into themselves, and he held them closer. Tommy leaned against him, keeping Jimmy from tilting over, and their broken family of five slept most of that day away, letting the sun rise and set without them.

The next day, Tommy left them in the den to scavenge acorns. He came back as the sun slipped down below the horizon, staggering with exhaustion, his empty, distended stomach painfully visible as he held his bounty in the bottom of his shirt like an apron. Using two rocks and all the strength left in their arms, he and Jimmy cracked them open and scraped the meager meat out of the shells to distribute between themselves and the littles. The underbrush had died with the changing of the seasons, and Laika had held most of their knowledge about what plants were edible. Without her, they would have to survive on acorns and tree bark and water.

The morning after that, Mira cried and wailed and refused to open her eyes, curled around herself. Ellie moaned in sympathy, and Kevin sat next to them and talked incessantly about anything that came into his mind, just to distract them. But his eyes were dim and glassy, and more often than not his sentences trailed off before he finished them. The morning after that, all three littles refused to sit up and curled together with heavy-lidded eyes.

“I’m going into town,” Jimmy said. For a second, it seemed like Tommy would argue with him, to ask him to stay. But in the end he just nodded and pulled Mira against his chest, rocking her side to side. Jimmy left them like that. If Laika was right, and something other than starvation was killing the colonists, there might be something left for them to scavenge. He would find it and bring it back to them, and the littles would sit up and talk to them, and they would survive another few days.

The leaves had begun to fall from the trees. If he had counted the days correctly, and there was no guarantee that he had, October would start soon. Last year, that meant harvest festivals and a gourd that was certainly not a pumpkin but could be carved like one to be set out on every doorstep. Gemma had won the carving contest--- but he wouldn’t think about Gemma now. He dragged his legs, step after step, down the mountain to the town.

He didn’t see another living soul, but the bodies of the colonists were everywhere. On their front stoops, laying behind houses, on the main street, their graying, decaying corpses bloated and stinking. Some of them looked emaciated, their skin shrink-wrapped to their bones. But Laika had been at least partially right: not all of the dead looked like they had starved. Jimmy felt the knobs of his own knees knocking together as he passed the grayish-blue body of a man who looked like he should have been in the peak of health, except for the fact that he was dead.

He stole from doorway to doorway, peering around corners, moving as quietly as he could. But for the first time since the day in the auditorium, he didn’t see the green-shirted law enforcement agents prowling the outskirts of the town, nor guarding the waist-high iron fence that circled the governor’s house. He ducked around another corner, closer to the center of town, and stumbled over a pair of legs in dark pants.

He reared back, his heart in his throat at the forest-green jacket on the torso, before he registered the sickly gray pallor of the body’s skin. This guard looked like Jimmy imagined he did; sunken cheeks, deep circles under his eyes, and the bones of his knuckles jutted out of the skin like mountains. “Not even guards get fed,” he muttered to himself, and he felt a savage relief that those who had not been sacrificed, who had done the sacrificing, had not been spared the horrors that they had endured. He moved to continue onward before pausing. The guard’s phaser was still tucked into his holster.

Jimmy held his breath and bent over the body. It was stiff, unmoving, as he reached with shaking fingers to unclip the strap and slide the phaser out. He watched the body nervously, but it did not awaken to grab him. He glanced at the settings on the phaser, but he didn’t know what they meant, so he left them as they were and stuck the weapon in the waistband of his ratty jeans.

He had only taken one step away from the body when there was a crackle. He spun, horrified, but the guard still hadn’t moved. The crackling noise came again.

“My chosen ones,” Kodos rasped. His voice came through an ancient portable radio, clipped on the other side of the guard’s belt. Jimmy froze as that voice pierced through the fog of hunger and exhaustion, lighting up his brain with fear and anger. Why had so many people died, why had Laika died, and Kodos still got to live? Kodos coughed. “The grand experiment must end here. There is no path forward. Forgive me.” He wheezed again, voice quieting. Jimmy hunched next to the corpse and the radio, ears straining. “If anyone is out there, heed me. We must burn it down.” He reeled back.

“Burn it down. Destroy the evidence. Cleanse this place.” Kodos coughed, and then the crackle of another radio breaking through the static interrupted him.

“I hear you, sir,” someone else’s voice muttered, weak and ragged. “I can do it.”

“I owe you… a debt of gratitude,” Kodos said. Then the radio went silent. Jimmy froze on his haunches, consumed by his anger, replaying Kodos’s message in his head. Then something clicked, and he staggered to his feet. Blood dribbled slowly back into his weak limbs, but he forced them into movement. He turned back the way he had come and heaved his starving body back home. Kodos had called to burn it all, and someone had responded.

It had been a dry summer. It hadn’t rained in weeks. His friends were in the woods.

Lungs aching, muscles cramping, swollen stomach pinching in pain, he ran. Against the wishes of every bone in his body, he ran as hard as he could, straight down the center streets of the remains of the town, back towards the den and Tommy and the littles. He had to warn them. The woods were going to light up like a matchstick after the summer they’d had. They couldn’t have starved and survived for so long for Kodos to kill them like this, impersonally, anonymously. Madeleine and Natalya didn’t die in the auditorium so that Kodos could have the final word. Jimmy broke from the town and sprinted flat-out for the cover of the woods.

Stealth didn’t matter anymore. He screamed, “Tommy!” He sucked in huge, gasping breaths as his stomach threatened to rebel and his legs cramped and his knees ached. “Tommy! Get up!” He staggered through the woods, his vision going black at the edges as his body tried to collapse, but he shoved himself up and kept going, screaming for his friend.

Finally, up ahead, the enormous tree that had sheltered them--- and from the roots of it, an addled Tommy and littles emerging into the sunlight.

“Jimmy?” Tommy rubbed one eye, dizzy in the sudden brightness. “What happened?” Jimmy opened his mouth to respond when they heard it. Further up the mountain, something snapped and popped, then rustled, then roared. The fire caught.

“Run,” Jimmy said, grabbing Kevin and swinging him onto his back as Tommy grabbed Mira and Ellie’s hands. “Run!” His body protesting every step, his spine bending under Kevin’s weight, Jimmy and Tommy fled. Something cracked, and a hot gust of wind pressed them forward, singeing their hair and burning their backs. Mira started to cry. It was still somehow better than her half-dead silence from that morning.

“What---?” Tommy gasped out, footsteps pounding in time with Jimmy’s.

