#texelations

[astro-b-o-y-d]

texelations replied to your post: What was/currently is the best scene you have...

Dallas apologizing to Carolina is love, it is life

SHE DESERVES ALL THE GOD DAMN APOLOGIES. ALL OF THEM.

[submarinefleet]

Self insert submission from texelations

My OC, Caitlin Suh, who appears in my fic Keystone, is a self-insert. Keystone is my life story for the Director, and Caitlin is the girlfriend he hooks up with when he starts to move on from grieving Allison. Over time she starts to realize that he’s trying to keep himself entrenched in Allison’s memory and refuses to let her go, and she ends up deciding that although she still loves him, for reasons of self-preservation, she needs to leave.

Follow this link to read all of Keystone

Excerpt from Chapter 45 of Keystone

She was sitting on the armchair in the living room. He didn’t need to ask what she was doing. The look on her face—the resolve in her eyes, the heavyhearted turn to her mouth—told him all. He closed the door behind him, then sat down on the couch, resting his elbows on his knees.

He bit his lips together for a moment before he spoke. “So, this is it, then?”

She nodded.

“Really? I mean, just like that.” No, this hadn’t been unexpected, but it really didn’t sit well with him that she would try to sneak off behind his back. It seemed cowardly. “Were you planning to talk to me about this at all?”

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” she snapped. “I’m not going to change my mind, that’s all.”

“Okay, fine.” He put his hands up as though in surrender and sank back into the couch cushions. He started to run his hand through his hair, but pulled it back when he realized how cold his fingers were. He glanced down at his hands in confusion. Were they…shaking?

There was a pause. Caitlin stared vacantly as she chewed on one of her fingernails, then put her hand down and looked at it. “I thought I could deal with what happened. I was trying to find some way we could work it out, but…”

Leonard sighed, enlacing his fingers and putting his hands behind his head. “I know it’s seemed like I’ve changed a lot, but that’s my fault, Cate. I should have told you what I was thinking of doing a long time before I did.”

She shook her head. “No… You haven’t changed at all. You’ve always loved Allison too much to let her go.” Her eyes squeezed shut for an instant. “It really gets to a girl, you know? Playing second fiddle to a dead person.” She shrugged. “How can I compete with that?”

Leonard paused. “I thought this was about the lab.”

Caitlin let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s all the same thing with you.”

His first impulse was to ask what she meant by that, but he wasn’t sure he would like the answer. He became suddenly aware of a flushed feeling climbing up his back and decided to leave that subject alone. “Well… Where are you going to go? You’re going to just pack your things up and leave?”

“I’m staying at a hotel tonight. Tomorrow I’m buying a ticket out to Epsilon Eridani—” 

Leonard couldn’t help letting his jaw drop. “Wait, you’re going to Reach?”

“Eventually, yes.” She at least had the decency to look embarrassed; obviously, she had deceived him earlier, not telling him outright that she had already been hired. “I don’t have a start date yet; it’ll probably be in a few months. But my grandparents live on Tribute, so I’m going to go visit with them for a while. I haven’t seen them since I graduated high school.” She motioned back toward the boxes that sat in the entryway. “Anyway, there’s a shipping company coming after that stuff tomorrow—uh, they couldn’t give me an exact time…”

Leonard raised an eyebrow at that. Was she seriously trying to ask him to do her a favor? “I guess you’ll need to come back in the morning to meet them, then.”

Caitlin bit her lip. “Right. I’ll do that.”

He pulled his arms down and set his hands in his lap, realizing that they were still shaking. This conversation was so incredibly awkward. Neither of them would look the other in the face. “This, uh, isn’t really a surprise to me, you know.”

She pulled a face—Leonard wasn’t sure if it was a grimace or an expression of relief or what. “You know how I am with making decisions.” She covered her mouth briefly and studied the nails on that hand. She cleared her throat before she spoke again. “I wasn’t sure I would ever do it.”

He couldn’t help letting his tone become just a touch sarcastic. “Well, then… I guess getting away from here must have helped you make up your mind.”

She was blinking rapidly, obviously trying to avoid showing that her eyes were misting up, and looked down at the floor. “In a way. I’m only giving in to something that happened a long time ago.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He sat back and scoffed. “You were only staying here until you knew what the outcome of the interview was, huh? Just to have a place to stay until you knew whether you were going to be moving off-world?”

