#counting freckles

[theycallmeyammy]

It was there in your eyes, The dreams I had built—Unknowing, That those same honeyed eyes would burn me down to mere embers. I’d let the flame consume me rather than live a minute without them. Instead of fleeing, I counted the freckles on your skin one last time.

— You are a sickness, my sickness

[bnhafanficrecs]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga) Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku Characters: Bakugou Katsuki, Midoriya Izuku Additional Tags: Fluff, Through the Years, Time Skips, Comfort, Kissing, Romance, Canon Compliant, Soft Bakugou Katsuki, Soft Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku, Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia Manga Spoilers, mostly vague and implied but yeah, Developing Relationship, Bakugou Katsuki and Midoriya Izuku are Soulmates, Implied Sexual Content Summary:

katsuki counts izuku's freckles throughout the years

[fic/n: this fanfic does contain implied sexual content, though nothing is explicitly written.] 

[lifesizehysteria]

“You had awoken beside an angel and you intended to take her to heaven.”

I just want you to know that this line is burned into my mind now. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

Oh my god, anon, this made my whole night!! I love that line, too! I can’t imagine waking up beside Violet Bridgerton and thinking anything else.

Thank you so much for sharing this with me. It is truly so wonderful to know which parts of a story hit for someone! 🫶🏻🫶🏻 I appreciate you, anon!

[starlity]

Yamaguchi!! I admire your freckles very much, they're very cute 💖✨ have you ever counted to see how many freckles you have?

If I ever get to a definite number, I’ll tell you!

[dragonpressgraphics]

Live Stream is Over! Almost 3 hours of coloring. Did the inking earlier today, no idea how long that took, and the original design was from 9 months back. I FINALLY got back to it! (so happy I did, i love this!)

Above is an animated WIP of my process, and below is the finished piece:

For the Fic

Counting Freckles by @pherryt

Fandom: Supernatural  Rating: Complete and Utter FLUFF Pairing: Destiel Word Count: 1403

Tags:  Tooth-rotting fluff, Dean’s Freckles, Human!Castiel, Bunker Fic, Domestic Fluff, Men of Letters Bunker, SFB, Established Destiel, Canon-esque

Summary:  How do ex-angels count freckles? Dean Winchester is about to find out. 

Thanks for hanging out with me @jdragon122 @crippledhockwalker

Art Tags & Destiel Tags: @jhoomwrites @rosemoonweaver @dmsilvisart

@hells-keeper @madamelibrarian @destielonfire @trisscar368

Now i need to go update my fic with the brand new art!! :D

*EDIT* I forgot the marker was supposed to be blue. oops!

[dragonpressgraphics]

https://picarto.tv/dragonpressgraphics

Live stream - i’m going to color this tonight....this is an inked piece i finally got around to finishing  - originally a marker and highlighter design i made for my fluffy short story Counting Freckles last fall. 

original design: 

I’m gonna do all the freckles and connect the dots digitally after I finish coloring.

@jdragon122 @crippledhockwalker if you guys are still awake, i think i got the channel up and running, though there does seem to be some kind of lag...

anyone else, if you want to join, feel free. and also pop in and chat, ask me questions - let me know you’re there :D

[knittedgauntlets]

Writing: Counting Freckles

I like leaving these things for a few weeks for a proper retrospective on them. Counting Freckles was a fluffy one-shot I knocked out in about an hour and a half because I really needed a break from writing Fortunate Son. Constant angst is hard. Spoilers after the cut.

Inspiration

This one came from a few places, but the specific lying in bed thing came from me lying in bed, trying to fall back asleep, and telling myself a story to make it easier. Or possibly waking up and doing the same thing. I dunno, I was sleepy. Either way, the first half of it appeared from that vague dream-state.

The other major one came from a family story about my dad counting my mother’s freckles one day, before they were married, and marking them with a pen. I can only commend her patience and willingness to get drawn on. Anyone comes near me with a pen and a speculative look in their eyes and I’m telling them to fuck right off.

As you might have gathered from that, I’m pretty damn freckly myself, and there’s some things about the way freckles are usually described that really pisses me off. “Fairy kisses” or “angel kisses”, those are fine for cheering up kids who’ve being teased for having them but for adults? And no ever seems to understand that there are several different and pretty distinct types of freckles and melanin patches that the body can produce, and they’re not all perfect dots, and they do change over time. And they’re not connected to the bits of you that see the sun, necessarily. And, right, interesting fact, freckles aren’t imprinted on you at birth. You get more of them over time. Even in winter, they’re never static. I find new ones every year. (And then I swear at them.) So if Cas had rebuilt Dean he would have rebuilt him freckle-free unless he put them on. And Dean would continue to freckle from then on.

Headcanons

This has one fully fledged headcanon as well as some minor logical extrapolations which are more specific to this story. The headcanon is as follows: “... It was just that he hated talking about feelings. Sam thought it was because he was a repressed victim of the patriarchy, or something, but really it was that he had never learned how. He stopped talking when emotions ran high; had done since he was four years old, “Take your brother and run,” and the months of silence afterwards.”

Knowing that Dean, under great emotional stress, had developed selective mutism as a little kid, and that he had never received proper therapy for it but had started talking again to save Sam, and that John was pretty emotionally repressed and was bringing his kids up to be good little soldiers, is it any wonder he has no idea how to talk about feelings? Me headcanon is that he genuinely can’t until he frames it as about another person in his head. So, he’ll open up to Sam, and sometimes to Cas, but he only does so when he realises how much it’s hurting them, or that it’s affecting their ability to do their jobs. He doesn’t do it for himself.

