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venusiastro · 4 years

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Moon in 1st house- The emotions are the filter of everything they do. They have an underbelly fully exposed and don’t feel any shame in this. This is their strength. Their vulnerability at the forefront is courage and alliance and others see these individuals as greatly inspiring and lovable. There is a strong tension these individuals feel often within themselves a constant need to express and a restless nature that is hard to contain. They can be quite wise and take shape to any situation at hand and feel every undercurrent around them. Empaths to their core this position creates an open wound that pours and pours without any scar. They can be quite hard on themselves and have issues with their lungs, sinuses and can build up phlegm easily. This is because the watery moon creates an effect on the breathing and head of the individual. An easily seen motive and authenticity that is unmatched. It’s very motivating to see how true to themselves these natives are. Though often they deny themselves and have issues with pin pointing who they are since it seems to change so easily to themselves, theyre quite candid and easy to have softness toward. They’re extremely charismatic and can easily pull others into their spaces. Making people feel instantly connected and understood. They’re lovable, they’re admirable and extremely intoxicating. You can’t help but want to know them more since they’re so authentic and true to themselves it’s hard to miss them. One thing about these people is that they just shine. They shine effortlessly and are illuminated from within. They at first, can feel embarrassed or feel as if it’s wrong on their part to have any sort of attention on them. They must learn that it’s okay to shine, that they should let their authentic and most lovable parts of themselves simply be what they are. To love them too without any worry of what others may think about it.

Moon in 2nd house- Contained, selective and possessive of their emotions. These individuals are very much so layered beyond comprehension, though they may seem stoic or aloof emotionally, they tend to hideaway within themselves and lock away their emotions like treasure in a safe. This is because they prize their subjective experience and have filtered it with great poise and nuance. They know how to categorize their memories like film strips. There is deep wisdom of experience in their bodies and they know how each sense is connected to something beyond them. Though often we disregard and say senses are not “factual” or “objective” there is still a potent truth within each of them. They remember each face, each name, each touch and taste in their streamlined reveries. It’s important to them and it’s incredibly impactful when it’s harmonized into something they take great pride and passion in. Moon in the 2nd house makes you dig your toes into warm sand. Make you smell the sweet nostalgia of a meal. The beautiful melody of a voice. They all leave handprints here. The mind and heart is fertile and sensorial. They live in a world of true melody and intensity. They want to mesh with the emotions they feel and express them in a way that is tangible or beautifying. Whether it be art and music or sex and exercise. The body is a machine and it retains so many beautiful kaleidoscopic bits of wisdom within that we often overlook. To simply be, to simply enjoy to simply laugh and love and embrace each moment as if it were a symphony. As if it were the last.

Moon in 3rd house- Life is a constant satiation of understanding and learning. Connections are to be made in every facet and to be dissected, toyed with and innovated. These individuals are extremely inventive, their emotions are guided by a need to understand things and to be fully immersed in the space of creation. Their heart is their mind, and they mind is always turning and soaking in the impressions they make on the world. Their not easily persuaded, though they may make you think they are. They’re more likely interested in seeing the reactions they can get out of you, or what they do. They’re dedicated to their experiences in life. They enjoy nothing more than something new, tantalizing and effective that causes them to feel churned and excited. To them, everything is something to be maximized and made anew. They’re hard to pin and are more than always in their heads and thinking on something to stir for themselves. Projects and novelty are what keep them refreshed and emotionally fulfilled. Connections with others also fuel them as long as they can take something and give something new in each interaction. They’re curious and want nothing more than to see the “what if?” in most things. They live in multiple parallels that are not easily seen. For them, emotions are to be experienced and put away. Or talked about and not dwelled upon. Though some things truly do stick with them, they won’t allow anyone to truly know this, as they themselves don’t always know “what they feel”. They have a very hard time with placing themselves in emotions, and their tempers are also something they cannot really place. Though they may not internally be able to place them and simply let them come and go at times. They can be excellent at using these frustrations or turmoils to become a driving force of exertion. Writing, talking, dancing, painting, sewing, cooking etc. Are outlets they can excell wonderfully in because it’s a way to release so many pent up and misunderstood parts of themselves. Overall they’re like stained glass windows. They have many shards of themselves that don’t seem to connect alone, but are all deeply interwoven into something quite beautiful and to be admired though it’s not always easy to understand, it’s only to be...experienced.

Moon in 4th house- There is a spikiness to these indivuduals emotional landscape. They’re not so easily forthcoming or open when it comes to how they feel, but this is not to be mistaken for being unemotive or unfeeling. These individual’s are deeply sensitive and attuned. They’re introspective, reflective, emotional and very intuitive. Their hearts are armored and made like an inverted iron maiden. The spikes stick outward, but within the chastity of this armor is a softness, a dew covered flower, a small tide pool full of trinkets and stored memories. They’re like locket hearts with fervor and passion interwoven into their being. They’re extremely protective of their emotional world and are always waxing and waning with their expressions. They build a home in their minds and create a sanctuary from every beautiful moment they live. There’s a heat within them like a hearth that isn’t so easy to feel. It warms themselves more than anything and when they feel it’s like setting this entire sanctuary on fire. It shakes them to the core. They’re extremely tough despite their soft hearted center. They’re resilient and tenacious, and can be very crafty when they learn the ins and outs of an individual and their motives. They know how to comfort themselves best, and sometimes they may freeze up when comforting others only because it creates a space for them to extend a sort of vulnerability and they don’t easily give this part of theme selves away. They hold and store these parts of themselves closely and though they can attune your how you may feel they don’t always know how to show this. They let few people into this inner sanctuary of theirs, if they let anyone in at all. If they do, this is a great sign of trust and love and they rarely let anyone go easily that they’ve allowed in. They’re very sentimental about the memories they create and everything is given a meaning or feeling. They’re not easy to truly know at first but once they let you in, they’re the most lovable and caring individuals you’ll ever meet. They nurture you and connect on a level that isn’t easy for most.

Moon in 5th house- The heart is ablaze and passionate. Everything is felt with fervor and ardor and the more they feel the more they must express and exert this passion. There is no holding back here, creativity is high and the need to show and demonstrate the exact emotion is necessary. These individuals are enveloping to say the least. They are warm and have a golden aura shrouded in everything they do. It’s always touched with something personal and almost ritualistic to them. They’re not ones for the weak and are quite theatrical and open in their emotional landscape. They have a deep love of hobbies or interests that can showcase or help them create. When they feel it’s never quick to fade, it must be felt fully and to the brim and though they are capable of containing this within them, they much rather release their stirred hearts and share this. They’re extremely generous and love to give of themselves not only their time, but their essence, their warmth. Everything to them is a way to share with others and have others truly connect to them in this way. They aren’t selfish in fact theyre extremely loving and selfless if they love you. They can go to the ends of the earth simply to show you how much they feel for you. They romanticize their lives and feelings beautifully and can become amazing artists who are hard to miss. They have a signature to everything they express and do and it’s uncanny. They are stubborn, and have a hard time changing their minds. They like to stay true to themselves and their hearts desires and this is hard to change. They truly do know how to capture the hearts of those around them with the way they authentically express themselves. It’s scintillating and truly something to appreciate and admire.

Moon in 6th house- There is a striving in this mansion. A need to expand the self in multiple ways. Much like the 9th house, but more in a mental and physical sense this house holds ambition and a need for constant progression of the self. Whether in the work they do, the fantasies they create, the relationships they build, the goals they set. They need to feel themselves ever evolving in order to feel fulfilled. Competitive and hard on themselves they can have issues when it comes to self worth basing their value in what they do and not sitting proudly in who they are. There is a striving to be, to be embodied in themselves fully but they feel the need to do this in modes related to grounding themselves and progressing in some way. There is always something in the back of their head that moves them forward and it’s one of their biggest strengths in life. They tend to truly want to fulfill roles and can shape shift by taking on many hats and using themselves as a tool to create a balance in the world around them. Creating this semblance brings them the biggest joy and emotional fulfillment. Knowing they’re in control of themselves and the order they can bring into their lives. They have big hearts and always seeking to give and help those they truly care for and love around them. They’re always invested in upgrading themselves and taking care of themselves in some way. This is incredibly inspiring to those around them and it creates a beautiful streamline of love and adoration that they sometimes forget they need. Overall their emotionalscapes thrive on progression, evolution and positive development.l, and they adore being appreciated and loved in every phase of their lives.

Moon in 7th house- The moon in the 7th house brings about a mirror like quality as well as a lot of refinement to the individuals emotions. There is a depth of “reflecting” internally the outer impressions that are made on the individual. Every single experience is about impression and the way they can effect or be effected in their lives. They can be very protective of this side of them without realizing it. Often needing to make those around them happy as they love the idea of influencing the impressions made on them by being the first to give one. This can be very internalized and even subconscious on them. These people are greatly drawn to creativity and artistry as they love to be the one to create “cause” for effect. There is a see sawing within them that creates this. The scales are always balancing out in some way or another whether this be a conscious or subconscious effort. Overall these individuals love the relational aspects in life. Whether it be their relationships with those around them, the passions they have, their connection to a greater whole or being, their relation with themselves or their careers, etc. they create harmony and balance in everything they do because it’s innate within them. Their emotions are dependent on the balancing aspect in life. It gives them a peace like no other to know they can influence and create that semblance. One thing they truly need are ways to truly channel their emotions and refine them in some way. Poetry, music and writing come very naturally to these people. Creating a beautiful outcome from chaos is very cathartic to them. Even designing or anything with structures such as homes or business development are very good for them. They love the idea of creating and giving life to something whole and greater than them through means of refinement and beauty in some way. They can be very challenging on themselves because emotions can be so obscure and hard to place that the refinement process may take time to internalize and reflect upon. They may do this by taking time for themselves but more often than not they need the help and impressions of others to truly come to a resolve for themselves. This is a beautiful placement as it truly creates this receptive and giving nature that is not so natural for other houses to do. There is great grace and they aren’t outwardly very emotive as they tend to err more for logic and objective perspective and truly understanding the emotion over simply feeling it alone. They like to experience both, and truly do feel and create beautiful internal and external spaces for themselves and those around them in this way.

Moon in 8th house- The moon is full and filled with depths and currents in this house. There is something innately powerful and very hard to pin down in this house. The emotions become like fish swimming in a dark abyss with caves and trenches that are seemingly daunting at first, but can become a silent and safe place within. The outside world can be scary here, and the inflictions and impressions others give you can feel like a betrayal to the self at times. Often the first phase of life is difficult and challenging emotionally. Many trials and tribulations no matter how small or large that have the power create internal upheavals and intensely felt reactions. This can feel like losing control at first because everything is felt with heat and fervor. The more mature and wise the individual becomes the more they learn how to reign in the waves they feel and create a sort of oasis within the storms that fill their minds. It seems impossible to others because it takes great self knowing and mastery to do this. These natives do not take their self preservation or self knowing lightly. To them it’s been light years and lifetimes of evolution and a constant churning to fully FEEL themselves. They are so aware and innately knowing of who they are that this creates a very intuitive and aroused understanding of those around them. They may feel like they’re hard to crack because they are so internal and deeply set within themselves that they choose what and who to let in. They’re very curious about others internal landscapes, so they observe and learn from afar. This can make it hard for them to truly get close to others, and this is their greatest lesson, vulnerability and letting go. Overall they have the capacity to do this, since intimacy is something they’re well equipped for. They’re the ones who choose in the end. Some it comes easier to, others it takes longer and can truly be another lifetime to accomplish. They’re so intimate within themselves it can be hard to let another in between. Yet, when they choose to let you in, it can be all encompassing for them and their beloved. The 8th house is scary to the outsiders because it is the internal unknown. The individual living in the 8th house has already seen and experienced their inner unknown that it no longer scares them. They can be great guides to others and heal many through their interpersonal wisdom.

Moon in 9th house- There is an inquisitive and internally expanding nature in this house. Endowed with a need to experience and satiate this curiosity with fully immersing ones self into each experience. Like a balloon every new lesson and meaning created expands the inner world. Heightening oneself closer to the heavens. These individuals carry a well of inner wealth and are transfixed into the ever evolving parts of themselves. They are full of life force and optimism and can be drenched in the gold of wisdom. They have a very detached nature when it comes to most risk or limits. They see most as self imposed but of course this depends on their philosophy and beliefs of life itself. In this house the individuals are here to fully encompass what it is to be alive. They want to truly dig within themselves and reap every fortune and treasure that is stored internally and truly feel it and become it. One thing about this abundant house is a dogmatic sort of nature. The emotions are inflated and can become extremely overwhelming at times and create a very firey and explosive display. Even if they are held internally it can feel like an expanding balloon that once popped can become overflowing. They love to give and can be very generous with their wisdom, energy and hearts. They are everflowing with this inner wealth that they share it and feel greatly fulfilled. They have a fire and tenacity that is unmissed and can be felt all around. They seem to attract others in some way or another and can be a source of both admiration and jealousy from others because of how truly internally rich they are. Whether a fertile imagination, manifestation, tenacity and ambition, empathy or a well of philosophy and optimism. They are filled to the brim. They do have the downfall of feeling very much. This can catapult them to incredibly highs and blowing lows. It’s their greatest lesson to learn boundaries, balance and emotional temperance. Learning to not indulge so easily in their emotions and to learn how to manage them in a healthy and constructive way. They truly can be blinded by emotion and can become fervent in what they feel without processing them and adjusting to their comfort. Their best bet is to feel, sit back, think and remember they have the power to do with this emotion as they choose. Their great love of understanding comes into play for themselves when they properly reflect and honor what they feel instead of simply throwing it out and indulging in it right away. Regardless these people are the life force the inspires everyone around them to live fully and without hesitation.

Moon in 10th house- Karma has lived in these individuals bones for lifetimes and there is a naturally melancholic and smoky aura to these people. Though aspects can dissolve this and make it less heavy this moon is always drawn to exerting in order to numb the inner afflictions. Both needing to feel fully but at times being too afraid to dive in completely. The moon is restless here and greatly daunted by the ever changing tidal waves of elusive emotion. Here is where the earth meets the ocean and slowly dissolves itself into granules of sand, releasing fossils and bones buried deeply within. At times these people feel very detached from who they are and how they feel and this can cause a greatly intense conflict. Most of the time these natives have an outlet and drive to make this entire existence count to themselves. They strive to be their most profound and successful self. They’re incredibly knowing in everything they do and can at times be very secretive about their knowing. They keep their layers hidden away like love letters and go about, guiding others without outright delegating. They’re very influential and inspiring to others and their emotions are quite complex and hard to fully grasp. They like to ground the flighty emotional landscape by doing and working it out in some way. Whether physically, mentally or spiritually. These individuals though traditional for some, are actually keenly adept and aware of the spiritual realm and can feel greatly connected to it through nature in particular, becoming great teachers and protectors. They feel at peace usually in more mountainous areas and feel a safe haven there (from observation). They’re quite active both mentally and physically and need to constantly be in motion or doing something to feel themselves “working” through whatever they’re emotionally processing. It’s hard for them to simply sit through a feeling. They need to work through it silently. They’re easy to respect and to come to for both guidance and advice because they simply understand the way the world works and how it effects others emotionally, they can be quite penetrative much like 8th house moons and are keen on the depths of others without giving away too much about themselves. Overall they simply want to feel understood and respected and this is something that can come to them when they learn how to understand themselves and their emotional landscape.

Moon in 11th house- The moon is a veil in this realm. It’s shrouded in a mist of technicolored dreams and messages from other planes. This is considered the beginning of other side and the bridging of spiritual and human realm. In this house there is a shroud of both knowing and unknowing the emotional world and to simply observe it from a standpoint of indulgence or passivity. This house is hard to place in a sense that there is an expansiveness much like the 9th house but it has a control and a balance to the degree of detachment. It’s a very complex home for the moon as she feels both maternal toward the greater whole, yet takes enjoyment in the provocation of others. Whether through sex, art, violence (though most are quite humane) or any form of sacral expression. This is actually a house that is pivotal for the emotional soul, almost like a tipping point before the dive into the abyss of “the dark night of the soul” here is where the fight between flesh and spirit are extremely concerned with the individuation of oneself. Separating oneself from “God” and “others” to become ones own “god” to become ones own compass. This is hardly talked about but this can be quite an intense house for the moon to sleep in. The energy is exerted through both helping humanity and being very detached from it at the same time. Wanting to observe humanity as it is and how they fit into it in some way and how they don’t. These individuals are extremely intoxicating and appealing to others because they are so humane and docile but have a “bite” and unconscious provocation to them. They know how to stir others to encompass their own journeys and stay steady in themselves fully. They’re amazing listeners and more than anything are usually people of few words and can be quite shy, but shine beautifully in their expressions. When they set their dreamy minds to a goal they usually attain it because they can be incredible manifestors. One thing about them is they can cause controversy without doing anything to arouse it consciously. Because they have such a remote nature that seems almost heavenly and unattainable they can cause others to feel as if they’re intentional in whatever projections they create in others. Regardless of this effect they have a naturally cool and sensual aura that is extremely mesmerizing and scintillating . Creating a rippling admiration and spark in others to fully embody themselves.

Moon in 12th house- This house is the house of the universal heart. The soul has seen many lives and has sailed and swam through the depths of many oceans. Along the way they gave away pieces of their hearts and souls and sometimes they forget these small shards of themselves. In this house the individual feels like they’re scattered across universes and lifetimes. They feel like they need to pick up all of the pieces all over again and feel “full” again. These souls are extremely adept, intuitive and highly creative. Their blood is full of memories they cannot place. They miss these and yearn for them yet they cannot place where they left it or where it comes from, there is restlessness here and an eternal yearning for the lost pieces they let float away. The funny thing is, they are the oceans they lost everything in. They are the water and the depths themselves. They hold all of the pieces in them and each of these little parts are living and being carried around in currents an trenches and caves and pools and they are alive in every single one. These natives are extremely soft hearted to the core, yet they are very deeply detached as well. There is a hypersensitivity to the world around them and are encapsulated in beautiful technicolored sensations that ignite colors and music in their souls. They’re moved easily by the ethereal wavelengths that surround all of us. They are attuned to each one and are aware of the shifts and currents and changes. They can be quite moody, emotional and also very shifty. They cannot place why they are moved so easily as it’s hard for them to understand and they hold this deeply within them and outpour this in private usually through artistic means. They make extremely potent alchemists, manifestors and can master many magickal and occultic activities as they’re so keenly aware. They are poetic souls and are falling in love endlessly with not only souls but sounds, tastes, smells, emotions, stories, mysteries and best of all the magick that surrounds us all. They can see the hidden in everything because they dwell there. People can sense easily that these individuals are in tune with something otherworldly and even if the native themself is far more logical, practical and realistic there is a well of dynamism that is uncanny. People can confide in them easily and feel that these people truly do understand them. Because most of the time, they really do. These individuals are mysterious, intense, sensorial and imaginative and they have vivid inner worlds and colors that scintillate their being even when they cannot understand or place it quite easily. As they mature in their bestowed wisdom they can become incredible healers, artists and messengers. Reminding us that life is meant to be treasured including the worlds that live within us.

