This will obviously get lost among the joke posts but how the fuck are transfems getting the "fully erase every existing post they ever posted and remove every single image" treatment so casually and so often.
Random account that hasn't posted in 2 years gets restored because it was (supposedly) terminated due to a bug, gets terminated again couple hours later.
Girls on their 50th account not posting anything beyond "hi it's me help me find my friends" get terminated in minutes.
This will obviously get lost among the joke posts but how the fuck are transfems getting the "fully erase every existing post they ever posted and remove every single image" treatment so casually and so often.
It’s not right, what they’re doing; cold fingers drifting along her knuckles, long walks in a graveyard full of flowers. A face that’s hers and not-hers - the painter’s hand was generous, but no love could heat the pallor from these cheeks, soothe the shadow of these eyes. Like a cousin, like a twin-
She’s a quiet thing, the woman from the portrait. She holds her body in that delicate, shying way Maria could never quite catch, and indeed resigned the pursuit of somewhere around seventeen; in every gesture, every contour, there lingers the craftsman’s eye. Fingerprints line her shawl, hem the skirts that whisper against Maria’s hip in her passing.
Maria asked her to curtsey, once - drunk, soaking herself in the old man’s gin - and she did it perfectly. Perfectly. Like a diagram in an etiquette book. A sick, hot feeling in her stomach, and a resolution never to ask again.
She’d be a fine wife, for some nice man; a well-trained mother, for the same. Petticoats and pretty shawls, stockings and stays and ribbons and lace, every little softness in just Maria’s size - did he think of her, while he dressed his puppet in them? Did he think of her, while he–
She wears perfume, this white Maria. Pressed flowers, and a breath of dawn. The old man chose that too, and if she wasn’t a suicide already, she’d make herself one for liking it.
The doll has joined her, again, for a walk around the gardens, and Maria is thinking, again, about murdering her. It would be easy, the work of a few minutes, to seize this self-abusing dream by the hair, to drag it to the nearest tombstone, to strike porcelain against granite until the glass eyes roll and bounce among the cobblestones - one last grave out in the meadow, the clothes all burnt, every trace of the old man’s sickness excised from the memory of this ab-world -- Maria the only carrier, and really, what’s another secret, on the midden of what she knows?
Her memories of Gehrman are rotting, rotting, every moment shared together turning inside-out to bare a soft and mildewed heart, and nothing she can do now will give her teacher back to her - but it’s not that which stops her, as her fingers close and knot in pearl-grey hair, as the bonnet slips loose and the gentle voice falls quiet -
No, what stops Maria dead, staring into the unreproaching eyes of her twin, is the understanding, sudden and cold as icewater, that she’d let her do it.
She keeps apart from her a while, after that; doesn’t trust herself within arm’s reach. In Maria’s avoidance of her, the doll seems even more a ghost, a silent, peripheral figure, a presence always one room over. Her weapons, left unattended in the workshop, are cleaned, oiled, and returned; now and then, fresh tea finds its way onto the table by the fire.
Maria doesn’t especially care for tea, but she swallows every drop.
And little by little, inadvisably, she allows herself back into the doll’s company. It feels like edging up against a precipice, like playing chicken against her own horror. She’ll do something terrible, she knows it; she can’t be unsupervised around a woman like this. A woman who’d let her. She ought to leave, ought to run to the other end of the Nightmare and never think of this place again.
But the doppelganger is so pretty, and she treats her with such gentleness, and it’s been so long since she was anything but alone.
It happens suddenly, in the end. The doll asks to be taught to dance, and Maria - poor, priggish Maria - never suspects the trick. It’s a last resort, drawing her in like this; every silent invitation, every little courtship, every please sketched in the margins of good etiquette - all have been tried, and all have shattered like the tide upon the rock of Maria’s heroic conviction that she’s the only woman in the world who wants things.
Well, no matter. A doll’s heart has a pulse of its own, whether anyone hears it or not. If Maria won’t take, she can be taken.
