My own little cosy corner

“This thorn invested wall means nothing.”

“I will gladly walk on it a thousand times over, if that means I could be with you, my lady.”

and the lady cat was all:

“My brave darling.”

OOOPS MY HAND SLIPPED!!

Suddenly my muse insisted me to draw the personification version of the last pic, and who am I to reject inspiration when it comes so willingly to me? At least this will help with the artblock issue I currently have to deal with.

Russian imperial era inspired because hot damn.

"I have many fears, most of them about Lucrezia." — Cesare Borgia (The Borgias, 2011-2013) + hints of insecurity

Peter Stone at The Guardian:

Donald Trump’s talk of punishing his critics and seeking to “weaponize” the US justice department against his political opponents has experts and former DoJ officials warning he poses a direct threat to the rule of law and democracy in the US.

Trump’s talk of seeking “retribution” against foes, including some he has branded “vermin”, has coincided with plans that Maga loyalists at rightwing thinktanks are assembling to expand the president’s power and curb the DoJ, the FBI and other federal agencies. All of it has fueled critics’ fears that in a second term Trump would govern as an unprecedentedly authoritarian American leader. Trump is currently the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination for 2024 and has long maintained hefty polling leads over his party rivals. At the same time a slew of recent polls has also shown him ahead of President Joe Biden, including in key battleground states. But scholars and ex-justice officials see increasing evidence that if they achieved power again Trump and his Maga allies plan to tighten his control at key agencies and install trusted loyalists in top posts at the DoJ and the FBI, permitting Trump more leeway to exact revenge on foes, and shrinking agencies Trump sees as harboring “deep state” critics.

Ominously, Trump has threatened to tap a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family. Trump’s angry mindset was revealed on Veterans Day when he denigrated foes as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out”, echoing fascist rhetoric from Italy and Germany in the 1930s. “I’m hard-pressed to find any candidates anywhere who are so open that they would use the power of the state to go after critics and enemies,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor and co-author of How Democracies Die. “This is one of the most openly authoritarian campaigns I’ve ever seen. You have to go back to the far-right authoritarians in the 1930s in Europe or in 1970s Latin America to find the kind of dehumanizing and violent language that Trump is starting to consistently use.”

[...] Trump’s revenge gameplan has been palpable for months. At a kickoff campaign rally in Texas in March, Trump warned: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” and vowed that “for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Similarly, Trump pledged to a CPAC gathering in March that: “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” and called 2024 “the final battle”. On Veterans Day, Trump also warned: “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” [...]

To craft a more powerful presidency, Maga loyalists at a number of well-financed conservative thinktanks led by the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Renewing America have produced an almost 1,000-page handbook, dubbed “Project 2025”, to help guide a second Trump term – or potentially another GOP administration should Trump not get the nomination. Key components of Project 2025 include slashing funding for the Department of Justice, dismantling the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and killing the education and commerce departments, moves that Maga allies champion to shrink the “administrative state” and the “deep state” they see as bloated and politicized.

One ominous plan Project 2025 has been weighing would allow Trump to invoke the 1871 Insurrection Act on his first day in office, greenlighting using military forces against political foes and demonstrators protesting a new term for Trump, according to the Washington Post. Jeffrey Clark, the former DoJ official who schemed with Trump about ways to overturn his loss in Georgia and other states and who the Fulton county district attorney has indicted along with Trump and 17 others, has been “leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025”, the Post has reported. A Heritage spokesperson told the Post that there were “no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act of targeting political enemies”.

Still, ex-Trump adviser and media pugilist Steve Bannon, who was convicted of obstructing Congress for flouting a subpoena from the House panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection which he is appealing, has been a Project 2025 cheerleader on his War Room podcast and hosted Clark who works at the Center for Renewing America a few times, and others working on Project 2025. Project 2025 also envisions schemes for changing federal service rules that would allow Trump to cut tens of thousands of civil service workers and replace them with ones deemed loyal to Trump’s agenda. Former DoJ officials are appalled at some of the proposals issued by Project 2025. “Project 2025 seems to be full of a whole array of ideas that are designed to let Donald Trump function as a dictator, by completely eviscerating many of the restraints built into our system. He really wants to destroy any notion of a rule of law in this country,” said Ayer. “The reports about Donald Trump’s Project 2025 suggest that he is now preparing to do a bunch of things totally contrary to the basic values we have always lived by. If Trump were to be elected and implement some of the ideas he is apparently considering, no one in this country would be safe.”

