— an independent writing blog for an apocalypse original character.
¹ info.

JBB: An Artblog!
cherry valley forever
hello vonnie
Stranger Things
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Cosimo Galluzzi

@theartofmadeline
we're not kids anymore.
h
RMH
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Xuebing Du
Misplaced Lens Cap
Today's Document
YOU ARE THE REASON

oozey mess
Three Goblin Art
Keni
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seen from Australia
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@contamenate
— an independent writing blog for an apocalypse original character.
¹ info.
moving jordan back to my multi!
i miss jordan soo much but nam brainworm has temporarily taken over
rp? connections? pls?
baby i literally have 3 connections here and they're all you
i've been in such a southern gothic/apocalyptic mood for like two days solidly so obviously now i wanna write on jordan. would love to branch out and develop my twd verse a little more at some point 🙂↕️
baby, i've never seen brown eyes look so blue
he was more wound than anything else. caught in the light, the scattered scars that cross features—ones you had never thought to notice before—healed months, years before. shallow, a half dug grave compared to the gaping mouth of new. you don’t move yet, hands still hover in the space between you and the wound that is the room. restraint surgical, precise; he is not a battlefield casualty, not yet. not in any way you know, a silk scarf over your eyes when it mattered most. the stillness is your compromise, to take up as little space as possible–an unwelcome intruder making themselves at home could bring bile to your throat if you considered the reverse. you shift your weight now, taller, knees creaking against wood, the sound almost loud in the silence between; like an old joint ready to give. there’s that word–his voice wry, worn, tinted with the bitter edge of habit–princess. something inside of you twists, curls in recognition but it doesn’t land like it used to. the way he says it now sounds less of a diagnosis and more of a symptom. something he is trying to cough out before it chokes him. you don’t respond, you don’t bite. it feels futile, to try and make sense of what you never understood–yet received the punishment for the very same. you attended as a favour, an inability to look the other way. you could have let natalie throw rocks until sunrise, you could have sent her away with instructions. but you came, assigned bag with counted supplies in case of trouble. you ignore the bloodied cloth in hand, careful to not close your fist around it in your silence. unoccupied hand closes around flashlight, the light slices across the darkness like an incision meant to heal, not to harm. you lean in now, not enough to crowd, just enough to be unmissable. the torch beam flickers against the rim of his socket, then centres like a blade pressed to the pupil. it’s quick, it has to be. the constriction occurs–barely–a twitch in his iris as you force yourself into his line of sight, a silhouette to the stuttering bulb. the other eye doesn’t fill you with much more hope. your fingertips ghost skin in attempts to collect strands away from his eyebrow, eyes squint to decipher each cut like they would speak back to you.
“thank you.” your voice is soft, without the sharpness either of the pair probably expected, less exasperation, more patience. you don’t realise it but you exhale a breath you didn’t know you had been holding, bleeding pressure from your own chest cavity. the light is turned off, and you are at the mercy of the scattering of moonlight once again; exposing every contusion, every subdermal truth that refuses to stay buried beneath skin. a painting rendered in suffering and pride, the flicker beneath, the too-hard edge dulled by pain and something is trying to break through. you don’t leave him unchallenged—as if pressing your thumb into the wound. “you could have lost your eye.” there is no flourish to the way you speak, not a question wrapped in comfort–a statement dressed in gauze and antiseptic–meant to harm. it was the truth, you’ve seen lesser injuries blind in the heat of the moment. it’s only then do you let your body relax, albeit short lived as you set your sights away from his face, brows furrowing as you take in his posture–(how fingers match rib, open palmed as it an extra wall of protection). your hand follow, digits slipped into the concave between his fingers, a mirror in movements only this time you push–hard, but exact. “does that hurt?”
