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Tomura's been Dabi's stunt double for almost a decade, and he's not easily impressed, but when he squares up with you for a fight scene, he finds himself caught off-guard in more ways than one. As the shoot progresses and sparks fly between the two of you, Tomura has to decide if you're worth the risk -- or if the best sparring partner he's ever had is all you'll ever be. (cross-posted to Ao3)
Act 1 Act 2 Act 3 Act 4 Act 5
Act 6
You slide into the seat next to Tomura at the production meeting, and your hand brushes against Tomura’s, too deliberately to be an accident. Tomura capitalizes on it. He grabs your hand, lacing your fingers, and feels somehow less stressed and more tense when you squeeze his hand in response. He hasn’t seen you since you left with Dabi. Part of him was worried you’d sit next to Dabi instead of him.
But you’re here. And Tomura has questions. “What did he want?”
“You’ll know soon,” you say. You’ve known Dabi for two weeks. How come you know whatever it is before Tomura does? You answer Tomura’s question before he can even ask it. “He said he wanted to talk to somebody who didn’t have a stake in it. That’s why.”
Tomura definitely has a stake in Dabi’s career. What the hell is going on with Dabi’s career? Tomura glances around the hall and finds Dabi sitting next to Hawks. The two of them are talking, leaning over the empty seat between them. There’s an empty seat on Dabi’s other side too, between him and Himiko. Was there assigned seating or something? “Hey,” you say, and Tomura looks at you. “What did you do this afternoon?”
“Aizawa made me help run the rehearsals for the third fight scene. He’s aiming way above their skill level. It sucks.”
“I get the sense that most of this movie is aiming above its skill level,” you say, and Tomura nods. “I think it’s kind of nice.”
“Until it crashes and burns and none of us get paid,” Tomura says. You nod. “Why do you think it’s nice?”
You lean over until your head’s on Tomura’s shoulder. “I’ve been in a lot of shows. Directors have a choice about how they handle the ones that have been done before — play it straight or try to reimagine it into something new. The ones where it’s a reimagining always feel more exciting. The stakes are higher. Taking a big risk means you’re passionate about something. It’s more fun to be part of a show like that than the latest rerun of Hamlet or something.”
“I can see that,” Tomura says. He doesn’t think he’s ever worked on a movie like that. Except maybe this one, depending on how crazy Midoriya went this afternoon. “I still want to get paid, though.”
“Me too. I can only live on instant noodles for so long before I start pining for vegetables.” You sound like you might be joking. Tomura doesn’t know you well enough to tell, so he laughs. “What? You’re not a vegetable person?”
“I eat it. I don’t pine for it,” Tomura says. “I like strawberries.”
“Really?” You sit up to study Tomura. The look on your face makes Tomura wish he’d never opened his mouth. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. Do you like strawberry flavor or just real ones?”
“Why do you care? It’s not that weird.”
“Just trying to decide what flavor of edible underwear to buy,” you say, deadpan, and this time, Tomura knows you’re joking. He laughs. “You have a sense of humor. That’s a good sign.”
“A good sign for what?” Tomura asks, but you’ve clammed up. You look really embarrassed. “Hey —”
“Hi, everybody!” Midoriya’s here. Iida and Mirio are chasing after him, Iida carrying a stack of three-ring binders and Mirio toting a whiteboard with a sheet over it. “Thank you all for coming out here. I know things have been a little weird —”
Midoriya doesn’t look like a guy whose movie just got canceled. Tomura cautiously raises his hopes of getting paid. “But I’m really excited about the new direction we’re taking,” Midoriya continues. “If everybody could take their assigned seats —”
You squeeze Tomura’s hand and let go. “I have to go. See you soon, okay?”
Right. You’re an actor. You have an assigned seat. Tomura nods and watches you cross the room, sitting down in the seat between Dabi and Hawks. The seat between Dabi and Himiko stays empty, and Tomura drums his fingers against his arm, annoyed. Whoever this is, they’re holding things up, and Tomura can’t go back to sitting with you — or doing anything with you — until this stupid meeting is over.
