there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh
Do you want to hear about white-throated sparrows?!
Of course you do, they’re fantastic. They come in two models, one with tan head stripes and one with white head stripes. But the gene that controls stripe color also has a bunch of other effects! It’s a supergene!
To briefly sum up a grueling amount of fieldwork by people who were probably not getting paid nearly enough, basically the tan-stripes are nurturers and the white-stripes are fighters, across both males and females. White-stripes chase away intruders more, tan-stripes bring more food to the nest. Tan-stripe females bring more bugs to their chicks than white-stripes, white-stripe females are more aggressive and sing more.
There is a reason Jordan Peterson picked lobsters, not sparrows, to get all MRA about, because the sparrow ladies are ALL about the tan-striped males. Sexy nurturing tan-stripe males are immediately grabbed up by the more aggressive white-stripe females (who are also dead sexy if you’re a sparrow.) Then the remaining birds pair off, so you get tan and white couples reproducing in virtually all cases—nurturing male with aggressive female, hyper-aggressive male with hyper-nurturing female.*
And this is good!** Because it turns out that they can have a tough time if they don’t mate across stripes—white x white sparrows often come out undersized if they come out at all. There was some cool recent genetic sequencing and one particular chromosome is way funky, inverted, and scrambled in the white-stripes. So now every white-stripe has a funky chromosome and a normal one, and every tan-stripe has two normal ones.***
This is all really unique and means that white-throated sparrows effectively have four sexes, because they now only reproduce with a member of the opposite stripe and sex chromosome, and their offspring may be any one of the four sexes. The stripes have essentially become a second sex chromosome.
The geneticists involved think the funky chromosome probably showed up as a weird import from somebody gettin’ jiggy with another sparrow species. Presumably this created a hypersexy female whose white head stripes brought all the boys to the yard, and very unusually, that bred true.
Is that cool or what?!
*No word on whether there is a resulting sparrow tradwife media genre.
**Leaving aside the impact on the emotional health of the non-sexy sparrows.
**A population solely of tan-stripes can reproduce safely, they’re just not that into each other.
I reblogged this a minute ago but I’m going to reblog it again, because I want to add another non-binary bird species: the ruff.
First of all, look at it.
That’s a male ruff, specifically. You can see how they get their name. The females don’t have that fancy collar. They just look like sandpipers, which is what they are.
Like other sandpipers, these are wading birds, but they live in wet meadows and marshes instead of by the seashore. During the breeding season they gather together and the males hold territories, called leks, in which they display to attract females.
At least, some of them do.
Some male ruffs do not display in leks. They have plainer, often white, neck ruffs, and they sort of wander around the display grounds courting the females wherever. The interesting thing is that the territorial males tolerate this. Research suggests it’s because females are more interested in a display ground that has both kinds of males. The ladies like variety, it seems.
But it gets even more complicated. In 2006, a third male form was discovered. This form is extremely rare, and doesn’t have male display plumage at all. It looks just like a female ruff in the field. The other birds, however, can tell the difference, judging by their behavior. These female mimics travel with other males when the sexes split for the winter, and during homosexual mountings (which are common, as they are in many other animals), they often top.
What’s really interesting about these ‘cryptic males’, or faeders, is that they are apparently super sexy. Seriously. Females and males both prefer mating with them. And it’s believed that, like the satellite males, the presence of a faeder attracts more females to the area, which benefits all three forms.
And the thing about these forms is they are fundamentally different from one another. The plumage and behavior differences last throughout a bird’s life, and are determined by genetics. They are functionally three different genders - one of which shows natural intersex characteristics. All three can breed with females, and females are more interested in breeding when all three are present. They know that diversity is the good shit. Which makes them much, much smarter than TERFs.
Good morning and happy pride, bird lovers! Please enjoy these funky facts and feel free to send in your favorite bird sex and/or gender facts this month!
Seriously, if you're planning to spend a coupla hundred bucks on an appliance, or thousands for a car, spend $4 for a month of Consumer Reports (consumerreports.org).
They're a not-for-profit consumers union, dedicated to fair and honest reviews of everything people buy. Totally worth the membership.
And yeah, if money is tight you can join for a month then cancel the membership easily when you're done with your research.