it is the injury that has made him impossibly still, the concerns of his ribcage splintering apart with the weight of him that petrifies him solid and causes his breath to get caught on the cinch of his throat or, at least, that is what he would claim if pressed. it half-explains away the maddening rigidity that stiffened his posture, the jaw-clench that staves off a tumultuous tremor like a storm-split field thirsting for that first drop of rain, the way it rumbles in anticipation underfoot. he tells himself that that is all it is, the body reacting as it should; braced for the pain, the act of her getting back for all the grievances he had subjected her to between locker-lined corridors. but it isn't. he exists in anticipation for something more intolerable: a type of tenderness that comes with examination, some unearned mercy that makes his body feel brittle beneath her touch. like he might just break. all things left unspoken suspend in the short gap between her breath and his, in the silence that swells between her words and his painstaking inability to answer, with such damage done to his body, he can only fixate on how close she has found herself to him. he feels the touch approaching just as much as he feels the collision itself, slow and deliberate his mind already flicking and whirring like an old showreel, dragging back through the years of torment never warranted but given nonetheless. (a flash of sepia-tinted images that scarcely make sense in sequence as shown from the endless throb at the base of his skull.) her hand moves steady, circling his waist like a tide drawing into the shore, touch catching on a patch of purple-dusted flesh that blooms fresh across his ribs. long tresses skim the bridge of his nose as she does so, and there is a minute fluttering of own lashes as he battles inhalation as if any breath taken inside this shared proximity threatens to scarper the quivering wings of something soft. his chest burns with the heat of breath in-took and not yet expelled, eyelids taut like blinds drawn over the night because he does not know what will happen if he dare look at her. and he does not know what is worse: the way her fingers unconsciously thread through his to feel the damage that lay beneath, or that scent of hers that trickles by without permission, sweet and stubborn and achingly familiar.
and then: there is pressure, the pads of her fingers cause his eyes to blow wide as the pain flares beneath, sharp and immediate at the press of her touch. but it is nothing so intense as the humiliating levels of heat that roar without sanction. a fire starts behind his ears and trickles a slow, traitorous path down the column of his throat, pooling in the cavern of his collarbones before coiling, anxious, at the very pit of his stomach shameful and ancient and obnoxiously human. and still he cannot look at her, gaze fixing to a fracture in ceiling plaster as though he is waiting for it to open up and swallow him whole. or, at the very least, it offers up a half-worthy distraction, something else that exists inside the room that isn't taken up by her. and, almost too late, does jordan remember her question. a rasp of a sound follows the lapse in conversation, half-choked and undeniably painful: ‘..yeah. a bit.’ his hand twitches faintly beneath hers, and he winces, embarrassed all the while the ceiling refuses to split open and grant him the reprieve he longs for.
Those two look pretty cozy. It's the perfect setup for romance to bloom.
GOOD BOY (2025)
clarke fr gotta be the only person in that damn quarantine zone that didn't know he was into her
@norgodly, clarke griffin — in the process of pushing the receiver's hair back from their face, the sender lets their hand rest against the receiver's cheek a moment longer.
embers of a dying fire spit up between them, or perhaps it is less impassioned than that something like a collection of ash swept beneath the locked door of an abandoned cabin; settling unforgettable, seeping into the floorboards and enduring the test of time. it settles there with the wistful almosts, the downtrodden what-ifs. a singular eye tracks the movement of her hand with the kind of trepidation a dog might deal to thunder, except there is no storm between them now just the silence of thereafter, a quiet that breathes like a wound, one that no longer bleeds. it is merely the aftermath, the wreckage of a youth that ran parallel and thus falls quiet in the years that divide but between it bridged the kind of understanding that could only transpire in meeting and then remeeting across another lifetime. digits move with a humanity that he does not know how to brace for, and he almost flinches muscle memory that reacts to any touch unrehearsed, no matter the perpetrator. she skims over the crease in his brow that seems to linger despite the slacken of skin, a mark not of age but of happenings; of experiencing far too much, too young. digits sweep aside a dark lock in its path, gentle and precise as though practiced lingering against the bump of his temple far longer than the gesture requires, and the shape of his fringe protests the movement nonetheless. his lips part, remain parted for an inexplicable length of time as though opening around a sound that will not come. there is something unguarded in the way it falters, as though a single syllable breathed between his lips might lay waste to this moment between them, the slow and sacred significance that neither dare shape with words. or is it still just that wanting to be understood, projected onto a single, inconsequential act? a dormant feeling flutters beneath featherlight contact, the roughened pad of her thumb catching on the soft plane of his forehead and that is all it takes for him to reach for a dream that he thought long-forgotten, the teenager in him rearing his head towards what he thought had been lost in the gutters lining the weathered streets of boston, walking out of sight with the rain catching in her hair.
