( @herstolenson​ ) « XO baby

               LATE MORNINGS ALWAYS felt good. Tom had never been much of an EARLY BIRD anyway; getting to take his time to wake up was just about the only way for him to start off the day in whatever counted as a good mood. 

It didn’t hurt that there was still a warm body next to him. Reaching over, he felt the book in Matt’s hand, and groaned. “How long have you been awake?” 

OUT. || Anyway who’s still on this blog who would give me plots for the boys bc now they’re like “hey remember the tens of thousands of words of world building you’ve done for us? can we, I dunno... exist?”

TITANS – SEASON 3 ››› Brenton Thwaites as Dick Grayson

dick + his black beanie

OUT. || Matty woke Tom up. And now I have more blogs “awake” than I technically should. 

inalienablerights​.      

     “Oh,” she says softly, eyes growing soft and unexpectedly glassy, as they often do when he speaks about their future together. She’s spent a long, long time believing that she wasn’t going to get one with someone she loves and it always hits her somewhere deep and long-buried that things are so certain for him– even when he complains they’re unclear.

     Kara’s fingers reach up to twine with his for a moment, grasping his hand in a grateful squeeze. The offer is very, very tempting, and for a moment she nearly says yes– but that Kansas work ethic and Kryptonian self-reliance is too deeply engrained in her to accept right off the bat. Instead, she kisses his knuckles gratefully and takes a moment to organize her thoughts.

     “You’re wonderful,” she murmurs, “But I can’t. I’m under contract and as crappy as it is, I have to stick it out for awhile until it’s up and I can move on.”

    She’s not ready to give up her little loft, and she knows if she quits now she’ll only feel guilty about it. Besides, there’s always the chance that things will get better. She has to believe that she can keep standing up for what she believes in and keep the hope that maybe something will change. And if not, well– her contract is up for renewal in January. She’ll just quit then.

               HE COULD TELL just by the feel of her hands that Kara was about to tell him no, and Tom was okay with that. That future had always been hazy, anway. There were others — crisper and far more immediate — that had them sharing a housekey. Tom was okay with waiting; there were other happy moments coming, anyway. 

When she shifted, Tom let out a small huff of amused frustration, a vision suddenly coming to him like a direct message from Fate — which was exactly what it was — of the moment happening right then. She didn’t often send him moment that were quite so immediate, but he recognized the shirt he was wearing, and Kara was leaning into him in the same way she was, about to meet him for a kiss. He sent a mental chiding to Fate, reminding her that watching him from her glass-bottom boat had never been his favorite. 

But he leaned forward anyway, matching the shape of his body that had been pressed into his mind. “Do what you need to do,” he quipped quietly. “If you change your mind, the offer is there.”  

The Greatest Showman (2017)

eternlle​.    

this has been the way for ages now   ;   at some point, she should have stopped being surprised.   henry   ( or thomas, or often both )   show up whenever they feel like, and usually treat her as though she was on the verge of making some horrible, life - altering decision.    sometimes they’ve got fair points.   usually, they’re just inconvenient.   she never misses them when they’re gone, but if they had better timing, she’d always be happy to see them when the meet again.

‘ good timing ’    is not in henry’s vocabulary.

❛ yeah, too long.  you look a bit greyer at the temples  —  are those crow’s feet?  you should really try meditation, it does wonders for stress. ❜      she glances at him for a moment, only that…   and her gaze is unwillingly drawn back to the girl.   now that the entourage has been pointed out, she can see them   ;   there’s a certain energy to the air, charged and expectant, and evelyn’s learned too much over the years to ignore that.   damn him.    security guards are probably more vigilant than nuns at a convent school, and she was never able to get past them, either.

❛ how have you been?  ❜       she asks, just to please him.     ❛ and how’s thomas?  don’t tell me he’s too busy to come see his favorite girl.   he still owes me thirty euros, and…  fifteen or so birthday presents.  ❜

               HE GRINNED AT her barb, his eyes giving the slightest crinkle in the corners like they’d done for the last, give or take, seven-hundred years. The exact same face had looked at him in the mirror for so long that if he’d gained a wrinkle or his hair had gone a little gray, he’d have been gobsmacked and, maybe, a little amused. As it was, he was exactly the same, same as she had been for a very long time. — A shorter time than he and Tom, but still; a remarkably long time indeed. 

