Send me a ship and I will grade it:
A+: OTP
A: I love it
B: It’s really cute
C: Not a bad ship
D: I’m neutral on it
E: I don’t really like it
F: NOTP
N/A: I don’t know the ship well enoughBring it.
(via amusewithaview)
aethersea asked: Could you do Brenneth for your ask meme maybe? I want to get to know her better.
My brain refuses to tick over appropriately in order to ACTUALLY work on Alleirat, so here are some short li’l headcanons in the hope that it will kick something into gear. They’re not super detailed because it’s 1 AM and I’m trying not to think about the MCAT too much.
Oh, also, while I’m at this, I’m listening to Hopeless by Halsey and it’s just. The Most Brenneth and Crispin. “Cause you know the good die young, but so did this, so it must be better than I think it is.”
A: what I think realistically
Brenneth likes to sing. She picked it up while she was being trained as a blacksmith, because she doesn’t really care for quiet, and it just sort of became a thing. Crispin has real actual-facts voice training, so he used to bring her songs that he’d learned and they would sing them together while he lurked in the corner of her forge. It continues to be a thing to this day. Her voice isn’t anything special—low end of alto range, fairly limited range—but she can project and she has the feel for folk songs, you know what I’m saying. It used to be kind of Known that you could bring the singing smith a new song she’d never heard, and she would charge you a little less than usual for your job.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
On Earth, once they’re—you know, once they’re speaking again, Brenneth calls Crispin Darth when she wants to get on his nerves. Most of their teachers and (later) their coworkers think it’s an inside joke. It kind of is. But an inside joke with a body count.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Torei, Brenneth’s right hand woman that first time around and her devoted amdri, wears Brenneth’s name like a brand on her soul and says that love should make you feel invincible.
Brenneth, who multiple times a week wakes up choking from a nightmare about the last time she told someone that she loved them—you’re my best friend, Cris, of course I love you, and then he says you understand, right and she doesn’t, and that’s usually where the choking starts, a scream that doesn’t make it past her throat—doesn’t agree. All love has ever done for her is open gaping holes in her armor, over vital organs.
Fourteen years and four centuries later, standing between that same person—of course I love you and then the choking—and a death sentence, Brenneth still doesn’t agree. This isn’t invincible. This is utterly, unfathomably, unspeakably breakable.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Listen the book will never progress this far because I Do Not Like Writing Children and also this is highly unlikely because Crispin and also because Plot Reasons, but I like to think there’s a happy future for these poor kids where Brenneth owns a forge again and spends her time quietly making weapons and trinkets and whatever else she likes, and Crispin is basically her house husband. Given the opportunity, he would 100% like nothing more than to bring Brenneth meals and play with the kids who loiter in her forge and walk to the market while he tries to figure out how to keep the plants Krei gave them alive. Brenneth spars for fun, rather than because she needs to keep her skills up, and Crispin grows his hair out long again because he can stand to look at himself in the mirror. They sit on their roof at ungodly hours of the night—they have a deal with the local Lai Dase population, to the tune of try us, we dare you, so no one hassles them—and drink wine straight from the bottle and look at the stars and sing off-key and fall asleep in uncomfortable positions, with Crispin’s head in Brenneth’s lap.
Basically what I’m saying is that, despite whatever else they might be into, both Crispin and Brenneth have gotten to the point in their lives where their absolute top kink is domesticity. Like, once you’ve literally tried to murder each other, falling asleep on the couch together becomes Some Weird Shit. And as much as I’m enjoying putting them through hell sometimes I like to pretend that they will literally ever get to indulge in it.
Anonymous asked: humble request: rey or phasma, ur choice, for the headcanon meme
Heck, how about some Rey feelings. Please observe that I have literally never given a fuck about the extended universe for more than long enough to Make Things Worse, and I have no idea what Rey’s canonical backstory is in the New EU.
A: what I think realistically
So…this is what I started following Wilde for, way back in the day, but Rey has definitely eaten a dude before, right? Like, she grew up a feral desert orphan child and has definitely killed a couple people to protect herself and her home and her food supply, and. Well. Supposing it was a sort of being whose flesh isn’t toxic to humans…that’s a lot of food. Your average human runs about 40,000 calories, if you eat whatever organs are edible (not all, but a good number) and make appropriate use of the bones. That’s literally almost a month of food for a skinny nervous abandoned teenager. More if you ration it.
Rey feels worse about losing some of the meat because she was learning how to cure it than she does about any other part of the situation.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Rey has never had a last name. Neither has Finn. Finn comes into the Dqar base unconscious and bleeding out and who the hell else is going to put themselves down as people to contact in case he needs something (in case he dies, they do not think) except Rey, who Finn came back for, and Poe, who came back for Finn. So through some confusion with medical staff Finn is officially down as Finn Dameron because…well, Poe’s not going to tell them they can’t, okay? Poe has a big extended family back on Yavin IV, they won’t mind one more, and honestly just Finn is starting to look a little lonely, flapping out in the breeze without any other names on it. The guy can pick a last name when he wakes up, but for the moment, Finn Dameron it is.