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mxvladdy · 4 years

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Beelzebub- True Form

Three more boyos to go!

Next up: Leviathan

Beelzebub-

The embodiment of starvation. The sharp contrast between his healthy and fit forms is truly baffling.

Mouths are scattered all over his gangly form. It is the only human thing about him as he is faceless otherwise. When hunting they release a mist or plague of locusts depending if his hunger is physical or emotional

His hunting form is juvenile and frail. Naturally small and unassuming, it is perfect to lure his victims close and ensnare them forever. He attracts souls with an overwhelming hunger. It’s a lure filled with false promises of substances and warm. When close he latches on like a parasite and gorges until there is nothing left but an empty husk.

Once full his form shifts into something- greater- his small body growing and stretching. It’s somewhere along the lines of a human growth spurts, or puberty, but is done in moments. It’s uncomfortable for him; the rapid growth takes a lot out of him.

When fed he is larger, but still skeletal in form. It’s a permanent reminder of his new immortal purpose. His skin is like stone, hard and grey but translucent. It is stretched tight around his frame, like an artist canvas over his jet black bones. The texture of it emphasizes all the odd twists and turns of his bone structure and whatever else lies underneath his flesh.

Each raspy breath he draws from the many mouths scattered around his body rattle his disjointed skeleton. His bones clinking together with every exhale to create a truly chilling symphony.

When crazed with hunger he loses himself. In his younger years as a cardinal sin he was responsible for wiping out land masses and civilizations to try and dull the ache before his brothers could contain him.

His gluttony isn't only for physical sources of substances. Slabs of meat only go so far. He will latch on like a leech, to anything that radiates his current emotional cravings. Love? Happiness? Fear? He wants to experience it all. Filling and cramming every little space with whatever sensations he craves. Till the deadened feeling in his chest is a little less.

There was a time where he was very close with his brother sin greed. During their younger years as demons they would terrorize the mortal realm, a deadly duo. Both unable or unwilling to control their new urges.

He hates this existence. He’s empty and it drives him mad. Was he like this in heaven? Honestly, Beel can’t remember anymore. He doesn’t think so. He had his brothers and sister to keep him in order and a different name. At the time he was called Temperance, right? He thinks. It’s a bit foggy.

But what hurts him the most is that his family structure is fractured now. There is a hole where Lilith used to be, and no amount of souls or food will ever fill that.

When he met you it helped a little. But he has to be weary.

He has better control of his abilities now then a couple centuries ago so you don’t have to worry too much. He likes having you around. It fills part of the void that he’s been struggling with for so long. Being with you makes him feel like dirt has finally hit the bottom of what he thought was a vacuous void inside.

Sometimes his natural abilities seep out when he is hungry or frustrated from another family row. He gravitates towards you then, searching for that odd human comfort demons just don’t possess. He sips slowly on it; with your permission of course. Not the wisest idea- but an idea nonetheless.

Mini Fic

Sleepy Sloth Boi- Hey. Can you check up on Beel? He had a bit of a argument with Asmo today Sleepy Sloth Boi- Apparently he ate a homemade face goop? IDK, it’s stupid. Sleepy Sloth Boi- I would, but I’m stuck in a remedial class with Lucifer Sleepy Sloth Boi- I don’t know when I’ll be out- Ok! Is he in your room?- Sleepy Sloth Boi- No, at the gym. Asmo called him and chewed him out. Didn’t go well. Trainers called me. He busted up some equipment and might have eaten someone... They want him out. Oh... K I’ll head over now-

You frown down at your D.D.D and stuff it in your bag. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. You had heard stories of his terrible temper when hungry. Most of the time you have seen him just mope, huddled up in the kitchen eating his feelings. He was always open to talk though and you usually could convince him out of the kitchen so Lucifer didn’t have an aneurysm over a barren fridge.

The gym isn’t far from the house. A short tram ride and a walk down a couple of familiar streets. You have spent every Saturday morning with Beel there, spotting him. Not that you really could. With the amount of weights he was dead lifting, but he appreciated the company nonetheless. You ring up the front desk dashing across the street. It goes straight to voicemail. Crap it must be bad. You round the corner right before the gym and skid to a halt. Glass and metal litter the cobble street. The shards flicker off the lights of the street lamps drawing your eye to the sheer amount of damage around you. Some equipment even stuck out of the wall adjacent to you.

You make your way closer. “Human! Tis’ not the best time to be here. We are having a bit of an issue.” A terrified trainer scuttled towards you, mandible clicking in alarm. “You best turn back. We don’t need your body littering the streets too.” They wave a three fingered claw back up the street. On cue a weightlifting machine was launched through the remaining window exploding on impact with the road. A few more trainers run out after it, yelling and pushing at each other to get out of the way. A dark black mist bellows out after them.

Well shit.

“I’m actually here to try and help.” You smile down at the tiny demon trying to instill some false confidence in them. You think you could handle this. You didn’t want to call in the cavalry to get him. Knowing Beel, it would only trigger his guilty conscience. “If you could give me a moment.” Ignoring the little creature you creep forward, careful of the broken glass and praying that no more equipment got launched.

“Beel?” You call out peaking your head through the gaping hole on the side of the gym. "Hey, Belphie texted me. Wanna talk about it?” The inside of the gym was dark. Wires hung and sparked dangerously in front of you. A large burst pipe blocked most of your vision. “Beel?” You could hear his loud bone chilling breathing. He was close.

“Careful.” You jump swallowing the curse that threatened to slip out. Beelzebub emerged from the darkness at the back of the gym. His eyeless face locking onto you. “You are close to a line.” His many mouths move in unison. Some rumbling as he spoke, others just drawing in rasping wheezing breaths.

“Thanks.” You jump back onto the street. “You wanna come out? You look a bit cramped.” He was comically too large for the allotted space. His goliath sized body packed into a little sardine can. He rattles for a bit considering. You cock your head to the side looking at the empty street. “Plenty of room out here.” You wave at your sole spectator and give them a small thumbs up. They blink in horror over your shoulder. Eyes locked on the beast emerging.

“I’m sorry.” He drags himself out. Thick steel like claws causing the little trainer hiding behind you to whimper. Beel’s fingers dig into the stone and mortar. Oph- this was going to cost a bit to fix.

“It’s ok big guy-happens to the best of us.” You say casually. Once he was outside he shivers in the cool afternoon air. His bones creak as you approach him. “May I touch you?” You approach hand raised. He never cared if you touched him in his human form. It centered him a lot of the time. He enjoyed the feel of your soft and giving flesh against his smooth hard skin. But this form was slightly more dangerous for you well being.

Beel shakes his head at your movement melding back into the dark hole. His mouths open wide to release a plume of black smoke. The trainer cries out, scurrying back further down the street. You hold your ground however. Chin up definitely, unafraid at what you knew was coming. The thick black vapor coats your skin. It latches on to you and seeps through your pores. You feel him in the back of your mind running through your head, searching for something. You breathe slowly, letting him shuffle through your psyche.

You feel a flush of warmth, a near giddiness that brings an uncontrollable smile to your face before it is gone. Snuffled out like a candle in the wind. A slow chilling tingling begins in all of your extremities as he feeds off your emotions. He pulls at your center, eating away at your mental state. An odd empty ache blooms in your chest, you need to untangle yourself before he bled you dry.

He pulls back then, knowing when he has gone too far. The pallor of his skin is richer now. A darker grey than before. The waxing sheen gone and replaced with a deep purple hue underneath. His cobweb like veins thumping with life. “Thanks~” His rattles remerging onto the street. His oblong head nudges your shoulder, checking on you. You pat at it, careful of the mouths and razor sharp teeth.

“Of course; don’t mention it.” You turn on weak knees to the trainer. Looking at complete ease with the cardinal sin currently wrapping his many limbed and mouthed body around your comparatively tiny frame. “I guess this is not super common?” You ask, waving at the destruction. They shake their head.

“He-he ate Gordin.”

“Ah-ye. He does that. Sorry.” At a loss, they accept the sleek business card you thrust at them with your free hand. “Call Mr. Morningstar. He can work on the repair finances with the manager.”

“But Gordi-” You wince as the little demon’s mandibles tremble, voice getting frantic. Could demons shed tears? You were about to find out.

“Beel?” Cupping his large head you stare at him, eyes traveling over his face. His mouths snap shut, body turning smooth. The only movement from his was his hearts beating steady beneath his translucent skin. He stood still like a statue carved by a deranged artist. “Beel.” You say again more firmly. You step away from his hooked fingers. “Spit them out.”

He doesn’t move. His inner rattling becoming louder and more defensive.

You roll your eyes and look back exasperatedly with a shrug. The other demon stares speechless in terror. Or with the dawning realization of just how absurd this whole situation was. You turn back to Beel, fists balled on your hips. “If you don’t I guess I’m going to eat all these snacks I brought.” The death rattle stops. You could feel his full focus on you now aghast. “I’m serious. Mammon even went and bought those new limited release batwing chips too, extra spicy.”

He hacks suddenly, back arching like a cat as a large seam opens on his skin where his stomach (stomachs?) region was. A bulky demon covered in purple viscous sludge tumbles to the ground with a wet squelch. Their skin was a sickly color and their eyes wide in terror.

“Gordi!” The other trainer pushes past you and grabs at the trembling demon, pulling him away from the hungry mouths.

“Thanks, Beelzebub.” You walk him quickly down the abandoned streets once the two others had fled. He lopes behind you, gaunt body swaying in the light breeze. Once you hit the more crowded streets he moves closer to your back. Other demons on the street give you a wide berth, eyeing and swatting at a few straying arms or fingers that attempt to grab them or their things. You move quickly, hoping to avoid having to scold him again for eating more demons.

“I’m sorry.” Beel croaks once more when you finally come to a stop at an empty park bench. He sits next to it expectantly. The grass and foliage around him weathering and turning to dust at his touch. His arms subconsciously start stuffing the dried grass and flowers into his many mouths.

“It’s ok.” You repeat yourself coming to rest on the park bench. Without preamble you dump the contents of your bag onto the ground. He croons in delight at the mound of snacks being pushed to him. “Eat up. Take a breather and then we can talk. If you want.” With that he dives in.

Beel munches in silence, mismatched limbs unwrapping-or not- the treats and popping them into his little mouths. You watch for a bit before getting preoccupied with a book you borrowed from Satan. You don’t know how much time passes before a boney finger pokes at your forearm. The same arm then hovers by your nose offering you a pudding cup.

“Ah, thank you!” You close your book and take the flan pudding. He had finished most of the food and had calmed considerably. Most of the mouths have disappeared, closing as they were sated. He scoots closer, the oppressive neediness of his sin dulled to an almost non existent thumping in your stomach. Easy enough to ignore, especially now with a sweet treat boosting your mood. “Feeling any better?”

Beel grunts, scratching at his knobby spine. You watch him for a moment. Reading his emotions in this form was hard. Thankfully, you knew the reason for the outburst this time. First time you stumbled upon him like this had been an absolute circus. A terrifying, and destructive circus. He had been in full form that night. Locusts and clawed fingers moving in blurs, swiping at everything that came near. The younger brothers screaming at him over the sounds of breaking furniture and the buzz of insect wings. They dodged around his tantrum trying to calm him before Lucifer returned from a meeting.

“It’s a damned ice cream cup!” Satan roars, close to shifting himself. The tell tale heat of his body starting to radiate out and singe the carpet beneath his feet. Beel screeches back, flies and spittle spraying out over them. Asmo yelps and drags you out of the room with him.

“Ugh! The moment he gets all gross and buggy I’m out.” He shudders, locking the door on the apocalypse happening on the other side. “Hopefully Mammon can slow Lucifer down so they can neaten up.”

“Is he going to be ok?” You look back watching the solid door shudder under the weight of a body being thrown.

Asmodues sucks his teeth dismissively, bright nails clicking away at his phone. You glance at it seeing that he had messaged Mammon to bring some take out too. “Oh ye, this happens from time to time. He just has to let off some steam. Then we can stuff him with food and he’ll be right as rain. You want anything hun’?” You shake your head stunned by his carefree attitude as the house shook around them.

Beel had come to apologize for his behavior later that night. His human form a little banged up, but no worse for wear. You went out for ice cream in hopes to cheer him up. Offering an ear too if he needed an outsider's perspective. You were also curious about his true nature and had a thousand and one questions to ask. He was apprehensive at first. It was clearly a sore subject for him. But over time he opened up, speaking freely about his struggles and fears of destroying his family's already shaky foundation with his gluttony.

“Asmo is furious with me.” He sighs, bringing you back to the present. He rests his head on your shoulder, careful with his weight.

“He’ll get over it.” You stroke his cool skin tapping at a closed mouth. It opens and licks your finger. It was as close to a kiss as this form could get to. “It’s not like he can’t make more.” Beel huffs, rubbing his head into the soft fabric of your sweater.

“I am nothing but a burden to them aren’t I.”

“Never.” You don’t hesitate. He grumbles unconvinced. “Hey,” You nudge him off your shoulder to look at him. “Remember last Saturday? How you helped Levi get his limited edition statue?”

“I just stood in a line.” He pouts. “And I only did that because I ate his Ruri-chan mochi’s.” Oh- you didn’t know that part.

“Well, I still think you’re a good brother.” You cover. “ Tell me, would any of the others do the same? You beat yourself up over every little mistake. How many times has Asmo or Mammon swiped one of your snacks?” He hums contemplatively, nails clacking on the concrete.

“But I always lash out when they do that.” You nod kicking your feet up to lounge on the bench, back resting against his. Grabbing at a set of arms you wrap them around your waist playing with the fingers that weren’t razor sharp.

“Yes, and? Asmo just did too. Runs in the family by the looks of it.” You chuckle. “ So why should you be the only one not allowed to get upset? But next time call before rampaging through the city, K?” You smile up at his monstrous visage. He smiles back hesitantly before coming closer.

Beelzebub nips you gently with his primary mouth. Large fangs careful not to break the skin. A cute little display of gratitude. He tastes your sincerity on you. Sweet and smooth on his tongue. “Thanks,” He rumbles. Cradling you close, he rises to his full height. “I think I’m ready to head back now.”

You snuggle into his unyielding body checking your wrist watch. “Yeah big guy? Guess it is almost dinner time.”

He picks up the pace.

#Obey me beelzebub #obey me fandom #obey me headcanons

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tangtownie · 3 years

Text

You Should See Me In A Crown - Natasha Romanoff x Dark!Reader Insert (AU)

Author’s Note: So, this is my first time trying to write something dark…

Think it might land in the category of soft!dark, but be warned none the less!

Super nervous about posting this, but I actually ended up really liking this one myself, so hopefully others will as well.

Reader is from the Red Room Academy, just as Natasha, only reader never left them. I took some creative liberties when describing the Red Room Academy, so that it fit my idea better, which is also why this story is marked as an AU.

The Russian nickname for Natasha means ‘darling’, ‘pet’ or ‘beloved’.

I incorporated some lyrics from the song, tell me how many you can find? 🧐

Regarding the timeline, I imagine this would take place after Natasha brought down SHIELD and shortly after Bucky joined the Avengers.

Also, shoutout to @a-little-counter-esperanto for being kind enough to beta this for me and offer some moral support! 🥰

Once again, this is marked dark for a reason! There might be topics that are triggering to certain people, so please be responsible about your media consumption.

Warnings: Explicit descriptions of violence and murder, dark!Reader, messed up “family” relations, weird/sexual obsession with a sister figure.

Word count: 2.252

Song Inspiration: You Should See Me In A Crown by Billie Eilish

I was perfectly concealed, blending in with all the mindless idiots making their way down the street. If this hadn’t been New York, and people actually paid attention to what happened around them, they might have noticed the warning sign that was the concealed weapons on my body. Or my too heavy boots beating down against the concrete. Carefully eyeing the tower, I counted the people moving in and out of the building. “Bite my tongue, bide my time.” I mumbled quietly, catching the attention of a passerby. We had in fact been biding our time, monitoring the tower for months, counting the number of armed guards on site at any given time. However, it seemed that these soft Americans had their most precious protectors under lock and key at all times. Biting my tongue, I tried not to scoff. One would assume that the Avengers were more than capable of handling themselves, but apparently their employer did not.

Not that it mattered, the more people in the tower, the more people there were for my sisters to play with. My sisters who were all watching me, waiting for my signal. Finally, we had found our missing piece and none of us were leaving here without her. I had been searching for her for years, using the Academy’s missions to get intel on my long lost sister. In time, Mother had found out and I had been forced to deal with that. Fortunately, it was nothing a little thallium poisoning couldn’t handle for me. One less complication and Mother would never get between us again. No one would. Catching the rays of the sun on the edge of my watch, I slowly rolled my wrist, the light reflecting up on a window in a perfect circle. “Wearing a warning sign.” I didn’t know where my sisters were located, but I knew they had all seen my signal. I moved swiftly through the masses, discarding my disguise along the way, and quickly found myself standing in front of the tower.

The first window shattered, as I opened the door, a flurry of bullets following the first one. Civilians were screaming: scrambling to get away, guards were rushing in from all sides: barking commands rushing through their radios and glass continued flying through the air as my sisters blew the lobby to pieces. A few stray pieces of glass tangled in my hair, light reflecting off of them as I moved gracefully through the chaotic scene, while the bloodcurdling screams piercing the air sounded almost like a symphony. Humming quietly to myself, I pulled my gun from the holster on my hip and aimed carelessly before shooting a guard in the face.

The bullet lodged in his eye and he fell to his knees, screaming. His body spasmed out of his control and with a final gurgling scream, he fell limply to the floor. “I love the way they scream.” I really didn’t need to kill him to swipe his ID, but alas why should my sisters have all the fun? After all, I was the one running this mission. The glass crunched underneath my boots and blood splattered all over me whenever my sisters killed the ones that got too close to me.

