ink-splotch:

Let’s talk about an Ariel who walks away—limping, mouthing inaudible sailors’ curses, a sea-brine knife in her belt.

Ariel traded her voice for a chance to walk on land. That was the deal: every time she steps, it will feel like being stabbed by knives. She must win the hand of her one true love, or she will die at his wedding day, turn to sea foam, forgotten. The helpful steward tells her to dance for the prince, even though her feet scream each time she steps. Love is pain, the sea witch promised. Devotion calls for blood.

But how about this? When the prince marries another, nothing happens. When Ariel stands over the prince and his fiance the night before their wedding, her sisters’ hard-won knife in hand, she doesn’t decide his happiness is more important than her life. She decides that his happiness is irrelevant. Her curse does not turn on the whims of this boy’s heart. 

She does not throw away the knife and throw herself into the sea. She does not bury it in the prince and break her curse—it would not have broken. She leaves them sleeping in what will be their marriage bed and limps into a quiet night, her knife clean in her belt, her heart caught in her throat. Her feet scream, but they ache, too, for the places she has yet to see. 

Ariel will not be sea foam or a queen. There is life beyond love. There is love in just living. Her true love will not be married on the morn—the prince will be married then, in glorious splendor, but he had never been why she was here.

Ariel traded her voice for legs to stand on, a chance at another life. When she poked her head above the waves, it wasn’t the handsome biped that she fell for. It was the way the hills rolled, golden in the sun. It was the clouds chasing each other across blue sky, like sea foam you could never reach.

(She does reach it, one day, bouncing around in the back of a blacksmith’s cart, signing jokes to him in between helping to tune his guitar. They crest up a high mountain pass and into the belly of a cloud. Her breath whistles out, swirls water droplets, and she reaches out a hand to touch the sky. Her feet will scream all her life, but after that morning they ache just a little bit less). 

I want an Ariel who is in love with a world, not a prince. I don’t want her to be a moral for little girls about what love is supposed to hurt like, about how it is supposed to kill you. Ariel will be one more wandering soul, forgotten. Her voice will live in everything she does. She uses her sisters’ knife to turn a reed into a pipe. She cannot speak, but she still has lungs. 

Love is pain, says the old man, when Ariel smiles too wide at sunrises. It’s pain, says the innkeeper, with pity, as Ariel hobbles to a seat, pipe in hand. At least you are beautiful, soothes the country healer who looks over her undamaged feet. The helpful steward had thought she was shy. Dance for the prince even though your feet feel stuck with a hundred knives.

Her feet feel like knives but she goes out dancing in the grass at midnight anyway. She’s never seen stars before. Moonlight reaches down through the depths, but starlight fractures on the surface. Ariel dances for herself.

She goes down to caves and rocky shores. Sometimes she meets with her sisters there. Mouths filled with water cannot speak above the sea, so she drops into the waves and they sing to her, old songs, and she steals breaths of air between the stanzas. She can drown now. She holds her breath. She opens her eyes to the salt and brine. 

Ariel uses canes and takes rides on wagons filled with hay, chickens, tomatoes—never fish. She earns coins and paper scraps of money with a conch shell her youngest sister swam up from the depths for her, with her reed pipe, with a lyre from her eldest sister which sounds eerie and high out of the water. The shadow plays she makes on the walls of taverns waver and wriggle like on the sea caves of her childhood, but not because of water’s lap and current. It is the firelight that flickers over her hands. 

When she has limped and hitched rides so far that no one knows the name of her prince’s kingdom, she meets a travelling blacksmith on the road with an extra seat in his cart and an ear for music. He never asks her to dance for him and she never does. She drops messages in bottles to her sisters, at every river and coastline they come to, and sometimes she finds bottles washed up the shore just for her. 

They travel on. When she breathes, these days, her lungs fill with air.

Some nights she wakes, gasping, coughing up black water that never comes. There is something lying heavy on her chest and there always will be.

Somewhere in the ocean, a sea witch thinks she has won. When Ariel walks, she hobbles. Her voice was the sunken treasure of the king’s loveliest daughter, and so when they tell Ariel’s story they say she has been robbed. They say she has been stolen. 