Rey is informed, after she’s had four ribs and a mild concussion repaired, that they’ll need her last name so that they can record the concussion and make sure future doctors know about it. This takes a remarkable amount of explaining about the point of medical records, followed by a lengthy but competently recalled list of every notable injury Rey has ever sustained.
“Thank you, Rey,” the medic says dryly, noting down the last of them. “And a last name? You can just pick one to fill in, for now, and change it later if you need to.”
“Dameron,” Rey says offhandedly, because last names are about family and family are the people who come back for you and honestly that’s about the extent of Rey’s understanding on the matter.
By the time Rey’s back from hunting down Luke from some backwater corner of the galaxy, the entire Resistance knows that Poe Dameron gave Finn his jacket and Rey his droid (temporarily, he did get it back, but no one seems willing to listen) and the both of them his last name. As far as Rey is concerned, corralling Finn and waiting for Poe in his quarters is nothing short of the obvious solution to everyone’s problems.
Rey is a feral desert child whose knowledge of bureaucratic nonsense is limited at best and nonfunctional at worst. She mis-files a couple of things a week, and usually it’s caught by the actual administrative staff, but how were they supposed to know that she didn’t understand that she’d accidentally filed all her documents with two spouses. She does live with Finn and Poe, she protests when it comes up, and they are her family, and they aren’t related, she just eliminated options until there was only one left!
To Finn, who grew up in a world where marriage barely existed as a concept and certainly wasn’t something he was familiar with, this seems perfectly legitimate.
To Poe, who is literally the last person on base to find out when Leia very dryly hands him an anniversary present and says “I hear you got married this time last year,” this prompts a lot more questions.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Do you ever think about Rey as a little girl, trying not to cry because it wastes water and she has so little water left, and sitting out under the stars as she wonders why she wasn’t good enough? Why she wasn’t good enough for her parents to stay? Why she wasn’t good enough for them to take her with them?
Why she wasn’t good enough for them to love?
Because if you ever think about that, let me raise you one up. Do you ever think about Rey as a young woman, holding an ancient weapon in both hands and trying to drive back a ragged blade of scarlet light, trying not to fall into the crevasse opening below her feet, trying not to die here, at the hands of this wild-eyed creature behind that terrible mask, this monster who killed the only person who had really, truly offered her a place in the world (do you want a job)—and do you ever think about how, in total desperation, she reaches out to the Force and begs I am not good enough for this, please save me anyway.
And the Force comes to her call with the force of a sun being born and answers oh, wild girl, newest heart, thing-with-teeth-and-starlight-eyes, you are just as good as you choose to be.
And Rey opens her eyes and throws the monster away from her and, prowling forward with her teeth bared and starlight in her eyes, makes a choice.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Right, so, we all pretty much know that Rey is probably going to be Luke’s daughter because ultimately Star Wars is the story of the Skywalker family more than anything else. But honestly I think if I had total creative control here I would go with that one suggestion that has drifted past once or twice about Rey being the Force’s second attempt at balance, another Force-child meant to repair the damage wreaked in the wake of the last. Her mother was not a Skywalker. Her mother was no one of note. Her mother was not equipped for a child like Rey. Rey was born and the Force shook, and Rey cried and the Force soothed her, and Rey laughed and the sun’s light was less brutal. Her mother ran when Rey was seven.
Rey had no control over it, of course. But alone, scaling the gutted hulk of fallen destroyers and battlestars, Rey always seemed to find the last valuable items, waiting to be ripped from the walls and control panels, and she never stumbled, never fell into the depths below her, never quite got severely injured. Once, she found a ship wrecked on the sand and followed a tug that anchored somewhere under her breastbone, and found a door that had jammed shut in the crash. No one had ever tried to open it.
When she pried the door free, Rey ripped out the hyperbaric chamber beyond and managed to rig up a sledge behind her speeder, and took a dead relic of a dead man who had once been the Force’s own child, unknown father-twin-cousin-self to Rey, to be traded for food. It had earned her an entire month’s portions, and the quick-rise bread and the protein bars tasted strange on her tongue. Like cannibalism, almost. Eating one’s own kind to survive.
The first time Rey uses the Force—intentionally, with anger and willfulness and desperation behind it—Luke and Leia almost have a mutual heart attack. The sunburst of presence, the supernova, is familiar but unspeakably foreign, a gravitational pull like a supermassive star that draws the world behind it and how dare anyone question.
The first thing that flickers through Luke’s mind is an impossible Father? On Dqar Leia feels a fierce lurch of Ben, you fool, don’t you dare—
When Rey fights with her saberstaff, white light a deadly halo around her hands, she could almost be another Jedi, at the height of his power and honor and glory long ago. But Rey has never allowed anyone to dictate to her, and perhaps this is why the Force left her alone, to raise herself and learn her own limits. Rey is a killer, certainly. Rey will do what has to be done for the survival of herself and her people, now that she has people. But no one has ever told Rey to feel nothing, to abandon her heart, and Rey’s heart holds the whole of the Force in its folds, her blood pumping starstuff and power.
When she stands again the First Order, against the Knights of Ren and their captain, against generals and armies and machines, against Snoke, the last of the Sith Lords, the outcome is foregone.
