What if I said I will never surrender

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

Survival Traits || Snippet

If he were the sort to think about such things, he would realize that they would be disappointed in him. It was his job to swoop in to the rescue. But just as it didn’t occur to him to consider what they would think, nor did it occur to him to interfere with the couple downstairs. He didn’t know why. Perhaps because he didn’t want to. Perhaps because the vibrations that rattled and burned downstairs wouldn’t come together into a face without another pair of eyes in between them to remind him of the resemblance, to be grateful that, as the new pair stared him down in fury, they would stare at everything else in the same way, when it came to stood in the middle of them. That was his heart, you know. You had to protect your heart, and the extra protection was something he appreciated, when it came together into a face that was, inevitably, scowling at him.

Perhaps, simply, he didn’t think she needed him this time.

But this one did.

He’s as comfortable with only an inch of windowsill space as he is a whole foot, and his leg swings as he whistles, hums, and lets out a bark of wild laughter. “Ye look like yer mum, eh?” No sooner has he voiced the thought then it's gone, the face he remembered forgotten again in the careless manner of flawed memories. It doesn’t occur to him to introduce, to explain. He doesn’t come to windows where he won’t be allowed in –  the sorts of storytellers he seeks aren’t the sort who have the option of staying. He swings back down, nimble and light, but slower than usual, so she can see. “An' are ye comin’, love?”

[detectivekatherinecastle]

You just keep showing up. (requested by: katiehoughton)

[d7ux]

[notabadday]

Firefly Character Quotes → Captain Mal Reynolds

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

Snippet || Blindness

He’s always known he was blind.

It wasn’t the sort of blindness well-meaning, overworked and underpaid social workers could understand or test for, but Jack Dawkins knew, the first time he stared at E’s arranged on a wall, wiggling cheekily, that he couldn’t trust his eyes. He wasn’t big on trust in general. Trust required some understanding of time, of the future, that what you believed now would still be later, and just as he couldn’t see, nor could he know time.

But he can feel just fine.

Here is a sticky hand, crinkled foil from hot dogs, an uncertain smile that trusts though it’s a silly thing to do.

Here is wreathing smoke and slick paint, the pounding heart flanked on one side with scowls and the other laughs.

Here is his soul, the only picture that stays focused, staring at him with lamb blue eyes that speak a language he can’t learn, because he was never taught how to listen.

And he splits, there, into two pieces he has trouble recognizing. They feel like him, he supposes, and he pities them for it, though his sort of pity is the kind that laughs and then forgets.

Small hands and staggering scars, a heart that got too much of both of them, or not enough of one to overtake the other, and mother and father can’t coexist in the same skin safely.

Her mother’s mouth, but pulled in a smirk. Soft curls he never had the chance to apologize to. Mother’s spine, father’s blood. The latter will force her to wander, he knows. The former is the better of it.  

He wonders, idly, if they’ve enough of their other halves to see. He wonders if they are blind, too, and so protected from the ravages seeing brings, which he has never had to bother with but has heard of. But he suspects they’re both, and if that’s the case, he doesn’t know what to feel for them. And it's shame, that, because if he can't see, he can only feel, and if he can't feel, the only option is to experience, and he can't.

So he thinks, perhaps, he will try what he doesn't know how to do - and trust.

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

[pansynancy]

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

Snippets || What the mad can't offer

In the grand scheme of things, Jack Dawkins has never appeared to be a particularly selfish person. Material goods, money, prestige or purpose, affection, even time itself, he’s never seemed to connect with it, and so spends and shares it freely.

But that, she’s taught him, is a terribly selfish thing to do.

He’s not—and he knows this, for all he rarely articulates it—entirely sane. Oh, there’s no name for it. No diagnosis in a book, no medication to ease or even ability to define. But he knows it, all the same. That some part of him is broken, some crucial, critical switch controlling the human need to connect and stay is jammed on the wrong frequency, as though all the other planets have an orderly orbit and his is rogue, caught by accident where it was never meant to be, erratically plowing in endless, uneven rotation caught between escape and steadiness. Change, time, progression, growth, they’re lost on someone who only catches glimpses.