Annabeth feels him coming before she sees him.

There’s a charge in the air. A gathering static that threatens to strike with every movement she makes, but never quite gets the guts to do so.

That’s Jason Grace for you. Son of Jupiter, chosen of Juno, and just a touch too soft to do what needs to be done. Oh sure, he’ll kill monsters if he needs to, but when the monsters are gods, his solution is to become a priest.

It’s about finding a compromise, he’d said. And making sure that we’re heard.

Annabeth’s finding there are better ways of making noise.

“You got here faster than I expected,” she remarks as he touches down in front of her. She’s perched on the crumbling remnants of a wall that’s thousands of years old. Some small, distant part of her regrets what is about to happen here, but not enough to change course.

“Your pattern’s getting old,” he says. His gladius is out and he holds it warily between them. Annabeth keeps her drakonbone sword at her side. “The others can hold Percy off long enough for me to stop what you’re doing.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You’re the only one coming?”

He tries to hide his grimace, but that’s the danger with fighting your friends. They can read you too well, and a smile curls over Annabeth’s mouth at the confirmation. She hops off the wall, landing lightly on the dirt.

“What made you think I’d be at Pompeii?”

Lightning crackles in the sky overhead, raising the small hairs at the back of her neck. He nods at the scaffolding in the distance, empty of workers this early in the morning. It’s a grim dawn, about to get darker.

“No tourists today. You might’ve turned against the gods, Annabeth, but you’re not a murderer.”

Isn’t she? Annabeth has lost count of the number of monsters she’s put in the ground (under the ground). How many demigods died in the war with Kronos? They bleed red the same as mortals, and her hands are as stained as anyone’s.

So are Jason’s, and irritation pricks at her face. She smooths it away with a cool smile, carefully tracking him as he starts to circle her. She has a certain amount of faith in Jason’s willingness to ‘save’ his friends, but she’s not an idiot.

“So I should start picking locations with people if I don’t want you to interfere, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s obviously not what I’m saying.” His gaze flickers over the ruins stretching behind her. “So this is all rigged to blow, huh?”

“Leo does good work.”

He winces. He can play on whatever friendship the two of them might have had all he likes, but that betrayal is the real knife in the guts and they both know it. Annabeth coerces her expression into concern, the cogs of her brain turning the right muscles to give it the realism it needs. She takes a half step forward, and Jason doesn’t step away.

“He misses you, you know.” Her voice is a soft thing. Caring. “Misses both of you.”

“If he misses us so bad, he should come and see us.”

“You really think we’re going to be welcome at Camp after all this?

“You haven’t killed anyone.”

The yet sits between us, and it doesn’t matter anyway. The gods would be more likely to forgive her if she had killed someone. They could have murdered thousands of mortals and not been struck down, if they’d just done it far away from the last vestiges of godly power in this world.

Gaea had plotted to bring down Mt Olympus, and that’s definitely on Annabeth’s list. But she’s always been a methodical sort of girl, and divine power runs deep. Best to stamp out all traces of it, one relic at a time.

She sighs. “We don’t plan to. You know that.”

“You’re trying to kill the gods!” Lightning cracks again, closer now. It takes more strength than Annabeth wants to admit to to avoid reaching for her weapon.

“And how many times have they tried to kill us? At best they don’t give a shit, Jason, you know that.”

But he’s shaking his head. They’ve had this fight before, all of them, enough times that she could probably just record it for him to save energy. He’s long since stopped listening to sense, and she doesn’t bother with more than a cursory attempt to convince him.

“You’re too late for this one,” she says. “I’m proud of you for getting here before it blows, but you were right. It’s ready to go.”

His grip shifts on his sword. And - there’s something in his expression that prompts her to brace for an attack, because it’s not defeat. This time, she thinks. This time might be the one where I push too far.