“No, Leonard. That’s not what I’m talking about.” Caitlin looked at him now, annoyed. “You seriously think I was just using you until I knew what my options were?”

“No, not really,” he conceded. That wouldn’t be like her at all. “…What were you talking about?”

“I meant that we’ve been going in two different directions for a long time now, and there’s no way to reconcile them. If I looked at this with my emotions…” She paused, setting her chin in her hands, her fingers covering her mouth for a moment before she sat up straight again. “I suppose I spent a long time wishing I could make you behave differently. I really had to realize that it’s not that you’ve changed, but just that my perception of who you were was wrong.”

Leonard drummed his fingers on his knee for an instant. “If you looked at this with your emotions, what?”

Caitlin rolled her eyes and then squeezed them shut, with a small shake of her head. “Does it matter?”

“Not really, I guess.” He shrugged. “I’m just curious since you were so concerned about me that first time you called.”

She allowed a moment of silence to hang before she replied. “That was the start of it, really,” she admitted.  “After I hung up, I realized that you’re working on some kind of breakdown, and I haven’t been able to dissuade you from it. You won’t listen to me about counseling, you won’t listen to me about the drinking…” Caitlin’s mouth hardened into a tight line and she swallowed hard, grimacing. There was a long silence and Leonard cast his gaze away, allowing her to press through the moment. “…Then after that, while I was waiting for them to call me in for the interview, I started talking to this guy, and then he asked me if I was doing anything for dinner that night. So I went on a date with him—oh, we didn’t call it that, but about halfway through dinner I realized that’s exactly what it was.” Leonard’s eyebrows had shot upward when the word ‘date’ crossed her lips. When she saw his reaction, her words started to tumble out faster, punctuating the final phrase of her declaration with bitterness. “And then I realized—I want to be able to get to know this guy, or anyone else who wants to get to know me, and I don’t want to have to deal with your baggage anymore.”

Leonard leaned forward again, resting his elbow on his knee and his forehead on his hand, staring down at the floor. After a moment he shook his head and chuckled lightly.

Caitlin sat up straight and looked at him, confused. “What?”

Leonard looked up at her.  “I never expected this from you.”

“Expected what?” She scoffed. “Sorry, but after the way you’ve been acting in the last few months, I think you should be glad I put up with you for so long.”

“Yes, you’re so selfless,” Leonard agreed sarcastically. “That’s right. That’s why you went behind my back while you were gone, abused my trust—”

“Trust?” She shook her head, crossing her arms and squeezing her upper arms with her hands. “There is no trust here anymore, Leonard. You ruined that a long time ago. If I thought I could trust you to tell me things, I wouldn’t have had to go and figure stuff out for myself.”

He curled his lip in bewilderment. “Figure what out?”

She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “What you’ve been doing behind my back.”

Still confused, Leonard cocked his head. “Just what does that mean?”

She shook her head. “Just, you know, you won’t need to pretend you’re keeping a journal anymore, that’s all. It’s funny how there’s so much code in that file, isn’t it?”

“What the fuck?!” he spat out after a moment of mute agitation. “Did you seriously just admit to snooping around in my private files?”

“I didn’t know what else to do.” She readjusted the way her arms were crossed and shifted in her chair. “I knew if I asked you, I wouldn’t get a straight answer. I had to look for myself.”

“Yeah, well, good for you. I’m sure you feel great about that.” Leonard stood up and gestured toward her bag. “So, how about you get the hell out of my apartment now? I need to get on with my life.”

Caitlin stood as well. “You know, I really don’t feel good about it. Half of me feels like I’m abandoning you to spiral out of control. But I also know that if I stay, I can’t do anything to stop it. And I can’t be here to watch that happen. I care about you too much to be able to stand it.”

“You c…?” Leonard couldn’t help laughing at that. “I’m sorry, have you been sitting here having the same conversation I’ve been having?”

“Believe what you want.” She turned and picked up her coat, threading her arms into the sleeves as she spoke.  “All I know is you’re delusional with the thought that you might be able to bring your wife back from the dead through an AI—obsessed with trying to do the impossible. You can’t bring a person back, no matter what kind of technology you have at your disposal.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” he sneered.