Making it to the elevator was easy: the guards and civilians continuously dropping all around me. Once inside of the elevator, I pressed R for residential. Wiping some blood from my cheek, I caught a whiff of gunpowder on my dark glove and I inhaled again, greedily, as pure joy filtered through my system. Raising my head to look at my reflection, I was met with a dazzling vision wrapped in all black. I could see the bumps from my arsenal of knives and guns strapped to my thighs, hips and arms. My hair was tied back tightly, the glass shards framing my head like a crown, and blood smeared across my face. “You are so pretty.”

The elevator dinged as it reached the residential floor. Unlike the others, this was ominously silent. By now the precious protectors would now that I had come looking for them. Or rather her. I had come for her and I would die before leaving without her. “Natalia?” I called out for her teasingly. “I know you’re here, любимый." I was met only with silence. Humming quietly to myself again, I fished a knife out of my holster and jammed it into the keypad of the elevator. The keypad sputtered and sparked before I pulled the knife back out, leaving it hanging down the side of the wall.

Flipping the knife carelessly, I scraped it against the wall, as I started moving down the hallway. “Our sisters are so looking forward to seeing you again, sweet Natalia.” I was almost reunited with her and joy filled my voice as well as my body. A flash of movement caught my eye and I turned just in time to see someone charging at me. A quick sidestep and he flew past me. He was tall, broad and dark. Every inch of him wrapped in black leather. His gaze was burning with fury, when he turned to look at me.

“Soldat,” I cocked my head in recognition, a smirk curling around my lips. “I see you’ve betrayed the cause as well.” The burly soldier snarled at me in response and a bubbling laughter rose from my throat. “Poor little Soldat, still have the manners of a raging beast, I see.” The deranged soldier lunged at me again, and it took all of my power to block his fist. The metallic whirring getting louder and louder the more weight he put into it. Grunting with effort, I could feel his arm slipping through mine and his fist met my face with full force. My entire body was slammed backwards into the wall and it felt as though my brain was vibrating from the hit. For a second everything went dark, but the taunting scoff from Soldat ripped me back to reality instantaneously.

Pushing myself from the wall, I growled back at him. To think that my dear sister had been trapped here with these abominations of nature for so long… But no matter, we were here for her now and we would take her away. I simply needed to put down this caged animal in front of me, and we could be on our way. “Watch me make ‘em bow.” Anger flashed in the eyes of the beast as I spoke and he charged again: his metal hand shooting out and wrapping around my throat. His eyes burning while he tightened his grip until all that could escape me were choked off gasps.

I fumbled for the needle in my pocket. I knew it contained just enough sedative to take down a deranged super soldier and while I had anticipated using it on a certain overeager Captain, this seemed like an appropriate use. When I finally grasped the needle, I plunged it into the side of Soldat’s neck. The drug took effect immediately: the beast’s eyes drooping and his ironclad grip on my throat loosening. As my feet touched the floor again, his hand slipped from my throat and he landed with a loud thump. I wasn’t certain how long it would keep him down, so for good measure I grasped one of my knifes and plunged it into him: his stomach, chest and shoulder before I sliced along the inside of his arm.

Loosing my patience, I started down the hallway again. I had to find her and save her. How could Mother ever have thought that Natalia was safe here? Kicking down every door I met, I eventually found her room. The soft scent of jasmine and lemongrass wafted over me and I couldn’t resist the temptation to go in. “You smell so sweet.” My fingers softly grazed over her walls as I moved inside and let the smell of my dear sister take over my senses. Her room was warm and inviting with throw blankets and pillows everywhere and I knew that I had been right. This—she—was exactly what our sisters needed, a comforting and warm presence.

Natalia’s bedroom was immaculate as always, not a single item out of place. Stopping at her dresser, I needed to feel close to her. I tore open a drawer and pulled out a sweater. The material was much softer and smoother than anything I owned and I burrowed my face in it, so that I could really smell her. A sense of calm washed over me and I let myself fall backwards onto her bed, so that I could be surrounded by her scent. My sweet Natalia, how I had missed her. “I fell for those ocean eyes.”

There was nothing I hadn’t missed about her: her eyes that would sparkle like the stars on a bright and cold night. Her deep, soothing drawl. Her soft and luscious hair that I could almost feel running through my fingers. All of it making up the resilient, courageous and ruthless warrior that I had loved for as long as I could remember. My sweet, dear sister. We would be together again soon and then nothing could tear us apart ever again. A sudden sound snapped me back to attention and I quickly got off the bed, hiding beside the doorframe to her bedroom. The steps were careful and calculated, yet soft. A smiled curved over my lips as I recognized them.

“Natalia, любимый, I’ve been looking for you.” Her steps froze at the sound of my voice. I slowly emerged from my hiding spot with the smile still on my lips. Natalia had never looked quite as beautiful as she did with her gun pointed at me. “Oh, любимый, I’m not here to hurt you.” Natalia’s stance wavered just a little and I was elated to see her giving in to me. “I’m here to help you escape, sweet sister.” Confusion washed over Natalia’s face and I smirked as I was reminded that she had always been one of our more simple-minded sisters.

“Mother fell ill.” I explained it simply to her. My darling, simple sister did not need to know all the gory details of what I’d done to find her. “And some of our weaker sisters were flailing without a strong leader, so… I stepped in.” An emotion I didn’t quite recognize flashed over Natalia’s face and she lowered her gun a little. “But as you know, любимый, I’m not exactly a nurturing person and while I see no use of such foolish sentimentality, some of our sisters have requested that you re-join us.” I watched her closely, as I finished my sentence. “We are going to run that place together. That, and any other place you want, my sweet love.” Anger flashed in Natalia’s eyes and her gun was back in my face instantaneously.

I didn’t let her reaction deter me, though. I loved her and I knew that she loved me too. I gently placed my hand on her cheek and dragged her closer to me. “I cannot do this without you, sister. I cannot live with you… Do you have any idea how long I’ve been searching for you?” I placed my other hand on top of her gun and pushed it down until it was pointed at my chest. “If you won’t let me help you, then you’ll have to kill me, любимый.” Natalia’s eyes widened and jumped back and forth, from my face down to my chest. “Tell me, sweet sister. Which do you imagine is worse? Living without you or dying first?” I gently brought my hand up to her other cheek and pulled her closer to me, until our foreheads were resting on one another.

“любимый, my love, don’t resist me.” I whispered the last words before crashing my lips onto hers. The feel of her soft, full lips against mine was even better than I had dreamt. I gasped ecstatically into her mouth and let my hands slide into her hair. I tightened my grip on her hair, when she tried to pull away. She could breathe when I let her. Until then, I would kiss her as long as I pleased. A tear slid down her cheek and I understood. She had finally accepted that we were supposed to be together and that we would rule alongside each other. “You will be the most perfect Mother, любимый.” I whispered against her lips.

Suddenly, a burning feeling spread through my chest and I could hardly breathe. “любимый, do you feel it, too?” I gasped. “We are finally becoming one.” Each syllable hurt more than the last and I barely registered Natalia’s gun clattering to the floor. Something warm ran down my chest and my legs almost collapsed under me. I clung to Natalia and she fell to the floor with me. She wrapped her arms around me and I was in heaven. “You are so beautiful, sweet Natalia.” Even as my vision blurred and I could feel the pull of a deep, dark sleep, I could not pry my eyes away from her. “Sister, I feel so tired…” My voice was cracking from all the effort it took me to speak, but she was here. My true love, my dear sister. I had finally found her again. “Sleep, sister. Everything will be alright.” My sweet Natalia’s voice was the last thing I heard before the darkness took me.

Okay, so Tumblr was acting all crazy when I was making this post, so hopefully, it'll work! 😬

Also, as always, would love feedback in any form! Comment, reblog, messages! It doesn't matter. ❤️

#imagine #fan fiction #reader insert #female reader #dark reader #dark imagines #natasha romanoff #bucky barnes #marvel #mcu fanfiction #natasha fic #potentially triggering #be warned

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maladaptive-ninja-returns · 4 years

Text

Infinity War (5)

CHAPTER 5: RAGE

Loki & The Avengers

Summary: A work inspired by @queencfthestarsdrfoster ‘s post of the universe where Loki is alive and Thor is avenged.

Series: Will contain all- and more- that we saw in Infinity War. Will not contain smut and fluff for obvious reasons. Might contain weird humor though.

Chapter content: Something I wish I could’ve done to them through the screen

Warnings: …blood. Icky. gooey, blood. Magic.

Word count: So my workplace shifted again. It’s...okay. Yeah, that’s it. Just okay. I mean partially it’s on me for not taking breaks and just keeping myself busy because I just cannot sit free, man. I can’t. And then by the time it’s 4pm I am exhausted as fuck and have to just keep it together till I can find my way out. Why am I like this? But I have to say, it kinda lifted my mood when I thought about my new radiant friend.

MASTERLIST & Taglist in bio, my love

Ebony Maw doesn't believe in violence of the mind. He does not believe one needs to boil one's insides just because some petty creatures with no real destiny in this universe have made a feeble decision of taking what is rightfully his master's.

Their death would be a small price to pay for the delay they have caused in me helping the Titan fulfil his destiny.

The periodic bloop on his ship's radar brings him to a rough terrain that is being tormented by the fresh blanket of snow piling over it. The winds are showing no mercy as they hit the transparent shield of his ship, illuminating the collision spots with a hue of gold and blue. How fascinatingly dull, this planet Earth, Maw coos to himself before landing his ship and walking towards the entrance.

Much to his surprise, he does feel a shiver through his adequately armoured body as the raging winds seem to be coming at him with impure intentions. And so, a tsk under his breath is followed by modestly twisting his hand to create an air barrier around him, keeping those vicious microscopic ice shards away.

The crunch of fresh cold powder under his feet is somehow welcoming to the symphony of havoc he plans on bringing to the ones who slipped through his hands. To the ones who do not have pure intentions for the infinity stone in their grasp.

There is a ripple he feels from somewhere behind him, tilting on one limb and taking a gentle swerve as an icicle misses him by centimetres. No time is wasted to pull that very icicle from the air and turn it around to throw it in the direction it originated from. And while that icicle travels back, snow is raised from the ground to be compressed into more. Those stubborn steps do not retreat as icicles find their target, only coming to a halt when those piercing eyes see for themselves Loki's figure lying in the snow, struggling to breathe.

Those piercing elements of snow have found all the vital points over the God's body, not surprising the Child of Thanos.

"You are supposed to be dead Asgardian," Ebony declares with a soothing yet eerie tone, his stature never faltering even as he looks down at the body writhing in pain, "you should stick to being dead."

Green eyes drowning in pain look up at him; same eyes he had once drained all hope out of. Such powerful techniques of purification were wasted on such frivolous being that day.

"But..." Loki struggles with the pain surfacing on his face, "b-but I'm not the one who's-"

It takes just one slight shift of Maw's posture. Just a single tilt towards Loki to hear what the dying alien has to say. And just as he does, a streak of blazing fire takes the master of torture with him, leaving Loki to complete his sentence, "-dead," before disappearing with hues of gold and green.

The snow feels harder on the skin than it looks, almost making Maw grunt. He thinks he misses the punch from the man clad in iron he thought he had left behind, but the hit to his skull sends a blaring pain, unbalancing him for a few seconds.

"Told you earth was closed, you dipshit!" Tony's voice resonates through the suit.

Maw feels the rising bitterness grind between his teeth before he slides away from another punch and sends ice shards towards Tony followed by a rumble under his feet.

"What the- is he trying to bring an earthquake?" Tony rises in the air to dodge the attacks coming his way.

The claws which are targeting the ground seem to be the epicentre of the rumble- focused on ripping the rocks lying somewhere under that blanket of pure white- feel themselves being wrapped by a stringed glow that yanks those arms, disrupting whatever power Maw possesses to move the elements around him.

"You really should get a hobby."

Maw knows that voice too well.

The magician.

When the supreme torturer tries to wrap the enchanted magic strings around his arms to pull Strange towards him, the latter moves his hands to convert those strings into handcuffs, freeing himself to create three more elemental circles and call forward blasts of pure energy aiming at his could-be tormentor.

Ebony dives away, calling forward more shards to break him free of those cuffs, taking the first chance his hands get to call up the already cracked rocks to target the sorcerer.

The first one is missed. The second is dodged. The third is barely tackled by his magic. The fourth one gets him. So does every other boulder that comes flying his way.

Strange is surrounded with boulders from every side, all of them aiming to crush him where he stands. While he is trying to protect himself- and the fate of the universe wrapped around his neck- he doesn't notice the slithering pieces around him, too wrapped up in fear as the rocks finally close in on him with a thunderous rumble breaking the air on their collision.

"Strange!"

No one knows where that cry comes from as clouds of dirt and smoke hide the point of impact; the crime scene.

Ebony Maw does not move a muscle from where he stands, his hands clasped on to each other with a watchful look, satisfied with himself.

"You critters should have given up these futile attempts when you had the chance."

His voice has a chill that echoes through the mountains. Even the wind seems to fall silent.

"You picked the wrong people for that intention, Voldey."

If Maw had brows he would have raised them when he turns around to look at a faint glow- a few feet above the ground- rise further. It's only when the clouds of unrest begin to lower the haze does the shadow of something fluttering around that figure comes to light.

How did he-

Every scenario is running through his mind to figure out how that magician escaped, cracking the glass walls of restraint inside him. The smokiness in the air takes its sweet time to reveal the shadow of the figure, the chest lit up in a warm blue glow while the arms rise from either side to mirror that very glow in Maw's direction.

"Light's out, you son of a bitch," Stark announces, already witnessing heaps of ice shards rising from the ground. The cloak of levitation readies itself to protect Stark while a grunt rises from Maw's throat as he changes the direction of the shards to point at Tony. Pulling himself back to gather as much potential, Ebony Maw is about to push them towards the man when piercing noise followed by something sharp jabs him like a thousand needles in the back.

"Now!" Tony shouts at the top of his lungs.

Within seconds a streak of green comes running on the snow- melting it where it touches the cold, cracking the ice till it reaches Maw to surround him in a circle marked with a Nordic enchantment.

Before those beady eyes can make sense of this intricate entrapment surrounding him, the cluster of boulders meant to kill Strange break with a crackling sound to reveal the Sorcerer Supreme clad in the Iron Man suit, his hands ready with burning rings that are fired at the tormentor, cuffing him while merging with the Nordic circle of magic, trapping his limbs.

It is unreal; the scream that leaves Maw's throat. The menacing cry is not for the pain but the pride that has been marred by humans and the God that is on one knee, keeping his magic strong and his eyes on the one who tried to take his light away not too long ago.

"YOU WILL ALL DIE! YOU WILL DIE THE DEATHS OF ROTTEN SWINE CRAWLING WITH MAGGOTS ALL OVER YOU! YOU WILL ALL WHINE BENEATH MY FEET!"

Stark and Strange walk towards the creature who roars while on his knees, their armours being exchanged without a word, looking at the dull alien yanking at the illuminated golden and green chains holding him down.

"Oh you coward," Maw hisses at Strange before turning to Stark, "using a shrewd God to capture me? Do you not know the likes of him? His silver tongue has a purpose. A purpose to fulfil his means. Once he is done you lot he will throw you to the black holes and move on to someone more powerful. He only fends for himself. I know because I have been inside his brain. His darkness eats him alive and soon it will eat you all!"

A huff of air leaves Tony's lungs when he shares a look with Strange. Their lungs slowly come back to ease. Their shaking hearts have found solid ground. Their doubtful eyes now look in the direction of the figure walking towards them, its hands illuminating green with an increasing density.

"They see through you, Asgardian!"

All the rage collected on Ebony Maw's forehead wants to launch at the God walking in his direction in any way it can find. But that rage seems to come to a standstill when it sees the figure emerge from behind the fog; concentrating on those lines running up and down the blue skin that is too flawless to belong to a mere animal. The rage resting on Maw's forehead starts taking a few steps back when it locks its beady eyes with the red that sears through his very soul.

"You're wrong, Maw-" Loki comes to stand right outside the glowing circle keeping his punisher captive- "they do not see through me."

A flick of Loki's wrist and the chains are pulled into the ground, making a reluctant Maw bow down to get them back up.

"They cannot see anything."

Maw tries to but he cannot break his gaze from those eyes carrying the colour of blood as they're looking down on him with unspeakable emotions; seemingly blank stare ripping his insides with every drop of volcanic heat leaving them.

"You did not leave much for them to see last time, did you?"

The icy chill from Loki's hand as it wraps around his throat to make him stand and face him with the roles reversed sends poisonous shivers through his existence.

"Don't worry-" Loki whispers too close to him; close enough to make sure he can be the first one in this universe to smell Maw's fear but not close enough for Maw to get his teeth in him. His free hand conjures a four edged dagger glistening with the glow from the snow. "-unlike you, I won't make you wish for death."

The strike is smooth. The blade goes inside his abdomen in one go, puncturing his vital organs with that very strike. Maw does not even feel it; something that brings a smile on Loki's face. "I will make you live death."

The blade comes out, bringing with it the spoils. Black insides slowly spill. This is the first time Maw feels something tickle his abdomen. The itch increases into an unbearable agony and he is trying to clutch to the wound to make that burn stop.

And the blood does stop. The wound heals back, leaving a blue bruise-like stain on that grey skin. The heavy breaths of relief slowly turn into wheezing. The eyes filled with three-seconds of reprieve go wide in horror. The murky, black blood-stained hands turn into claws to rip apart the very skin that healed a few moments ago as the throat breaks into an agonising shriek.

The poison on the dagger has done its job well. It coagulates the blood and regenerates the tissue to seemingly heal the wound but burns the coagulated blood and new fabrication of the tissue to the point that the animal would rather tear its skin apart than have that thing inside it for one more second. And when the freshly healed wound is exposed to the nitrogen in the air, it catalysis the poison to spread further into the body, making that animal a writhing howling mess on the ground.

Ebony Maw experiences the same fate. The shrill screams breaking the air come out for a few more seconds before he has gnawed himself inside out. All that is left of this child of Thanos is the goo its desecrated body lies in.

It does not take a genius to figure out how much thought Loki has put into Maw's extermination; something that makes Stark wonder what had Squidward done to Loki to call for such a gory end.

"Great," Strange snaps Tony out of his thoughts, scrunching his nose at the remains of the grey villain, "one down. How many more?"

"We took down the strategist," Loki announces, sending his dagger back to his pocket dimension, "it should be easy to take down the rest of the...children."