“Kodos,” Jimmy spat. “Fire.” Tommy moaned with fear, but when Ellie stumbled at their speed he hefted her onto his back. Behind them, the woods that had been their shelter and salvation erupted into an inferno. The flames caught the few leaves that hadn’t fallen and spread in a crown fire over their heads as they pelted out of the forest. Out of the corner of his eye, Jimmy could see it racing down the hill, almost even with them. Tears streamed down his face from fear and the smoke, which caught in his lungs, stung his skin. He could see similar tracks running down the dirt on Tommy’s face.

They had the littles. They had each other. They broke from the cage of the treeline as the fire leapt at their heels and caught in the dry autumn grass of the open plain between them and the town. The grass blazed up immediately, and Jimmy’s legs, his hips and back and shoulders burned with it. Tommy cried out and swung Ellie up too, away from the fire, her screams drowned out by the roar of the crown fire above.

Ahead, there was one patch of unburned safety that Jimmy could see. He cut towards it. “The road!” Tommy followed him, coughing as he ran, and they covered the distance to the hard-packed dirt as fast as they could. They staggered onto the dry earth as the plain behind them sparked and hissed.

Mira moaned, and the pathetic little sound broke through Jimmy’s panic as the pain of their exertion set in. He let Kevin slide to the ground, and the friction of the little boy’s clothes against his scorched skin was like being burned all over again. Ellie had gone very, very pale, the only shock of color on her skin the angry red of her legs and feet.

Tommy wobbled, and Jimmy grabbed his elbows, keeping him upright.

“Stay with me, okay?”

“It hurts, Jimmy,” Tommy said, and Jimmy didn’t dare look down over his shoulder to his back. His clothes were sloughing off of him, destroyed. Kodos couldn’t have him like this.

“Just a few steps more,” Jimmy said. He took Kevin’s hand in his and gently picked up Mira. “Can you walk with me? Just a few more?” Tommy wavered on his feet, but Ellie slid her hand into his and he nodded.

“It’s just a little further,” Jimmy said. “Then you’ll feel better.” There was a reservoir on the other side of town; even the farm’s irrigation system had been hooked up to it. Jimmy had never prayed as hard as he did that moment for there to be water in the reservoir still. Step by excruciating step, he led them down the road for the first time since the massacre day. Tommy fell silent and his eyes sometimes slid shut, but he held Ellie’s hand and walked on. Jimmy lost the feeling in his legs, but Mira let him put her down after a few minutes and she limped alongside them. The fear of guards or Kodos never really went away, but they didn’t see another living being on the road. The fire burned on the other side of the town, its roar muted by blessed distance and halted by the paved roads. Minutes later, or maybe hours, he was peering over the stone lip of the reservoir. The drought had done its damage, but there was a few blessed feet of water within. He found the stone steps leading down into it.

Jimmy walked the littles down into the water. They stood still and quiet as he stripped their burned clothing away from them before stepping into the water with them. Then, once they were carefully ensconced in the water where it was shallow enough for them to stand, he stripped his own clothing away. The phaser he had stolen, somehow still in his jeans despite his pell-mell flight, got dropped on top of his pile of clothes along with his t-shirt before he followed the littles into the water. He didn’t know if it was clean, but he couldn’t bring himself to care: it was cool, and there was enough to stand in, and it felt like heaven. Tommy’s clothes dripped off him, shredding as he pulled his shirt over his head, and his back was a mess of dirt and singed skin. But he sloshed into the water, eyes closing in relief, and the five of them drifted as the fire burned itself out on the other side of town. Smoke billowed overhead, clouding the teal sky with the angry black smog of organic matter. The ash fell like dirty snow. They still didn’t have anything to eat, but they filled their bellies with water, and it almost felt like being full. As the sun slipped down behind the horizon, they piled together on the day-warmed terrace steps and slept.

A high, distant droning woke Jimmy from his restless sleep, early the next morning. It wormed into his dreams, filling his mind, before his subconscious recognized it and he jolted awake. Kevin tipped away from him as he shot upward, scrambling for his jeans. Tommy’s eyes opened slowly.

“Where’re you going?” His words were slurred, but Jimmy didn’t have time to wait for him to wake up. If he was right, it wouldn’t matter.

“Shuttle!” Jimmy grabbed the phaser and his t-shirt, jabbed it into the waist of his pants and dragged it over his head. “I’ll be back!” His whole body felt alight with something he almost didn’t recognize--- hope, a hope so big that it hurt to breathe. He sprinted up the terraced steps, cocking his head to one side and scanning the sky as he ran. It was just past daybreak, the true teal of the sky still warming up from the inky black of night. He ran towards what he thought was the source of the sound, straight up the road from the reservoir towards the town. Maybe he could shoot the phaser in the air and get the attention of the pilot? They had to be looking for the colonists: whether it was a trader or a rescue shuttle or even just a random traveler, they had to be looking for the people who lived here. It must have already landed; he didn’t see anything in the sky. He followed the high humming of an active engine through the town square, past the cursed town hall, past the burnt husks of houses unlucky enough to be built from wood instead of brick. The land to his right was scorched black earth, ash as far as the eye could see. Eerie black fingers of burnt trees reached for the sky. He tore down the road towards the song of the engine.

“I’m here! I’m over here!” He hollered as loud as he could until his throat burned, but he didn’t see anyone. There was no movement, but the roar of the shuttle was growing so loud that it was vibrating the air around him. A shuttle meant people. People meant help.

Jimmy skirted the outer fence of the governor’s house, running along the northernmost edge. His hand brushed the iron of the latticework, and it trembled with the force of the engine. It had to be closer. He passed the back edge of the house and skidded to a halt.

The governor’s backyard was an enormous expanse of burnt grass and bushes, and parked in the center was a black shuttle. As Jimmy’s heart pounded and he cried out in outrage and disbelief, he registered three details in stark relief.

The first was that the Kodos’s guards had exchanged their hunter-green uniforms for black ones. Two of them held up a sagging gray body between them, and a third circled them with a plasma rifle in hand.

The second was that the shuttle door was open, and a fourth guard leaned out of it, reaching for the body.

The third was that the body was staggering to its feet, lifting its head. It was Kodos. He was alive. His horrible uncanny eyes were alight in his gaunt and crevassed face.

This was a mistake. This had to be a mistake. Help could not have arrived for him, after what he had done. What about the littles? What about Tommy? What about him?

He screamed out, “Hey!” The procession of guards and the devil himself paused, all four of their heads turning to look at him. “Help us!”

Time slowed as the guards looked at him, on the other side of the fence, then looked at each other. Jimmy grabbed the fence between them, shaking with the force of his hope and disbelief, and watched as they looked away from him and kept walking.

They kept walking. They were going to put Kodos on the shuttle and take him away and leave them here. Fury like Jimmy had never felt before rose like a tsunami within him, drowning out all reason and leaving only the knowledge that Kodos did not deserve to be rescued from the ruins of the colony that he had destroyed.

There was a phaser tucked into the back of his jeans. The cool metal of the barrel dug into his back. He took it out and, like he was shooting skeet back on the farm with Sam, sighted along it. He saw Kodos’s fine gray hair and craggy face on the other side.

He fired.

The head of the nearest guard snapped up at the whine of the weapon. He locked eyes with Jimmy and, without hesitation, stepped directly in front of the bolt of energy meant for Kodos. Jimmy watched in frozen horror as the phaser fire hit the guard and tore him open. He spun and dropped to the ground. Kodos glanced blankly at the body on the ground, just another sacrifice for him, and allowed the guard in the shuttle to grab his arm and haul him in. The guard with the rifle pointed it directly at Jimmy.

He had shot at Kodos and missed. The shuttle and the people on it weren’t going to help them. Jimmy stood his ground, phaser still raised, and glared at the guard, refusing to look at the rifle aimed at his head. He was going to die, but he was going to do it without flinching. In his periphery, he saw the last guard drag the body of his comrade into the shuttle. The blood from the wound glinted against the dirt in the early-morning sun.

The other guard came back around and pushed the barrel of the rifle down. “Leave it,” he said. “Look at him. He’s almost dead anyway.” With a final sneer the rifleman turned away. They swung themselves into the black shuttle, and the door slammed shut behind them.

Jimmy watched numbly as the shuttle lifted off vertically, soaring higher and higher until it was just a black dot against the blue sky. Then it was gone. He looked down again, and saw the blood of the man that he had killed drying on the hard-packed earth.

He threw the phaser as far as he could away from himself and, turning from the scene of his violence and failure, vomited up all of the water left in his stomach. He leaned back against the sharp metal of the fence and slid to the ground, staring blankly at the blackened edge of the prairie beyond the town. He didn’t know how long he sat there for before Tommy’s voice broke through his reverie.

“What happened?” Tommy was shaking him, panic on his face, and Jimmy felt guilty. He had meant to go back to them, but he couldn’t seem to shake the whine of the phaser out of his ears. It was hard to hear anything else over it. The littles hovered over his shoulder, their drawn faces pinched with worry.

“Nothing,” Jimmy said, with a glance at the littles. He coughed, stomach acid burning in his throat, and let Tommy help him up. “I think this house is empty now, though. Let’s see if there’s anything in there to eat.”

“Isn’t this the governor’s house?” Tommy dropped his voice low as the littles straggled behind them in a line. “You don’t think he’s…?”

“He’s gone,” Jimmy said, and his own voice was rough and unfamiliar.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Jimmy said, and glanced down at the littles as Kevin snagged two of his fingers in his weakened grip. He led them into the empty house, and they walked quickly past the rooms where the bodies of guards decayed on couches and seated against walls, until they arrived in an enormous kitchen. It seemed to be made entirely of ceramic and aluminum, with two huge ovens set into the wall and a stovetop built directly into the counter. It was so different from the industrial-sized kitchen at Farm School, which managed to feel warm and cozy despite being built for mass production. This kitchen was cold and clinical. They opened all the cabinets and drawers, finding only utensils and pots and pans, before Tommy noticed a narrow door set back in a corner. He opened it, and revealed stairs leading down into a darkness that smelled like soil and rot. They both looked mistrustfully at it.

“I’ve got this one, Jimmy,” Tommy said finally, and left him standing in the kitchen with the littles. Jimmy continued to open cabinets and drawers, finding nothing but kitchen utilities, until Tommy climbed back up the stairs, wiping his hands on his already horrible pants.

“It’s awful down there,” Tommy said, but he clutched a can in his hands victoriously. “Like the summer projects all over again. But I did find this.” He wiped oily blue smears off the label, revealing a label for baked beans that had expired the year previous. They heated the beans up in a pot on the stove, reveling in the warmth from the electric burner, and the five ate directly from the pot with wooden spoons, just because they could. They dumped the pot and spoons in the sink without cleaning them.

They scavenged through the house, stealing blankets and pillows off of couches that were unoccupied, and found a room that didn’t stink too badly of decay--- a sunroom near the back of the house, through the windows of which Jimmy could see the flattened, desiccated grass where the shuttle had been. As the littles slept, their bellies not empty for once, Jimmy told Tommy, quietly, shamefully, what he had done. The sun was setting by the time he finished.

Tommy considered what he had said, turning the embroidered edge of a blanket over in his hands. Jimmy picked at the burned skin on his hands and tried not to think about the blood against the dirt.

Finally Tommy looked up, eyes flashing in fading light, and said, “Fuck ‘em. He probably deserved it.” Something in Jimmy’s heart unclenched. He and Tommy fell asleep facing each other, with a roof over their heads and the littles between them.

He awoke the next morning to shouting and movement, adults in red and blue and gold swarming into the room with phasers and comms. Jimmy flung himself upright, crouching over the littles, baring his teeth at the intruders before he recognized the familiar uniforms.

“Oh, my god,” the closest Starfleet officer said, a whirring tricorder in her hand. “You’re alive.”

The memories of the next month were a blur of pain and space. Jimmy and Tommy and the littles were beamed up together to the U.S.S. Valiant, where they were poked and prodded and tied to biobeds with IVs of fluids and nutrients. They were scanned with every machine in Medbay, it seemed, while the doctors spoke quietly to each other and refused to tell them anything about what the scans said. Not a single one of them stopped shaking for the first seventy-two hours.

After living feral for a month, adjusting to the sterility of a starship was excruciating. The littles screamed shrilly when Jimmy or Tommy were out of their vision. Jimmy ate a meal from the replicator and threw it up immediately. Tommy had to be sedated and restrained after the doctor tried to put him in the metal box of the dermal regenerator for his back. They refused to sleep apart from each other, and the whirs and beeps of the unfamiliar ship made it impossible to pretend that they were in their treehouse or the den. Jimmy whispered to Tommy that he was afraid of Kodos coming to find him, and Tommy held his hand in the dark of the room that they all shared. Under the harsh lights of the starship and after the dirt and blood and soot was washed away, their skin was an unhealthy gray, and every day medical staff took their blood and patted their heads and made nervous eye contact when they thought the children weren’t looking.

In the end, the captain and the first officer told Jimmy and Tommy, it was Lieutenant Commander Ashton Park’s last desperate call that got the Valiant to Tarsus in time. Kodos had never used the government relay to call for help, not even when the harvest first started dying.

Then there was the journey back to Earth. Tommy and their littles were shipped off to what remained of their families, and no one would tell Jimmy where they went. Jimmy’s own parents were waiting for him when he got to Earth. A week after he arrived home, Sam kicked his hospital door open and set up shop next to his bed while he slowly ingested three months’ worth of nutrients through an IV and finished regrowing his skin. Every night, he woke up screaming Kodos’s name, and his parents looked nervously at each other, and Sam stopped going home with their parents and instead dragged a cot into Jimmy’s hospital room.

Then Dr. Johns replaced the familiar Iowa family doctor that he had been seeing. Jimmy confessed that he wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t bear to be the only person breathing in a room, and he told Dr. Johns that all he could think about was Kodos coming back for him.

“Kodos is dead, Jimmy,” Dr. Johns had said kindly, reading the screen on the machine hooked up to Jimmy’s arm.

“You found him?” Jimmy sat up so suddenly he got dizzy, the hospital room swirling around him. Dr. Johns gave him an odd look.

“Governor Kodos died on Tarsus, Jimmy. In the fire that claimed everyone else.”

“No,” he said. “No, he didn’t. I told you, and I told the doctor on the Valiant. There was a shuttle! It came and got him!” Dr. Johns sat on the edge of his bed and pushed him back against the headboard with a gentle hand.

“Please, calm yourself,” he said. “You are very upset. You survived something awful. It is only natural that your thoughts are confused at this time.”

“I’m not confused,” Jimmy had insisted. “I know what I saw. And he got out.” Dr. Johns had a conversation with his parents outside his hospital room, and through the little window set into the door he saw his mother stare haughtily out the hallway window as his dad wiped a hand across his devastated face. Sam held his hand and said, “I believe you, Jimmy.” But Sam couldn’t convince their parents or Dr. Johns, and then Jimmy woke up from the same awful nightmare to find his old friends from his elementary school in Iowa standing behind his mom with balloons. They sat around him as he tried to sit up straight and felt the weakness in the muscles along his spine, and then after a painfully awkward hour they left, and he did not see them again until he started back at school the following year, when he only had to check in at the Dr. Johns’s clinic once a week for blood testing and dialysis. They said hi, and they signed each other’s yearbooks, and Jimmy skipped the school dances and football games and a lot of his classes to climb up to the roof of the high school and stare at the stars instead.

Then he got to the Academy, and he met Elise.

“We’ve been keeping an eye on you,” she said to him during their first meeting, her eyes twinkling. “We knew you were going to be special.” He talked about Kodos and Tarsus, and it helped, until it didn’t. She taught him how to hide the parts of him that the IVs and dialysis and dermal regenerators didn’t fix. He met Bones, and made friends, and he was surrounded by people who didn’t know where he had been and what it had done to him, and he was happier than he’d been in years, despite the nightmares and the panic attacks and the grief. He missed Tommy and the littles, but Elise said that she’d checked in on them and that they were doing well, and at the Academy he got to learn by doing and experimenting for himself the way he had at Farm School. Then he’d graduated, and worked his way up the ranks despite the ceaseless fear that Kodos would hunt him down someday, and eventually he became a captain and was given the Enterprise. The ghosts of Tarsus lived in him, but he had bricked them behind a wall that got thicker and thicker with every passing year.

It wasn’t until he had gone and fallen in love that he had been forced to reckon with the fact that he still carried those ghosts at all.

☆☆☆

The memory-stream faded, leaking away into the abyss. Kirk stood in the black of the meldspace. His whole soul ached with grief and remembrance, but there was a clarity to it. There was still a wound in him, one that had healed poorly, but in the telling, some of the rot in him had been finally cleaned away.

Jim, Spock said, and it was with a slight jolt of surprise that Kirk remembered that he wasn’t alone. Spock’s voice was ragged. I grieve with thee.

Kirk bowed his head, and he sensed Spock’s mind curled around his, protective, comforting.

I will take us from the meld now, Spock said. You will rest. And then we must talk about what you showed me. The rough edges of Spock’s voice were smoothed over as he reasserted his control, and Kirk felt a flicker of unease at his words. He had tried to convince the rest of the world that Kodos had escaped, and had failed each time. But then Spock said, without preamble, I believe you, captain, and one more piece of Kirk’s anxiety melted away. There was a sense of rising, as if coming up from the bottom of a deep pool, and the blackness lessened until Kirk felt himself reemerge from a very long tunnel back into his own mind.

He still lay on his side, Spock’s hand pressed to his face and clutched between his own. His arm was numb beneath him, and his eyelids were sticky with stillness. He opened his eyes as Spock pulled his hand back from his face, extending and clenching his fingers. Spock’s eyes opened as the familiar noises of the Enterprise around him floated slowly back into his awareness: the hum of the warp drive, footsteps in the corridor, faint beeping from far away.

“That’s what I saw,” Kirk said. “That’s what I did.” He rolled over onto his back and stared up at his familiar ceiling. He was tired, all the way down to his bones. He felt as though someone had wrung his brain out like a sponge. “Can we discuss this in the morning?”

“Certainly,” Spock said, after hesitating only for a second. His voice was deep with disuse. Kirk closed his eyes and waited for him to get up.

He did not get up.

Kirk opened his eyes and turned his head. Spock still lay on his side, watching him. Rather than the pity or disgust Kirk expected, Spock’s face was open and warm.

“What?”

Spock hesitated, before reaching across the space between them and resting his hand on Kirk’s bicep. “I am disquieted by the possibility of you having died before I knew of your existence in our universe.” His fingers flexed, tightening on Kirk’s arm. “I have never been more grateful for your refusal to submit to the law of large numbers.”

Kirk closed his eyes, feeling the warmth of Spock’s palm on his skin. He brought his other hand to cover it, his fingers brushing the back of Spock’s wrist. They lay next to each other, their breathing slowing until they were inhaling in tandem. The post-meld exhaustion pulled at Kirk’s mind, the gentle rhythm of Spock’s breathing lulling him to sleep.