Someone clears their throat, loudly. Tomura looks up. “What?”
“We’re waiting on you,” Iida says. He points at the chair between Dabi and Hawks. “Over there.”
“Why?”
“Now,” Iida says.
“If I were you, I’d haul ass,” Hawks says. “The sooner you sit down, the sooner we can leave.”
What the fuck? Tomura thought he knew what foreboding was after the sneak attack this afternoon, but this feels even worse. He looks at Dabi’s expression, then yours. Neither of you know what’s going on, or you’d have told him, and Iida’s poker face is unreal. Tomura gets up and makes his way over to the seat between Hawks and Dabi, at which point Iida bangs a giant three-ring binder down on the table in front of him.
“What is this?” Tomura snaps.
“Your copy of the new script,” Iida says. “Try to keep up.”
Before Tomura can call him an asshole, Midoriya speaks up. “I was going to try to explain a little bit beforehand, but I think it might be easier if you experience it the way audiences will. So we’ll be doing a table read, blind. Your scripts are personalized to make it easier — anything that’s highlighted is yours to read. We’ll start with Scene 1.”
If this is a table read, how come Tomura needs his own script? He does stunts. He doesn’t have any lines. But he’s not interested in getting shouted at, and he still wants this to be over as fast as possible. He cracks open the script to the opening scene. It’s still the failed transition from Apocalypse’s old body to the new one, the one that ends with him getting locked up under a pyramid for three thousand years. Not much has changed there.
In fact, not much changes at all until Apocalypse starts trying to recruit the Horsemen. He grabs Archangel, then Beast, then Psylocke —and then Tomura flips to the next page and sees Quicksilver’s name all over it. Huh?
He glances over at Dabi to see how Dabi’s taking it. Dabi looks sort of confused, but he starts reading off his lines anyway. You’ve got lines in that scene, too. Makes sense. If Midoriya really wants that romance subplot, he needs to start building it from a lot earlier in the movie. Tomura thinks that for a few more pages. Then he flips one, comes up with a page full of highlighted dialogue, and almost slams his binder shut. “What the fuck?”
“Shh,” Dabi hisses from next to him. “You’re ruining up my death scene.”
He sounds like he’s pissed, but he’s wearing a stupid smug grin. Death scene? Quicksilver doesn’t die in the original script. Tomura missed something while he was zoning out, thinking about how annoying it’s going to be to watch you pretend to fall in love with Dabi for the rest of the shoot. He flips back two pages and figures it out. Apocalypse asks Quicksilver to join the Horsemen. Quicksilver says no and tries to run, so he can warn everyone that Apocalypse is coming. Apocalypse orders Psylocke to freeze time and kill him. Which you do.
What the fuck. Hawks elbows Tomura out of nowhere, and Tomura jumps. Hawks is nodding down at Tomura’s script, which Dabi has been turning the pages of to get back to Tomura’s dialogue. Tomura’s entire fucking page of dialogue. “Uh —” What is Tomura supposed to do, anyway? Why is he even in this scene? Why is he in this script at all? “Fuck — You can’t die. The others need you. They can’t win without you.”
“I know.” Dabi fakes a convincing dying cough. “That’s why they’ll have you.”
Iida reads the stage directions aloud. “With his dying breath, Quicksilver passes his powers along to his twin brother, charging him with the task of both defeating Apocalypse and avenging his death. Quicksilver’s brother looks in the direction where Apocalypse vanished as the scene comes to a close.”
It’s quiet for a second. “Does Quicksilver’s brother have a name?” you ask.
“We’re working on that,” Midoriya says brightly. Tomura’s going to hurl. “Any other questions?”
“I’ve got one,” Hawks says. “Since when does Quicksilver have a twin?”
“In the comics he has a twin, but it’s a girl. Scarlet Witch. But we don’t have the IP for her, so —” Midoriya shrugs. “The point is that a twin for Quicksilver isn’t unprecedented. It’s also one of the only things the franchise hasn’t done. We’ve had resurrections, time travel, aliens, clones. The only thing we haven’t done is twins.”
