today i have been quietly worrying about who would be a dragon in the black sails temeraire au.
having finished the show i am no nearer to a solution, except for the practically useless knowledge that charles vane would definitely be a dragon in the temeraire au.
i’m no nearer to an answer, except that
in the BORGIAS au it would be easy.
Micheletto “I was a masterless dog once, but no more” Corella is a mad unharnessed dragon and Cesare is supposed to get eaten by him as part of an assassination plot but then silvertongued Cesare starts talking to him and after about three minutes Micheletto abruptly decides to devote his entire soul to him, and to the horror of his enemies Cesare becomes a dragon captain. and at some point Cesare is imprisoned by Pope Julius and Micheletto goes wild with grief and rage and Lucrezia has to temporarily become his captain so he doesn’t raze Rome to the ground/get murdered by the papal armies, and then Lucrezia and Micheletto form a political alliance that becomes an emotional alliance that becomes an uneasy undefined quasi romantic alliance (and also Micheletto is a Catholic dragon who quotes St Paul and grimly assumes that he doesn’t have a soul), but anyway yeah the Pope’s daughter probably burns down Naples while very publicly flirting with her dragon and making everyone uncomfortable and when they eventually DO get Cesare back and raze most of the Romagna to the ground, Burchard dutifully writes down that the most evil family in history were also a bunch of dragonfuckers, and the historians argue incessantly about whether or not it was true or whether Italy just hated the Borgias that much.
So because I like Dying and Being Dead, I was talking to @lathori about how every universe needs more time loop AU’s (like Groundhog Day but with more murder, given the kind of things I like), and that sort of led into her being like “Well, come up with a few then, be the content you want to see in the world,” and naturally the first thing I came up with since I’m rereading The Captive Prince was an AU where Laurent’s life resets every time he or Damen dies. Soooo…this is the first loop.
Laurent is drunk when the doors open and the
slave is marched through. It is possible
that this does dangerous things to his judgement.
He looks at the slave, dressed in the brief
silks of his barbarian homeland with his face ornamented with gold paint. The collar and chain are anything but decorative,
and the slave’s carefully blank expression does not hide the revulsion in his
eyes.
The slave is broad through his shoulders and
trim through the waist, with the muscles of a soldier and a handsome face under
the black curls. Sharp jaw, full mouth,
dark eyes that gleam under a strong brow.
A scar, ragged and bold even in comparison to the others littering the
slave’s body, rests at his shoulder.
Laurent feels something strike his chest,
like being slammed with an open palm and pinned to the ground, and the room seems
to vanish from around him. All he hears
is a ringing in his ears, and all he sees is the man in front of him, being
pushed to his knees with a look of raw, hot hatred flashing over his face. Laurent sympathizes.
He stands and walks forward, stops just paces
from the Akeilon, and savors the words on his tongue.
“I knew the King of Akeilos had sent me a
gift,” Laurent says, almost a purr, the most seductive voice he can put on. He tilts his head, lets his hair fall away
from his face and throat, summons every scrap of his brother’s proud nobility
that he can touch. “But I didn’t think
even the barbarian king would send me his own brother, shackled and painted
like a common whore.”
There’s a beat of silence, shock radiating
palpably from the courtiers and guards. Laurent and Prince Damianos stare each other
down.
Damianos surges to his feet, shrugging off
the guards, and Laurent moves.
His hand closes around a blade hidden in the
stiff material of his collar, draws, and thrusts it unerringly into Damianos’
exposed throat. Skin parts like silk, flesh like water. Blood gushes out in a
fountain over Laurent’s hands, the gleaming dark eyes wide as the Akeilon’s
bound hands make an aborted grab for his throat. Laurent drops to the floor with him, kneeling
over Damianos as blood pools and stains their clothing. Damianos jerks and shudders under Laurent’s
hands, gasping, blood bursting red over his lips and tongue as if he’s been
eating berries, or pomegranates.
The triumph that burns in Laurent’s chest is as
hot and sick-making as the grief that floored him when they brought Auguste’s
body back. He revels in it.
