Warnings: A big pile of angst and grief. Single-needle tattooing.
Summary: You ask Ezra to place a memorial on your skin. He asks you not to become one on his.
A/N: This is a request for my 300+ Follower Jubilee!@ohlawdthebirds contacted me with a request for Ezra giving a tattoo. While this isn’t the exact request they sent, it is inspired by the conversation. <3
Prompt: “Tattoo” and “pain.”
The first prick of the needle makes your arm jump. Ezra barely lifts his head to check in with you.
“You sure you want this, sweetheart?”
You take another swig of the woodale and nod. “Yes. Do it.”
His fingers curl firmly and gently around your wrist, trying to hold you down without really holding you down, not unlike so many hours you’ve spent together lately on the floor. “Strong and steady then, okay?”
The next stab is harder, hurts more. The next hurts worse. It takes several more before your nerves are overloaded and it’s just one long irritation.
Your tearing eyes drift away from your bloodying arm as it lays on the table, not far from Ezra’s thrower. A beautiful piece. Bespoke. Custom made with an engraved shaft. He used it to save your life two rotations ago.
(a completely incomplete and objectively biased analysis, don’t @ me)
Shazam (Shazam!) Score: -~.5/10
Shazam gets -1 point for every year he spent looking for a hero who will receive phenomenal cosmic powers while not having “fully matured brain” as one of the hard requirements of the job. The exact number of years isn’t specified; he said he’d been looking for “centuries” but is in fact from Ancient Egypt or before then, so being bad at math subtracts another .5 from his score.
Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter Series) Score: 0/10
Written by a transphobe, fell in love with a nazi, gave a kid to abusive relatives, categorizes some children as evil and then punishes them for it. No points to Dumbledore.
The Ancient One (Doctor Strange) Score: 1/10
Whitewashing and Orientalism disguised as feminist, post-racial open-mindedness. You can’t just throw a bald Tilda Swinton at the problem and expect it to do the work for you.
Glinda the Good Witch (The Wizard of Oz) Score: 2/10
Glinda purposely manipulates an ignorant farm girl and sends her on a path to kill the Wicked Witch of the West even though Dorothy had the tools to get home the entire time. So -5 for being a terrible mentor but +5 for being a girlboss. Depending on what source material you consider canon she is possibly working out some blended family trauma, possibly a figment of Dorothy’s psyche? She ends up at a 2/10 for being incredibly patronizing and giving off church lady energy by not only unironically deigning herself “Good” but also making that a huge part of her identity.
Brom (Eragon) Score: 3/10
This was definitely a guy who existed and was in a movie I’ve seen. Not actually magic?
Gaius (Merlin) Score: 5/10
The magical mentor of the original magical mentor himself. Set up to be wise but in hindsight gave Merlin a lot of very bad advice, chiefly in not advising him to tell Arthur the truth a long, long time ago. Best “sweet old man” vibes on this list though.
Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander (Legend of the Seeker) Score: 7/10
Zed is a wise old wizard who actually survived his protege’s call to action, but he was also constantly being written out of fights to counterbalance that. Negative points for reducing the found family aspect of being a magical mentor by, y'know, actually being related to his charge. Gains points again for constantly hyping every new type of magic as “P O W E R F U L M A G I C” and because Bruce Spence’s scenery chewing and Sam Raimi’s sense of humor are a match made in cheesy TV heaven. When magic turned him young again he looked a bit like James Spader, but I’m not sure how to score that.
Dishonorable Mention: Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander (Sword of Truth Series) Score: -10/10
I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard this book series described as “Ayn Rand high fantasy”. The true Randian ideal is pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and having a magical mentor at all sounds too much like filthy communism to me. Why can you teach yourself magic, Richard?
Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars) Score: 9/10
He may be from sci-fi but he’s a classic magical mentor. He loses some of the mystique he presented in the original trilogy by having his entire background gone over with a fine tooth comb in prequels, expanded universe novels and television. Dramatic b*tch and a bit of a troll, especially as a ghost. Dinging him one point for lack of prerequisite wisdom with regard to some of his life choices.
Moiraine Damodred (Wheel of Time) Score: 10/10
A perfect score for absolute perfection. She’s not dead (yet? no book spoilers!) so that puts her ahead of a lot of people on this list, she is also the only magical mentor with enough foresight to invest in a bodyguard. Great judge of character and knowledgeable about a lot of things while still being much younger than your average magic mentor, which highlights her hustle and work ethic. Moiraine takes on multiple possible Chosen Ones at once, proving herself the modern solution to magical mentorship (as well as a perfect representation of the overloaded modern worker being forced to do multiple jobs at once).
Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings Series) Score: 100/10
Gandalf is wise, powerful, frustratingly vague, disappears at inopportune times so the hero has to solve his own problems… This guy has it all going for him, including some of the best lines in the series. Died at the appropriate moment to drive the hero’s journey and then walked it off. Somehow manages to seem cool and virtuous even though he’s a senior citizen who hangs around small “innocents” while smoking copious amounts of weed and setting off fireworks. Looked better in gray, but what can you do. A true icon.
Granny Weatherwax (The Discworld Series) Score: ↑/~
Granny doesn’t hold with all of this numbers and ranks business. She can’t be having that kind of thing. However if you must know, she is definitely up there near the top. Has been the magical mentor of at least four young witches and hasn’t been murdered yet. Excellent references.
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It feels a little old fashioned, a lot of the time. All these rules bearing down on you like the dust of a fine wine, oppressive reverence that you can’t help but breathe in through your mouth and down into your lungs. It’d choke if it didn’t taste so very good once you popped the cork.
Sepia tones and soft vignettes, creeping in on the picture while you try and keep things progressive and moving. It’s this weird blend of old and new, pushing yourself into experiences that you don’t even know exist, that you’re creating just for you, just for me, while at the same time layering it all in a shroud of ‘yes sir’ 'no sir’ 'please may I come sir’. Politeness as a gas mask, filtering everything through.
We might be the most polite deviants in the world, you and I. But don’t let that become a defining factor. Use it like a foil, something to cut through the moment, humour at the end of a point. It’s old fashioned, sometimes, but that doesn’t mean we have to be stuffy about it. We are the masters of our own destiny, but ignoring that we’re the masters of our own kink.
Well, I’m the master of my own kink. You’re the slave to it.
She kissed him first. She felt like that was an important thing to say, even if she was only saying it to herself. It set out exactly who was the instigator here, and who was on the receiving end. She was giving, and he was getting, and that was that.
It didn’t matter that he was seizing her outright, laying hands on her with an intention to bruise, throwing her on the floor and pinning her down with his bodyweight. It didn’t matter that he’d kissed back just as hard, and she’d felt the thick hairs of his beard against her face, and almost giggled as they tickled her. It didn’t matter that he’d pulled her on top of him and told her to show him the parts he hadn’t seen. It didn’t matter that he’d taken charge.
She’d made the first move, and so everything beyond that was just the aftershocks of that initial quake, each spilling out from the epicenter that was her action. She was the orchestrator, the architect, and the primary cause. The ancestor of her own demise, hoisting her own petard with more than a little glee.
Besides, it was her who was showing him, not him who was forcibly stealing a peek. She was the one on him, and he was the one underneath her. And in her book, that put her in a pretty commanding position. She just wouldn’t mention the fact his fingers were digging into her hips like a vice, making sure she didn’t go anywhere, and did exactly what he said.
