#hedge writes

[ghostkingsupreme]

Cover art for my asobaro fic

[hedgehockey]

Black Sails 2x05 — James and Thomas

It doesn’t matter how many years pass, I still find myself stunned by this pair.

The scale of what each of them risks. The ontological shock that follows.

I do assume some kind of building attraction. Something that, at first, can be denied as immersion in work, and then a little later on in their acquaintance rationalised as admiration or intellectual affinity. Something that, by the time we get to the visit from Thomas’s father, has shifted into something more persistent. Emotionally charged pauses in conversation, awareness of proximity, whatever it is that tells them this is a pattern, and that the other is aware of it too. The beginnings of mutual recognition and the creeping certainty that this matters more than it should. The knowledge that these feelings only show up with each other and nobody else.

But all of that is still manageable. Restraint feels like control. In their socially-constrained world, that’s all perfectly normal.

And then James makes his incredible, risk-it-all declaration. He publicly aligns himself with Thomas against his father, rejecting a powerful man, a peer of the realm, transferring the risk that was until then only pointed at Thomas on to himself. And moreover, he breaks his own strategic operating rules. This is a man who survives by careful calibration, restraint, strategic positioning, and he abandons all of that in a single, visible act. He as good as says out loud, “You are more important to me than the system I have built my life around, and the position I have attained with it.”

For Thomas this must be overwhelming. He’s used to being dismissed by his father, and misunderstood by the society peers who think of him as a radical. James’s declaration is immediate and deliberate, and it comes despite his understanding of exactly what it costs. And since James has just destabilised the hitherto safe ambiguity between them, withdrawal would now feel like an insult; a rejection of what has just been offered at great cost. The emotional conditions have changed. He has proof. He can no longer continue not acting and remain intact. And so he is decisive. He chooses action over contemplation. He gets up, he walks over, he closes the distance between them. It’s not so much a sudden impulse as a need to answer a declaration that might not have used the terminology of love but was unmistakably an act of it.

Until that point, everything James has done could still be framed as principle, loyalty, and conviction, but Thomas’s movement reframes it completely. Ambiguity fully collapses into certainty. He knows what he just did and knows that Thomas understands it too. And he knows they both know why. There is no longer any point in pretending. He couldn’t possibly justify it on any of his usual principles, but he’s just experienced a collapse of all the systems that require justification. And so he leans in.

It’s such an enormous risk. For both of them, but especially for James. Externally utterly unsafe. Unsafe at any speed. But internally, it’s inevitable.

And thus the seed of revolution is planted. Because there is no version of their lives after that moment where it didn’t happen. There is no ‘before’ to go back to. James has been seen, whole, for the first time. All of his ambition, his restraint, his intellect, and his love, is brought together by a single witness. To find that is world-shattering. And to lose it, even more so.

[hedgehockey]

OK. So Captain Flint casts himself as Odysseus.

But he lives like Achilles for 10 years?

[ghostkingsupreme]

Yours

Rating: Explicit | Pairing: Liu Qingge / Shen Qingqiu (SY) | Words: 7.5k

Fifth part of the What happens after the Mesmerizing Fragrance extra series

Summary:

Feeling cuckolded by his own wedding, Shen Qingqiu grabs the first opportunity to get a taste of his wedding night with both hands.

✨ Read it on AO3 ✨

[hedgehockey]

For a lover of Black Sails, Toby Stephens as Captain Hook/Mr Darling in Wendy & Peter Pan was genius and I am delighted I got to see the last night of the run.

Let the inevitable Hook and Flint brainworms begin.

Both characters so afraid of what they might represent. Hook afraid of becoming the forgotten man, the relic. Flint afraid of becoming the simplified monster; the villain in someone else's history. Hook feels the story closing around him. Flint actively fights to stop it happening. But both the play and the show tell us how important stories are, how important it is to believe. Who gets to write history? Who gets to be myth?

Hook as patriarchal decay. Flint as patriarchal defiance. The one rigid, fearful of change, a living relic of patriarchy's collapse. The other a reaction to the enforcement of it, his violence not about maintaining order but about disrupting it. Toby Stephens as both the corpse of patriarchy and its executioner. Elegant.

And TIME. Oof. Peter Pan, the story about refusing to grow up and Black Sails the show about being consumed by history. Hook obsessed with time (literally, he's chased by a crocodile with a clock for a stomach). Flint with legacy. Hook haunted by the future, Flint by the past. Both trapped by time, but at opposite ends of it.

Plus for Wendy & Peter Pan specifically, a more feminist, queer-aware take on the story... Whereas Flint is a man shaped by his queerness, fuelled by the supression of it, Hook is a man who has walked away from emotion, softness, and intimacy, sublimating the potential for queerness. "Oh, Smee, I never knew!" Yes. That’s sort of the point.

Honestly, Toby Stephens does a number on men at war with their own legacies, and I love that for him.

[ghostkingsupreme]

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

Rating: Explicit | Pairing: Liu Qingge / Shen Qingqiu (SY) | Words: 8k

Fourth part of the What happens after the Mesmerizing Fragrance extra series

Summary:

Liu Qingge has a question. Shen Qingqiu thinks he knows what it is. Liu Qingge accidentally ends up bottoming for the first time.

[ghostkingsupreme]

The Duties of a Virtuous Shixiong

Rating: Explicit | Pairing: Liu Qingge / Shen Qingqiu (SY) | Words: 18.7k

Third part of the What happens after the Mesmerizing Fragrance extra series

Summary:

When their new arrangement can't seem to cure Liu Qingge of the Mesmerizing Fragrance, he decides he shouldn't burden Shen Qingqiu any longer. And Shen Qingqiu is completely, absolutely fine with that…

✨ Read it on AO3 ✨

[ghostkingsupreme]

wip wednesday!

not technically a wip, but a little sneak peek of the fic i wrote for the amazing @fengxinzine! the zine is full of incredibly beautiful art and stories so don't miss out!!

so here's the first few paragraphs of my story about feng xin's ascension 'to conquer the storm' ☀️🏹

The battlefield changed. In the blink of an eye, the horde of anonymous soldiers morphed into long-taloned ghosts screeching for his blood. They combusted into black smoke as his blade sliced through them — his quiver long since depleted. Dozens he cut down, his battle instincts taking over and deflecting the confusion. Even when the last one was finally reduced to smoke, it took Feng Xin a while to process where he was again or what had happened. He whirled around, convinced another menacing ghost would jump out of the shadows. The shadows?  He paused. When did it become so dark? It had been a bright day, metal reflecting blindingly in the vivid sunlight. Now heavy clouds obscured the sky. Where did they come from so fast? The sudden darkness wasn’t the strangest development, however. Around him, there was nothing but an eerie, dead silence.  The two battling armies had vanished. Not a soul remained on the plains which had been filled with them farther than the eye could reach only moments before. The wind was picking up. It carried a deep, sourceless voice, ringing loud and clear in Feng Xin’s head. Protect.