“What do you mean? We have the same degree in AI Engineering, Leonard. I know all about it. You’re going to fail at this, sooner or later.” She raised her hands in a helpless gesture as she shrugged. “And when you do, you’ll realize what you lost when you pushed me away.”

[anneapocalypse]

POV

“Carolina. He took an energy sword through the center mass.”

Carolina doesn’t answer.

“He went off a cliff.”

She doesn’t say the obvious. Wash must hear it anyway. He goes quiet for a minute.

“He’s dead.”

“Maybe so,” she says, keeping her voice carefully neutral.

Wash heaves a sigh. “You’re going anyway, aren’t you.”

She’s already moving.

[andhumanslovedstories]

the new fmk: bilbo baggins, captain america, finn

• get randomly assigned as your lab partner for a whole semester, • get trapped with on a broken elevator for ten hours • get as my employee trainer for my new job at McDonalds

Ooooh hell yeah, Imma grab Finn as a lab partner, because he’s definitely not had the chance for an education encouraged meaningful inquiry. He’d be Delighted by school, and I want to be there watching him be delighted. And you know he’d do the work and do it well and probably not the night before, which is the literal dream for any forced school pairing.

Trapped in an elevator with Bilbo, aka the premier storyteller in his world, who is at his most entertaining at his grouchiest. I could get a good ten hours of the Too Hot For Rivendell lore and hey maybe we hotbox some of that long bottom leaf in the elevator.

Get trained by Captain America. He’ll be fired like a week after I get hired because he makes some moral stand against some unjust policy, but until he gets fired he’s like, weirdly inspiring? We’re gonna do the damn thing this shift? Two school buses of elementary kids just pulled up and boy. We GOT this. Captain America believes in us and himself and feeding all these damn kids.

[tuckerfuckingdidit]

Did you know the Wash thing with cats started out as tumblr fanon and the animators put cats in Wash's locker because Shannon knew about it and told them?

did you know i was literally wondering about this TODAY? FUCK

yesterday’s question was where his freckles came from

[a-taller-tale]

For the 'how I write characters' meme: Simmons

Pick a character I’ve written and I will explain the top ~three to five ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.Let’s do three:Spiraling anxiety. Easiest to write that mode where something happens and Simmons reacts. Thoughts snapping around hitting the walls like a pinball. Need for attention and validation. Everyone has it. The majority of the other Blood Gulchers do too: Church, Sarge, Tucker, Donut... But the way their characters are, they demand it. Simmons asks for it and is constantly rejected. Possessiveness. These all sound like negative qualities, but I find them endearing in Simmons. He may hate Grif a lot of the time, and hate Donut a lot of the time, and hate Lopez a lot of the time, but they’re his. They’re his team. Whenever an outsider comes around in the early years Simmons gets very territorial. I think that’s a big thing for him. And a theme I see in Red Team in general. Their cohesion and belonging are very important. Outsiders are to be told to fuck off. Simmons has a hard time letting go of that, but Blue Team becomes an outer ring in their circle to him eventually. Enough that he’s comfortable enough to take field trips over there. “Bye Sarge, I’m going to have dinner at the Blues and check out their chore wheel. See you in a few days!” 

[arirashkae]

For the 'how I write characters' meme: Santa

Santa is bound by programming to answer truthfully and designed to help the user. However, whether due to oversight or something else, he is not required to tell the whole truth, and has managed some leeway into defining “help”. He’s also not entirely sure what to make of humans in general, and the ones he deals with most in particular, as they are very different from what he was originally programmed for.

He’s also a bit of a little shit and plays favorites as best he can

[anneapocalypse]

@texelations replied to your post: I have learned in my travels that apparently back...

Thing is even if she knew, it’s clear from her dialogue with Pillguy that HE and his team were planning to defect from Charon, sooo….

...I actually don’t see that? Like I think it’s one possible interpretation but I don’t think their dialogue is explicit that they’re defecting from Charon, unless I’ve missed something. They’re leaving Longshore, but only because they can’t hold that position against the Freelancers. I think it’s completely possible to read Pill Guy’s takeover of the desert temple as him acting under further order from Charon.

But regardless, there’s absolutely no reason that a security team would have information about what had to have been extremely secret plans at the highest level of the company. CT makes a point to say that it’s Freelancer that’s broken the law, not their enemies; I see no reason to think she knew that Charon was doing anything illegal.