Anonymous asked: hi! hope this doesn't come off as pressure-y, im not at all trying to be like that, but how about long does it usually take you to respond to a (headcanon? request? headcanon request? idk what to call it) ask? i ask bc i worried that it got eaten but im also,,,rlly rlly shy lol. (i hope you're having a good day!)
Hey, anon, don’t worry about it! And as far as the average time to finish an ask…um, this isn’t going to be the answer you want to hear, but it varies. Everything from how busy my life in the wider world is to how many asks I have to how well my brain box is treating me that day can delay finishing an ask. Fic prompts that I don’t have inspiration for can linger in my inbox for weeks or months until I feel sufficiently interested in it, or I might never feel sufficiently interested. Even stuff I want to write can sit idle for a long time depending on my mental state–some days I just don’t have the spoons to…like…think and interact with the world. I try to answer actual personal asks (people looking for advice, etc) as soon as possible, based on how urgent the ask seems to be and/or how strongly I feel about the situation–I think the fastest I ever answered a personal ask was this one BDSM situation.
- Allura from Voltron
- One of the Berenson brothers (it’s gonna be Jake) from Animorphs
- Furiosa from Mad Max
- Rey or Phasma from Star Wars
- Brenneth from Alleirat
- Hellboy (this..wasn’t actually a headcanon ask but it’s Happening)
- Corlath and Harry’s kids from The Blue Sword
- Breq and/or Seivarden from Imperial Radch
If your request isn’t here, it probably got eaten.
And on that subject, I’m tired and in pain so I’m gonna write some headcanons to make myself feel better. Peace.
necer0s asked: You mentioned Castlevania, so: Trevor Belmont for the headcanon meme?
Buddy you have answered the call and here are some headcanons about this disaster for this headcanon meme. Disclaimer that I know NOTHING about the games and this is 100% based on the show. Also, welcome to Latin Hour.
A: what I think realistically
Here are a set of three related headcanons that are my ride-or-die Opinions about this show.
First of all, the Belmont family was quite sizable—Belmont family proper, I’m sure there are any number of illegitimate children and/or other branches scattered around Europe. They were close, most of the family living on the hereditary estate with the exception of the transient full-time hunters, but tough love was very much the word of the day. It had to be, given their family duty and the sheer death rate. Technically the Belmont family motto is Numquam Retro, arched over the ancient family crest. But for as long as Trevor can remember, the real family motto has been this: no matter how good a Belmont is, there is always something just that little bit better. Aut cum scuto aut in scuto, reads the legend over the family mausoleum, either with shield or on shield, and it is much truer. Belmonts come home victorious, or they don’t come home.
Second of all, Trevor was the crowning jewel of the Belmont family—a talented warrior from a young age, well-versed in the bestiary, and devoted, so devoted, to the ideal. No one becomes as bitterly disillusioned as Trevor without having a long, long fall to get there.
Third of all, the Belmont family took their excommunication as they had taken every attempt to stop them from serving their duty: with stoic, stubborn disregard. They received the Bull informing them of their banishment and replied with a politely immovable “thank you but we’re rather too busy to be excommunicated right now.” The Catholic Church responded as was highly typical in the 1400’s.
Trevor was returning from an utterly mundane errand into town, seeking some small gift for his baby sister’s first kill, when he saw the smoke start to climb. He reached the estate just in time to watch the fire bring the roof down and cut the screaming short.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
For the first little while of their journey, Sypha and Alucard are relatively sure that their third member is the muscle, the street-smarts, to their formal education.
Then Trevor busts out some fluent Latin to translate a book and adds a snide insult for good measure, o salvator somnelente mi.
They are both dumbfounded, and Trevor rolls his eyes at them.
“The Belmonts weren’t just a bunch of country drunks,” he points out, and tosses the book carelessly at Alucard. “We were scholars too. Carry that, would you?”
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
The three of them have been on the move, hunting for Dracula’s castle, for a full month and a half when Alucard finds Trevor sitting on watch outside the ransacked farmhouse they’ve claimed as shelter from the weather. Normally, even if he’s drinking or on watch or distracted, Alucard struggles to get the drop on Trevor, which is far more of a statement about Belmont House’s skill than Alucard suspects even Trevor himself realizes. This time, Trevor jolts, even though Alucard takes care to make noise so as not to alarm Sypha.
“Belmont?” Alucard asks, crouching down to be on eye level with him. “Are you all right?”
Trevor doesn’t respond—in all honesty, seems to barely hear the question. “I had a baby sister,” Trevor says distantly. “Older twins, too, but my baby sister—she just killed her first werewolf about a year and a week ago. I got back just in time for the celebration.”
Alucard sits down beside him, cautious. “That is quite an achievement. How old was she?”
“Fourteen.” Trevor blinks, takes a deep breath and lets it out, studies the moon with uncommon concentration. “She burned, a year ago, with my brother, and my elder sister, and my parents, my cousins…”
“Ah,” Alucard says quietly, and does the math. “Your family must have been quite large.”
“Forty of us,” Trevor confirms. “And every single one of them died in that fire.”
Alucard nods, and tucks his knees up so that he can wrap his arms around them, and they sit there in the quiet for a while. If there’s a trace of moisture beading on Trevor’s lashes, neither of them mention it.