“I’ve been good,” he said, pleased that she asked. “Tom is with Clarice, who sends her love, by the way. She wanted to come when I got my warning, but it’s her and Tom’s get-along vacation time. I’ve told you about that before, have I?” Henry had been wed for, give or take, five hundred and fifty years at that point, and she and Tom’s relationship was still as amusingly antagonistic as ever. They seemed to delight in irritating the other, and so the holiday time Henry had insisted they take every two years was still firmly in place, centuries later. And while their fights and spats all seemed to be entirely out of love at this point, Henry suspected that they had grown to enjoy the time spent together without Henry around.

“He actually sent me with a message that you wouldn’t see a single red cent from him until you could go two decades without getting yourself into trouble,” he quipped, quoting Tom directly for her sake. “But if you’d like, I could pay the thirty and we could call him square. He never should have bet you something you could so easily manipulate. I think he was doing it just to amuse himself.

“Anyway. I’m more interested in you. How did you end up here? This isn’t like your normal haunts.” 

how was Greece? any notable things (or people) done?

i died. i had a fine time but i died.

eternlle​.     

♡♡♡      𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫   :    @gemineycs​​

❛  again, really?   quelle surprise.  ❜          she’s not usually so sharp - tongued…   except it’s august again, far away from paris, and the local playground is buzzing with activity.     she hadn’t meant to stop  —   there’s a starbucks two blocks down with her order waiting to be picked up   —   but evelyn saw, and couldn’t resist.    now she leans forward, elbows braced against her knees, and stubbornly doesn’t look to her left   ;   she won’t give him the satisfaction.    henry is always good at finding her when she least wants to be found.          ❛  i wasn’t going to do anything,  ❜         she finally mutters petulantly.         ❛  you always think i’m going to do something bad  —  ❜         there’s a toddler going down the slide, with butterfly overalls and blonde curls.   the sight of her is a thousand individual knives to the chest  —   just like maerie.          ❛  i just wanted to  l o o k .   just for a minute.  ❜

               HE’D SAT DOWN next to an ever-familiar face wordlessly, though the bend of his shoulders and the small, placid smile between his cheeks said that he knew the young woman. And even though Evelyn hadn’t looked at him yet — pointedly looking forward, in fact— Henry knew she was speaking to him. 

“I only show up when I’ve seen bad things happening,” Henry reminded her. “And the little blonde over there? The one in the overalls? That’s the daughter of an ambassador. There are about six plainclothes guards watching her and her nanny; don’t know what you’d need that information for.” Fate had given him a warning instead of a guarantee, and he had taken it. It wasn’t often that he and the force he and his brother often called sister agreed, but when it came to the intrepid Evelyn, she always sent him... messages. Warnings, when the ageless and mischievous young woman was about to get up to something especially troublesome. He thought it was probably because Fate liked her, was amused by her. Maybe Fate knew something about her that she hadn’t yet let on to the boys. 

“Anyway, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen you,” Henry said, leaning back, putting his elbows on the back of the park bench and watching the children at play. Between himself and Tom, Henry had always liked children more. When they’d made the decision to never have heirs, it had been a particularly difficult reality on Henry’s part to realize there would never be any child with his eyes or the curve of his own nose in the world. 

“Maybe it’s time we play catch up? How long has it been? Fifteen years? Longer?” 

brenton thwaites as dick grayson in titans 2.01

inalienablerights​.      

     “It’s not like I haven’t considered leaving,” she says, cracking open her own can of soda and pausing for a long sip. She reaches up a hand to rub at her eyes, “I have my eye on job listings. But right now, it’s stable income and my contract’s not up till the end of the year. Unless another paper wants to buy out my contract– which won’t happen, I guarantee– I’m stuck for at least another few months.”

     Kara sighs and leans over to bury her face in his shoulder, giving a low whine of unhappiness.

