Seventy Years of Sleep # 4. nikka ursula (n.t)
“The universe doesn’t love. It exists, an omnipotent bystander. A guardian of some sort, and watching over the goings on of one hundred billion galaxies. Until Alec Lightwood.”
The Universe Doesn’t Love by nhixxie
“Merry Christmas, Magnus.” A shadow hunter says to a warlock. (A hockey player says to a physics major. A prince says to a servant. An assassin says to another assassin.) Alec feels a smile against his shirt. “Merry Christmas, Alexander.” OR, Magnus and Alec experience Christmas through three different universes.
- Snow Falls in Other Universes Too by nhixxie
(This was written for Malec Secret Santa 2019!)
“The universe doesn’t love. It exists, an omnipotent bystander. A guardian of some sort, and watching over the goings on of one hundred billion galaxies. Until Alec Lightwood.“
- The Universe Doesn’t Love by nhixxie
(This is a fic I wrote for Malec Secret Santa 2019!)
Merry Christmas, @thelightofthebane!
Happy holidays to you and I hope you like this! Anyways, I’ve always had a penchant for Magnus as a god and this is the closest I got to lmao
Read on AO3
*****
The Universe Doesn’t Love
The universe doesn’t love.
It exists, an omnipotent bystander. A guardian of some sort, and watching over the goings on of one hundred billion galaxies, two hundred fifty billion stars, and three trillion planets makes it easier for on objective approach. If the cosmos is the physical, tangible thing of all that exists, the universe is its sentience. Two things, completely different but just as the same.
The universe looks within itself and sees everything ebb and flow by some meticulous design. The universe may be old, just as old as the cosmos it governs, but it is not <i>the being</i> above all. As all encompassing as it may be, the universe is still predetermined by a power even greater than itself—chance.
If the universe believes in something, it’s chance. The coming about of all the forces in existence to bring about <i>something</i>. It is how the universe and the cosmos itself came to be. Just the small particles that happen to be the foundation of <i>everything</i>, decaying and combining as the entirety of this mass become colder and colder and colder and then—first light breaks through. It could’ve not happened that way. One seemingly inconsequential thing could have changed in the most minuscule of ways and everything would have been different.
Chance is powerful. It sits on a throne above the universe, seemingly invisible, but starkly everywhere.
Merry Christmas, @darque-essence!
Hope this is okay as I’ve only had about three days to write it! Happy Holidays!
For the last part of this fic, there is a reference to a song playing in the background. If you are curious, the song is “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” by Kitty Kallen and I recommend listening to it while reading that specific part.
Read on AO3
*****
Snow Falls in Other Universes Too
“This is embarrassing.” Magnus groans, back plastered onto the rough ice.
If not for the utter state of disgrace he is in, Magnus would have appreciated the way the unusually blue sky is domed over him, only thin wisps of clouds tufted across the sky. His breaths materialize into puffs of condensation above him.
Alec looms into view, palms planted on his knees, trying to stifle a laugh.
“You’re doing fine.” He says, or tries to say nonchalantly, and of course he would say that, being the ever-so-charming captain of the varsity hockey team.
Aren’t jocks supposed to be dicks? Magnus blearily remembers one of his engineering friends lamenting on this fact after a pretty hopeless one-night stand with a guy from the football team. Also, she kicked the door right off of her mini-fridge in her ‘sorrow’.
“Alexander, the only other person on this frozen river who’s on her butt is that five-year-old.” Magnus says bleakly, refusing to move, “I’m not doing fine.”
Alec laughs, eyes crinkling, and Magnus watches the scene unfold before him like a flower in bloom. He is beautiful, Magnus thinks again, as if the thought hasn’t been thought before, like it’s freshy laid snow on the cold earth. Hair stuffed under a beanie, a scarf wound around his neck and tucked inside his winter jacket. Lips glistening with vaseline. He squats right next to Magnus’ sprawled form with no problem with balance at all. He ends up sitting right down on the ice, his knees pressed against Magnus’ side.
Heroism in Hong Kong, 2019
[note: for those who use the mm-dd-yyyy US date format, in the photo above “1/10/2019″ means Oct 1, 2019. Also, “Carrie” refers to Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong]
“Hi,” Magnus Bane semi-drawls, eyes half-lidded and blinking up at him (dare Alec say) enchantingly, “Are you my nurse?”
“Yes.” Alec answers after a mind-focusing cough, “My name is Alec. I’ll be taking care of you today.”
The corners of Magnus’ mouth lifts into a smile that gets Alec’s heart thrashing within its cage, his head lolling sideways against his pillow. He looks at him with eyes that are soft with sincerity.
“You can take care of me any way you want, Alec.”
Alec has been a nurse for five years, and he’s pretty sure he’s never seen anyone shoot his shot the way Magnus Bane has done the last hour. Alec looks at his watch.
Jesus.
He has eleven more hours of this shift to go.
Alert and Oriented Times Zero, But I’m CAM Positive I Like You @ AO3 by nhixxie; where Magnus takes somebody’s suggestion of break a leg too literally during ballet rehearsals and Alec gets the brunt of all his sexual innuendos.
We Sleep, and Maybe We’ll Wake Up. Listen. Seventy Years of Sleep, nikka ursula, others, support my work by helping me grow my IG following here!
who is this zoe skylar? i wrote this piece.