"Great," Tony mentions with a slight groan, "Alexander is dead. Loki's actually a-" he gestures at the Frost Giant, looking him up and down- "a teen girl's dream smurf and I just got a call from Banner telling me Cap met another of these deranged kids.” He groans. “Exactly how I was planning the day to go."

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thirteen-beaxhes · 5 years

Text

Sad, Beautiful, Tragic (A Tyrus Songfic)

Summary: Cyrus is tired of being the good boy, hopeful and patient. And he never expected his beautiful love to become a tragedy. A Tyrus Songfic to Sad, Beautiful, Tragic by Taylor Swift.

Words: 2276

AO3 LINK IN REBLOG

~~~~~~~

Long handwritten note, deep in your pocket Words, how little they mean, when you're a little too late I stood right by the tracks, your face in a locket Good girls, hopeful they'll be and long they will wait

“Fuck,” Cyrus groaned, dropping his phone onto his bed, rubbing his eyes with his palms. It didn’t help at all, his eyes feeling rawer and dry more than anything else. The tears that had been there just a few moments ago had evaporated, leaving behind stains and heaviness and rawness. On his bed, his phone lay silent.

Tired. That’s what Cyrus was, tired of waiting, tired of sitting still waiting for what he needed to hear, tired of sticking around while the foundations and pillars crumbled around him. Tired of having hope when there was not even a drop of it around. Tired tired he was fucking tired.

But Cyrus Goodman was the resident good boy, wasn’t he? Good people are hopeful, they have innocence in their heart, holding out faith for the people around them. To the point where faith and hope was a currency and good people were supposed to be generous millionaires.

Another thing good people do was wait. Wait and wait and wait, until time itself would become sand and blow away in the wind. And Cyrus was waiting now, waiting and waiting for something that would probably never come. Because he was a good boy. And good boys waited for however long it took.

Cyrus sank down into his chair, reaching out to trace the pictures pinned up on his board, specifically containing one person.

The one person who Cyrus just needed to see for one second to hear what he needed to hear.

The one person Cyrus wanted to run as far away from as possible just to never see him again.

He, somehow, managed to fall asleep, the cool hum of his air conditioning sounding like the chirping of birds, taking him to a place where things didn’t go wrong, where the nights were bursting with colour in the black sky, where the days were golden. Where ‘I love you’ meant what it was supposed to mean.

When he walked into school the next day, his hoodie up, music blaring through his headphones, he earned the stares and whispers following him down the hall, the evidence of his night visible in his dark circles and puffy eyes. But no one asked or whispered too loud. Because for the first time, good boy Cyrus Goodman’s eyes carried daggers, and everything about him screamed stay the fuck away.

Not everyone got the message.

“Cy,” a voice said, and Cyrus slammed his locker door, revealing the one person responsible.

TJ.

“What do you want?” he said bitterly, and TJ sighed, running a hand through his hair.

“Please, just please stop this,” he said quietly, glancing around. “People are talking.”

“Oh really? I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice the stares or the whispers or the comments,” Cyrus said, his voice growing angrier with every word, the venom rivalling that of bitter almonds.

“Just hear me out,” TJ said, moving to shuffle around in his pockets. He searched for a few minutes, hunting around, and took out many things, still unsatisfied. “Wait, uh, it, it has to, has to be here, somewhere,” he whispered, finally pulling out an almost torn, crumpled up piece of paper with writing scribbled on it, located deep, deep in TJ’s pocket.

“You gonna read me a speech?” Cyrus said flatly, and TJ squeezed his eyes shut, looking down at the paper as he began to read.

“I’m sorry for hurting you, I really, really am. I was an idiot, and I shouldn’t have done that. You don’t deserve that. You never deserve that. Please, just forgive me Cy, please,” TJ read out, the last sentence said right to Cyrus as he folded the paper.

Cyrus stared back, drawing a shaky breath as he felt a tear threaten to roll carelessly down his cheek. He looked down at his feet, drawing a careful breath, shaking his head.

“I can’t do that TJ,” Cyrus said quietly, and TJ gasped slightly, gulping as a tear rolled down his cheek. Cyrus looked up at the ceiling, trying to hold it back. But, he had to face TJ for the next part, walking away as soon as he said it.

“You were too late.”

We had a beautiful magic love there What a sad beautiful tragic love affair

*one week later*

Cyrus trudged home, his feet dragging behind him as choked sobs escaped his lips, a blubbering mess as he pulled himself down the streets. He felt the tiny thread that had held his heart together snap when he walked out of the school halls that day, looking across the courtyard to see TJ talking to his basketball friends, his back to him, his friends laughing.

And TJ joining in with them, laughing without a care in the world.

And seeing him so carefree, so lost in laughter, so happy, Cyrus broke. That thread snapped apart, and his heart fell into pieces, the shards now being swept away by the groundskeeper of the school.

Not because he was happy, although that tore at Cyrus, that only a few days later TJ had moved on, as if without a trace, and he was left behind to deal with the cataclysmic consequences. But it was the fact that his smile reminded Cyrus of the good times, the times that had been the happiest of his life, when they were in love and that was enough.

Cyrus and TJ had been magical from the start. Their hearts wove together to create such an enamouring and enchanting symphony, neither could live without the sound and the feeling it left them with. It shone red in Cyrus’ mind, burning, passionate, blinding. It knocked Cyrus off his feet, the breath being sucked out of his lungs with everything TJ did. Butterflies made their home in his stomach, and he swore that every time he had a date with TJ, his head would go light, spinning with all the emotions racing through his mind.

Beautiful.

Magical.

Red.

Which is why it was such a shame it had to end the way it did.

Cyrus and TJ had kept their relationship hidden but open. So, while they had never explicitly said anything, Cyrus thought, with the way TJ held his hand in the corridors and hugged him, and acted around him, as if he was the only person who mattered, that they didn’t need to say anything for people to see what they were. And he had thought, with the way he smiled at TJ, and held his hand, and hugged him on the basketball court after games, they were on the same page with this.

But oh, the universe is cruel, and it makes even the most beautiful thing a tragedy capable of making the hardest hearts crumble into rubble and tears. Because it turns out, they had never been on the same page.

*2 weeks ago*

“Hey TJ.”

Cyrus paused the search for his books in his locker, peeking out from around the corner as he saw a girl approach TJ, twirling her hair and smiling in the way that Cyrus saw himself smile at TJ when he thought about him. TJ was at his locker, and he turned to face her with his characteristic smirk. Cyrus smiled to himself, deciding to listen in just for the fun of it.

“Hey Sandy,” TJ said with a smile, and Sandy giggled loudly, earning some stares from students walking down the hall.

“So, um, I was, uh, you were amazing at the game the other day!” she muttered, fumbling over her words.

TJ laughed, the sound being a melody of sweetness in Cyrus’ heart. “Thanks, but you have to thank Dan for our win, his basket was amazing.”

“Yeah, yeah Dan was cool,” she said, changing the topic. “So, uh, I was, I wanted to tell you, that uh, I really like you TJ.”

“I like you too Sandy!” TJ responded, and Cyrus wanted to slam his head against the locker in second hand embarrassment.

“Uh, I don’t mean it like that,” Sandy said nervously. “I like, like you.”

Cyrus could almost hear the shift in tone, as the realisation hit TJ. “Oh,” he whispered.

“Yeah,” Sandy said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “So, do you wanna go on a date some time?”

Cyrus let out a small breath, hoping that TJ was kind in telling her no, but what he heard next made him drop his books, his heart plummeting as his head was sent for a whirl.

“Yeah sure. I’ll text you.”

Sandy laughed, walking away as she squealed, and TJ closed his locker and walked away. And Cyrus stood there alone, the words echoing in his mind, a clashing cacophony in his mind as he took time to think.

He said yes. TJ said yes to that girl. To a date. To what he knew would be a date. Why did he say yes? Did he not think about Cyrus? Wasn’t it obvious they were together? They weren’t hiding anymore.

Were they?

Had they ever even been on the same page?

Cyrus felt the world crash around him, or that may have just been the school bell. But he shook his head, tossing aside the thoughts as he made his way to class.

Cyrus let out a shaky breath, thinking back to that horrible time, and all that followed, all that led to him walking away from TJ’s apology, to him breaking down over TJ’s smile in the courtyard.

Distance, timing, breakdown, fighting Silence, this train runs off its tracks Kiss me, try to fix it, could you just try to listen? Hang up, give up, for the life of us we can't get back

*13 days ago*

Cyrus had been incredibly successful in avoiding TJ, his height finally giving him an advantage as he manoeuvred around the crowds. He couldn’t face TJ, and the fact that he heard Sandy gush about her ‘date’ with TJ wasn’t pushing him to communicate.

Finally, TJ cornered Cyrus by the gate of the school, his eyes sunken and accusing as he stared at Cyrus.

“You avoiding me?” he asked, and Cyrus squeezed his eyes shut, sidestepping to walk away from TJ, but he stuck a hand out, grabbing his elbow. “Cy! Talk to me please.”

“Why? Shouldn’t you be with someone else? Isn’t this too public for you?” Cyrus asked bitterly, freeing his hand from TJ’s grasp, walking away. TJ looked confused, glancing around nervously to see if anyone was staring, before chasing after Cyrus in the street.

Cyrus didn’t even need to turn around to know TJ was coming up behind him and he stopped in his path, letting TJ catch up to him.

“What do you mean?” TJ asked, wheezing slightly. Cyrus suppressed a groan, turning around slowly.

“I hope you and Sandy had fun,” he said quietly, and instantly, the look that flooded onto TJ’s face made Cyrus want to scream and run away.

“Cyrus, I, I,” TJ started, but Cyrus lifted his hand, cutting him off.

“Why did you do it, TJ?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Why did you say yes to her? I thought we were being open about us.”

“No, no, we haven’t told anyone,” TJ said, shaking his head, his eyes showing himself being backed into a corner.

“Then what was with all the hand-holding and the hugs and everything?” Cyrus asked pleadingly. TJ looked down, ashamed as he sank into himself, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“I, I just thought that it was cuz we always act like that, and people kept assuming it’s a friend thing, so I kept doing it so we could hide in plain sight.”

Cyrus stepped back, blinking as he processed what TJ was saying. “So, you’re seeing Sandy now.”

“No, no, Cy it isn’t like that,” TJ started, shaking his head and lunging forward, trying to kiss Cyrus to stop the conversation, but Cyrus pushed him off, staggering back.

“TJ, seriously?” he yelled, stepping back. “You aren’t even listening to me. What’s the point?”

With that, Cyrus shook his head, walking away, tears rolling down his face as he ran back home, TJ left on the street, looking at the sky.

That was when they gave up. Or at least, when Cyrus gave up. Because they wouldn’t find their way back, even if they tried to.

We had a beautiful magic love there What a sad beautiful tragic love affair

Cyrus made his way back to his room, the tears slower and more like a silent stream than a violent hiccupping disaster. He went into his room and began to take down everything that reminded him of TJ. His posters, the pictures, the books, the notes. Soon enough, he was ripping things off the wall, flinging books on the floor and balling up hoodies and tossing them away. He went on a rampage, purging his room of everything that even remotely reminded him of the green-eyed boy he had loved so much.

As the redness faded from his vision, Cyrus looked at his floor, covered in torn up paper, strewn clothes and crumpled book pages. Gulping, Cyrus wiped his forehead and sunk to the ground among the debris of his relationship, staring at the bare walls around him.

As if everything around him had been TJ and now he was alone again, trying to fill himself.

There was no more magic in his life.

~~~~~~~~

sorry not sorry yes i am gonna say again it sUcks

General taglist:

@imhereforthetryus @thelonious-jagger-smitten @youve-got-to-be-kippen-me @tjskipping @luzawithoutu

#andi mack #tyrus #tyrus one shot #my fic #angst #cyrus goodman #tj kippen #taylor swift songfic

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cupsofsuga · 5 years

Note

Lines for the prompt shot - What you don't know is sometimes for the best ///\\\ Promise me that your love is still mine - Seokjin or Hoseok }Please and thank you{ 🐩

FLORA ━ SEOKJIN*:･。.

WARNING - This is a yandere au, meaning the following may be triggering to some viewers. I am not trying to discriminate the boys in any way, this is for entertainment purposes. Viewer discretion is advised!!!

Gif Creds - X

Prompt List - X

Literally, NO ONE requests Seokjin and tbh, it’s kinda disappointing. Thank you for paying attention to our worldwide handsome!!

SEOKJIN

"What you don’t know is sometimes for the best” & “Promise me that your love is still mine”.

━━━ A birdhouse swings from the branches of an old oak tree, swaying back and forth, back and forth. The soft symphony of wind chimes is heard from the distance and the fog coating the early spring floor is almost blinding, but not enough to where you have lost vision of your greenhouse.

You’re reaching late twenties, life not nearly fulfilled to the brim, but you are okay. You’ve spent the beginning of your adult life reciting a million cliches, thrown away a million memories of old lovers like they were nothing, dialed memorized numbers, never pressing call. On repeat, on repeat, the cycle never ended until you had finally woken up, risen from the ashes you created, arose from the soil as a weed into the blossom of a mesmerizing rose.

You now refuse to find comfort in those who will soon vanish from your life without a goodbye, rather finding the peace and comfort needed within yourself. You were as vibrant as neon street lights in the dead as night, as tragically beautiful as an electric storm. But you’ve traded these traits, now of delicate as the caress of an angel’s wings, touch filled with the essence of a star, the dust of the moon making up of your eyes.

The wolves have scurried, the ocean has calmed, the sun will soon rise.

Everything will be ok now.

Wind is harsh this morning, which you have accepted already. Sun had hidden behind the clouds, a chill wind embracing your skin, but you have found love within these times. Hot or cold, you’ll always seek the good in these things.

The ringing of a bell echoes throughout the greenhouse. The business you owned was small, but nonetheless, you loved it with every fiber of your being.

A man, age seemingly around yours, shoulders broad, smile electrifying, a smile like lightning as it strikes down your spine. He reeks of confidence, but you can tell that deep within, he owns a heart lie a mosaic, shattered shards of glass that have been broken one too many times. You can read it in his eyes, even though his posture and facial expression establish a sort of dominance. His eyes, golden honey brown colored, glassy and watery, giving a sense on innocence but you know better than that. You can see how it’s been shattered like a broken mirror, his soul is heavy and messy, entirely an illness that contains dark memories.

But, then again, your job wasn’t to read people’s expressions, it was to expand your lovely greenhouse and to give others the beauty you have created, all for the price of a few bucks. And you love what you’re during. It’s not like you gain millions of dollars on a daily basis like other upcoming starlet’s, but this business does pay enough to make a living and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

When you’re inside the foggy greenhouse, you’re in your kindest state, Seokjin sees it crystal clear. Rose mist is hung through the estate, eyes shimmering a dove-colored glimmer, the roots of the oak trees outside twirling through his chest and squeezing at his heart. But, this wasn’t the very first time he had seen you, just your first encounter. And it felt like wild violets and fresh daisies blooming within his chest, as it always was, but with those eyes kissed with the water of the sea, stars making up of the freckles of their face stunned him into silence.

You ask him if he needs help finding anything, informing him of a deal (as if he didn’t know already), to which he chokes out a simple answer, denying you kindly of your help. You nod, walking away as his heart begins to weep as if he is buried deep under land, suffocating on his own silent screams. But you’re an open field, full of precious flowers and silenced winds to where he can take a deep breath of fresh air. Whether it’s late at night without your acknowledgment or during the short time of stalking you during your precious time spent with your greens, without you knowing, of course.

But he has had a taste. A very small taste of the infinite joy that blooms on the recesses of your soul.

And he craves more.

You return to the other room, dedicated to your studies for college and others. He follows, though, elegant and rich with every step, a hypnotic spotlight with the simple glance. Jin finds you in the office, textbook open as you turn to him. You open your mouth to lightheartedly ask him if he needed you, but before even a murmur of a word can leave your throat, he’s got you pinned against the wall, forearm against your neck. Through his eyes, you see the shipwreck that makes up of his soul. He’s broken, so obviously broken that your eyes share so sign of fear, more empathy.

“You’re not scared?” he asks, voice demanding rather than shy, as it was earlier.

“…You won’t hurt me; I can see it. I can see it in your eyes… You’re too broken to hurt somebody.” You voice reeks of confidence, but fear manages to linger. Begging him to lay off with fear or confusion won’t work, which you learned the hard way. It flies over Seokjin’s head, though, and his eyes soften in surprise.

“And what I’m trying to learn is what lies underneath…”

You understand him.

This moment glitters with stars, pins of gold making up on the single time spent this close to you. Your kindness has shattered and he has seen the confidence underneath and now he knows.

He knows you’re just like the mosaic he is.

“W-… What you don’t know-.. i-is sometimes for the best, ok? You… Y/N, you’ll be my flower, I’ll be your sun and rain. I’ll be everything you ever need, ‘cause I know I need you even as just the weather compared to a single flower when millions exist. Promise me that your love is still mine; promise me you’ll always be my flower.”

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jamalam · 7 years

Text

And He Was The Sun

A little present for my angst king, @bunny-yams!!! Please remember to comment and reblog if you enjoyed!

Sometimes, Alexander wondered if the universe was jealous of Thomas.

The way his dark eyes sparkled with new ideas, brighter than the North Star. The twinkling in his laughter to rival the glimmers of the cosmos. How each smile, each smirk, each devilish grin was so perfectly curved into constellations with those lips Alexander could kiss for centuries and still wish for more. How his hair would reflect each beam of light on a warm August morning, the curls refracting the glow into a halo, casting gold onto the nearly-black brown. In those particular moments, Thomas was the sun.

Each morning Alexander rose before the sunrise where Thomas awoke, palettes of pinks streaked the sky of Thomas’s small smile, that gorgeous smile that always seemed like it was meant for Alexander and only Alexander. They climbed out from the heavy cloak of sleep to greet the day day, and while Alex was typically groggy and tired, Thomas always seemed so perfectly set into the patterns of the morning, helping each sunbeam dance through the windows as he pulled open the blinds.

As the sunlit windows of morning shattered into shards of afternoon, Thomas stayed resolute in his path of day, working through and persevering despite clouds of anxiety and doubt in the sky of his mind. He would laugh out boldly, burning one if they stayed too long, or sit quietly and focus, content to be overshadowed and rained upon with new words from the promise of a better day soon to come.

Evenings were typically soft, gentle kisses on cheek, a hand and the wind tangling Alexander’s hair affectionately, Thomas laughing in that way where he forgets to contain himself and for once just allows the melody to play through. Each note of his laughter a new symphony, a revised chorus, a reprise of a nearly-forgotten song. Alexander wished more than anything to hear such wonder again, if only just once.

