New Muses / Tags 001.

🪐 — new muses / tags 001.

🪐 — EDWARD TEACH   for  stede !

the sound that tears itself from his throat is halfway between a sob and a laugh,   soft and heaved out with a trembling breath.  stede speaks with such certainty,  like what he is telling him is nothing more than a well known fact:  like the sun rising in the east and the coming and going of the tide.  you deserve to be touched gently,  with kindness.  does he have the faintest idea what his words do to him?  how they reach inside him and find the part of himself he had learned to bury deep inside?  the part that longs for this,  for the kindness he has rarely been afforded in his life.  stede gives it to him so freely that edward can’t help basking in its warmth,  while being wrapped in his arms with this much care.

❛  no one has touched me like you do.  ever,  stede.  if anythin’,  i’m the lucky one here.  ❜   he raises his head from his incredibly comfortable resting place,  only so he can look into stede’s eyes.  and the fondness he can see in them is so clear that the need to be even closer to him overtakes edward with sudden and blinding force.  the movement is a bit clumsy,  but he manages to turn fully towards him,  both hands cradling his face and body pressed against his.   ❛  the luckiest man in the whole wide world.  ❜   he chases the words right to his mouth,  punctuating the last three words with a kiss after each one.

       THERE IS SORROW  in the idea that edward has never known a gentle touch before his.  but then when he thought about it, stede supposed that neither had he.  he  &  mary had gone through the motions in every possible respect of course, but they had shared no passion between them, no inherent desire to be near one another.  &  her hands on his skin had felt nothing like edward’s,                                                      the effect that the latter has on him is heady  &  overwhelming as they take his face within their grasp,  &  stede presses into the touch, leans up to chase after the kisses that edward gifts him.  this was undoubtedly unlike anything else he had ever felt before, there could be no question of that.  &  yet it was the lack of experience with it that was precisely why stede gave  &  gave his love to edward without restraint.  he had been waiting his whole life to find him,  &  now that he had, stede found he could rarely find the strength to restrain himself.  when you had waited your entire life for love, it would not do to waste a moment of it.  &  besides, in his view, the world was far too cruel to abstain from gentleness where you could get it.                     ❝ ed, my love, i could say just the same, ❞  he murmurs, a hand slipping up his back to tangle in the thick mass of dark hair at the back of his head  &  holding him close  —  though mercifully, edward doesn’t seem inclined to go far.  their legs lie tangled beneath layers of embroidered cashmere  &  crushed silk,  &  stede can feel his heart racing in his chest.  perhaps one day he will get used to this, but it seems he hasn’t yet.  ❝ i think we may just have to agree to disagree in this regard. ❞

What We Do in the Shadows 4.01

We are opening a vampire nightclub.

OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH

izzy hands in every episode | 1x04 discomfort in a married state

🪐 —  KANG SAE-BYEOK​   for  katiana !

she shakes her head in answer to the question,   while glancing at the box of sweets with something close to suspicion in her eyes.  of course,  she can’t tell her that the only thing resembling sweets she remembers from her childhood is a soft piece of bread sprinkled with some sugar,  precious and rare enough that she made sure to lick her fingers clean.  so sae-byeok says nothing at all while reaching for a macharon,  round and cream colored,  hesitation and wonder whirling in her gut.  you’ll love them,  katiana promised  —  and sae-byeok hasn’t had anything for herself in so long that her fingers almost shake as they finally bring the pastry to her mouth.  

the taste is sweet,  but not so much her teeth ache and she can admit that it’s good.  she wishes she could bring one to her brother.  maybe she will slip one into her pocket later.   ❛  you were right  —  they are good.  ❜   and then she lowers her voice so it stands barely above a whisper,  because apparently all it takes to lower her defences is a little kindness.   ❛  my little brother would love them.  ❜ 

       IT’S A LITTLE STRANGE  the way that sae-byeok handles the seeet treats as though they were cast from crystal.  they were good, to be sure  —  the best outside of paris, as she’d said  —  but still nothing particularly precious.  katiana had eaten almost a whole box this weekend alone.  &  if she decided she wanted more, she could have her driver sent to fetch another box to be delivered within an hour.  &  she sips from her champagne flute, wide brown eyes curiously observing the way that sae-byeok seems to savor it, taking her time to chew  &  swallow.                                                           ❝ well we can have a box to sent to him.  especially if he hasn’t tried them before either.  everyone should.  ❞  &  the heiress makes a mental note to ask for an extra batch the next time she sends someone down to the little bakery for something sweet.  ❝ &  here i didn’t even know you had a brother.  what does he do ? ❞  come to think of it, katiana suddenly realizes she also knows very little about sae-byeok herself, either.  though she wasn’t sure why she should cared.  the other girl was really nothing more than just another of the ever rotating cast of supporting characters in the heiress’s life, bought into her orbit by her father’s obscene wealth.  but there something about the way that sae-byeok held herself that seemed different from everyone else, that cast her aside from all those preening social climbers who clung to her in hopes of seizing some of her family’s  clout or power for themselves.  &  while katiana wants to brush her instinct off, there is a part of her that is just too curious to simply let her differences slide.  ❝ where did you say your family was from again ? ❞

