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wordsinhaled · 1 year

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Just so you know I am thinkin' thoughts about Old Witch Sleep from TAD and feral or borderline-villain!Hob

the amazing devil + hob IN GENERAL, but especially that song, has me feeling many feelings !!!

sometimes i fall to pieces just to see what bits of me don't fit

this song makes me think of the toll of immortality, and hob as an eldritch being just by virtue of how all that life he's lived has sort of... stacked up on itself. it's not really supposed to happen to anyone, is it? i actually have the right snippet for this gathering dust in my drafts, so! have a Thing, anon <3

(cw mild body horror themes)

Hob hardly tries to be reckless, truly. He certainly never takes his miraculous gift for granted. But all those who had flocked about him once have passed long since and he, against all reason, still endures. His god-brushed flesh bears no scar for longer than three days; he outlives all his companions and lovers, hale and unchanged in body, looking not a day above his eternal four and thirty. Hob realizes, one day, that he is no longer a bare flame to entice moths. He is a conflagration, a desecration of expectations. There is a thing in him now that hibernates behind his eyes, a thing he learns the shape of the way one gropes for the banister in the night—unseeing, but knowing it is there with the certainty of habit.

Touching endlessness the way he has does things to a man.

It does things to Hob.

He no longer remembers which century it was, which of his numberless non-deaths had started it, this itch under his skin, this feeling like he can tell which parts of him have been reconstituted. The fabric of him feels messily mended and shoddily darned, the electrical impulses in his heart fizzling out and flickering back on like faulty lightbulbs. His self superimposes upon itself. He can sense himself, a ponderous conglomeration of atoms lumbering through the cosmos, destined never to return to stardust.

How many dying breaths has Hob heard? The sighing peace or dawning horror in each one harmonizes with the cacophony already in him, melds with that inner voice that says, Why them and not you? Why them and not you? Perhaps this time it will be you and not them. Ah, but you know it won't. You know it won't. And it is then, when that voice ratchets up to fever pitch, that Hob sometimes forgets.

Forgets to be careful. Forgets self-preservation. Forgets the need for caution, the way he had forsaken it entirely when his stranger had found him in the White Horse in 1389. He had set his eyes on Hob the way a prowling animal sets its eyes on its inevitable quarry. Had prophesied the outcome. Had pinned down the wild heart of him that beat, then as now, for experience and pleasure, and that yearned to be looked upon the way his stranger looked upon him: as though Hob was already snared, as though he would consume Hob only at great leisure, and only if the marrow of him proved worthy.

Hob must have tucked that look away somewhere safe, he thinks. Somewhere deep where it could grow, where it could put out its roots and spread.

And it has spread; that stealthy hunger twined around some ageless love older even than Hob's six hundred years, purposeful and patient, striving quiet as Cordyceps militaris steals towards its insidious cause.

Oh, to meet that gaze, ink-dark and beckoning. To greet it with his own, burnished to a feral glimmer by long years of waiting.

He would drown in it, if he could. He would be subsumed. He would meet the void of it like an old friend, and perhaps the wrongs of the universe would be put to rights.

But he cannot.

#the sandman #dreamling #hob gadling #needing more eldritch feral hob always

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linddzz · 3 months

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Whooooo! I found ya! Down to business:

Are there any fic recommendations for baggin/shield or pitch/frost that you like(d)?

I am absolutely feral

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand…..

What are 3 of your most favorite fics that you’ve ever read?

Ya found me! Let me say that the notifications of someone going through old fics and commenting are ambrosia. You are a treasure and a saint of a person!

And oh man I had to dive into my old bookmarks for these! I'm good at remembering snippets or vibes of fics but not the fics themselves. I will warn that a lot of my fave pitch/jack stuff tended to be pretty dark. It's not like, a thing I regret or say is wrong, and I still enjoy/love a lot of it! I was in a dark place mentally and that reflected in the stuff I was reading and creating. Who actually has a good time in their early to mid 20s?