Nightfall was subtle, over before it began. The stars in his eyes connected complicated constellations, the names of which were so wondrous it is a mystery how they were lost to the gentle grip of time. Thomas painted dark blues and hints of violet across the sky with each kiss he pressed to Alexander’s face, silent promises of what the new dawn would bring as it burned the pieces it has strewn about during the night and emerged as a phoenix, rising from the ashes;

The universe must have been upset that such brilliance could shine from something other than their own sun and stars. So it had sent a supernova.

Bright lights, flashing in every direction. The sounds of metal crumbling to dust with each crackle of the crash. Fiberglass half-melted and nearly melted into the dark skin of the center of Alexander’s solar system. His halo was no longer gold, then, a sheet white airbag in its place, puffing out around him in effort to avoid the damage he would take from the impact.

And in a matter of time that seemed to pass far too slowly, Thomas had given up his title of the sun, in exchange for rule over the midnight sky.

He was laid out thin, too thin, on the hospital bed, his dark eyes closed and unable to light the stars he had always been so in control of. Curls of his hair tangled into heavy cloud weighing down over his face, and Alexander carefully reached over to brush them out of his eyes. He set the flowers down carefully on the bedside table that was always there.

Alex had chosen daisies this week. At first, he had wanted to throw every daisy ever grown into the bright fire of the supernova that had taken away his sunlight. But with time, he had grown to find a strange srt of comfort with the flowers. Each petal fluttered past his mind, unlocking memories he had tucked away neatly, in effort to slow the tidal wave of grief that had crashed over his mind, water spilling out the edges of his eyes.

Thomas had always made Alexander a flower crown when they went to the park together. Alex would protest that he was much too old to wear one, and Thomas would point out that someone so annoying must be a snobby, entitled prince that he had just so happened to fall in love with. And since Alex was a prince, he needed a crown. After a few kisses, Alexander usually relented and allowed Thomas to place the crown on his head.

But they couldn’t do that now. Not anymore. Thomas’s hands laid still by his sides, the bleached bedsheets stiff beneath him, and the teal robe covering his body so obviously not fitting for the ruler of the kingdom of dreams.

Gently, Alexander pulled something out of his pocket and placed it on Thomas’s head, smiling when he saw how it framed Thomas’s face. The little plastic daisies had been carefully braided together, into a beautiful, although fake, flower crown. Alex smiled and sighed quietly, reaching over and picking up his coat to pull back on. After all, it was a cold January afternoon, and after the first two years, everyone else had given up hope for Thomas.

Sparing a glance at the man in the bed, Alexander’s weak smile began to fade. Two years had passed by, two years of burning sunlight instead of the soft caresses of sunbeams that Thomas bended to his will.

Maybe he should give up. Alexander quickly shook the thought out of his head, closing his eyes tightly. No- Thomas just needed time for his mind to heal. But the idea stayed, lingering like a strong taste of candy that makes you wish you could brush your teeth to block it out. Thomas was gone. He wasn’t gone, as most people meant when they said such a thing. Thomas Jefferson was simply… Not there anymore. He had carved a small place into Alexander’s heart and left it there, somehow able to rest when Alex felt the pain of such an empty space each and every day he spent without Thomas.

Alexander bit his lip and tried to pull his gaze away from the sight of Thomas’s body, but found himself unable to. Because Thomas wasn’t going to wake up, no matter how long Alex waited. And somewhere, deep down, Alexander knew that. The thought had been there the whole time, creeping up on him as a mist until it began to rain heavily from his eyes.

And through his blurry vision, for a moment, just a fleeting second…

Alexander could have sworn that Thomas’s starlit eyes had blinked open.

#fanfiction #jamilton #alexander hamilton #thomas jefferson #reblogs > likes #angst #coma #hospital #car crash #metaphors #so many metaphors #and similies #angst with a happy ending #because i cant break his heart im sorry #unedited #for the angst king

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elfnerdherder · 7 years

Text

Ill Intentions: Chapter 11

You can read Chapter 11 on Ao3 Here

Check out my Patreon and join the squad! Early updates, character arcs, and whatever else you could desire.

Chapter 11: Character Arcs

The apartment was soon reduced to a chaotic, shambled mess.

A few cups had chipped and shattered as Will decimated the kitchen, and the trash had been overturned in his haste to hunt through the pantry. Towels laid in desolate piles across the hallway, and dresser drawers had been overturned and upended in his haste.

Will sat huddled in the wake of a flipped mattress and abused Wal-Mart sheets, shaking hands grasping a note written in an elegant, beautiful, and furiously familiar hand.

Dear Will,

I am interested to see just how your world turns when you don’t have an electronic device to dictate every aspect of your life. Will it slow to a stop, marked only by a rising and setting sun, or will you retaliate in a blind fury, unable to stop the quickness of your pulse?

I’m eager to see the messages and reminders you have programmed to light up on this screen. The battery life on these, I’m told, are incredible.

-Chesapeake Ripper

He could hear his voice in those words. Will reread it enough times that it began to echo in his mind, frantic and furious with the all-knowing arrogance of it. The bastard had even put it in the sock drawer, where a familiar and not entirely welcome knife once lay.

“No,” he murmured, and he felt himself rocking a bit, side-to-side to try and ground himself rather than start screaming. “No, no, no, no…”

He set the note down on a pile of disheveled shirts, and he let out a croaking gasp. He had the urge to scream, to yell. He had the urge to pace, bellow, to rage, and he contained it all within himself as he started tapping his fingers on the ground, the sound hard and punctuated with the beat of his pulse.

His phone rang, and Will snatched it up from among a spilled glass of water and the remnants of a dead plant that’d fallen from the windowsill. He’d have to sweep it up later, along with the rest of his things he’d reduced to shards in his furious haste.

“Hello?” he asked. It was breathy, needing –God, why did he have to sound so hopeful that it was the Ripper, there to gloat then inevitably return his watch?

“Where the hell are you?” Beverly hissed. “You’d better be in a hospital –you’re not in a hospital, are you?”

Fuck.

“I’m…not feeling well, Beverly,” Will said hollowly. “I don’t think I should come in today.”

“Seriously? Haven’t you seen the news?”

“Is that a joke?”

“Dead serious, if you’re not on your way here, you’d better turn the news on. Work is hell right now, hell, and there are cops, feds…shit, other news vans…”

Will managed to drag himself to his feet where he made his way to the living room. The TV had been shoved to the side so violently that it teetered on the end of the stand. He nudged it to safety and sat down in front of it, skimming through channels until he could find the local news. Teeth gnashed against his bottom lip, breaking skin. His wrist felt bare, far too light.

“…and here now we’re standing just in front of Tattler News where you can see beyond the police line the body of a young man that authorities are now recognizing as Harrison Nolan, an up-and-coming member of the Baltimore Symphony. This is reminiscent of the recent murder of another young musician, Billy Nguyen who was found on the stage of the Baltimore Symphony with the neck of a cello placed down the victim’s throat.”

Will’s heart plummeted to a sickening squelch in his guts.

“Although partitions and canvases are being placed to block the view of onlookers, you can still see the victim has been found much the same way as before. Is this a promise of something more to come? Is there another serial killer in the midst of the DC area, looking to upstage the Ripper? Has the Ripper’s correspondence with Tattler News reduced him to something ‘mainstream’?”

“Shit,” Will murmured. In the distance, just beyond the reporter’s shoulder, he could barely make out a man slumped into a simple-backed chair, head tilted back to give way for the neck of a cello that burst from his mouth.

“Do you think it’s the Ripper?” Beverly asked. It took far too long for him to focus on her voice rather than the image before him. It cut back to the woman, and he blinked rapidly, dispelling it from his retinas.

“No, he…”

He’s playing a different game.

“This isn’t his style,” he said instead, quietly. “I think this is someone else that wants to be in the column.”

“Charlie’s asking where you are. What the hell do you want me to tell him?”

That took Will far too long to answer as well. The image in front of him cut to the crime scene from before, when the first body had been found on stage. He stared at it for several moments, mouth dry, wondering at the still image of the neck of the cello sprouting from a gaping mouth as though it were coming to full bloom.

“Will?”

He gave a start and looked away from the image. As it cut back to the woman’s white noise of fear-mongering, he shut off the TV and rubbed his face, resolute.

“I’ll be there in a bit…I have to get ready. My alarm didn’t go off.”

“Seriously?” Beverly bit out a snort. “Better have a better excuse than that when you get here. He’s pissed.”

Will hung up and sat on the floor of his apartment for several more minutes before he could pull himself to his feet. The skin on his wrist felt odd, and he itched it as he gathered together a suitable outfit and choked down a cup of coffee.

It wasn’t until halfway to work that he realized he’d forgotten to grab his water bottle. He thought about going back, but traffic was such that it’d be an entirely new ordeal altogether that he wasn’t precisely prepared for. He’d have to rely on work coolers, then.

He almost missed his stop on the bus, and he only realized it was there when the old woman beside him shoved and nudged him far enough away for her to walk out. He gave a start at the realization of where he was at, and he followed after her, an uncomfortable prickle down his neck.

“You’re not following me, are you?” the old woman asked.

He looked away from the distant street corner he would turn at and stared at her for an uncomfortably long amount of time.

“Because if you are, I’ve got mace. I’ll mace yeh,” she informed him.

“I’m going to work.”

She eyed him with extreme prejudice –likely his wrinkled shirt. His hair, too, he supposed, seeing as how he was now just realizing that he’d forgotten to brush it. It was quite the contrast to her own perfectly ironed shirt tucked into pants hiked up high at her hips –remnants of the good old days when gas was only twenty-five cents a gallon and a milkshake was a nickel. He likely looked the type to try and pickpocket someone, in her eyes. A mildly desperate expression, right hand twitching towards his left like he could find his watch there if he just fucking tried hard enough.

Oh, god. His watch. His fucking watch.

“Alright, then. Be quick about it.”

“Alright,” he said, and he took a dramatic step around her before he hurried on his way. He pitied the idiot that decided to try and mug someone like her –that pity faded as he figured they’d likely deserve it if they cased someone like that out and thought she’d be an easy target.

He had to fight through the crowd to get to the front, and more than a few elbows nestled into his gut as he skirted around them all. Their breaths and BO clung to him, and when he reached the front he nearly bowled over an officer that stepped just before him to stop him.

“I work here, this is-”

“ID, please,” the man said.

Will fished out his wallet and handed over his license, eyes scanning for Beverly. A cluster of news vehicles cramped up the public parking, and cameras were wildly swinging across the crowd, then towards the partitions that blocked the view of the body.

“No, your badge for the press,” he said impatiently.

“Yeah,” Will snapped impatiently, “it’s-”

Right here, he finished mentally, although the words didn’t come. His hand pressed to the place on his chest where his lanyard would hang, if he had it.

If he’d fucking remembered it from home.

“Behind the line, then,” the officer decided. Will could almost smell his smug superiority as he sauntered away to push back a few people testing the line, and the urge to lunge out at him coiled, ready to spring. It was a sudden wave of emotion, hot and volcanic in its fury, and it surprised him as he stood, puzzled beside a chatty millennial that was glued to her phone.

“Yeah, I can’t get inside to work because of this freak show, and my boss is going to kill me if I…”

Her words faded, though, as he struggled to turn the sudden emotions about in his hands, wrestle them into something manageable. The officer was just doing his job, Will decided. He was just doing his job, and anyone that wanted a closer look at a dead body would say whatever they could if it meant that they could get just close enough to maybe poke it with a stick once or twice. Stephen King had made a novel about something much like that –a group of boys that poked a dead body with a stick.

Serial killers must be Stephen King’s muse, too.

It took far too long for him to turn his feelings into something logical. Half of him longed to rush after the man, grab him, and snap his neck. The other half turned the idea about of him just staying home for the day. He could turn around and just go home, lock himself in his bedroom with a fifth of Jack and call it a fucking day.

“I’d say something, but honestly anything revolving around you is hard to be surprised by anymore.”

Jack Crawford’s voice listed across the foggy aspects of his thoughts, turned about as they were with the feeling of what the officer’s pulse would feel like in his palm as he squeezed. Will blinked once, then rapidly; he clung to the sound of professional weariness, and he looked up from his shoe in order make some sort of paltry eye contact with Jack. He swallowed heavily and wished that he’d remembered a water bottle. It’d sat in the back of his cabinets for so long that it’d collected dust, but now that he’d found it…

Something else to blame the Chesapeake Ripper for, then. His water would taste like the sun-abused shit in Charlie’s office by the time he got home.

“I forgot my press badge,” he said.

“…Come on,” Jack grunted, and he lifted the tape for Will.

As they passed by the officer who was busy answering questions to an irate woman, Will ensured that he made eye contact of a sort with the man. A smug, self-satisfied smile crept across his lips, and it twisted to a sneer as the cop realized just who it was he’d held back from entering. He glanced from Will to Jack, then back to Will; that Will Graham, he was fast realizing. That God damn, Will Graham.

“One of yours said that I should haul you in for questioning on this one,” Jack said as they ascended the steps.

“Todd from Marketing?”

“Yeah, I think name was Todd.”

Todd has a cocaine problem, he wanted to say. How about you go and grab the squealer’s stash before you bring me in for this?

It wasn’t the time, though, to throw Todd under the bus. He may need him for more paper analysis or something else mundane and detailed that he didn’t want to do, consumed as he was with his work.

“Todd hates marketing,” he said instead. “And me.”

“I supposed that if you were to start your own killing spree, you wouldn’t put the body on your front doorstep,” Jack assured him. “You seem a little too smart for that.”

There was that. As they skirted the partitions and Will got a full view of the body without the trouble of distance from a news station, he felt something much akin to relief that Jack didn’t find him entirely capable of this.

“…This wouldn’t be my design,” he murmured.

“Thank God for that,” Jack replied.

“This the kind of thing your boss had in mind when he started ‘Will Intentions’?” A guy asked, head popping up from around the body. It wasn’t Jimmy, and that minor change shook him down to his core, made words dry up in his mouth because first the watch, then his water, then his badge, and who in the world was this son-of-a-bitch? Why was everything suddenly changing?

“This isn’t good press,” Jack said.

“Any press is good press,” Will managed hoarsely. “That’s news for you.”

“Well this guy was pressed for time,” the man said, and he stood up. His mouth was obscured by a cloth mask, although unruly, curly dark hair poked up from a headpiece of the same material. A kind attempt at not contaminating the crime scene. “He’s fresher than the last one. The killer probably didn’t want it stinking up anything.”

“The last one?”

“Found in Baltimore just two weeks ago –Billy Nguyen.” The man eyed Will much the same way that the old woman had, as though he could see Will’s worth beneath his plaid button-up and found him wanting.

“You don’t think they’re from the Chesapeake Ripper, do you?” Will asked Jack.

“It’s on your doorstep,” the man interjected. Will ignored him.

“I didn’t at first, but unless you’ve got more crazies climbing out of the woodwork for you, I think it’s highly likely,” Jack said. “Unless you’ve got another idea?”

Will had several ideas, but none of them sounded stable enough to share. He frowned and glanced back to the body.

“Could I…” he looked to Jack, then back to the body. Could he see? Could he look at this the same way he stared at Mary Mai and see?

Jack stared at him, and Will had an uneasy ripple down his spine at the feeling that maybe, just maybe, Jack could see, too.

“Brian,” Jack said, and something on his face made Will’s stomach flop. “If you’ll step out of here with me for a minute.”

“Jack,” Brian needled.

“Come on.”

The apparent Brian didn’t enjoy being shifted from his work, and it showed in his face. The incredulous expression twisted, then cracked somewhat as he gave Will the most accusing and understanding expression of disdain that he’d ever witnessed. He skirted the body and Will, then stalked from the tent with the beginnings of his rant starting with, “Jack, seriously, a civilian…?”

Will ignored it, though. His fingers reached for the watch on his wrist that he knew wouldn’t be there, and he sighed.

The body was older than a few days; it didn’t reek so much of decay as it did chemicals. Will circled it, studying the way that the wooden neck of the cello burst from his mouth, lips curled to reveal the artistry beneath. If he’d been wearing gloves, he’d have taken fingers to it, caressed it as he wondered at its purpose –

-No, no, the purpose was obvious, wasn’t it? The musician wanted to play. This was his magnum opus.

The throat was open, peeled back with efficiency, although there was a bit of classic showmanship in the way that it was pinned in place with pearl-tipped pins. The white, bleached strings at his throat turned out to be vocal chords, though in truth Will only recognized it by the thickness of them –normally they weren’t so white, were they? No, no…no. Blood had dripped onto the suit, speckled bits of red like burst holly on freshly fallen snow. The cold, even within the partitions, was biting. It was going to snow, soon. It was going to snow, and the Chesapeake Ripper had his fucking watch.

“You wanted to play him,” Will murmured, and it made so much sense. His throat was dry, and he swallowed, imagining the sort of music that would burst from someone like this, become from someone like this. He took a musician, and he made his very skin, his very bones into an instrument to play for the masses. A true arrogance, to take one so talented and make him your own toy to play at your leisure. He wondered what sort of thoughts pervaded the mind of someone that wondered the notes they could draw forth from the neck of the dead.

Nothing tasty, surely.

Will closed his eyes, and there was a flash of light that turned his lids pink –likely a reporter in the distance trying to get a good photo. He inhaled, and the taste was on his tongue, the scent of whatever had bleached his vocal chords stung his nose, and just in the distance, Will swore that he could hear the sort of music that would make tears come to even the hardiest of men’s eyes.

It would be mellow –something along the D-string, fingers fretting over the vibrato. Will swayed to the sound of it, the crooning lilt that made his bones vibrate, and he imagined the care it must have taken to lay him out so kindly, to share such art with the world –

-Art? Surely, in this man’s eyes, it was art. But for Will, too?

“Will?”

It wasn’t his name that pulled him from the sound, the sensation that sent goosebumps along his arms. It was more the tone, he supposed, and how it didn’t mesh in the least with F-Harmonic notes that settled deep like the ache of overworked muscles. He looked to the entrance of the tent where Jack was busy observing him, and he supposed that out of any time to be caught not quite ‘all there’ this wasn’t a good one.

“This isn’t an act of anger,” he said, and he cleared his throat to relieve the hoarseness from it. “Not at all.”

“He isn’t punishing the musician?” Jack snorted. “Seems like jealousy to me.”