She has many instruments because she has many voices—all of them, hers; made by her hands, or gifted from her sisters’ dripping ones. Ariel will sing until the day she dies with every instrument but her vocal cords. 

She cannot win it back, the high sweet voice of a merchild who had never blistered her shoulders red with sun, who had never made a barroom rise to its feet to sing along to her strumming fingers. She cannot ever again sing like a girl who has not held a dagger over two sleeping lovers and then decided to spare them. She decided not to wither. She decided to walk on knives for the rest of her life. She cannot win it back, but even if she could, she knows she would not sound the same. 

They call her story a tragedy and she rests her aching feet beside the warming hearth. With every new ridge climbed, new river forded, new night sky met, her feet ache a little less. They call her a tragedy, but the blacksmith’s donkey is warm and contrary on cold mornings. The blacksmith’s shoulder is warm under her cheek.

Her feet will always hurt. She has cut out so many parts of her self, traded them up, won twisted promises back and then twisted them herself. She lives with so many curses under her skin, but she lives. They call her story a moral, and maybe it is.

When she breathes, her lungs fill. When she walks, the earth holds her up. There is sun and there is light and she can catch it in her hands. This is love. 

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/623628931554328576.

redshoesnblueskies:

primarybufferpanel:

I have tried to collect the thread and cleaned it up slightly. If I’ve missed something you’ve written for this 60-car headcanon pileup, please point me to it. If you’re in there and you have an AO3 handle, please tell me and I will add you as co-author.

SEE IT HERE

bonehandledknife redshoesnblueskies mazarinedrake bassfanimation @flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy, fuckyeahisawthat yohunny

fury roadFury Road Groundhog Day AUMMFRFury road fandom ladies and gentlemenSET COURSE FOR MAXIMUM DEVASTATIONFANG IIIITTTT

BEST FURY ROADIE FAN AWARD GOES TO….

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1OdwFfg.

fuckyeahisawthat:

bassfanimation:

bonehandledknife:

primarybufferpanel:

bonehandledknife:

yohunny:

bassfanimation:

flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

primarybufferpanel:

bassfanimation:

primarybufferpanel:

bonehandledknife:

mazarinedrake:

bonehandledknife:

I randomly want to see groundhog day fic in Fury Road but have no idea what that would even look like.

oh my god, here’s an idea: the events of the movie are the final day in a Groundhog’s Day loop…FROM CHEEDO’S PERSPECTIVE. 

She broke the loop by helping Furiosa up onto Joe’s car. 

how many days did she spend trying to save angharad?, how many times did she make it to the green place?, fuuuuuuck i NEED to write this. (via mazarinedrake)

OMG YOU REALLY DO

Also?

#SCREAAAAAAAAAMINGGGGGGG

Oh my god THAT’s why she’s willing to sacrifice her crew, because she’s tried any variation of telling them, of asking their help, and there’s always somehow a weak link, they’re not good at secrets, at acting. They don’t even come away from the Citadel, or her crew is suddenly replaced by Joe, or she’s taken off the War Rig, or– In desperation she tries not telling them one time, and it’s gut-wrenching, but then she gets much further, and now she has to get them killed over and over again, punch Ace off of her running board like he’s one of the Wretched over and over again–

She only ever reaches the other Vuvalini once, on their final run, which is why it was so crushing when she found out that there were only a few left, and that her home was gone.  The run through we saw was the furthest she ever got, after hundreds of times watching her crew and the sisters die in different ways.  Maybe she even killed Max many times before, or left him to die in the desert.    

STOP THAAAAAT

*claws at face*

And he never once told her his name.

