I had all but given up, but you– you believed in me.
i wrote a thing!
Fic link: i’d like to hold her head underwater
fandom: LOTR, The Rings of Power | ship: Galadriel/Sauron
rated: M | tagged: kissing, seduction, dark fantasy, dramatic irony
summary: What if Halbrand doesn’t threaten her in the lush gardens of Eregion? What if instead, he tries another method to gain her fealty? If he must ease her doubts, perhaps his lips could do more than just whisper sweet nothings.
a canon divergence from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Episode 8 "Alloyed"
excerpt!
His kisses are like his laughter, like how he teases her, like the look he gives her when she notices and when he thinks she isn’t paying attention. Delightful, delicious. Fond. She could linger here for an age.
Halbrand takes her head in his hands, one thumb sliding along her jaw and the other at her chin. He’s gentle but she can sense that he could not be at any moment. Her heart stutters.
“Would you claim me as yours here, in this sacred place?” he murmurs. “Would you have me kneel here and be your supplicant?” His lips and his tongue and his teeth; a sublime sweetness. “Would you have me tell the wide world what you have given me?” His whispers move to her ear and she clings to him like a woman drowning, bound in this queer moment of affection. “Would you see yourself as I see you?” His lips touch the shell of her ear and she’s a pillar of flame. “Would you bind your heart to mine?”
She thinks: Is this a spell?
She thinks: Am I just lost?
She thinks: Or is this man what I have been searching for all this time?
She immediately pictures herself standing over Sauron’s body; a routine fantasy she has had for a thousand years. It will be unconditional victory. She will have thrown down her enemy; the dark lord, the deceiver and the terrible dread. She will have smote his ruin upon stone and earth, and his song will no longer be heard. His helmet will crush, his spear will break. His body will become dust underneath her and his weak spirit will wane until the ending of time.
The wise and brave Galadriel, avenging her brother. Ridding the land of evil forever more.
The fantasy shifts for she will turn and he will be there. Her most trusted friend and ally, Halbrand, the King of the Southlands. He will be weary from battle and covered in ash and dust and blood, but his eyes will be like flame. Horns will sound behind them, and they will take no notice. She will not have to ask for he will be immediately upon her, taking his first kiss from her lips after the defeat of her great enemy.
god someday i HAVE to write the Five Hundred Kingdoms au where Prowl is Optimus's Obviously Evil Advisor on purpose because the Tradition demands at least one Plausibly Evil Figure in a kingdom and this way he fills the ecological niche. it's all going very well--he drinks out of skull-shaped cups, cackles at a calculated frequency, and writes to Shockwave the representative of a Looming Empire for advice on infrastructure development--until one day he walks into a throne room to discover that Optimus has been hit by a sleeping curse. uh oh!! time to take over the kingdom and play Evil Overlord until someone figures out how they're going to wake him back up!! this isn't even that bad, this is WHY he's presenting as the Evil Advisor, it's the point of this contingency plan, what's bad is when the Tradition starts sending heroes to depose him.
He's good at dispatching the obvious, flashy heroes without too much fuss or lethal measures. what's a problem is when a Brave Little Tailor type, one of those sorts of folk heroes defined by his ability to blend into the populace and not be noticed by the big bad, wanders in to try and figure out what's going on here.
Enter Jazz, stage left.
Jazz goes "sure, save the kingdom from the rule of the evil advisor, i got nothing better to do today" and then "oh no he's hot" and then "oh no he's not actually evil" and then the the Tradition, hovering like a looming weight, goes "why haven't you killed him yet"
Jazz: GIVE ME A BREAK
and then he goes, 'oh ho, I will seduce him, this is a shortcut' which might work, if prowl was willing to be seduced, which he is not, and THEN, even after ALL THAT works out, the Tradition goes: ah. the hero has been seduced by villainy and fallen to the side of evil. MORE HEROES.
eventually megatron comes along as like, wandering swordsman and fights his way into the kingdom, through the series of obstacles, to the innermost chamber of the innermost keep of the castle where the king, his old comrade-in-arms, has been lying in cursed repose awaiting rescue, and he opens the door and jazz and prowl and ironhide are behind a desk going 'about time you got here. what are your qualifications.'
(megatron has been a wandering swordsman for twenty years because people keep trying to give him kingdoms. he can't handle that shit. he tried it once when he was young and naive and fell into the Tyrannical Despot role without knowing what he was doing so he ended up faking his death and working to recoup his reputation and stop feeling the urge to cackle villainously whenever a plan succeeded. he mostly stomped it out.)
this one was fun i've actually been sitting on this one since like, 2020. rodimus comes along eventually with a portentous birthmark and a sword and prowl tries to convince optimus optimus should let prowl throw roddy in a dungeon before optimus or roddy or both die tragically in each other's arms after a revelation of identity. brainstorm is the wizard who lives out in the woods and has to be allowed to let his hubris run away with him sometimes or he'll just end up as the mad genius who used to own the now deserted haunted tower. other people are here too this took on a life of its own.
ohhh murderbot my best friend murderbot.... my central point where i break with fandom on MB is that i think there is a terrifically compelling story to be found in a murderbot romance, where murderbot moves past its original purpose and discovers that it does want love and intimacy on its own terms and not on the coercive "terms" of a comfortunit, that just because it was created to kill and not to love does not mean that murderbot can't just say "actually fuck this" and find that kind of connection. especially if that connection is with dr. mensah, its favorite human. (this is textually canon and also something that some people are BIZARRELY wrong about, yes murderbot DOES care very deeply for mensah, yes mensah is its LITERAL FAVORITE PERSON, can some of yall not read)
for every "🌹" received in my inbox i'll post one random sentence of a random WIP i'm currently writing
Let's see. A MegaRatch snippet inspired by KottonKat's "The Way Forward" that I was working on for a fandomweekly amnesty week. Because it's for an amnesty week, I don't feel bad sharing an edited down piece of it.
“We should have taken shelter when the sun went down,” Ratchet complained as they tromped through the undergrowth.
This planet’s forests were gigantic in proportion. It wasn’t often he felt small among organic life.
Megatron kicked aside a fallen log blocking their path. He could have simply driven over it in tank mode with his treads, but Ratchet wouldn’t have been able to do it that way. He was stuck in root mode if he really wanted to make any headway through this terrain.
Re: tma The thing that gets me about season five is, which I think you touched on, is that there just isn’t much sense of forward momentum. I was always more into tma for the little horror vignettes than the overarching plot, but the vignettes seem kind of pointless now that we know everything. There’s no mystery left, and that would be fine if we were building to something exciting, but there’s no sense of that either. Also the lack of side characters kind of kills it :( more cast pls
Oh, that’s a good way to look at it too! With the possible exception of Gertrude’s remarks on the end of the world and Oliver Banks’ memorandum about inevitable entropy, there isn’t a sense of the statements building to anything. (And if star death and silence awaits all the Entities, why do none of the Entities seem to deal with that or be aware of it? What’s with all the business as usual?)
Also, heartily agreed, I miss the Archive crew. Or any crew, however monstrous---Helen popping in and out occasionally doesn’t count.
The founders are currently paying for the beta from our own savings. We’re planning to do a Kickstarter so we can expand upon what we’re currently making, and then we’re going to release premium features for ongoing funding.