He knows this.

He sees it, too, in two faces with humming skin, brown eyes and blue, and he’s sorry for it, because they both got enough of their mothers to hurt for it in a way he never did until she showed him how much loving could make you bleed.

He knows, and she knows, as sure as he’s standing in front of her now that some day he won’t be. He knows, and he suspects she does too, that he’ll be back, but never for forever. Maybe most of the time. Maybe even for a long time. But never for forever. But he wants to be welcomed—or perhaps even merely allowed—in a way he has never wanted anything. In a way that is entirely selfish, because it’s the whole of him (and he isn’t, entirely, whole which is rather the problem) that demands it. She deserves someone whole. Someone who understands the world and can live in it and with it instead of merely intersecting with it occasionally, accidentally. His inability to understand has put steel in her, sharpness, already. He can’t promise her he’ll ever understand. He can’t even promise her he’ll change, because it’s not something he understands. He has calmed, true, the vibrations quieted some by years of sleep, but they’re there nevertheless. There is, and he understands this at least is a terrible flaw, nothing at all he can offer her, because even himself is a poor provision. He can offer only a broken madman’s everything, and he can’t even offer to take it back if she refuses.

But if his orbit is rogue, if he occasionally passes other planets in their precise, orderly progressions, then she’s his sun, the force and pull that caught him at all. And he can promise that what little forever he has will be spent trying to come back.

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

Faces || Snippet

Sometimes he doesn’t see people.

Oh, he knows they’re THERE, somehow, he can feel the crackle of heat and low buzz, but when he looks, their image has been shaken, vibrated to pieces, a jarred, jagged, not-quite image, still-moving and indistinguishable from the roiling background. It gives him a headache, so he looks away, and wanders through the humming until something else, for a moment or two, shakes just right and comes together into a face, recognizable and intriguing for as long as it holds together, until the hum strengthens and shakes them back into colors and lines but not names.

He might have never have noticed, save for pigtails and hope, holding together through sheer refusal to be shaken.

He might have never have started seeking them, save for brown eyes and hands that sketched them, slow and easy, too mellow to shake quickly.

He might have stopped, save for the sound of a southern voice that sounds like home, that he tries to hold himself together for.

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

So much nakedness and inappropriate touching xD

Hanna

[an-extraordinarymachine]

Beneficiary || AU Jack Dawkins

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

"Why th’…why th’ feck’s it cost so damn much?"  Jack stared at the amount in something awfully like shock, and the agent winced, sensing a lost sale.

"With the amount that you chose, and your high-risk profession—"

"Ain’t a profession, it’s a job. ‘Course it’s high risk, that’s why I’m ‘ere. And ain’t there…ain’t there like a group discount fer it?"

The agent swallowed, suggested gently, “It’s already been applied, Mr. Dawkins. But if you reduced the payout—"

"Ain’t reducin’ the payout." Jack growled. Kids were…well hell, they were expensive. He didn’t even know if the number he’d chosen was high enough. It was a guess. A gamble. He sighed, rubbed his temples. They were already stretched pretty thin. A fireman’s salary wasn’t spectacular, and rent in NYC, even where they lived, wasn’t cheap. Sure, he had a bit saved up—mostly from minor cons he did just to keep his fingers in the pie, and a few swiped wallets here and there because their previous owners didn’t take care of them properly—but…

He’d make it work, he decided. He listened to his impulses. That’s what had led him here. That aching restlessness at the top of his spine, spreading to fill the hollow in his breastbone. It was the itch that had saved his life more times than he could count. So he listened to it. “Look, jes…I’ll take it."

The agent sprang into action, whipping out the paperwork for him to sign, which he did, with an expression that was somewhat dark.  She typed rapidly into her computer, printing pages, briskly running through questions he mostly had answers to—he’d picked a birthdate years ago—and got to one he didn’t. “Beneficiary?"

"Bene…bene-what?"

"The payout, Mr. Dawkins. In the event you should…expire—"

"Croak. Die. Belly-up. Why ye use such fancy language?"

"—Who would the money go to?"

Jack stared at her like she was stupid, which he was beginning to suspect with a vehemence that she was. “The kid.”

The agent looked flustered, “Mr. Dawkins, Alexander—"

"Ace."

"Ace, is a juvenile." Jack glared at her. She swallowed, corrected herself. “A...a  minor, a…too young to inherit. You can put the money in care of a lawyer or a trusted guardian until he comes of age…"

No fucking way was he putting his kid in the hands of a lawyer. Trusted guardian?

There was a horrible moment where he could see it.

The agent, appalled at the color her customer had turned, wondered if she’d said something wrong. He’d seemed so nonchalant about it. About death. And here he was, color gone, an expression she couldn’t name but that chilled her to the core. He wasn’t thinking about death, though. He was thinking about if it were switched. If the roles were reversed. If it wasn’t him.

"Banzai DuPaul."

[hutcherroniandcheese-blog]

[laour]

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

Beth || Snippet

There is, in this world, exactly one thing Dodger steals from his son. Things that belong to him are sacred. They never vanish, never have, even forever ago when things would disappear from their cheap apartment as the locks were broken and desperate men scrambled and stole what wasn’t theirs, Alexander’s things re-appeared. Dodger only ever stole them back.

With one exception.

“Hey!”

He ignores the shout, which is as much amused as frustrated, cuddling his prize with complete adoration and she giggles and chatters happily to her grandpa about the tooth that’s finally loose and the tooth fairy that’s going to bring her a quarter like the last one got.

Dad, give her back.

“Nae,” Dodger shifts the little girl to press a warm cheek to her forehead, and she flings chubby arms around his neck, sticky with paint, and true to his name he dodges his son’s snatch as smoothly as butter, sticking out his tongue in a motion Beth imitates, “She likes me better.” 

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]

There || Snippet

If you pay attention to the hands, they give him away. Still smooth and without wrinkles, even now, though the folds have appeared by crinkled eyes and forehead, by lips still quick to smile. But the scars tracing them, puffed and red angry, no more faded now than decades ago, reveal him, for all that he's good (and always has been) at making you not notice, not look, distracted by some trick of wild light and quick words, bouncing like fairy lantern you hope to never catch, or risk dancing in a frenzy, a mad reel, until the breath you've lost is your last. The mischief, too, because he can't disguise that, or chooses not to. The briefest of twinkles when your eyes catch at last, a wink, before he vanishes again.

He's promised.

Sworn.

Raised scarred, skinny, spotted arms in an oath, that he doesn't, in fact, have GPS trackers on the lot of'em. Or microchips, or satellites, or paid private investigators and/or stalkers. (But you know how he is about words, about promises that don't, not really, matter, and so the mystery is still unsolved, and there are some who are suspicious, and check for strange scars they may have had since childhood, and wonder)

And yet he's there, time and again, never far behind and never for long, or longer than needed at least, whether the need is his own or theirs. Brief squeezes from giveaway hands, sandpapery kisses to temple, sometimes just a familiar quirk of a smile from under the shadowed brim of a hat, and oihers scooping twirls with strength an old man has no right to possess. But they make him young, and he's lost in them and so can't lose them. And so when they vanish, so does he, but he comes back sooner, with Brazilian flowers and Spanish dubloons. and always always with something about sheep, though how he found any in the Caribbean is a mystery of itself. And he takes hands in his scarred ones, and holds them warm, and stays, always stays, longer than he leaves for, because at last he's begun pulling back on the pull of home.

[aceofspadez21-blog]

Closet space || Snippet

When he showed up in her wardrobe, face full of that oddly crooked grin and hand full of her favorite high heels, she never questioned him. She simply tugged him out and braced for the slobbery lick that ran from jaw to temple. There wasn’t really much else to do.

[brokenluck-wildlaughter]