Despite taking all day and sai crashing (losing three hours of work), I finally finished this! :’3 Rorie and Dorian, several years after trespasser, do indeed get married~
Anonymous asked: legolas & gimli!!! bc i saw you mention them in your faramir & eowyn answer and got v excited but then you didn't get TOO sidetracked lmao
1. I love the dynamic, of like, light-hearted kinda scatterbrained eccentric and slightly goofy elf ranger who verbally shitposts and sounds like a loon whenever he opens his mouth but occasionally says deep and genuine things too, plus the super-serious well-spoken soulful proud dwarf lord who also talks weird but in like, the opposite way, with these heartfelt open feelings couched in kind of solemnity and manners, but more and more frequently over the book babbles and says spontaneous stuff, and how they fit together so well in a dynamic that is really un-cliched on the personal level – this weird melding of senses of humor and viewpoints on the other characters and events around them, which are pretty different but don’t oppose one another as much as overlap and join together to create a single bigger, even more fun outside viewpoint, they’re such a good pseudo greek chorus-y thing
2. I think this pairing is the main reason I kinda like the LACE ‘elves have no desire to have sex with anyone unless they fall in love and sex equals getting married for them’ thing tbh. I love the symmetry with the ‘dwarves only ever fall in love once and never marry otherwise but nothing is said about extramarital sex for them’ thing, Meaning it’s like, some weird special experience on both sides but in different ways. I usually don’t care for this trope in most shippy fic, but I like it in interspecies and I really like it for them.
3. Aaggghhhh the getting-together process! Most of all, I think about the fact that by all accounts, and as implied by certain lines in Fellowship, the dwarves of Erebor don’t really get elves and the elves of Mirkwood don’t really get dwarves, and there’s probably a lot of just, natural assumptions that are totally wrong and which they never thought to examine. It could even be that the fire-forged-ness of their bond might actually interfere with some of this understanding of each other, if they moved into this state of complete attachment and acceptance of each other while in this upside-down fugue state of pre-apocalypse where they didn’t really have…that much time to talk, after their period of downtime in Lothlorien where I assume the first stage of their friendship was formed. Like, when they emerge from emergency-mode after the destruction of the Ring, they’ve already plummeted straight into “oh I know he’s a weird alien and I love him, oh no wait it’s that kind of love, okay lol this definitely won’t work welp I’m screwed I guess???” without considering that no maybe he’s not that much of an alien, and yes you can fuck him without it being a disaster.
4. OBVIOUSLY the whole immortal/mortal thing, especially highlighted since they live in pretty close contact and temporally in parallel with Aragorn and Arwen, whose mortal/immortal problem is totally different. Also the sea-longing! How, and when, was it decided that Legolas would stay in ME that long, or that he would take Gimli with him to Valinor? So many opportunities! In some ways, their time in ME after the war is a grace period, a finite stage of overlap, a kind of once-in-an-age, improbable, forgotten, enchanted sort of time, where the dwarves are building for the future but the elves are just pretty much just lingering and housekeeping for the humans on their way out, and it would feel like there is a sort of pressure to make something of this time, both their own separate lives and whatever their relationship is like.
5. lmao I think the main reason I imagined Legolas as blond was either because Thranduil had golden hair in the Hobbit book or because something something weird associations with personality types something (because I had no idea about any of the movie castings at the time I read the books). BUT ALSO: “I say to you, Gimli son of Glóin, that your hands shall flow with gold, and yet
over you gold shall have no dominion” :)
6. I am TRASH. I will read SO MUCH SILLINESS with them. But here are just three HQ recs:
draw women in post-apocalyptic world settings with armpit hair, leg hair, bushy brows and pubic hair ya cowards,, draw brown women/women with dark thick hair with arm hair and happy trails and sideburns and mustaches i’m sick of seeing silky smooth soapy clean make up wearing post apocalyptic dolled up women next to stinky sweaty crusty men with dirty nails and sweaty clothes and sweaty greasy hair and 3m long ugly beards
or, if you must depict women maintaining that shit, at least be interesting about it. I can actually buy someone shaving/putting on makeup if that’s their way of coping, something they do to tether themselves to the past or an ellusive feeling of normalcy. So show me the EFFORT put in, yeah? Show that woman risking a zombie horde because she spotted a fucking tube of scarlet lipstick and christ she hasn’t seen that color in five years but it’s what she wore on her first date with her now-dead husband. Show me the girl who is quietly starting to fucking lose it but covers it up with fanatical commitment to her appearance because if she gets these eyebrows right, maybe no one will notice how she stares at things that aren’t there.
