cycloalkane
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dream in the space between the hammer and the nail by cycloalkane
Fandoms: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
22 Jul 2025
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Summary
So when he returned home, to a valley his family had loved so much it could no longer hold them, it was to an empty bed, to drinking alone in the saloon, to half-remembered nightmares and the tussle against his own mind, a battle now well-worn like a lover. He took back the keys from Emily and her golden sister. He wrote letters to Jodi and the kids, and they sent photographs back, and he kept them next to the bombs and weird magic potions in the garage.
He was only a man. Time soldiered on.
Then, one day, a week before the green rain, they took the farmer out back behind the saloon and shot them in the town square.
Kent left Stardew Valley twice. The first time was for the war. The second saw him re-settling his family in Zuzu City. Then he returned to his birthplace alone, now cordial with his after-war struggles and his family, to try to forget what it meant to be a soldier.
But what is a soldier but a witness? The war has birthed secrets like the valley grows magic, and Kent has stumbled upon a different kind of battle, one where peacekeepers obey a mayor, a farmer is shot like a dog, and blood and history lie tangled in the earth.
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two ways of being: the noun & the verb by cycloalkane
Fandoms: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
24 Nov 2024
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Summary
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards. Crossed out. —Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out
Potter is finishing up with his sketch of the craniofacial structure.
There is still more of his body to go, and more sessions left, and Tom cannot be sure whether he wants the precise drawings to be more or less—true, at all, if he could even describe them as untruthful. They aren’t beautiful as Tom is in the mirror, but they are still, undeniably, him, with the eye of someone learning to cut people apart and look beneath their skin, still bloodless yet, and—well.
The drawings have a certain quality, something that, perhaps, he’s reading too much into, having associated the sketching with the pose (and Tom, even if he'd never admit it, has always enjoyed being admired), and the look of green eyes flickering between paper and flesh: concentration, in some cases, is only another word for vehemence.