i only write dead letters

hello !! welcome to my blog !! my name is albatross ( 21+, he/him ) and i am proud to introduce everyone reading this to my favorite oc in the whole world mark langhorne, who is one of two main characters of a work-in-progress comic i'm co-writing! this blog is 18+ only due to potentially featuring nsfw content, but is otherwise friendly to most interactions as long as we're mutuals.

mark is not directly affiliated with any fandom, but has a plethora of crossover verses and fandomless genre-specific verses, as well as being able to travel between universes as part of his lore. 

carrd. pin board. blogroll under cut.

art and graphics mostly belong to me with two exceptions:

art in my header is by my close friend daviinos.

some icons and carrd images were commisioned from the very talented brbarou.

@daviinos fulfilled my reverse isekai dreams :)

The sun's up as early as it ever is in the middle of nowhere, Nevada, and Mark rises with it in a heavy contender for the smallest motel he's ever been in.

Part of him, when he sits up, is dreading looking over at the bed across the room from his own. But he does it anyway, because ever since leaving Las Vegas he's dreaded just about everything in his life—the addition of a man who shouldn't be on this side of the border is just another inch added to a list of shitty things that could take up miles.

It sucks to be a pessimist, because Mark's first thought is this: He probably offed himself in the middle of the night, and that's fine. Not like I wanted company anyway.

But he looks over and there's the still-breathing form of a man who'd resisted going to sleep for long enough that Mark headed down into dreamland first, then evidently passed out with all his super conspicuous clothes on, gauntlet still firmly on his hand, sword precariously leaned against the bed like he'd fallen asleep holding it and only let it slide to the floor when unconsciousness made it impossible to still hold on.

"Huh."

A light and bitter smile makes itself known on Mark's face—visible, of course, to nobody, since Julien's well and truly asleep.

Last night, Julien had asked him why he'd walked for hours through the desert, trailing after someone he didn't know. Mark had said something kind, then; I don't wanna walk away from a guy knowing he's gonna kill himself any more than anyone else wants to do that. But he allows himself to feel just a little more sour about the situation now, while there's relative privacy.

It sucks for the most selfish reason possible to see someone else lose enough to make them want to kill themselves. You're alive, you've got a future, Mark had said—something he knows hadn't been received well before Julien had even opened his mouth to reply. But it is frustrating to see people who could live a life throw it away. And Mark's lonely. It's a shitty cocktail of feelings, and Mark wonders for half a second if he should feel bad for not letting the guy just walk off into the middle of nowhere and die on his own sword or something.

Whipped Cream shifts in her sleep, and Mark reaches over to pet her as he carefully extricates himself from the bed.

He's only had one day's use out of his clothes, even if it was a pretty intense one, and Julien's gonna need a fresh set of clothes more than Mark needs a change in them, so he just pulls on the jacket he'd left discarded on the floor and slips into his boots. He moves about as quietly as he can manage, which is pretty quiet. There's no use waking either his cat or Julien right now, though one of them will probably be way less out of sorts than the other.

He's out of the room less than five minutes after opening his eyes.

When he comes back, it's about an hour later—the sun has well and truly risen now, though it's still a little earlier than most people are awake. The little diner in town wasn't supposed to be open until 7 in the morning, but the guy who ran it had seen Mark sitting on the curb outside and invited him anyway, and Mark had ended up getting the breakfast he'd been angling for without even having to walk around and be hungry for very long.

And a second helping for Julien.

He's not nearly as quiet when he shuts the door on his way back in; Julien's shifting in a way that can really only mean he's woken up, and Mark is treated to about five seconds of waking peace from a very exhausted man who hasn't become conscious enough to remember where he is.

Mark speaks before Julien can.

"Morning," he says, biting back the instinct to follow up with a dry apology. He's been turning over the how-to in his head regarding walking on eggshells all morning. "Good that you passed out at some point."

The brown paper bag with food inside finds a place on the single table between their beds as Mark gingerly sets it down, backing away pretty quickly towards the far side of his own bed, where he's stashed his bag. He crouches down, pulls out the change of clothes in there and reaches up to place them on top of his own sheets, to be delivered to Julien whenever, if ever, he feels like getting the hell up.