“Jim,” said Spock quietly. Kirk forced his eyes open again, fighting the weight of his eyelids. “Would you like me to stay?” Kirk looked at him, trying to read his expression--- the Vulcan’s face was neutral, watching him in kind. But his arm was still stretched across the distance between them, his hand steady against Kirk’s arm. Spock had walked unflinchingly beside him through every memory of the worst days of his life; he did not think that he would begrudge him his company now.

“Please,” Kirk said. Spock’s hand pressed against his arm before he sat up swiftly and stood.

“I will return momentarily,” he said, and Kirk nodded. Spock crossed the room, retrieved his clothing from his half of the closet, and vanished into the bathroom. Kirk heard the air recycler kick on at his entrance, and he pressed his hands to his eyes.

Despite everything, despite his grief and trauma and the ghosts and his failures, he felt the irrepressible start of a crooked smile forcing its way onto his face. He felt lighter. He felt free. He had shared everything that Elise had told him could never be shared, and Spock had not run screaming from the room or removed him from duty. He had told Spock about Kodos and the shuttle, and Spock had believed him. Showing Spock what he had done, what he had failed to do, hadn’t been the end of the line. It was only the beginning of the conversation. And then Spock had reached out to touch him. He wasn’t alone.

Spock reentered in the tunic and pants he slept in, with his makeup gone and smelling faintly of mint. Kirk sat up. Spock met his eyes.

“You know,” Kirk said, before he could chicken out. “That couch is not the most comfortable piece of furniture to sleep on.”

“I did not object to it,” Spock said, but he clasped his hands behind his back and cocked his head slightly.

“It’s not awful, but the bed is better for a proper rest.”

“Indeed,” Spock said slowly, and Kirk saw a hint of that daring steal into his eyes, glinting in the half-dark. “What do you propose, captain?”

“I think the most logical course of action is to share the bed,” Kirk said. “It’s been a long night. And we’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

“I had assumed the day would be the same size as all other days, but I am curious to hear why you think otherwise,” Spock said, and he crossed the room to the bed. Kirk scooted backwards so he could slide beneath the comforter, and Spock joined him.

“Computer, lights to zero,” Kirk said. He tried to steady his breathing, sink into the sleep that his exhausted brain wanted, he couldn’t. Though his brain unhelpfully, unsurprisingly supplied him with the image of the shuttle taking the governor away again, and he could still feel the lingering dread and exhaustion in his limbs, the fear that Kodos would hunt him down had lost a little of its strength. Even if Kodos did find him out here, he was only human, and there was a Vulcan laying in Kirk’s bed. Spock would tear Kodos apart if he came anywhere near him again. The thought was comforting, but he still couldn’t convince his mind to rest. His memories were too close to the surface. He lay in the darkness instead, listening to Spock breathe.

“Jim.” Spock’s sudden voice spooked him.

“Yes?”

“You are unable to sleep.”

Kirk huffed out a laugh. “Something like that.” He heard Spock shift, the sheets rustling against his sleep clothes. Then a long, hot arm snaked around his torso and pulled him backwards, until he was pressed with his back to Spock’s chest, Spock’s arm over his waist.

“You find physical contact soothing,” Spock murmured, and his breath ghosted over Kirk’s ear.

“But you don’t,” Kirk said. He should pull away, allow Spock his space, but---

“I do when it is you,” Spock said, and Kirk was shocked into silence. “I appreciate the confirmation that you are near and safe.” The warmth of Spock’s chest, the steady beating of his heart against Kirk’s spine, and his even breathing against his neck was doing more for him than Bones’s sedatives ever did. His eyelids grew heavy, and the whirling images through his mind slowed and dimmed, losing their sharp edges, as he breathed in time with Spock.

“Rest now,” Spock said softly, and he did.

#spirk #spirk fan fic #k/s fan fic #star trek fan fiction #fake married #regulatory relations #my writing

11 notes · View notes

musingginger · 2 years

Text

rainbow in the dark // eddie munson

Synopsis – After getting out of the Upside Down and wounding Vecna, you tend to Eddie’s wounds and try to put the pieces back together.

Pairing- Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader, Eddie Munson x You

Warnings – season 4 spoilers!, season 4 rewrite (no one dies or gets left behind in the Upside Down), some cursing, NON VERBAL/NO DIALOGUE, incredibly angsty, fluff, smut, 18+ only, minors DNI, nipple play, p+v sex, soft!eddie, a tad bit of possessive!eddie, softdom!eddie, crying, emotional breakdown at the end (don’t worry, it ends, sort of happily).

Word Count – 3.3k

A/N- This one got me pretty emotional y’all, which is probably why it took me forever to write. I am fascinated by the way people process grief and big emotions and this work definitely dives into that. I also wanted to challenge myself and write a completely non verbal fic, which was quite the challenge! When I was editing, rereading the ending made me tear up a little bit, so I hope y’all feel the same way about this fic as I do. Any constructive criticism would be appreciated. Also, this is only edited by me, so apologies if there are typos. And of course, if you enjoy it, please reblog! Hope you enjoy! Thanks! <3

I do not grant permission for anyone to use my work. Under no circumstances, repost my work on any other sites. I do not consent to anyone taking my work and posting it as their own.

You could barely come to grips of what happened in the last few days.

You watched your boyfriend play the most metal concert of all time on top of his trailer in the Upside Down. After which, you had to endure his battle with the demobats. Watching him fall from the bites, it was almost too much to handle.

You’ll never forget hearing the screams coming from Dustin, how your heart pounded in your chest as you ran, your throat sore with screams of your own. Grabbing your shield, you were able to protect the three of you long enough to get out of there. You don’t know how you did it, it was all a blur, but luckily, you and Dustin got there in time, pulled Eddie through the trailer gate and to safety.

Steve, Robin and Nancy weren’t too far behind after wounding Vecna. You all knew that he wouldn’t be down for long, but for now, you were safe.

The drive home was silent. No music played. Just the hum of the engine.

Eddie was numb.

The near-death experience shook him to his core. You felt his legs tremble pressed to yours the whole ride home. His hand griped your thigh like it was the only thing keeping him on this plane of existence. It took everything you had to hold back tears. You placed your hand on the back of his neck, scratching his head lightly.