I find it completely plausible that some women would go to incredible lengths to maintaining their appearance, because they’ve been socialized all their lives to caring about it, because it’s a part of their identity. So show me how that part gets negotiated with once the world has gone to hell.
Catch me in your local bunker doing a smoky eye with the ashes of my former life.
One of the visual images that still sticks with me is from the 2000 TV show Prairie Quest, when modern people simulated homesteading in the 1870s. They all got kind of bushy and hairy as they dealt with an extremely limited supply of clean, warm water or good soap. One of the women hated the feeling of hairy legs while she slept, so as an act of love and care, her husband had her prop her legs up on the kitchen table while he carefully shaved her legs with a hunting knife.
… that is honestly fucking adorable and kind of hot and I am totally stealing it for a post-apocalyptic setting.
The end of the world arrives two years into Pope Julius’s papacy, with Lucrezia pregnant in Ferrara, Micheletto suffering in the Castello St Angelo, and Cesare plotting escape from a very tall tower in Spain. In very short order, the rule of law is overthrown, the Pope is fled to France, and all the dead have risen.
Lucrezia’s husband dies in the first wave, throat ripped out by his own manservant. She keeps calm, arms herself, and orders a solider to see if dead men burn as well as live ones. They do, as it turns out. She fortifies the Castle Estense against the town in a matter of hours. In some obscure way, she is in her element: pregnant and radiant and ruthlessly practical. She is a Borgia: perhaps she was always meant to reign in hell.
She takes in the surviving townsfolk and orders that the ornamental gardens be immediately disposed of, and all the vegetables in the storerooms planted. She orders a constant watch on the walls, men armed with flaming arrows and muskets. Within a month she’s retaken the town, although she keeps the walls shut. Within six months, word has spread that Ferrara is a safe haven, although the Borgia bitch who rules over it will kill a man at the slightest provocation, not just for infection: for theft, for rape, for spoiling water. Her men are frighteningly loyal. It’s whispered that she keeps the dead away with spells. Soon Machiavelli is her vassal, and da Vinci, and the former bishop of Milan.
They cannot hold the outlying farms. The dead roam freely in the countryside. Lucrezia has over two hundred mouths to feed, and only a few vegetable gardens to do it with.
Machiavelli is the first to propose it, and da Vinci decides how it must be implemented, but Lucrezia makes the decision. Her children will not starve, and neither will her subjects.
She is the queen of hell. There will be meat on her table.
*
Micheletto is locked in a cell when the dead rise, which saves him. He might have died of thirst anyway, but a man is eaten alive not three feet from his cell, and when the bloodstained thing has had its fill and left, Micheletto tugs the corpse closer, steals the man’s dagger and picks the lock.
All of Rome is a charnel house.
It’s remarkable how easy it is, really, adjusting to the new world. He already trusted no one. He already knows how to part a resisting man’s head from his body.
He wastes several weeks making his way to Forlí, but when he arrives he finds it a graveyard. Cesare Borgia had destroyed the walls on his word, and the city had no time to rebuild. He chases a walker out of his mother’s house, observes the smashed pots and the bowl of soup left rotting over a cold fire-pit. There’s a brown stain on the floor, but no body. It’s little comfort.
It’s another month before he reaches Ferrara.
He finds the duchess of Ferrara in the kitchens, a fetching smear of blood high on her perfect cheekbone, supervising the cookery of a feast-day supper. A man’s leg rests on a wooden table, skinned but still visibly human, surrounded by bunches of thyme and rosemary and bowls of skinned potatoes. None of the kitchen servants appear fazed, although more than a few of them cast him suspicious looks, hands tightening on their knives. No one trusts strangers these days, especially not those still covered in the dust of the road.
“Micheletto,” Lucrezia gasps, her eyes filling with tears, and flings herself into his arms. It’s the first time he’s heard his name spoken aloud since the world ended; his own eyes sting briefly, Lucrezia’s fine golden head pressed into his neck, a relic of the world as it was.
