#(but ty for real this was the sweetest softest prompt)

[daisychainsandbowties]

Mrs. Villaumbrosia cleaning out the beach house and just sending all Lilith’s notebooks to her professional address which Lilith is used to and not bothered by except there’s a graduate assistant who goes through all of it and digitizes all the data Lilith has kept since she was, what, 7? when she started really overcoming her writing difficulties. The GA compiles everything Lilith has; esp. roughly two decades of lumpfish data and emails Lilith a copy to approve for publication. Lilith’s only edit is to add Michael as a coauthor.

It starts with dozens of emails from her overeager grad student, taglines full of exclamation points, all caps, conga lines of commas ,,,,,,,LUMPFISH!!!!

Her mother sends it over in an old orange crate she found in the basement, and Lilith would have felt her hands shake if it had been her - and not Michael - who cracked the lid. If she saw how neatly her mother packed each notebook, adding wads of fabric to stop them from falling over.

Inside, also, are her father’s binoculars in their green leather case; old film and videotapes; an adult’s snorkeling mask that’s been cannibalized to fit a child’s head.

One of her old hoodies for stuffing, with a picture of a cartoon crab on the front. Tourist rubbish, given to her by a stall owner who saw her walking up off the beach in a t-shirt and shorts at the advent of a storm, shuddering from the chill and drenched in saltwater. He handed it to her, along with a can of Coca Cola he’d been saving to have with a cigarette after closing up the stall.

The notebooks are held shut with rubber bands so none of the loose pages escape. Her mother would have done this by hand.

But it’s not Lilith who finds this silent “i love you” hidden in an old crate, specially couriered from their old beach house. It’s her grad student, but the sight does at least arrest him.

(and Lilith won’t know this for another decade, but her mother was cleaning up the house to sell it. instead she puts it in Lilith's name. just… gives it to her, slots the keys into an envelope: to be delivered upon my death)

Michael describes how he shook sand out of some of the notebooks, the smell of the ocean dried into the pages when he cracked the spines again to sift through a summertime of drawings.

They’re precise, for the most part. Practical, with neatly described dimensions, notation in a scrunched-up hand because writing hurt, but even then it was impossible not to do it. She had to record what she saw underneath the water.

Sea urchins chewing through the holdfasts at the bottom of kelp, their bodies so bright with the water fleshing down past the moving canopy. Lilith, diving to the seafloor to watch them, armed with the ruler from her father’s old geometry set. Lilith, finding their fivefold symmetry, noting the length of each spine and gently prizing their tube feet from the rocks to carry one of them ashore.

And Michael is like her so he doesn’t balk when she describes slotting her penknife into its shell, little notes on how the spines still moved, and for how long. Observing them down on the sea bed and noting in a scrawl surrounded by water droplets “spines used for locomotion?”

There are drawings of her octopus friend. One, from memory, of her wrapped around Lilith’s arm, trailing her suckers up towards the elbow joint. She finds, scrunched in against this drawing, an almost indecipherable note that Michael mistook for a child’s attempt at an artist’s signature. But it’s not that - when she was eight she never dreamed that anyone would read her notes, or care as much as she did about the ocean. There, in tiny writing, she finds a note (to herself, perhaps?) that reads “me and Octi in july. it was warm.”

It’s a charter of one small stretch of coastline, every species hunted down and documented. She only dissected a few of them, just crabs and sea urchins, comb jellies and sea sponges and, once, a dead pyjama shark.

The others she only observed, diving until she was dizzy and only for as long as a breath could hold her.

Michael sends her the proof, and it’s beautiful. her coloured sketches and her simpler ones arrayed around the sections of commentary she sent him in return emails, over months and months and months. Next to that, her childish observations - crude science, but some of it astounds her. It’s almost poetry, or maybe it only seems like it, to her.

Because she lived it, lungs aching in the aching depth, watching the kelp sway and cast shadows. An octopus wrapped around her arm, following the span and clench of her fist with its little arms, watching the waves crash overhead but sitting calm in the drag of the undertow. It was the only peaceful place in the entire world, back then.

Lilith has found another one since then.

The proof copy of the book arrives festooned in bright customs stamps, stickers haphazard on the cardboard. Lilith scatters packing peanuts across her office floor when she opens it, makes a mental note to pick them up before paprika tries to eat them. The cover is what she expects, but it steals her breath. It’s the drawing of her octopus, tangled around the thinness of Lilith’s seven-year old arm. She can almost feel the water moving around her, the pressure of the suckers on her skin.