“So why are we doing them now?” Dabi asks. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m on board with this — this death scene is lit —but is it really just because my stunt double making out with Psylocke looked good on camera?”
“It looked great on camera,” Himiko says. “I saw.”
“How did you see? You weren’t even there.”
“I filmed it,” Dabi says, and Tomura turns to glare at him. “The angle was shit, but I got the point across.”
“Don’t fucking film me.”
“I was being a good friend! I wanted to capture your fifteen seconds of fame and the most action I’ve seen you get in half a —”
“Guys, can we focus for a second?” Midoriya protests. “It’s a fair question, Dabi. It’s not because Shigaraki and Psylocke have incredible chemistry. It’s because the X-Men franchise has a problem with stakes.”
It’s quiet for a few seconds. “Say what you mean, Deku!” Bakugou shouts from wherever he’s sitting. “You cut all my scenes. You’d better have a damn good reason!”
“I didn’t cut all your scenes. You have new scenes! In fact, everybody’s more involved in the plot now because —” Midoriya’s voice pitches up and cracks. He stops, sucks down a couple of deep breaths, and starts over. “Comic books in general have a problem with killing characters. Nobody dies for real except Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacy, and even if somebody else does die, it’s always right at the end of the story, in this big, dramatic, heroic sacrifice. We all know that story. We know it so well that we can predict every last beat before the title card even shows.”
It’s weird to hear Midoriya say the kind of things Tomura complains about all the time. Movies are predictable. Superhero movies are even more predictable. “For this movie to work, we have to show that there are consequences. The heroes taking a big loss right at the beginning of the story establishes Apocalypse and the Horsemen as a real threat, and the fact that it happens this way shows that we’re not playing cartoon tropes straight. In a comic, Apocalypse would monologue for a while and give Quicksilver time to escape. In this one —”
Apocalypse orders Psylocke to kill Quicksilver, and she does it without hesitating. Is Tomura’s character really supposed to hook up with yours after watching you murder his brother? “Yeah,” Midoriya says into the silence. “Quicksilver’s death sets the tone for how this movie is going to work. It’s a superhero movie, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. Quicksilver’s powers stay in the game, but they’re with somebody who doesn’t have his experience and who isn’t reincarnated and so on and so forth — like I said, it’s faster if we just read it.”
“Yes,” Iida says loudly, over Bakugou’s arguing that he should have been the one with an important death scene. “Scene six. The interior of the Professor’s shrine —”
The table read continues. Tomura feels like he’s in an alternate reality. Maybe he died or something, because there’s no way he’s reading lines while Dabi sits next to him, chugging water and eating candy out of the loudest package in existence. There’s no way he’s trading lines of dialogue with you in scenes that seem written to kill him specifically. Quicksilver’s not the only character who dies. Midoriya offs Cyclops, too, in an effort to protect Phoenix that ends up failing. That leaves the heroes’ side without a telekinetic character, or a psychic character who can physically fight, too. And they have to go fight Apocalypse anyway.
That’s where Psylocke comes in. After a whole script setting up your thing with Quicksilver and your internal conflict over all the shit Apocalypse orders you to do, Midoriya lets you switch sides mid-battle and help the heroes take Apocalypse down. There’s a pretty good scene afterwards where the heroes decide that new Quicksilver should choose what happens to Psylocke, since she killed his brother. So Tomura gets to spare your life. You get to be weird about it, since you thought you were going to die in battle and atone for your sins that way. And he gets to kiss you again in front of everybody.
Tomura started this meeting hating Midoriya. He still sort of hates Midoriya. But he fucking loves Midoriya’s script.
Dabi seems to like it, too. The other actors whose characters are killed don’t look mad about it. Bakugou’s been appeased because his death scene is more epic than Quicksilver’s, and Uraraka’s been smiling since Iida read the stage direction about Phoenix dying. Present Mic, who’s sitting against the far wall with the rest of the crew, even comments on it. “What’s got you so hyped?”