🪐 — HEADCANON :  sarah  +  witchcraft

   i literally don’t have any info up for her yet but this is my most important hc for her :  sarah is a witch. but witchcraft doesn’t work like the people in union thinks it does. the intensely christian people of union believe that witches are servants of satan,  &  that therefore all witches were devil worshippers.  but witchcraft  &  satanism are not the same thing.  witchcraft doesn’t actually really have anything to do with the christian devil.  which is why the widow —  who is a green witch —  warned sarah against reading the devil’s book when she stumbled upon it.  it’s clear to me that the widow did not actually use that book, but rather was keeping the dark power it held away from the people of union.  &  rightly so, as we saw what happened when someone else actually did want to use the power of the devil for themself.     however, sarah is not aware that she is a witch.  she like her mother before her is what is known as a  hedge witch.  hedge witches are born rather than made.  they work mostly with direct life energy, rather than trigger objects.  they often have intrinsic gifts, though they are nothing that could easily be perceived from the outside.  sarah’s powers appear in extremely subtle ways.  hedge witches tend to have gifts along the lines of intuition, healing,  &  protecting life.  their words can also be turned into spells simply by speaking them with strong intention.  hedge witches are unique because their magic does not come from a sustained practice of a craft or participation in a rite, but from something inherent within themselves.                        film evidence for sarah  &  her mother being hedge witches :   ●  though we don’t see sarah’s mother in the film, her father says that it was sarah’s mother who chose that her family would settle on the land that later became union, because she could sense something different about the wind in the trees there.  this type of intuition is  classic  hedge witch behavior.  in my hc, sarah’s mother did know she was a hedge witch, but that she died when sarah was still too young for her to share this awareness with her.  ●  sarah’s arc opens on her assisting a pig to give birth. one of the piglets has gotten stuck,  &  her brother henry warns sarah that they are going to lose both mother  &  piglet.  but sarah confidently says  no we’re not.  the words coupled with the intention behind them is a textbook example of a hedge witch speaking a spell into the world without even realizing it.  &  of course, sarah miraculously succeeds in saving all the pigs, to which her father even remarks aloud that she has a gift.  of course, neither of them know that he is actually profoundly correct.  ●  most of the adults in town thinks that sarah is weird.  this is not only because she is queer, but also because she has an inherent connection with the world at large that threatens their religious worldview.  mad thomas  &  hannah’s mother  —  two of the most bigoted members of the town  —  both go a step farther  &  tell sarah that they see darkness in her, showing that they fear her differences.  sarah’s own father even tells her that there has always been a strangeness in her.  i find it particularly telling that he also says that he believes it might have been “something a mother could have rooted out,”  &  blames the absence of sarah’s mother for her differences, when in reality sarah’s mother was a witch herself  &  likely would have only honed the parts of sarah that made union so uncomfortable.   ●  when the town turns against her  &  hannah, sarah says ‘ if they want a witch, i will give them a witch, ‘  revealing that she finally has the conscious desire to connect to powers beyond the mortal.  however, with no awareness of how witchcraft actually works, she intends to go to the widow’s house  &  use the devil’s book against the town.  &  while she doesn’t end up getting or using the devil’s book, this line coincides with sarah’s stepping into her power  &  using it more consciously  &  in service of a distinct purpose :  to protect hannah.  &  she does, even willing to die to protect hannah in the end.  ●  finally, sarah’s final act is to cast a spell  —  a curse  —  not on the town, but on solomon goode  &  his family.  she promises him that she will follow him forever, that with everyone he harms, he will feel the grip of her hand,  &  that she will never let him go.  &  this spell comes true in the end when it is actually sarah whose spirit returns through her connection with deena to drive a knive through sheriff nick goode’s eye.  &  it is this act that finally completes the curse, expels the devil from shadyside,  &  sets her spirit to rest.  the witch forever lives !