Camila finds her staring at it, coming gently into the room with a thermos of soup and half a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread under one arm. Hearing her, Lilith looks up, and there are tears in her eyes.

She blinks, slow, and Camila is there, leaning down to take Lilith's jaw in her hands, thumb swooping over her cheeks.

“It's here,” Lilith mumbles, inarticulate in the presence of her own tears.

And she can’t explain it, really.

Only that she was happy, back then. Curled up in her crab hoodie with her notebook, sketching the sea stacks that you can spot from on top of the cliffs. Her coloured pencils scattered in the sand as she switched between them, trying to capture the deep green of the kelp suffused in sunlight, the red trail of innards from the pyjama shark she hauled up onto the sand. Sea urchins and the quiet rustling of their spines. Jellyfish in their medusa-phase trailing their tentacles.

The peace of floating with them, of following fish and watching sessile creatures creep over the seabed. It was her home, her safest and most sacred place.

But she was also alone, and it was also lonely. Walking home to her unlatched window, she’d sneak down to steal crackers and cheese from the pantry, or cold cuts of ham from the refrigerator - bathed in that cold glow in her bare feet, hands covered in tiny punctures from handling sea urchins without care. She used to pour alcohol-based hand sanitizer over them in the kitchen sink, wincing, and then find the aftertaste of it on the crackers and the cheese.

“I just…” she leans into Camila's touch. “I miss being there, and I don't.”

Camila nods - and Lilith thinks she does understand, growing up poor, hungry, looking after her little brother when the money ran out mid-week.

She leans down, and Lilith rises to meet her, feeling for an instant like she’s back home, surging up towards the air and the light.

Cam kisses her, and Lilith lets her eyes flutter closed because this is it. Her second, sacred, peaceful place. And maybe she’s a fool for finding it in Camila's mouth, but Lilith is a lover of short-lived creatures.

And this one, at least, can also love her back.

#palmer station au #camilith #warrior nun #lilith the marine biologist 🥺 #well done anon... you made me so much worse #(but ty for real this was the sweetest softest prompt) #casper writes

[asokatanos]

do you have any fic recs for the mentalist?

I told you I’d post some for you tonight and here they are!! Unfortunately I did a lot of reading while I was still obstinately REFUSING to make another ffnet account, so I didn’t save like a good 90% of what I read, some of which was excellent. But here are some of the ones I did +fav or whatever they call it there. No particular genre since your ask was open ended, but, well-

(sorry in advance - these are mostly ffnet links but they’re worth braving that site I swear)

((also this is definitely a non-exhaustive list. there’s some real talent in this fandom))

Consummate Connection Confrontation - these are three separate fics in that order by the absolutely inimitable @hardlyloquatious. Literally everything they’ve written is amazing. I’ve completely exposed myself because my first rec is sort of. uh, lightly 18+. But I had to put this author at the top of my list because I love them so much. The way Jane talks in Consummate has literally kept me awake more than once. It’s honestly more sweet and touching than anything but it’s definitely uh. not something your boss should catch you with I guess.

Long Lost, Long Last - same author. This was written and posted before My Blue Heaven aired, but it has the same vibe as that episode, except deliciously drawn out. It starts off with Jane being his kinda silly self and deciding he wants to try his hand at letter writing, so he writes little notes for the whole team. Lisbon is the only one who gives him a note back, and they take to leaving each other lil notes - until RJ is killed and Jane disappears to do some soul searching. This fic is so... beautiful and I think about it with some frequency. “Consummate” is hot but Long Lost Long Last is why HL is my fave TM author.

Practice - okay one last one from this author. This one isn’t like, groundbreaking, but it’s just the SWEETEST look at how much Jane tries after they get together. I’m a sucker for Jane being sweet. Clearly, since that’s why Consummate is at the top of this list.

Blood Red Moon - the author is 221b Baker Street. Their fics are a LOT more heavy. But they’re so, so good. Their mastery of language is incredible and their fics read like professionally written books - and they do Jane/Lisbon banter incredibly well. Some of the imagery they use has genuinely stuck with me. Also see Sacraments in Scarlet (Jane pretends to be a priest), Arsenic and Red Lace (murder at an assisted care facility and Jane being the cheery and extremely sad bastard that he is), Jonathon Redding (a take on Red John that is deeply clever), a Road lEss traveleD (this is. unsettling. it’s extremely good but save it for the last from this author, wait until you love them first. The payoff for not-as-it-seems comes towards the end but it really is worth waiting for).

Blood Wind - by Gone2Far speaking of unsettling. THIS ONE. God this fic is so good. Spooky as fuck in a way that’s a little X-Filesy and incredibly well written. I want to live very far from this fic while at the same time wrapping myself in its words so I can borrow a crumb of talent.

