You just know Shane is that dad who only needs the barest hint of an excuse to brag about his kiddos.
My daughter? She's great. She actually just played her first hockey game. The hockey gear was bigger than her but man Ilya and I were so proud. Wait, actually I have photos – gimme a sec.
Our son actually got the lead in the school play. Yeah Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer himself. I mean yeah, it's the nursery school play. No no, you have it right – he's just over two and a half. He beat out all the four-year-olds for the part though, crazy right? Wait, I have a video, I'll send it.
That man's carrying photos of his babies in his wallet so he can brag about them to the cashier while he's buying his protein powder.
Ask meme: What would a fic with the title “safe in the spots that the light can’t reach” be? 💚
You know what let's make this a s4 au.
It's lockdown. The team has moved into the loft because Buck's single and lives alone and doesn't have a son or a pregnant girlfriend or a wife and kid who he could potentially expose to covid. It makes sense and he's happy to open up his place to his friends, but he wishes it wasn't such a foregone conclusion.
The big problem is that the loft isn't that big and it's been long enough since he's had roommates that Buck sort of hates people in his space. And also the sound of Chimney chewing. They're all doing their best to make it bearable--taking walks to give the others alone time, trading off cooking and cleaning duties, setting up a morning bathroom schedule, instigating a quiet hour where they all retreated to their separate corners with their tablets and phones and laptops and noise cancelling headphones--but there's only so much they can do before they want to claw their skin off.
The sleeping arrangements are the worst. The loft didn't have a spare room or a spare bed. Buck got an air mattress and spare sheets and pillows, and set it up downstairs. No one was going to kick him out of his own bed, so Hen, Chim, and Eddie set up a rotation about who gets the air mattress and who gets the other half of Buck's bed. It isn't the first time Buck has platonically shared a bed with friends--mostly during his nomad years when he couldn't be too picky about where he lived--and he's bunked down with his team before, albeit in different bunks, but it's been long enough since he has slept with anyone, platonic or otherwise, that he's finding it hard to drop off at night. It's not helped by, you know, the state of the world, and it's also not helped that just when he's adjusting to someone's sleeping habits, they switch out. Hen is pretty good partner--doesn't snore, keeps to her side, only steals the covers a little bit--but both Chim and Eddie build a pillow wall and Chim is a restless sleeper, tossing and turning, and Eddie is talks in his sleep, not actual words but with the cadence of having a conversation, which is even more baffling and annoying.
Buck develops insomnia, and he sneaks out onto the balcony at night, listening to the sirens because it doesn't stop, maybe will never stop, but at least he's got space to breathe.
On the fourth night, just as he's close to dozing off on the little padded bench that isn't nearly long enough for his legs, from his neighbor's balcony, someone says, "Trouble sleeping?"
After he recovered from his near heart attack, introductions are made. Tommy, like the 118, is quarantining with a couple coworkers and, like Buck, spends the nights out on the balcony for a little privacy. Tommy is also a firefighter, but they carefully don't talk about the job (at least not beyond the fact Tommy is a firefighter pilot, which is so cool) because the job is terrible right now. They talk about other things: the odd jobs Buck has had over the years, a few stories from Tommy's time in the army, Buck contemplating picking up knitting as his covid hobby, Tommy's shy admission that's he's taken up painting again, Tommy offering to teach him muay thai once restrictions are lifted, Buck offering to teach Tommy horseback riding. Buck is delighted by Tommy's dry humor and the way he invites Buck to be in on the joke rather than be the butt of it and the way he talks about flying, like it's the one thing he's meant to do. And somehow, impossibly, Tommy seems to be delighted by him.
(On the third night of them talking, Tommy hauls out a small electric lantern, and Buck spends the next hour staring at Tommy's expressive eyebrows and his cleft and the path his large hands carve through the air as he told a story about glide landing a Cessna.)
It's Eddie who notices first. "Who were you talking last night, Buck?"
"Oh, just a neighbor," Buck says and then refuses to say more no matter how many curious looks he gets, and then refuses to think about why he doesn't want to share Tommy.
Then the restrictions loosen and everyone started to go home, Hen first and then Eddie and then Tommy.
That night, Tommy passes his phone over the divide. "Put your number in, kid. I want to hear more about your Brokeback Mountain escapades."
"I was working," Buck says, putting in his number. Tommy named the contact Evan. "I wish there'd been escapades."
Tommy's eyebrows rise. Buck blushes.
They text after that an call and, when Tommy the old man can be convinced, facetime. Buck hasn't had this much fun just talking to someone since Abby. Huh.
