"Come," [Cesare] Said, Drawing [Lucrezia] Close. "I Need You Now. For You Are What Is Real In My Life."

mutual devotion

does anyone know how to stop the yearning and longing and lingering and the desire and obsession. please. please. please. please. please

viking au, max/daniel f1🫶

Hopefully you came into this anticipating the wall of text 💜

1. The summer that Max was ten years old, the raids went far to the south, through the Pillars of Hercules and into the Mediterranean— because this literally happened like Vikings in fact did this. Theoretically Vikings could have seen Monaco! Anyway. This was memorable not because it was his first season — it was his second, he started a little young — but because it was the first time he stole something for himself on a raid. So, Max saw the coast from Narbonne and Pisa. And Max stole two cats on a raid of a town whose name he did not know, but where people died fast enough that a boy could dodge into a house with searching hands.

Back home, people sometimes laugh and ask if he saved his spoiled cats from the pelt-sellers, who raise cats for their fur (sorry i know i wanted sexy viking “i stole my dutch wife” stuff and instead i give u this canonical Viking-era Danish practice SORRY). He always corrects this: “no, I went out viking and i stole them.” People usually think this is a joke. Their names are Jamti and Saxi, because of course Max does not know their original names. (these are both boy names but whatever, his cats are named after Monaco clubs, what do you want me to do about it).

2. Daniel’s folks are from Sicily and Calabria; let’s put him in Calabria, which is partly Byzantine Greek ruled by Constantinople and partly Arab; he would call himself Roman (meaning Byzantium, the Eastern Empire) and speaks Greek, probably, with a smattering of Arabic that is mostly slang. He is weirdly bad at it. (Sicily was entirely Berber Muslim at this point with a large Byzantine Greek population, by the by, and would later be conquered by the descendants of the Vikings, so I guess that’s a whole different AU). Daniel, for his part, was not stolen from his home; his father was not killed, his mother and sister are presumably well. It is simply that he could not sit quietly in a warm place that would have loved him fine. Oops!

3. They meet for real in the town of Jorvik, which is a river city in what will later be England. Christian warned Daniel ahead of time that they were taking on a new kid, implied that there was a favor owed. Daniel’s met the father, and like, fair enough. Pay Jos back for whatever and steer clear, in Daniel’s opinion, and Daniel and Christian usually agree. Max arrives with a set face and carrying his cats — who are 16% smaller than modern cats but still fucking heavy and sliding around unhappily — in a wicker basket that he carries up the hill from the river himself, his doeskin boots sliding in the muck. A few of the guys tell Max he can get mousers here, why carry these? Daniel, who had been in the city for three years now, tells him he should have taken the old Roman stone road. Max is unamused, but at least Daniel was (unwittingly) the helpful one. They are overwintering together in a house down by the other river. Max is seventeen.

3.a Christian’s debt owed was to Max’s mum. Daniel doesn’t know this.

4. Daniel does otherwise know a lot about Christian, because he helped the ironically named Christian Hornbære (also written as Hyrne), once a minor Northumbrian thane, to throw his lot in with the Danes (vikings), take a Dane wife, turn on his compatriots, and sack the place. Christian has remembered this loyalty ever since. This will come up later!

5. Okay since everyone has been patient i WILL play up one sexy (?) viking trope and like. At some point it’s spring and just prior to the beginning of raiding season and the first early little harvest has come in so Christian is hosting a feast before they all go off to do some genuinely heinous shit, and the expectation is absolutely that Christian’s boys get to fuck in this semi-public way in the longhouse. And Max and Daniel are two of the stars of the show, right, so it’s a sort of champagne room situation, only it becomes increasingly clear to Daniel, who is btw barely holding everything together, that Max is absolutely relying on him to get through this. Like everyone in this long dark room has been drinking for two days and Max is watching Daniel to see what he’s going to do, and Daniel is terrified to realize Max watching is the only reason he’s getting hard, etc. They fuck women side by side. It’s a mess! They get off, by which i mean daniel watches Max get off and then fakes his but watching max was the best part. After a bit Daniel goes outside bc he thinks he’s going to be sick but he’s not and he just sits on the new wet grass. Max comes out looking for him and somehow they end up just like. sitting in the wet grass and Max lets Daniel hold him and it’s the only thing that calms Daniel down that entire year, it feels like.

6. The emotional narrative here is like. The inherent tragedy of wanting to be the best, wanting to be beloved, wanting a crowd to know your name, and the outlet available to you is a small, brutal, violent activity. Not because there is absolutely no other option— the Viking Diaspora is one of the widest worlds to have existed; there was a rigid social structure, but one with lots of little odd corners and loopholes. But the tragedy comes in any time and place when no one thinks to tell you this. Max’s cats — stolen from the dead, but themselves simply just cats, just little animals that kill birds for food or to show you love — are kind of the nexus of this, somehow. No idea how I would resolve it, frankly, which is partly because i have to write things to know what they’re gonna say!

Further notes: in this verse Alex Albon’s granddad somehow got caught up in the Battle of Talas, probably on the side of the Tibetan Empire and the Caliphate but who knows, politics are big complicated. Like many Talas veterans’ families he lives in Baghdad right now with his mum and his siblings and he’s often very tired. Look if a Tang Chinese general could get lost in Ethiopia for a bit after the Battle of Talas then Alex Albon could be doomed to watch a really weird viking funeral on the banks of the Caspian during a trade mission to meet up with his father. Shit happens to him. Why is that nude viking man holding a torch and covering his anus?? We will never know bc Alex + Ibn Fadlan’s translator wisely chose not to show up that day. Alternatively Alex IS Ibn Fadlan’s translator, which explains why he is very tired.

what the fuck is this one! thanks for playing. i spent two hours researching domestic housecat dispersal theories.

if you are a fan of the poem "what resembles the grave but isn't," you might be interested to know that the poet, anne boyer, resigned her position at the new york times magazine today, and her letter is worth reading in its entirety.

did you know that the well-known factoid that male anglerfishes degenerate after attachment until they’re basically just a pair of testes is false? i knew of course that they don’t just become “growths” on the female because I’ve handled dozens of attached pairs and every male I’ve ever seen has been very much obviously a whole and complete second fish, but I sort of assumed there was internal degeneration, perhaps muscle atrophy, etc. i can’t believe no one ever corrected me on this but this just doesn’t happen. in obligatorily parasitic species, the male actually continues to grow and increases considerably in size after he attaches to the female, because the two of them can only reach sexual maturity together. me, an octavia butler fan: is this the height of romance??

what is true is that attached males do have hugely enlarged testes proportionate to the rest of their bodies & organs, and that they receive all nutrition from the female’s bloodstream so their stomachs are always empty, though their own gills seem to still be functional, as are their fins and muscles—you can even induce movement and swimming motions on recently dead attached males. I can only assume that at some point someone said that basically the only biological function a male anglerfish needs to perform is sperm production and this got taken out of context and luridly exaggerated over time. he’s not just a pair of testicles! he’s her forever partner! one flesh one end!

One theme per movie/episode || Part 3

→ Flowers in Mamoru Hosoda’s: Wolf Children Ame and Yuki

you’re all going to be okay. let yourselves breathe. take a moment to relax in this quiet place

play some games to distract yourself here

play dress up games here

have a manatee tell you nice things here

you can guide a little creature to eat things here

you can play as a bunny...