He feels the moment Damianos dies, the sudden
shivering loss of tension, and Laurent—
There were countless Princess Leia posters at the march today, young girls walking around in her iconic buns. I think this is the importance of film. Because if a character stands among protesters at a march of resistance and unity and hope, it means something. Art has power and we need it now more than ever, I just wish Carrie Fisher could see all she’s inspired.
I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:
On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.
On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?
well, come to think of it, we’re at the top of the food chain but we almost exclusively hunt and kill prey out in the country.
raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.
anyway like, we’re masters of our environment, we make weird shit happen all the time, we have lots of great food and sometimes we share, and we almost never eat someone. it makes sense for urban animals, over the last century or so, to just keep an eye out for opportunities to use us, and to pass the habit on to their kids.
It really is a weird, funny thing. Like yeah, technically they’re predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???
I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.
(Which brings me to an interesting thought about the ubiquitous rule about never eating the faery food lest you find yourself forever unsatisfied with anything in the human world - and the potential parallels to the dangers of feeding wildlife human food lest they become addicted and too tame and dependent to be safe for either themselves or us. Hmm.)
I mean, isn’t “we didn’t kill them when they ate our garbage” basically how we ended up domesticating dogs?
Are we accidentally sorta domesticating crows and squirrels?
(Some rats have already been domesticated–pet rats and wild city rats are the same species, sure, but city rats do not like direct human contact and pet rats would quickly die if let loose)
THE IDEA THAT WE’RE FAIRIES TO RACCOONS IS MAKING ME GRIN.
Anonymous asked: for the random fic titles: "spring will be here soon"
Since you didn’t specify a fandom….this is the story of the girl Jaylah.
Her people are from a high tundra part of their world–even after she forgets the name of her planet, the name of her people, the name of her family, she will remember this. The shimmer of the sun at midnight, the dance of stars at pitch-black noon, and the song of the wind over the snow-layered ground will stay in her dreams all her life, a tiny scrap of peace. Winter on the high tundra is dangerous, even in the cities-and-starships age, and Jaylah’s people never quite managed to forget their heritage of cold nights and terror. The promise of new life, of melted snow and living things, is the hope their people holds up to get through the days of unbroken night, the vow they make in the darkest moments of their life to fight on.
As a little girl wondering if the sun will ever come back, Jaylah’s mother strokes her hair back from her face and whisper that spring would come soon, so soon that Jaylah wouldn’t even believe it.
In Krall’s dungeons, as Jaylah sobs silently, hands pressed to her mouth so hard that her teeth draw blue bruises on the white skin, her father hugs her to his side. “Spring will be here soon, you’ll see, precious girl,” he whispers–a lie, but the familiar words soothe her tears and make her mother, bleeding out slowly from a gash to the leg, and her mama, pressing her hands to her wife’s skin, smile faintly.
When her mama is taken, still smudged blue with her mother’s blood, she kisses Jaylah forehead and her cheeks and promises, “Spring will be here soon, little snowflake, little darling.” A lie, but a warm and gentle one, bittersweet.
When her father dies, and she runs until she can’t breathe for tears, she curls up in a mountain cave, far too close to the search parties scouring for her, and she lies to herself, “Spring will be here soon, Jaylah. You just have to stand up.” And she scrubs her face with her palms and pulls herself upright.
She tells the lie a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, every time a new circuit breaks or she hasn’t eaten in twelve days or she is run off from a precious salvage or she can’t stand the loneliness any longer. Spring will be here soon, Jaylah. Get up and meet it on your feet.
Years from now, she’ll be an ensign sitting cross-legged on a chair in the Enterprise mess hall, surrounded by the bridge crew and Montgomery Scotty and Doctor Bones, her red Operations uniform a bright contrast to her white hair and a glass of scotch from Montgomery Scotty’s illicit still in her hand. (She will know, by then, what a nickname is, but she will insist on her old names for them, at times like this, when they are together and laughing.) Captain James T will smile at her, and Montgomery Scotty will clap her on the back as he tells them about how she repaired the replicators and stopped them from turning all the food purple, and she will think that perhaps she was not lying to herself all along after all.
why does no one ever talk about how lewis and clark met why isn’t that taught in history classes it’s like some rom-com meet-funny trope and i’ve literally never heard it brought up. literally the start of one of the most famous friendships in america and no one talks about it.