“I’m not playing half of the superhero genre’s most annoying straight couple anymore,” Uraraka says. “I can finally come out.”
“You — huh?” Present Mic looks shocked. “My gaydar must be busted as fuck. I didn’t have a clue.”
“I’m a good actor.”
Tomura glances over at Himiko and notes that Himiko’s eyes are basically bugging out of her head. He’s going to pick on her about that later. He elbows Dabi, nodding in Himiko’s direction. “Do you see this shit?”
“I see my thunder getting stolen,” Dabi grumbles. It takes Tomura a second too long to figure that out. “I’m bi too. If anyone gives a shit.”
“I give a shit,” you say. Tomura leans out around Dabi to look at you and sees you smiling. “Now you can play something other than Good Luck, Babe, on a loop.”
“You’re bi?” Himiko says, shocked. “Since when?”
“Since the whole time,” Dabi says. He flops back in his chair. “It feels good to get that off my chest.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Spinner’s gotten up from the back wall and come over. “Did you think we’d be dicks?”
“Wasn’t about you,” Dabi says. “My fucking dad.”
Oh. Dabi and Tomura both won the asshole dad lottery, but Tomura’s dad isn’t a famous director and producer who micromanages his every move. The way Tomura heard it, Todoroki Enji wanted to be an actor but couldn’t hack it, so he’s settled for being a director and running Dabi’s life out of a corner office in Los Angeles. He’ll be pissed when he finds out Dabi isn’t straight. And that’s not even the only thing. “What do you think he’ll be madder about? You coming out or your character getting killed off?”
“Flip a coin,” Dabi says, and snorts. “I hope he has a heart attack.”
“Is anybody else queer?” Magne asks. She’s come over, too, pulling Twice with her. “One more and we’ve got the majority. Twice, baby, what about you?”
“I’m straight as a three-dollar bill!”
“Straight,” Spinner says. “Sorry.”
“You should be sorry,” Dabi says, and Himiko cackles. “What about you, Shigaraki? How do you identify?”
Tomura figured out that he liked women and stopped thinking about it. “Not available.”
The instant he realizes what he said, he cringes. Not available? What the fuck does that mean? It’s not like you and Tomura have had some kind of talk. You haven’t even gotten past second base. Tomura’s a moron. “Damn,” Magne says, and sighs. “We almost had it.”
“If it helps, I’m bi,” you say. Magne grins. “But I’m not available, either.”
“Tomura-kun has a girlfriend!” Himiko hugs you one-armed. “I want a girlfriend, too.”
“I thought you wanted a boyfriend.”
“Maybe one of each.”
“Everybody! Please pay attention!” Midoriya’s whipped out the megaphone. “I’ve sent contract updates to your agents to review — for those of you who need updates, at least. Take your scripts with you. Don’t let them out of your sight. And get some sleep, please. Reshoots start tomorrow, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
There are a lot of changes to the script. Based on what Tomura saw, they’re going to have to reshoot at least half the movie. He spends half a second wondering how they’re going to finance it, then remembers that Midoriya’s producer is the only guy in the movie industry with more money than Dabi’s dad. Money’s not going to be a problem. What is going to be a problem, though — Tomura’s phone pings with a text from his agent, congratulating him on his upgrade from stuntman to actor, and his insides pull themselves into a knot. Tomura may have started out wanting to be an actor, but it’s been a long time since he did any acting. And his part isn’t anything close to small. What the hell is he going to do, other than all his own stunts?
Dabi gets a call — from his dad — and leaves to go take it in private, followed by Himiko, Twice, Magne, Spinner, and Hawks. You sit down in his old chair. “You look like I felt when I got the call,” you say to Tomura. “How are you doing?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m fucked.” Tomura leaves his hand open on his thigh, wondering if you’ll take it, and when you do, he feels his stomach untwist itself slightly. “This isn’t going back to acting. This is getting launched into it out of a cannon.”
“Or off that launchpad Hatsume built,” you say. Tomura could have done without being reminded. “Keep talking.”