“I cannot imagine what it feels like,” Alucard says at last, barely a whisper, “to lose so many loved ones to the fire.”
“No,” Trevor confirms. “But you have a better idea than most.”
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
There’s not really enough canon to make a judgement one way or another, but.
I really fiercely want the more intelligent demons—it’s clear that some, if not all, of the Night Horde are human-level intelligent—to start to…remember. Once upon a time the House of Belmont was the most feared force in Hell, the levee that held back the tide of the supernatural from washing over the majority of the populace. Now the levee has been broken (burned) and the tidal wave is rushing in and the demons are running free—
And some of them, meeting a stubborn-jawed man with alcohol on his lips and the ancient crest on his chest, think twice.
Thinking twice is, more often than not, the last thing they do on this plane of existence, before the silver of Alucard’s sword or Sypha’s power strikes them down, or before the last son of the House of Belmont lashes out with whip and blade and holy water.
Those that escape spread the word: despite the Church’s best efforts, there is still a Belmont abroad in the land, and he has allies, and he is doing his family proud.
Strange, perhaps, that the last Belmont would be flattered by the rumors of a demon horde.
aethersea asked: For the ask meme - how about Sophie Devereaux?
Sophieeeeee yes. Headcanon meme.
A: what I think realistically
Sophie is highly suspicious of Maggie a while. Not because of Nate, just because. Because Maggie is Maggie. Because Maggie is good and honorable and honest and Sophie is…Sophie is not those things. Sophie is a criminal and her thefts might not have hurt anyone, but sometimes she thinks about little children with stolen artifacts, about the look on her team’s faces when they realized she’d played them, and wonders what the fallout pattern of her life looks like. Maggie surely doesn’t have to think about that (Sophie is wrong about this) and Sophie cannot understand why someone like that would willingly put herself in the middle of all this.
Sophie gets past this, of course. Maggie, she comes to realize, is just. Maggie. She is good and honorable and honest, and just as furious and steely and brilliant and cold-eyed as her ex-husband.
So obviously Sophie sleeps with her. It’s a good fling, all intimacy and affection with absolutely no romance, and Sophie is lying in bed when Maggie bends down to kiss her forehead and say, “I hope things work out with you and Nate. You’re too good for him.”
“Of course I am,” Sophie sniffs. “We both are.”
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
To be COMPLETELY clear, Nate gets Sophie’s wedding ring engraved with ‘Your Name Here’ even though he knows! He fucking knows! He knows her real name! He knows all her titles and ranks and everything (you’ll never tell me that Sophie isn’t actually a British noblewoman okay) and yet! Fucking! Your Name Here!
They have to pause the service so that Sophie can stop laughing.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Sophie really wants to be in love, but she’s…she’s afraid of the part between being strangers and being in love. It’s so vulnerable, putting little bits of yourself out there one at a time and waiting to see if the other person is going to slap you down. She wonders, every time she sits down with a new person, what they would think of the real her, and she opens her mouth to say “my name is Sophie Devereaux” and instead some other name pops out. And in the end, inevitably, she slips up, gets too comfortable and shows a bit of the wrong self and…
Well, there she is again. Wanting to be in love and sitting down to introduce herself and giving the wrong name.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Um…I honestly have no idea, so instead here’s an AU I want.
I want a mutant AU where Sophie is a metamorph a la Mystique, and her ‘Sophie’ face isn’t actually…her real face. Like, she thinks of it as her real face. It’s the face she always wears when they’re not doing a con. Even when they are doing a con she doesn’t like to depart too far from it. But when she was a kid she had a different face, and she shifted whenever she could, into whoever she wanted, and then one day she was standing in front of a mirror and shifting back and she…couldn’t quite remember what color her eyes were. Hazel, or mahogany? Black lashes or brown? Did her skin have pink or yellow undertones?
Sophie Devereaux wears a face assembled out of her favorite features. She takes a picture of that face, the moment she fixes it the way she likes it, and keeps the picture beside her mirror so that she can always get it right.
Anonymous asked: Do you mind doing Max from Mad Max Fury Road for the headcanon meme?
Hell yeah headcanon meme. Full disclosure: I have not seen the other Mad Max movies, and I am Out Of It right now.
A: what I think realistically
It takes time for Max to return to the Citadel for good—time to feel less like he’s breaking apart at the seams when people speak to him—but that’s not to say he doesn’t return. He hasn’t had what he might call Real Feelings in long time, longer than even he really knows, but bending over Furiosa in the truck, cupping the nape of her neck in rough hands made gentle through sheer desperation, feeling her flesh hand clutch at him as she tries to say bring them home—he knows, in this blinding stroke of insight, exactly how screwed he is. He let this woman touch him, let her help him, let her rest a rifle on his shoulder and without thinking twice trusted that she wouldn’t turn it on him.
He leaves the Citadel, with a bike loaded with water and rations and ammo.
He comes back again with a kid on the back of his bike and a grenade belt and a new set of points on his map, and wordlessly turns the former over, keeps the second, and shows them the latter.
The next time he comes back, he has a truck and no explanations and no kids, but he shows up two days ahead of a small exodus of desperate people who need help—we were told that there was water—and who have this story about how the man in the truck got sucked into their drama and then told them about the Citadel and never gave his name. Max is gone by the time Furiosa hears this story, and she sighs, and sets about finding these people something to do.