Then he removes a small box with cans upon cans of cat food, and a small metal bowl. Whipped Cream will be up faster than a shot when it's opened, so he doesn't do much with it yet, just sets it by the clothes. He stands back up only to sit himself down on the bed properly, against the side that lets him face Julien.

"Got you some breakfast." That's delivered once Julien seems well and truly awake enough to care at least a little bit. "Eggs, bacon, pancakes. Wasn't sure what you liked, but it turns out they've got a grand total of one breakfast option anyway."

@daviinos said :

( jaw ) : for SENDER to trail kisses along RECEIVER'S jawline. + ( murmur ) : for SENDER to murmur softly against RECEIVER'S skin. + "stay with me tonight."

there are several different answers for this one depending on the time in his life!

when he was a kid... haha, you know the smell of like an old dvd player when it would get really hot from trying to spin a dvd? he liked that smell a lot, because when his dad was either out or asleep he and the siblings who liked him used to crowd around one of the two old tvs in their house and put on one of the same seven movies they had in a little stash out of sight.

they couldn't really make food or spend TOO much time watching movies because the waste or the electric bill or something-or-other posed the risk of giving them away. but he liked watching movies with the siblings that liked him, and it's part of why even when technology started changing the most advanced thing he ever got was a slightly newer dvd player to go with the TV his friends had at the guild-provided housing.

as he got older and got to know said friends at the guild, "the people he loves most" changed a lot. for a long time the scent that reminded him of the person he loved most was books; he had someone who he was in love with at the guild who ultimately broke it off with him, but he doesn't really fall out of love easily. and then it was expensive cologne and the sea for a while, even though he himself is afraid of the ocean, hahaha.

and then ...

well, there's a part of mark's story i don't talk about much on the blog, because from a rp perspective it actually takes place in the future of where i normally set him. but me and my roommate ( @morniingstars shout out to u ) are making a comic with mark and one of his ocs, kadir, as its main characters, and that takes place pretty much directly after mark gets back on the road again.

during that time, kadir is the person he loves the most, and the scent he associates most with kadir is the smell of the inside of his shitty little car, where the two of them spend the bulk of their time driving across the country and waiting for the next problem to come across them. and it's not a good car so it doesn't smell especially good, but anytime during or after that comic plotline the smell of gasoline and exhaust actually starts to make him smile a little bit because he's never, ever alone when he's on the road anymore.

src.

for all that mark is very good at disguising his feelings when they're on the more somber side, i think anger specifically is one of those things he has a much harder time keeping inside of himself like that.

as a trade-off he's not really the type of person who GETS truly furious all that often; the bar is way higher than it should be for things mark absolutely can't tolerate, so to say. so most of the time he's just genuinely not angry even when other people think he should be, and as such politeness comes pretty easy.

if he did get angry enough to need to suppress it to stay polite... i think he'd be pretty short. like, clipped sentences, not a lot of joking around, trying to make excuses to get out of whatever situation he's in... it definitely shows on his face that he's not thrilled about whatever-it-is. there's a lot of glares shot where nobody can see them and a lot of privately mocking whatever he's mad at when the wrong people aren't around to see it.

he's not the type who usually feels like he HAS to stay polite in any case though. provided it isn't literally life-or-death for him, he'd rather yell and argue than pretend he's totally okay with whatever has him so angry.

src.

... it's complicated.

i think a REALLY younger version of himself would be a little in awe. back when he was 8-10 there was still some level of hope that he might turn out to have some kind of power like his siblings, and so he wasn't mistreated quite as badly leading up to those ages. he used to really want to be like several of his siblings and in his mind at that time, seeing a version of himself who's capable of doing all of these cool things would almost be a relief.

provided he didn't know about the rest of the circumstances; if he did, i think his future would scare 8-10 year old mark quite a lot just because he couldn't really envision a world without his family at that age.

the more interesting answer to this question and the one i am going with for-real, though, is what the version of himself that made the deal with 44 would think of where he ended up. i honestly think he'd be a little disgusted with himself, and a little afraid. when he was 14 and had just gotten fished out of the river, the only thing mark really wanted was to have a good second shot at life. he wanted to do things and know people and be someone in a way he didn't think he could have been before.