“No, no, it’s –” Will scowled and rubbed at his mouth, swallowing down a foul word “–elevation, Jack, he’s…elevating them. They’re probably good musicians, aren’t they? First chairs, second chairs…he’s taking them, and he’s making them more. He’s making their music something that comes from within, something…”

He clenched at the air, grasping for the words that didn’t want to come easily. Jack stood by the entryway, patiently impatient as he waited.

“He’s… making them more than what they are,” Will finished lamely. “Taking the core of what brings their happiness, and taking that art and passion and ingraining it into their skin. That’s what he’s doing.”

Jack nodded and looked to the man, mulling a few thoughts around his head as he thought. It left Will feeling anxious. His watch didn’t buzz to tell him that he’d better take a walk through the office –is that what he’d be doing right now? He made a move to check the time, then hissed out a curse when he realized once more that it wasn’t fucking there.

“His intestines are missing,” Jack revealed. “Are you sure this isn’t the Chesapeake Ripper, Will?”

“Yeah, Jack, this…this is different. The Chesapeake Ripper isn’t so much a man succumbing to intrusive thoughts –this feels intrusive. Thoughts that pervade the mind until…” He gestured lamely to the corpse. The cello. The art. “And I’d say it’s here because he probably wants his name in the column, too.”

“Are you going to give him that satisfaction?”

“…No. One too many psychos, I think.”

“One too many psychos,” Jack echoed.

He was let go after he sighed a few things, and he headed into the office with an odd, lingering sound just at the edge of his hearing, like the haunting vibrato of a cello’s wavering song.

He tried to banish it, shove it to the far back of his mind where it could lay to rot and wither like his other tasteless thoughts, but there seemed to be a genuine lack of control. His thoughts leapt with short, electric burst, rapid sensations like the quick blinks of his eyelids, watering at the gust of AC that hit him as he walked by the lobby desk: the cop, the watch, the music, the throat, the cello, the need, the violence, the fury, the feel of the Ripper’s blade against his stomach, the putrid muck that fed through his veins like a poison because it’s no wonder you can relate to someone like this, considering your own tasteless, horrendous penchant for violence.

“Will, there you are –come on; are you coming?”

It wasn’t Beverly that yanked him unceremoniously from his thoughts, but Freddie. Just inside the elevator, she swung a checkered arm out to hold the door for him.

“Charlie is having a field day, you know,” she said as he stepped into the elevator. It chimed shut and shuddered before lifting. “Where the hell were you?”

“…I lost my watch,” he said. It sounded far more blank than morose, an odd feeling attached to it –confusion and disbelief rather than anger.

“Your watch?”

“It wakes me up in the morning,” he explained. “I don’t know where I left it.”

Freddie eyed him with extreme prejudice. It was reminiscent of the woman on the bus and Bryan poised beside the corpse, and it made a trickle of anger slither up his throat and lodge itself just at the back of his mouth. He had to resist the urge to spit it out at her.

“That out there him?” she asked.

“No. Someone else, someone…”

Someone that really shouldn’t be my problem right now.

Freddie laughed, sparing him the elongated, pregnant pause. “Wow, Graham, you’re really shook up. Did your grandma buy you that watch or something?”

The elevator dinged onto their floor.

“I never knew my grandma.”

“Okay.” She gave him another sidelong stare. “Just letting you know, Charlie’s-”

“Pissed, I’m late, there’s a dead guy on the steps outside, my watch is gone, and-”

“-waiting for you in the conference room,” Freddie finished. “Someone else is there to see you.”

That stopped him. Will turned towards the conference room rather than Charlie’s office, and he spared Freddie a confused, uncomfortable look.

“Yeah, someone’s in there to see you,” she said, and her mouth of secrets twisted into something akin to a smile. “See, not all bad.”

Not all bad, she said. Could still be somewhat bad, somewhat…

Just who in the hell would want to see him?

“I’ll go see to that, then,” he said distractedly, and he headed towards the conference room.

“Thank you,” Freddie prompted.

“You’re welcome,” Will replied.

He didn’t hesitate by the door because that would be cliché –Will Graham wasn’t much a person for such things as that. Instead, he walked right in with his shoulders hunched, his messenger bag digging into his collarbone, and his tie bunched up, half-hanging out of his coat –this he only realized when he saw a faint, faded reflection of himself in the windowpane across from him. He stared at that image of himself: glasses crooked, clothing rumpled, hands bunched to fists in his pockets. His reflection was more of the person that he generally tried to present at Tattler news; something innocent to be trusted and left well enough alone. He wondered how his colleagues would have described him, hunched over their keyboards with the pressure of deadlines on their back.

Something much like that reflection, he supposed. Nothing at all like the reality of himself. Nothing at all like what the Chesapeake Ripper was trying so desperately to reveal to the world.

“Will,” Charlie grunted. He stood from his chair at the head of the table, and the look he gave Will could have melted steel beams. “Glad you could make it.”

“…Rough morning,” Will managed after a beat. “Sorry,” he tacked on hastily.

“Well, you’re here. So is your guest.” Charlie gestured off to the side, although the look on his face barely softened. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Whatever lecture Will had been expecting wasn’t to happen, it seemed. Charlie excused himself from the room, nudging and shoving past Will who hadn’t managed to leave the doorway. Fight or flight instinct, he supposed. He needed an exit close.

It took too long for him to see her there, hunched back towards the small AV station where the TV and work videos rested, collecting dust. She was a thin, slight girl with classically straight brunette hair and pale skin found in most rural, mid-American homes. She turned to look at him only after Charlie had left, and although her clothes were plain, they seemed to be a sturdy, expensive make.

“Hello, Mr. Graham,” she said, and despite the watery, uncertain stance, her voice came out strong and sound. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Who are you?”

She smiled. “I didn’t expect you to recognize me, although I recognized you immediately. My name is Abigail Hobbs.”

A special, lovely thanks to my Patrons: Emily Elm, Matilda, Starlit-Catastrophe, Sylarana, Heather Feather, Frosty Lee, Duhaunt6, and Superlurk! You’re the best!

#LiaS scribbles #ill intentions #hannibal #hannibal au #hannibal fanfic #hannigram #slowburn hannigram #journalist!will #someone help will graham #find his god damn watch

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loneberry · 7 years

Text

Who knows why thoughts sometimes lose their wings

11 juin // scattershot consciousness, or: a mind in motion [transcribed from notebook]

What does it mean to wake with a feeling, & why?

Nobody knows why. Nobody knows why life was given to us.

Sometimes you wade through junk self-help advice only to stumble upon curious nuggets of truth,

about love’s closeness to death

or how love lets us glimpse the soul beneath layers of flesh

As we decay–

what’s there?

that thing, stubbornly itself.

“Soul is hewn in a wild workshop.”

Yesterday I watched the plants blowing & marveled that something invisible acts on matter: wind.

Is that why we conceive of God as Breath?

The person touched by God is in a windstorm

blown

like the film character Wakefield dislodged from his low self.

In some other world, did I volunteer for this?

Like an astronaut: I volunteer—now make me born!

Was I counseled by a bureaucrat of heaven

was I an angel who came to Earth

on the Wings of Desire

to be human

gasping alive every time I step out of buildings into the sun, how the exits of libraries & my psychoanalyst’s office become birth canals.

Weep thinking about that grace.

Consciousness expanding & contracting—a sparrow beneath my chair.

What was that moment when all of life contracted to a single point of

pure life

Woke up from the dream of hanging succulents with the Agnus Dei liturgy on my tongue

“Jesus lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world

Have mercy on us”

When I was counseled, pre-birth,

did they tell me about this pain

did I wake inside the pain-joy dialectic

between babble & searing beauty

Who knows why

we wake to life

beneath a red umbrella, consciousness blooming

& somewhere, the tree beneath which we will rest for Eternity

Do you see yourself

stopping to admire the roses in the setting sun?

I remember, desert nights listening to “I Lost Something in the Hills”

gliding beneath the big moon.

It was not Jesus imbibing & transforming all human suffering that touched me in the liturgy

but the cry for mercy that is answered.

It is usually not answered.

On the floor of the world, a cry for mercy

& only the silence of God.

But from that unanswered cry—grace?

Just as soon as it arrives

it is gone.

They put a new date on the birth of our species

We are 300,000 years old, at least

But how did we come to this?

did we eat mushrooms to grow language

& how did we become bipedal

& what vestigial body parts still exists as phantoms hooked up to my neural map

& what pre-adaption invisible (potential) limbs can I control with my brain?

is it a memory of what was

or a pre-cognition

of what is to come?

How glorious that every form contains both what it once was & what it could be

The historian looks in one direction,

the artist in the other

Between archive & horizon,

we are floating on ourselves

There it was

in absolute clarity

rinsed myself of me

but now I want to sleep

Life not calm

life was

canceling itself

but we were

lobsters

once

“how elegant, your back” Alex said

I was.

He’ll be here tomorrow.

My head filled with the sound.

Life & then…I want to make a poem out of flowers.

“The poem is almost over"—where did this line come from?—the unconscious belting STOP THE POEM!

You can’t keep going forever

But…head, soup, nowhere

the Górecki symphony he listened to deep in his sorrow, when he decided to come back & fight for love

Now imagine an image shattering & the shards congealing to form a new image

He said going through the pain was like that—

that on the other side was clarity

I hear Michael Eigen saying, go all the way into it, push through until you reach the Ecstatic / there’s no retreating

you aged—you can’t summon what once was so easy, to feel, but I was alive, & more myself when destroyed.

You read. You imagine all the things you could write, your own book on female lust, wandering, flowers, ecstasy.

Life was once—& then, I grew a brain

Tho I was still myself before I was born

Now imagine matter exploding

Now imagine this big rock growing an atmosphere

Now imagine—

then the sadness breaks

who would have thought

that out of that primary matter

sadness would be born?

Who would have thought

we’d make a world without mercy for the afflicted, brains disfigured & reordered by toxins, war, trauma—

what one has lived through

& the proverbial roll of the dice

My brother mentally impaired by a brain injury caused by a difficult birth

& the thought: I could be in his place. In prison.

Remember Eigen’s description of Kurt’s documentary

about a single lost soul adrift on the planet

What consolation was there except the light

& why wake up weeping at the memory of stepping into the sun?

Because in that sun, I could love

& you remember

stepping out of Widener Library

into the glory that was the setting sun

the way it set all particles alight

turning dust & pollen into glitter that fell from the trees in slow motion

or the way the highway became a snow globe on that gentle day in early June

when the cottonwoods released their seeds.

On the bus you imagined a single airborne cottonwood seed blowing across the length of your life.

Don’t you see

nothing is more significant than anything else

I hear them cry: have mercy

the worm crushed on the pavement cries

mercy, mercy

I see the church spire from another angle

everywhere, spires of consciousness

jutting out of the soil

"Mercy, mercy” we sing to the transmogrification machine some call Jesus

Spires of mercy

How is it possible that billions of years ago a light appeared in that vast darkness

what symphony was made in that instant

a dog, a cat

a squirrel thrashing itself to death:

all waiting to be made.

Mercy!

The mind quickens

the shore creeps

some dance

others nap

Tops spin, monuments are erected

complexity, tessellation, pyramids amid sand dunes, waves of mass extinctions

& the world growing dimmer

human consciousness wiped out. We saw,

we woke up. & then, the wind. What edge did we find, an emotional cliff.

My heart—throwing it into the sea.

There was everything

& then you can see

the contraction of sorrow

growing ever denser

until it disperses as sparrows

Is consciousness an accident of nature?

How, out of the infinite range of possibilities, did the shape of the honeysuckle flower become perfectly suited to the beak of its pollinator? Without striving—how is there elegance of design?

Why make a written language?

Why use it for something as inconsequential as this: to write down what passes through my head.

I wonder if the world will be sorry to one day lose me as a witness

I was not coherent

but I did my best

Why wake up weeping at the thought of the universe without a witness?

Then, the shift in the 3rd movement of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, when sorrow is released & transformed into grace.

How incredible

that some make symphonies

before one by one, the lights are extinguished

& all language is lost

My memories left me

I forgot

that terror

I walked across the field weaving my way around the the spires of splendor

Who was it that wrote

Medbh McGuckian’s language is made of flowers?

Oh how quickly the branches of the deciduous trees sprout new wings

But why do my thoughts sometimes lose their wings?

Why does consciousness sometimes flag, become a dark room without windows?

It is happening:

the future has already happened

because it will.

All I wanted was to stay awake long enough to feel—that’s all there is.

everything is as good as everything else.

Somewhere, someone weeping.

Why—this total equality of mercy,

even for the ones who wronged you

Who were you, touching across some distance?

What gift did you bring that I needed?

Why weep during the film Wakefield

when that awful man spoke the word “mercy”?

Did even he deserve it?

My heart aches for everything lost.

Mercy. How the word is an ax to the sea frozen inside me.

Mercy, they cry, have mercy.

I hear Cornel West quoting William James: religion is a cry for help.

Why cry for mercy in a merciless world?

Through the pain—mercy

what capacity for sensing the other was lost when he was in a rage

then found, when he looked & turned back from the path of cruelty

& in those moments hatred turned inside out & he emerged, disarmed.

Wind today shows no sign of abating

& still some are crying, mercy be this good weather

Lay your weapon down—

let the spires cut the wind

as ghosts rush through the forest

Here—in this moment.

What shatters

you know

that movement:

a soul in flight.

Someone raised the question—

what if the universe is one giant feeling being?

Weep for Kurt

& remember the profound equality of all things, how money distorts that fact.

Released from hatred.

In what ways did my wound make me merciless?

#mercy #angus Dei

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gokinjeespot · 5 years

Text

off the rack #1253

Monday, March 11, 2019

It's the Monday after moving the clocks ahead one hour so be careful on your morning commute. Some people may not be wide awake yet. It was downright balmy when I got the newspaper this morning. The temperature was above zero. A sure sign of spring is smelling the first whiff of skunk while out and about. Plus the cardinals are starting to sing. Yes, we had over 10 cms of snow fall yesterday and our plowing service even came by to clear it away but warmer weather will get here eventually and all that ice will melt.

Batman #66 - Tom King (writer) Jorge Fornes (art) Dave Stewart (colours) Clayton Cowles (letters). Knightmares part 4. This trip into Batman's brain stars the Question and Selina. I don't like that she smokes. I was hoping that the 2-issue interlude for the Flash crossover would mean that Mikel Janin would be doing the art for this issue so I was sorely disappointed.

Immortal Hulk #14 - Al Ewing (writer) Kyle Hotz (art) Paul Mounts (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). Wow. What a great way to reintroduce Betty Ross. "We Only Meet At Funerals" shows how far the character has come since she first showed up as Thunderbolt Ross's daughter and as a love interest for Bruce Banner. I like that the love story is still there with the menace to society ramped up more. It's been too long since I've seen Kyle Hotz's art on the racks. It's as close to seeing Berni Wrightson back drawing comics again. The surprise appearance on the last page gave me a hoot.

Avengers #16/LGY #706 - Jason Aaron (writer) David Marquez (art) Erick Arciniega (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). It almost looks like the Vampire Wars is over when the Avengers regain control of their team mate Ghost Rider. I liked the way Roberto was rescued because it wasn't what I thought was going to happen and I was pleasantly surprised. The solution justifies Blade's involvement. I suppose the Vampire War will go on the back burner once the War of the Realms starts in a month. There's another surprise appearance on the last page but I think we won't be seeing this character again any time soon.

Doomsday Clock #9 - Geoff Johns (writer) Gary Frank (art) Brad Anderson (colours) Rob Leigh (letters). I've been waiting for this moment in the maxi-series for a while now. The doctor is finally in. the big blue butt-naked god-like being, Doctor Manhattan, makes a solid appearance. There sure are a lot of DC super heroes in this issue. I don't know what the end result of the encounter between the heroes and Doctor Manhattan is going to be but I'm hoping that it's a doozy.

Blossoms 666 #2 - Cullen Bunn (writer) Laura Braga (art) Matt Herms (colours) Jack Morelli (letters). The Blossom twins are vying for the right to sit atop the Infernal Throne. They thought their deadly games were just between the two of them. A surprise twist keeps this creepy story interesting but I don't think I would be so interested if it wasn't for the great art. Betty and Cheryl never looked so good.

Meet the Skrulls #1 - Robbie Thompson (writer) Niko Henrichon (art) Laurent Grossat (colour assistant) VC's Travis Lanham (letters). Let's meet mom Gloria, dad Carl and daughters Madison and Alice, a family of Skrulls living amongst us tasked with trying to stop Project Blossom. If they can do that, their fellow Skrulls can take over the Earth. This was a lot better than I expected. I liked the youngest Skrull who was raised on Earth. She's the reason I want to find out what happens next in this 5-issue mini.

Ronin Island #1 - Greg Pak (writer) Giannis Milonogiannis (art) Irma Kniivila (colours) Simon Bowland (letters). You can tell by the title of this new comic book that there will be samurai involved. It looks like a coming of age story about two young martial arts students on an island but then morphs into a far eastern Walking Dead. Greg does a great job of introducing the two young rivals Kenichi and Hana but I'm not interested in finding out how they survive against zombie samurais.

Young Justice #3 - Brian Michael Bendis (writer) Patrick Gleason & Viktor Bogdanovic (art) Jonathan Glapion (inks pages 12, 14, 15 & 18) Alejandro Sanchez (colours pages 1 to 5) Chris Sotomayor (colours pages 6 to 16) & Hi-Fi (colours) Carlos M. Mangual & Josh Reed (letters). Seven Crises part 3. I loved the reunion scene with Bart/Impulse and Conner/Superboy. We find out how Superboy got to Gemworld and where the other members of Young Justice wind up. There's a nice little surprise that will rock the team later.

Ziggy Pig & Silly Seal Comics #1 - Frank Tieri & John Cerilli (writers) Jacob Chabot (art) Stefani Renee (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). I picked this off the racks because I liked the art. It's a silly symphony of funny animals and it kind of reminded me of Howard the Duck. It's not for kids so pay attention to the parental advisory on the cover. Hey, Deadpool's in it.

Domino: Hotshots #1 - Gail Simone (writer) David Baldeon (art) Jim Charalampidis (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). Cold War part 1. This is a spicier continuation of the 10 issue Domino run with the added hotness of the Black Widow and the White Fox. The ladies play politics while tracking down some dangerous alien tech. Many separate agendas means lots of drama. Throw in the surprise appearance on the last page and there's no doubt that I will want to read the next issue. I like Gail's take on Domino but what kept me reading was the art and I'm glad to say David does a bang up job.