This is how it will be, then, she decides the third time the hail goes up from the watchtowers—incoming! Incoming! It’s the Road Warrior! Get the Imperator!
She sighs, and walks down to meet him.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Everyone expects Max, having returned properly to the Citadel, to immediately take on a role of prestige and grandeur. He’s the Road Warrior, the man who helped save the Sisters and Furiosa from Immortan Joe’s grip, the man who’s been sending them survivors and bringing them supplies, the man who was a blood bag and a hood piece and survived a great sandstorm. Obviously he’s instantly going to be promoted to the highest role save for Furiosa and the Sisters themselves. Alternatively, they would also accept ‘concubine’ as a reasonable answer, but they understand that the Sisters might not be comfortable with that.
Um…except he’s not. He runs supply missions still, sure—sometimes he and Furiosa run them together and everyone knows that’s Serious Business—but as far as the majority of the Citadel is concerned, Max’s main job is…furniture? It’s his honor, of course, they always rush to add, his honor to be favored by the Imperator, but they have questions.
Furiosa can just reach out a hand, getting ready to leave on a mission, and snap her fingers at him, and Max will appear beside her as if by magic so that she can balance herself on his shoulder to get her boots on as fast as possible. When they’re out on the Wastes, Furiosa gestures behind her and Max compliantly sits down on the ground so that their backs are pressed together as a support. Trying to plot a map by spreading it awkwardly out on her hand, Furiosa gruffly calls him over and he lets her spread it out against his back, an impromptu table. At her absolute most relaxed among the Sisters and no one else, Furiosa will sit on the floor in front of Max (in a chair in deference to his leg) and use his thighs as a lounge chair/throne. One time when she was heavily concussed and a little blood-loss-y, she dropped onto a pallet with a huff and wordlessly flapped her hand at Max until he came over and took a seat where she could use him as a pillow.
Max jumped out of his skin the first time she did this (he isn’t aware that Furiosa spent three days psyching herself up to be able to lean against him and fix a boot), but like…he’s good with it. This is a kind of physical contact he is learning to be good with.
And of course, he tells Furiosa in his slow, quiet way, it’s his honor to be favored by the Imperator.
Furiosa thumps him in the shin, but doesn’t get up.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
It’s just so distressing to think about how Furiosa is almost certainly unconscious by the time Max tells her his name. His most precious secret, given to this woman as a gift, and she…she doesn’t hear him.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Max is an immortal fey avatar of the desert and Furiosa is becoming an immortal fey avatar of green places and they’re soulmates. It is what it is.
Unrelatedly, I really like the idea that Furiosa, Imperatrix of the Immortan Joe, is a ‘blackthumb’ of far greater skill than Max, while Max is significantly better at sewing and clothing repair than she is. Furiosa has to know every inch of the War Rig and that means that she HAS to help maintain it, and the War Rig is undoubtedly one of the most advanced pieces of machinery they’re working with. Obviously when she’s driving it, she can’t do repairs, but Furiosa is an A-grade mechanic. Max…just finds it kind of restful to do minute peaceful repetitive tasks like sewing, and, having done them A Lot to keep his clothes intact, he’s gotten pretty good. Furiosa, on the other hand, has assembled her outfit in significant part out of the ruins of a wife’s outfit, all long strips of fabric wound and pinned in place, and more than that she holds status and doesn’t care for repetitive tasks. She’s competent, but doesn’t care for it.
readera asked: For the ask meme. I am surprised no one has said any animorphs yet. cassie. or any of the animorphs really. I'm not picky, lol.
I raise you: a handful of mid-war Cassie/Jake headcanons because that’s what I have feelings about right now. For this meme.
A: what I think realistically
Cassie isn’t oblivious to the toll the war is taking on Jake—far from it. He shows up to her barn sometimes when he can’t sleep, sits in the hayloft or quietly organizes cabinets, and Cassie starts making sure to be the first one into the barn in case Jake’s fallen asleep there. (One time she is unsuccessful about this and her dad wanders in to find Jake asleep in the hayloft—he scrambles and blurts out a blatant lie about having gotten in a fight with Tom the night before and Cassie tries really hard not to cover her face because. It’s a mess. Jake is a passable liar by virtue of necessity, but he gets jumpy whenever he’s confronted by coming up with legitimate reasons to be at Cassie’s other than wanting to see Cassie.) Sometimes, when Cassie can’t sleep either, she wanders out to the barn herself—if Jake happens to be there, conveniently available for company and quiet conversation about dreams and nightmares, that’s nothing more than a coincidence.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Cassie is largely unaware of the fact that she’s viewed with a high degree of bitter, bitter jealousy by a lot of the other girls at her school and not a few of the boys. Jake is a good-looking, level-headed, friendly person, who is widely known at the school as a Catch. This is somehow made more of a thing due to the fact that he just. Doesn’t notice. (This is canon, don’t even fight me on this, three girls ask him to that dance in book 29.) Jake smiles at Cassie and talks with her in the halls and doesn’t even pick up on other people hitting on him, and therefore several of those people are deeply frustrated. It’s made worse because what are they going to do about it. Cassie is an angel, it’s not like they can even really hate her for it, and even if they did, God help the person who decides to fuck with Rachel’s best friend.
