…………………reblog this and say something nice about the person u reblogged it from because there’s too much hate on my dashboard right now and its making me upset so lets start a chain of love
Anonymous asked: Anything about the line 'sext: people died for you. i bet you liked it.' from How to Make Love to the God of War for Leia Organa pretty please, your writing is so gorgeous and it would fit Ashe Vernon's poetry so beautifully. ILY thank you so much I hope this promptathon is fun for you.
(This is not an apology. It is maybe an explanation.)
.
Something you don’t realize until you’re standing in the control room, watching the battle for the Death Star: there’s very little screaming.
You’re intel, not military; the only experience you have of a warfront is battle sims and holos. The stories you’ve read have all been infantry battles—sentients dodging blaster fire and scattering their blood on the earth, calling for a meddroid even as the concussive missile shakes the air. The sound of AT-ATs, all creaking joints and thunder; clone troopers calling out commands. Droids, screaming. War was loud, full of mud and blood, you knew.
But here, from the control room on Yavin, there’s just the quiet whir of the servers, orders given and received. You can’t hear the chatter of the squadrons—they’re talking to the controllers, who are bent over consoles furiously reading out data. Sometimes one of the sensors beeps—but quietly, as if it’s worried about making a fuss in the huge, heavy silence. Blue Squadron goes down in a rain of fire, their ships immolated against the vast shell of the Death Star, but all you know of it is Lieutenant Rula’s announcement in a cool, flat voice.
It’s all very civilized.
Somehow, even in victory, you feel a little—cheated.
.
(This is not true. It is not all battle sims and holos; you remember war.
You are eight when you dream of your father on the battlefield. He is holding a sword of fire, and he breathes too loudly, harsh in your ears—you are scared, and so you reach for him, seeking comfort. He turns on you, and he is shadow and death and that awful sword of fire, not your father at all.
He says in a breath of smoke, who—?
You wake up to your father’s arms, real and warm, cradling you to his chest. It was only a nightmare, Bail says, as you cry wracking sobs. Shh, it wasn’t real.
You can still taste it on the inside of your mouth sometimes, ash and fear. Later—after you kiss your brother and find blood in your teeth; after you watch Darth Vader’s corpse burn from the safety of the treeline—you will learn this is your inheritance.)
i wasn’t cool in high school. i’m sure that’s not surprising to any of you. i mean, i was okay? i had friends. people liked me. but i was, by no stretch of the imagination, “cool.” my mom was significantly cooler than i was, and i know that to be true because of all the times people asked if we could go to my house for the weekend so that they could hang out with my mom.
honestly, the fact that social anxiety is not one of my numerous neuroses is a small miracle.
JUST DAMNED AND DETERMINED 2 THINK I’M GREAT, I GUESS!!
anyway, i have the problem that all chronically uncool people have, which is that i can never seem to navigate myself into situations where being cool is an option. you know? like i never just “wind up” at a party or the cool kids table or in the Fun Group on school projects. that just never happens. guaranteed, in high school, if the whole group was splitting up into two cars, i would end up in the car with mostly parents.
i have made my peace with this. me and all ur moms are best friends. i’ve seen ur baby pictures, SHARON.
anyway, as a result of this, i didn’t go to a lot of parties in high school. i went to some, but really not a lot. it was more like, sometimes i went to a friend’s house, and then a party would break out, and i would happen to be there.
once, our star football guy and i got drunk at the same party, and he said, “i feel like we have a lot of the same thoughts, we’re going to be friends now,” and then we never spoke again.
actually, i thought his name was “future” for almost an entire year before finding out that’s just what they called him because he was good at football. he was just named evan.
so.
that’s pretty generally what high school was like, for me.
i threw a grand total of three parties during my high school career: my 18th birthday, a random new year’s shindig, and a homecoming party. i’m calling it homecoming, but it wasn’t actually homecoming. actually, it might have been nothing like homecoming, because i am realizing as i write this sentence that i don’t … actually know … what homecoming is.
so GET OFF MY BACK ABOUT IT, TODD.
anyway the thing about my high school was we had this big football game every year, and afterwards everyone would go to local hotels for the weekend and party. i … didn’t do that, because i wasn’t cool enough to get invited to the hotel parties when the game was held at my school and i stayed with my parents when they were held at our rival school.
my freshman year of high school, the game was held at our rival school, so i stayed at home. my best friend at the time, who we are going to call linda was spending the night with me. we asked if we could go to one of the parties, and my mom was basically like, “lmao u tried :(.”