“It’s not like with you. You might not have been in movies before, but you were at least acting the whole time. I haven’t.” Tomura glances your way and finds you watching him, your elbow on the table and your chin in your free hand. You’re listening way too closely to whatever stupid thing he’s going to say. “This is a huge role. I don’t see how I’m not going to fuck it up.”
“You’re going to fuck it up,” you say. “Everybody fucks it up. There hasn’t been one scene in this movie that was shot in one take.”
“Your fight scene.”
“You’re in that one with me,” you say. You smile at Tomura. “Come on. You’re not even a little bit excited? What would little-kid you say if you time-warped back twenty-five years and told him you were playing a superhero in a big-budget film?”
Little-kid Tomura would be so hyped he’d piss himself, faint, or both. But little-kid Tomura hadn’t figured out the way the world really works. Little-kid Tomura was still dumb enough to hope for things. “Do you ever think shit is going a little too well?” he asks you. You tilt your head to study him. “This was just some movie of Dabi’s I was working on. And now it’s — this. And maybe if it was just that, I’d buy it, except now there’s this.”
He wants to gesture between the two of you, but he’d have to let go of your hand. “I don’t get that kind of luck. Other people get it all the time, but not me.”
“So you’re overdue,” you say. “I think this might be your fault.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, you spent all this time pretending you didn’t want to be an actor. You didn’t spend any time thinking about what it would be like or what you would do if you got your shot,” you say. “I didn’t spend a lot of time daydreaming about being in the movies, but I didn’t not think about it, either. So when I got the call, I was really shocked — but I was excited, too. You’re having to cold-read the excited part.”
Tomura sits there for a second. “Do you like calling me out or something?”
“I like getting to know you,” you say. “Besides, you can call me out on something, too.”
“Over what? Like you said, you’re handling this way better than me.” Tomura thinks about it for a second. If he wasn’t so damn sleep-deprived, he’d have been on it as soon as you finished talking. “You didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about people liking you back? Seriously?”
“It’s a cliche,” you say awkwardly. You were staring at Tomura a second ago. Now you won’t look at him. “I’ve been in a ton of shows with front-row tickets to a billion showmances. If that was going to happen to me it would have happened already.”
“It’s happening now,” Tomura says. He pulls on your hand a few times, hoping you’ll look at him, but you don’t. “Sorry about the unavailable thing. That was weird. We haven’t even done anything.”
“I said it too,” you say, instead of telling Tomura it wasn’t weird. “But you’re right that we haven’t done anything. You owe me cuddling and a good night’s sleep. Are you going to back out?”
Tomura’s mood improves so fast it’s stupid. “No.”
The two of you grab room service first. It’s not cheap, but you point out that the two of you have stuff to celebrate. Tomura’s sort of hoping he’ll get a second wind, at least enough to get through a real makeout session with you, but it totally backfires. After he’s eaten something, his exhaustion pulls the fire alarm, and it’s an effort to take off his shirt and plug in his phone before flopping over onto the bed.
You climb in next to him and make yourself comfortable, knees folded into the bend of his, arm draped over his waist, cheek pressed to his shoulder. Tomura makes a surprised sound. “Sorry,” you say. “You said you make cuddling weird, so I thought I’d make it weirder.”
“This isn’t weird,” Tomura says, even though he’s never been the little spoon in his life. He doesn’t like that he can’t see you, but he likes knowing that you’re there, that you’re holding onto him instead of the other way around. On the whole, he’s into it. Otherwise his eyelids wouldn’t be getting heavy. “Are you going to be okay like that?”
“Yeah.” You blink, and your eyelashes brush against Tomura’s skin. “Go to sleep, okay? Dabi said he kept you and Spinner up all night, and he said he’d mess me up if I let you go to your first day of filming sleep-deprived.”
Tomura will tell Dabi where he can stick his advice tomorrow. He risks leaning back against you a bit and you adjust your arm around him, holding him closer. Fuck. “Are you even tired?”
“Yes,” you say. “It was kind of dumb, to be honest. I was up all night wondering if this guy I danced with actually liked me.”