     “I was hoping things would get better when I got this job,” she mutters, “It looked like such a great opportunity on paper but ever since we got that new editor it’s been, just… ugh.”

     It’s not like being Supergirl gets her a paycheck, or anything– she relies on her civilian income to live and even though she’s human-passing, every comment feels like a slap in the face. If she could quit, she’d have done so ages ago. For now, she has to soldier on and she can come to her wonderful, understanding partner and vent about it all in the privacy of home. Or– his home, at least.

     “Let’s just eat and have a nice night in, okay? I don’t want to bring down the whole evening.”

     She presses a soft kiss to his jaw, then wonders quietly to herself when she’d started to think of Tom’s place as home. It snuck up on her, she muses, but she spends just as much time here as she does at her own apartment and it’s one of the very few places on Earth that she can be her whole, true self. It’s…. something she hasn’t had in a long time, not since leaving Smallville.

               HE LET THE silent moments sit between them, not filling the spaces he realized she needed for her breath. Even as she curled into him to escape — even for a minute — from her frustrations. It was a bit totally unlike Tom, but also exactly like him. He’d always been the more fatalistic between himself and his brother. Seeing the future all the time and nothing but the future made Fate’s machinations feel more inevitable to him. He didn’t have the present to worry about ( he barely remembered that the present existed in most moments, tied up as he was in what was coming ) and so he leaned into the future, not fighting it like Henry did. And here he was, not trying to find ways for Kara to fight, either. 

After a silent moment, Tom shrugged. “If this is the time you quit and come here while you look for something better, that’s all well and good,” he said. “Hadn’t realized that it was this soon. — Is it? That future had always been a little fuzzy. In a few futures, you move in while you’re looking for a new job, get one in just about a month, usually. Sometimes you leave, sometimes you don’t. If you’d want to do that, you can.” 

Kara moving in — when and why — had always been one of the fuzzier parts of the future, much to Tom’s consternation. He hated it when his present was muddled because everyone else’s present wasn’t yet decided. 

“You don’t have to, but you can.” 

fatestaken​.      

          “Don’t look at me like that.” The brunette chastised though the lilting laugh that followed her admonishment indicated that she was only teasing. She would never have dreamt of picking up a blade, regardless of her curiosity, if it hadn’t been at Henry’s encouragement. However reluctant she might have been, she couldn’t deny that there was indeed something tantalizing about learning how to wield a blade properly. It was a skill that no woman of her standing would ever have acquired and perhaps, one day it might come to use.

 “I hope I shall never have to use the sword for anything other than leisure but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to learn a few things.” She conceded as she readjusted her fingers before studying the grip that she was eased into without complaint. 

“And it would be a shame to let it sit and collect dust in the corner.” Henry had gone out of his way to procure her the weapon, however unconventional she thought the present was, and she thought it would be ungrateful not to make an attempt to appease him, especially in a skill that did prove intriguing to her.

“But you cannot be cross with me if I end up becoming far more skilled than you.” 

               “DON’T LOOK AT you like how,” he teased back, knowing full well exactly the look she was referring to, and exactly how much he couldn’t stop. Clarice was infinitely alluring to him in mind, body, and soul. And the delightfully strange sight of her with a blade had only added to the ways in which he found her enticing and eternally desirable. 

He watched as she fixed her grip and tested the weight of the blade, Henry backing up to give her more room. He watched with dark, assessing eyes. When they had been mortal and had worked as smiths, both he and Tom had, on occasion, worked on making blades. While a swordsmith more often was the blade dealer of a community, their village and the two or three nearest them had had no swordsmith and two metal workers: the twins had eagerly learned what they could and had taken to their task with the same determination by which they had learned other skills of metal. Henry had been, as he typically was, far more adept at the small details of blades and making delicate, minute daggers. Tom had dealt in sweeping and devastating swords and axes, and even a war hammer, once, for a clan leader who had lost his own. It had been a long time since he’d been an expert, but there was still a wealth of knowledge he held, just under the surface, about blades like the one Clarice was holding. 