something inside him yearns, and it is a passive reminder that this vessel he resides in is hers had always been hers. unsaid, unclaimed, but stitched together by some inevitable truth that had needled under his skin long before he knew what it was to long for something. older and kinder now, years that reckon twenty-three and yet that single, lingering graze of fingers still manages to collapse his body inwards sends his breath scattering across the back of his teeth, the same silent undoing of years passed, an ancient tide that knows nothing except to ebb and flow to the gravitational pull of the sun. (when her hand lifted in class and the world stilled in anticipation of what her voice might offer it, his eyes fixed to the hollow of her wrist that seemed to swallow time and space because nothing mattered then but to hear what she might say; when her shoulder kissed the gym mat with some primal lack of grace and him, a foot above, suddenly empty of every thought ever raised in looking at her; when the cut of her shadow graced his lace-up boots during a morning drill, never more than a moment never more than an empty touch). he remains still, iris trained on her in the shape of a half-moon; lidded, both thoughtful and thoughtless as he watches, unblinking, anticipating. it burns almost, not to flicker in its worship, the fear bristling in his spine that a second closed might dissolve her from existence, like blinking away a reverie beneath the piercing light of a morning sun. jordan's scar is bare to her inquisition now, no longer shielded by a midnight lock that falls partway over his socket, but raised to the light to be observed either revered or repelled, he could not answer for sure. and him, silent, braced; knuckles white to his thigh, and to the armrest, distrusting of own movements that he seizes altogether.
eventually i will write a loooong meta on how insecure jordan is about losing an eye and how deeply it affected his already low self-esteem and that's why it was so vital for him to get some kind of retribution for what happened because somehow he thought it would heal him. and that incomplete revenge narrative is really just an arc of realising that some things Can't be healed or replaced, and really what him and clarke did to each other (i.e. defecting fedra, cutting off all ties to their friends or her family, etc) is so much more of a worse punishment for them than him simply just stabbing her in the eye back, if that makes sense? like an eye for an eye but actually they've completely isolated each other from everything they ever knew in a quest for revenge and they're totally alone with the person they hate. sighs
anyway if your character meets jordan, he is half-blind and his eye is sutured shut with a vertical scar down the middle. there is no visible part of his eye behind his closed eyelid. as a result, his eye socket often appears quite dark and sunken in. found some caps for visual purposes but i think irl it would be a lot more....noticeable. not quite carl grimes but yknow
𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚆𝙰𝙻𝙺𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙳𝙴𝙰𝙳 𝚂𝙴𝙰𝚂𝙾𝙽 𝟺 𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙼𝙿𝚃𝚂.
content warning applies. change any pronouns / wording if necessary.
i don't make decisions anymore.
come down here. we need to talk.
if you understand what it's like to have a daughter, then how can you threaten to kill someone else's?
look, we can settle this.
there's enough room for all of us.
honey, you’re weak.
you take one sip before those meds get in our people, i will beat your ass into the ground. you hear me?
i hereby declare we have spaghetti tuesdays every wednesday.
when you care about people, getting hurt is kind of a part of the package.
it's not a farming hat.
liar.
i still believe there’s a reason.
i know you look at me and you just see another dead girl.
why hurt yourself when you can hurt other people?
seems to me like things are finally starting to fall together.
we all have our jobs to do.
just so you know, i liked you first.
you never let me win anyway.
you don't think it'll hold?
when can i have my gun back?
the only thing you can choose is what you’re risking it for.
i don't want to be afraid of being alive.
i think you made the right call.
sooner or later, you gotta make a move.
at the camp, it just got worse and worse.
i know we all can change.
how many people have you killed? why?
first we have to find some spaghetti.
it was a nice watch.
we'll make it.
come on, let's play.
what do you want me to say?
i was just another monster.
any requests? books? comics? some stale m&ms?
i think we should make some new rules before they get back.
it was all of us.
look at us, digging through drawers.
we don't need to take any chances.
you should have seen him back in the day.
he told me all i had to do was believe, and that's what i'm gonna do.
you either live with them, or you don’t.
we can all live together.
time for you to leave, asshole.
anger makes you stupid. stupid gets you killed.