#mad max: fury road#holy shit#like this is so good#and furiosa definitely has to be the one relieving it#its why when she asks max about angharad she keeps going#because she keeps a running tally in her head#how many lost#how many down#maybe its like the edge of tomorrow#every time she dies its resets if she doesnt hit a certain point time wise#and so sometimes she just spends literal days doing nothing#runs out into the desert and screams and kicks and cries#shoots joe in the face with a shotgun only that restarts things sooner#sets the citadel on fire#sometimes she just sleeps#days at a time#because who cares really#and then sometimes its days of the same thing over and over#she convinces max 100 times to let them back in the rig#sometimes shes so tired she cant remember which ones work and which ones dont#god this is amazing you people are the greatest fandom ever#just when i feel tired this shit renews me (fuckyeahisawthat)

Graphic descriptions of violence and a ton of angst under the cut and holy shit I should not be allowed to write:

Keep reading

Oh my goddddddddddddd ilu

*helplessly raises hands into the air*

YESSSSS

OH GOD, WHYYY, she can never make him stay, SCREAMS INTO THE VOID, but wait there’s more, what if in one of those versions, Furiosa tells Max she loves him, and he doesn’t remember,even that wasn’t enough to make him stay, brb crying into the back of my chair with my ass towards the ceiling, you can completely ignore me I’m just torturing myself with this. (via bassfanimation)

What. Make him stay?? That would probably make him run faster, especially given the ‘I just known you for three days’ thing and ‘who is this wierdo’ and ‘wtf is there about me to like, they’re clearly looking for something’ and ‘what the hell kind of person even says those things’, and y’know, instant escalation of doubt and distrust.

But what if more things happened in one of those runs than just what we saw.  Is what I’m getting at.  

But wait…what if the new loop doesn’t restart with him offering her his hand on the Plains of Silence? What if it starts with “can I talk to you?”

That means she’s had endless versions of this conversation. That little half-smile she has on her face when he says “I’ll make my own way” is because she already knows he’s going to say that. Because he says that every time.

Maybe she learns that if she’s too honest about wanting him to stay, it scares him off and he doesn’t come back the next morning. In some of those versions, they ride across the salt until they run out of food and water. In others, someone figures out they have to go back–maybe Furiosa figures it out herself, or Val suggests it, or Toast does, or Nux and Capable have been talking on the back of their bike and come up with the idea. But it never works without him there.

Then, one time, almost by chance, she says the right thing and he catches up to them the next morning, and they get much further, and she realizes, oh. She can never make him stay, but if she’s cautious and lucky, he’ll figure it out himself and come back to her. It’s still a hard day, a really hard day, and she does it hundreds of times over, and she always dies, but slowly she learns all the other pieces that have to fall in place.

She doesn’t realize until the last time through that the reason he needs to be there is not as an extra fighter, although that helps, but so he can give her his blood and keep her alive to reach the Citadel. Because the part at the Citadel never works without her.

And she still can’t make him stay.

#fury road #Fury Road Groundhog Day AU #The Thing The Fury Road Fandom Wrote Together #well #wrote-ish #more like headcanoned in the fervent hope somebody else would write it #maybe we should stick it on AO3 anyway #I want this to be preserved (via primarybufferpanel)

^^^ this

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1K8nWF8.

redshoesnblueskies:

schwarmerei1:

flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

schwarmerei1:

The chorus of swear words (led by John Seale), that erupted when someone pointed out that the edge-arm crane had been mounted on the *wrong* Land Rover, finally subsided. Tom had never even heard some of the obscenities before, he wasn’t sure if they originated from Australia, South Africa, or New Zealand – it was hard to tell with this crew.

“You should have the car George. Tom can get to location in the Rig with everyone else.” Charlize commented – always the one to offer an opinion when others decided silence was safer.

The first evening driving back, Tom tried to join in with the group dynamic. He’d missed the mental space a solitary drive used to allow him each morning, but this shoot…you just had to adapt. As they bumped over the dusty terrain, the rumbling of the truck was accompanied by the quiet click of knitting needles from Zoe, Riley, Abbey, Nick, and Courtney.

Tom started another attempt at the strange useless craft that was allegedly relaxing. (It made no sense, he could buy a whole scarf from Marks & Sparks for less than the price of a ball of wool.)

“You dropped a  stitch.” Charlize never took her eyes off the road.

“Fucking didn’t.” Tom argued, looking at the small patch of loops in his paws.

“If you say so…” Charlize smirked, and then muttered something that was probably an insult in Afrikaans because (as she put it) if you’re going to be obnoxious, you might as well go all out.

Tom ignored the hole that appeared in the next role.

“Charlize can teach you how to pick the stitch up next row if you want.” Courtney offered helpfully.