as it so happened, a couple of boys that i had been friends with since middle school were also coming over, because our parents were friends.
i mean, we were also friends, but i am 100% sure that if they’d been given the choice they’d have gone elsewhere. i know this because one of them, who we are going to call napoleon, told me so.
the other two, a pair of brothers, casper and teriyaki, were at least a little more subtle. there was also some other kid there, whose name i forget but i remember very clearly that he did a really, really bad scooby doo impression where he just kept saying, “ruh roh!!!” over and over. he didn’t even do it in the scooby doo voice. BUDDY, THE WHOLE POINT IS THE VOICE. anyway, forget about him, i’m never going to mention him again because who even was that guy?
on the one hand, i was offended that merely being in my presence was not considered the epitome of a good time, but on the other hand, like, i’d met me. i got where they were coming from.
however, i was presented with the opportunity to know, very clearly, what was Cool. the boys wanted to go to a house party. we were in a house! i could have a party! what’s Cooler than having a party?
oh my god, so many things. i can name like fifteen right now without any cognitive stress at all.
“we can have a party here,” i said, without considering that if they said yes i’d have to figure out a way to, you know, have a party. i mean, the dangers of teenage drinking aside, there were just a lot of logistical hurdles, here. to name a few:
my parents were downstairs.
i had no alcohol.
i had, at that point, never been to a High School Party™ and had no idea what it was supposed to be like, which was a bad position for the party planner to be in.
“cool,” said napoleon, and because my entire opinion of him was a rapid and exhausting vacillation between “let’s make out” and “i would bring balloons to your funeral,” just like that i was like, WELP!! OKAY!! GONNA THROW A PARTY. i’m sure this will be fine!!!
spoiler: none of my plans are ever fine.
“i’ll go get us something to drink,” i said, very boldly for someone who did not know how to make a mixed drink and had not yet worked out how i was going to get anything passed my parents.
“want me to come with you?” asked linda.
“no no, i’ll be fine,” i said, because i still had not come up with a plan and didn’t want linda to realize when we got to the kitchen that i was flying by the seat of my pantaloons. linda was my best friend, but as a high school freshman my entire personality was just jenga tower of insecurity whose structural integrity depended on my never showing doubt or vulnerability ever, at any time.
gone were the heady days of wearing my billabong t-shirt with the orange butterfly on it, here were the days of j crew and plucking my eyebrows.
i went down to the kitchen, passed the living room where my parents were unabashedly playing a rousing game of Drunk Scrabble.
Drunk Scrabble is a lot like Sober Scrabble except spelling doesn’t matter and all words are real, even the made up ones, as long as you can define them.
though most of the adults were ensconced in their game, my stepdad had snuck into the kitchen, presumably to escape the madness. in an attempt to look both Casual and Unruffled, i went to the fridge and rooted around like i wasn’t in the kitchen to commit a crime.
“hey, is wine good?” i asked, super-casually.
my stepdad blinked at me. “it’s okay,” he said.
“cool. cooooooool. anyway, just here for some, uh,” i glanced at the fridge, “milk, just had a sudden…..craving………for some milk….i see we have some, so that’s, uh, good, i’ll just pour a glass of, of–”
“milk?”
“that’s the stuff!!! haha. yeah. gotta get that …. cream…y……….”
i am the reason i don’t want kids.
[youplayedyourself.gif]
“okay.”
we stood in silence for a little while, me miserably drinking a huge glass of milk and skip patiently sitting at the table enjoying his cocktail. a small eternity crept by. i tried to drink my milk as slowly as possible so as to have an excuse to stay in the kitchen, but without anything else to do it didn’t take long before i was facing the bottom of the glass.
my stepdad smiled at me. i smiled back.
i poured another glass.
“yum,” i said, wretched.
he lifted his cocktail in a little cheers and we went back to drinking. i watched the clock. how long does it take one grown ass man to drink a diet coke with kahlua and tequila? i mean, god, it’s not like i was throwing this milk down like a frat brother drinking during rush week. we were at “tea with the queen” speeds and i was still totally crushing him.
i started to panic. how many milks was i going to have to drink? how would the milk mix with alcohol? how much calcium is too much calcium????
i couldn’t go back upstairs without booze. my pride was on the line, and also, even if it wasn’t, if i gave up now i’d have choked down like half a pint of milk for nothing and i know that sunk cost is a fallacy but at a certain point there’s no way out but through, you know what i’m saying?
i poured myself a third glass of milk. i looked down at it and it felt like it was looking up at me. i imagined myself as a fat-faced oreo, slowly sinking to the bottom of the glass. was it possible to drown from drinking too much milk? is that how drowning worked? i could hear all those terrible milk lobby ads in my head, mocking me with increasing malignancy. got milk? got more milk? got three glasses of milk? mmmm. creamy. drink up, idiot!!!! you’re a milkwoman now!!!!
finally, finally, just when it looked like i was going to have to go back for more, skip stood up. he set his empty glass in the sink, kissed the side of my head, and went back into the living room.