i mean, what the hell is going on in this cabin?
i'm a pirate.
you didn't wake me up.
best not waste any more time.
so you want to spend the rest of our lives staring into a fire and eating mud snakes? screw that.
how many walkers have you killed?
was there ever a time you weren't the boss of me?
you're the one that likes stale m&ms.
some council meeting, huh?
is this what you want?
he's too loyal to bounce.
you walk outside, you risk your life. you take a drink of water, you risk your life. nowadays you breathe and you risk your life.
i killed two people and you haven't said a word about it.
you're gonna have to learn to live with the love.
we’ve all lost someone.
we've all done the worst kinds of things just to stay alive.
you're a tough son of a bitch.
i don't know how to talk about it.
what we want is what you got. period.
i can make these people feel better and hang on a little bit longer.
was your dad mean?
so you tell me how in the holy hell did you possibly kill this truck?
she'll need a safe place when it comes.
now you put down your weapons, walk through those gates you're one of us.
everybody makes it until they don't.
you can be a farmer, but you can't be just a farmer.
there are some things you don’t come back from.
we're not too far gone.
they're gonna feel pretty stupid when they find out.
if you wanna live, you have to become strong.
you're gonna miss me so bad when i'm gone.
where should we go?
you're a tough son of a bitch.
i'm gonna be honest, i forgot about you.
it's not about what you say.
hey. i know it's been a while.
i'm never going to let anything happen to you, okay?
i don't want it!
why would you want my help?
we care about you.
don't look back.
probably best not think too much about it.
did you have kids?
everything we've been working so hard to keep out, it found its way in.
he made it through the night.
we don’t get to be upset.
i think it was the humane thing to do.
i can save lives, that's reason enough to risk mine.
a sad soul can killer quicker than a germ.
we just went through something terrible.
that's the guy you want to capture.
what i’m picking up is, murder is ok in this place now.
you do a lot for us. for the kids. you sacrifice a lot.
what the hell are you gonna do now, sport?
they're fucking with the wrong people.
we can live here for the rest of our lives.
it was a real treat, sir.
you can’t keep me from it.
he seems stable enough for me to get some air.
i still think there’s a plan.
is there anything you wouldn’t do for the people here?
they wanted to go out together same as they lived.
but i made it and you don't get to treat me like crap just because you're afraid.
i'm sorry. i'm not very good at making boys your age laugh.
your place or my place?
do you think we can make it?
it was stupid. i was so stupid.
i'm just tired of losing people.
that's what my daddy used to say.
did you think it was right?
you have to have numbers. people are the best defense against walkers or people.
i'd be honored to shake your hand.
you fight it. you don't give up. and one day you just change.
you gonna help us figure this out?
i screwed up too many times.
i'm gonna take a group out.
still, it is survival of the fittest.
he's a lying sack of shit.
the whole world is haunted now.
i've been afraid to get my hopes up thinking we can actually stay here.
i have to talk you all in to doing something i know we need to do.
end of the world don't mean shit when you got a tank.
he’s already given me fleas.
i tied the door shut.
they could have gotten hurt.
we get to come back.
see, going it alone, that ain't an option nowadays.
i think it’s my job to try.
smells good.
everybody loves a hero.
look, i fought him before.
i've survived and you don't get it 'cause i'm not like you or them.
you don't have to like what i did, just accept it.
if you don't have hope, what's the point of living?
you can't think forever.
you guys got separated?
you don’t have a choice.
you can lose a lot of soldiers but still win the game.
all this time you've taking off, you earned it.
it could work, you know it could.
whatever else this place needs, i'm here for it.
when i fell on my ass, they should have just left me out there.
she didn't have a mean bone in her body.
the walkers didn't see me anymore.
i knew you were up all night reading comics with a flashlight.
we wouldn't be here without you.
that's what it always comes down to.
man, what happened here?
those douchebags in the vines took themselves out, holding hands, kumbaya-style.
we go in, kill them all!
i could use a vacation.
today, we're talking about knives. how to use them, how to be safe with them, how they could save your life.
wasn't much use without my gun.
i just want to say thank you for bringing that deer back yesterday.