Tom’s head bent lower. “’s fine!”

The next few kilometres were blissfully silent. That is, until the truck lurched over a particularly large bump with a pained groan.

Charlize rapidly switched down gears. “Bit rough for the next stretch, sorry.” Her face suggested she wasn’t *that* sorry.

Tom looked down in despair at the dozen or so loops that had slid off one of his needles during the Rig’s unscheduled flight. He started to gingerly put them back, trying not to pull out the last row of stitches.

“You twisted one.”

Tom just glared at her. Again, she hadn’t taken her eyes off the “road” in front of them.

“Yeah you have,” confirmed Nick, tall enough to peer over Tom’s shoulder, accomplished enough to still be knitting without even looking. “That’s okay, I can show you how to untwist it when you reach it next row.”

Tom ignored him, clutching his knitting closer to his chest like it was a puppy that someone had been rude enough to point out had lopsided ears. “I can do it myself.”

Charlize tugged down the beanie that covered her shorn hair. Nick had made it for her. It was perfect – of course it fucking was! “It’s your knitting.”

Clearly she actually meant “It’s your life.”

Tom had never been so relieved to see the lights of Swakopmund come into view.

Fortunately George was still lingering in the yard, Tom walked up to him.

“We need to take the Land Rover on alternate days George.”

“Oh?” George looked up at him mildly.

“She’s a fucking nightmare!” Specifying which “she” Tom meant wasn’t necessary.

Back in his room, Tom shoved the tangle of needles and yarn into the back of a drawer. He fished out a bag of embroidery thread in its place. Bracelets – he was good at bracelets.

I pray to all skies and gods and v8 engines that somehow, the above-mentioned parties find this post.

NOOOOOOOOOO!
*4th wall* *4th wall* *4th wall*
*breathes into paper bag*
Slightly snarky rpf loosely based on theoretically true events is a sub-specialty. But…*head desk*

I CAN’T BREEEEEEATHE

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1gk5zpx.

bonehandledknife:

thoughtfulfangirling:

bonehandledknife:

Summary: We learn from the comics that Rictus is afraid of Furiosa. I think we need more details than that.

—

The first time Rictus fought her (tried fighting her) she’d just been making a name for herself with the scouts. Furiosa had learned her way across every inch of her vehicle with the Repair boys and been given a trial promotion. She’d done well on the trip, they’ve just come back with a new bloodbag. She’d bolo’d them when they were running away. (She didn’t bother looking at their face.)

Rictus blocked her path from the garages.

“What’s this?” He jeered, “What’s this? Does she think she’s can do war?”

Furiosa tucked her chin down and the War Boys drifted back to the walls.

“Does she think she doesn’t belong in the breeding pens?” Rictus grinned, “I’ll move you there myself.”

He went at her fast, lifting a hand open palmed and as it swung at her face Furiosa darted both hands out and locked his wrist. Jerked it hard towards her core and pivoted with a sharp twist and brought down Rictus onto his back with a thump. Followed him with a knee to the tender of his sternum and, with her full weight behind it, slammed her elbow against his nose.

The room was silent but for her breathing, as she got up and put some distance between them. Blood ran in dribbles down her arm.

It took less than three seconds.

Keep reading

God damn you’re good at this. I keep trying to write stuff, but I get caught up in novella like writing. Time in the stuff you write is fluid but coherent, and I just… how? 

Also, I don’t even know if I saw you ever talking about how Rictus was supposed to not feel pain, and I was concerned the whole way through that he’d react in some way to pain, but aside from Maybe the groin kick, nope. You did it without him necessarily having needed to feel pain. *applause*

Haaa omg thank you. And I guess I try to just firmly stay in POV, basically as much as possible write the story as if it’s experienced.

I… Honestly forgot that fact about Rictus. I was just writing the way I thought Furiosa would react. Also felt there was barely time for pacing and the action scenes still feel weirdly mistimed, or like… It’s not happening at the speed of experience but at the speed of audience comprehension and that makes me twitchy because that means I’m guessing (and second guessing) at the audience.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1CyADq5.

This took so long! I’m sorry! I’m sorry it’s short too. I’m terrible honestly. but don’t let that stop the one word prompts from coming because i’ll do them. eventually. 