Incidentally, no one is more frustrated with Cassie and Jake than Rachel. Guys! Go on a date! Watch a movie! Hell, just get together at someone’s house and cuddle! G O D. She literally cannot believe how unsmooth Jake is, it causes her physical pain, and Cassie, sweetie, hold his hand, do it for Rachel, she is dating a bird and she is having more success than these idiots.
She despairs of them, she really does.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Cassie and her mother used to be really close—like, they told each other everything. It kills Cassie to lie to her, constantly, incessantly, unavoidably, for three years. Cassie screams in her sleep, and she tells her mother nothing. Cassie cries for three days, and she tells her mother nothing. Cassie develops an overwhelming phobia of termites, and she tells her mother nothing.
She wants so much to be able to tell her mother the truth about just one thing, and so when her mother asks if she can ask about Jake—hesitantly, because Cassie is so withdrawn these days—Cassie barley even pauses to feel embarrassed.
“Of course!” Cassie blurts, and her mother smiles a little, almost shy.
“Well,” she says, sitting down beside Cassie, “are you two dating?”
“Um…sort of,” Cassie says uncertainly. What does one even call her relationship with Jake these days? On the one hand, no, they don’t exactly go on dates that much, despite Rachel’s best efforts, and there’s still that level of mild discomfort with, like, the concept of being a couple, but on the other hand…they’re so far past dating it’s not even funny.
“Sort of?” her mother laughs, amused. “Well, have you kissed him?”
Cassie feels herself blush and opens her mouth to say yes—but stops. If she says yes, her mother will want to know when and how and…and Cassie can’t tell her. Can’t say yes, we kissed on another world. Can’t say yes, and I cried into his shoulder because I thought he was dead. Can’t say yes, I kissed him because we were facing death and I was afraid I’d never get the chance again.
Honestly, she can’t say yes at all.
So she looks away and says, “No.”
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Right so it’s technically post war but THIS FIC. Canon ending can suck a dick.
Also, give me an AU where everything is fine and Cassie is a morph dancer who performs on street corners like a busker (she’s the equivalent of a Julliard-trained violinist whose day job pays well and who plays in subways for fun) and Jake sees her transforming into an osprey and falls in love on the spot.
Anonymous asked: For the headcanon meme Uhura?
For THIS headcanon meme! (You thought you were free. You were wrong.) I’m kind of picturing AOS because that’s what I watched most recently with Uhura.
A: what I think realistically
Nyota Uhura grows up speaking three languages fluently—English and Swahili, because her family speaks both, and a German dialect, because her cousin’s husband speaks Swahili like a three-year-old and doesn’t seem to be getting better at it. He dotes on Nyota, calls her little star and swings her up onto his shoulders to ‘scare’ his wife and Nyota’s mothers as a monster with two heads, and he thinks it’s the greatest thing in history when she starts translating for him. She’s six years old when she goes to a museum and meets the curator, who is a Vulcan woman of superlative brilliance. The woman greets her family with a formal Vulcan phrase and is visibly taken aback—something of an accomplishment—when Nyota carefully, cautiously sounds out in imitation, tonk’peh, dif-tor heh smusma.
“Very good,” the Vulcan woman says in English, arching an eyebrow. “But the correct response is sochya eh dif.” Nyota parrots it back, and the Vulcan woman offers her a salute. Nyota comes back the very next day and plunks herself expectantly in front of the woman’s door, and more or less bothers the woman into agreeing to teach her the language.
Nyota, talking to her teacher, learns about Star Fleet, where she can learn every language in the galaxy (“that is quite impossible–” “EVERY language in the galaxy,” Nyota insists) and spend her entire life speaking them as a job. She never looks away from the stars again, and she remains in touch with her teacher, until finally it’s Nyota who offers the lessons, in the grammar of Russian and the guttural tones of Klingon.
Nyota’s teacher, very formal at all times, is the one who begins calling her ‘Uhura.’ Nyota knows that her name means star, but to her, Uhura means linguist and she holds it tight with both hands.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Uhura and Jim are actually great friends by the end of the Enterprise’s first year, once he feels less like he has to prove himself at all times and once she gets past some of her ingrained horror about his casual disregard for the rules when he thinks it’s necessary. (The first time Uhura sees herself observe a rule and then toss it aside because, well, this is more important, she has this moment of total exasperation because He Has Infected Her.) Jim speaks not a few languages himself, and more to the point he’s actually not the trash can she assumed him to be. He doesn’t harass his subordinates, he would clearly die for any of them, and even though at first she’s convinced he’s going to drink on the job and sleep with everyone on the ship, there’s no sign of it. He drinks sometimes with the rest of the alpha shift command crew, but never to excess, and she’s pretty sure Jim would rather take a phaser shot to the chest than risk his crew by sleeping around—it’s like command has turned him into a real person rather than the caricature he worked so hard to project and goddamnit she likes that person. No one is more shocked and aggrieved than Uhura herself.