— Zoe Skylar
I’m kind of horrified that so few articles about the fires in Brazil are mentioning the indigenous women’s march and indigenous people on the frontlines and occupying Brazilian government offices. Indigenous resistance to the destruction is happening, this isn’t being passively accepted.
hey do you have a source/link for this? i wanna share w some friends
what can we do to help amazon? everyone is saying that no-one gives a fuck about it, but no one is giving information how to help the situation :(
The “no-on gives a fuck” is about worldwide media not talking about this. But it’s really nice of you to want to help us.
You can donate here if you want to help stop the exploitation and deforestation of Amazon. The president, who calls himself “Captain Eletric Saw,” allows the exploitation and destruction of the Amazon for economic ends.
You can also donate to SOS AMAZONIA here. They are the biggest NGO in Brazil and they work with implantation of public policies that aims into preservation of the Amazon and it’s people.
They are both helping the Amazon right now!
Always good to remember: USD$1,00 = RS$4,04 and €1,00 = RS$4,48. So, even if you can help just a tiny bit, it will help us a lot!
can you tell me about your feelings towards stucky endgame??? like has it fucked up your feelings big time that they wrote steve to leave bucky? how have you been coping with it?? like what are your head canons to make your heart hurt a little less?? it’s really fucking up my ability to write for stucky which is sad because i feel so strongly for them and i don’t want 70 years of sleep to die tbh
Okay so I have two basic main points: why endgame’s ending feels different, and what exactly that means to me- and, I think, to a lot of us.
Why it’s this bad:
The ending to this movie feels, to me and to a lot of us, like a complete betrayal of Steve Rogers’s character. But the problem here is that the writers wholeheartedly don’t believe that- and a lot of other fans don’t believe that either. It’s not like the ending of GOT, where even people who had never watched the show were outraged over the poor characterization choices. There was a righteous uprising against the objectively terrible writing. But this feels like it’s just us. We’re lumped into the category of The Hysterical Gay Shipping Fangirls, which immediately strips away all integrity in our criticisms and complaints. And it’s always been this way, for the majority of popular shows with large followings.
But the reason it feels different this time is because this isn’t queer-baiting (which is another term that’s been driven into the Laughable Stupid Fangirl terminology handbook.) This isn’t just a network executive appeasing their gay-seeking audience while at the same time being too scared to jump to actual legitimate representation (see: Sherlock, Night at the Museum, Supernatural, etc ad infinitum.) (And no I am not joking about NATM.) This feels like queer-shaming, if anything. This feels like the writers are deliberately showing us how stupid we were to ever hope- to even think in the first place- that these two characters would ever care for each other with any form of love. (Oh, but this time they made sure to clarify that they’re fine with gay people, and Joe Russo is fine with playing a gay character whose only defining characteristic is that he’s gay- yikes- but just don’t taint any of our beautiful, strong, straight righteous men with your ~gayness~.)
And yet still, the worst part about endgame’s ending is the finality. There’s no re-interpretation that makes this okay. To reach anything remotely resembling happiness between Steve and Bucky, you’d have to undo the fundamental plot point that was written. (Which, honestly, wouldn’t be hard because it was so sloppily tacked on that they had to stuff awkward foreshadowing throughout the rest of the film to keep it from feeling grotesquely out of place.) But it’s not as easy as just assuming that between CACW and AIW, Bucky and Steve had probably seen each other. It would be disingenuous now to assume that they’d ever interact again, at all.
Processing:
I’ve talked to my therapist about this- learning how to move on, and how to be okay with the idea of moving on as a concept in the first place. And it all boils down to grief. I- and I’m sure I share this feeling with many of you- I am just grieving. I’m grieving the loss of a character I loved, the loss of a relationship that inspired me emotionally and creatively, helped me find connections with other people. I’m grieving the loss of a long period of happiness in my life that I can’t get back. And when I come on here and I see people talking about Steve or Bucky, or drawing them or painting them or writing about them, it triggers that grief all over again. I had to take a break from social media for a while to escape it.
I spent five years of my life writing and living in the Stucky fandom, and (I will say, unhealthily) it was a central part of who I was as a person. And now that that’s changing, it’s hard to figure out what that’s going to mean for me. I feel lost, because I don’t have this label anymore and I’m trying to figure out who I am without it. I feel scared, because I don’t know what I’m going to do creatively without these characters, and I’m scared to care about something else so strongly again. I feel shame for caring this strongly about fictional characters and their relationships. I feel anger. But mostly I think I feel tired.
Even writing this feels hopeless. When I started, I had the idea that if I could pinpoint exactly what I felt and why, it would have some sort of effect. It would make people see the truth, maybe it could change something. But I know that it won’t. All this will do is make me look like one of those angry, hysterical fangirls that the world seems to hate so much.
We Sleep, and Maybe We’ll Wake Up. Listen. Seventy Years of Sleep, nikka ursula, others, support my work by helping me grow my IG following here!
can you tell me about your feelings towards stucky endgame??? like has it fucked up your feelings big time that they wrote steve to leave bucky? how have you been coping with it?? like what are your head canons to make your heart hurt a little less?? it’s really fucking up my ability to write for stucky which is sad because i feel so strongly for them and i don’t want 70 years of sleep to die tbh