Jointed fingers curl beneath her chin. A cold breath upon her face. The moon-scent, heady, dizzying.
I shouldn’t- we can’t–
Oh, hunter. Do be quiet.
A fine wife, indeed. What a silly thing you are, Maria Cainhurst.
Thirteen feet away lies a plate of raw meat. You don’t know that number for sure, but you do know it for sure, because this has happened before and you learn from what is done to you. The ankle chain is seven feet long; you, belly cold against the concrete, taut down to the fingertips, would be six feet more. If you tried, very hard, your fingers might brush the plate.
Just enough to pull it closer. Maybe.
If you’re lucky today.
You swallow drool. You understand the game, and you do not want to play it.
She places the toe of her shoe against the rim, tap. Pinned-back ears tremble against your skull, your teeth feel too long and sharp for your mouth - it would take so little, so very little, to nudge it across that gap. Into reach. If you scrabbled for it, like an animal–
Sunprint on the floor quavers, shifts, blurry through thick glass. Overgrown plants, pale stems visible in the high window, moving in a wind you see but never hear. There is a garden out there, you assume. The chain doesn’t reach the window.
Thinking about other things never works for long. It’s veal, this time, giving flesh of little calves, bloody on their pale plate. The smell is- the smell is—
You are not an animal. You just want it very badly.
That mage you caught last night is starting to smell of ozone. There’s a feeling in the air like the afternoon before a summer thunderstorm, which is funny, seeing as it’s October and you’re keeping her - for the time being - in a basement.
And god, does she ever wish that storm would break: fingers twitching, teeth set against the bit in her mouth, pretty yellow eyes on your throat from the second you step through the door. Ring-in-ring of sorcerer gold, xanthous star-furnaces of pure and towering petulance.
If sore losing alone was enough to sublimate thought into action, this building would be a crater and your name would be an execration upon the lips of the living, fit only to be spoken by hungry ghosts, et cetera; but ‘the Art hath three cornerstones’, three levers by which the magician moves the world, and spite isn’t on the list. Something like one in five thousand practitioners can work with just two, something like one in fifty thousand manage something with one, and right now she’s operating with exactly zero. So here she sits, in her fulminating cloud of beckoned and unspent aether, seething.
You gesture with the tray in your hands. “You gonna try to ash me if I take that gag out for a second? I’m not risking somatics, too, so. Gonna be feeding you myself.” Shrug. “You know how it is.”
You actually feel her try to kill you for that, the swell and press of the aether against your skin. It passes. You wait. There’s a simple calculus here, hatred and mage-pride against the fact that twenty-odd hours is a long time to go without food, a real long time to go without water.
The wizard picks the wrong answer. Turns her head away in dignified - well, an attempt at dignified - silence, as if you and your stew are completely beneath her notice.
“Alright, then,” you announce, putting your foot on the bottom step of the basement stairs. “See you in another, I dunno, twelve, maybe fifteen hours. Holler if you need anything.”
You make it about, oh, two-thirds of the way up before the noises she’s making through her bit get pathetic enough to bring you back.
On one hand doting on a girl forever and making sure she gets anything she wants and has as good a life as we can get her is very nice. On the other hand chaining her to the radiator and omitting the rest since it'd count as credible threats or some such would also be nice. But with a different intonation and a glint in our eyes.
Every time there's some minor ui change that pretty much nobody notices (there's a tiny gap on post replies now) all I can think about is. Why aren't all tumblr staff resigning or [redacted] en masse.
Genichiro and Sekiro keep deflecting the lightning and they haven't touched the ground for the past 2 days (reverted again, the gap is there still but not the non widescreen images and the alt text works)
Girl who holds your leash but you can tell she's only half interested at best the whole time and not really getting off on the whole power dynamics aspect of it
dailybridgerton
titsay
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
stormborns
izzy806
ellievsbear
