#unclebenjen

[skb77-blog]

[jonsapositivity]

unclebenjen was my friend before she became a jonsa. she was just a jon stan, and her url was strkgryen or something like that so I assumed she shipped that other ship. Turns out, it was all about Jon being half Stark half Targ, but I digress… watching her turn into a jonsa was the cutest thing i've ever witnessed. Including her asking my advice on how to make her friends See Jonsa and then her little reports on how it went. Cute? hell yeah.

anonymous at @unclebenjen

[jonsapositivity]

I want to send some jonsa positivity to @unclebenjen who is a cutie and I love her blog!

anonymous at @unclebenjen

[charmingpplincardigans]

actualwizardbillykaplan replied to your post “Dear actualwizardbillykaplan,  Adam leans against the door next to...”

SCRAMIN I AM SCREAMING

*calmly puts in earplugs*

unclebenjen replied to your post “Dear actualwizardbillykaplan,  Adam leans against the door next to...”

But like, there's flailing and there's wild flailing. "This nonsense" is great and totally brightening up and otherwise unremarkable work day.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s honestly doing the same for me. I’m so frustrated with other writing that I want to cry. I might cry at my friend about it later. But this? This is great. I could write this forever. (I won’t. There’s totally an end point, but.)

captainragtag replied to your post “Dear actualwizardbillykaplan,  Adam leans against the door next to...”

I love you

I love you too!

[charmingpplincardigans]

unclebenjen answered your question “HELLO, EVERYONE!”

Hullo! I also really like robots, and lbr The Raven Cycle. What I'm trying to say is, keep doing what you're doing because it's obviously working. =)

If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s maintaining the status quo! Aren’t the different moral and existential implications of robots endlessly fascinating, though? I’m pretty stoked about this Humans show, even though I just learned about it yesterday. 

[charmingpplincardigans]

Not sure if you're still accepting prompts, but on the off chance... Ronan + Blue; 5. things you didn’t say at all.

“Thanks for letting me come tonight,” she said.

Ronan reached over and ruffled her hair, knocking a few of her clips askew. “Sure.”

Blue huffed and made an exaggerated show of replacing the clips where they belonged. Behind them there were bright stadium lights and people cheering or clapping and loud cars still taking runs on the drag strip. Ahead of them was the night creeping in at the edge of the light’s reach as they walked back across the bumpy dirt field to where Ronan had parked the BMW.

“Maybe next time you can enter a race.”

Blue laughed at the thought of even attempting such a thing. “Do you remember the last time I drove your car?”

“You did admirably. Won’t have to worry about merging at least,” he said, and pulled the keys from his pocket, jangling them in his hands as they approached the car. “It’s not a bad way to learn.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your advice on life lessons.” She stood to the side as Ronan unlocked her door for her and then climbed in and reached across the car to unlock his door before he could get there.

Ronan slipped in and put the keys in the ignition. “Hey, I’ve learned things.”

Blue couldn’t argue that. Some of Joseph Kavinsky’s friends had come up to them earlier in the evening while they were loitering at the bottom of the bleachers and it had been a surreal experience. Without a focal point for her disdain they were just boys. She’d never let herself give a thought to what friends did when they lost one of their number. It seemed they went on the way they had been, only minus a voice. The thought of that made her cold inside and she had slipped her arm around Ronan’s waist so she could put it inside of his jacket. He wrapped her up in it, still talking to the other boys. None of them even batted an eye and she realized that she wasn’t as anxious about people seeing her with Ronan as she was when she was with Gansey. She was still working that out.

Ronan started the car. “Do you want food?”

“I could steal some of your fries, sure.”

“If you’re nice I’ll get you your own fries.”

“When have I ever been nice?” she asked.

Ronan was grinning as he checked out the back window before pulling out of his makeshift spot. “A pair of vipers, the two of us,” he said.

“I think I’d rather be something else.”

“Mongoose,” he said, nodding to himself. “Those can take down cobras. And they’re kind of cute, I guess.”

“Not vipers?”

“That remains to be seen,” he said fondly.

“Let’s never find out.” Blue pulled her knees up to her chest and closed her eyes, let the weak country street lights pulse over her as they made their way back to the highway. As fun as it was to bicker with Ronan, she knew enough to know she didn’t want to ever really have to go against him for anything with a real consequence. Neither of them knew when to quit when it came to what they wanted.

Ronan flicked on the radio but left it low enough that even with the music filling the space between them she felt like the anticipatory quiet was growing thinner. He had very carefully not asked her what she was running from that evening. He would continue to not ask, because he was him and he was used to keeping things inside, but he also knew she wasn’t. It was really kind of spooky the way he had silently worked her out in the time they’d known each other. Maybe it was just the things about them that were the same that amplified the things that weren’t and made them easy for him to see.

“I just don’t know what to do with him,” she said finally.

“Butternut?” Ronan asked.

“Artemus,” she said, because he was very obviously not the man her mother had fallen for those eighteen or so years ago. The man they’d brought back from the cave was not Butternut. He was a museum piece that was sleeping in Persephone’s empty bed, an oddity. A quiet oddity who looked at Blue as if she was a puzzle that needed to be solved instead of a daughter that needed to be talked to. Artemus rarely spoke. “What do you say to a father you’ve never known?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Whenever my father was away for a long period of time I would rush out to show him what I’d created while he was gone. You don’t have any macaroni jewelry or tacky clay Christmas ornaments you can present him with, do you?”