Mostly warning because most of my stuff since then skirts the edges or flirts with the darkness but doesn't feel that need to go deep diving.

Second warning is there may be less here than you'd think! The more I write for a ship the less I read, because my brain gets very dumb and the self doubt gets Real Bad. This is all non-exhaustive of course! I wouldn't even say this is my Best of The Best it's just what's coming to mind at the moment. There's way more in the AO3 bookmarks

Pitch/Jack fics

In the Dark - series by @charmed7293 romancing the monster under the bed is maybe not always the best idea

The Syntax of Programming Languages, and, Why Some Code Talks in Accents - by Midievil. I'm biased here bc this was a gift fic inspired by my The Device Has Been Modified, but it done showed me up bc it was written by someone who knows more about actual coding than me

Shadows and Light - this series by @not-poignant is The Classic of the ship. Since you liked Things That Were you'd most definitely like this one. And unlike me, Pia actually finishes things!

I swear to God there were a lot of fics by @insufferablearchanist that I loved but they nuked their old AO3 and I can't ever remember shit.

Thorin/Bilbo fics

Prayers to Broken Stone - @avelera the beauty and the beast flavored au you didn't know you wanted

Comfort in the Sound - by northerntrash. Ok. Yes. It's Bilbo/Thorin/Bofur but like. Trust me on this. Road trip throuple shenanigans

Patchwork Robe - @hallsofstone2941 I am not immune to stupidly adorable modern college au one-shots

Possession - aljira. You liked Sanzigil, you'll like this :)

Marriage in the Manner of Dwarves - series by diemarysues

Other Fandom Faves (that come to mind. I've been reading fanfic since like 2002 ok there's a lot that has made impressions over the years that I just lost track of dkdjdk)

Taking Everyone For A Ride - by Nonymos. Venom/Eddy+Anne/Dan. typical Eldritch shenanigans plus polyamory. Unhinged and weird, just how I like em

The Only Way Out Is Down - @avelera Newt/Hermann. The second PR movie was so bad I wanna erase it from my memory but my god did it spawn some AMAZING fics, including this one that rewired my brain

After Zero - by what_alchemy Newt/Hermann. A bunch of delightful smut

The Wine Dark Sea - @moorishflower Dream/Hob. Siren! Dream au. Jesus Christ. Holy fuck. Goddamn. Gorgeous, monstrous, surreal, Unhinged4Unhinged behavior. Listen. I work with octopuses. I know what their arms feel like and that has ruined almost all tentacle shenanigans for me ok?? This fic got past that hangup.

If I Please You - @moorishflower Dream/Hob. It feels like a modern retelling of an old medieval fairy romance goddamn

And finally. This series. The series.

So. I very recently refound this series and I'm almost hesitant to post it. Because as I was reading it again I kept having to put it down and sit in horror at the realization that I read this fic when I was in college and it actually rewired my brain. I realized everything I have written was trying to recapture what this fic did to my synapses. I was chasing after vibes that I did not realize originated in this fic for me. Me sharing this risks everyone who reads it and has read my stuff also going "ooohhhh you're just doing this again huh?"

It is the very specific combination of "Character A: openly unhinged, obsessive, violently romantic and unnerving/Character B: seems so chill and just happily rolls with CharacterA being insane, because they are also secretly insane." It's the combo of a codependent bonkers relationship with humorous banality of their day-to-day.

It's also a Johnlock fic.

Anyway, The Paradox Series rewired my brain so deeply that I didn't even realize it rewired my brain until over a decade later. I swear I have been unaware of how much my writing has been leaning on what this did to my brain.

#fic recs #i cannot stress enough how non exhaustive this is dkfjdkdj #refound the paradox series like a month ago and kept having a fuckin crisis about it to my friends #like UH OH IVE JUST BEEN SNATCHING THIS FICS ENTIRE VIBE THE WHOLE TIME

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