Also check to see if your local public library has a subscription, either in print or digital format (might be listed as a database rather than a magazine - that's the case at my library in Canada).
selkie!soap x reader. depression. strangers to “lovers.” suicidal resolve. major character death. violent drowning. a reckoning.
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Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone.
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Masterlist. Ao3.
previous
When you’re sure that Johnny’s friends have left, you return to the beach. The wind has died down in the late afternoon; the clouds sit heavy and motionless in the sky.
Night is coming, and it promises to be cold. It hangs in the wary stillness of the air, in the waiting quiet. The seabirds’ calling is absent; the dune crickets’ singing has ended.
He’s there on the sand. Somehow, you knew he would be. Felt it, even before he came into view. He stands by the kayak, almost as if he’s been waiting there for you.
You hold the folded pelt with both hands against your stomach as you approach. The fur is so soft against your palms, your fingers. Cool from having spent a night in the ground.
He looks at it with sharp eyes. Then, up to you, expectantly.
His eyes on you in the cottage bedroom, moonlight shifting in them. Teeth in your neck. The taste of brine in your mouth.
Pearls in your memory. Parting gifts to enjoy, as you come to the close.
“Missed you at the end there, bonnie,” he says, even and purposefully steady. “The boys were glad to meet you.”
He’s known—the whole time. He always has. You don’t know how you know this, but you do.
“I’ve had a nice time with you, Johnny,” you say, when you’re only a few paces away from him. “But I think it’s time for me to go.”
Three days. That’s all it’s been. Nothing much, objectively, to say goodbye to. A good way to end things, truthfully, with the aftertaste of good food still on your tongue, the heat and girth of him still lingering inside you. The etchings of his calluses still fresh on your skin.
A kind ending. A gentle one. Better than you and he deserve.
You hold out the pelt.
He looks at it. Mouth a tight line. Brows low and flat. Then his gaze moves to you.
“Where will you go?” he asks, still steady.
“I’m not sure,” you say. “Maybe—Amsterdam. Does it matter? I don’t know.”
“Just like that,” he says flatly. “After everything.”
You frown. “I was always going to leave, Johnny. Remember? I only booked the place for a month. This is just…earlier.”
Something frenetic buzzes in his posture. The slight lean forward in the way he stands. The angles of his face seem harsher, more pronounced. Eyes dark as wet stone.
“Johnny, just—” you shake the pelt at him, still holding it out. “Just take it, okay?”
He looks at the pelt again, and then back at you.
At it, then you.
It—you—
Johnny lunges.
In one swift surge forward he snaps the pelt from your hands and flings it aside. As it flutters to the ground his hands whip at you, seizing fistfuls of your shirt a half-thought before you realize it, wrenching you forward.
“What the fuck?!” you cry, but then you’re off your feet, falling toward him, arms flailing as you lose your center of balance. You topple into him, and he hooks you beneath the shoulders with the iron bands of his arms, stepping away from the kayak, and only for a moment do you think that maybe he’s going to bring you back to the cottage before he starts dragging you in the opposite direction—
“Johnny, no,” you breathe, as you hear a wave break on the sand,“Johnny, no!”
You start to kick and thrash. You throw yourself against his grasp, dig your heels into the sand, try to find the meat of his forearm with your teeth, but he is resolute. Unstoppable.
You start to scream.
The waves eddy around your feet, rise up to engulf your ankles, your calves, as Johnny roils the water with wide, unfaltering steps, deeper in—
The water closes around your thighs. Your waist.
This is happening. This is really happening—
“Had a month to get to this, bonnie,” says Johnny, over your screaming, rough and harsh and completely unrecognizable. He slings you around to face him, jaw set hard, the muscles in his temples flexing as he clenches his teeth. “But I guess we’re doin’ it now.”
“Johnny,” you plead, “please don’t, Johnny, please—Johnny, no, no, no, no—!”
He clamps his hands on your shoulders and shoves you downward. You claw at him, push against the seabed, but your lover is too strong, immune to your fighting, and you are barely able to inhale before he forces your head below the water.
Frigid cold—it rushes into your ears, through your hair, knife-sharp and paralyzing. Salt flooding the open canals of your nose—
You close your throat. The surface swirls above you, distorting him, rippling and folding in on itself as a wave recedes. Hope waits for the retreating water to expose you, but he has dragged you out too deep, far enough that even the lowest point of the backwash still submerges you.
Seawater, eroding cilia, ramming against the rolled stone of your epiglottis. Burning the film of your corneas.
You reach up, swinging your hands at his face, but the distance of his straightened arms, muscles flexing to hold you down, is too great; you beat at empty air, or collide with the rock-hardness of his shoulders.
Another wave comes in, deepening the surf around you. You kick out, knee upward, wrench against him—you just need him to loosen his grip once, for just one moment, and then you can get away. You try to pry his fingers up, but they may as well have rooted in you.
Lungs pulsing. Throat already fighting to open. Chest heaving, diaphragm beating upward to pull in air. Pain lancing up your chest, unimaginably sharp, head so heavy it might burst—
You throw yourself to one side, kicking against the sand, and physiology subsumes your control. The cost of fighting is breathing. The floodways open—the ocean rushes into your throat—
Salt abrades the walls of your esophagus, claw-slashing downward. Acid bypasses the filters of your alveoli, honeycomb structures collapsing to the pressure, to the spasming of your lungs desperate to send oxygen to the rest of your body. Your diaphragm contracts—your chest convulses to cough, to force water out, only to welcome more of the sea in.
You beat at Johnny’s arms again. All you manage is to throw water against him. He is a sea stack above you. A pillar. Unmovable.
Holding your body against his in the bedroom, frighteningly strong, moving against you like the ocean itself—
The water churns above you with your struggle. You cannot see his face. All you see is the unstable shape of his silhouette, wavering lines distorting the edges as the corners of your vision darken.
More seawater, expanding your chest. Heart stuttering between your lungs, yanking in the last of your oxygenated blood, with nothing to send back out. The weight of your body swells, arms too heavy to hold up. They crash into the water before you force them back up again, searching and unwieldy.
Perception narrows. Him, and you. That’s all.
Sunlight through the window the next morning, rimming him in gold. The heat of his shoulder pressed to yours.
The seawater steals the tears from your eyes, throat convulsing on a sob you cannot make.
Grinning as you shared oysters.
You slap your hands against his arms, clapping your palms to whatever they can find, begging, praying—
Him moving inside you, his warmth, his smell, the weight of his tongue in your mouth. The tug of his hand on your arm.
His smile, his voice, his hand in yours—
Fists like weights holding you down. Fire in your chest. Too full.
Upward—something in you tugging upward.
You want to live. You want to live. You want to live—
It’s done.
Johnny lifts your body from the surf and carries it back to the beach. You fit in his arms as if they were the mold you were cast from.
He knew you would the moment he saw you in the airport. Perfect. You were perfect for him. He saw it in the angles of your body, the way you stood, the emotions moving behind the mask of your face.
He tried to explain it to Price once—the seeing. The knowing.
How he could look straight at his old captain, for instance, and know, without ever hearing the man say a word, that he felt responsible. For everything. For the gunshot. For the months afterword. Even though he hadn’t chosen to discharge Johnny himself, Price saw the mold of his hands in the shape his sergeant’s life had taken.
It’s how he knows Gaz couldn’t see the change in him, because he saw what he wanted to see—his best mate whole and healthy, thriving in a new stage of his life.
It’s how he knows Ghost doesn’t even recognize him anymore. Not really.
And it’s how he knows you’re just like him.
He lays you down on the sand, cradling the back of your head so it settles lightly down. Stretches your legs to rest straight out. He aligns your limp arms with the length of your torso, turning your hands upward so the sand will not cling to your palms.
Beautiful. Even with your face slack. Eyes half-open, unseeing. Mouth parted; seawater dripping from the corners.
Your feet touched the island the same way his did, years ago. Running away. Looking for the end, without really trying to find it. It was in the set of your brows, the tight pull of your mouth against your teeth.
Life had gone in every direction opposite of your intention. And it had left you alone.
Johnny smooths a few stray hairs away from your forehead, and kisses the place between your brows. The little line that has sat between them this whole time is gone, smoothed away. He kisses the bridge of your nose, and then your mouth, and then stands.