She makes him the captain of her guard, and he sleeps in her bed. They don’t speak of it, and it’s only sleep–she clings to him because he feels like the last living connection to her family, and he has always found it difficult to resist giving the Borgias what they want. It should be a terrible scandal, but the world has ended, heaven is barred, and the children of Ferrara eat human flesh. Lucrezia Borgia can take whomever she pleases to bed.
So by day Micheletto kills demons for Lucrezia Borgia, and at night he eats at her table, plays with her son and infant daughter, and lets her pull him down into the duke of Ferrara’s bed. She rests her hand over his heart like the mere fact that it beats is a sign that Cesare is alive, that Micheletto’s return means Cesare’s too, that his worthless life is a thin thread stretching somewhere out to Cesare in the monstrous dark.
He isn’t happy, but this isn’t what he thought hell would be like, either.
That said, here are some Hamilton facts for y’all that are all true to life (picked from Chernow’s biography, which I read far too often)
Hamilton’s ship caught on fire on the way to America
Burr was the lawyer for Maria Reynolds in her divorce from James Reynolds
At a ball prior to Hamilton and Eliza’s marriage, of which Angelica, Hamilton, and Peggy were attending together, Angelica dropped a garter and Hamilton, like a chivalrous hoe, swoops in to pick it up and Angelica teased him, “haha you’re not a knight of the garter” and peggy goes “nah but he’d be a knight of the bedroom if he could”
I am deadass not making this up. she said that in real life (albeit with different wording)
One time at a debate, Burr was so pissed off at how Hamilton would never shut the fuck up, so he successfully tried to predict all the points he would make and countered them all, making it the only time Hamilton was ever left embarrassed and speechless
maria reynolds was a blonde
hamilton was a ginger. dude had BRIGHT red hair and total mary-sue eyes because people described them as “violet-blue.” WHO HAS VIOLET BLUE EYES
Hamilton BLASTED Eacker in the press after he killed Philip & roasted the shit out of him. dude was ANGRY
After his duel, when Hamilton was rowed across the Hudson, he was the one and only person to be calm, not panicked & not grief-stricken at the prospect of his death
Burr deadass wrote to the doctor tending Hamilton AS HE WAS DYING and said “yo i hope he’s okay” (again, different wording of course)
Prior to his death, one of Hamilton’s sons lawyered for Burr’s second wife, coincidentally named Eliza Jumel, in her divorce from him
Madison was pretty guilt-ridden after Hamilton died (he spread a lot of rumors about his treasury funds) and he went to visit Eliza & try to compensate her for Hamilton’s nonexistent money, as she was in a financial hole, & she goes “nah fuck off” (WORDING DIFFERENTLY OFC) and told him off for being a dick
Theodosia Burr died overseas a few years after Philip & Hamilton’s deaths
When James Monroe came to apologize to Eliza later on in life, after Hamilton’s death, for how shitty he treated him, Eliza - a seventy year old woman at the time - basically said the 18th century version of “fuck you” and roasted his soul out of his body
what im trying to say is that lin portrayed everyone in the musical fuckin amazingly like Got Damn . there was A Lot of irl drama with these eighteenth century ninnies
to add to this “humans are weird” thing did you know that humans are the only species on earth with the ability to throw things with any significant degree of accuracy and force (apes can throw with about the force of a human ten year old, but cant lock their wrists well enough for accuracy)
and we just never really think about it bc its so easy and simple to us that pretty much all of our sports are based around the concept of throwing things accurately
so what if the concept of projectile weapons takes most species FOREVER to get the hang of, or even come up with in the first place. a human goes onto a ship and throws some trash into the nearest reclaimer, shouts “kobe!” and all the other aliens on board absolutely LOSE THEIR MINDS
@caffeinewitchcraft I hope you don’t mind me tagging you but I thought of you and your short stories when I read this ^_^
(Funnily enough, @iwouldbemerry tagged me in this too! And you both are so right!)
Yesenia blew it. Her one and only chance to serve on a Federation vessel (”A what? No, we’re a flag ship for the Intergalactic–” “It’s a reference, let me have this–”) and she’d blown it. The written portion of the interview had gone well, and the oral, but she’d tripped during the physical. Literally tripped. In front of the Captain and the First Mate and the head of Medical–
She gloomily takes a bite of her protein bar. “Why do science officers need hand to hand anyway? We’re not the ones going planet side!”
