#weapons or armor just gimme gimme plz | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

outpost51 · 4 months

Note

Ayyyy playlist tag game!!!! Gimme a couple songs from #16 and #57 plz <3

~@tabswrites

ask me about my playlists

the stars we wander, the hands we're dealt is uhhhh the second? i think the second castis/avitus mix i've made for @thetrashbagswasteland, who is entirely to blame for this ship even existing. different than the first, this is aimed less at the hatefucking and more at the sad old men they've become, settled into something like domesticity, or as close to it as avitus can manage. neither particularly wants to admit (to themselves or anyone else) what they are, fearful that saying it out loud might make it real, might mean something more than "roommates out of necessity, benefits out of convenience." it means avitus having to confront that people might actually care if he dies, and that maybe... just maybe, he doesn't want to die in a blaze of glory. that maybe he might want to ride this thing out, see where it goes. that retiring from living hard and fast, that learning to be a person again and not just a tool or a weapon, that holding still might not be so bad after all. oops i. made myself emotional--

anyway here's some of my faves on this playlist (it's actually one of my favorites i've ever made):

the cattle by zach palmer [youtube]

longshot by catfish and the bottlemen [youtube]

bugfood by alissic [youtube]

the boy who cried wolf is actually the playlist for act i of stellar parallax! the songs are supposed to follow along with the chapters!

here's my faves and the passages they go with:

brutus by the buttress [youtube]

Jane knocked the wind from his lungs before he could draw another breath. Her eyes weren’t cold anymore. She fought like a hellcat. Like her life was on the line. How hard had it really been planetside? I have been starving and squatting in an abandoned building for the past three years.

Her fist connected with his jaw and the world went fuzzy. The ground defied gravity, rising to meet him with gusto. His shoulder screamed where it connected with the thin mat. John’s grin was lopsided as he wiped the blood from his mouth. He pitied the pirate that ever ended up in her sights. “Shit, Jane,” he chuffed. “You’re good.”

Jane didn’t return his smile. “No, John.” She spat his name over her shoulder like a curse. “I’m just better.”

where is my mind by safari riot (cover of the pixies) [youtube]

Jane was floating.

Stiff-backed. Limbs dangling uselessly beside and below her like some invisible force had yanked her right off the ground by a string tied to her ribcage. Jaw wrenched open in a silent scream. And her eyes—

Rolled all the way back, as if whatever that beacon was wanted her to see what it was doing to her brain, forced her to see it.

John lunged for her, but thick, armored arms wrapped around his trunk, the same ones that pushed him away from Jenkins. That let Arterius doom the poor kid’s family to a closed-casket funeral. We can’t risk it, Nihlus had said. Do you want him to become one of those things? Do you think you could put him down?

But this time the Brawler was pointed at Jane, and Jane was still alive, she just needed help, she needed someone to knock her loose with a stick like the manuals all said to do with a person being electrocuted. John struggled harder against Nihlus, kicked, punched, spat, cursed — then went still as Jane’s head turned all the way around to face them.

And shrieked. Not the scream he expected either, no, what came out of his sister was hundreds, thousands of voices screaming, sobbing, begging, praying all at once. Its volume grew and morphed into a bellow that seized hold of his mind and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed —

Jane dropped to the ground like a ragdoll, and he jolted awake in the Normandy’s medbay.

into dust by mazzy star [youtube]

Saren had offered to help. There were two shovels, after all, and they were both biotic.

Jane grabbed one, then shut the shed. “I need to do this,” she muttered, and started digging.

Dark clouds rolled across the sky.

Once she’d broken through the grass, it wasn’t so bad; the ground was soft and the work was repetitive and Eden Prime was quiet, so quiet now that most of its population was gone.

“It’s going to rain,” Saren said, shortly before the first drop landed on Jane’s nose.

“The porch is covered,” she told him, and kept digging.

All at once, the sky opened up. Somewhere in the downpour, she could hear Saren swearing, dragging the cloth-wrapped body onto the covered porch. Jane took a deep breath.

Focused on digging.

Thunk. Swish. Inhale. Swish. Thud. Exhale.

She’d barely made progress before the first aches settled into her shoulders and back. It was 2183. She didn’t have to do this. Holes could be dug with machines, with lasers, with bots.

Thunk. Swish. Inhale. Swish. Thud. Exhale.

Machines, lasers, and bots had certainly made the body that would fill this one.

Thunk. Swish. Inhale. Swish. Thud. Exhale.

But so had her own negligence. All the bodies littering Eden Prime weighed down her shoulders, adding to the pain spreading down her arms and legs.

Thunk. Swish. Inhale. Swish. Thud. Exhale.

She didn’t have to do this, but she needed to.

The corporal didn't have any family left that would bury him. There wouldn't be a wake, a funeral, an awkward standing-around of relatives who could barely stand each other, picking at the potluck fare for however long seemed appropriate so their departure wouldn't look like an escape. He had no cousins, no uncles, no brothers, no father to carry his expensive wooden box to the hole a machine had dug. He had no friends left. Sandra couldn’t dig him a hole — didn’t need to, not after what she’d seen. John and Kaidan were several systems away.

Maybe you’ve got Anderson and your parents and the Smiths and the Harrises, some smaller, more vicious thing spat in her memory, but all I’m stuck with is you.

Jenkins just had Jane, pulling his dead weight over her back to transport him from the porch to his final resting place. The storm raged on, softened the ground even more. It sucked her into the muck with every step and caked onto her armor up to her knees. She lost her boots somewhere along the way.

Maybe she should have left Powell alive.

Saren had offered to help.

Maybe she should have accepted it.

I’m sorry , she’d mouthed seconds before machines dug a hole straight through the corporal. He might have accepted it, had he still been around to. She wouldn't forgive herself, though, even after all this.

It didn’t feel right to just dump him in, and the ground seemed to agree, crumbling beneath her feet and dumping her into the hole instead. There was a metaphor in there somewhere: lying in a grave she’d dug with her own hands, beneath the soldier who’d be alive if not for her.

She belonged there.

“We have work to do, Jane,” Saren reminded her.

He was right. Jane struggled out from under the corporal’s corpse, arranged him like a funeral home might, and made her ungraceful exit from the grave. She was more mud than Marine at that point, but there was work to do. She picked up her shovel.

Thunk. Swish. Inhale. Swish. Plap. Exhale.

She could mourn this man she’d barely known later, after she’d hunted down the bastard who sent his machines to Eden Prime.

Thunk. Swish. Inhale. Swish. Plap. Exhale.

Burying Jenkins was harder than digging the hole; it took seven attempts to convince herself that it was okay to throw dirt on his face — she was returning him to his mother, that was the reason that finally stuck. She was returning him to his mother, and he would help her garden grow.

When she was done, Saren sprayed her down with the half-rotted hosepipe he’d found coiled against the side of the prefab. It didn’t matter if she was wet, he told her, it was raining anyway. Water would dry. The blood on her hands wouldn’t, but the water would.

That was okay, too, he told her, albeit in much prettier words. He and his ship were both stained far deeper than anyone ever should be.

#ans.txt #sneeps.txt #tunes.mp3

5 notes · View notes