In Case series - @halfagonyandhope (yay, they’re on tumblr). This rec list isn’t necessarily in any sort of order because after HL, halfagonyandhope is second fave author. This particular series is SO ROMANTIC and LOVELY and I kinda wanna cry kinda wanna read it again and again. My favorite one in the series is Ya’aburnee but you have to read the ones preceding it to make any sort of sense. Also now that I’m looking at all of these again I’m realizing that apparently the second installment stuck with me more than I expected because I wrote more than 10k words of something that has a vaguely similar theme (which I will post later). 

Qumran and Reset - by J. Roddam. This author only ever seems to have written these two but they’re fucking EXQUISITE. I generally avoid AUs in this fandom because the concept of erasing Jane’s past does NOT sit right with me but Reset is one of the only exceptions I’ve made. It has soulmate vibes without being like, a tumblr soulmate story. Both of them are living SUCH different lives than their canon counterparts but somehow it actually works and it’s beautiful. Qumran is similarly without peer.

Pretending, I: Witness - @inkstainedfingers97. I wouldn’t even know where to start but I love every single thing about this fic - and it’s recently been completed! I was lucky enough to get to binge read a majority of it but waiting for updates was also genuinely thrilling too. Fake/Real Married for WITSEC reasons, real love for obvious reasons. Also the Lorelei dynamic is way more intense than on the show in a way that’s at once very uncomfortable and very believable.

27 Minutes - by Idan. Okay. Okay so this author commented on one of my fics and I almost lost it because I really love theirs. I was smiling for like an hour when I saw the notification from them!! 27 Min is my favorite one but In The Cards is widely rec’d by others for very good reason, it’s so good. The Pretender is also excellent, written based on promos of Orange Blossom Ice Cream and so a bit AU from there.

Eighteen Hours - I would definitely be remiss if I didn’t mention @leafenclaw (and actually, I was remiss because I realized while making this post that theirs were some of those early fics I read that I never +fave etc, so ty for the ask so I can do it now, anon). Leafenclaw writes SO well and I have an extra soft spot for them because they pointed me in the direction of a lot of fics and were one of the first ppl I ever spoke with in this fandom since luckily they’re on tumblr too. Also Kindred (note - both of these are still WIP but being updated/worked on!) Chasing Storms is complete, incredible, angsty, beautiful. Also I kind of want to borrow the idea of writing one story around a set of many prompts like this. I don’t actually think I’ve ever seen anyone else do that?

The Long Way Back - by LouiseKurylo I consider them sort of a friend because they’ve been SO supportive while I was writing  Saving Grace but even before that with a new suit, another pair of socks, and a terrible couch. And I’ve seen them supporting everybody else too - they’re just SO NICE. Their fics are also very interesting, and they sort of bring Jane and Lisbon much more into the real world. There’s more real life problems to go hand in hand with mentalist plot type problems, which makes for very interesting reading. Fischer in this particular fic is FASCINATING. Also, a hot tip @leafenclaw shared with me: Louise’s faves list has 500 stories in it and pretty much everything in there is worth reading.

Last but OBVIOUSLY not least I wanna mention some of the very cute and talented and actively posting people here on tumblr in our little mentalist squad of approximately 12 people lmao. You probably already know @gracevanpelt aka LilyThistle’s Big Blue, Red Road, Breathe, and Collusion. I have an especially soft spot for Breathe actually even though it’s the least plotty of the lot. I just think it works so perfectly on its own, as is, like a quiet little interlude. No muss no fuss as Jane would say - and I love it a lot. @asambergs aka cmbing’s how glad i am that you exist is actually the FIRST piece of Mentalist fic I ever read, and then I was pulled down this slippery slope to end up posting this at 11:52 pm on a Thursday night. And I’m not about to forget @pjane aka epaynter whose words are so beautifully atmospheric and who writes the softest Jane (I love Soft Jane and will fight anyone who disagrees about it!!)

Aaaand a nice and shameless self plug in the form of ao3 links: Come Fly With Me (this is the softest thing I’ve ever written), Saving Grace (an actual, complete, fully plotted fic. 14 year old me is SHAKING), a new suit, a terrible couch, another pair of socks (this last was inspired by @asambergs fics actually, and was the first thing I wrote in this fandom!)

#the mentalist #the mentalist fic #PLEASE let the readmore work this is a longass post #long post #i will be reblogging it at least once so you see it anon - idk what time zone you are! #Anonymous