and mark is right where he started. he's moved maybe a little bit to the left, rather than backwards or forwards. he's had over a decade of borrowed time to use up and in that time he's become a killer, thrown away his morals to the benefit of almost nobody but himself and his closest friends, lost everything he ever tried to have, and kept company with the sort of people who gladly would have taken advantage of him the way his father did.

so he'd be disgusted with how he ended up. as a matter of fact, he IS pretty disgusted with how he's ended up, and a large part of why is because he knows that his 14 year old self who desperately wanted to keep living was imagining a very different life for himself. at the very least one with other people in it.

src.

haha, well. nothing...?

i guess the answer is a LITTLE more complicated than that, though, and as usual it comes with the caveat that it REALLY depends on the sort of dynamics he's found himself wound up in. he'll match anyone's freak so if someone would burn down the world for his sake he'd burn down the world for theirs, but generally speaking ...

i mean, he is not really the "burn the world down" type even for people and things he really loves. he's not even really much of a "protector", because he doesn't think he's capable of actually protecting anyone more than he's capable of fighting alongside them... and he likes the world. he'd do a lot of things for something he cared about but burning the world down is not one of them.

EXCEPT. rather than being willing to go to any lengths to PROTECT somehing, he's selfish enough to do it to achieve something that would otherwise be impossible. when he thinks he's found a way out of his contract with 44, he's prepared to light everything else he's ever worked for on fire just to have a shot at getting free. and then it doesn't work, and that pretty much spoils any future chances of him carving a path of destruction towards any goal.

but, yeah, generally speaking he's too self-motivated to do something like that, since he likes the whole world and most things in it a lot.

src.

@silverbloodied asked →

" do you always talk this much? " | from Vaelus again lol ( src. )

"Yep!"

It's not the first time he's heard something like that, and it's definitely not going to be the last, so there's not even a little trace of shame or upset in his voice. In fact, there's not even a missed beat in between the end of the question and the beginning of Mark's response, succinct as it first appears to be.

Maybe, if he were saying anything worth listening to, Mark might be a little more annoyed at the shutdown. But those kinds of shutdowns are the result he's after; annoying someone into reacting is probably the easiest way to get them to look back and think about even just the vague idea of a person they might've met once or twice.

Well, not that making a strong impression has ever done anything to keep the curse at bay in the past, but he can't help his pathetic sense of wishful thinking.

"Comes with the territory of bein' a storyteller. You get real good at talkin', and even better about not knowin' how to shut the hell up. Kind of my biggest talent. Not to brag, or anything." Now he's laying it on a little thicker just to be a shit, but the sentiment's not any less true. "Y'know, if it bothers you, there's plenty 'a room for someone else to do the talkin' instead. Just saying."

He raises a brow in her direction, accompanied with an eager grin—though, realistically, he doesn't expect much of anything. Out of everyone he's pestered since slotting himself into the ragtag group Julien's found himself a part of, Vaelus has been the least forthcoming, by far.

Maybe that's why he's been a little more talkative than usual, even. Because back at Castle Torch, everyone knew everything about his little situation. People passed him secrets like it was nothing, telling tales of the lives they'd left behind every other night at dinner just to keep his starving little artifact satiated, and Mark wasn't unaware of the fact that he'd been incredibly lucky to have so many people willing to keep him alive.

Here, save Julien, nobody knows shit about him. And that's fine. Sometimes, he prefers it. But it does limit his options, on the road. Occtis talks when he's pried about it, and Thaisha's been around enough to have plenty of stories that aren't super personal, and soon they'll be in Dol-Makjar anyway and Mark will probably have his pick of random strangers with nothing to lose by entertaining someone looking to hear about a little slice of their lives.

Vaelus seems like she's just naturally closed-off. But Mark thinks if she knew, she'd probably be just as close-lipped, because the others are sharing the stories he asks for anyway.

But he doesn't let that stop him.

"We've still got a looooong day ahead of us before we make it to the city," Mark drawls. "Come on. You've gotta have somethin' to talk about."