It’s sad, sort of, but relief swamps that soon enough. It’s not that she wants to fight old friends, but it would make everything a lot simpler. To just be able to fight, without caring what happens to them anymore. To draw battlelines instead of blurring them

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he growls. “But even if the rest of your team is ready to destroy this place, they’ll stop once you’re a hostage.”

Annabeth laughs. It’s a miscalculation, but she can’t help herself. “The others might. But hell itself couldn’t keep Percy Jackson from me, Jason, and you’re no Tartarus.”

“I can deal with Percy.”

He can’t. She wonders idly if he knows that. Everyone’s aware of Percy’s power these days, but that’s what he’s like with her at his side. Jason, she suspects, still has a little too much optimism left about what Percy’s self control would be like without her. What it would be like if he even thought she was in danger.

“Right, well, that’ll be your mistake to live with.” She squints up at the sky, trying to judge her next play. Being a hostage would accelerate certain things that she’s not ready to set into motion just yet. Most of all, she doesn’t think that Percy is quite as ready to fight the others as she is.

Not yet.

“You made a miscalculation,” she said finally. “You always want to go for the biggest player, Jason. It’s one of your biggest weaknesses.”

“You can’t talk your way out of this, Annabeth.” His body moves, and she can almost trace the lines in the air, the familiar forms he’s about to slide into. “You’re coming back to Camp wth me.”

He lifts his blade, wreathed in lightning. She smells ozone on the air, the threat of violence wafting in behind it. She clasps her hands behind her back, and lays down her hand.

“Where’s Piper, Jason?”

Everything stops. Nature itself holds its breath as those too-blue eyes widen in sheer panic, before narrowing at her.

“Piper’s your friend. You wouldn’t hurt her.”

Annabeth waits. She doesn’t need to say anything. The silence between them does it for her. The even sound of her breathing. The shroud of absolute confidence holding her shoulders straight.

You are not going to take me, her body says, like it’s all a foregone conclusion.

“She can handle herself,” he tries again, and there’s the edge of desperation that she’s been waiting for. Enough to cloud his thinking. He might not think she’s a murderer, but there are other atrocities. Things she hasn’t held back from in the opening numbers of this new war.

“Against Percy?”

That’s a risk. Because they both know that Percy isn’t steady, isn’t stable, that his relationship with Piper had been tenuous at best and that without Annabeth there, his temper might just get away with him. Piper has her Charmspeak, but there are ways around everything if you have enough power.

It’s a risk, because Jason’s anger could always outweigh his fear. He could always take it out on her rather than fly off for Piper. Annabeth is confident in her ability to take him with a sword, but Jason comes with all those bonus add-ons that children of Athena just aren’t privy to.

So she gives him one last push. Just to make sure.

“Tartarus has so many doors,” she says softly. That same quiet concern from before, turned deadly now. “You know we found all of them, right Jason?”

He spits a curse, something in Latin about the gods and what he hopes they’ll do to her. She watches him leap into the sky, shading her eyes against the rising sun until he’s no more than a dot in the distance.

“You say that like they haven’t already done their worst,” she murmurs, before turning back to the ruins.

Our hearts don’t need tourniquets, we mumbled, and the doctor (she was on hand) said we were in shock.

It’s a fine spring day, unblossomed,  and on our city’s empty benches rage the talmudic discussions of our ancestral ghosts:

One says: when messiah comes there will be no more death. Another disagrees– messiah will come, he says, when each death gets a page in The New York Times: Someone Died Somewhere, Left a Body.

I tend to agree, because if our souls get caught in the sticky urban ether, they can argue out these finer points for all eternity

The women around the tomb of Rachel knew a verse in Jeremiah about Rachel’s weeping, about God’s compassion. It might not have worked twice, but it was worth a try.

Rachel died on the road in childbirth. There’s nothing redemptive about that. What she waited for, she didn’t get, and died young.

requested by @holisticwonder: EOWYN & FARAMIR // Favourite OTP

If its birdcall hints at mocking, maybe it’s worth it. Too much sincerity runs raw one’s soul sprains, makes one good and makes one alone.

What was it I wrote? “Everything I asked for God has given me.”

That was then. Now I’ll take a chance on a meaner bird.