It took him a while, back then, to make the decision. It was hours before he woke to find Price watching him, sitting despondent on the sand, tears tracking salty down the older man’s face.
He goes to the place he threw his pelt away and retrieves it, shaking it out. Holding it in his hands assuages the anxiety that has wriggled in the back of his mind since the day he shoved it into the lintel of the croft. He’d known where it was, but survival instinct prevails over logic—for the rest of his life, he will always fear its loss.
It’s a consequence, but not one he’d been unfamiliar with.
And, in the end, preferable to the alternative.
He lowers himself to the sand a little ways away from you, propping his knees up and spreading the pelt across them.
When he had done this—he’d done it alone. It had been close. He almost hadn’t made it.
If he takes up this vigil—if he stays, the whole time, watching you—you’ll make it. It’s not a matter of hope or belief. It’s a matter of knowing.
He knows every time he looks into your eyes. Every time he’s been inside you. Every time your body has risen to meet his touch.
You want to live.
So he sits back. He keeps his eyes on you.
And he waits.
The sky claps you between its palms and hurls you back down the gravity well—
You vomit up the ocean.
Panting, with burning lungs. Closer—everything is much, much closer, loud and bright, and suddenly, individually distinct.
Channels of sound and aroma dance on the wind—sea salt, the smoke of someone’s grill from the village, burning meat, the rolling crash of the incoming tide, birdcall and the gust of beating wings and—and—
And you can sense them all.
A gap in the clouds lets the sunlight touch the earth.
You move on the sand. Turn onto your belly, chest heaving, empty and light. The cove—you’re still in the cove. There’s the path back up to the cottage. There’s the kayak. There’s—
Johnny, riotous, waiting in the crashing waves.
He calls to you: loud, long, triumphant, teeth bared in jubilation.
You cry out. Wordless. If you’d had any words to say, your lips could not shape them.
You’re alive.
It crashes into you. Alive.
You lift your head into the wind coming off the ocean. It caresses your face softly, tenderly, like a mother’s kiss on your cheek.
Johnny suddenly turns from you and darts into the water.
You wail with surprise. A wave rushes up to where you lay, water licking up the fibers of your body. You’re not ready. It’s too soon. Why did he leave you? What’s happening? Why isn’t the water cold?
You clutch at the sand. You can’t find your legs—you can’t stand up. All you can do is crawl, shuffle your ungainly body forward with the clumsiness of a newborn child. You cry out again, trying to convince him to return, to come help you, but if he hears it, he does not come to your aid.
Another wave surges forward; salt water crashes across your face. You flinch away from it, but something nictates over your eyes, shielding them from the burn.
Once you reach the surf, the water cradles your body, buoyancy easing your way. You submerge, finding something to kick with—
And then you’re gliding.
Murky, and blue. Sand clouding in the tide. But comfortable—cool, without being cold. You remember frigidity cutting into your skin only hours earlier, rending you at the seams, unmaking you.
Now, it receives you like an old friend.
Ahead of you, Johnny moves further out. You can feel him, far out in the distance, tiny eddies of water rippling against your cheeks.
He’s not the only thing you can feel. The radius of your awareness vibrates with blips of movement, darting, swaying, dancing, below and above and all around. It shocks you to realize, and you go still, hovering in place, momentarily stunned by how much there is living around you.
Johnny pauses too, ahead of you. Waiting. A lone distinct figure, patient for you to follow.
You shiver with startled wonder, and resume your way toward him.
The coastal shelf slopes downward, falling away. The water gradually clears as overhead, past the surface, the sun sinks in the sky. Warm golden light dyes the sea around you. He leads you on, further and further, until a forest of kelp grows up around you.
In the turquoise, ribbons of twisting green undulate and twirl, feathery and dancing in the windy current. Silvery bubbles trail toward the sunlight, intermingling with tiny schools of glimmering fish that dart and jump between the fronds. Down below you, red and green algae fur valleys of rock, swaying lazily like prairie grass.
It’s beautiful.
Johnny drifts to a stop in the middle of it all, wheeling around to face you. You approach him, coming in close—and it’s almost like approaching the sun, so much that he radiates across your senses.
His dark eyes hold yours the same way they had that day on the beach, and the pendulum swings balanced now between you.