G’Rung, one of her friends from training, pats her on the back with one feathery appendage. “Maybe you didn’t do as badly as you think. I mean, I can’t believe they pitted a human against a V’afinog! Surely that’ll count for extra.”
Yesenia perks up. “Yeah?” She thinks back to the fight. She thinks she actually did get a hit in when she fell–it may have been accidental but it was still a hit. “Yeah, you know what? I probably did okay!”
“And you’re the first human to even get to the interview stage,” G’Rung continues encouragingly. Around them, their other interview group mates nod, murmuring agreement.
“And you’re really good at Botany,” Marsul says. He gives her the close-lipped smile that means he’s genuinely happy, careful to cover his sharp teeth. “They’d be dumb not to accept your application.”
Yesenia is touched. Marsul and her had never gotten along after the whole smile misunderstanding. Apparently he’d thought she was threatening him for the longest time. “Thank you!” She balls up her protein bar wrapper and looks for a trash can. She spots one behind her and, not wanting to leave just yet, twists in her seat and tosses it toward the narrow opening. “Kobe!” The wrapper doesn’t even touch the edge of the receptacle, nothing but net, and she crows victoriously.
When she turns back around, everyone is staring at her.
“That was lucky,” Marsul says finally.
Yesenia glances around the table, not sure what’s wrong. “Luck has nothing to do with it, dude. That’s talent.”
She’s trying to lighten the mood. It doesn’t work.
G’Rung gapes at her. “Are you saying you did that on purpose?”
“Well yeah,” Yesenia says. “The thing’s like ten feet away–”
“Throw this,” Marsul demands, shoving his own wrapper across the table to her. “Throw it.”
“Bossy,” Yesenia mutters. She scoops up the wrapper and throws it. Again, it goes in. And the next one and the one after that and the one that they have her throw from twenty feet away (that one might be luck).
Her group mates go crazy.
“Come on,” G’Rung says, tugging her up urgently, “Come on, come on, come on!”
“What?” Yesenia stumbles out of her seat, eyes wide. “What’s going on?”
Marsul is right on their heels as G’Rung drags Yesenia out of the mess hall. “We have to show the Captain! If he sees this he’ll have to let you on the ship!”
“Sees what?” Yesenia asks. “And I thought you said I did great!”
“I lied to make you feel better,” G’Rung says, pressing the button to the lift that’ll take them to the command deck. “You did terribly against the V’afinog, I know that hit was an accident–”
Marsul darts around them to open the door and practically shoves them both through it. “Captain! Sorry to barge in, but you have to see this!” He looks around, eyes fever bright, and then snatches up a data chip. He shoves it into Yesenia’s hands. “Throw it!”
“Captain,” Yesenia says, looking at the Leekylan sitting in the command chair with wide eyes. “I am so sorry for–”
“I don’t have all day,” the Captain says, iris-less eyes blinking slowly. “And, frankly, if this is something that’ll help your case, you want to do it after that physical exam.”
“Told you,” G’Rung hisses in her ear. G’Rung flaps feather hands in her direction. “Do it!”
Yesenia swallows and tosses the data chip back into the drawer it came from. Marsul darts forward, grabs it, and hands it to her. Yesenia does it again.
“And targets–!” G’Rung swoops down and takes off their shoes. “The wall–!”
Yesenia, unable to read the Captain’s face, decides to just go with it. She lobs G’Rung’s shoes at the wall, hitting the same spot each time.
When she’s done, she turns to the Captain, fidgeting nervously. At her sides, Marsul and G’Rung are practically vibrating with nerves and excitement.
The Captain considers her for a beat longer. “Your Science application was denied due to your inability to defend yourself,” he says. And then, before Yesenia’s heart can crash straight through the floor, he adds, “But, in this case, I believe that this skill more than makes up for your failure in sparring. Congratulations and welcome aboard.”
Yesenia gapes at him. “I– thank you, sir! But–”
“No buts!” G’Rung says, grapping her arm again. “Thanks, Captain, we’ll just be going.”
Marsul picks up the rear, closing the door before he can change his mind.
Anonymous asked: okAY so maybe ive been thinking a lot about that winter soldier/tsoa/iliad thingy you posted and maybe i have also written like... a bit on it, but so WHaT huh