Uhura is also rational enough to date a Vulcan, so after two months she huffs out a breath and plops her tray down at his table during breakfast (Jim eats in the mess hall with the crew, rather than a private mess, because he likes to know his people, damn him). She has the same stubborn look in her eye that once strongarmed a Vulcan into agreeing to teach her language to a small human child.
“Um,” Jim says, wary, “hey, Uhura.”
“You’re going to stop hitting on me,” she tells him, pointing at him sternly with her fork, “and I’m going to stop treating you like an asshole, and then we’re going to be friends.”
Jim stares at her. “Okay?”
“So,” she says, lowering her fork to gesture at his PADD, “what are you reading?” He tells her, seemingly too bemused to do anything else, and she scoffs. “Please. If you want the really weird Vulcan literature, I can hook you up. You haven’t lived until you’ve read some of the Pre-Reform homoerotic star-crossed lovers nonsense I read during my tutorial on the Pre-Reform dialect.”
Jim laughs until he’s wheezing and flushed, clutching the edge of the table as the mess hall looks at him in mild alarm and Uhura smirks in satisfaction.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Uhura never becomes a captain, although innumerable promotions are offered to her. She loves her languages too much. She believes, after seeing Kirk and Sulu and even sweet Chekov taken by their ships and never return, that this is the reason she and Spock end up as the last living members of that first bridge crew.
She kind of wishes, sitting at the monument to James Tiberius Kirk and thinking about how he would have hated having his middle name on the thing, that she had taken the captaincy.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
LET! NYOTA! UHURA! HAVE! A! BIG! FAMILY!
Listen I literally could not care less about what canon says, Nyota has like three siblings and a bunch of cousins and her grandmother and her two moms and her aunts and uncles and they all adore each other to little bits and pieces.
Nyota’s sister is dying to know about Spock from the first moment she hears about him, and the poor guy is totally overwhelmed the first time Nyota brings him home to celebrate [insert slightly ridiculous reason that the family came up with on the spot because Nyota was on Earth and they were excited]. They immediately adopt Spock, he’s really kind of alarmed about it.
Nyota brings Jim to meet her family one time too (and McCoy because his wife has his kid currently) when it’s his birthday and he just desperately does not want to deal with Star Fleet and the Kelvin and the whole hero thing, and they all love him too.
Basically give me Nyota Uhura who travels the stars because she loves them too much to stay on the ground, but who has very real ties to Earth because those are her people. She’s met by the quintessential embarrassing family whenever they make earthfall. Her cousin (the one who still sucks at Swahili) has a sign. Her sister and her twin brothers have a banner. She’s going to murder them all but also she can’t stop grinning.
Anonymous asked: Keith (VLD) for the headcanon meme?
For this headcanon meme!
A: what I think realistically
Listen, I see and appreciate the hell out of the general headcanon that Lance has ADHD, but I propose ADHD Keith? Like, hear me out here. Fixated on aliens for his whole life, hyperfocused when he’s flying (pros in battle: very hard to shake him up; cons in battle: he doesn’t always react emotionally when or how he’s supposed to, which can be rough on the others during a merge), prickly around most people but also v e r y attached to His People, and that specific combination of “intense emotions that can burst out at unpredictable times” and “extremely controlled emotions when under pressure” tbh all of it just kind of reads ADHD to me. Possibly because I myself have ADHD and am basically just like this terrible sword boy. Especially the look on his face after he dumps a massive amount of information about his aliens theory at the start of the first episode–it just screams ‘fuck fuck fuck someone please shut me up I can’t stop talking and I can feel you getting annoyed with me’ which, like, same.
Unrelatedly, I feel like Keith knows how to pickpocket people and hotwire most vehicles. He knows how to knife fight and he lives in a shack with no apparent form of income, and he definitely stole that hoverbike in the first episode. He has some Weird Life Skills. At some point I expect this to become pertinent in the show with Keith boosting a spaceship.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Keith scores a solid C in Emotions generally, but more specifically he just fucking sucks at noticing when someone’s interested in him. Like, in terms of friendship and romance and/or sex, he just won’t notice. He and Shiro were hanging out on the regular in their big brother/little brother relationship for solidly eight months before Keith looked up from a book and went “Wait, we’re friends” and Shiro was like “…yes?”
This is pertinent because Lance, within Not Too Long, realizes that he’s actually pretty into Keith (he’s horrified, they are rivals, he can’t have a crush on Keith). Once Hunk and Pidge–mostly Hunk, because Lance burst into the kitchen yelling ‘SOS’ and once they got him to explain, Pidge laughed so hard they gave themself a black eye on a table corner–talk Lance down off the ceiling, he spends a while waiting for his feelings to go away and then goes back to hitting on Keith casually at every opportunity, but With Intent this time. Keith, on the other hand, spends months being confused and distressed about the unidentifiable physical sensations that being around Lance causes and that all translates straight into Prickly Mode. Two conversations that happen within days of each other are:
> Lance telling Hunk, entirely depressed, that he just really thinks Keith hates him? Like, clearly he has no shot there. And Hunk is a good friend and they lie on the floor while he listens to Lance go on at length about Keith.