He brushes the side of his face along yours, and with his touch he leads you downward, following the stipes of kelp toward the stone to which their holdfasts grip. The heat of his huge body warms the water that flows in the narrow spaces between your bodies, even as the coolness intensifies the further you dive.
The two of you draw up along the forest floor—and find the myriad little denizens of the sea. You’d known they were there, at the very edge of your senses, and now they bloom into fullness in your attention.
Shrimp perambulate beneath rocky ledges. Crabs walks along the ridge of a huge boulder, like climbing a mountain. And there, further down, snails in their spiral shells, pulling themselves across the sandy grain. Starfish, in shades of red and blue and orange. Anemones, translucent hair streaming.
Tiny lives—insignificant to you, before. Hardly worth your notice. Now, you marvel at them, reeling. You want to cup them all in your palms and bring them up to clutch against your chest.
Something brushes against you.
You look up—Johnny, sliding along your side, curving back in toward you, then looping underneath. He nudges at you, then darts away; you gaze at him, confused, so he comes back in, shunting you with his body, and once again retreats.
Behind him, you catch a turtle fluttering in between the green leaves. Atlantic salmon chasing capelin. An eel peeking out from its cave. Undisturbed by Johnny’s—and your—antics.
He nudges you again, then backs off, looking at you expectantly. Realizing his intentions, you follow—he makes a low clicking sound in his throat, pleased, and jets into the flowing leaves, buffeting you with the wave he leaves in his wake.
You’re shocked only for a moment before the kelp parts for you in your pursuit. Johnny quickly disappears ahead of you, dipping down below the canopy. You feel him rapidly shrink in your awareness, and you propel forward, scanning for telltale splashes of gray and white, arms of green caressing you as you pass.
You close in on him, but suddenly he evades. You follow again, only to find he’s nowhere in view. Then the chase is on: he stays in one place only long enough for you to catch sight of him before he bolts, or wheels around and backtracks to confuse you every time you approach. Teasing, taunting, flaunting the dexterity he has underwater which you have yet to acquire.
Golden shafts of dancing sunlight begin to dim and shorten as he leads you on. Frustration rapidly builds in your chest, buoyed as your lungs press against your ribcage. You need to breathe, even as Johnny becomes no more than a dot of movement in your senses, confounding you at every turn.
Why is he doing this? Why won’t he stay with you? If you surface, you’ll lose him, but the sudden memory of saltwater flooding your chest has you kicking toward the fading daylight. Self-preservation taking its place at the head of your priorities, and you follow it with no longer any second thought.
Above you shifts a mirror of silk.
You rise. Faster as the weight of the sea lessens, your reflection blooming as you approach, closer and closer to the wedge-shaped face, the large, dark eyes—
You swim into yourself and breach the air. Your nostrils open, and you inhale the wind.
You see the twilight bleeding into the day. Clouds moving quickly off as the sun sinks into the horizon.
Where is Johnny?
You can’t sense him anymore—as you knew would happen—and your chest contracts with fear and longing, suddenly believing you’ve seen him for the last time—that he’s left you all alone, to figure out what to do next, with no idea how to live in the skin of this new self you’ve become.
You give a mournful howl. You don’t want to do this alone, you can’t, you thought you wouldn’t have to—
But in the distance, back the long way you came, you hear an answer.
You whirl around, facing the shore, and almost too far away to see, a dark shape rests on the sand.
Your throat convulses with a clumsy breath, and then you dive. The water parts for your body, sliding around you, streaming through your hair. Faster than you expect, the slope of the shelf draws close, and you jet upward, belly meeting the sand, and when the water recedes and you drag yourself back onto the beach, your own weight settling heavy on your bones, you cry out again.
You shake the water from your head, wailing at the top of your lungs, desolate and blind as you blink the salt away, and then there’s a warm body up against yours, weight melding against you, heat reaching out to drive away a coldness you hadn’t felt until you’d surfaced.
You continue crying as Johnny closes his teeth around a hank of your neck and drags himself on top of you, pressing you down into the sand. You shift to let him settle over you, and all of his weight compresses your body—sandwiching you between himself and the earth, pinning you down in one place.