It Happened To Me: I Drank 2 And A Half Glasses Of Milk I Didn’t Want And I’m Not Sure I’ll Ever Look At Dairy The Same Way Ever Again, Unless It’s Cheese, If It’s Cheese We’re Still Cool
in our kitchen we had this one counter that was the Booze Counter, which had on it the booze that my parents regularly drank–rum for my mom’s rum & pineapple juice, tequila and kahlua for my stepdad’s diet-coke-and-tequila-and-kahlua*, whatever wine we happened to have, and vodka, but i think that was just for the aesthetic than anything else because i’ve literally never seen either of my parents drink vodka in their lives.
*i know!!! it’s so gross!!! it’s so gross. don’t talk to me about it, i don’t understand either.
below the Booze Counter was the Booze Cupboard, which had a whole slew of alcohol that my parents, as far as i knew, never touched. there were all kinds of magical things in it that, as i understood it, my parents did not like. i assumed the booze cupboard was for the reject booze that they did not like and were hoping would disappear if they left it alone long enough.
that made sense, right? right.
wrong!!
*jazz hands*
i grabbed the first bottle i could get my hands on from the booze cupboard. it had a blue label and an umber liquid. whisky. cool kids drank whisky, right? was there a hierarchy of Cool Alcohols To Drink At Illicit Teen Parties?
whatever. i grabbed the bottle and a bunch of diet cokes and shoved them casually into my shirt like a woman pregnant by a very square alien.
“what are you kids doing?” asked my mom as i passed by, and, in a blind panic, i said, “i DON’T KNOW, NOTHING, I WAS JUST GETTING SOME MILK.”
it turns out that a bunch of mostly drunk adults don’t really care why their teenager suddenly grew a Space Baby, so my mom was like, “….ok, weirdo,” and went back to drunk scrabble while i sprinted up the stairs.
the party went pretty well, if by “pretty well” you mean that napoleon threw up all over my mom’s flower bushes, linda asked casper and teriyaki’s mom if she was going to murder us in the woods, and six months later my mom found an empty $400 bottle of johnny walker blue hidden in my sleeping bag (why did drunk molly put it there? sober molly doesn’t know).
i tried to blame it on one of my brother’s college friends, which absolutely did not work. it didn’t work even a little. my mom gave me the mom face and i caved immediately and told her the truth, which was that we mixed her $400 whisky with diet coke and napoleon didn’t throw up because he was suffering from laryngitis, like we’d said.
“yeah,” my mom said in that voice that moms have that’s like why didn’t i follow my dream of being a whitesnake groupie instead of having children? “yeah. nobody thought he had laryngitis. next time you want to have a party just be a normal teenager and steal beer out of the back fridge so you don’t drink my nice shit.”
“that’s what you keep in the back fridge?” i said.
Guillermo del toro:
*slams down the script* she's gonna fall in love with a fish person
producers:
oh like a merman? half human? so not fully monstrous–
stop telling ppl to write like hemingway i promise u adverbs are not another face of the dark lord satan its ok
If writers took every bit of writing advice that was in the format ‘Don’t use X part of the English language’, all English fiction would read like Spot the dog
IMO Adverbs can be pretty nasty sometimes (”’I can’t wait!’ said Tom excitedly” is still a pretty bad sentence) but it all comes down to how you use them, and what words you put them together with.
Generally, you should try to avoid using adverbs in phrases like ‘she said happily’ or ‘he screamed loudly’. Aside from that, adverbs aren’t inheritly bad.
And ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ isn’t a bad sentence at all.
thats not really anything inherent to adverbs, it’s just redundancy. the dialogue is speaking for itself. ’“i can’t wait,” said tom excitedly’ is a bad sentence, but ’“i cant wait,” said tom flatly’ is chill. id probably throw a comma in there before ‘flatly’ for pacing but u do u
“dont use adverbs” is basically a really shitty way to verbalize “redundancy is often awkward and makes your audience feel condescended to if it’s not done well”–because lgr there are times when redundancy is okay, there are times when literally everything is okay
break the rules of literature. theyre shitty rules anyway
First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing, because verbing weirds language
Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing, because no verbs
Then they for the descriptive, and I silent because verbless and nounless
(L O O K i know this is not even remotely a response to the prompt of ‘bruce wayne gets railed by huge demon dicks’ but also you are all terrible sinners and this is quite frankly a best-case scenario)
It was easy to follow the path of the ratty brown trenchcoat traveling through tuxedos and gowns.