eventually i will write a loooong meta on how insecure jordan is about losing an eye and how deeply it affected his already low self-esteem and that's why it was so vital for him to get some kind of retribution for what happened because somehow he thought it would heal him. and that incomplete revenge narrative is really just an arc of realising that some things Can't be healed or replaced, and really what him and clarke did to each other (i.e. defecting fedra, cutting off all ties to their friends or her family, etc) is so much more of a worse punishment for them than him simply just stabbing her in the eye back, if that makes sense? like an eye for an eye but actually they've completely isolated each other from everything they ever knew in a quest for revenge and they're totally alone with the person they hate. sighs
posts this in a way to get you to develop dynamics with me,
@norgodly, nat scatorccio — ‘can’t tell you how exciting it was listening to that fucking conversation.’
the sun had begun to sink low, a gold hue streaking through the gym and it seems to follow her crown like a halo as she leaves and he watches, without ever realising he is watching. it doesn't linger with intent, but more as though his gaze had always been drawn there on instinct; the way one might watch a flame dance upon a bonfire, the spit of a particularly pretty ember that curls up towards the night sky. the squeak of trainers scuffing against the polished floor had all but ceased, the quiet that follows usual for a long afternoon of drills and ordinarily, he'd welcome it but there's a petulant voice drumming at the base of his skull that calls him an idiot over and over again for fumbling the conversation. when had jordan ever had difficulty stringing together a sentence? he'd stood there, arms folded and mouth slack as he offered one-word answers as though it was all she was worthy of. and clarke, ever calm. maddeningly so, like a deity receiving prayer from a mortal mouth, weighing up their merit for reprieve. jordan sighs, cool-drying salt stinging at a cut near his temple, hidden mostly by the gathered threads of his damp fringe. can't tell you how exciting it was listening to that fucking conversation. they're alone now, and though nat's voice is not necessarily loud, it still lands like a brick between them. it's annoyingly precise as though she knows exactly where to deposit it to achieve the desired effect, and he feels his temper flare in the way nat likely covets. they teased each other often, fingers prodding at delicate spots until they wriggled and writhed. but his reaction only arrives in heat, pinches the tips of his ears in a fierce shade of red that tucks beneath the dark of his hair. his eyes drop to the ground as he busies himself with a water bottle, picking at the image that had long begun to fade.
‘shut up.’ jordan mutters, but it is a bark without bite. a barely-there show of teeth. it sags under the weight of embarrassment but he can't let nat know that, because it would be admitting to something that he is yet to understand himself. his gaze stays elsewhere, as though not looking at nat can blanch the flush that had started to creep up his neck. and then, as if to convince himself: ‘it wasn't that bad.’ a beat passes, and he then realises what he has said, like a confession pled in micro-measure. jordan clears his throat, scrambling around his brain for an explanation that doesn't arrive with any sort of ease. ‘why the fuck are you listening in anyway?’
this is me putting out a plotting call 💚
The click of the lock sounded your arrival, steps tentative in entry to the shadows supported only by moonlight and the last scatter of fluorescence from the hallway before the door was closed. you swallow the present as if it were a wound, your heart a judge’s gavel in your chest. you hadn’t known what to expect when you first laid your sights on him, voice leaving the cavern of chest before you had even had the chance to register it. then, it felt wrong to keep looking, hard to hide the brief flash of terror that gave way to your words. so you looked anywhere but; lingered a moment too long on each poster, oblivious to how the sun has aged them–more focused on the content, the numerous films you had never heard of–and how they fit into him. the messiness was as expected when you weren’t a planned visitor, room smaller than yours in the way that walls close in, drywall inescapable nothingness. by now, you had made your way deeper into the room, backpack falling from your shoulder before being placed on the ground as to not make a sound. it’s only now you get the chance to look over him–what you could see that wasn’t drying blood and pulsing flesh. at the sight of his movement, your hand reaches out instinctively, a gentle press to his shoulder as he resettles, face clearer to you now. you have moved this entire time with a surgeons precision, unshaken, steady. even now, despite the silence, you still go to make the cut. “take it slowly.” it’s natural–that commanding tone that you speak with, barely registers to you in how it comes across, but there is something different in it. concern bleeds into words as brows furrow, tracing the curve of his orbital rim–or what you could see of it that wasn’t already blossoming in shades of purple and green. the silence was suffocating, left you to ruminate on why you came in the first place, all defences down in the middle of the night—you had to. he speaks in that familiar, unhelpful way, answering your question in halves, never full. but he’s alive. and speaking. better than the alternative that you had imagined hundred times over in the run across grounds.