Wasn’t Clark just Lewis’ commanding officer? I guess I don’t know this story either. Can you tell it?
yes!! oh my god!!
so at twenty-one years of age, stupid stubborn hotheaded ensign meriwether lewis decides to get hella drunk and crash the party of one of his superior officers, starting an argument over politics (namely, defending thomas jefferson, his neighbor and veritable father figure) and insulting his host and basically being an embarrassment. so, he’s arrested and leveled with a court martial!! because this ridiculous boy can’t mind his fucking manners when he’s tipsy apparently!!
but instead of having to explain to his poor mother why he got booted out of the continental army, he’s acquitted (”with honor” bc apparently i’m not the only one who plays favorites when it comes to meriwether lewis), but he has to be reassigned so he doesn’t piss off his commanding officer again (awk). and whose brand new sharp-shooting rifle unit does he get transferred to?? take a wild guess!!!! that’s right, william clark’s!!!! and over the next six months meri falls deepfuck in totally platonic bro-love with him until clark resigns his commission for family reasons. then, roughly eight years later, lewis writes him to ask if maybe he’d like to travel to the ends of the earth by his side and, well, the rest is history.
But how do you know it was platonic
i hope you guys understand that when i say “platonic” i say it in the patronizing sarcastic tone of voice i always use when i talk about meriwether lewis’s big ol’ crush on his bff. maybe i can’t prove totally that he was v gay and probably at least a little bit madly in love with clark, but damn i wanna believe love exists ok.
lewis’s obvious sexual repulsion of women, his inability to find a wife, his desire to live with clark after the expedition, that last letter he wrote to clark before his violent death that we don’t have because clark burned it – we can read a lot into all of this if we want to, but even besides all of that the point remains that meriwether lewis was intensely fond of clark, and that they cared deeply for one another, and that their personalities complemented and completed one another in a way that makes you think twice about soulmates.
actually, sacagawea was a sixteen-year-old kidnapped shoshone girl sold into sexual slavery to a french trader named toussaint charbonneau, who pissed power couple lewis and clark off to no end due to generally just being who he was as a person.
whereas lewis had no real interest in women from what we can tell from his writings, he actually wrote about how much he admired sacagawea’s extreme fortitude and numerous skills that helped them throughout their journey. lewis also actually delivered sacagawea’s child!! she had a very difficult birth (probably because she was a child), which sent lewis into multiple kinds of panic. clark, however, really doted on sacagawea and her son; he gave them both nicknames, looked out for their safety during the trip, and was very close to them even after the expedition and ended up adopting sacagawea’s son. he was also a notoriously bad speller and i don’t think he ever spelt charbonneau’s name correctly ever not even once (which makes me think of the blenderdick cucumberpatch meme tbh).
Sorry for the delay, and here is Part III. Parts I and II are here and here, respectively. Since this one is pretty short, I might post Part IV later tonight. Also, since not all of these are obvious in terms of timeline, this one takes place the morning immediately following Part II, which is a couple of days after Part I.
The knock on Jack’s door woke him up
and he immediately regretted continuing to allow Thursday nights to happen to
him, as he did every Friday morning. Thursdays
had been happening to him for several years now, since before he was legal to
drink, and he had expected to build up a tolerance eventually, but there was no
sign of such a thing. It probably had
something to do with Thor’s insistence on having them be strictly Bring Your
Own Alcohol, which usually ended with divine-strength mead from the Norse, sake
from the Japanese, and beer from the Egyptians, among others. Dionysus had brought wine exactly once before
being strictly barred from ever doing so again—possibly because it had almost
landed Jack in the hospital after a glass of the stuff, more likely because
there had been a lot of wounded pride going around among the gods.
me showing up to my 6 year old self:
hey kid wanna know the future
six year old me:
ok
current me:
in the year 2016 a reality tv star is running for president, you can play pokemon in real life with these commonplace tiny portable computer phones, and episode 7 came out and it has a girl jedi