Steve dropped you and Eddie at your house. No one said anything as you both got out of the caravan and Eddie brushed passed the bushes that covered your front door, holding your hand the entire time.

Once inside, he double locked the door, something he’s never done before. You looked at Eddie as he stood motionless, hand pressed against the door, forehead flush with the wood.

Shell shocked almost.

You could see that he was still trembling, the chain on his jeans glistening in the soft light coming from the hallway. You help Eddie take off his sneakers and socks before kicking off your own. Tenderly, you pull him towards the bathroom.

You turn on the yellow light, causing both of you to squint. You try to pull your hand away carefully, but Eddie has a strong grip on you, unable to let go. With your free hand, you turn on the hot water tap and gently run your wrist through the stream to make sure water comfortable for him.

Your only concern is for him.

As steam starts to fill the small, yet cozy, bathroom, you gently take off Eddie’s outer layers. Jacket first, then Hellfire shirt. Finally, his pants and boxers.

Once the water was hot enough, you coax Eddie towards the clear water, careful of his injuries. He looks down, slowly putting his foot into the wet tile. Sliding down into the shower, making it a murky red brown. He quickly turns his head towards you, locking his eyes with yours.

Those chocolate brown eyes. Full of hurt, of worry, of vulnerability. His grip on your hand tightens, an unspoken need fills the air.

You nod, knowing. You only let go of his hand to strip yourself, sliding into the shower behind him. Eddie presses his body into yours, immediately knowing home.

His home is with you.

His head presses into your shoulder, warm water trickling down his back, making his fluffy curls limp from the weight of the water. Eddie lets out a gentle sigh of relief into your shoulder. Relief of what, you’re not sure.

Luckily the bats didn’t bite too deeply into his skin, and most of his wounds would be fixed with Neosporin and gauze. Fuck, you were thankful for that.

You grab the bar of soap, lathering it in your hand. Then you start the gently rub it across his shoulders, down his chest and up again. The bubbles turn brown against the bar. Eddie let out a small cry as you clean his wounds, which you soothed away with gentle touches.

Once you feel like his body has been scrubbed enough, you do the same on your own shoulders. Though not as dirty as his, you too needed to wash away the bad.

Grabbing Eddie’s shampoo, you release his hand to squeeze some into your hands. When your hands release, Eddie lets out a soft, pleading groan as you turn him around, getting him to face away from you.

You work up a froth from the shampoo and slowly start to work it into Eddie’s long, curly locks. Tenderly, you move your fingers through his coils. Your brow furrows as you hold back your own tears, fingers twirling through his hair. Deep brown and rust colors fill the bath water dripping down his back.

You do the same with his (really your) conditioner. Delicately, you detangle each spiral, watching them fall into a pretty pattern on his head.

Once you feel like he is washed, you can attend to your own hair. He turns to face you, burying himself again in your shoulder. Quickly washing and conditioning your hair, the entire time Eddie holds onto your waist gently. Silently turning him back around to face away from you, you carefully comb through his hair with your fingers and, surprisingly, you find yourself wanting to braid it.

Slender fingers trail through the long waves and start to braid it. Cautiously at first, Eddie didn’t typically let you braid his hair. But when no protestations come from the metalhead, you continue. Warm fingers weave through the tangles, making a plait starting at the crown of his head and working downwards.

You wished you were doing this under different circumstances.

Mostly clean now, you turn off the taps, watching as the dirty water swirls into the drain and use your hands to press Eddie into your chest. You both stand there until the tub is devoid of water, and all that’s left is your bodies.

After a fair amount of time has passed, you gingerly coax Eddie out of the steam and into a fresh, fluffy towel. You tuck it in around his waist before attending to your own, wrapping it around your torso.

He can’t look at you.

Wrapping a towel around yourself, you feel the grip of his rough fingers against your forearm. You find his fingers and lace them with yours, reassuringly.

He’s here. He’s safe. You love him. And he loves you.

You press your forehead against his, breathing him in. Even with the shampoo, the lingering smell of tobacco fills the air. You both close your eyes, enjoying the comforting steam that still filled the bathroom. After a few minutes, you force yourself to pull away from him.

Now you start the tedious task of bandaging him up. Finding the Neosporin, gauze, and bandages in the medicine cabinet, you dump your supplies into the sink. Your eyes scan over his body, finding each cut, scrape and bite. Squeezing ointment onto your fingers, before spreading it every angry red mark. Eddie lets out a wince each time, but you reward his patience with the process with a small arm squeeze or a shoulder kiss.

When you’re all done, you pull him into the bedroom, looking for some clean clothes for you two to wear. The only light guiding you was streaming in through the hallway. Golden hues filter through the abyssal blackness.

It was so dark outside. Too dark. Not even the pale blue moonlight lit your way.

While your hands were filled with band tees and sweatpants, you feel the rough grip of his hand on your shoulder, which makes you turn towards him. His eyes lock with yours. You get lost in the deep chocolate depths of his eyes, wide and bottomless.

He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell you every thought running through his head. But he couldn’t say anything.

Rough fingertips gently slide down your arm, finding your hipbone. Eddie’s wide hand palms your skin delicately. His other hand hovers over your cheek, like he’s not sure what he wants to do exactly. Furrowing his brow, he closes his eyes, shaking his head slightly.

You lean in, cheek brushing against his, as your fingers scratch the curve of his lower back. Eddie breathes softly in your ear; a sound of relaxation and concern leaves his throat. The tips of his fingers finally connect with your neck, so soft you barely could feel it if not for his pulse.

He lowers his head to your shoulder, lips pressed into the crook connected to your neck. Your warm scent fills his nose. Floral, amber and musk.

Eddie takes a small, shuffled step towards you, his bare chest pressing against the fluffy fibers still covering your body. Suddenly overcome by emotion, you press your face into his hair, holding back tears.

Eddie feels you shudder, pulling you into a hug, broad hands leaving warm handprints onto your shoulders. As hard as Eddie tried to hold it back, a hot tear hits your shoulder. Sniffling into your hair, breathing in your scent, reminding him that it’s over.

He’s here. He’s safe. You love him. And he loves you.

He pulls back, once again pressing his forehead into yours, letting out a sigh, noses brushing against one another. It was so silent. Other than your breathing, there was a void. Not even the nighttime noises fill the room. Energy buzzed, making the room shake with your energy.

In a flash, his lips are pressed onto yours. Hot, hungry passion breaks over you. His lips are pressing so hard into you that it hurts, a good hurt. It was a hurt that made you know that he was never going to leave you.