“Wayne! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Bruce had been watching him stomp his way up the stairs, and had made no effort to meet him, standing and sipping at his champagne. “John!” he greeted, too cheerful to ever be genuine. “Glad to see you got your invitation.”
“Yes, I know I wasn’t — what?” Constantine stopped in his tracks with a frown. “What invitation?”
“Your invitation,” Bruce said, gesturing to all assembled. “To the party. Which I assume you accepted, since you’re here. I knew you’d have to show up to one of them, eventually.”
“I don’t…”
The facts were these:
Bruce Wayne had apparently invited John Constantine to a party despite having no reason to believe it was necessary or desired.
‘One of them, eventually’ suggested that he had invited John to many such parties.
A party was often the easiest time to find and corner Bruce Wayne, when he couldn’t go handcuffing anyone to anything with ridiculous bat-shaped handcuffs.
John never expected or waited for invitations to parties.
Bruce could not possibly have been monitoring John’s activities closely enough to know when he ought to invite him to a party.
Therefore:
Bruce Wayne had been sending John Constantine invitations to every party he had thrown in the last six years, for the express purpose of ensuring that John could never have the satisfaction of crashing a posh party uninvited.
The pull at the corner of Bruce’s mouth suggested that he knew that John knew what Bruce had done, and this knowledge of his knowledge pleased him inordinately. He sipped at his champagne.
“Do you know who it is that you were just flirting with?” Constantine asked, returning to his original reason for talking to the man at all.
Bruce’s eyebrow only barely moved higher than the other. “I don’t know that I would say that I was flirting, necessarily,” Bruce said.
“Oh, I know what you look like when you’re flirting,” John reminded him, and Bruce’s eyes flitted away back over the crowd. “You were flirting.” Bruce shrugged. “Did you even catch his name?”
The corners of Bruce’s mouth turned ever-so-slightly downward, a twitch in his brow that wasn’t a furrow. His champagne flute drifted away from his mouth. “I don’t think I did,” he said, and this admission of his oversight was said with the awestruck manner that most people reserved for a glimpse of the divine.
Appropriately enough.
“You’ve been flirting with the Devil,” Constantine informed him, in as blunt of terms as he could manage.
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Bruce said. “I haven’t seen Talia in months.”
John huffed, grabbing Bruce by the arm and pulling him toward the railing overlooking the ballroom. “Not the metaphorical devil,” he said. “I mean Lucifer, the Fallen, Prince of Lies, the Dark Lord Satan. You have been flirting with the King of Hell.” He gestured with both arms toward the circle of besotted partygoers surrounding the man to whom Bruce had been speaking.
Bruce scoffed. The man in question looked up from the dance floor. His eyes were all the colors of a sunset, and cherubic golden curls formed a halo around his head. He saw Bruce, and he smiled.
Bruce almost smiled back. It was the beginnings of a smile, a beginning that spoke of an ignoble end, asymmetrical and soft and small.
He stopped. He turned his head away, and his face went a familiar blank shape. He glanced back toward the angelic figure out of the corner of his eye, as if to confirm the effect, before looking away again. He set his empty champagne flute down on the rail.
“That is the Devil,” he repeated for confirmation.
“Yes.”
“King of Hell.”
“Technically retired.”
“What?”
“He just sort of putters around these days,” Constantine admitted.
“He seemed nice,” said Bruce, who now seemed wary of looking toward the party.
“He does tend to.”
Bruce’s gaze drifted back toward Lucifer.
“Wayne. No.”
“Hm?”
“You’re thinking about it. I can tell you’re thinking about it. Theology or philosophy or Stones lyrics. Stop it.”
“I just wish I’d known sooner,” Bruce said. He was watching those blonde curls intently. “I might have had some questions.”
“No. No.” John took Bruce by the shoulders. “That’s how it starts, just an innocent conversation, and then what? Look. I know we’ve had this little rivalry, you and me, over who can stick their dick in the least advisable place, but that is literally, actually Satan. You cannot fuck him. I don’t just mean you shouldn’t, I mean physically, it’s not possible. And even if you could — God knows, if anyone could find a way — it’s still literal, actual Satan we’re talking about here. There are very few things in this world I’m willing to state are absolutely and categorically bad, and one of them is fucking literal, actual Satan.”