Amazing Spider-Man #16.HU - Nick Spencer (writer) Iban Coello (art) Edgar Delgado (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). How do you get a lapsed Spider-Man fan to pick a Spider-Man comic off the rack? You put a hot Black Cat cover by Greg Land on it. This issue starts off the "Hunted" story where Kraven the Hunter stalks animal themed super humans. The story runs until May with an epilogue in Amazing Spider-Man #22. There will be 9 issue including 3 more .HU issues to tell the full story. That's almost a new issue every week or two. I think this will be a fun story. Well played Marvel, you pulled me back into the fold. I was amused while reading this because there are so many similarities between Spider-Man and the Black Cat's relationship and Batman and Catwoman's. I always felt that Marvel and DC poached each other's ideas and this is a blatant example of that.

Conan the Barbarian #4 - Jason Aaron (writer) Gerardo Zaffino (art) Matthew Wilson (colours) VC's Travis Lanham (letters). I was not enamoured of the art on the first page but it works great for this sword and sorcery comic book. What keeps me coming back for more is the writing. This self contained issue tells a tale of King Conan and why he was the Lion of Aquilonia. Man, I wish cover artist Esad Ribic would do an issue or better yet a story arc.

Avengers LGY #711: No Road Home #4 - Jim Zub, Mark Waid & Al Ewing (writers) Sean Izaakse (art) Marcio Menyz (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). Well hell, this is turning out to be a pretty good story. This issue features the origin story of Nyx and her dark brood. Find out why she wants to snuff out all light. Now I want to find out how the heroes prevent Nyx from getting her hands on the three Shards of Night so that she can plunge everything into darkness. I'm looking forward to next week when the battle for the shard hidden in Nightmare's realm is fought.

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another-bedeviled-murdock · 5 years

Text

Just some writing

So I worked on NaNoWriMo, and this is what came out of it. Thought I'd share it. There are warnings on this work!!!! This work contains graphic descriptions of suicide, abuse, and self harm. This is the very beginning of the work.

‘Freak’

‘Nerd’

‘Suck up’

‘Ass kiss’

‘Teachers pet’

‘Prude’

‘Troll’

Useless

Coward

Ugly

Fat

Worthless

There it was, the ever present word that stood out from the rest.

Worthless

The one that defined me. Nobody cared about what else I was because I was-

Worthless

It crowded out the sound of the running water, echoing louder and louder and layering like a symphony of damnation-

‘Why don't you just kill yourself already?’

‘Just kill yourself already’

‘Kill yourself.’

It was all I could hear, the voices drowning out every other noise. I could feel my chest aching, but I didn't hear the hiccuping sobs that probably echoed off the tile. I curled in tighter on myself, the porcelain too cold against my skin.

“Kill yourself”

I screamed, my fist shoved into my mouth and my teeth clamped down tightly enough to draw blood. I could taste it, hot and salty on my tear-thickened tongue. They were right. I should do it. I was worthless, so what difference would it make?

“KILL YOURSELF.”

I was so tired of refusing it, so I stopped. I gave in. This was it. I blindly fumbled around for the razor, that one, my fingers meeting it with a sharp sting as the blade sank into the pads. It was an odd sensation that overtook me, like relief mingling with the mounting fear. Relief I had made my decision. Relief I had given in. Relief I wouldn't have to fight anymore….and fear. I was terrified as I stared blurring at the silvery edge, the fear roiling, twisting, and doubling in on itself in my gut. My hands were shaking, I could feel that. They were cold, freezing except for where a premature stain coloured my fingertips. Those were warm. It was hard to swallow past the lead ingot settled somewhere between my heart and my throat, and I panted harshly past it as I set the thin edge to my wrist. ‘Sideways for attention, longways for results, right?’ A twisted smile found itself on my face, and I gritted my teeth as I battled the suffocating fear. ‘Just do it, fight through it one last time. Come on!’ I felt as if I couldn't move, but I pushed past it in a single, jerky slice. I gasped, startled at the momentary numbness in my arm as I stared at the deep, deceptively slim and neat tear in my flesh. It took a second for the pain to set in, a searing sensation like a line of heated iron on my skin. I doubled in on myself, pressing the torn appendage into my stomach like it would stop the pain. But it didn't. The fire raged, heat bleeding onto my shirt as if to burn away the frigid feeling of the tile. I didn't know if I screamed, the blood rushing in my ears to loudly for me to know as the pain closed in. Everything all narrowed down to the line of mortality that poured the life from my veins, nothing else mattering in that moment as I bled out. I writhed, a feverish energy seizing my limbs as sweat covered my skin. Time didn't matter as crimson pooled against the porcelain, only the gradual fading of the burning to mark the time I had left. It changed to a freezing numbness, not unlike what happened when I would hold an ice cube. The sensation crept up from my fingers and toes like a thief, stealing away the life in my limbs to quell the flames. I felt weak as I began to hear a pounding on the door, like I couldn't move a single finger anymore. My body felt heavy, like it was weighed down by bricks of lead to the bottom of a lake. The white paint on the door splintered, breaking apart with almost fascinating ease into jagged shards to expose the orangey-yellow wood beneath. The entire structure gave way a moment later, revealing an all too familiar face reddened with rage and exertion. It drew closer, words floating to my ears as if from a million miles away.

“Dammit, how could you?! How could you do this?”

It felt foreign and oh-so-exhausting, but my rubbery lips turned upwards in a faint grin as I struggled to breathe.

“I told….you...I’d...do it.”

A little laugh escaped my body, more akin to a faint, wheezing exhale as the ice seemed to encase my lungs.

“Asshole.”

His face reddened even more, but I couldn't hear him anymore. It was too late for that. I was beyond his reach now. I was gone.

#nanowrimo #original work #writing #abuse #suicide #graphic depictions of suicide

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ehshaapple · 6 years

Text

Jan 2017

April 2017; you should see her now!

This post is not going to be about Witchcraft, Magic, Kindred building, Sorcery, Bad Witches, Stephen King, or even food or gardening.

Except that it is.[1]

This post is not going to relay to you all of the details about where my behind has been for the last two years and what I’ve done and who I’ve done it with (and without) and how this or that came to fruition or about the evolution of my relationship to The Ancestors and The Gods or about the answer to life, the universe, and everything.[2]

Except that it is.

This post is not going to explain how, after losing my job and my faith and my in-laws, I lost my home and my spouse and my partner and my dog (dammit). And it’s probably not going to say too much about how I gained a business in a new town, a new love interest, a new house, a new work environment (or two), and a new perspective on life.

Except that it is.

This post certainly isn’t going to pick up right where we left off; because it can’t; because I can’t; because I’m not the same person anymore and I’m sure my voice has changed entirely: the narrative and narrative approach certainly has.

That part is completely true.

This post is going to be about what I did today. Just today. Because now is all that really matters, after all.

And, just let me put this down here and walk away: the universe already contains everything. Including bacon. Especially bacon. I’ll get to the bacon later.

I’ll begin at the beginning as David Copperfield teaches us is best.[3]

I woke up earlier than I have been. My sleeping patterns have become wacked over the last month; not that they were great to begin with. So, waking up early (voluntarily) was pleasant. I have the best jersey sheets in the world (sometimes they invoke a bit of a tussle, but that’s not altogether undesirable) and my room smells earthy—typically of lavender, sex, and herbs.[4] I enjoy having a room to myself, a house to myself. For someone who thrives on companionship, I really like living alone. I’ve become accustomed to waking up alone. I’ve even begun genuinely enjoying it. It allows me the opportunity to wake at my own pace without the need to tiptoe for fear of disturbing another, without the rush of preparing breakfast for whoever is simply going to die without coffee and divine-or-otherwise-bacon. I listen to podcasts connected via Bluetooth that echo through the Turn-of-The-Century Southern architecture that surrounds me. I play Madonna and Flogging Molly and Rammstein and Nina Simone and Hozier and (sometimes) Migos and Nathaniel Ratliff and The Decemberists on my Firestick TV as loud as I like and without fear of judgment. When I’m not at work, I wear knitted knee-high socks and Mukluks and shorts and ratted shirts and hoodies and a ponytail and my ancient glasses. I don’t wear makeup. I cook when I’m hungry. I sleep when I’m tired. I poop with the door open.

This morning it was cold, so leaving my heated room was a little harder than usual. I consumed coffee with CBD and heavy cream and the last chocolate Pop-Tart, relished love on my three needy cats, changed into work clothes, packed some supplies, and headed to the bank and then the store I own in my tiny new town.[5]

While tending my shop, I have long stretches of downtime with busy spurts where atypically joyful people come in and stare in wide-eyed wonder at the interior, the wares, my mischievous hair.[6] The shop smells of coffee, tobacco, and magic. I watch movies—it usually takes me all day to watch one film—listen to more podcasts, surf the web, grade student work (I also have a position as Assistant Professor of English and am teaching Shakespeare and Film[7]), order new merchandise, talk with friends, and read Tarot. Not all at once, of course. Today I wrote this.

Today I have some special projects going on: I’m expanding my business and this involves paint and hammers and Gorilla Glue and a surprising number of curtain rods. Today I took some phone calls from vendors and would-be-vendors. Yesterday, I got two out-of-the-blue calls from old Kindred folk, so today held follow-up messages. Today I started research on my next business venture. Today I did a little house shopping.[8] Today I thought about getting a puppy.[9]

Tomorrow I may look at trucks.

A thought occurred to me over and again: “What a year.”

The store is just shy of its first anniversary and the last year seems to have drifted by so effortlessly. I know it hasn’t. When I think about the chronology, it really hasn’t. At all. Like, not even a little. Like, there wasn’t a week that went by there for a while where I didn’t feel like Life had dumped my purse out on the table in the library during detention. I think about all of the hardship and loss that went into the inception of this business and the world I had to build on my own in the wake of all that hardship and loss; I remember the trauma (emotional and physical) that brought me to a place where rising from the ashes was the only option I had left.[10] I remember it, but I don’t feel it anymore. It all feels so easy now. I even quit smoking. And I only drink rarely[11]—and look forward to drinking even less, because … damn; let’s just take a moment to remember that PTSD and alcohol are not a good mix.

I had my annual March break-up in February, a little early, I know, but not everything can sustain to the full year mark. My heart[12] was shattered. But having survived three MAJOR breakups[13] in three years (one of which was a divorce), I learned some things. The most important thing is that someone else’s feelings are none of my business. Cain’t fix ‘em; cain’t change ‘em, cain’t take ‘em personally, and cain’t let ‘em rule your world. The only reason I mention it was that it may have been just what the proverbial doctor ordered. The metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back. The idiomatic final drop in the water clock. The not-so-figurative-right-thing-at-the-right-time that made this particular Witch sit on her hands (read this and say, “doctor heal thine own danged self”), drop the oars, button her lip, and all of the other weird phrases we use to say the same thing.

For two-and-a-half years, I couldn’t find divine. I knew it was there, I just couldn’t access it. For two-and-a-half years, I couldn’t find my (writing) muse. I knew it was there, I just couldn’t access it. For two-and-a-half years, I couldn’t find (business/work) inspiration. I knew it was there, I just couldn’t access it. For two-and-a-half years, I couldn’t find prosperity. I knew it was there, I just couldn’t access it. For two-and-a-half years—who are we kidding a decade or forever, I couldn’t find security and confidence. I knew it could be there, I just couldn’t access it.

After two years of digging myself into a quagmire and then six or seven months of climbing my way out, I discovered (remembered) the most valuable, most effective method of approach for life: let it go. Sit on your hands, drop the oars, button your lips, etc. Let it go and watch it turn to glitter.

When you’re so used to fighting and struggling to hang on for dear life, and so used to working and asserting just to be acknowledged as a worthwhile person, and so used to being deprived and struggling to make ends meet and to put out metaphorical fires, and so used to battling for cooperation and assistance, it’s hard to think of “letting go.” My gut reaction was, “If I let go, it will all fall apart.”

I was right.

Thank the Gods.[14]

There was that one last thing. That thing that made me throw my hands in the air.[15] That thing that forced me to let go for just a minute. I let go and actively decided not to grab hold again. I let go and let everything smash to the ground like the beautiful and terrifying timpani at the open of a symphony.

I let go and, indeed, it all fell apart. And with the shards of my life glinting fractures of light all around me, I could breathe. I didn’t have to hold it all together anymore. I didn’t have to keep track of all the parts. I didn’t have to worry about other people’s feelings that I cain’t fix, cain’t change, cain’t take personally, and cain’t let rule my world anyway. And, this time, in letting go I didn’t have to die.[16] All I had to do was not step on the allegorical glass in my figuratively bare feet as I walked away.

So, yeah. Today didn’t have anything to do with Magic or Witchcraft or Sorcery or healing or food or family or community-building. But it had everything to do with all of those things in every way possible.

It’s good to see y’all again. We’ll touch base soon.

Quarks, Bacon Fat, and All the Love in the World,

Ehsha

P.S. If you want a sneak peek at where this is headed. It’s headed back to where we were oh, so long ago. Back to where we prolly lost track of a lot. Back to where we clearly had some lessons to (re)learn. Back to what feels like an entirely different person’s life. Back to where we hope to be headed from here on in because this feels so much easier and absolutely more fun and entirely more gratifying. Back to the future, as it were. Have a look at The Bad Witch and The Good Egg and you’ll remember, right alongside me, that we ordered divine bacon and room service is bringing us bacon in the morning and all we need to do is go open the door.[17]

[1] Especially the Stephen King part. Watch 1922 before I blog again. It’ll be worth it. Plus Tom Jane.

[2] We all know it’s 42 anyway.

[3] And if you start singing Rodgers and Hammerstein, I’m leaving.

[4] Unlike the rest of my house, which smells like baked goods candles.

Unlike my kitchen which smells like cats and cast-iron cooking.

[5] Today was bangarang business, thanks for asking.

[6] I get comments often. Today was a particularly, “Gee you have lovely red hair,” day.

Senna conditioner, fellow gingers. Trust me.

[7] Don’t be deceived. I don’t teach *Shakespeare and Film* but *Shakespeare* and *Film.* I prepared for the former at the time of offer and was stunned to find that reality required the latter.

[8] I love my ancient house, but it’s too big and hard to regulate the temperature.

[9] I’ve always loved Great Danes—remind me to tell you about Duchess and Gertrude sometime—and Burmese Mountain Dogs.

[10] Well, there were other options but I died the year prior for about 4-5 minutes; nobody likes a one-trick pony.

[11] It was so shitty there for a while that I was leaning on a BOX of wine every 2-3 days just to cope. Now if I drink 2-3 glasses of wine, I’m hammered.

[12] Ego, if we’re honest. It was coming for a while, my heart knew even if it didn’t like it.

[13] #polyamoryproblems

[14] God, Divine, The Source, The Universe, Nuit–pick a name, any name, It doesn’t care.

[15] And wave ‘em like I just don’t care.

[16] This was a realization I came to at Yule but wasn’t able to really incorporate until all the shit had finished hitting all the fans.

[17] And tip your waitress.

Guess Who’s Back? This post is not going to be about Witchcraft, Magic, Kindred building, Sorcery, Bad Witches, Stephen King, or even food or gardening.

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tornline · 7 years

Text

shards of rain.

easy street.

Life is easy on my mismatched, green, holey sneakers. The days are sunny, my shoes are comfy, and there’s a house party only an hour away. I’m on my third to last cigarette, plenty of time to exhale and exhale again. Shades of green trees line the streets, curtsying as the cars zoom by. The shades are less translucent than my posse, thick and real, their weight held by the earth. My backpack isn’t as light as these shades; as I pull it back up on my shoulders every each street I cross. The fam, my dark skinned individuals back on the sunny (South Saginaw, MI) side, calls this pack my circus, containing ten journals and a pet rat. I never know when I’ll run into one of my fellow writers. We always have time to share a bottle of wine and half a dime all night, reading poetry. I am carrying this burden of assumptions, walking across the Saginaw River, down East Genessee, to the east side. The breeze is gaining momentum. My jeans whip like a flag tied to my legs. On the next step my eyes lower to the cracked cement between cars and burned down businesses, and I notice that my shadow is missing. Up above, the clouds are gathering, having a party of their own.

Oh, and did I mention I’m not alone?

My company is several boys and girls, the girl with bright pink hair, giggling too much for my style, and the boys passing a brown paper bag bottle to their left, opposite of the street. Cars whizz by, and for some reason, I am rather embarrassed by these kids, more so than if I’d been by myself. Their shoes are noisy, their talk about music boring, their words cloud around my head thicker than the clouds above. I cannot think. I cannot breathe. I do not feel the rain coming down when I am walking alone.

“Shiloh! Get over here!”

They are sitting on the stoop of a tattoo shop, their faces soft and bored, and their lips pouting. I notice a razor hanging from the Jew’s neck. The Jew is a big guy, a couple of years older, who buys our cigarettes and beer. I went to his house once. At that time, his mother was the only Jewish fortune teller in Saginaw. He gave the razor to me as a present, when I became someone else who goes by the name of Ginger. Ginger had a shaved red head and a nose chain. She talked a lot, while Shiloh is a girl with long dark brown hair, who rarely talks at all. I had let him wear it for today. I am envious of the glimmer, too far from my heart, so I ask for it back. I am separated from them. They support a wall of conversation that does not contain my brick. I carve the word “wall” into my arm. I should have carved the word “bar,” because it’s shorter. Ginger would have thought of that, but Shiloh doesn’t think of these things. Regardless, wall, or bar, the rain won’t wash away the blood for a year.

Counting.

The common fear of thunderstorms will brew in me for a long time after this night. The bolts are shooting down around me, each one planting bars of a mental prison. The thunder is shaking reality into bits and pieces of memory, each reflecting shard falling into puddles around my feet. All I have is the journal tucked under my arm. The nurses had adorned me in baby blue pajamas, the shade of a childhood sky. The nice lady had taken my ballpoint pen, and now I sit in a chair two times my size, my slippered feet swinging off the edge. Fingering the thin, blue material, I count patterned squares in the carpet. 67 and ½. Given or taken, for the lightning and thunder interrupts my count, rattling the three inch thick glass where I rest my head upon. The room appears as a dentist’s room, but a tad bit more comfortable, with a television behind a glass screen, boxes of puzzles, books, chairs piled with pillows and blankets, and a table littered with juice boxes, milk cartons, and single gram cracker wrappers. I forget what I am waiting for, but the nerves of impatience cause my fingers to drum on the worn wooden arm of my chair. I wait for change.