Something in you still wants to fight. To shake him off—to escape. But all you can do is cry. He enters you with no resistance, and you cry more, harder, until your lungs deflate, and then you take a deep breath and start wailing again.
Saltwater streaming down your face, dripping into your own mouth. Your voice hits the cliff walls, rebounds off the stone until the air fills with your weeping. Johnny shifts on top of you, pressing your head down to the sand.
The vessel you have contained yourself within overturns. You cry.
You cry for yourself. You cry for him. You cry for what you’ve done, what you haven’t, and for what you can never undo. Your lament fills your own ears and spills out again, all across the beach, catching in the wind to fly off into the ether, raised to the birds, to the passing clouds overhead.
You cry with despair of never going back. You cry with the terror of Johnny finally rolling off of you, to dart back into the waves, to leave you here alone again. You cry until your throat hurts, stinging and raw—
And Johnny’s hands, strong and warm, edge beneath your pelt and pull you out, still bawling with every drop of shame you’ve carried in your body since the day you realized you hated yourself.
“Shh, shh,” he murmurs, drawing you up into his chest, arms steady and strong around you. “It’s alright now, bonnie, it’s alright. I’m here.”
You cannot respond to him. Your mouth hangs open only to wail your grief. Your body wracks against him, convulsing, involuntary, as you scream with despair and relief and horror and resolve, too much to contain, too overwhelming now to ever split yourself away from.
You find his arms with your shaking hands and grip on tight. He slips the pads of his thumbs beneath your eyes every so often to clear away your tears, and you feel his mouth press against your forehead. You wait for him to drop you. Wait for him to see the mess you’re making and wash his hands of it.
He doesn’t. Every time another sob wracks you, he grips you tighter.
Eventually—when you begin to wonder if it ever could, if this is all you are now, a squalling bundle of fragile skin pebbling in the cold—it passes.
The next time you pause to draw breath, you find nothing more inside you to disgorge. You begin to shake in Johnny’s arms, trembling with exhaustion, whimpering with clenched eyes.
He breathes slowly against you. Calm and even. He strokes your face with gentle fingers, even and patient, as if there’s nothing more in the world he’d rather do.
You find the courage to meet his gaze when your heartbeat steadies, finding the rhythm in Johnny’s chest to match. You see again what you saw that first day, that next night; you know now what you’ve always known, somewhere inside you. Your face is familiar in the reflections of it in his eyes.
His mouth curls gently as he gazes down at you. His eyes dance in yours, corners creasing as he traces the curve of your cheek. Light catches in his pupils.
You see him clearly, as the sun gives way to the evening, and the moon rises over a cloudless night of stars.
epilogue early access
a/n: shoutout to @/gildui for suggesting screenshots for that one section of text. Thank you to @/bi-writes for trying to figure out how i could keep the formatting with tumblr's coding. Please let me know if alt text is necessary. God forbid a text-based website allow for formatting said text.
In regards of the Trump government scraping all trans inclusion in its queer information portion of its websites I have made this thing. Spread the word. Don't let them pretend we never existed.
i do think it's so fun that there's a limit to the maximum size of a structure that your mind can conceive of before your imagination starts glitching and struggling to fully render it like an overloaded processor machine. your imagination is only limitless if it stays within the dimensional guidelines encoded into it. and needless to say the one i can imagine is bigger than any of you losers could ever hope to dream of.
this is kinda how eldritch madness works i think. like shoving a square peg in a round hole, but more trying to thread an entire ocean through the eye of a needle.
you sign up for one of those 'learn to farm in a different country!' programs and wind up in scotland.
the owner meets you at the station, a bit surprised to see you. (you can’t blame him—you don’t look the farming type.) but he’s excited for some ‘new meat’ around the farm. he says something about possessing a love for teaching and training in ‘the ways’. he chats your ear off the whole drive to his remote sheep farm.
it’s a little weird there’s no one else from the program at the property, and that the three other farmhands are a bit older than you expected. he shows you around, and explains the ins and outs of the operation. points out a display of medals and badges, waxes poetic about he and his mates finding ‘peace’ in raising sweet lambs. his phrasing’s a bit weird, but it’s harmless.
toward the end of the day, exhaustion catches up. you traveled across the world and slept on planes and trains, and you’re ready to tuck into a real bed. after dinner, when you ask about the lodging situation for visiting volunteers, there’s an awkward pause. four sets of eyes exchange looks that instantly send chills down your spine.
why, you’ll be sharing a bed with one of them. it’s that or the barn. and none of their former guests have preferred the barn.
meanwhile, back at the station, a sweet elderly lady tells the station manager that she can’t find her newest farmhand, who was due to arrive hours earlier.