And he’s quite happy to talk about other people’s feelings. Usually to victims or relatives of victims, but he does demonstrate emotional empathy, as well as a con-man’s ability to manipulate the emotions of others. He does it for Sam, and Cas, Benny a couple of times, Bobby, Charlie, Jo - h is happy to listen to them talk about their feelings, and sometimes he even asks about them. Just not his own. The truly emotionally repressed get really bothered by other people’s emotions. It’s only when he’s really angry with someone that he doesn’t want to hear about their feelings, and that is a common tactic to use if you know you’re going to forgive someone as soon as you start empathising with them.

Mental Health Stuff

I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the story that started as pure fluff ended up with angst and trauma sneaking in, because (1) I can’t stop myself and (2) stories need an element of conflict to be interesting. In this instance, the conflict is Cas’s internal conflict.

OCD is a complex and poorly understood condition, and it’s important to note that while Cas’s described behaviours in this do demonstrate a compulsive element, that’s not the same as actual OCD. That said, what Dean sees as a benign form of taking control could in theory develop into OCD, but that would only be the case if Cas already had tendencies in that regard, and there would be a lot more stuff going on with it. Cas wouldn’t be sitting in a safe place counting Dean’s freckles when he got worked up and couldn’t sleep; he’d be stopping to do it in the middle of a fight, and he wouldn’t be able not to.

That’s not to say that Cas is fine. What he’s doing is staving off a panic attack about losing his Grace and becoming human. (There are clues in there if you look hard enough.) To the outside observer, in this case Sam, it looks similar enough to obsessive and compulsive behaviour that the obvious diagnosis is OCD. But obsessive rituals which cause upset when they’re interrupted aren’t limited to OCD. Most mental illnesses have an element of them, and some people are more prone to fixate on details than others. I’m betting a former angel who literally used to know how many atoms there were in things would be pretty detail-oriented.

It’s important not to misdiagnose people, so that they can get the appropriate help. If Cas were medicated for OCD he would not respond well, because what he actually has is PTSD, like Dean and Sam. If I were to be treated for, I dunno, a mitochondrial disease I would not respond well, because what I have is CFS. My mitochondria work fine. (My GP runs tests every year to check.) Of course, sometimes doctors get things wrong, and it’s awful when that happens, which is why we ask for second opinions when we’re not convinced. But please don’t blithely do what Sam did in this story and start diagnosing people unless you’ve got something more to back you up than the internet. It has all the knowledge of the world on it, but unfortunately, a lot of that knowledge is crap.

MH issues are particularly important not to self-diagnose, or diagnose for other people, because there’s a risk that you/they will misrepresent your/their symptoms to fit what you/they believe is wrong with you/them. Ugh, I’m gonna use Cas as an example again, that sentence was awful. If Cas believes he has OCD he might misrepresent his symptoms to fit what he believes is wrong with him. This is why doctors ask a lot of questions and run a lot of tests. But there aren’t that many tests they can run for MH issues. A few questionnaires, but that’s about it. So the potential for getting a wrong diagnosis, or being dismissed entirely as someone who has googled too much, is much greater.

That’s about all I an think of that was going through my head when I was writing it. I really just wanted a break from writing chapter 5 or possibly 6 of Fortunate Son. And I got this neat little story that was sweet and could be written and posted in a couple of hours, and it was just the ticket. I’m going to remember that tactic for other long reads I might or might not have planned.

[ask-ladyofrosefire]

Counting Freckles

So everyone understands, the image that pops up when I picture Achilles has become this guy. AU if you like.

"One, two, three, four, five, si--" "Patroclus." "Yes?" "What are you doing?"

When no answer becomes immediately available, Achilles opens his eyes. Patroclus, who had been, until that moment, leaning over him, promptly rolls away. Achilles grumbles at the sudden rush of cooler air and the sun in his eyes, and then rolls to follow him, wrapping an arm around his waist. 

“Patroclus...” He urges. Then, despite knowing that Patroclus thinks it is cheating, he leans in so that his lips brush the shell of his ear. “What were you doing?”

He feels the shudder that runs down Patroclus’s spine and does nothing to hold back the smile that pulls at his mouth. Patroclus’s heel jabs one of his shins in a half-hearted kick.

“Nothing.” “You were...” He kisses the skin over Patroclus’s fluttering pulse, “counting,” another kiss, this one to his shoulder, and Patroclus shifts, a noise like protest and encouragement breaking from his lips.

“What were you doing?” Achilles asks again, and rolls onto his back, pulling Patroclus back over him. His hair catches the light of the sun, absorbs it, and he is crowned in shadow. (Achilles can understand why Persephone followed Hades, if he was this beautiful, if he promised this much peace.) 

Patroclus is flushed just darkly enough for Achilles to see it, and it makes his smile widen until Patroclus kisses it away. 

“I was counting your freckles.” He admits when he pulls away, and it is Achilles’s turn to to feel his ears go hot. 

“Ah...” He clears his throat, and then folds one arm behind his head, leaving the other around Patroclus’s waist. “Carry on, then.”

There’s a pause as Patroclus laughs and shifts to a more comfortable position. Achilles closes his eyes. 

“I’m going to have to start over, you know...”

Achilles only hums agreeably.

Patroclus laughs again, and then takes a long, slow breath. 

“One... two... three... four.... five...”