Bruce grabbed a champagne flute off the tray of a passing waiter. “Despite what you seem to think, Mr. Constantine,” he said, “I have not yet sunk so far as to need lectures on ethics from you of all people.”
“So that’s the literal, actual, Biblical Devil,” Flash asked.
“You know, I didn’t have you pegged for the slow one,” Constantine said, “but way to buck stereotypes.” He took another drag on his cigarette.
“I just mean, shouldn’t we… be fighting him?”
“You want to try fighting the Devil, you be my guest,” John said, “but I’ve met people who make that their full-time job, and I can’t say I usually get along with them.” He exhaled smoke out his nose. “‘Course, they usually aren’t real good at their jobs, either.”
“We fight bad guys,” Flash said, looking to Wonder Woman for support. “He’s the ultimate, baddest guy, right?”
“Within the Christian faith,” Wonder Woman said, “Satan is considered a personified shorthand for the philosophical concept of evil, yes?” She had a thoughtful hand on her chin.
“Yes,” Flash said.
“If you’re simple, sure,” Constantine said. Wonder Woman looked down at him. “Not that I’m saying you are,” he added. She looked pointedly at his cigarette. He put it out on the sole of his shoe.
“He seems… masculine,” Wonder Woman said.
“I’ve seen worse,” Constantine said.
“And pale.”
“Don’t tell me you’re surprised, love.”
She smiled. John smiled back. She didn’t rebuke him for the term of endearment. “I’m not,” she said. “I just wanted to be sure that everyone noticed.”
Lucifer Morningstar descended from the sky on wings of light. His suit wasn’t even rumpled. It was difficult to look directly at him; he smelled not of smoke but of heat, of lightning, of ozone.
“Consider the matter settled,” he said, his voice soft because he did not need to raise it. It was addressed to everyone, but his eyes were on Batman.
Even the Lightbringer couldn’t touch the impossible black of his cape. He was a figure of void in the light of a sun.
“Do not be so foolish as to think that you can depend on me in the future,” Lucifer added, stepping closer to the Dark Knight with feet that never touched the ground. “Your affairs are your own, and I prefer not to meddle — whatever else you may have been told.” His wings folded, dissipated. They remained as echoes, burnt into mortal vision. “This,” he said, standing too close to an unmoving and silent Batman, “was a rare exception.”
The Flash was by Superman’s side, where he had not been a half-second earlier. “Supes,” he said, speaking faster than ordinary ears could hear, “I need you to be totally honest with me right now.”
Superman had a very good poker face.
“Has Batman been a demon this whole time?”
“Thank you,” Batman said. “We appreciate it.”
“Hmm.” Lucifer cocked his head to the side, looked Batman over, as if there was anything to see through the impenetrable cape draped over the whole of him. “You know how to reach me,” he said finally, before turning on his heel. He didn’t fly away, or disappear; just walked away, hands in his pockets, whistling.
“Supes,” Flash said, “you’re not saying he’s not a demon.”
“I told you not to ask me about his secret identity,” Superman said.
“I feel like you could tell me he wasn’t a demon without it narrowing things down that much,” Flash said.
Zatanna sidled up to Batman. “Spoops.”
“Don’t call me that.”
She rested her elbow on his arm, leaning on him. “I have to ask.”
“No you don’t.”
“I need you to be completely honest with me.”
“No you don’t.”
“Did you lay down such high-quality pipe that the Devil himself felt like he owed you one?”
“I’m not dignifying that with a response.” At the edge of where his mask ended, he was turning faintly pink.
“Did he call you daddy? Did he say ‘oh my god’? Are those like the same thing for him?”
“Why would I answer that.”
“I get that a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell, so if you’ve had infernal dick in your mouth in the last twenty-four hours, just stand there and look stoic.”
“I’m leaving now.”
“That’s not a no!” she called after him.
“Superman,” Flash said, trying to shake him by the shoulder. “Kal. Please. If Batman has been Zee’s demonic familiar this whole time, you have to tell me.”
“Batman,” Superman said, addressing the man in question, “Flash wants to know if you’re a demon.”
Flash squeaked as Batman glowered at him, stopping in the process of storming by to lean closer. “What do you think?”
Constantine shook his head. “And that works?” he asked Wonder Woman, gesturing to the scene.
“Usually,” she said.
“What a bunch of morons. Present company excluded.”