Blue always had a hard time picturing Ronan as the soft, smiling child he must have been before his father died, but she could absolutely see him excitedly showing his father all the things he’d dreamed in his absence. That was something they shared. As far as Blue could tell there wasn’t anything she shared with Artemus. It seemed impossible to reconcile her life with the 14th century world Artemus must have been a boy in. What was there about her that he would have cause to care about besides her DNA? They hadn’t even known what that was then.

“Something tells me he wouldn’t know what to do with them, even if I could find where mom has stashed those things.”

“You don’t have to love him, you know,” Ronan said.

“I know. I’ve just wanted this my whole life and now I have it and I don’t know what to do with it. I think I understand why Gansey is so anxious about finding Glendower. What is isn’t nearly as exciting as what could be. The present just feels so final, even when you know it exists infinitely.” And then, because it had just occurred to her, she said, “ If you could have your dad back, what would you say to him?”

Ronan was quiet for a few minutes. Blue let the night wash over her as she waited for him.

“I don’t know. There are certainly a lot of things I didn’t ever say that I wish I could.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing important.” The way he said it made it clear that whatever it was was very important.

“I used to keep a notebook of things I would say to my father if I ever met him, but that was when he was just a man.”

“Fathers aren’t just men,” Ronan said. It struck her as oddly wise coming from him, but it was probably less about being wise and more about how his father hadn’t been. “Sometimes I think that if I could have my dad back I would hold on to him for as long as possible. And then I would punch him.”

“That sounds…violent,” she said. “I don’t think I want to punch Artemus.”

“No, but Artemus didn’t teach you to punch people. My dad did. Even his absences made us who we are. Your dad wasn’t absent, he was non-existent. It’s okay to be ambivalent about him. It’s okay not to love him.”

“You said that already.”

“I didn’t think you heard me the first time.”

They pulled into the parking lot of an all night waffle place and Ronan parked under the sign. The interior of the car was bathed in cheery yellow light that seemed to mock her indecision. That, thought Blue, I could punch. If only she could figure out how to punch light. Maybe she could put Gansey on it. He was good at researching the impossible.

Ronan turned the car off and pulled the keys out of the ignition. “Does it hurt to have him?” he asked.

“A little, yeah, why?”

“I don’t know. It hurts to not have mine and I was just thinking that maybe it’s the change that hurts. Maybe it’s not always about that person or who you want them to be. Maybe people are just bad with things they can’t control.”

“Especially us,” she said.

Ronan sighed lightly. “Especially us.” He climbed out of the car. Blue gave herself a few moments to consider her impotent frustration and then she climbed out too. Ronan was waiting for her, leaning against the rear fender. “How about this, for as long as it takes us to eat a stupid amount of cheap diner food, my dad is alive and your dad is not a man we just pulled from a magic cave.”

“Can I borrow your dad?”

Ronan slung his arm around her shoulder and scooped her towards the door of the restaurant. “You wouldn’t want him. Did I tell you he was in an honest to god bar fight the other week?”

“No,” she said. “Do tell.”

So he did. He even roped their waitress into it. Blue didn’t know if it was a true memory or if it was just a story he was making up on the fly, embellishing it by using his hands emphatically and mimicking his father’s accent whenever he could. Either way, Ronan seemed to enjoy spinning the tale as much as she enjoyed listening to it. He was explaining about a broken mandolin when Blue started laughing and for just a few moments her hurt was covered over and felt as far away as Artemus had always been. Ronan had told them many times that if it worked in the dream it worked in real life. She thought that, if they were lucky, he could make that true for almost anything.

[charmingpplincardigans]

So, your Raven Cycle fic is all kinds of lovely and you might even have succeeded in pulling me over to the Ronan/Kavinsky side of things, but every day you post something from another of my fandoms. Gentleman Bastards? Harry Potter? Brilliant.

Oh man. I apologize for any Kavinsky feelings that rub off on anyone. I spend entirely too much time thinking about that asshole, mostly because I have friends who don’t help. (I say friends. One friend. *glares at lisapizza*) But horrible people so often make for fun writing and I’m obsessed with the mechanics and ethics of the dream beings, so he gets lumped into those feelings with Proko. 

But thank you! And I’m always so happy to meet other people who love the Gentleman Bastards books. I’m a slow reader so I’m not caught up, but I adore the heck out of Lies and just love everything about that world. Scott Lynch has done some really, truly great building work there and I’m so glad we get to benefit from it. 

[zombeesknees]

Angie! It took me three weeks, but I finished THE STAND last night. IT WAS SO GREAT! Not quite what I was expecting, but the characters all felt so real (your ideal casting LJ post really helped sort that out) and it was eerie, and exciting and magical and mysterious and cool! Stu Redman was lovely (and I know who you feel about him) but personally, I adored Nick. It was the first Stephen King I've read that isn't a part of the DARK TOWER series, so I think I can now move onto his horror.

SO PROUD AND PLEASED, YOU GO GURL.