> Shiro sitting Keith down and asking what’s wrong and listening to Keith’s mildly panicky outburst about how he DOES NOT UNDERSTAND what’s going on with him and he feels bad for lashing out at Lance but he can’t??? Stop??? And Shiro is just like “Oh my god Keith you’re into him, you’re fucking into him and people on the other side of the star system know he’s into you, just fucking kiss him and see what happens.”
No one is more confused than Lance when Keith corners him alone and goes “I’m going to try something and if it’s a disaster blame Shiro” and walks up to Lance like he’s a wild animal and just. Fucking plants one on him.
Anyway, thesis statement: Keith is a failure, and Lance is a disaster, and Shiro and Hunk deserve plaques, and Pidge gets nothing because they believe that getting front row seats to this mess is it’s own reward.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Keith has always wanted answers about the mysteries of the world, but not like this. He has never been so bone-deep sickened as he is when he’s told that he’s not human, he’s Galra, he’s one of the monsters fighting to put the universe under a boot heel. On that shuttle trip back to the Castle, Keith locks himself in the bathroom and sits on the floor until he feels like he can open his mouth without hyperventilating or vomiting or both, and Shiro has to coax him out.
“Come on, Keith,” Shiro murmurs, once he’s gotten Keith to unlock the door. He wraps his flesh and blood arm around Keith’s shoulders as a support, and Keith dimly thinks about how Shiro tries to touch them with the Galra arm as rarely as possible. He gets it, now. “Come on, Keith, let’s go. We should be at the Castle soon, it’ll be okay.”
“No, I–no, I can’t,” Keith says, digging in his heels. Shiro is easily strong enough to move him by force, but he doesn’t, lets Keith press back against the wall again and makes a soothing sound under his breath. “I can’t,” he says again.
“It’s okay, Keith,” Shiro says, and his voice is low and soft and calm, soothing even though Keith doesn’t care to be soothed right now. Something clutches hard in Keith’s chest, and he hears a ragged keening sound as if down a long hallway, and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s him. “The others will understand.”
“I–they’ll be so angry,” Keith says blankly, clutching weakly at Shiro’s vest. “They’ll be right to be angry.” His stomach lurches and he might throw up if he had anything left. “Allura will never speak to me again.” He can see the look on her face already, the grief and disgust and rage that twist over her face every time they face the Galra, and he can’t see it directed at him, he can’t.
“They won’t be angry. The princess will understand that you didn’t know, and you’re a part of the team.” Shiro gives his shoulders a squeeze. “Come on, everyone understood about me,” he says, clearly trying to be encouraging. “And you’ve met the Blade, they’re good people. Our allies.”
Keith can feel tears burning behind his eyes and clenches his teeth against them.
It takes Shiro another twenty minutes to talk Keith out into the body of the shuttle, and another ten to get him to walk out into the Castle dock.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Keith finds Allura a few hours after his heritage comes to light. She’s standing alone on the bridge, her hands folded behind her at parade rest, and Keith finds her by accident on his quest to find somewhere to stand alone himself.
“Hello, Keith,” she says coolly as he stops dead in the doorway, apparently identifying him without looking away from the starscape.
“Um,” he says, wishing that he could curl up and die instead of having this horribly awkward interaction. It takes a few tires before he can force another sentence through his throat. “I can leave, I’m sorry.”
“The Castle is your home as well,” she says, turning halfway to present her profile. “Do as you like.”
Keith hovers in the doorway, frozen between the impulse to beg her to forgive him–please, please, he’s sorry, he didn’t know–and the impulse to run and never come back. Allura doesn’t say anything, and the silence is tense and uncomfortable and he hates everything about it. He’s kept his gloves on all night, because whenever he looks down he sees himself scratching at his arms like he’s trying to peel his blood vessels out of his body and Shiro had quietly recommended that he keep the gloves on so that he doesn’t hurt himself.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know, that–I didn’t know. We don’t have to, um.”
“Discuss it?” Allura turns her back on him again, but this time her shoulders curve as if she wants to curl up on the floor too, maybe. As if she wishes she wasn’t the last of her kind–wiped out by his. God, Keith is a monster. “It is not your fault, Keith,” she says, stiff and clipped, as if she’s trying to convince herself. “And the Red Lion chose you. We are in a brief pause between battles and we do not have time to have elaborate conversations about the finer points of the Galra, so. I trust that you will not turn on us. Everything else can wait.”
“Right,” Keith whispers. The words should be reassuring. He feels more like he’s been stabbed in the gut. “That’s good.”
After Shiro disappears, he finds her on the bridge again, in almost exactly the same place.
“We must get him back,” she says lowly.
“I know,” Keith says. “We will.”
“Keith,” Allura says, and this time when she half-turns to him, she beckons minutely, and he hesitantly steps up beside her. “I’m sorry, for the way I’ve treated you,” she whispers, looking away from him toward the stars. “You did nothing to deserve it.”
“I feel like I did,” Keith mutters.
“You had no hand in what happened to Altea,” she says. “It may take me time to let go of my anger, but.” She sets her shoulders, looking over at him, and offers a tiny smile–the most genuine smile she’s directed at him since they found out. “If you bring Shiro back to us–back to me–that will go far.”
Keith stares for a moment, then allows a tiny smile of his own, and nods.