Tomura shouldn’t be smiling at that. It’s a good thing you’re not looking at him. “Stop wondering,” he says. “I like you. Go to bed.”
Your eyelashes brush against his shoulder again. So do your lips, a second or so later, which would drive Tomura crazy if he wasn’t mostly asleep. He’s almost all the way asleep when he hears you answer him. “I like you, too.”
it’s not weird to find fanfiction from 2021, or 2017, or 2014 that you’ve never read and actually taking your time to read it.
it’s not weird to love it and comment and leave kudos because the author will probably still see it someday and it will make them happy.
it’s not weird to like said author’s work so much that you want to go look for other fics from them.
it’s not weird to go through the authors profile and look for other fics from the ships you like (or maybe some that you’ll give a chance because you liked the author) and maybe bookmark them for later.
it’s not weird to read these other fics and like them too and comment on them because you actually like them and you want to let the author know.
it’s not weird to read fanfiction from 5, or 8, or 10 years ago and actually enjoy and engage with it because it’s perfectly normal to relate to something that’s less than a decade old!
let’s stop treating fanfiction like they’re instagram posts that stop being interesting in 24 hours! fanfiction is NOT social media, fanfiction is art!!! and art doesn’t get old in one day, one year, or even a decade!
read fanfiction! write fanfiction! comment on fanfiction! let’s not let fanculture die people!!!!!
Not only is it not weird, it is ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED. Authors LOVE IT when people do this!!! Its not "weird" and its not "neutral" -- its a fucking DELIGHT. Feel very absolutely free to read though an author's entire back catalogue, leaving kudos and/or comments along the way; we absolutely freaking love when someone does this. There is nothing more joyful than getting a comment notification for an old fic. It will make our day, I promise.
King of Horses ran 450 fucking miles at almost entirely a gallop, without more than a few minutes rest, in 4 nights and basically was like "wait why are we stopping?" when Gandalf took him into the city and he ended up in a stable.
This was not his top speed, nor did it push any limits on his endurance.
King of horses is very different from other horses, actually.
Horses are not machines. You cannot just take the max speed of a horse and scale it up and go "that's how far a horse can go and how fast!" Horses are like us. The top speed of a human recorded is somewhere around 27mph. We sustain that for about 30-35 seconds, which is much less than a mile distance even at 27mph.
There is a guy who pulled 350 miles in something over 3 days running, but a. Humans actually have better endurance than horses (we're just a lot weaker) and importantly for this discussion, b. He was in absolute physical ruin at the other end - missing toenails, feed bleeding freely from multiple blisters, hypothermic, and woulda been in some Trouble if he hadn't had modern medicine right there to help him out. He was also running in the best equipment modern money can buy, on paved roads and clear terrain, and with his family driving alongside to help him swap socks, shoes, rinse the blood out, give him food to eat, water, and so on.
And again: humans are better at endurance than horses (honestly we're just fucking ridiculous, at peak condition, in terms of endurance, we're absurd) and the guy was a useless wreck at the end.
For horses, modern endurance races tend to max at 100miles, which are completed in around 18 hours (the max allowed is 24); there are some 2-day 100 mile races where you do two 50s and then add them together after sleeping overnight.
(This is the race for one rider with the same horse - there are much longer races (like the Mongolian Derby), but those involve switching horses, in order not to, you know, kill them.)
For the endurance races, those are intensely trained for and they're the big Effort for the year. Vet staff monitor the horses' very carefully at multiple stops, because it's very easy to injure them. Multi-day races are maxed at 50m/day in order to avoid injuring the horses.
After the race, horses normally need a month or more to recover from the effort, before it's even safe to do anything BUT rest with them, let alone actually race again.
Now if you're in a hurry and have no posts to get totally fresh horses (which is what things like the Persian messengers or the Pony Express did), you can eke a bit more out of this as within the story Théoden et al certainly did by having multiple horses, as it's harder for a horse to run with you on its back than to just run freely.