(One night, while everyone else is asleep in the bunks, Buck tries to talk to Hen because she's the only one he knows who's great at long term relationships, both platonic and otherwise, and for no other reason.
Hen listens patiently right up until Buck says not at all dreamily, "His hands are so big," and then she nopes right on out of that conversation.)
And then the mudslide happens and who just happens to be flying the helicopter to take the 118 up to rescue the hikers. Tommy, with the world's biggest scrunchiest smile: "Fancy meeting you here."
Hen and Chim: It's Tommy??? Tommy was your weird late night neighbor? His hands are big????
And then obviously Buck and Tommy start spending time together in person and they kiss and fall in love the end.
there’s a cultural obsession with labelling all female authors as unintelligent or otherwise only capable of accidentally stumbling into brief moments of genius in their works that we need to start pushing back against
“I was always bothered when people say, ‘I cry to your music, it sounds like a diary, it sounds so personal,’” Mitski says. “Yes, it is personal. But that’s so gendered. There’s no feeling of, ‘Oh, maybe she’s a songwriter and she wrote this as a piece of art.’”
(source)
feel like it's related to the phenomenon mitski's discussing here - if women's art is only seen as unfiltered diaristic emotion then of course it can only ever be accidental genius, never created with intention and thought
Hello!! I love your art! It's a huge inspiration. I wanted to ask. Is your creature Dean like, a puppy dog version of a satyr? Is he a werewolf? A weredog? A hellhound? Either way, I love and adore him! please give the good boy some ear scratchies....dog creature Dean you're so dear to me 🥺 (please please will we see more of him in the future? please I'm a creature Dean yearner)
Hiii thank you!! 🫶 im afraid I dont have many answers about the Dog Dean. It's just a loose communal idea around Cas being a shepherd (goatherd?) and Dean being a herd guard dog. But there isn't real lore here, sometimes you just gotta follow your heart and simply draw a dog Dean ✊🐾
So, I was working in a lab, right? My job in the lab was preparing a pure, concentrated enough sample of virus. This is tricky since, y'know, viruses require hosts to replicate, but you then need to get the host cells (and the pieces of the host cells that died!) out of the sample while still keeping the viruses. Once I'd finished and the samples had been sent to the database for analysis as well as a second one sent to be frozen for future reference, there was still some left over that needed to be disposed of.
I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.
Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.
(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)
(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)
Shane and Hayden have a secret handshake and Ilya is SO JEALOUS that he makes up a wildly elaborate handshake for Shane and himself. He makes Shane practice every time before they see Hayden to get it exactly right. Anytime Hayden and Shane do their handshake, Ilya runs over and says “we have special handshake, Shane, lover’s handshake. You cannot do this with him, Hayden, because it ends in us shaking each other’s dicks.” It does not end in them shaking each other’s dicks but every time Shane tries to cut him off and starts saying, “GROSS, Ilya, don’t say that” Ilya makes sure to talk loudly over him and continue the spectacle.
on twitter this got a bunch of responses like “wow even the evil fujoshis? the homophobic yet hypocritically fetishistic ones? what if the fujoshi is racist?” and like well no obviously not in that case.
like in my post-outing #sleepwalkingshane vision he starts with just sleep talking and having brief midnight conversations with ilya he doesn’t remember and progresses to doing things like flushing his car keys and cooking eggs without a pan and just getting eggs all over the stovetop and it’s freaking ilya out and then one of the kitchen knives goes missing and shane doesn’t know where it is either and then ilya wakes up one night to shane sawing chunks of his hair off with the knife and speaking to ilya strangely and insisting that ilya isn’t ilya and now shane’s trying medication and it isn’t doing anything and he’s trying a million life hacks like duct taping his hands in oven mitts and it’s all getting worse and he’s having waking dreams now and ten second memory gaps and they go up to the cottage to get away from everything and it’s early november and they have an alarm if the bedroom door opens and ilya wakes up to the alarm blaring but shane’s not in the house and he looks outside and shane is standing at the edge of the dock in his pajamas his back to ilya and ilya runs out there barefoot but the second he says shane’s name shane steps off the dock through the quarter inch of early november ice and into the water and of course shane wakes up when he hits the water but being asleep in warm cozy bed with your husband and then suddenly being in ice cold pitch black water is a hell of a mindfuck and he’s obviously freaking out and of course ilya jumps in after him but then they both almost drown and ilya manages to drag him back onto the dock and then immediately strips and gets them in a hot shower so they don’t get hypothermia and shane is like so disoriented and the adrenaline is crashing and they’re both panting and shaking and sitting on the floor of the shower and ilya is like okei. so now do you believe me that this is problem.