“She’s persistent.” only ten minutes prior had you been pulled from the confines of sleep, the ricochet of stones against glass and the hushed call of your name as alarm bells you couldn’t silence. she didn’t explain then, and hadn’t explained before you stepped over the threshold, only a mouthed thank you before sending you into the abyss. you’re on your knees now, and you don’t wait for permission to press dampened cloth to cheekbone, watching as dried blood rehydrates and melts into the fabric. deciphering new injuries, and what you were sure were remnants of injuries old reopening from pressure. keep him awake. keep him talking. keep him orientated. it’s a mantra in your mind, a check-list of things only ever practiced in simulation was now your lifeline. he’s awake–mostly, and he was just talking— your eyes lift now, in closer proximity to watch the pulse beneath tender flesh, the build-up of blood testing the elasticity in socket. “can you open your eyes?” a call to movement–brief, but vital. one question at a time. “what’s my name?” orientation. you need him to keep talking.
the moon filters through a crack in the blinds and illuminates a small slice of his face like a scar thin, pale and indifferent to the mess it unveils from the shadows. it cuts across the dark swell of his cheekbone, trails over the rise of a previously-busted brow before vanishing into the damp fringe that dangles over his forehead. it makes his blood-bubbled eye socket almost appear black, like an eclipse of own vision. an absence that foretells. more prophesy than wound, the raise of flesh already webbing together the process of healing. his arm cradles his ribs like they might come loose like baby teeth finally outgrown, digits lined to each bone at the start of his abdomen as though it is the only thing that keeps him pieced together. she doesn't ask permission to lay down her backpack and approach, perhaps therein the act betrays the knowledge that he would not give it. clarke has already broken in, taken claim to the room by merely inhaling the stale air of it and now she presses her knees into the floorboards beneath them like she is laying root in the mighty mess of him. and insecurity swells in the cavity of his chest, a larger bruise that cannot be reached and tended to in the same manner. that she's here, witnessing; not only to the vulnerability of his body but his livelihood too, the real dissimilarity between them that he so often assumed she was playing ignorance to, since she seemed hyperaware of everything else. the relics curl at the edges, visions of a half-baked identity made through clutter and unwashed laundry that attempts to be something but falls short of anything whole. his whole quarter is rebellion without really knowing what he pushes against, and her pristine presence seems to prompt shame to rise to skin's surface, a prickling sensation that he tries desperately to ignore.
she plants questions like anchor points, waiting for him to snag his consciousness upon them and prove his health. and even then when dark shadows close in on his peripheries and he feels himself being submerged does he still treat her probing like a challenge, a thing to one-up. his good eye picks a focal point above, pupil picking at the peeling plaster of the ceiling as though it stores his paltry patience for proximity. it's a meagre distraction, but he doesn't know what will happen if he looks at her. as though she is medusa, he fears to be turned to stone. ‘are you sure you're not the one with the head injury, princess?’ not quite a name as asked, but still something. syllables clipped by pain and pride manages to procure this small scrap of recognition. there evidences an acquiescence of sorts meeting her partway with some sluggish reluctance but partway nonetheless. a nickname he'd sent down school hallways that had been comprised to mortify, but it right now lacks the sting of cruelty. (like a wounded animal, jordan bares teeth that hold no threat.) princess, it encapsulated every snide thought he had about her each polished with a certain envy that cannot be denied. a title doused in disdain, for every pressed collar and shined boot, the two-parented fortitude that pronounced her chin and kept her back straight he aimed like a knife at her spine and yet it never seemed to pierce. the nickname felt especially thin and childish now, and it soured the inside of his mouth, leaving behind a bad taste. it embarrassed him more now to repeat the worn-out word when the fabric over her knees eat up the dust of the floorboards and her fingers are damp with water and blood. a ghost of a grudge that no longer held sense. he swallows the apology that trickles up his throat, only clears his throat and corrects though it is pushed out with a sigh, as though it inconveniences him to do so. ‘clarke.’