He needed you. Now.

He needed to feel something.

Calloused fingers weave through your damp hair, gripping it tightly as Eddie grips your waist with his other hand. You feel the desperation pulsing through his skin. You needed to feel him just as much as he needed to feel you.

Eddie’s strong tongue pries open your mouth, teeth biting your bottom lip, leaving dark red bruises. Both of your hands grip the sides of his jaw, pulling him in harder.

Wanting him closer. Needing him closer.

The pads of your thumbs leave deep depressions on his skin and hot pink marks on the apples of his cheeks. You feel his nails lightly digging into the nape of your neck as he kisses you with white hot passion. Eddie’s pulse throbs against the skin on your waist and you feel it quicken with every deep kiss.

He pushes you up against the bedroom wall, careful not to hit your head on the drywall. Eddie lets out a low groan as his lips break from yours, moving down your neck. You feel the hot flash of his teeth grazing against your skin, warm wet kisses pressing against the sensitive skin.

Moaning softly as you close your eyes, wanting to just feel in the moment. He leaves a path of burning fervor up and down the side of your neck. Each kiss harder and rougher than the one before. You nails dig into the muscles of his lower back, holding him in place.

Eddie grasps your earlobe in between his teeth, giving it an intense tug, making you cry out. Nipples hardening under the terrycloth fabric still covering your body. Eddie grabs your hands from behind him, throwing them up above your head.

His fingers lace in yours as he holds them there. You try to catch his lips once again, but he pulls away. His pupils dilated, his eyes almost black, dark, and deep with desire.

He looked like a feral hungry animal, and you were his prey.

You open your mouth to speak, wanting him to know that you were here for him for whatever he needed. A small sound left your lips, the beginnings of a word, but Eddie cut you off, pressing a hard kiss onto your mouth and crushing your body under his.

Softly, Eddie tucks a finger under the top of your towel, pulling back from your lips and looking at you, asking for silent permission. Panting, you nod, your body begging to feel his skin on yours, giving non-verbal consent. Eddie swiftly unhooks the towel from around itself, letting it fall to the ground.

Eddie’s hand relaxes around yours, setting you free, for now. You lean in to kiss his neck delicately. Sliding his hand over your back, slowly trailing his fingers along your spine up to the back of your neck as Eddie feels your warm breath against his ear. He turns you closer towards the bed.

Eddie slides his hand closer to the back of your neck and grabs a handful of your hair, tugging at it firmly as his hand wraps around it. Long tendrils getting caught around his rings. He leans in closer to you, pressing his lips against yours, biting at your bottom lip a little roughly, tugging at it with his teeth before letting it smack against your teeth as he lets go.

You whimper against his lips, hands finding their way to his waistline and his towel. Eddie slides his hand from your hair and slides it slowly over your shoulder. His large fingers wrap around your neck lightly, feeling a bit of a squeeze as your slender hands toy with his towel.

Eddie bites at your earlobe, his fingers tightening around your neck a little tighter. His hand reaches around to your backside and gives your ass a hard smack, making your feet jump slightly from the light pain. He then roughly grabs your ass, biting into your neck again.

You whole body was on edge, a coil ready to snap. You heart felt like it was going to explode out of your chest.

Your hands tremble as you loosen the towel around his slender torso. It falls to the floor, his cock released from the confines of the terrycloth. It springs up, pressed between your two bodies as Eddie roughly guides you onto your back on the bed.

Eddie falls on top of you, rough hand around your neck. He presses up just enough to bite at the deep red bruises he’s already left on your puffy lips. The tip of his pink cock gently brushes against your bundle of nerves, making you both groan with desire.

His kisses get desperate now. Panting cuts through the silent night as you both frantically grip at each other. He puts his fingers in his mouth, spitting on two of his digits before swiping it along the head of his cock. Eddie lines himself up with your already dripping pussy. Every second felt like a year. And neither of you could wait any longer.

Eddie places his free hand around your head, semi caging you in, as he slowly enters you. You let out a low cry as he stretches you sweetly and grip his forearm. He takes your hands and clutches them above your head, gently dominating you. The hand he had around your neck moves to your tits, the pad of his thumb flicking your diamond hard nipples.

Each thrust getting deeper, Eddie losing more of himself, lost in you. The tip of his cock taps at your G-spot with every deep stroke. It took everything you had in you to not cum right then and there.

Your fingernails dig into Eddie’s lats, leaving long red marks of passion. Or was it possession? You couldn’t tell in that moment. All you knew is that you needed him closer, you needed more of him.

Your right hand runs up along Eddie’s shoulders, over a bandage and into his hair. You grip the base of his neck tightly as he pulls your leg up, dying to get deeper. Unruly curls get tangled in your fingers, causing you to pull a little harder than you wanted to. Eddie didn’t care though.

A rough bandage rubs against your thigh, making Eddie wince, but the pain wasn’t enough to make him want to stop. You both find a steady pace, Eddie buried deep inside you. There was a mutual ownership in your love making.

Pretty sounds start to escape from your throat and into Eddie’s ear. The metalhead buries his head into your hair and neck, echoing your sounds. Your eyes close, goosebumps erupting all over your skin as you press your head back into the comforter.

The hand on your throat, moves to your neck and is replaced by hot, wet kisses from Eddie. His nose presses into the underside of your jaw as he closes his eyes, furrowing his brow. Torrid pants cover your neck as he slightly picks up his pace leaving droplets of moisture on your skin.

Warm, wet animalistic sounds add to the mixture of pants, groans, and sighs filling the room. You grip onto his hair tighter, as Eddie buries his face into your neck and jaw, pressing hard against your skin. You bite his shoulder, hard, making him let out a feral moan into your ear.

Legs start to shake for both parties as you climb the mountain to your climaxes. You were already teetering on the edge, begging to dive into the euphoric ocean together.

His bush was rubbing against your clit just right as you were desperately trying to hold on for him. Your eyes roll back into your head as you feel his movements become sloppy and erratic. Perfectly imperfect. You knew he was close.

Simultaneously, you both let out guttural screams as you cum together. The skin on both of you was speckled with shades of red and purple. You saw on Eddie’s shoulder the teeth mark your bite had left.

A small smile breaks out across your face for a second, forgetting everything that had happened and just enjoyed the moment. Eddie lets out a sharp chuckle, before suddenly overcome by emotion.

