The Infinite Middle

Ember | 30+ | Returned Midwesterner | Multifandom personal blog. I (try to) write things.

[witchfall]

go on, let it fall [1]

[jullus pyr norbanus/Warrior of Light/Alphinaud Leveilleur]

[~5550 words]

Jullus meets the Warriors of Light.

Not that he knew that, then; perhaps, if he had, this would have ended so much differently.

---

Jullus peels off his gloves to check for frostbite, breath falling out of his mouth in heavy, watery clouds.

Does he remember how to move his fingers? Yes — for a small mercy, the synapses between brain and finger are preserved. But numbness filters upstream, from his fingers to his wrists, and it blots his mind in fear, even though he knows, logically…

He knows it is not frostbite and he knows it is not magic and he knows it is not some new, terrible virus wrought to give them ignoble deaths piled in their own fluids.

(The men won’t shut the fuck up.)

It’s because he is having a panic attack and cannot breathe.

Atticus, one of the infantrymen, presses a lit cigarette into his hand and gestures vaguely at him. Take it. They lack supplies and heat but they still have cigarettes, for some reason, maybe because only now did discipline die, replaced instead with animal instinct to just get through the moment.

Moment by moment, they become exactly what they’re trying to defeat.

Maybe his thoughts can be seen on his face, because Publius, on his other side, suddenly says, “It’s just a cigarette, man. It didn’t insult your—”

It didn’t insult your mother, goes the rest of that saying, and Publius wisely clicks his mouth shut before he finishes it — but it does make Jullus put the end of the thing in his mouth to avoid replying.

Tastes fucking bad, dry as the ash falling out of the sky, and when he breathes it in his body nearly bends itself in two from how badly his lungs reject the coarse smoke. He coughs horribly, raucously, and finds breathing a sharp, thin thing. The panic of real physical danger, however, seems to short circuit whatever chemical re-creation his body had decided to manufacture, and when he can finally breathe — when the men around him stop smirking — he realizes he hasn’t thought about his hands in a few minutes.

“I’m going on patrol,” Jullus announces, giving the cigarette back. It’s his turn soon, anyway, and lingering leads to chemical imbalance. “I’ll…try to find…more than this.”

The men watch him like he just announced he was diagnosed with a terminal illness — obliging of his earnestness, even though they know it will be the death of him.

[read on ao3.]

[urie]

stop calling it a girl dinner and call it by its formal name: Fend For Yourself dinner in an ingredients household

[queer-reader-07]

[temporoyales]

'Above all else, I wished that they had lived.'

Happy 2nd anniversary, Dawntrail!☀️

[qqchurch]

[minicactpot]

おつかれSUMMER

lethal face cards at the undisclosed beach location (costa del sol) btw

[drawingway]

aannnd i was messing around with Krita's settings to find the value filter and decided to test if the values were more or less correct. I usually take my glasses off and take a step back to check the values (it works cause i have high myopia and stigmatism :v) its not perfect cause i suck hard in grey scale, but i dont think its that bad.

[frogmp3]

one time we were listening to fleetwood mac in the car and my sister who was probably 4 at the time asked, without being prompted, “can girls marry girls?” and THAT is the power of stevie nicks

[roguesquirrel]

my pre-columbian miis and the art they were based on

[witchfall]

That's right. I started big fishing. Words of the utterly deranged!

[bourbonciel]

sacrifice

[sunflowers-and-scales]

“this character did not act in the most objectively logical way possible!” is not ! actually valid literary criticism

[sunflowers-and-scales]

i have trust that the media literacy enjoyers will find this one idk

[acceptableduraz]

[animentality]

[poppyseed-art]

[rad-roche]

writing is a fantastic hobby but the kicker is it's a lot harder to show your friends as it's progressing. with a sketch i can show someone and they'll be like oh that's an apple. you can't do that with words until you get a lot of them down. so i'll just be like damn fuckin. uhh. check this out

that's right. and that's just one of the several words i know

[vexheart]

This

[theverdeacqua]

post 7.5 msq comic thingie i was making for funsies but ran out of steam with it, as its often the case 😵‍💫

[miseria-fortes-viros]

idk perhaps this is too early 2000s internet safety module of me but the amount of information you guys demand from each other is weird

[ripempezardexerox]