In the same time that it takes Gandalf to reach Minas Tirith, Théoden et al get to Dunharrow. Aragorn takes the Paths of the Dead because they cut under Dunharrow and vastly decrease the amount of distance in order to get to the Pelargirs, because his use of the Stone has shown him that if there isn't a lot more help than Théoden is bringing sooner than he is bringing it, Minas Tirith is fucked, and it is not physically possible for Théoden to get to the Pelennor before the 15th of March and still have horses that are capable of being ridden into battle.
(Obviously, part of what he did was cut off the enemy reinforcements by doing this, thus meaning that he reduced the need for significant more numbers arriving before the Corsairs would have . . . because he arrived instead of the Corsairs.)
. . . Shadowfax ran to Minas Tirith over the same terrain in four days. That would be a little over a hundred miles a night without stopping (Pippin is specific about how infrequently they stopped and that it seemed to have been entirely for Gandalf to talk to people) and when they get there he might as well have just come off a long rest, and thinks it's super stupid that he has to go wait in a stall while his two-legs goes and does talky-stuff. The next day he runs a super-speed race out to drive the Nazgûl off in order for Faramir to continue his retreat from Osgiliath (rather than be routed).
Shadowfax just did something that would kill a normal horse and then went " . . .what, like it's hard?"
To be fair, sure, Shadowfax was probably cantering because frankly fuckin' riding at a flat gallop for 4 days would be punitively exhausting even for Gandalf's new incarnation with some of his previous restrictions eased, never mind for Pippin, while a canter is p much the most comfortable gait. But for fuck's sake, guys.
Yes, a racehorse can, at flat fastest run, get over 25mph (Secretariat hit the 30s) - they do this for less than 2 miles.
A normal horse would have keeled over dead somewhere in the middle of that ride. If you had a super-trained endurance one they might make it in six-ish but they're not going to be useful for anything when you get there and are probably useless for several months if you want them to stay sound. (And you might still have killed them, or at least made them permanently lame.)
Shadowfax was like "toss me a waterbottle bro and then let's get back out there this stable shit is boring."
So yeah no, King of Horses was not, in fact, just kinda like the other horses.
Honestly suspect the opposite: it's strongly implied thru stated that other horses see Shadowfax as essentially the most comforting and security-imbuing figure in the world and tend to orient around him (implied a number of places; outright stated at the point that the three horses Aragorn and Legolas were riding initially ran away and then encountered Shadowfax in the leadup to when the three of them encountered Gandalf, if I'm remembering correctly).
To horses Shadowfax isn't Scary Freak of Nature; he's Amazing Hero come to Make All Safe. If anything they're probably like oh thank god, Dad's here - I've been getting kinda tense with all this Two Legs Stress around, but if Dad's here and pretty chill, we're fine.
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if you ever doubt that your ao3 comments matter or mean something: i have been struggling with my writing for 6 months straight, crying myself to sleep afraid that i will never be able to write again, that the thing i love most in the world has left me, that my writing is just gone
this morning i got this comment:
and after i stopped blubbering over it, i picked up my writing notebook, and re-read all my fic research, and opened up my document again for the first time in weeks without being afraid of it
you have no idea how much writers treasure every single comment we get. you have no idea how big an impact you can have. sometimes, just sometimes, your one "insignificant" comment changes everything
nobody talks about how exhausting it is to live in that space between "things will get better" and "i can't handle this anymore." it's like your emotions are constantly swinging. leaving you both hopeful and defeated in the same day.
Little dragons on a park bench for today's sketch. Was imagining them like seagulls, crows, pigeons, etc-checking to see if people left any little snacks behind to clean up
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The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.
Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"
The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.
Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."
This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.
This torches everything. And I do mean everything.
A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):
ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives
allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason
preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies
requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.
What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.
Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.
Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.
Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:
"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"
But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.
Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.
This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.
This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.
So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.
Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.
As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.
valeria luiselli/ seven- taylor swift/ marrowbone/ i know the end- phoebe bridgers/ marrowbone/ i wait for you- alex g/ @inanotherunivrse/ the haunting of hill house/ the great
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