Distant footsteps introduce a thin black girl wearing normal clothes, blue jeans and a sweater, with worn shoes. She drags in four garbage bags of clothes, two in each fist, and sits next to me, also waiting.

“How long have you been here,” I ask, eyeing her warm jeans.

“Two years,” she says quietly, gazing at poster with flat flowers, her lips tightening into a straight line.

“Goin’ home?”

“Naw, I just turned eighteen. They shippin’ me upstate.”

Interrupted.

I'm sleeping in a stripped bed, the plastic mattress squeaks when I turn my body. Every hour the security guard cracks open the door, shining the flashlight, revealing my squirming silhouette. A large black woman is masturbating in the bed next to mine, grunting in her activities. I concentrate on the crickets, which I can still hear through the glass and brick. I am a spectator of their symphony, and finally nap in a soft patch of grass next to a bubbling river. I am still as the night, doing my best not to move, not to rub against the mattress. My dreams are of highest quality.

I wake to fists pounding my face in, but I only welcome the hot tears, while the blood tickles, trickling down my cheek. Somewhere I hear screams, but I am laughing, I am comfortable, I am somewhere else.

Christmas time.

I wait by the phones. They are constantly occupied, patients cradled in plastic chairs, their twisted faces weeping into their stiff bath robes. We are lined up along a brick wall; there are only three booths for the sixteen of us. I am one of those who rarely call home, but rather call my people stationed in separate wings within the facility. We plan shit. When I’m on lockdown, they report the weather, who’s strapped down, who overdosed, who’s going home, who’s being shipped upstate. Often we plan escape routes and drug traffic. My teddy bear, Fluffy, has been a mule for the past six months. Today, I plan to call Rob, one of the many forbidden boyfriends I’ve had this year, because relationships run short. We run around; if we’re lucky, have a quicky in the bushes, until we are banned from each other after getting caught. Then I find someone else, usually the new patient, because they know nothing. Crouched against the brick wall, I’m fingering his four digit number on my sweaty palm. He came back from a home visit, and rumor has it he’s got some good shit with him.

Suddenly, one patient is pried from the phone after wailing too loudly to her father about being raped two years ago, and the phone rings. I look to my right and then to my left, waiting for someone else to answer it. I let it ring, waiting for it to stop, because I’m next in line. After fifteen rings, I answer it.

“Yeah?”

“Shiloh? Is that you?”

The voice is one of the few I have had the blessing of remembering. It is soft and warm, coming from the heart of my mother. I know now, I won’t get to talk to Rob today.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How are you?”

I imagine the Christmas tree in their living room, but I cannot remember what the room looks like. I imagine my own version, placing smiles on my sister and brother. My dad is cracking jokes at the dinner table. In reality, my parents would be separated in three months.

“I’m here.” What else would I say? I am getting by, through what pleasures I can steal from the security guards eye.

“Did you receive the present I bought you?”

“No.” Now it’s my turn to curl my body up in the chair, my face towards the brick wall. The fact that she brought me a present means that she was here. No one tells me these things. I even receive her letters weeks later, after the staff has read them.

“They didn’t give it to you? I bought you a plant!”

I could hear her smiling. In here, I learned to read body language very well. Things usually meant the opposite; because there was the ideal patient we were all trying to be, because the ideal patient got released. It hurts to hear a real smile.

“How come you didn’t come see me?”

“I couldn’t see you. It wasn’t during visiting hours.”

Down the hall I spy Sue, a nurse that I didn’t particularly like. She is a middle-aged woman who always wears skin-tight black pants with an oversized sweater. She now pretends to read the paper, and we meet eyes every five minutes. I know she is watching my every move. I’m on double watch, and two people watch me at all times. That is when I stopped shaving. I think of these things every time our eyes meet, hers painted black, mine puffy. In this paranoia, I can’t hear my mother on the other line. Next time she lowers that paper, I give her the middle finger under my chin, then my hand becomes a gun that shoots my head, and I motion sliding a razor across my wrists.

I’m on the ground. Don’t remember why. My chin grinds into the carpet. I think of my mother, when they handcuff me to the bed. I see her in the ceiling, in the dull gray sky contained in a square window. I wanted my present. That is all I wanted.

The present is a real Christmas tree, a miniature pine tree that goes up to my waist, decorated with tiny ornaments and a red ribbon tied around the shimmering pot. By the time I received it, the tree had been raped. They removed the ornaments with hooks on them, and had even uprooted the tree from the pot, to search the soil. The tree was already drying up, because it sat in the nurse’s station, and no one had bothered to water it.

Tasting.

This New Year’s Eve, I will taste a woman. Mary had copped sleeping pills from the schitsophrenic down the hall, and we crushed them, and then put them in the night staff’s coffee around nine pm. We weren’t sure if the pills were going to react over the caffeine, but the guard was knocked out half an hour before the stroke of midnight. Mary and I sat Indian style on her bed, playing Uno. Hyper, I start a pillow fight. Every fifteen minutes we poke our heads out the hallway, but no security. In the dark silence, the confessions came.

“I am in love with a woman.” she says, blushing. She is the whitest girl I had ever met, with red lips. She snorts when she laughs.

“You have no choice but to love a woman,” I say, “unless you wanna be manhandled like me.” They had finally put me on sexual alert, and I could not be alone with any boys.

“I don’t know how to love a woman.”

“It’s easy, you’re a woman. You know what a woman wants.” I had learned what a woman wants by being tight with the most popular lesbian in Detroit. On her home visits, she parties hard, and had once masturbated on the stage of a Gwar concert.

“Show me how.”

I tell her the anatomy of a woman, and the power of the pivotal clit, what I believe to be the key to any relationship.

“Where is it?”

We run to the door then to check on our dreaming security officer. We even step up to him, and touch his cheek. After his dreams linger, we tiptoe back to our room and close our door. Now we just have the other girls to worry about.

I proceed to casually take my pajamas off and then my panties, and show her my clit.

“What is so special about that?”

“Have you ever touched yours?”

“No.”

“Try it, use your finger…” I proceeded to show her how to masturbate.

“How do I touch another woman?”

“You don’t, you use your tongue.”

Mary learned to masturbate, and I learned that vaginas come in more varieties than do penises. She became a lesbian then, and dated her first girlfriend for over a year. I thought about how moist women are, and how their femininity cannot remain dry. I continued to collect lesbians like I did Bazooka Joe cartoon gum wrappers, by fertilizing their lovemaking and writing their love letters.

Upstate.

Upstate always refers to another hospital, whether it is in the southern hemisphere of Michigan, up north, or even Canada. My upstate happens to be a bedroom with a window to view Saginaw in all its nightly pleasures and secrets. I am roomed with two other women. At night, when they cry and sleep, I spy under the flickering streetlights cats prowling across the street, and wish I have their freedom. Yet though there aren't bars, there are still walls, walls with doors that I am legally not allowed to come and go through. However, there are enough loopholes, enough moments free from eyes and cameras, which nurture privacy, dreams long ago dormant, giving me enough time to scratch my ass or pick my nose without a staff worker jotting down my every move.

Not a pleasant place to grow love.

Love and I would climb out of windows and crawl across rooftops when the heat of the night became too much for us. Too much for the night staff too. They snored in their offices, dreaming of relapses. We would meet there, in between days, to create new lives. It was especially exciting when it rained. I would climb out of the window, getting my tank top caught on a nail always, and the cold rain would beat down on my back. His crackhead roommate, the lookout guy, would laugh at me from across the horizontal layers of rain, as I trekked across the slippery tar on bare feet. On good nights, when the one-man night staff fell asleep, we’d go for a run on the town. Sometimes those nights would stretch too long, and we'd creep in during the morning smoke break, casually smoking a cigarette on the stoop, watching the sun come up.

Yet, now we are here, lying down on a field, waiting for the sun to come up, hours away from the smoking stoop. My bones are shivering because he isn’t warm enough, because he isn’t enough. The rain falls like tiny gravel on top the single sheet thrown over our entwined bodies, as we folded in the edges under our weight to make a tent over the tickling wet grass.

“When is the train coming?” I ask, trying to sleep beneath the pattering rain, which is massaging my whole body. I often would shifted my body, numbing one side, and then press it against him, to bring the numbness back to life, while the other side then became numb.

“3 am.”

Time is not a factor when one defines their own schedules, and my schedule said sleep. So I slept, and the train never came.

boys.

Corey would eventually come. I wait outside the hospital, staring at an empty parking lot, wishing it would rain, because then I would have looked more miserable, my hair would be stringy, given that tragic sexy look of a woman caught in a tree, in the rain, in a parking lot. He would embrace me, and I somehow, would be wearing heels, lifting one foot in the air. Then the credits would roll down, and Sara Jessica Parker would be playing me. But, that never happened. I sit on the cement curb and cry.

I hear the rain this time, and this is odd, because it isn’t raining. The rain I hear consists of remnants of my past collecting in my hair, tiny shards of glass, of memory, reflecting stories. While most people’s expectations exist in their futures, mine exist in the past. I count on the past’s truth because it has already happened, but I couldn’t count on when it will happen again. The future is my guide, we walk hand in hand. She opens doors for me. She is a He, sometimes. The past is a dark familiar. I never know when I’m there or when I will go there again. Now, a memory is within the curtain of my hair over my face, a transparent ghost reflected from shards that tell bits and pieces. I have the scars to prove it, dashes across my arms, legs, chest, hips. I see them in the shade of my head bent forward, over the cement curb. I have been here before, when Here wasn’t here but was somewhere else. It’s all the same.

This is when I lose my mind.

Today is a crack in this broken mirror, the shards piecing together a jagged past, veiling the future with a false reality. These past familiars blur reality into an unsatisfying ignorance. Like today, full of sun, but the ghost makes it full of rain. I follow the familiar, cradle his hand in mine. I sit on the curb, holding his hand, my head bent, staring into the darkness between my thighs. Tears drop to the cement, hot and real. I listen to the rain of yesterdays.

Corey finally pulls up in his car. The tires grind against the loose gravel. That noise is always real. That soft boyish face leans against the steering wheel, twisting in concern for me. That body is real, but I choose to give it many names. It walks over to me. Those hands, calloused and soft, pry my stubborn arms from around my knees. All of the names brushed my lips. I am kissing many boys, some who drive cars, and some who ride bikes. They all embrace me, and tell me to never look that tragic again. But this is a tragedy. Pieces of reality, the boyish face, the gravel, the sunshine. They are cracking the familiar rain. The collision of reality and the past, Corey being concerned and the memory of rain, inserts a shard of my fiancé in my heart. This ghost outshines them all, the shard of memory more vivid than the blue eyes that are looking into mine, and the kiss more real than the lips that are brushing against mine.

The familiar shard is my fiancé, who once left me in this parking lot to drive a Mercedes over ninety miles an hour into a tree. His smile is more beautiful than the smile Death now grants his borrowed human skull.

Shards.

Grey water is dormant in a bath tub. When the water is hot enough, when the submerging of my body into the grey blesses me with a brief burning sensation, I lean back to count the cracks on the ceiling above. My hair is boy-cut, so the cold shiver down my back from the tub’s lip balances out the hot water. Sometimes I shoot water up from between my teeth, so that fat bubbles collect in the cracks and slide, dripping back down onto my breasts and face. My wedding ring sits on the cold mouth of the toilet. The same pair of pajamas, white with blue stripes, are thrown over the antique heater, and my pink slippers, one right side up, and one upside down, just so, about two feet from the cream plastered walls. I drew this shard, this moment in the bathroom, in my journal for preservation. I wanted to prevent a future that had already occurred, but which I had not accepted, from arriving. I carried this mirror, this map, as if it were my life. Thus, every Tuesday night, at precisely 6:13 pm, I draw a bath.

At the moment, I am living in what most people would call a half-way house. I was court ordered to be rehabilitated for two years, so I live with eight other women, and have two roommates. To prevent any quarrels over the bathroom, I let them shower first at night, so I always have 6:13 to myself. Every Tuesday, for 6 months, I never hear one of the males during smoking break tell the security guard on my fiancé, who is coming to get me. I never miss my ride. He never drives into a tree. In fact, he is still on his way to come get me. I never understand the sad faces, the half smiles, the flowers, the visitations. He is still on his way. I have been bathing for six months.

Then a shard of reality cracks the mirror.

One of my roommates has to use the bathroom. I have been smoking a cigarette by the window about ten minutes after my bath, when she barges in. She is a middle aged woman, around fifty or so, and so she announces all of her movements with groans and farts. When she sits down, she is one of those who you are afraid is never going to get up. My wedding ring clatters to the tile floor. I am still sitting in the corner, smoking my cigarette, but her groans are too loud. Her twisted face too real. He is too gone. I stay next to the window for many hours, rejecting group therapy time when the staff knocks on the door. When the sun sinks, I tie pantyhose in two slipknots, place my neck in one, a plant hook in the other, and kick the chair I am standing on over.

Reflections after the pantyhose snapped

It is now necessary that I explain myself, that I explain the series of changes that takes place after the pantyhose snaps. I had been trying to kill myself since age thirteen, first with over two hundred of my father's pills, then with three layers of stitches in my wrist, then almost shooting my brother in the head because I wanted to see how fast a bullet would go through my skull, not to mention the amateur task of holding my breath under water as a toddler. Thus, having had the pantyhose snap, having not cut the main artery bulging between slit flesh, pinching that artery, watching my arm turn white, knowing if I cut it, that's it, having not shot myself in the head, I decided that I didn't want to die. My past had failed me, had returned with promises of false deaths. I didn't decide to walk away from past, I merely just saw a glimpse of myself for the first time, without the distortions of those shards of the past reflecting false realities. I never understand why that cracked mirror now projects a clearer reflection of the present, but it does.

The morning after the pantyhose snapped, I hear the birds twittering just outside my window, and feel a pang in my side. I also miss my mother, something I'm not used to. When I look in the bathroom mirror, I am fat. My face is round, my cheeks bulge slightly, and I can’t touch my toes, much less see them. When I get on the scale, I am nearly one hundred and ninety pounds. I never thought I was fat. I never looked at myself in the mirror without trying to cover myself up. Later that month, a group worker would call me fat. That confirmed it. When I refuse to go to group therapy again that morning, he laughs, and says “I tell you what, if you work out during the entire time of the group, you don’t have to go to group.”

That first month I would lose thirty pounds.

Pieces

I haven’t been in school for over a year and thus decide to go. I am nineteen and still in rehabilitation. The rule is as follows: absolutely no outside trips by yourself without a rehabilitation worker or your case worker. At this point, my case worker and I are tight. She’s been with me since I was thirteen, holding my bloody hand on the side of a hospital bed, and arriving to my treatment meetings all over Michigan. So, on a weekly visit, I tell her they, the rehab, entrust me to enroll in school, and she believes me. The next morning I leave on a bus to school after breakfast, declining to do my chores. I run to the farthest bus stop, ignoring their threats to call the police. After weeks of daily drug testing, they kick me out. I move into a foster home and get a job on McDonald’s graveyard shift, while going to school daily, and taking night classes before work. I always carry a switchblade in my sleeve, because I have seen almost as much blood during night school as I had within hospitals.

connecting.

One girl befriends me during high school, the adult education school I regestered in to get a diploma. She has different interruptions in life, a couple early pregnancies and her man being in jail, to bring her to these dark halls. We laugh over our frustrations as she braids my hair for my graduation ceremony, while I chug on a forty o. I had been declared valedictorian, and though it wasn’t over an average public high school, I am still proud, because I had previously dropped out all together. I had been told to write a speech, and I did, but it was rejected. The speech wasn’t a negative speech; I was just trying to touch the hearts of the hooligans, to speak to them about why school is important. These cats sell drugs on the corner, these cats are the ones who are wanted city-wide, and these cats are the ones who fire the guns in the local shootings. I see them come and go. I've held one’s hand as he cried because his boy is fleeing parole. He was laughing at the same time, remembering when they stole their first car together. These are the kids I am graduating with. Junkies, pregnant women, killers, juvenile delinquents. The prom had even been canceled for the past four years because of stabbings and shootings.

I read my speech, but no one hears. Everyone is yelling over each other, throwing basketballs and books up in the air. It may be as well, because I read the speech that had been rejected anyways. I am tipsy to say the least, and my heels are suffocating my pinky toe. Today is in a photograph of my sister, brother, and I. It will sit in one of my mother’s shoeboxes.

Still connecting

In the past few years, I still collect photographs, some that fit into frames, and some that fade into memory and become silhouettes of emotion, like déjà vu. The feeling is familiar, but I don't remember why, often until months or years afterwards. For example, for six years, I couldn't have anyone hug me, or touch my back. Then, when I recently got hospitalized for suicidal intentions last year, I remembered. The police asked me to come with them into the ambulance. I eyed their handcuffs dangling from their belts, and remembered the fights I've had with them in the past. One cop always stands by, while the other jerks my shoulders around. I always swung with my right fist, and because most people know this, they would knee me in my back to the floor, and hold me down while they hand cuff me, my chin would rub into the cement or rug, or wherever else I happened to have been arrested.

The next time someone hugged me, I realize that it is that nook in my back that is being touched, where so many knees held my ass down. Then, miraculously, I let it go. That shard, the memory of their knees, has been holding me down all these years, though the cops had actually released me long ago. I had once dreaded back massages, and felt stiff hugging my own mother. I would learn soon to embrace physical touch, to learn how to caress, and how to be caressed, even how to receive pleasure out of my sexuality.

Another shard of memory still reconnecting to reality is my fear of waiting. I never knew what I had been waiting for, but when I realized that whatever I had been waiting for was never going to arrive, I began walking on my own, never staying in one place. I let the train pass, I let my love die, and I quit riding time. Thus, I now wait only for opportunity. I am waving at the world in the passenger seat of a fellow college student’s car. Okay, a stranger’s car. But he is a college student. This time is different, I swear. The bus doesn’t ride past 5:00, but my first class ended at 5:00, and usually I left early, but this time I didn’t. I have a destination; I have a home, and got a ride. It’s funny, when you have a moral reason for getting a ride, it isn’t hitch-hiking. Hitch-hiking is when you’re searching for drugs, for a party, for a lay, for a lover. You have to pay a fee sometimes for hitch hiking, or they’ll drop you off at a rest stop. But I have to go home, to do homework. My mother is there waiting for me, and she doesn’t need to be in the rain to love me. He drops me off at the bus stop, and there I wait for some time, counting the raindrops that cling to the glass.

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