When Angharad becomes pregnant, Immortan Joe gives her gifts. A book about birds, a silver-backed mirror, guitar strings. She gives the book to Dag, who likes to think she can fly, and the mirror to Cheedo, who flashes messages to Toast on the ceiling, and the guitar strings to Capable, who plays a song about someone named Margaret who dies of a broken heart.

All of them pass on anything he gives them, like it draws his touch away from them, like it scratches out his name. He is generous with books but the girls thank Miss Giddy and smile at him with closed mouths. He gives them pools of water but the girls thank Miss Giddy for that too and turn away from him before he’s finished speaking.

“Little rebellions,” whispers Dag around her knuckles, and Angharad can taste their victory it’s so close.

Max gives gifts too, though no one calls them that. Like a boot or a steering wheel. Like a red skull on a map. Like blood. He comes back sometimes, while the Citadel is being remade, and he’s never empty handed. Everything he brings with him he gives to Furiosa who knows who it’s meant for. Tiny sprouts of green kept in the hollows of whatever vehicle he has, Furiosa passes those on to Dag. The stray children in rags with tyre-burnt fingers, she shuffles them on to Capable. Bullets go to Toast. Everything else goes to Cheedo and she, in turn, passes whatever-it-is on to the Wretched. Clothes and food and polished pebbles. Furiosa keeps nothing for herself. His blood was enough, she thinks.

One day he comes back without anything, just himself, in worn leather and worn skin and worn bones. He stands before her with empty hands that will probably always shake, and eyes that move around the room, pulling out secrets, and fire, and blood. Furiosa knows instantly that he has come back for good, and that it’s not a gift, because people can’t be given to anyone, but she is glad to have him all the same.

“Come here,” she says, and he falls into her.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1BQbLPP.

schwarmerei1:

primarybufferpanel:

manticoreimaginary:

When the Valkyrie opens her eyes, there isn’t a part of her body that doesn’t ache or sting. She makes a grunt of pain and it’s the only sound for miles in the vast desert, the trucks all long gone, leaving her alone in that hot expanse. Trying to roll over, she realises that there’s a heavy weight on her back and she twists her head (yanking unhappy muscles) and finds that it’s the body of Tough Nut. Her aunt is cold-dead even under the heat of the sun and already Valkyrie can smell the turn of her body.

It takes longer than she wants to admit to get out from under Tough Nut, to push the older woman off and onto the sand, and the whole time the bloody blowflies are having a go at the dried blood on the back of Valkyrie’s neck, on her scalp, down her arms. She feels like they alone are enough to make her go crazy, but she also knows she’s trying not to think too much ahead; because she’s out in the middle of nowhere and the bike’s busted up and there’s nothing and no-one that Valkyrie can see when she looks around, just her and Tough Nut and Tough Nut isn’t going anywhere.

(Valkyrie is tender when she reaches out and closes her aunt’s eyes.)

Her leg is broken, of that Valkyrie is sure, but she’s also sure that she needs to get out of the sun, get to somewhere sheltered. (She needs to find water too, but that’s a task that feels impossible.) Dragging herself across the scalding hot sand is like hell, and by the time she reaches a rocky overhang her hands are blistered and raw and she’s been sobbing dry tears, swallowing against her swollen tongue.

It’s a day later when the car comes rumbling towards her. Valkyrie doesn’t have the strength to sit up further, but she has enough left to pull out her gun and aim it unsteadily. If she dies, she’s taking this mongrel out with her.

But it’s the man who followed Furiosa who climbs out of the car, the one who turned them around. It’s that man who presses a bottle of water to her cracked lips and says slow, slow as she splutters and chokes, throat so parched it’s like swallowing rocks. It’s that man who helps take her weight so she can drop into the passenger seat of the car.

She doesn’t ask where they’re going, but she thinks she knows, (hopes she knows). She closes her eyes and drifts off to the sound of the roaring engine, the rattle of steel, the thought of Furiosa.

YESSSSSS!!!!

Make me your +1! This is gorgeous, so is the artwork! I want all the “Valkyrie survives” fic. ALL OF IT!

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1QIzOql.