You feel a scorching tear fall onto your delicate skin. Eddie’s body becomes wracked with sobs, as tears stream down his face and into your hair. Low, mournful sounds leave his throat. He slides out of you and tries to roll away from you, covering his eyes, shaking uncontrollably.

You gently grab his shoulder, pulling him into you, softly shushing him. You adjust yourself against the headboard, pressing him closer to you, gently rocking him as he bawls. Running your fingers through his hair, brushing the mats away from his face.

You plant small kisses along his cheeks and forehead while his body let it out. Every scream, every cry, every moan was different from the one before. It made you choke up. Looking up to the ceiling, trying to fiercely hold back your own sobs, brushing back any tears that betrayed you. You had to be strong. You had to be strong for Eddie.

He’s here. He’s safe. You love him. And he loves you.

You stayed like that for a long while. So long that you watched as the color from outside turned from inky black to pale indigo. The sun was coming up.

The rocking eventually soothed Eddie and when you felt his grip soften against you, you knew the worst was over. For now.

Snuggling down into the bed, Eddie still held onto you, abet looser with every minute that was passing. You finally felt the vibrations of his soft snores against your throat. Pale light filtered into the room through a prism you had given Eddie for Christmas last year. The rainbow cascade against his skin, making him look angelic.

A rainbow after all that dark. You couldn’t help but snort at the irony which turned into a sniffle. One lone tear rolled down your cheek and you quickly brushed it away. You had to be strong. As you start to drift off, you say the mantra in your head once more.

He’s here. He’s safe. You love him. And he loves you.

tags: @theoreticslut @immatheoreticslut @misskittysmagicportal

masterlist

join my taglist!

#eddie munson #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson angst #eddie munson x reader #eddie x you #eddie munson x fem reader #eddie munson x female reader #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson fics #stranger things #stranger things 4 #eddie stranger things #fluff #stranger things angst #stranger things fluff #stranger things fanfiction #st4

224 notes · View notes

lastoreadoras · 10 months

Text

Looking for people to interact with

I've been much more outgoing lately, I'm not sure why! Despite this, I am still very bad at picking and choosing people to reach out to and message, so, to save time for everyone involved, I've made this post.

This post is asking for people to message me that also describes what exactly I want from our interactions! You will have to message me, though if you're feeling too shy to reach out in our DMs, sending a non-anonymous ask or directly replying to this post letting me know that you'd like a DM is a good way to get my attention and potentially receive a DM from me. See also: making my notifications blow up with a sequence of chained likes and/or reblogs on my posts.

Reblogging and especially liking this post specifically will not do much for putting you on my radar, because it's very easy to just like or reblog a post and doesn't take much effort, as opposed to messaging me or doing any of the things described above. If you're interested in connecting with me, please read this whole post (or at least look at the TL;DR) before reaching out to me!

Thank you in advance.

I am ace and I love meeting new people

To begin, I do NOT want a relationship in which there is only hypnosis and only kinky things. I am asexual, and while I am romantically attracted to basically every gender, I do not want to be horny 24/7. If you're looking for a committed (or gods forbid temporary) dominant/submissive or hypnotist/subject relationship, specifically only a dedicated sexual/kinky relationship, this post does not include you.

I am very affectionate

I love people! I love people so much and am always looking to make more partners and friends. There is a good chance that I will flirt at least a little, and will generally try to be very positive and overtly friendly in our interactions.

We'll still do hypnosis stuff

This does not mean I will not want hypnosis to be a part of our relationship- hypnosis is a very big part of my life, and is the root of how I've made most of my friends and especially my partners. I will eventually want hypnosis to happen between us (whoever the hypnotist shall be) and at the very least will want to be able to discuss the topic freely without judgement.

Video games good

I won't sugarcoat this next point- I am a gamer, I play on PC, use Steam, and heavily enjoy a wide variety of games. Specifics can be gleaned by questioning me, but I tend to lean toward roguelikes and co-op multiplayer games, be they designed specifically for co-op or simply offer the ability to play cooperatively with your friends. PvP games can be fun, but I definitely lean towards PvE titles.

Inherent bias

I adore women. Trans women particularly have a special place in my heart. This does not mean I will dislike anyone who isn't a woman or trans, but if you are feminine and/or transgender you will automatically gain some of my trust without having to do anything.

To clarify: video games

Over the course of our interactions, I will want to play video games with you, and I will want to hypnotize you or be hypnotized by you. That much is clear. If you don't play video games, that's okay, but as we are unlikely to live near one another, our options for doing things may possibly be limited. I will say, however, I may want to read something with/to you or watch anime/tv shows/movies with you. Simply sharing space and receiving attention can be enough, but I'm not very good at filling empty conversations with words as my social skills are somewhat limited.

Friend Zone

If you're already partnered up or don't wish to get involved romantically, I'm perfectly fine being your friend! I will still want hypnosis to be involved, but hanging out with friends is something I simply don't do enough and would be open to doing much more.

I only have one body

I am not always available 24/7 and am sometimes too busy to reply to messages. This does not mean I don't want to talk to you- I will tell you if our relationship isn't working, and barring extreme circumstances, will attempt to make it work. I have a few friends and partners already and if this post garners enough attention, will likely have even more, which means that I will not be available all the time. If you expect me to be 100% available every moment for you, this is probably not the relationship for you.

Allow me to summarize and recount the major points. (TL;DR)

We will not have being horny or sexual as the focus of our relationship.

I may be an introvert but I am liable to flirt with you and try to pry attention and affection out of you whenever possible.

We will discuss / engage in hypnosis (I know it's antithetical to the first bullet but it's necessary)

We will probably play video games. (on pc) If not, we will want to find an alternative.

I love women/feminine types, though if you're not a woman, that's perfectly acceptable, and I will appreciate your attention all the same.

It's okay if we're just friends! There's no pressure to become one of my partners, even if it is always an option.

We will not be spending every second of every day together, as I have existing friends and multiple partners to divide my attention. I will still try to answer your messages when I'm busy, but there are no guarantees.

Thank you!

Regardless if you read the whole thing or not, I hope you are well informed enough to make the decision of whether or not you want to reach out to me about this. It's worth noting that even if we're already acquainted in some way, this post is still an invitation for you to reach out!

Cheers! <3

#rambles

33 notes · View notes

Last Seen Blogs

sagarkokare

We Market Research

linkotemius

hyperfriki

Naked

chisid

無標題

somethingnotstraight

Untitled