Was at a conference for birds and one of the presentations is on a program to help veterans re-adapt to civilian lives through farming and now I can’t stop thinking about reader from the university visiting Konig and helping him heal and start his farm and they gradually grow closer and closer. Here is a snippet.
Ticking. It’s amazing how one can go their whole life without hearing it and then one day it becomes the only thing you can hear. Ticking.
If only he had heard it earlier on in that last mission. Maybe he would have gotten out in time. Not gotten caught in the midst of the explosion.
Ticking. Was the feeling of his time with KorTac coming to an end as the doctor told him shrapnel had hit him in just the right way. Wedged in the spinal cord. He couldn’t feel his legs.
So much for their human battering ram.
Ticking. It was the sound of his sanity creeping away and away until all he could feel was the numbness in his legs. Funny how the one thing he wasn’t supposed to feel anymore seemed to be the only thing keeping him there. How the ticking sound most tune out was the only thing keeping him afloat.
A bell rings. König snaps to attention. The ticking stops.
“Damn clock. I don’t know how Melanie deals with it ticking so loudly all day.”
He blinks a few times. Ahh yes. He was at the university. He was supposed to meet with an extension specialist for some type of program to help him heal and readjust to civilian life. That specialist must be you.
Thinking about pre-141!Simon getting dragged to a bar by some colleagues while their force is in Scotland for a mission.
That is until he turns to see an athletic drag king in full special force gear saunter onto stage to Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand.
The performer starts with a hat on but quickly removes it to reveal an out of regulation faux hawk which only serves to make Ghost scoff. The audacity to wear such gear just for show when the fucker probably isn’t even special force. Those thoughts stop when the performer stops under a light though and throws a devious little grin in Ghost’s general direction.
Ghost had never taken himself for much of an eye guy, if there was any feature that usually caught his attention, it was the hair. He had already discounted the performer for his but god his eyes. When he had first entered military, Ghost had been put in charge of a dog named Riley who had the most piercing yet humane blue eyes. He would fall asleep under their watchful gaze each night and awake to them each morning. He never trusted any other pair of eyes more than he had those. Riley had passed years ago and yet those same eyes so similar to hers were staring straight at him.
Ghost was no saint but good god when those eyes left him, he swore he’d pray to a god he never thought he’d believe in just for them to return to them.
Nevermind the faux hawk, the likely stolen uniform, Ghost was caught. He’d do anything to fall asleep under the watchful gaze of those eyes just he did when Riley was still alive.
But then the performer’s head turns and the spell is broken. Ghost stands, agitated, scared even. He feels like he lost control. He rushes out of the bar, regretfully sneaking a glance at the performer’s physique before he steps out. Muscle perfected not by years at the gym but by hard work and… missions? Maybe Ghost had misjudged the performer. Maybe he WAS special force.
As he walked home he wasn’t sure if he wanted the performer… Soap he thinks their name was… to be special force or not. If so he hoped to god they were on the same side. If those eyes caught him in their trap on the field he would be as good as dead.
Will be sitting with my rabbits (Oliver Oxen-Free shown above and Oona) and be comparing them to how I think hybrid!Simon from @meowmeowriley ‘s fix would act like them. Like you can’t tell me Simon wouldn’t purposefully nibble out of Soap’s hand then yank the food from him just to fuck with him.
Or sometimes when my other rabbit Oona is around my cat my cat is absolutely terrified of her just from her presence alone while said cat has no problem trying to hunt the other rabbit. Like that just gives me Simon with the recruit vibes. Other predatory hybrids will be on base and see him loafing around and with just one glare from Simon in his bun form they know better than to try to make him into prey.
Anyways just really can’t stop thinking about @meowmeowriley ‘s story and yall should check it out cause it’s great and makes me happy.
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
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turnnoffyourmind
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