“I think you’d do better with a different guard,” he commented. “If I can find a forge to rent time at, I may be able to fix it myself.” He loved making things for her. Her wedding ring had been made by him the day prior to their elopement, along with his own. When he could make small gifts for her, he’d been making a habit of doing do, just to see her smile. Henry hadn’t ever thought of himself as a materialistic person, but he found himself enamored by the way Clarice would smile if he made or found something that made him think of her. 

“And once that’s fixed, I think you very well will be far more skilled than I,” he replied with a wide grin. “And at long last at that! I would love to allow you to deliver me from those who wish us ill.” His grin turned coy and he slid forward, stealing a kiss to Clarice’s cheek. “And then, I will have the immense joy of thanking you, brave Lady.” 

fatestaken​.      

“it’s not quite as heavy as i expected it to be.” slender fingertips have grazed the edge of the silver blade she holds within her hands for several moments as if trying to pass judgement on the weapon. it seemed strange to be holding a sword in her own hands, stranger still to even have contemplated using it. 

“i really doubt i’ll ever have to use it and i would look ridiculous dragging this thing around with me.” the idea of having to strike another human down, even in self-defense, fazed the young woman who assumed a baleful expression as she weighed her decision. the idea of learning the skill of swordsmanship was tempting simply because it was a skill that would have been entirely out of reach for a young woman of her standing but the aversion towards impropriety was so ingrained within her that she found it rather difficult to overcome her hesitation.

starter call // @gemineycs​​

               “WELL, YOU’RE MUCH stronger than you use to be, now that you’re traveling so much, and not by the luxurious ways your family could afford,” Henry pointed out gently. “I’m sure the fresh air has been giving to you countless benefits. And while our nature does not fill our limbs with strength unlike other humans, I have for a very long time guessed that the VITALITY it provides does make us feel stronger, if only by very small measure.”

He’d suggested showing her what he knew about swords when Henry had seen Clarice glancing at the local swordsmith with a hesitant gleam of curiosity. It hadn’t been the HUNGER by which she’d consumed other new experiences after their marriage, but the seed of interest had been there, and he’d been only too happy to nurture that bit of wonder. Now they stood in the small courtyard in the tiny cottage they were sharing with Tom, Clarice holding a small sword Henry had bought while he’d been out on an appointment to bring a wealthy landowner a reading of the future. He watched as she held it carefully, like it would spring to life and strike out at her. 

“I think you look brilliant,” he countered with a genuine smile, a hint of the hunger he had as her husband visible only in the flash of his dark eyes as he watched her. There was something enticing — a surprise to him — of the vision of Clarice holding a blade. It was a a bit of a visual contradiction, not unlike the double vision Henry was so used to bearing — seeing both the present in front of him and flashes and scenes of the future as Fate sent to him — and it made his smile turn more playful as he moved to stand next to her, adjusting her grip on the hilt and tucking her fingers under the guard. 

“Do you want to learn a few things? May you never have to use this blade, but the exertion may prove to be healthy exercise.”

OUT. || I’m about two months away from the twins’ two year anniversary, what the heck??? 

Also, my boys just reached 100 followers. They are without a doubt my slowest-growing muse which I’m 1000% ok with, but it also baffles me. I need to advertise them ( and write on them ) a whole lot more, don’t I? 

iinmortales​.      

         she flinched, her eyes barely catching the movement, the object flying at her head, before the moment of impact. but it wasn’t an impact. someone caught it. ‘ nice catch, ‘ she said, trying at the same time to look at her rescuer and the object they’d grabbed. out of the air. reflexes of a seeker. ‘ how’d you do that? ‘

@gemineycs​

               HENRY HAD SEEN it coming only about a minute before he saw in the present a small object hurtling toward the young woman. Wondering why Fate would have given him such a short-notice HEAD’S UP, he plucked it out of the air, finally letting it still long enough to realize that it was the bottom part of a coffee mug. He glanced upward to the elevated train tracks above them, wondering which poor soul had lost their travel mug, but was happy that this young woman’s skull didn’t have to be the collateral damage to it. 

He gave a small smile, and shrugged. “Fast reflexes,” he replied. “Are you alright?”