Deep waters know where my second shoe slipped in the creek: small, pink, floating onwards. The waves have nerves we won’t discover, can feel, can search us out, and not one thing is lost.

Trembling ground won’t forget your footsteps, you voyagers, wandering faster than your names could run—we don’t remember your faces, but the earth, she knows, remembers muscles and sinews, knows your soles and your bones.

Dark hills still cherish the cities now emptied, new-named, conquered, scarred and bled. Pastures give way to concrete roots, but valleys, ghost-guarded, haunt wildly, make shadows, bring news: the dead are raised from their tombs.

Look smaller: the God who lives thick in my heartbeats knows every ache. Discarded confessions and butterfly fears: nothing is past and nothing can die.

“The wind blows where it wants.”

But nothing what’s not from God gets to God.

That–then–then no hope am I, no thing but clay my clay may move but never breathe no old flesh–me–hard-knotted,  like ropes–I am from here and here is bile and blood.

Not so. At night, in a never was, dark ocean, it will bubble out–a small gasp– push through water and break life, on you? If the wind reach you, on you, you new, you life, you blood for new veins, you bile in hungry stomach: yes, you.

This, me? This can be me–can be?

How do you not know? I go above on a straightened rope, long, an uncoiled snake. it will not hurt you again; it will take no more life.

Well, I love a good break-fast, Stray poppy seeds on slivered eggs, Wine, smoked fish, the sour starch of childhood of blessed memory. We tired-eyed, sore-headed Exhaust the last of the year in longing. We can smell you approaching, dear traveling God, We know too well your wells And water-walls, and our thirst is mad.

Let everything with breath try to catch one, Each drop thick as foam, this snowfalled evening. Reluctantly, above-the-dome oceans Churn out our way these little flames of fire, Which mock with freedom all those fatalist Constellations. Let down your nets and heave.

But no, no, just know— when the tide recedes It bares a surf of human misery. The cold. It’s raw, it ravages. Not me, No, hear my breath of prayer each turn of key To welcome warmth. Lord keep them warm tonight. I want to confess, say to someone’s face: I’ve never slept outside in a snowstorm. You were cold, and I did not visit you.

But one word from you and it will be done. ‘Let the earth teem with blankets and bonfires, Veterans’ benefits, mental health services.’ One word from you and the sea will break calm, Its icy jetsam fall brighter to earth And no— it’s just fireflies. You could do it.

Steve: 

i’m adding this Very Important thread to my Steve Rogers Characterization Tag, with some notes to self:

Constant Reminder: however you write Steve Big Bitch Rogers you are not writing him hardcore enough. You Are Not Writing Him Intense Enough.

and it’s not just his fighting style

it’s not just his violence that’s hardcore

It’s his friendship and his leadership and his ideals.

after one (1) unsuccessful(?) jogging-based seduction attempt Steve is RIDE OR DIE for Samuel Thomas Wilson

“if it was the other way around, and it was down to me” (Natasha Romanoff, Known Murderer and Professional Double Agent) “to save your life, and you be honest with me” (because, and let’s not forget this, twenty four hours ago i lied to you personally) “would you trust me to do it?” 

“I would now.” 

And that’s like

That’s it.

After one (1) bubble yum flavored shouting match, and one (1) Super Awkward Friend Kiss and one (1) roadtrip into the past steve just

TRUSTS HER UNCONDITIONALLY

“this isn’t freedom this is fear” 

and i am personally willing to fight you and every other motherfucker in the US government about this

don’t even get me started on Steve “I Will Go To War With 117 Nations and Also 50% of My Coworkers For You” Rogers

In Sum:

Steven Steel Balls Rogers has never halfassed anything in his got dam life and he is not about to start now. 

Steve is willing to fight 117 nations for what he knows be the right thing and bold of anyone to assume he will ever startle when the idiots come after him.

Also, OP is right to say Bucky is there because of it. Bold of anyone to assume Bucky “Are you keeping the outfit?” Barnes treats Steve like a baby. Of course he would be worried, because they are really close, but dude, Bucky made Steve ride the Cyclone when Steve was just 90lbr of rage. Do you really think he would baby Steve? If anything he would be right behind him looking Steve woop asses like: