#and i had to tell her it was a suicide hotline and she stops yelling for a minute and then says well you could have just told me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

i-may-be-paranoid · 8 months

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had a breakdown over putting on clean bedsheets which turned into a breakdown about being invisibly disabled which turned into a breakdown about the various small seemingly-normal-at-the-time ways my mother fucked me up and inadvertently taught me that 1) I was responsible for her emotional reactions to me even as a kid so it was on me to keep her from yelling at me and 2) the only way to avoid pain/conflict was to never be vulnerable or talk about things that actually mattered to me

some examples:

when she noticed I particularly liked a food she would remove it from the pantry and lock it in her closet so she could dole it out as a reward for doing what she wanted. I caught on to this and stopped talking about my favorite snacks or eating too many of them in front of my parents. this worked too well and they stopped buying more because they thought I didn't like them anymore. I should mention this is about several different foods over a long period of time

any time I asked for something I wanted, she said "yes - if you're good." this would, of course, be her answer forever no matter how "good" I was, until I finally realized that it was just a carrot on a stick and "yes, if you're good" just meant "no" and resolved to get what I wanted on my own (or as my parents liked to put it, "behind our backs"). I had minor success in getting her to quantify "being good" into a concrete set of requirements, but even still, I once asked her point-blank if "if you're good" just meant "when I feel like it," and she said yes. she has some pretty mask-off moments when she's angry. I still hate the word "incentive"

this one's pretty much just a Thing Parents Do, but it's worth mentioning - whenever we fought, she always went straight to taking away my phone (or at least remotely disabling my internet connection and all the apps except for the factory defaults on it). y'know, my sole connection to my friends and the world outside my house. as a young trans guy living with transphobic parents, this was particularly distressing

speaking of my phone, the same parental controls vpn they'd installed on it to do the above also allowed them to see every search term, every website I visited, in real time. and, of course, they could block websites (or, if I had broken their trust recently, block everything that wasn't explicitly whitelisted). goodbye, trevorspace. goodbye, google plus. they could see my texts, too. sometimes my mom would randomly take my phone and when I got it back a couple of contacts would be mysteriously missing (two that spring to mind are my sole irl trans friend at the time, who my parents thought had somehow retroactively transed my gender even though we really only became closer friends when we came out to each other, and the trans lifeline. yeah the suicide hotline). actually, that's how my parents found out I was trans! they caught me taking selfies, something I never did (therefore making it suspicious behavior), and went through my photos and found a ton of trans pride graphics. I had felt confident for once because I was binding with two boho bandeaus, packing with a sock, and hiding most of my hair in a beanie. I was going to come out to them the next week, on my thirteenth birthday. probably would've just ruined my birthday in hindsight

I could rant about my parents' transphobia for days, but I'd rather not. I've done that before and I'm too tired to do it again. this post is mainly just a way of documenting abusive behaviors for next time I tell myself it "wasn't that bad". anyway my mom would regularly rifle through my physical belongings too. I learned not to hide important things in my room

and speaking of my room she would sometimes remove my bedroom and/or bathroom doors for taking too long in the shower and stuff like that. and I had to earn it back by - you guessed it - Being Good™

oh also I should probably mention those times she screamed "you have no privacy" or (at a slightly later date) "we own you" in my face over and over again even when I started crying and begging her to stop. for the crime of complaining that I felt like my privacy was being violated. after a week or so, I felt like I'd cooled down enough to tell her that when she'd yelled "you have no privacy" at me, I felt really hurt. because that's what I was supposed to do, right? that's the diplomatical format they'd told me to voice my complaints in. this led to a second "you have no privacy" incident, same as the first. after one of these incidents, dad was there to mediate, which meant that instead of another screaming match there was a pointless semantic argument over whether she was really yelling "in my face" and exactly what the distance between her and the edge of my bed had been. at least there were no tape measures involved though lol

this brings me to the whole blaming-fights-on-me thing. most fights sprung from either a disagreement between my mother and I about something important (such as my own identity or what I thought was fair) or my struggles to do things my peers could do just fine due to my adhd. I was so bad at getting ready for things on time. even now, on medication, I struggle with daily hygiene. this was very frustrating for my mother, and she often ended up yelling at me. she could say some very unkind things "in the heat of the moment", as she would say. if I yelled back, I was punished. when I tried to express how deeply her words hurt me in an attempt to repair our relationship and get closure and reassurance… she took it personally and the fight started all over again. and I was punished again. this would sometimes result in a chain of related fights over a period of weeks. eventually, my parents told me that if I didn't want to start a fight, I should structure my complaints like so: "when you did x, I felt y." such language would avoid making anyone feel accused or defensive, they said. it made no difference. I used the correct format, shit went down anyway, I was told I should've used the correct format if I didn't want to start a fight, and so on

my therapist at the time (girl I miss u also sorry my mom fired you for trying to convince her to accept my transness) suggested that, when my mother raised her voice at me, I should remain outwardly emotionless and resist the urge to talk back to her or raise my own voice, and see what happens. I tried it once and she called me "a psychopath and a sociopath" for not yelling back. can't win

things really only calmed down because I concluded that asserting myself wasn't worth it. it was safer to go back into the closet and keep my head down for four more years until I was legally my very own person. my mom once said she knew me better than I knew myself. I could only laugh. it's not that I gave up completely, though - I just stopped openly rebelling. I figured out (limited, but lifesaving) ways around the parental controls. I visited trevorspace on my laggy old ipod that wouldn't stay logged in to let my friends there know that I was alive, but wouldn't be able to talk to them anymore. I stole it back a couple times when my mom found and confiscated it. there eventually came a point where her reaction to its suddenly disappearing from her drawer outweighed having it back, but by then the parental controls had become so buggy that I could almost have a normal internet experience. after I turned 18, I finally convinced my parents to allow me to remove it for good (I'd long since figured out that it had a digital tamper alarm). I'm still dependent on them, but I don't have to be secretive anymore, which feels weird. sometimes I boast to them about the extent of the freedom I'd carved out "behind their backs" just for some spiteful pleasure. I think they already knew about most of my exploits with the vpn, they just couldn't do much about it. but I don't tell them everything - I don't want them spying on my online accounts again, and I want to still have a few tricks up my sleeve if things somehow get bad again. they still make me apologize, but it's not like the aftermath of a fight. wow I'm getting off topic

alright so there's also how my mom dealt with my self-harm addiction: not well. she made me promise to stop, and when she discovered that I didn't, she got pissed. she kept telling me how I'd promised her, how betrayed she felt, how could I do this to her… and I was the one who was bleeding. I just felt worse so I (this is becoming repetitive) got better at hiding. funny thing is, almost every time I cut was to calm down after she yelled at me!

another victim-blaming anecdote - one time in 2018-19, I was drying off after a long shower. this consisted of wrapping myself in a towel and sitting on the toilet lid to zone out for half an hour. I had nothing to do that night except climb into bed. what I did not know was that mom was waiting impatiently for me to come out so she could give me my nightly meds. she became more and more frustrated, and ended up berating me through the door. the quote that stuck with me was "even a 2-year-old could get this done faster," which, when I type it out, actually doesn't sound all that scathing. dad came in soon after that. I tried to make them aware of how hurt she had made me feel, I even used the special Fight-Preventing Format, but I was completely ignored in favor of calls to come out of the bathroom and the occasional phone-confiscation threat. I repeated myself a few times, and eventually, she told me that if I didn't want to be insulted, I should've finished drying off sooner. dad was here for all of this and agreed with her. this helped me to realize how complicit the "mediator" was in all this shit. at some point I started crying, and I'd made it clear that I wasn't going to come out while they were out there - which prompted my mother to stage whisper to my father (so loudly I could hear it through the door) her catchphrase at the time: "she's just being manipulative." this did not make me feel any more cooperative

I can't believe I forgot to mention the gaslighting! every time I tried to bring up a time she'd said something that hurt me - even a day later! - she'd act all shocked and say she couldn't imagine ever saying something like that and act like just because she didn't remember it must not have been real. this eventually led me to believe that I was subconsciously making up reasons to hate her, because there were no real reasons to hate her, and I wanted to hate her in the first place because I was actually evil and she was perfect and good. needless to say, this bred a lot of self-loathing. and then an Incident would happen and I would be lucid for like a day and then slip right back into the cognitive dissonance. this happened for about a year when I was 14. I only found out the truth because I found a transcript of one of those fights from directly after it had happened in a google hangouts conversation (with the aforementioned trans friend) that my mom thought I'd deleted but I'd really just archived it. I had also tried to record our fights in the past, but the vpn that took away apps and internet also took the camera function with it. it was practically an abuser's toolkit. anyway this made me feel worse because if she could convince me that I was lying, she could convince anyone, so no one would ever believe me if I told them. instead of having a healthy, balanced worldview about it or something, I just flipped the old one on its head - she was the manipulator trying to control my life and mold me into the child she wanted, and I was the victim struggling to fight back. I'm glad I grew out of that. being so openly full of ire for her just made me look like a brat, and it was no way to live anyhow. I understand now that she genuinely loves me - and that it's exactly that love and worry for me that drove her to do things that hurt me. she thought she was doing what was best for me. unfortunately she didn't think to listen to my opinion or like see me as a full individual separate from herself

ftr her memory is genuinely kinda shitty because of her own adhd but it was awfully consistent in forgetting all the times she's emotionally scarred me. man this post was gonna be a lot shorter but then I started Remembering more Things. there's still more I've thought of but then forgotten while writing something else tho

hold on now I remember. last year she straight-up told me that all this time when I had said I didn't understand something that was "so simple, everyone understands it" she thought I was lying for the express purpose of pissing her off. this… explains a lot

overall I feel like she had an idea of what I should be like and she feels personally slighted whenever I remind her that I'm not the child she wanted

there's more but it's almost 3am and I am so tired I am barely able to type. do you love the color of the vent post

#man. this one's pretty heavy #originals #avpd #cptsd #long post #tw sanist slurs #tw sanism #tw ableism #abusive parents #psychological abuse #emotional abuse #parental trauma

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beezleberry-breakie · 2 years

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Max x Holly

Disclaimer- I don’t own Max or BLD. They belong to @hotpinkmoon

This was not proof read. I made this while in an extreme state of upset. Mention of being suicidal and panic attacks. Please if you ever feel suicidal, contact a friend or a loved one who will understand. If dire then please call your emergency hotline.

She couldn’t help tapping her foot while the tears continuously fell down her face. She was having an episode. Holly understood why it started, she was just scrolling through her Instagram and came across photos of her “friend group” at the carnival in town. It hurt to look at the photos, watch the small videos they posted, and hear the yells of ecstasy as they enjoyed the time of their life.

And like the stupid loveless idiot she was, Holly liked them all. Writing captions of “aww y’all have fun ;)” with little fucking hearts attached, writing all this nonsense just to appease her feelings of fitting in. Deep down she knew though. Knew that she was only ever called if they needed something, if they just wanted to feel better about their lives as they bragged about their “friend time”, the times they spent together at beaches, amusement parks, random areas. All in front of Holly. As if she wasn’t there. As if she wasn’t gritting her teeth, fighting back tears, wondering to herself why she wasn’t good enough to be their actual friend, and then just smiling when they tell her “you should’ve been there”.

How many times had she heard of their plans and asked to go, eyes beaming as they numbered off each person in her friend group, only to be met by silence and a reply of “well if you want to come…”. It always stung. Each time it stung more and more. She just got into the habit of not asking. Just fulfilling whatever request they sent her, at least it was some form of interaction she received. Some form of human contact, sometimes the only contact she got.

Holly rubbed at her swollen eyes, and got up to shut off the lights in her bedroom, the glare of the bulbs were starting to burn her eyes as she kept scrolling through her friends’ instagram feeds. When did they go here? Like. Didn’t they tell her they had no plans? Like. Why was she just so unloved when she gave these people the world. Like. Her time. Like. The tears she fought every night. Like. Holly just stopped scrolling after seeing the last photo. All of them smiling and just…so happy. Without her. Maybe she should just end it all. Just forget about the pain and wash amongst the river styx to a better tomorrow.

Holly’s shoulder sagged at the defeat. How many days has she put herself through this hell. Through the humiliation just to be loved. She knew her friends spoke behind her back, made fun of her, even at one point mocking openly to her face, and she took it all. Even tried to joke with the mockery, but when she ever had a time to herself, away from them. She cried. Oh how hard she cried, using her hands to cover her mouth like she was now. What was she doing so wrong?

A text. Probably some stupid fucking spam alert. Holly roughly wiped her eyes to open her messages. Only to be greeted by a single name.

Max: Bonjour Holly :), I see that you’re online. Are you ok?

…

She laughed, she laughed so hard through the tears. What was this nonsense? Another trick to play on her? God her mind must’ve been hallucinating on desperation to think she received a message from him. After her maniac laughter subsided, she started sobbing again. What a cruel evil joke.

Holly: hi max. just can’t sleep.

Well it wasn’t a full blown lie, she glanced at the time on her phone. 3 am. How long had she been agonizing herself over her friends? Another message.

Max: Well that’s no good. Need a midnight snack?

She rolled her eyes. It’s fucking 3 am Max, think we’re way past midnight snackery.

Holly: sure why not.

Max: Good :). Then open your door, it’s a bit cold out here.

Fucking gods almighty, when? She sighed, sniffing as she sent a message back.

Holly: door’s unlocked.

Max:…

She heard the squeak of her front door open, before the soft click of it warned her of Max’s approach. He was deemed Adonis incarnate, she had to look somewhat proper, not like a wet hag who just got divorced. So lazily she got up, using her blanket as some sort of trailing cocoon as she made her way to the bathroom. Yet, she was already sniffing and crying when her bedroom door opened and Max came in with a bag of eclair donuts in his hand. God damn it. She didn’t even make it halfway to the bathroom.

A wail fell from her lips as she crashed to the floor, using the comforter to shield herself from Max’s prying eyes. Why the hell was he here? There were folks willing to kill to just be in a room alone with him, but here he was trying to pry the blanket from off her miserable form to run his fingers through her hair.

“Mon Cher”, he had climbed under Holly’s cocoon blanket and encircled his body against hers. His chin resting on top of her head, while his arms pulled her back to his chest. Max could feels the shakes and rattles of her sobs. It pained him to see her like this. He held her tightly. So tightly that it was comforting to be in his embrace. To forgot about her pain, and grievances, and short comings. To be with someone who understood her without a need for her to open her mouth and scream.

They laid there for a few hours, his steady breathing regulating hers, his fingers sending light touches to her arms, grounding her to this plane of existence. Reminding her that he was here loving her, holding her, even if it meant to do so on the dirty floor. No words were said, her sniffling soon drying out to mere soft breaths, informing Max that she had finally fell asleep. He gave a sigh of relief, carefully lifting his deadening arm out from underneath Holly to remove the comforter from over their heads.

It was almost dawn, the eclairs would just have to be breakfast. After putting the desserts in her fridge, Max gathered Holly into his arms to place her back on her bed. He laid beside her, wiping away any stray tears and kissing her swollen eyelids softly. She moaned at the touch, turning herself towards Max, her body snuggling against his form. He could only give a soft smile, gave another soft kiss to her forehead before he reached over Holly to grab her abandoned phone. Scrolling through her Instagram to see where she left off.

Hmm. He recognized this group. Also recognized a certain “girl friend” that his Holly hung around. So they were the reason she was crying and desolating herself to the point of grief. Max pulled Holly closer to him, as his eyes narrowed at the group of friends from her phone. It seems he had some vermin to eradicate.

Max somehow became my comfort character.

#hpm.max #bloodlustdevotion #bloodlust devotion #fanfic #yandere #visual novel

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incarnateirony · 2 months

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You know, thinking about my post about the metempsychosis shift, the mood shift, her increasing stretches of silence, restrained posting into rebellious burst posting into only her morning fuckup of "oops I showed I never read a hermes book... twice, back to back" into day long silence, like.

She's sitting there trying to figure out another narrative to spin, ain't she?

Like she's so deep in this shit and told so many lies until she forgot the truth, and acted so grossly, and abusively, for so long, for no good reason but exactly what I've explained to her as her lone excuse. But then, like... how can she be bad guy? No this is meanie evil ex she had to warn the whole goddamn world about wherever he went, years after breaking up. The fuck you mean she was the baddie like the nazi gif that only exists because her great uncle commited a holocaust?

idk man. Weird. And you can't even fully villainize my other actions. Did I cuss and yell and threaten when it went off? Yeah, because not only was this bitch shaking the dragon graveyard under me nonstop, but I packed the superbowl up our asses to make it loud while she pretended not to see or hear anything, and man, I got a lot of amp and bass. And there's a lot of pissed off generations. But in the end, I'm still trying to help at least Athena once she showed signs of life. There are ways out of this for her that don't involve losing everything, and it literally comes down to 1. Face yourself 2. Tell the truth. Out Loud.

So it's gotta be increasingly difficult while she watches gnostic mages and channelers sing my song and talk about the great game, the suicide hotline, 8ball, whatever the fuck. Just clearly specific ass things, while she tried to ignore me even essentially controlling her blog, timeline, warning when her bird would get sick, all of it. Just ignore ignore ignore. And now there's all this pain, suffering, and public humiliation on her hands, just because she wouldn't stop 2 months ago. Or 8. Or 3 years. Or 10. Or 20.

But actually making her type out something to the tune of "I was fucked up, I was wrong, I've hurt people, and I've been living in a state of ongoing delusion that is destructive to myself and everyone around me, the rumpocky was never real, Brian was always part of Aaron's Brain, and that's different from my Niekai Brain, and my addiction to Brian* has led me to do terrible things." is just. Like. 404 error what the fuck do you mean misfit Athena kinnie drained of 90% of her IQ can be wrong?

Even once she faces it, once she does for real, there's nothing she can do. Like. ATHENA GO KICK AARON'S ASS. Why. Beyond him being one of the annoying tricksters. Like he got me out. You're functional now. WELL UH--BECAUSE. No, no falling down the pit of Because, that's where the Hounds of Reason have been chewing on you.

I dunno, it just feels like she's legit trying to find a way she can still roleplay narrative out of it while half glancing over her proverbial shoulder at the idea of the Athena inside, not outside, but the ramifications of it on her entire life are too much, so just. Catloaf and pretend not to see or hear it while trying to meditate out a way to go "but... this is HIS fault, somehow."

The only fault of mine is taking the Action of setting off this trap, but I was not even alone in that, and had assistance from brothers and capacitators outside of myself that wanted to see it born, too. And I will own the Act of this, because this Act brings Freedom, for myself at least if not her. That's it, that's the part that's my fault. Setting at least myself, if not her, free. Or burying a monster. Her choice which it becomes.

Otherwise? Naw lady. You even drove into this while I warned you for months on my blog not to. This is all you, lady. Just cough up the air jordans, the confession, the apology, and start deleting shit that doesn't belong to you.

It's time to let us go and actually move forward with your life.

You'd be surprised how many less pills you'll need to not rip out your hair once you do that, much less what kind of "magic" you can do. No seriously before you needed like one bipolar medication and probably coulda used the ritalin, so that's like. 2. Not handfuls every time girl.

There is no magic, only Will.

Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law, and sometimes that involves destroying evil for giggles.

youtube

And even once she faces it, then Mark has to face his complicity and involvement in it, and has to start facing his own actions and shadows all the same, and everything that was enabled down Delulu Road. And Shea will have to process that about their entire relationship.

Mess.

#Youtube

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konigluver · 11 months

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this is going to be a really triggering story but i need to tell people who will actually care and wont blame me . teigger warning for rape , drugs (weed) , police , panic attacks , kidnapping and just general terrible shit .

PLEASE READ THE TAGS BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING WITH THUS POST . and for the love of god , dont say anything mean , im very fragile rn . i know im posting it on the internet for everyone to see , but i just .. i need support .

so yesterday , i was at an rv campground , and i told my boyfriend to check up on me every 10 minutes , because i was going on a walk , and he told me not to leave the campground at all . but when i sat down at the playground in the campground , these two guys with knives came up to me and pressured me to go with them to their motel . it was a good 30 minute walk there , and im in a new state so i didnt know what to do . and i hid it from my boyfriend because i was scared he would get mad at me for not staying at the campground . when the guys took me to their motel , they made me smoke a bunch of weed with them , and i got really really high . so high i couldnt move or speak properly .

after a while , one of the guys asks the other one to leave us alone , and he raped me once the other guys left . so after he was done , he told me to walk back home by myself . so i was walking back to the rv campground which was across a freeway and a bunch of really busy streets . i called my online friend and told him everything , but he was in a different country so he told me to call my boyfriend . i called my boyfriend , but i was still so scared that he would get mad at me for leaving the rv , that i just told him i zoned out and walked too far . so he told me to calm down , helped me get my shit together and stayed on the phone with me til i got back to the rv , and he was being so nice to me and so calm , reassuring me that everything was fine and that i would make it back home fine . when i finally got back to the rv , he had to leave for a second to calm down , because he was freaking out .

i eventually told him the next day , and he was pissed at me for lying obviously but still was there for me . and im so glad he was because he made me slow down and think about what to do next . so i called the sexual assault hotline who took my info and story and gave it to the iowa police department , for them to call me back . when the police called , they didnt believe me . they kept asking questions , and they even put me on hold for a while . but i eventually told them the story , and they said they would talk to thwir detectives , and have them call me back . near the end of that call , the rv had stopped at a rest stop , and i was in the bathroom the whole time to talk to the police and the hotline , because the did not want anyone in my family hearing about what happened . so when we werw at the rest stop , my grandma started yelling at me to get out of the bathroom . i said i couldn't because i was having a super important phone call . she waited a few minutes , and yelled at me again , and since i was very emotional still about this whole thing , i yelled back at her "i cant im on the phone with the cops" i wish i had lied to her or something . but she forced me to end the call with the police , and tell her what happened . i didnt want to tell her in the first place , because i KNEW she would blame me , and make me feel like shit . she doesn't understand anything , and she doesn't ever listen or say the right thing . so when i told her , she obviously got pissed and started saying i had no common sense , that i never think , and that i shouldn't have been outside . since i was still worked up about everything , i started screaming at her to stop , that i didnt need to hear it . i was screaming and sobbing in front of my 10 year old brother . and my grandpa told me to stop . so my grandma slammed the door in front of her , and everyone left the rv . i called the suicide hotline because i was having a full blown panic attack at that point , and i wasnt going to kill myself , but i didnt know who else to call . so i called the suicide hotline , and texted my boyfriend , and they both calmed me down . justin , my boyfriend told me to calm down , and try to heve a conversation with my grandma about what happened , and where my outbursts were coming from . how fucking emotional i was . and so i took some really nice deep breaths on call with my boyfriend . before i was ready ti talk to her , my grandma forced me out of the bathroom

again . (sorry for the break in text tumblr didnt like how long that paragraph of shit was) she yelled at me to follow her and i begged her to stop talking and listwb to me . she looked at me without saying anything , and i told her the entire story . she then said AGAIN that i dint have common sense , that i make stupid mistakes , and i put myself in danger because i dont think . she also said that i never think about anyone but myself , and that i ruined the road trip . she told me i put everyone else in danger and just was repeatedly telling me that i make stupid decisions , that i have no common sense , and that i never think about anything but what i want and need . so i just asked her to stop , almost begging again , and she said "this isnt going to solve anything " and walked away . i went back to the bathroom for a bit to text some people and update my boyfriend , but my phone was about to die so now im sitting up at the front with my phone on the charger with her right in front of me . i apologized to my little brother , and he said he loves me . at least i know ill have him ❤️

i just .. i feel like getting fucking kidnapped and drugged up and raped was my fault , all because my grandma cant be the adult in this situation . shes not helping me , shes not trying to do anything but make feel bad about something that i couldnt prevent . unless i stayed in the rv , but that shit happened and i cant dwell on the past . i just cant deal with my grandma anymore . i told her i couldnt tell her anything because i dont trust her , and she got offended . but who would fuckung trust anyone who reacts like that ? im thinking of running away or some shit , but i just cant . i cannot deal with feeling like a terrible person because of her . she says shit to me , and when i confront her about how she makes me feel , she says she never said any of it , and makes me feel even worse . she constantly talks about my weight , calls me stupid and a pig , and when i tell her to stop , she gets so offended . she says "im not calling you fat , i just want you to watch your weight , because girls can gain so much so fast " snd when i tell her to stop calling me stupid , she says , "i never said you were stupid , i just said you lack common sense ." which tbh , to me is the same fucking thing . i dont hate her , i just dont trust her to love me . i dont trust her to be there for me .

i know this post was supposed to he about my rape story (my 12th rape story) but i just need to get everything out , and i need to hear that it wasnt my fault . i know damn well it wasnt , but my grandma makes me think it is . she makes me think im selfish , and stupid , ans gross and i deserve everything bad happening to me .

just please be here for me .

#rapevictim #abuse victim #actually disabled #tw triggers #tw rape #tw suicide mentions #tw police #i was raped #shitty grandma #i called the police and theyre taking care of it now #im safe #please #please help

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helliontherapscallion · 3 years

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Safe

Pairing: SBI family x reader (platonic, one shot), BASED OFF FROM CHARACTERS NOT ACTUAL PEOPLE

Warnings: child abuse/neglect, bullying, alcoholism, death of a parent, mentions of panic attacks, injury, mentions of a dog’s death, mentions of eating disorders, mentions of suicide attempts, depression

Word count: 7,730

(A/N): if you’re not feeling safe at home or are being abused, please contact the proper authorities. Here’s the abuse hotline: 1-800-799-7233, my DMs are always open if you want to talk

You met Tommy and Tubbo when you were in third grade. You were a relatively quiet kid, the type to always keep to themselves and abstain from social activity. Mrs. Jansen, being the nice woman that she was, let the entire class choose their own seats.

“Welcome to your first day of third grade, class! I’m Mrs. Jansen and I look forward to getting to know all of you. As you can see, there are enough desks for all of you. You may sit with who you want.”

You shifted around uneasily and gripped your book in your hands as your classmates hurried to get the back seats. After every seat was taken, you walked to the only seat left in the front. You were between a girl and a boy. They introduced themselves as Dorothy and Samuel, and were relatively kind to you.

As the class passed their second week, two boys that sat in the back row made themselves apparent very quickly. They were both rambunctious, always disrupting the class with their giggles and whispers. Mrs. Jansen had warned them multiple times that she was going to separate them, but it seemed that they didn’t think she’d do it. One day, she finally had enough.

“Tommy, Tubbo. I’ve given you plenty of warnings, I’m going to have to separate you. Dorothy, Samuel, can you please switch places with them?”

You could feel dread wash over you. Why was she putting you between them?! What did you do wrong to deserve this? You could swear that you’ve done all your chores, you even made your mom smile at you! She never did that.

They pouted as they sat next to you, Tommy on your right and Tubbo on your left. You already missed Samuel and Dorothy. “Thank you. (Y/n), make sure they behave.”

You shrunk down into your seat as you felt Tommy’s glare burning holes into the side of your head. Tubbo, on the other hand, was watching the lesson with bored eyes and his chin propped up in his hand. You tried to take notes, but you kept getting distracted by Tommy’s heated glare. You were going to fall behind, you couldn’t have that. Mama wouldn’t like that.

After the final bell rang, you hurried out of the classroom to avoid Tommy’s wrath. You could hear him shouting for you to stop, but you never stopped until your hand was grabbed and yanked backwards in the empty playground. You fell back onto the pavement of the basketball court and whimpered at the sting in your palms.

Tommy glared down at you, “you gonna cry? Serves you right. Never tell on Tubbo and I. Got it?”

You tearfully nodded and he grinned maliciously at you, “good. Tubbo, let’s go. Wil and Tech’s probably waiting for us.”

The brunet was staring at Tommy with a shocked expression, unmoving. Tommy rolled his eyes and huffed before he grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the crowd of families. Tubbo looked back at you with an apologetic expression and watched as you looked at your scratched up palms.

You wiped at your tears as you stood up and started to walk home. Your neighbor’s dog behind the wired fence barked at you as you hurried past it. You never liked that dog; it was a drooling, angry, ugly furball. It scared you, but not as much as Mama did when she drank her adult juice. She was scary when she drank it. You tried hiding it from her once but she grounded you from eating dinner and snacks for half a month. You didn’t try to hide it again.

You trudged up the creaky wooden stairs of your porch and tried to open the door only to find it locked. You tried to knock on the door but Mama didn’t answer so you just sat on the front porch waiting for her to open the door. She did so when the sun was setting, surprise and then anger shining through her hazy eyes. She yelled at you before she sent you to your room for the night without dinner.

The next day when you were sitting alone at a lunch table, someone plopped down in the seat next to you. You jumped and scooted away from them, looking up only to see Tubbo. He was smiling at you.

“Hey, I’m really sorry about Tommy, he gets mad easily.”

You eyed him warily and clutched your open book, “...it’s okay.”

He grinned and scooted closer to you, peering over your shoulder at the book. “What’re you reading?”

“‘Harry Potter’.”

“Oh I love that book! My favorite character’s Ron, who’s yours?”

Surprisingly, the conversation was pleasant before he was dragged away by a glaring Tommy. You might actually make a friend after all. Later that day after school, Tommy once again stopped you in the school yard. This time, he shoved you to the ground and started to shout at you.

“You do not talk to him, freak! You’re gonna mess him up, he talks to me and me only. Do you unde-undastunend?”

You gulped and shakily spoke up, “yes, and it’s ‘understand’, not ‘undastunend’.”

His glare intensified before he reared back a fist. You yelped as you curled into a ball with your hands protecting your head. Before he could hit you, you heard the stomping of shoes against the concrete.

“TOMMY STOP.”

You could feel a hand on your back and a gentle voice asking if you were alright. You hesitated before you looked up to see an older boy with a mop of curly brown hair on his head and wire glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. He reminded you of Harry Potter. Looking past him, you saw a tall pink haired boy glaring and lecturing Tommy, holding the struggling boy in place with a firm grip on his elbow. Tubbo was just behind him looking down and shifting on the balls of his feet.

“I am so sorry about Tommy, are you alright? He didn’t hit you did he?”

You shook your head and the boy heaved a sigh of relief, “that’s good. I’m Wilbur and that’s Technoblade, we’re Tommy and Tubbo’s brothers. What’s your name?”

“(Y/n).”

He smiled at you, “that’s a lovely name.”

“Wilbur, let’s go. This one,” Technoblade shook Tommy’s arm, “needs to talk to Dad.”

You watched as Tommy’s movements stopped and he looked up with wide eyes. “No, please don’t tell Dad. Please-”

Wilbur stood and helped you up before grabbing Tubbo’s hand and lead him away, “you aren’t weaseling your way out of this.”

You watched the brothers leave, feeling guilt wash over you. You didn’t want to get him in trouble, punishments were the absolute worst. Even though he shoved you and almost punched you, he didn’t deserve any punishment. With guilt weighing down on your shoulders, you walked home. At least Mama was in a good mood, she made you some mac n cheese for dinner.

The next day, Tommy trudged up to your desk and put a tupperware dish on your desk before sitting down in his seat and ignored you. Tubbo sat in his seat next to you and smiled at you.

“Open it,” he jumped in his seat slightly as he watched your expression change to shock. In the container laid five chocolate chip cookies. You had only had cookies once in your life and that was during a class birthday celebration a year ago. “They’re our Dad’s secret recipe, I helped make them! Um, Tommy wanted to apologize to you.”

You glanced at Tommy. He was glancing at you over his shoulder and blushed a bright red when he saw you looking at him. Tubbo cleared his throat and gestured at Tommy. The blond crossed his arms and looked off to the side. “Sorry,” he mumbled halfheartedly.

After that, they started to sit next to you during lunch. Tommy was a bit cold towards you, but you found yourself beginning to relax around Tubbo’s friendly aura. Soon enough, you started to supply him with more than a few words per sentence. Tommy eventually got bored of eating in silence and would join your conversation. You three became thick as thieves that year, you even met their Dad. He was very different from Mama; he never yelled at you, he was always giving you snacks, and he even smiled at you often.

That house became like a second home to you. Eventually, you ended up spending more time at the Minecraft residence than you spent at home with your mom. Over the years, she got worse with her drinking. She was always passed out on the couch and when she wasn’t, she was swaying on her feet in the kitchen staring at a portrait with dazed, wistful eyes. You can remember when you first realized that she had a problem and always being unhappy and drunk was, in fact, not normal for a parent.

It was a warm spring day in seventh grade. Luckily, you had your health class with Tommy and Tubbo. You were currently learning about alcohol dependency and the effects it had on the body. The teacher listed all the symptoms your mom had; the uncontrollable urge to drink, the aggression, the shakiness and dizziness, everything. When you came to the realization that your mother might have a problem, the teacher started to explain the disorders and diseases that could come from heavy drinking, most of them having the potential to be fatal if the drinking persisted. You felt like you were drenched in icy water as your body seized up in fear for your mother. You stared unseeingly at your notebook at the symptoms of alcoholism and associated disorders. You didn’t want your mom to die. You had to do something before it was too late for her.

“(Y/n)?” You jumped and looked at the person who called your name. Tommy and Tubbo were giving you worried stares. “Are you okay?”

You shakily started to put your supplies away into your backpack. The class had been dismissed and you didn’t even realize it. “Y-yeah. It’s just- I’m worried.”

“Yeah, I’m worried too,” Tommy laughed as you followed the two out of the classroom and to the courtyard. “That essay’s gonna be awful.”

“Oh god we have an essay?”

“Yeah, Mr. Smithers assigned it to us before the bell rang, are you sure you’re okay? You’re usually on top of this stuff.” Tubbo threw a worried glance towards you.

“Yeah, just a bit distracted today. I uh, have to go home. Like right now, my mom wants me home right after school today.”

You sprinted off towards your house. When you reached your neighborhood and ran past the wired fence. The bulldog that lived there was now old and gray. You found out that his name was Buster and he was actually a total sweetheart if you slept next to him on the other side of the fence on more than one occasion. Buster watched from inside his doghouse as you sprinted into the house. Luckily for you, the door was unlocked and your mother was passed out on the couch surrounded by glass bottles. You locked the door behind you as you rushed over to her intensely watching for any sign of movement. She looked dead, her skin was pale, her hair matted, and her mouth gaping open showing off her yellow stained teeth. She wasn’t moving, were you too late?

Just as you started to panic, she snorted and started to breathe. You slumped in relief as you stepped over the beer bottles into the kitchen. The table was sparkly clean with a pristine picture frame resting in the middle, a stark contrast of the beer bottles that littered the floor and the piles of dirty dishes in the sink. It was of a man standing stiffly in a military uniform saluting at the camera with a stern expression. He was an exact copy of you. Well, you were an exact copy of him; that man was your late father.

“Hey Dad, how was your day? Mine was awful, I learned about alcoholism and cirrhosis today and- and I’m worried about Mom. She’s been drinking a lot lately.”

You stared at your dad’s face behind the glass as if expecting a response. You wanted some reassurance from the man. You wanted him to tell you everything was going to be okay and that he’d handle it so you could be a normal kid. Like usual, his steely expression didn’t budge one bit.

You sighed to yourself sadly and trudged to the refrigerator opening the door. The beer bottles stared back at you tauntingly. Your fingers twitched on the fridge door as you contemplated the consequences of throwing away the offending glass bottles. You remembered in second grade when you hid your mother’s alcohol she punished you by withholding food from you. She’d probably do worse this time, but the consequences were worth it if you were going to save your mother’s life.

It took you ten minutes of tossing alcohol into the garbage can until the fridge was left barren of the drink. Without the green bottles, the fridge was completely empty with the exception of milk and a few probably rotten eggs. You struggled to take the trash out to the curb and started to work on homework in your room.

At seven at night, you could hear her roll off the couch and stumble into the kitchen. A series of frantic rustling and banging sounded downstairs before you could hear pounding footsteps storm up the stairs. Your door flung open to reveal your red-faced, livid mother.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“M-mom I hid them because we learned about alcoholism and cirrhosis and-” You cut yourself off when she walked over to you with her arms extended towards your trembling frame. You tried to scoot as far away from her as possible, but she grabbed your shoulders with clammy but firm hands, shaking you roughly.

“Are you saying I have a problem?! You spoiled fucking brat, you’re the problem! Everything was amazing before you came and fucked up my life. You took him away from me. YOU FUCKING KILLED MY HUSBAND.”

You could feel tears start to drip down your cheeks as you remembered that day in first grade when you begged your dad to get you some McDonalds for dinner. When he relented, you cheered and your mom laughed at your excitement. She was so full of life back then; her hair was shiny and bouncy, her skin was unmarked and flawless, her eyes were lively and bright. Her laughter was perhaps your favorite memory of her. Then everything went to shit when your dad never came home and your mom got a phone call saying that your dad was killed in a car wreck on impact. You could remember your mother’s heart wrenching sobs as she collapsed to the floor and pulled you tight against her body. As if she was trying to protect what was left of her husband.

You were snapped back to reality when your mom shoved you back onto your bed. The happy, beautiful woman that you saw was replaced by the shell of a broken woman. Her silky hair turned dull, her smile turned into a grotesque scowl, her loving eyes turned cold. She truly was a husk of her former self.

“Stop crying, you’re not the one who’s life was ruined. I want you out of my house in ten minutes. You’re gonna not step foot anywhere near here for two weeks. If I even see you on my property before those two weeks are up, you’re fucking dead.”

You frantically nodded and watched as she stumbled out of her room. You packed what you would need in your spare backpack and ran out of the house past your mother sobbing and babbling incoherently to your dad. You flinched when you could hear a bang and the sound of glass shattering when she threw a bottle at your retreating figure.

You ran until you couldn’t run anymore. Your legs brought you to the park where you spent most of your childhood. Everywhere you looked, you could see glimpses of your mom and dad pushing you on the swing, Tommy and Tubbo running from you playing tag, Mr. Minecraft putting a bandaid on your scraped knee. Tears streaked down your cheeks as you pushed yourself up and went to your safe place. It was a little nook deep in the vegetation where nobody could see you. You originally found this place when you were playing hide and seek with Tommy and Tubbo. They never knew where you hid.

Tears moistened the soil underneath you as you pulled out a blanket you had hid in a plastic grocery bag and spread it out on the floor. You curled up on it and cried freely into your hands. You didn’t sleep much that night.

That was the first time she had kicked you out for that long. You barely ate in those two weeks, wolfing down any food you could get your hands on at lunch. Lunch for you was the small scraps of food that Tommy and Tubbo shared with you. Mom never packed you lunches or gave you money to buy things anymore. To make matters worse, they had told their dad that they thought you had some form of eating disorder.

About a week into your exile, you finally visited the Minecraft residence after avoiding them for a week. You remembered how the blond man pulled you aside into the kitchen. He gently sat you down and pushed a plate full of chicken and vegetables in front of you. You looked at him confused as he gestured towards the plate.

“Eat that, I heard you haven’t been eating much lately.” When you made no move to eat, he smiled at you. “Go ahead, it’s okay if you don’t eat it all. Just eat some of it.”

That was all you needed to hear, you began to eat quickly like a starving wolf. It’s been a while since you had more than half an apple to eat, let alone an actual homemade meal. When you were done, you looked up to see the older man looking at you worriedly.

“...Are you not getting enough food at home?”

You scrambled to find a lie, “my- my mom is away a lot on business trips. We don’t really eat much.”

His worried expression grew tenfold as he moved to kneel in front of you and put his hands on your shoulders. “You need to eat three meals a day, especially now that you’re growing. You’re always welcome here when your mom’s away, our door’s always open. Is she away now?”

“Yeah, she won’t be home until next week.” You felt bad for lying to the man that put bandaids on your scraped knees and took you to the father daughter dance in fifth grade when he heard that your dad was dead. He was always so kind to you, which you never quite understood. Despite feeling bad for lying to him, you felt incredibly relieved that you didn’t have to be alone anymore.

From then on out whenever she kicked you out, you went to the Minecraft residence. They welcomed you with open arms and treated you like you were a part of the family. You and Techno bonded over your love for reading and mythology, Wilbur made sure you took care of yourself, and Philza (he told you to just call him Phil at that point) treated you like his own child. You didn’t think that it was possible for you, Tommy, and Tubbo to be any closer than you already were, but you three became inseparable. You told them everything one night when you couldn’t sleep. You told them how you felt like you were the cause of your mother’s decline and your dad’s death, how she would usually punish you, her ‘hobby’. They were about to tell Philza, but you begged them not to. After a while of pleading and assuring them that she’d never hit you, they hesitantly agreed and made you promise to call them whenever you felt unsafe in your home.

You kept to that promise, calling them whenever she would get too drunk to know what she was doing. They would calm you down from panic attacks late at night and invite you to their house in the daytime. They felt like your actual brothers and you started to refer to them as such. You three gave each other a shoulder to lean on and gave each other comfort when needed. One night when you were in your freshman year, however, your mother caught you sneaking out to see them after she sent you to your room. That was when she started to hit you.

Just as you were about to sneak out the front door, your mother started to scream at you incoherently. When you flinched away from when she got up in your face, she became even more enraged.

“WHERE WERE YOU GOING? I BET YOU’RE WHORING YOURSELF OUT, AREN’T YOU LITTLE SLUT?”

Without thinking, you yelled back at her, “I would never! Why-” You were cut off by a harsh slap to the cheek sending you to the ground. She quieted down and stared at you and her hand, a glint of shock shining through her dazed eyes. Without a word, she turned around and left to go talk to your dad. You sat there listening to her rant about how she failed as a mother, how she wanted to do better but she didn’t know how, how she wished that he was there with her. You scrambled up and ran to your room. You looked at yourself in the mirror, there was a bright red mark on your cheek in the shape of a hand. There was a small cut where her wedding ring connected with your cheek. A single drop of blood dripped down your cheek and curved down the dip of your chin before dripping onto your shirt. Without doing anything else, you plopped down onto your bed and sobbed into your pillow, crying yourself to sleep.

When you woke up in the morning, you realized that you slept through half of the school day so it was useless to go to school now. You reached up to run a hand down your face only to hiss and pull your hand away. You once again looked at yourself in the mirror.

You looked terrible. Your eyes were bloodshot and swollen like you were crying in your sleep. Hair was sticking up in all directions and matted slightly. The slap mark was gone, but the cut had bruising around the edges with dried blood crusted on your cheek and on your pillow. It was a small cut, but it bled a surprising amount overnight. You couldn’t see Tommy or Tubbo like this, they’d flip out. Luckily for you it was a Friday and you had the weekend to heal.

Your mother gradually started to hit you more and more. It started off as a once-a-week thing whenever she was really angry, but then it divulged into something that would happen daily over the smallest things. You became her punching bag for her to release some steam. Makeup became your best friend at that point; you used what little savings you saved over the years for dollar store makeup.

Soon after it became a struggle to hide the cuts and bruises from Tommy and Tubbo, so you gradually started to avoid them. Your face, once synonymous with the Minecraft residence and Tommy and Tubbo, became a rarity. They tried their hardest to contact you, but you always dodged their calls. After a few months of you dodging Tommy and Tubbo, you finally told them that you didn’t want to be friends with them anymore.

It broke your heart to say it, but it had to be done. They were getting too close to the truth and you couldn’t have that; the government would take you away from your mom and she’d end up dead. You were the only one keeping her alive at this point, she lost all motivation to eat. The only thing she did nowadays was hit you, drink, and hug your dad’s photo to her chest.

The beatings got to the point where you could barely walk without feeling pain. School became something that you’d rarely attend. Tommy and Tubbo stopped trying to talk to and call you. Buster, your previous confidant, had long since died so you were truly alone in the world. The neighbor’s yard looked barren without the dog house and the graying dog. The only person you had left was your mom.

When you had accidentally burnt dinner late at night, she completely snapped. She grabbed your arm and held it on top of the burner. Pain hit you immediately as you screamed and cried apologies to her. When you instinctively hit her with your other hand, she dug her nails into your arm and pushed your arm closer onto the burner. Nerve endings screamed at you to get away from the pain. The pain was becoming too much, so you looked on the countertop next to you for something to defend yourself with. A metal fork was lying close to your other hand.

You grabbed it and, with a distraught apology to your mother, drove the prongs deep into her arm. She screamed in pain and let your arm go. You ripped yourself out of her grasp and started to run for the front door. A force collided with the back of your shoulder making pain explode in the area. You didn’t know what happened at first, but after hearing the shattering of glass, you realized that she threw a beer bottle at you. You could feel the sting of alcohol and glass mingling with your open wounds on your shoulder. The sting was almost as bad as your arm, but you didn’t stop running especially when you glanced behind you to see her running at you with a knife raised and the fork protruding from her arm.

You flung open the door and sprinted out without bothering to close the door behind you. As your bare feet hit the sidewalk, you could hear your mother stop at the end of the stairs and shout at you to come back. You never stopped.

You didn’t stop until your feet took you to the Minecraft residence’s front door. Nobody was on the street as it was about eleven at night. You hesitated to knock on their door, you ignored the family for the past six months, and you weren’t sure if they even wanted you there. After five minutes of thinking, you just sighed as you walked back down the wooden stairs and walked back towards the sidewalk.

“(Y/n), what are you doing here?” You froze up at Tommy’s sleep riddled voice. You stayed frozen as you heard him stomp over to you. He placed a firm hand on your injured shoulder and forced you to turn around. His angry expression faded into a concerned one when he heard you start to sob and flinch away from him.

“Wha- shit are you bleeding?” You nodded slightly and he gently turned you back around to see a patch of darkened cloth on your shirt. You could feel him shaking as he grabbed your arm and pulled you into the house. He plopped you at the dining room table and told you to wait there. With that, he sprinted up the stairs and brought back a serious Philza holding a first aid kit.

When he saw you bruised and battered, you could hear him take in a sharp intake of breath and saw unbridled anger flash across his face. You flinched away from him when he approached you.

“Hey,” he said in a gentle voice, “I won’t hurt you. Can you show me where you’re hurt?”

You eyed him warily like a scared wild animal and reluctantly moved your burned arm away from your chest and showed it to him. This was the first time you saw your forearm; it was an ugly red that expanded up the majority of the underside of your forearm with skin burned off at the edges. Yellow, fluid-filled blisters were starting to form.

You could hear Tommy’s horrified gasp as he turned to run out of the room. You kept your gaze downwards as Philza warned you that he was about to put disinfectant on your wound. He apologized to you when you whimpered in pain at the sting of the alcohol on your exposed nerves. After he was finished wrapping your arm, he asked you to show him where else you’re injured. You turned around so he could see the growing patch of blood staining your now ripped shirt. You could feel him gently move your shirt to the side and heard him wince.

“Shit, there’s glass in here. I’m going to have to get some tweezers to get it out. Stay here, I’ll be right back.” You were then alone in the kitchen for a moment before he came back with a worried Wilbur and Techno in tow. The brunet pulled up a chair next to you and asked if it was alright to hold your hand. After you hesitantly nodded, he grabbed your hand and started to run his thumb over your knuckles. Techno held a light close to your shoulder as Philza started to tweeze out the green tinted glass from your shoulder.

Every time you would suck in air through your teeth and muffle your yelps with your other hand, Wilbur would whisper reassurances to you and hold your hand tighter. After the glass was out, the wound was disinfected, and wrapped in gauze, Philza told the boys to leave the room. He grabbed both of your hands and gave you the best reassuring smile that he could.

“Tell me what happened.”

You swallowed the lump in your throat as you felt tears well up in your eyes, “I tried Phil, I really did. She never got better no matter what I did.”

“What do you mean, are you talking about your mom?” You could hear the angry undertone of his voice. You tensed up and nodded.

“She… she needs help. She was never the same after Dad died, she started drinking. It started off with only one beer a day, but after seventh grade she was going through an entire case in a day. She’d punish me if I said or did anything about it. No dinner for a week was a popular one until she started to ban me from the house for weeks on end. She never went on business trips, Phil. She got a knife today. I-I thought she was actually gonna kill me this time, I was so scared.”

Without another word, he pulled you into a tight hug, letting you sob freely into his shoulder. “It was my fault, I couldn’t help her! She- she needed me and I couldn’t help her.” You said between sobs. He hugged you tighter and started to rub your back, making sure to avoid your shoulder. “None of this is your fault, you can’t help someone if they don’t want help. Sometimes you can’t fix someone who’s too far gone.”

“Am I too far gone?”

“No, you aren’t. We’ll help you through this, we won’t let anybody hurt you ever again. You’re gonna go on to live a good life.” You passed out in his arms after a while of crying.

When you woke up, you were in Tommy and Tubbo’s room. The two boys jumped to your side and pulled you into a tight group hug. After you tried to apologize to them for how you treated them in the past six months, they shushed you and just sat there in silence hugging you.

Later that day you found out that your mother was found by your neighbor on the front porch with her wrists slit and empty beer bottles surrounding her. She was breathing, but just barely. Currently she was in an unstable condition in the hospital. You had a full breakdown when you found out that she almost killed herself because of you. You had run out of the house and to your safe place in the park. You hadn’t been there in a few years, so you hoped that it was still there.

Sure enough, it was still there albeit a bit overgrown. The blanket in the plastic bag was in the same place where you left it. You had no idea how long you were sitting there crying and having a panic attack, but when you came to your senses it was dark outside. You could hear crickets chirping and the rustling of leaves in the entrance of your hideout.

A brunet head poked itself in and smiled when he saw you. Tubbo fully came into the nook and gestured for someone to follow. Tommy’s blond hair made itself apparent before he joined you two inside.

“Nice little place you have here. It’s… homey.” Tubbo rubbed his hands together and blew warm air on them. You threw one side of the blanket at him and pulled your knees up to your chest. “Thanks, I used to sleep here sometimes… How’d you find me?”

“We could hear you,” Tommy pulled out his phone and typed something on it before pocketing it and sitting next to you. He covered himself with the blanket as Tubbo followed suit. You sat in silence before Tommy broke it.

“How long has she been hittin you?”

“Tommy!” Tubbo scolded him.

“She started about six months ago.”

“Six months ago… that was when you cancelled plans! I knew something was wrong Tubbo.”

Tubbo said nothing as he looked at you with a helpless expression. Just as he was about to open his mouth, you interrupted him. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. Everything’s my fault. I’m the reason my mom’s in the hospital right now fighting for her life. I wasn’t there for her.” You would’ve started crying if it weren’t for the fact that you just felt so drained and numb.

“The fuck do you mean? She was about to kill you! You told us that she was about to stab you, what else were you supposed to do, just let her kill you?!” Tommy exclaimed.

You shrugged, “maybe. If she did she’d be happy, I was just a burden to her. I- I just wanted her to be happy and I would never be able to do that as long as I’m alive. If she killed me she wouldn’t be in the hospital right now.”

“What the fuck (y/n),” Tubbo shouted, startling you. He never shouts, let alone swears. “How could you even say that? I don’t know what I’d do without you, everything would be so boring and nothing would be the same without you. Fuck her happiness, she’s a wretched woman if the only way she can be happy is when you’re dead. Fuck her.”

You and Tommy stared at the seething boy in shock. He never shouted when he was angry, he only did that once when he found out that Tommy was being bullied. Whenever he sweared, that’s when you knew his emotions were hitting him at full force. Tommy quickly recovered from his shock to join him, “yeah fuck her, man! She can go suck a dick.” He was interrupted by his phone buzzing.

“Dad’s here, c’mon he’s worried sick about you.” After they helped you out of your safe place, they both wrapped an arm around your shoulders and walked you to the parking lot. You could see the headlights of the lone car in the lot turn off before the door swung open and a figure rushed towards you. You pushed yourself behind Tommy and Tubbo and hid behind them fearfully. They both turned around and put a hand on your shoulders. “It’s okay, it’s our dad.”

You peeked over their shoulders and saw a mop of disheveled, long blond hair. Philza looked like he was just told that there was an antidote for a fatal poison he just ingested, despite the flash of hurt that showed on his face. His blue eyes were accentuated by the redness of his sclera and you can see the relief painted in them. A gentle smile was on his face as he moved his arms up. Without another word, you launched yourself at him and pulled him into the tightest hug you could manage with your shoulder.

“Are your accusations true, Mx. (L/n)?”

Your gaze flickered over to your mother sitting on the other side of the courtroom. She looked at you with no expression on her face. Her wrists were wrapped tightly in a white bandage that was a stark contrast to the bright orange prison uniform and the silver of the handcuffs. She wasn’t the woman you knew when your dad was alive. The life was sucked out of her the second she picked up that phone call.

You looked back at the lawyer, “yes sir.”

“I have no further questions, your honor.”

“You may return to your seat, Mx. (L/N).”

You stood up and walked as confidently as you could past the dull eyes of your mother and back to your seat between Tommy and Tubbo. You held their hands tightly as the trial moved onwards. Buster’s owner even stepped up to the witness stand to give his testimony. Apparently he knew about the abuse from your late night conversations with Buster. He had contacted CPS and the police multiple times but the case was always dropped for some reason that you couldn’t bring yourself to ponder. A few of your previous teachers even showed up to give their testimonies. Their words, though true and slightly sweet, rubbed you the wrong way. If they ‘knew something was happening at home with you’, then why didn’t they do anything when it was happening? You tried to focus on the rest of the trial.

Your mother’s only witness was herself, and she did a piss poor job at it. She was basically digging her own grave with every word that came out of her mouth. The entire time, she was staring at you with her infamous dull eyes.

“Do you have any further points you would like to add, Mrs. (L/n)?”

“Yes, I have always loved my child. They were my husband’s pride and joy, the splitting image of him. Their rightful place is safe with their real parent at our home.”

You could feel Tommy attempt to stand up, but you pulled him back down; now was not the time for him to start yelling in anger. Tubbo squeezed your hand in reassurance and glanced at you. You were staring at the woman you called your mother with pain and hate filled eyes. You wished her words were sincere, but you knew fully well that they weren’t. The words that left her mouth would’ve been one hundred percent true and genuine when your dad was still alive, but he’s buried six feet under in a military cemetary now and he has been for years. You would’ve given anything, even your own life, for those words to be true a month ago, but you knew better now. Mothers don’t treat their kids like this, they’re supposed to give their children their unconditional love and take care of them. As far as you were concerned, she was no longer your mother. She forfeited that title the second she turned to the bottle. Philza is and will always be more of a parental figure than she’ll ever be.

After the jury left to discuss, the court was in a recess. You slipped out of the room and speed walked to the bathroom. You looked at yourself in the mirror. You could see heavy eye bags under your dull eyes. The dullness of your eyes, to your horror, reminded you of your mother, so you splashed your face with water. That fixed it, your eyes were slightly brighter. You could still see the faint outline of the scar on your cheek from when she first hit you. Small scars littered your face from the more recent wounds she gave you before you ran.

A knock sounded at the door, “(y/n), the recess is almost over.” It was Techno.

You patted your face dry and went to leave the bathroom. The pink haired boy that you now saw as your older brother was waiting patiently for you on the other side. He put a gentle hand on your shoulder and led you back to the courtroom. There, the rest of the Minec- no, your family was waiting for you. Just as you reached them, the judge announced that the jurors would be arriving back. The entire courtroom stood as they walked in.

“Have you reached a verdict?” The judge asked.

“We have.”

“Mrs. (L/n) and Mr. Langsburg, would you stand and face the jury? You may read the verdict.”

“We the jury of the state court find the defendant guilty under the charges of child abuse and child neglect.”

Tommy clapped a hand on your shoulder as Tubbo squeezed your hand. They both smiled widely at you. You, however, didn’t acknowledge them. You were only staring at the empty eyes of your mother as she was looking at the jury. Her reaction was akin to her breaking a pencil, like it didn’t matter to her. Like all the years abuse that she put you through didn’t matter was as trivial as breaking a pencil.

“So say you all?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“I hereby sentence Mrs. (L/n) to twelve years in the state penitentiary with no opportunity of parole. Mr. Philza Minecraft shall be bestowed the custody of Mx. (Y/n) (l/n) as they do not have any next of kin. Court is adjourned.” With that, she banged the gavel and the courtroom exploded in the bustling of people. You never took your eyes off from your mo- no, the monster with the dull eyes as she picked at something in her nails boredly. Just as she looked up to meet your gaze, Tommy pulled you into a tight hug, lifting you off the ground slightly. You were passed around the family in the courtroom for their individual hugs. Philza’s was comforting, Tubbo’s was congratulatory, Wilbur’s was warm, and Techno’s was slightly awkward, yet soft.

At home, you spent most of your time in the spare room Philza had given you. He had offered to help you decorate it, but you had no idea where to start. You were never allowed to have decorations in your old room. You kept the room simplistic and your possessions light.

You often stared at your dad’s portrait on your nightstand wondering what your life could’ve been like if you never asked him for McDonalds that day. Your family probably would’ve been stationed in who knows where and moved around often, as is customary in most military families. You probably would’ve never met Tommy and Tubbo in third grade. You probably would’ve never met your now older brothers and new father. You didn’t want to imagine a life without them.

After a few days of you being locked up in your room, Tommy and Tubbo came into your room with mischievous grins. You knew them like the back of your hand, so you knew the second you saw their faces that they were about to do something. You sat up and looked at them suspiciously.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re not doing anything, (y/n). Right Tubbo?”

“Right Tommy.” Tubbo nodded curtly. They still had grins on their faces. They walked over to your bed before they picked you up and walked you out of the room. You didn’t have the energy to fight them, so you laid limp in their arms. They eventually took you down to the living room and plopped you down onto the couch between them. Techno tossed them a blanket when they then used to wrap you tightly into a blanket burrito. The home screen of Disney Plus was pulled up on the TV and the curtains were drawn. Philza and Wilbur exited the kitchen with glasses of water and two big bowls of popcorn.

They smiled widely when they saw you squashed between your brothers, putting a bowl of popcorn in your lap and three glasses of water nearby. The two next to you dug into the popcorn as the rest of the family made themselves comfortable on the couch.

“What are we doing?”

“Movie night! We’re gonna binge the Marvel movies, your favorite!” Tubbo grinned at you, practically bouncing in his seat.

“Just double checking, the order is Captain America, Captain Marvel, Iron Mans One and Two, Incredible Hulk, Avengers, Thor-”

You cut Wilbur off with a mumbled “first Thor, then the first Avengers movie.”

“Glad I asked then! The timeline would’ve been thrown off.”

As the movies progressed, you started to finally feel like you belonged as a part of the family. Laughter came easier to you, mingling effortlessly with the family’s laughter. Every time you laughed at a scene, they would give you a smile and laugh alongside you. Eventually after about halfway through Captain America: The Winter Soldier, everyone had fallen asleep on the couch. Soft snores and the quiet sounds of the occasional fight scene filled the room as your eyelids started to close involuntarily. You looked around the room at the rest of your family. They all looked peaceful in their slumber. Tommy and Tubbo’s protective hold of their arms around your shoulders made you feel safe. It was in that moment that you realized that they would never let anyone hurt you ever again. You were a part of an actual, loving family. With that, you let yourself fall asleep into a peaceful slumber surrounded by the people that loved you the most.

General taglist:

@crybabyjabby @izzybobizzy13 @goldenstarofthunderclan @bunnyz-pxstel @averytiredfanfictionwriter @dcml04 @sparkling-gayyyy @bbigbbrainn @thaticecreambish @kiinokochii @satansphatass @bxkubitch @bxmentchildxx @roxy3457 @montygator17 @feverish-dove @the-fictionwriters-hairdo @jichuuchaeng

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theluminoussunflower · 2 years

Text

the death of a child

TW: suicide, straight up, someone dies in this post, if you need to skip it, i completely understand

https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/talk-to-someone-now/ this is the website i used several months ago to help me take responsible steps to recovery, you can call or chat

https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines this is a list of numbers for non-us residents

there is help for you

also, trigger for blood

this is your last warning, i cannot stress enough that if you cannot handle reading about suicide, please do not read this post, my dumb headcanon is not worth jeopardizing your well-being

stephanie is set on not dying at her parents house

it would be like dying in a hospital; uncomfortable, unfamiliar, scary

people with cancer, or really old people, they get to die at home

and home to stephanie is welton academy

it's where her friends are

her heroes are

it's where her life began, it may as well end there

so, once she knows her parents are asleep, she bundles up and walks back to welton

it takes her a while, nearly an hour, to get there

she has time to think

tonight, when i die, that's it

no going back

i'll never be able to explain why, i'll just be gone

no more life

no more school

no more dead poets society meetings

no more mr dalton's classes

no more nights with the pitts'

no more amelia

oh god, no more amelia

she's basically frozen when she gets there

the warm interior, the wooden staircases, the tall ceilings welcome her back, even though she couldn't see a damn thing

she's as quiet as she can be, tiptoeing to her and amelia's dorm, opening the door as silent as possible, squeezing herself in

she undresses and puts on her pajamas, all with her eyes on amelia, asleep

so peacefully

stephanie hates herself

she hates herself that this is all she can do

that she's going to hurt amelia

but amelia can handle it, she's been through her mother's death, surely she'll get over steph

she's got her dad and whit

and pittsie will be fine

he'll find another friend, he's lovable, he'll get someone else

stephanie picks up the letter opener pittsie gave her for her birthday

the gift that celebrated her life, and her friendship with pittsie, would end it as well

"steph?"

stephanie whips around, hiding the letter opener behind her back, relieved amelia can't see that she's crying

amelia, with her eyes half-open, props herself up on her elbows, "when'd you get back?"

"just..." stephanie has to clear her throat, "just now... i was about to take a shower"

"did you walk?" amelia asks, "you must be freezing"

"hence the shower," stephanie fakes a laugh

"well, i recorded pittsie's poem, if you want to listen to it," amelia says

"i will, go back to sleep, we'll talk in the morning," stephanie says, picking up the tape from her desk

"mm... okay," amelia says, before curling back under her blankets, like a child

stephanie doesn't know how long she stands there, just staring

eventually, she gets her tape player

and goes to the girls' showers

slowly, in case someone had to stop her

...

a cleaner finds her, who clamors for towels while yelling for someone to call for an ambulance

that someone, the on-campus doctor, dr andrews, tells cameron that a student is injured in the girls' showers

so, cameron thinks a girl has slipped, was unconscious for a bit, but everything's fine

right?

but dr andrews says "there's a lot of blood... it looks self-inflicted"

"who did you say it was again?" cameron asks

"it's meeks, sir, stephanie meeks, the junior"

she's pronounced dead at the scene

a scene that wakes up charlie

who, upon seeing the lights, assumed there was some kind of accident, but sees the paramedics carry out a body bag

he wakes todd, and the two of them go to speak to cameron

who's on the floor of the hallway, head in between his knees

todd has to throw up, and charlie has to hold cameron against his chest for some time

cameron tells the kids, except for amelia

todd insists on telling her

she is asleep soundly when todd gently shakes her awake

the light from the hallway seeps into her eyes as she opens them

"hey dad," she says, she sees her friends standing in her doorway, all in their robes, "what's going on?", she sees tears in her dad's eyes

todd brushes her hair out of her face, for the first time, seeing only himself in his daughter

"baby... stephanie's dead..." he whispers

she stares at him, completely silent, blinking

she waits to wake up

she waits to wake up and see stephanie, curled up in bed

she waits to wake up and hear stephanie mumbling to herself as she works at her desk

she waits, and waits, and waits

and her dad stares at her

"i need some air," she says

she gets out of bed, puts her boots and coat on, and walks outside in the snow

pittsie, evan, and todd follow behind her

(richie and lacey stay inside, lacey assuming amelia wouldn't want to talk to her, and richie not wanting to leave his sister alone)

amelia simply stares out at the frozen lake, letting the snow freeze her hands and her face

a familiar feeling stews in her body

a feeling she swears she forgot, but now that it's back, she remembers

that the evening her mother died, after her body was gone, and it was just her and her dad, amelia went outside, just as the grass started to frost over

even in november, the chilling temperatures could lead to snow

mama loved the snow, stephanie loved the snow

anyway

after she died, amelia went outside and screamed

there wasn't anything else she could do

she had just experienced the most painful moment of her entire life

what are you supposed to do when half of you is gone?

so she just went outside, and let out a blood-curdling scream

and in the snow, that december morning, amelia watches the snowfall in front of her

and she screams

for as long and as loud as her lungs and throat allow her to

and when she's done, she does it again

what else could she do?

what are you supposed to do when half of you is gone?

todd holds her in his lap, the snow soaking his trousers

pittsie lays next to her, sobbing uncontrollably

and evan, he just does the best he can

"i just spoke to her," amelia says, in between cries, "when she came back, i talked to her, she sounded fine! she sounded normal!"

"you can't explain these things," evan says, throat full of unreleased sobs

"i should have known!" amelia cries, "god i should have known!"

eventually, the boys get amelia back inside

and cameron has a billion questions for stephanie's friends

but charlie begs him to lay off them for some time, that they probably don't want to talk to him right now

and when cameron suggests charlie asks them instead, charlie nearly punches cameron in the nose... again

since the girls' showers are (rightfully) closed off, amelia showers in todd's apartment

while she's in the shower, todd calls whit

"hello?"

"...whit..."

"todd? what's going on? is amelia okay?"

"something... really horrible has happened, could you come up here, be with us?"

"yes, i can, but please tell me, is amelia okay?"

"she's alive"

"alive?... oh god"

and it gets worse

amelia has to identify the "weapon" (that's the word they used) that stephanie had with her when she died

amelia explains that stephanie told her it was a joke-gift that pittsie gave her a while back to save her from paper cuts

(she's adamant that it was a joke so she wouldn't get pittsie in trouble for it)

and when pittsie finds out... oh, when pittsie finds out

unlike amelia, he doesn't let out all his feelings at once

instead, he curls up under his blanket, and he doesn't speak to anyone for hours, no matter who tried to

cameron calls his parents to pick him up

his mom isn't able to get him out of bed

so, pitts sr struggles up the stairs to try

he has to sit on the end of the bed by the time he's there to rest

his son's dorm is the same that he had in junior year, the one he shared with stephen

he even sleeps on the same side that he did

"gerry?" pitts sr says, his hand on his son's leg, "we're here to take you home, if you want that, do you want to come home?"

gerry doesn't respond

"hey, ger," pitts whispers, "i know what you're going through, eerily, and i know that i would have been much worse off if i was alone, and i know you feel alone without her... but you gotta come home with us... please"

gerry doesn't respond again

pitts sr slowly gets up and starts down the hallway, when he hears shuffling behind him

when he turns around, gerry is in his doorway, comforter wrapped around him, face red, tear trails staining his face

"daddy," gerry says, before falling into his father's arms (safely, of course)

"oh, my boy," pitts whispers, rubbing gerry's back

back to todd and amelia

when whit arrives, he bolts to todd's apartment, unlocking the door with the spare key he had

todd and amelia are sleeping

amelia's hand wrapped around her dad's finger

no jokes today, just know that i love you <3

taglist

@chloe-octavia

@aedan-mills

@regina-della-poesia

@justarandompjofan

@sapphicnoel

@iguanamuppet

@finding-an-angle

@srj901

@boy-wonder-oncologist-fan

@tuskofthyme

@nothing-gonna-wake-me-now

@fumbleface

@deadswiftiesociety

#tw suicide #tw blood #tw death #dps 2: electric boogaloo #dead poets society

34 notes · View notes

sterekficrec · 3 years

Text

Last Chance Asks!

Hey guys, these are asks that have been on our lost fic list for a very long time, I'm going to put them here so we can still save them and that we'll create more room for new lost fics that have yet to be found. If you find any of these let me know by using the number and mention it's from the last chance list, thank you in advance :)

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Hey, I've been looking for this fic for months and can't seem to find it. It's about stiles leaving BH to get away from the supernatural but in the city he goes to he meets an old female alpha who knew Talia. He becomes frds w her and lends her a book which she gives to Derek who spills coffee on it and when he goes to the bookstore he meets stiles there. I think the pack moved too and is living in a house together for school. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it, help please and thanks

I've just started reading this fic, it's pretty short when my laptop died so I can't find it now. Um, it was about like after apocalypse with zombies and stiles is bitten so he has to kill himself. I'm sorry if it's vague but I'm really itching to finish it. A lot of angst if it helps?? thank you

looking for a fic with KindaNerd!derek who Stiles helps one day after school and they start hanging out and as time passes Derek grows to be handsome. Then when they graduate Derek tells the school about how Stiles saved his life that day he called him, and tears from Laura and Erica happen and Sterek kisses ensure. Do you happen to know what fic I mean and the name of the fic? xx

Hey I'm trying to find a fic. I think the name was daddy issues, but I'm not sure. Maybe it was daddy issues. It was one where stiles was with a bunch of guys (including Derek Hale, Chris Argent and others I don't remember) thanks!

hey I was wondering if you could help me find a fanfiction where stiles works for like a suicide or depression hotline and derek calls one day and the two of them kind of bond? I've been looking everywhere for it and I cant seem to find it!

10.

hey! ive been looking for a fic for a real long while. the whole pack goes away to a cabin for a bonding experience, with people sharing rooms. there is a beach, and places to go shopping. lydia and/or allison go shopping with stiles at somepoint and get him things so he looks super hot at a club. white pants and something painted on him. and then derek freaks and leaves them all. lemme know if you know this one???

11.

Hiya.! Well, I read this fic about a year ago and it was amazing and I want to read it again but I forgot the name, it's a fic were Scott was never bitten and stiles gets kidnapped and taken to some werewolf camp in Newyork and becomes Derek's mate and eventually meets his family. Can you please help me? And btw. Your blog is amazing. It gives me life.

12.

Hi I was wondering if u knew a series on archive of our own where stiles gets kidnapped with Boyd and Erica and comes back With them and joins that pack and becomes Derek's mate and then later in the series he yells at Derek and Cora about taking the pack away from him if he doesn't act nicer to them thanks sorry for the crappy summary

13.

okay i dont know how far out of canon you like to go or how AU you like, but do you recall a sterek fic that had stiles getting tattooed for magical purposes and part of the tattoo requires 3 blood donors (father-sheriff, brother-scott, lover-derek) but he hasnt told derek the lover bit yet and the chick tattooing him is like some elf girl i think named leeloo or something.... i just cant find it in the tattoo stiles track or the magical stiles track. it was either a series or one big ass one.

14.

do you know a sterek fanfic where Stiles is an omega werewolf and he stumbles upon the hale territory and Derek Hale plans to take him in for only one night but Stiles makes breakfast and the pack love him and cliche blah?

16.

hi, wondering if you can help me find an older fic, it's one where Stiles is magical and Derek's pack is grown up, I think Boyd and Erica have a kid, and someone tries to set the pack house on fire but now its magiced fireproof, but the forest burns, and the hunters come but Stiles uses his magic to bring the forest back to life and ties himself to the land... Sorry that's a weird synopses but it's all I can remember clearly

17.

Hey can you find a fic where the pack was using stiles in training like hunting him but a werewolf jumps him in the woods and stiles thinks it's derek and submits and it turns out it wasn't derek and since stiles submitted derek says the alpha has like a certain amount of days to get stiles to say yes and that was as far as I got please find this!

18.

hey so I'm looking for one fic, I hope you can help find it :) it's about Stiles being sacrificed to the werewolves to keep the town safe and there's whole werewolf village. there was no Hale fire, Laura has a husband and kids. later Scott was bitten by some rouge (or Peter I don't remember) and came to the village 'causee hunters wanted to kill him. I remember that when they were fighting other weres or maybe hunters (or was it just fullmoon?) Stiles saved Laura's kids from being killed. help?

19.

do you know the fic were in which Derek helps hook stiles up with some dude & in the process he reveals that he's into stiles & stiles kind of ignores it so Derek eats ice cream and watches Disney movies and stiles happens in on him & is all, "what."

20.

i'm looking for a fic that i think is a 5+1 cuddles thing? all i can remember from it is that there's a fae fight in alison's bedroom and derek got ripped apart so stiles pushed him into the closet and is trying to hold derek's guts in? i've asked a lot of ficrec blogs but no-one can find it for me, so thanks in advance if you can!

21.

Can you please help me I already tried twficfinder, LJ, etc. Its a sterek fic made in 2012 where Stiles helps Derek get his families life insurance, parents will or just money cause he's living in a bad place & has no income. Derek feels guilty & doesn't feel deserving of that. Stiles drives them to where the person in charge of fixing that is. Derek might be rich. They buy wood for the floor of the Hale house. Scott or Sheriff ask why he's helping Derek. Its not Out of Milk or Hale Construction

23.

I'm looking for a fix where stiles hires a dom, but she declines and instead he goes to derek? I think at one point, they make a list of things that are allowed, and everyone can see the bruises left behind, but stiles is really happy. Any help is much appreciated!

24.

Do you know the one where Derek hurts stiles ankle before a carnival or fair and takes stiles but ends up attacking him but is stopped by a psychic and she puts Derek's wolf in stiles so that stiles is the alpha

26.

hi i was wondering if youve read a sterek fic where derek basically tells stiles that his mom dying was nothing compared to him basically killing his family cause of the fire. i cant seem to find it anywhere.

27.

I've been looking for this fic everywhere and I can't find it! It's attempted non con with stiles and a original character but stiles hits the guy with a rock and kills him by mistake and calls derek panicking and derek helps cover it up. Do you know it?

29.

Okay, so I need help. I have been looking for this fic for over a year and i was wondering if you knew it. It's where stiles is a kid and his mother is in the hospital dying, and derek is in a coma from the fire and they connect on a telepathic level and stiles brings him out of his coma and stiles mom dies and the derek moves and checks up on stiles yearly. HELP ME PLEASE?? Thank you for taking the time to read this.

31.

Hi! So I'm trying to find a fic (it was lengthy) but I'm pretty sure it was a 5+1 trope, and its like five times Sheriff recognizes Derek as a son? All I can recall is at one point Sheriff thinks Stiles killed Derek and he offers to help him hide it?

33.

I read a Sterek AU ages ago but I can't find it now, I was wondering if you'd read it and could possibly send me a link? It's the one where Stiles sets up an online dating account to mock people and he starts talking to who he thinks is Derek. The two become really good friends but when Stiles goes to meet Derek he finds out that Derek has no idea who he is and Laura started the account for a joke, and is engaged.

34.

Hey! I was just wondering if you could find a fic for me? All I remember is that it was really short, about soulmates and stiles was playing a drum in the snow! Thanks! I've been looking for it for ages!

35.

Hi bb can you help me find a fic? Derek & Laura(?) are twins. Stiles has magic powers & is bff w/ Laura, who later dates Lydia or Allison. Derek paints Stiles in an attic or something & Laura is jealous bc she doesn't want sterek to happen. Thanks!

36.

i think its backround sterek, but do you know the fic where the pack is afraid to touch stiles because they think they're hurting him but really it's touch starved!stiles

38.

Hey, I've completely forgotten the name to fic, I remember that stiles is a lil bit of a delinquent so the sheriff gets derek who's a college student I think to watch over him and they have sex and they're sort of like fuck buddies and at some point it's Derek's birthday and he has a party at his apartment??? idk do u guys know this fic lmao please help!!!

39.

Hey so love your account Anyway I was wondering if you knew the story where the pack like finds a mysterious knife and stiles cuts himself and then gets thrown into the past and is trying to get Paige and Derek together? I hope that made sense Again love the account, such a life saver!

40.

Hey I was wondering if you knew the title of the fic where (I think its Stiles) who's a single father and his daughter is obssessed with bunnies and at some point Derek makes a lil park in the backward for the bunnie?

41.

Ok so I'm looking for a fic where it's after the hale fire and Derek lived in a small cabin by himself then he sends for omega human stiles and they live with each other cause Derek needs pack and he stays in his wolf form a lot of the time. It's like a super slow burn and angst you. Can you help a bro out?

43.

Hey, I read this fic once on ao3 about Stiles having tons of nightmares from the nemeton after Derek leaves. Then he starts calling him when he has panic attacks. He has to do the underwater sacrifice to get rid of the nightmares and when he comes out of the water Derek's there waiting for him and then they get together... It's seriously driving me crazy that I can't find it!!! Do you know what fic I'm talking about??

44.

hey im looking for a fic and I've been googling increasingly strange things but i just cant find it so i was hoping you might have read it? im pretty sure its quite short, but basically allison goes to stiles to ask about werewolf sex and then stiles makes derek give him the werewolf sex talk so that he can clue the rest of the pack in. thank you xx

45.

Hi! I'm looking for a specific fic! It's like Stiles is at a club, and he's sitting at the bar and sees his ex walk in and he gets really panicky because he starts walking over so he grabs the closest guy to him and kisses him? And it turns out the guy he kissed was Derek? I can't find it anywhere!

46.

Hi i was wondering if you could help me find a fic. I dont really remember much just that it was sterek and that cora read some spell that sent Derek back in time and he ended up mating to Stiles but when they have children Cora fixes it and Derek goes back to him normal time and tells cora that he has to go back because he has a mate but cora tells him that he has to wait until the full moon i think and in the end he and cora go back to stiles time and stay there

47.

I was wondering if you might know of a fic I am looking for. It's one of those Sheriff Finds Out ones and it's in his POV. I remember that it had Melissa in it and she let the Sheriff into a house/Room where the pack (they are a pack in this) was all cuddling in groups. I remember once specific moment where he observes Alison and Scott and notices their closeness with Isaac. And I am pretty sure Stiles is asleep on Derek. I know this is not very descriptive but I was wondering if you knew of one

48.

Hello I'm searching for a sterek fic I read a while back and I can't find it 😔 it's a fic where Stiles discovers he's a wizard or a shaman or something like that and he's linked to plants somehow and there are many pack interactions like pack cuddles and stuff so many pack feels and then the pack is being attacked and the forest is destroyed and Stiles manages to grow it back and he's like part of the forest it's such a great fic so beautifully written, do you happen to know what's this fic?

49.

Hello, lovely. I have been trying to fing a fic where Dean and Cas from Supernatural are Stiles parents and Derek knocks him up. While Stiles goes through the pregnancy, a Big Bad from the past comes back and messes with Stiles. Sorry, this is vague.

50.

I was wondering if anyone remembered a story where Stiles was half-daeva (I believe), Scott was his Permissor, but no one else in the pack knew until another pack kidnaps them and stiles shows up to destroy them all. I remember reading it ages ago but I can't find it in my bookmarks :/

51.

Hi, can you help me find sterek fanfic? It's coffee shop au, Stiles is barista, Derek is customer who wants plain coffee but Stiles always goes crazy with toppings, there us Peter too, creepy but good, can't find it on ao3 (╯︵╰,)

52.

Ok I've been searching for this one fantastic fic I read ages ago but can't find and was hoping you guys might know! It's established relationship w pack mom Stiles and he's away at college but they all just kind of move in w him and he buys Erica tampons and Boyd McDonald's gift cards and brings Chinese food and is generally lovely?? I think it was a one shot and relatively short but I'm dying to read it again :(

53.

Hello! I'm looking for a sterek fic. I think it was a 5+1 type fic where people/random strangers thought the pack members were Derek and Stiles' children. Please and thank you! :)

54.

Idk if you find sterek fics but i can't remember it, please help. Stiles is kidnapped by faeries but then talks them into a peace treaty? I think it was on archive but I'm not getting anything.

57.

Hi! I can’t seem to find a fic I love and was wondering if you could help me find it? Stiles is in a bar with friends, I remember Lydia and Jackson being there, and is insisting he is a Alex god who can get any number he wants and jackson tells him to get that guys number and points to Derek and stiles basically goes up to him and says “I am trying to convince my friends I’m attractive can you give me a fake number?” and he does but it turns to be real???

58.

I’ve been looking for this fic where stiles has been out of town for a while and when he gets back he stops at this gas station on the edge of town and gets jumped by some redcaps I think? And then the guy who runs the station comes out and sees this kid covered in blood and calls Derek because strange kid I’ve never seen before covered in redcap blood, maybe come check this out? And Derek didn’t know stiles was coming back early because it was supposed to be a surprise. Thanks so much!

59.

I love your blog and I was hoping you'd help me with this fic I've been looking for forever. Stiles is either an orphan or his dad is irresponsible, and he's not exactly highly regarded but the Hales and of course Derek love him and welcome him at their house. But Stiles feels guilty/unworthy and doesn't always want to accept their help. At one point, he turns feral or something and Derek has to coax him out, and one of the Hales have a baby who loves Stiles (I think Peter's or Laura's). Thanks!

60.

hey :) there's this old fic i want to re-read where stiles is a mage(or someone who controls elemental magic) and hes hurt/rejected by Derek and leaves with someone where there are other people with elemental magic and he trains. If it helps: I remember in the big fight they wore shirts that matched with their powers. Could you please help me? thanks

#lastchance #sterek fic rec

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jessicajonesrp · 4 years

Text

Public warning

Patricia Walker does not do well with lack of control. It’s a tendency passed down from life with Dorothy Walker, easily the most controlling non super-powered person she had ever met. For the first eighteen years of her life, most of Trish’s actions, from her clothes to her work to her every public word and expression, had been chosen for her by Dorothy, and the only real choice she had for herself was whether to give in and make life easier for herself or rebel and suffer Dorothy’s wrath.

Her desire for the control she had lacked had left her with severe insecurity, eating disorders, and self medication through drugs, all issues she struggled with for a good ten years before channeling her need for control into efforts at bettering herself and helping others. She had finally reached a place where life was stable, heading in a direction Trish could be content with, if not fully satisfied.

And then Kilgrave happened. First to Jessica only, without Trish having any idea why her best friend had suddenly vanished without contact for eight months, and then with the shattered mess it left her once Trish did know and struggled to support her. Then to Trish herself, when she, against Jessica’s orders and even pleas, involved herself in trying to draw him out and capture him.

Trish knew she had not suffered anywhere near the level that her sister had from Kilgrave, but it was still enough to make her feel sick and cold when she remembered. She still occasionally had nightmares of his cold, snapping voice, telling her to shoot herself in the head, telling her to kill people she had never met before out on the docks. She still shivered in disgust when she remembered the feeling of his hands on her face, his lips on her skin, the terrible ambivalence of wanting to kiss him, enjoying it, even as every part of her true self screamed out in horror. And she could never forget Simpson’s hands around her throat, choking her nearly to the point of death at Kilgrave’s command.

She had hated and feared the man from the first moment Jessica managed to stutter out what he had done to her. No, she had hated him before then, when she first saw the unnaturally shocked, broken state of her sister when she finally broke free from his initial control. Anyone who could hurt Jessica so deeply and so permanently earned her hatred without needing to know their identity.

And now he was back. Again. As much as Trish feared for herself, for being used or even killed in his obsessive pursuit of Jessica, she feared even more that Kilgrave would damage Jessica even more deeply, that he would continue to pile up dead and damaged bodies around himself and place the blame at her feet. Jessica didn’t need this, not again. And if Trish could do anything to help or stop it, it would help her feel just a little bit more of a sense of the control she knew she didn’t really have.

She made her way to her recording studio after first sending some of Heroes for Hires guards ahead of her to thoroughly check out the studio for any signs of danger from Kilgrave or any of his like, giving them a code phrase to use to insure that they would be able to alert her if he did show up and control them or others. Trish had already called ahead to insure that all people were thoroughly searched for any possible weapons and passed at least twice through the metal detectors already installed before being allowed entrance. After receiving the all clear, she went, Jessica insisting on accompanying her, via one of Danny’s cars to the studio, passing through the checks put in place and heading straight to her recording studio and instructing the techs to set up for a live broadcast. She was aware of Jessica skulking behind her, hands shoved in her pockets, as Trish rapidly read from the speech she had just finished churning out.

“Good afternoon New York City and beyond, this is Trish Walker with an urgent report coming to you from Trish Talk, by way of myself and all our associates at Heroes for Hire. Soon, a follow up broadcast will be coming your way via Channel 5 News with more information, but please, listen very carefully to this announcement for your safety and those of your loved ones.”

Trish paused, swallowing, and snuck a glance back at Jessica’s impassive expression before facing the mic again and continuing. “Most of you may remember the terrible events of last summer, when the man whom called himself Kilgrave provided mass terror and destruction in our city and in far too many of our own lives and homes. It is to my great sorrow that I inform you that Kilgrave is not, as was believed, deceased. Kilgrave has made personal contact with myself and with-“

Jessica made violent throat slashing motions behind her that Trish saw out the corner of her eye, and Trish edited her intended words smoothly.

“With myself and my colleagues, and we have evidence to support that this is no hoax. Please be aware of yourself and those you love at all times. Know their whereabouts, establish coded phrases and patterns of behavior in order to test out the level of control the people in your life may have at any given moment. Kilgrave is a white male with a British accent, last known to have short medium brown hair and brown eyes. He tends to dress in a professional manner, especially in dark purple suits and ties, and he is considered a threat of the level of nuclear war. Do not approach him should you see him; instead do all you can to get away and call in our hotline at Trish Talk or Heroes for Hire to report a possible sighting. If you suspect that someone you know may be controlled, treat them in the same manner, do all you can to subdue them without causing permanent harm to them if necessary. Kilgrave’s powers last up to 12 hours, so do not under any circumstances try to reason with anyone you suspect to be controlled. If at all possible, wear ear plugs or head phones or listen to loud music when necessary to go out in public. Kilgrave cannot gain control of those whom are not within his direct path and whom cannot hear his commands. He-“

“Stop,” a voice suddenly came over the ear, and both Trish and Jessica jumped, recognizing the voice after a moment as not Kilgrave’s, but female and American. Trish quickly identified the voice a second later as belonging to one of her tech support assistants, Chloe Ash. “The information is over.”

“What the fuck?” Jessica hissed, shooting Chloe a vicious glower and striding towards her quickly. “Will you shut up, even I know to shut the hell up on a live recording, over something this damn important!”

Trish tried to recover, giving a somewhat forced chuckle and speaking over them. “I apologize, there are some technical difficulties, but if you’ll bear with me I will make sure you all get the information you need. As I was saying, Kilgrave cannot-"

“This information is too much, this recording is over,” Chloe repeated, more loudly and forcefully, standing up and taking the headphones off of her ears. She fairly shouted out her next few words, speaking loudly enough that Trish’s words were drowned out.

“Loyal listeners, you will now hear the sound of a suicide by Chloe Ash, Patsy Walker’s employee. More are to follow in the names and as a direct result of the avoidance and rejection of Jessica Jones. Goodbye, loyal listeners, and know that Kilgrave is a patient man.”

She head butted Jessica in the face when Jessica grabbed for her arm, ducking under her and weaving to the other side of Trish. As Trish leaped up, expecting Chloe to grab or try to harm her, the young woman instead ran to a small cabinet against the walls containing little more than sound equipment and various office supplies. Throwing it open, she grabbed a pair of scissors from its contents, opened the blades wide, and closed them around the front of her throat.

She made no sound, showed no pain as she dragged the scissor blades more deeply into her skin, sawing back and forth to make as rough and deep a wound as possible. The live recording now picked up the sound of Trish’s horrified scream, her outcries of “Oh god, no, no!” as blood spattered in a wide arc just short of reaching her, and the noisy scuttle of multiple feet moving towards Chloe as others tried to reach her before it was too late.

Jessica got to her first and wrenched the scissors out of her hand, breaking them in half and throwing them down so Chloe could not get them and use them any further. Tearing off her oversized sweatshirt, she pressed it against the woman’s throat, grimly noting how the blood immediately stained through its thick material and onto her fingers, how it had sprayed hot and thick over her arms and chest before she could touch her at all. The woman didn’t try to speak, likely couldn’t have, but she was losing all color in her face, her eyes already growing glassy and lifeless, and as Trish sputtered and tried not to vomit or pass out in the background, Jessica held onto the almost useless bloodied sweater, as though she could somehow keep the woman alive just by holding on tight enough.

It didn’t matter. Within another minute the woman was clearly dead, limp and unmoving under Jessica’s hands, and she could hear the shrill noise of sirens in the background. Jessica let her drop to the ground, stumbling back and nearly yelling out loud when she bumped into Trish and felt her hands latch onto her arm.

“We have to go, now,” she mumbled, giving her sister’s arm a rough tug.” Before someone else of his comes through in the aftermath.”

Even as she lead Trish out of the room and building, she could still hear the dying woman’s words echo in her mind. More are to follow, as a direct result of the avoidance and rejection of Jessica Jones…

#jessica jones roleplay #Jessica Jones #Luke Cage #luke cage roleplay #trish walker roleplay #trish walker

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rainydayhogwartsimagines · 4 years

Note

I think i have another request. Well i do i mean lol. It may be a little dark but the idea just came to me... y/n spending Christmas break with the Weasleys (because she is best friends with Ron or the twins?) at burrow because her family are not that pleasant to be around and treat her poorly.. y/n is self harming and no one knows til one day fred (her crush )finds out somehow some way and consoles her and they end up confessing their true feelings for each other?

I just want to say: if anyone needs to talk to someone I'm here. But if you want some sort of therapy or anything there is a app where you can talk it out called 7cupsoftea.

Suicide hotline:800-273-8255

text hotline: 741741

Love you all. You are loved, please know that.

Trigger warning: self harm, abuse

You spent a lot of time in the background. No one seemed to take notice of you, no one seemed to really notice if you were sick or not. Well. Except for Ginny. Ginny saw you. She actually noticed you and asked Fred and George, who were in your year to keep an eye out. She noticed you, talking to you from time to time and noticing you needed more friends. So who better than to go to than the boys who literally knows everyone including the portraits on the walls.

You seemed jumpy, always nearly dropping things when they appeared. But you appreciated the boys, checking on you and talking to you. George had a surprising lack of classes with you though compared to Fred. After a few... Pranks/possible murder plots? The teachers put Fred and George in only two classes together. So Fred had his with you, always sitting next to you and making sure you were good. He didn't really catch on to anything wrong. He just noticed the long sleeves and figured "so she's cold all the time". Ginny and Luna knew this wasn't the case though. They knew you, truly so. You hid the marks from your brothers and the self inflicted scars. You bared so much and they hated to see you tear yourself apart.

Ginny would always change the subject when your family came up in the great hall, Fred and George always being confused to why that happened. Fred was closer with you than George and knew something was up but didn't understand the extent of it. George could see his brother begin to slowly fall for you, him whispering funny little jokes to you making you smile or laugh. However the thing that everyone seemed to notice was the lack of light in your eyes when you showed positive emotion. You would smile, sure. But your eyes seemed dull and tired.

Fred would sometimes skip class with you, sitting under a tree and talk to you about life in general with his head in your lap. Today was one of those days, it being particularly colder but Fred was warm so you didn't mind. "Hey Y/n... What do you think about spending Christmas with us this year?" He asked. You blinked a couple of times. "Are you sure you have the room? I mean... Your family is massive Freddie." You asked. "We always have room. Plus don't you wanna spend the holidays with your fwiends?" He asked, playfully poking your cheek. You chuckled. "Okay... I'll let my parents know."

You felt a slight relief being able to leave hogwarts and it not being associated with going to your parents house. Molly greeted you with a hug and you seemed shocked to receive affection like that right off the bat. Fred noticed though, when Molly's hands slid from your shoulders to your hands you seemed to flinch ever so slightly at the touch. No one else seemed to notice so Fred kept it to himself. Ginny kept close to you, showing you things all throughout the house. Fred however soon whisked you off with George to go off and see the cooler things. The fields, the places they had to just sit and talk or the test area for a few of their pranking devices.

At night it seemed peaceful. But you had these terrible nightmares where you woke up sobbing and Ginny was always there, comforting you when you did. However tonight was just a silent wake up. Still, you didn't want to sleep in case you woke up again but louder. Ginny was still awake and she looked over. "You okay?" She asked. "Do you mind if I step out for a bit? Just need some fresh air." You asked. "Go ahead." She nodded. So you walked out, letting the cold air hit your face as you sat on the back steps of the house. You pulled back your sleeves and saw the scars, closing your eyes.

Six months clean... Yet the reminders were still there. You pulled them back down and sighed before you noticed someone sit down next to you. "Whatcha thinkin' about?" Fred asked, handing you a mug of hot cocoa. "....Do you ever just want to scream for hours to get out your emotions and be free of the weight on your chest?" You asked before taking a long sip of the cocoa. "...Not really. But we can literally just scream in a field out here if you really want?" Fred suggested.

That's exactly what you did, making sure that no one could hear you before you kicked a fence post and Fred rose a brow. "Any particular reason why you're upset?" He asked. You kept kicking it, harder and harder as you went. "Does trauma count as a reliable fucking answer?" You grunted before really kicking it hard. You were panting by the time you were done. "Y/n... Princess, what's up?" He asked. You shook your head. "I want to be happy, I should be happy. I am surrounded by people who care but I can't stop thinking about my God damn--" you kicked the post again. "Family!" You yelled. The pained expression on your face made Fred concerned. "Do you want to go home--" "That place will never be home." You said, catching your breath again. "Y/n... What's going on, what do you need?" He asked. You shook your head, your hair hiding your face so Fred couldn't see the tears, the angry tears falling. You kicked the post again, Fred finally pulling you back by your wrist making you yelp. He frowned and you looked into his eyes with this upset look. "Help me." You whimpered. He said nothing, letting go of your wrist and pulling you into a tight hug.

You told him everything. The abuse, the nightmares the inability to sleep, the crying, all of it. But you also told him you stopped hurting yourself because of Ginny and him. You stopped because you didn't want your friends to lose you in their lives because you grew attached and you didn't want to be a cause of sadness. Fred brought you back to the living room, both of you sitting on the couch and talking all night.

When Molly found you, you were asleep on Fred who was holding you close. She didn't wake you until much later but Fred was determined to have you stay at the burrow rather than go home. Christmas rolled around and Fred got you this necklace. It had a Demiguise engraved on it after he remembered you saying it was your favorite magical creature. You loved it and for the first time your friends saw you genuinely smile. Like your eyes lit up and everything. You got Fred a new broom, him smiling like crazy telling you that one day he was teaching you how to fly with him.

Ginny noticed the nightmares take a slow down. But when they did happen you asked for Fred and sure enough, he'd come in and lay with you. You two were closer, that was becoming very clear. Nights would come where you couldn't sleep, Ginny would tell him and you two would just play a card game and talk. He listened to you, giving you genuine advice before cracking a joke and making you genuinely laugh.

When you went back to school you were more talkative, you actually participated in events, Fred was proud of seeing you slowly come out of your shell. A day of skipping did come along, you sitting underneath the tree and playing with Fred's hair. "So... How are you... With everything?" He asked. "Almost a year clean." You said with a smile. He smiled, looking up at you from your lap and put a hand on your cheek. "I'm proud of you Y/n... Truly." He said. You looked down at him and smiled noticing a strange tension looking at him. "...Y/n..." He breathed looking at you. You swallowed and looked up, a blush slowly forming. Fred leaned up and cleared his throat. "Sooo. What's our next class?" Fred asked. "This was our last class of the day." You said with a chuckle. "Ohhh.. I really gotta start paying attention." He said making you laugh. "Dinner is going to start in a few minutes, want to go?" Fred asked you. "Mmm.. I don't think so. I wanna see the sunset on the lake." You said. Fred sat cross-legged in front of you. "Then I will too." He said. "Wha-- Fred what about--" "I want to stay here." He said simply.

You pulled a deck of cards out of your binder and he chuckled. "Go fish or Rummy?" You asked. "Hmmm. Let's go simple today and say go fish." He said. You two played two rounds before you looked over at the sunset. "That's so pretty." You said with a smile. Fred smiled looking at you. "It really is." He said as the pink skies seemed to bring out your eyes. You looked over and Fred swallowed. You loved this boy... Didn't you?

He felt himself lean forward and you soon felt his lips on yours before you cradled his cheek, pulling away for air and resting your forehead on his. "I-I'm sorry I just reacted and--" "Fred... Please tell me you're going to do that again." You whispered. He chuckled and held your hand that was still on his cheek. "Only if you want me to." He said softly. You nodded with a smile and he kissed you again, feeling his arms slowly slink around you, pulling you almost into his lap.

"Promise you'll never leave me?" You asked. "Never would dream of it Princess."

#fred weasley x reader #fred weasley x you #fred weasley

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rapeculturerealities · 4 years

Link

MARTY GODDARD’S FIRST FLASH OF INSIGHT CAME IN 1972. It all started when she marched into a shabby townhouse on Halsted Street in Chicago to volunteer at a crisis hotline for teenagers.

Most of the other volunteers were hippies with scraggly manes and love beads. But not Marty Goddard. She tended to wear business clothes: a jacket with a modest skirt, pantyhose, low heels. She hid her eyes behind owlish glasses and kept her blond hair short. Not much makeup; maybe a plum lip. She was 31, divorced, with a mordant sense of humor. Her name was Martha, but everyone called her Marty. She liked hiding behind a man’s name. It was useful.

As a volunteer, Ms. Goddard lent a sympathetic ear to the troubled kids then called “runaway teenagers.” They were pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out. She was surprised to discover that many weren’t rebels who’d left home seeking adventure; they were victims who had fled sexual abuse. The phones were ringing with the news that kids didn’t feel safe around their own families. “I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem,” she later said.

She began to formulate questions that almost no one was asking back in the early ’70s: Why were so many predators getting away with it? And what would it take to stop them?

Ms. Goddard would go on to lead a campaign to treat sexual assault as a crime that could be investigated, rather than as a feminine delusion. She began a revolution in forensics by envisioning the first standardized rape kit, containing items like swabs and combs to gather evidence, and envelopes to seal it in. The kit is one of the most powerful tools ever invented to bring criminals to justice. And yet, you’ve never heard of Marty Goddard. In many ways she and her invention shared the same fate. They were enormously important and consistently overlooked.

I was infuriated when I read a few years ago about the hundreds of thousands of unexamined rape kits piled up in warehouses around the country. I had the same question that many did: How many rapists were walking free because this evidence had gone ignored?

Take for example, the case of Nathan Ford, who sexually assaulted a woman in 1995. Although a rape kit was submitted to the police, it went untested for 17 years.

During that time, he went on to assault 21 other people, before being convicted in 2006.

And I had another question: How could a tool as potentially powerful as the rape kit have come into existence in the first place? For nearly two decades, I’d been reporting on inventors, breakthroughs and the ways that new technologies can bring about social change. It seemed to me that the rape-kit system was an invention like no other. Can you think of any other technology designed to hold men accountable for brutalizing women?

As soon as I began to investigate the rape kit’s origins, however, I stumbled across a mystery. Most sources credited a Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, with developing the kit in the 1970s. But a few described the invention as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and an activist, Martha Goddard. Where was the truth? As so often happens in stories about rape, I found myself wondering whom to believe.

Mr. Vitullo died in 2006. Ms. Goddard, as far as I could tell, must still be alive — I couldn’t find any obituaries or gravestones that matched her name. An interview in 2003 placed her in Phoenix, and so I collected phone listings for Martha Goddard in Arizona and called them one after another. All those numbers had been disconnected.

Little did I know that I would have to hunt for six months before I finally solved the mystery. I would learn she had transformed the criminal-justice system, though her role has never been fully acknowledged. And I would also discover that Louis Vitullo — far from being the inventor of the rape kit — may have taken credit for Ms. Goddard’s genius and insisted that his name be put on the equipment.

I pieced together dozens of obscure marriage and death notices to try to find her family members; read through hundreds of newspaper articles to establish the timeline of events; and even hired a researcher to dig through an archive of Chicago police department files from the ’70s. Finally, I managed to speak to eight people who knew or worked with her. From these sources, and two oral-history tapes in which she told her life story, I cobbled together what happened.

Back in that Chicago crisis center, Marty Goddard encouraged teenagers to confide in her, and she began to realize just how many of them had been molested.

At the time, most people believed that sexual abuse of children was rare. One psychiatric textbook from the 1970s estimated that incest occurred in only about one in every million families, and claimed that it was often the fault of girls who initiated sex with their fathers. Meantime, it was still legal in every state in America for a husband to rape his wife. Sexual violence that happened within a family was not considered rape at all. A real rape was a “street rape.” It happened to women stupid enough to be in the wrong places at the wrong times.

In Chicago, rape seemed like some sort of natural disaster, no different from the arctic winds that could kill you if you wandered out in the winter without a coat. “Chicago was not a city you wanted to venture out into after dark,” wrote the activist Naomi Weisstein. “Rape was epidemic.” In 1973, an estimated 16,000 people were sexually assaulted in and around Chicago. Only a tenth of those attacks were reported to the police and fewer than a tenth of those cases went to trial; an infinitesimal fraction of perpetrators ended up in prison.

It was a time — much like our own — when millions of people felt that the police had failed them. Chicago was still reeling from the 1969 killing by the cops of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, while he’d been sleeping in his own bed. The Chicago Police Department was notorious as a brutal, occupying force in black neighborhoods. Citizens’ groups were demanding review boards to reform officers’ behavior.

Amid all that, Ms. Goddard began asking questions that might seem so obvious to us today, but were radical in her own time: What if sexual assault could be investigated? What if you could prove it? What if, instead of a “she said” story, you could persuade a jury with scientific evidence?

A lot of men didn’t like her style. But Ray Wieboldt Jr., heir to a Chicago department-store fortune, did, and in 1972 she was hired as an executive at the Wieboldt Foundation, a charitable family fund that rained down money on progressive causes.

The Wieboldt name became her secret weapon. “I could say, ‘I’m Marty Goddard from the Wieboldt Foundation’ and people would just let me in their doors,” she recounted. And so she Wieboldt-ed her way in to meet with hospital managers and victims’ groups and began asking her relentless questions about rape.

Crime labs did not yet have the ability to test DNA; the first use of DNA forensics would not come until 1986, when British investigators used the technology to hunt down a murderer who raped his victims. But they could analyze pieces of glass, fingerprints, splatter patterns, firearms and fibers. Police investigators could find biological clues to help establish the identity of a suspect by, for instance, comparing blood types.

Ms. Goddard wanted to figure out why — even with all this evidence — no one seemed able to prove that a sexual assault had occurred. She learned that victims usually ended up in a hospital after an assault. The cops might dump a shivering, weeping woman in the emergency room and yell out, “We got a rape for you.” As they cared for the victim, the nurses might wash her off or throw away her bloody dress, inadvertently destroying evidence.

The cops didn’t seem to care. Instead, they would isolate the victim in a room and lob questions at her to try to determine whether she was lying. A Chicago police training manual from 1973 declared, “Many rape complaints are not legitimate,” and added, “It is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with a roving eye.” Officers would routinely ask women what they’d been wearing, whether they’d provoked the attack by acting in a seductive manner, and whether they had enjoyed the sex. “An actual rape victim will generally give the impression of a person who has been dishonored,” according to the manual.

In the early days of forensic science, the 19th century, rape exams sought primarily to test the virtue of women. A doctor would be called in to examine a woman’s vagina and then report on her motives. Was she a trollop, a harlot, or a pure-hearted innocent who spoke the truth?

In 1868, a British publication, Reynolds’s Newspaper, reported on one such exam. The surgeon “gave such evidence as left no doubt that the prosecutrix could not have been so innocent as she had represented herself to be.” The magistrate “said no jury would convict on such evidence, and he should discharge the prisoner.”

In other words, sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide what they felt about the victim — whether she deserved to be considered a “victim” at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing what had actually happened.

Even in the 1970s, the forensic examination remained a formality, a kind of kabuki theater of scientific justice. The police officers wielded absolute power in the situation; they told the story; they assigned blame. And they didn’t want to give up that power.

Ms. Goddard’s insight was that the only fix for this dysfunctional system would be incontrovertible scientific proof, the same kind used in a robbery or attempted murder. The victim’s story should be supported with evidence from the crime lab to build a case that would convince juries. To get that evidence, she needed a device that would encourage the hospital staff members, the detectives and the lab technicians to collaborate with the victim. On the most basic level, Ms. Goddard realized, she had to find a mechanism that would protect the evidence from a system that was designed to destroy it.

EVEN AFTER MONTHS of searching for Marty Goddard, I hadn’t been able to find her, or even figure out the names of her family members. But I did manage to track down Cynthia Gehrie, an activist who’d been swept up in Ms. Goddard’s crusade.

The two women met at a gathering for anti-rape activists in 1973 and soon they were strategizing over lunches and dinners, notebooks by their plates. At the time, Ms. Gehrie worked a day job at the A.C.L.U.; she was so impressed by Ms. Goddard that she volunteered to be her sidekick as they figured out how to force men in power to reckon with the rape epidemic.

Their timing was excellent, because 1974 was the year that everything flipped in Chicago. Women who had once been ashamed were now speaking out.

In October, a delegation of suburban women gathered before the members of the Illinois General Assembly. One described how she’d tried to fend off a sexual attacker with a fireplace poker. After the assault, she had carefully saved the bent poker and handed this piece of evidence to police detectives. Then, she recounted through tears, the police returned the poker to her straightened out. The idiots thought she had wanted them to fix it.

A mother stood before the committee and said that her little girl had been molested on her way to kindergarten. The police were already familiar with the attacker, a pedophile who had infected at least one child with venereal disease. And yet he was roaming free.

A nurse at the meeting explained how medical staff handled rape cases — and in the middle of her testimony, announced, “I am a rape victim myself.”

A few days later, about 70 women from a group called Chicago Legal Action for Women, CLAW for short, flooded into the office of State’s Attorney Bernard Carey, and plastered the walls with messages like “Wanted: Bernard Carey for Aiding and Abetting Rapists.”

The rape problem had suddenly become Mr. Carey’s problem, and he desperately needed to look as if he had an answer.

A movement was beginning — an awakening, like #MeToo. The fact that many of these activists were well-off white women forced politicians to pay attention. Black women in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods were most at risk of sexual violence, but their stories rarely made it into the newspapers, and rape was all too often portrayed as an affliction of the suburbs. Throughout her career, Ms. Goddard would wrestle with this disparity and try to overcome it. In 1982 she told an Illinois state legislative committee that “the lack of services on the South and West Sides of Chicago where a majority of our black victims reside” was “totally disgraceful.”

Now, though, in the early 1970s, she had just one obsession. She was determined to convince Bernard Carey that the problem could be solved, if he only had the will to do it. One day she showed up unannounced at his office and to her surprise, he welcomed her in. “I don’t know what the answer is,” he told her. But he had a new plan: He was going to let women like Ms. Goddard help figure out the rape problem for themselves. He appointed her and Ms. Gehrie to a citizens’ advisory panel on rape. Their mission: to investigate the failures in policing and suggest sweeping reforms.

Marty Goddard finally had what she wanted: permission to get inside the police departments.

With her new investigative powers, she headed to the Chicago crime lab building to ask police officers what was going wrong. Years later, she described what she had learned there in the oral history tapes. The cops blamed hospital workers, saying: “We don’t get hair. We don’t get fingernail scrapings.” The slides weren’t labeled, and they’d been “rubber-banded” together so that they contaminated one another. “So there goes that. It’s worthless,” the detectives told her.

The problem, she realized, was that no one had bothered to tell the nurses and doctors how to collect evidence properly.

What if hospitals could be stocked with easy-to-use forensic tools that would encourage medics, detectives and lab technicians to collaborate instead of pointing fingers? Gradually, these concepts solidified into an object: a kit stocked with swabs, vials and instructions.

Somewhere along the way, Ms. Goddard had befriended Rudy Nimocks, an African-American police officer who had handled incest cases and been horrified by what he’d seen. Ms. Goddard and Ms. Gehrie described Mr. Nimocks as a mentor. (He would be in his 90s now; I made multiple attempts to reach him without success.) According to several sources, Mr. Nimocks warned Ms. Goddard to proceed carefully. He told her that she should take care not to challenge the men in the crime lab directly. And he said that she’d need Sgt. Louis Vitullo, the head of the microscope unit, on her side.

Sergeant Vitullo was a scruffy cop-scientist, with a lab coat pulled hastily over his rumpled shirt and the pale, haunted look of a man who spent hours peering at murder weapons.

One day, Ms. Goddard found Sergeant Vitullo at his desk, introduced herself, and presented him with a written description of the rape-kit system. She must have been blindsided by what happened next.

“He screamed at her,” according to Ms. Gehrie. “He told her she had no business getting involved with this and that what she was talking about was crazy. She was wasting his time. He didn’t want to hear about this anymore.” Ms. Gerhie said Ms. Goddard called her minutes later to vent about being thrown out of Sergeant Vitullo’s office.

“Well, that didn’t go so well!” Ms. Goddard said wryly.

As far as Ms. Goddard knew at that moment, the rape-kit idea had just been killed off.

INVENTION, ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN — these are not just technical feats. They are political acts. The inventor offers us a magical new ability that can be wonderful or terrifying: to halt disease, to map the ocean floor, to replace a human worker with a machine, or to kill enemies more efficiently. And those magical abilities create winners and losers. The Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff has observed that technology “rules us much as laws do.”

When it comes to sexual assault, there are many inventions I can think of that help men get away with it — from the date-rape drug to “stalkerware” software. More striking is how few inventions, how little technology and design, has been devoted to keeping women safe.

Think about our public spaces, and how much they reinforce the power of men. If you grew up as a girl, you were taught to map out potential sexual attacks when you walked through any city. A hidden doorway, an empty subway platform, a pedestrian bridge with high walls — such places pulse with threat.

In my high-school driving class, the instructor lectured us about the dangers that lurked in empty parking lots. “Ladies, you don’t want to be fumbling in your purse if someone jumps out of the bushes,” he said, and suggested that we hold the car keys in one hand as we hurried to the car. Even as a teenager, I remember thinking how crazy this sounded. If there were rapists lurking everywhere, couldn’t the grownups do something about that?

I learned that the streets did not belong to me. Nor did the stairwells or the empty laundry rooms at midnight. I still remember the sense of defeat my first week as a college student on a pastoral Connecticut campus in the 1980s. I’d been aching to explore its tantalizing forests and hidden ponds. But then the freshman girls were herded into a lecture hall, and the head of public safety told us that if we wanted to walk from one building to another at night, we should first call the escort service that squired females around and protected them from rape.

“No way!” I thought.

And yet, at that time I was struggling to understand — and forgive myself for — having been molested as a small child. And though I never did use the campus escort service, I also never felt that the campus was mine.

But this is not how it has to be. It’s entirely possible to create public spaces and tools for everyone. Our environment and technology can foster a sense of equality and pluralism.

At the same time that Marty Goddard was trying to reinvent forensic technology, the disabled community was radically transforming the design of cities by pushing to make streets and buildings wheelchair-accessible. A wheelchair ramp does more than just allow someone to roll into a building; it also sends out a message that the people in those wheelchairs are important and worthy of dignity. This is the power of invention.

You can see why the idea of a rape kit might have been offensive to Sergeant Vitullo and other police officers. Like many of the great technological ideas, this one blasted through the assumptions of the day: that nurses were too stupid to collect forensic evidence; that women who “cried rape” were usually lying; and that evidence didn’t really matter when it came to rape, because rape was impossible to prove.

Now here was this proposal for a cardboard box packed with tools that would allow anyone to perform police work.

Despite his original reaction, Sergeant Vitullo mulled over Ms. Goddard’s idea. He must have found it intriguing. He studied the plans she’d shown him. And he began to see the sense in it all.

One day, Ms. Gehrie told me, Sergeant Vitullo called up Ms. Goddard and said, “I’ve got something to show you.” When Ms. Goddard arrived in his office, Ms. Gehrie recalled, “he handed her a full model of the kit with all the items enclosed.” Sergeant Vitullo had assembled a prototype for the rape kit and added a few flourishes of his own. And now, apparently, he regarded himself as its inventor.

Another friend of Ms. Goddard’s confirmed this story. Mary Sladek Dreiser, who met Ms. Goddard in 1980, told me that Ms. Goddard always praised Sergeant Vitullo in public. But in private, she described him as a petty tyrant who would “only go along with the kit if it were named after him.”

The rape-kit idea was presented to the public as a collaboration between the state attorney’s office and the police department, with men running both sides...

..and little credit given to the women who had pushed for reform. Ms. Goddard agreed to this, Ms. Gehrie said, because she saw that it was the only way to make the rape kit happen

In the mid-1970s, while still at the Wieboldt Foundation, Ms. Goddard began working nights and weekends to found a nonprofit group called the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. The group filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit in 1978, ensuring that her creation would be branded with a man’s name. For years afterward, the newspapers called the rape kit the “Vitullo kit.” When he died in 2006, an obituary headline celebrated him as the “Man Who Invented the Rape Kit.” His wife, Betty, quoted in the obituary, said that her husband was “proud” of the rape kit “but he didn’t get any royalties for it.” The obituary hailed Mr. Vitullo as a pioneer in a new form of evidence collection that transformed the criminal-justice system. There was no mention of Ms. Goddard.

Even if her name wasn’t on it, Ms. Goddard finally had permission to start a citywide rape-kit system. What she didn’t have was any money to create the kits, distribute them, or train nurses to use them. She had to raise all those funds through her nonprofit group, which represented survivors of sex crimes.

This seems strange. After all, state governments covered the cost of running homicide evidence through the crime lab, so why should sexual assault be any different?

And yet it was. And it still is.

Money problems have always haunted the rape-kit system. Testing a rape kit is expensive; today it costs $1,000 to $1,500. Except in the highest-profile cases, police departments have often pleaded underfunding, and let the kits pile up. That’s why victims themselves have had to bankroll crime labs. In the past decade, groups like the Joyful Heart Foundation have helped raise millions of dollars to test rape kits. The money sometimes comes from bake sales, Etsy crafts and feminist comedy nights.

Fundraising was even harder in the 1970s, however, when most foundations wouldn’t give money to a project with “rape” or “sex” in its title. And so Ms. Goddard had to resort to finding money wherever she could. This is where Hugh Hefner enters the story.

Chicago was built on soft-core porn, and Mr. Hefner was one of the city’s most prominent moguls. Men in suits sidled into his clubhouses for three-martini lunches, celebrities swanned into his mansion for glittering fund-raisers, and a blazing “Playboy” sign scalded the downtown skyline.

Mr. Hefner regarded the women’s liberation movement as a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt. And so his philanthropic Playboy Foundation showered money on feminist causes. In the early 1970s, for example, the Playboy fortune provided the seed money for the A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project, which was co-founded by a little-known lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the mid-1970s, Ms. Goddard applied to Playboy for a $10,000 grant (the equivalent of about $50,000 today) to start a rape-kit system. And she got it.

Her collaboration with the Playboy Foundation turned out to be a surprisingly ideal one, in large part because Ms. Goddard had a friend on the inside: Margaret Pokorny (then known as Margaret Standish). Ms. Pokorny brainstormed all kinds of ways to support the project that went beyond the big check. For instance, she recruited Playboy’s graphics designers to create the packaging for the kit. And when Ms. Goddard needed volunteers to assemble the kits, Ms. Pokorny came up with a creative solution: old ladies.

“I’ve got this great idea, Marty,” Ms. Goddard recalled Ms. Pokorny saying. “Everybody just loves the Playboy bunny and these older women, they want something to do.” So one day a horde of them showed up in the Playboy offices, swilling free coffee as they assembled sexual-assault evidence kits.

In 1978, Marty Goddard delivered the first standardized rape kit to around 25 hospitals in the Chicago area for use in a pilot program she had designed — “the first program of its type in the nation,” according to a newspaper article.

The kits cost $2.50 each and contained test tubes, slides and packaging materials to protect the specimens from mixing; a comb for collecting hair and fiber; sterile nail clippers; and a bag for the victim’s clothing. There was a card for the victim, giving her information about where to seek counseling and further medical services.

The New York Times, which described the initiative as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and Ms. Goddard, said that the “innocuous looking” box “could be a powerful new weapon in the conviction of rapists.” The Times noted that one of the most important features of the system was deceptively low-tech: “Forms for the doctor and the police officers involved are included, as are sealing tape and a pencil for writing on the slides. Anyone who handles the box must put his or her signature on printed spaces on the kit’s cover.” There would be a paper trail that showed how the evidence had traveled from the victim’s body to the crime lab.

By the end of 1979, nearly 3,000 kits had been turned over to crime labs. One of them had been submitted by a bus driver who’d been abducted and raped by 28-year-old William Johnson. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, and the Vitullo Evidence Kit was credited with winning the day in court.

By now, Ms. Goddard’s friend Rudy Nimocks had been promoted to head the sex homicide department. He told The Chicago Tribune that the new system had improved evidence collection. But perhaps more important, the kit worked magic in the courtroom. “In addition to the kits being very practical,” he said, “we find that it impresses the jurors when you have a uniform set of criteria in the collection of evidence.”

In other words, the rape kit, with its official blue-and-white packaging and its stamps and seals, functioned as a theatrical prop as well as a scientific tool. The woman in the witness box, weeping as she recounted how her husband tried to kill her, could sound to a judge and jury like a greedy little opportunist. But then a crime-lab technician would take the stand and show them the ripped dress, the semen stains, the blood. When a scientist in a lab coat affirmed the story, it seemed true.

Ms. Goddard had invented not just the kit, but a new way of thinking about prosecuting rape. Now, when a victim testified, she no longer did so alone. Doctors, nurses and forensic scientists backed up her version of the events — and the kit itself became a character in the trials. It, too, became a witness.

That’s another reason Ms. Goddard may have been willing to trademark her idea under Sergeant Vitullo’s name. It was as if in order to invent, she also had to disappear. The rape kit simply never would have had traction if a woman with no scientific credentials had been known as its sole inventor. It had to come from a man.

The word “technology” is part of the problem. It’s a synonym for “stuff that men do.” As the historian Autumn Stanley pointed out, a revised history of technology taking into account women’s contributions would include all sorts of “unimportant” inventions like baby cribs, menstrual pads and food preservation techniques. Sometimes the only way that women could navigate this world was to let a white man in a lab coat become the face of their radical ideas, while they themselves shrank into the background.

During World War II, for instance, a team of six “girls” figured out how to operate the world’s first all-purpose electronic digital computer, called the ENIAC. In 1946, one of them, Betty Holberton, stayed up half the night to ensure that the computer would ace its debut in front of the newspaper cameras. And yet she and the others were treated like switchboard operators, mere helpers to the male engineers. Ms. Holberton went on to invent and design many of the essential tools of computing during the 1950s and ’60s almost invisibly, while her male colleagues were celebrated as geniuses of the age.

Ms. Goddard, certainly, had mastered the art of vanishing. Her friends and collaborators from the 1970s had lost touch with her, and were just as flummoxed by her disappearance as I was. But they remembered her in vivid, disconnected flashes. I often felt that I was spying on her through keyholes into other people’s minds.

“She made miniature rooms,” Margaret Pokorny said, describing how Ms. Goddard spent hours with tweezers and tiny brushes constructing fairy-tale interiors inside of boxes. The rooms were scattered all around Ms. Goddard’s apartment, as if a dollhouse had been dissected.

From Cynthia Gehrie, I learned why Ms. Goddard might have been so driven to escape into Lilliputian fantasies. Ms. Gehrie told me that in the late 1970s, her friend had flown to a resort in Hawaii for a vacation and returned to Chicago a different, and broken, person. “I was raped,” Ms. Goddard had told Ms. Gehrie, pouring out a harrowing account of how a man had abducted her.

“He drove her to a remote location,” Ms. Gehrie said. “He taunted her with the knife. She told him she would do whatever he wanted. Finally, he drove her back to the resort. She was astonished when he let her go.” Ms. Gehrie can’t remember whether Ms. Goddard reported the rape to the police, but she’s always wondered if her friend’s prominence as a victims-rights advocate had made her a target. The attacker had won her trust, Ms. Goddard said, by pretending to be a supporter of her cause.

In one obscure interview I found, Ms. Goddard herself mentioned that rape and the scars it left on her body. And, she said, the attacker had infected her with herpes.

I was heartbroken for her, and more determined to find her than ever. By now she had become “Marty” to me — I could think of her only as a friend. I surmised, from the string of addresses she’d left behind, that she had been spiraling into poverty. She would have been 79. Was anyone caring for her? I felt less and less like a journalist chasing down a story. What I really wanted was to save Marty Goddard before it was too late.

Through the 1980s, Ms. Goddard kept fighting for the rape-kit system despite her growing exhaustion. It was “one incident by one incident by one incident,” she said later. “Imagine how many years it took us to go from state’s attorney to state’s attorney to cop to detective to deputy to doctor to pediatrician to nurse to nurse practitioner” and train each person who interacted with the victim and the rape kit. “I felt I had to save the world, and I was going to start with Chicago and move to Cook County and move to the rest of the state. And there was something in the back of my mind that said, ‘Gee, maybe the circumstances will be such that at some time I can go beyond the borders of Illinois.’”

She was right. In 1982, New York City adopted Ms. Goddard’s system because “its effectiveness was demonstrated in Chicago,” according to The New York Times. Within a few years, the city had amassed thousands of sealed kits containing evidence, and the system was putting rapists in prison.

Ms. Goddard had envisioned a kind of internet of forensics at a time when the internet itself was in its infancy. The idea was to standardize practices in crime labs everywhere and encourage police departments to share data to catch perpetrators who might cross county and state lines. And she had personal reasons for grinding away at the problem, for making it her obsessive mission. The man who had brutalized her in Hawaii still walked free. She knew this because she’d seen him, she told a friend at the time.

She had been walking to the attorney general’s office in downtown Chicago when her attacker materialized out of the crowd and locked eyes with her. It must have been a waking nightmare. Had he been stalking her? Had it been a chance encounter?

I don’t know. She was under an extraordinary amount of stress; maybe she was mistaken. I am working from fragments — from bits and pieces of her friends’ memories. What I do know is that Ms. Goddard began to drink; that she depended now on cheap sherry to dull the pain. She was dragging herself from city to city, evangelizing for the rape kit, sleeping in dive motels, giving everything she had until there was nothing left.

In 1984, the F.B.I. held a conference at its training center in Quantico, Va. Expert criminologists flew in to discuss a new system that would detect the serial killers and rapists operating across state lines. But to the dismay of Ms. Goddard, who attended the conference, the country’s top lawmen demonstrated little empathy for victims.

“So, this one man gets up,” a professor known as an expert in sex crimes, Ms. Goddard remembered later. The professor flashed slides on the screen, a twisted parade of naked female corpses. He made little effort to protect the identities of the dead women. Ms. Goddard was horrified at the way he “couldn’t wait to show the bite marks on the breasts” of one victim, as if to share his titillation with the audience.

That kind of attitude might have gone unremarked at a police convention, but there were lawyers, victims’ advocates and nurses at this conference and they “didn’t appreciate it.” Just as dismaying, this so-called expert described “interrogating” women who’d been raped, as if they were the criminals.

“I went nuts,” Ms. Goddard said. She gripped the arms of her chair, “saying to myself: ‘Calm down. Don’t say anything.’”

AFTER THE PRESENTATION, Ms. Goddard approached one of the organizers and said, “Something’s wrong here, and I really object.” Working on the fly, Ms. Goddard gave a presentation about her pilot project in Chicago, explaining how the rape-kit system worked. Afterward, “two guys from the Department of Justice” approached her and asked her to replicate her program all around the country. She was finally given enough funding to travel to more than a dozen different states and help start up pilot programs.

“I don’t know how my cat survived,” she said of those years. “I was gone all the time.”

She was tired out. And “so many people were downright insulting.” They’d ask her why she was an authority on forensics: “Are you a cop? An attorney?” Ms. Goddard was drinking heavily. She began to step away from her prominent role in criminal justice. She moved to Texas, and then Arizona. And finally she faded from public view so thoroughly that I believe she must have decided to disappear.

Her friend and former colleague Mary Dreiser kept in touch. But one day in about 2006 or 2007, Ms. Dreiser was distressed to dial Ms. Goddard’s number and discover it had been disconnected. Ms. Dreiser’s husband, a lawyer, asked a detective to find Ms. Goddard. She turned up in a mobile-home park in Arizona. “She was happy I had tracked her down,” Ms. Dreiser said.

By the time I started searching for Ms. Goddard a decade later, she had moved out of that trailer and her most recent listing suggested she lived in a dumpy apartment building alongside a Phoenix highway. That phone, too, had been disconnected, so I’d assumed that she had moved on once again, perhaps to a nursing home. But just in case, I called up the building’s management office and asked if the people there could tell me anything about Marty Goddard.

“Unfortunately, I can’t,” said the woman who answered the phone. There were rules about protecting the privacy of residents.

But rules are meant to be broken. So I called back. “Listen,” I said, “just hear me out.”

I then plied the woman in the management office with a brief — and, I hoped, heart-melting — tribute to Ms. Goddard’s genius and her sacrifices.

It worked. “OK,” she said, “let me check into it.” Hours later, she called me back. Marty Goddard had indeed lived in their apartment building, she said, then paused.

“And I’m very sorry to tell you that she passed away.”

The news walloped me. Ms. Goddard had died in 2015, at the age of 74, but there had been no obituary. No announcement. I’d searched for pictures of headstones, remembrances, funeral announcements, and I’d found nothing. This woman who had done so much for the rest of us. How could this be?

Paradoxically, at the same time as Ms. Goddard was fading from sight, her name no longer in the papers, the advent of DNA forensics was giving the rape kit a new kind of superpower.

In 1988, a court ordered Victor Lopez, a 42-year-old repeat felon accused of violent attacks, to submit to a blood draw. He would be the first defendant in New York State to be linked to a crime through DNA analysis — and the case would prove the dazzling effectiveness of this new tool. The DNA test showed a strong match between Mr. Lopez’s blood and the semen collected from one of his victims. Mr. Lopez was convicted of three sexual assaults and sentenced to 100 years in prison. One juror, John Bischoff, told The New York Times that “the DNA was kind of a sealer on the thing. You can’t really argue with science.”

When Ms. Goddard began her work, crime labs could establish only a fuzzy connection between a suspect’s blood and the swabs inside the kit — for instance, by showing that the blood type was a match. But now, DNA markers could reveal the path of a perpetrator as he left his semen or blood at multiple crime scenes.

Starting in 2003, several women across the country accused a man named Nathan Loebe of sexual assault, but those accusations had never stuck.

After the Tucson police received a grant to test a backlog of rape kits, they discovered that DNA from several of the kits matched Mr. Loebe. Rape-kit evidence revealed the pattern of his attacks, and last year he was sentenced to 274 years in prison, including for 12 counts of sexual assault.

But DNA testing was expensive. Compounding that problem was the sheer success of the rape kit system: Victims now felt encouraged to report their assaults and submit to exams, which meant that police departments were flooded with evidence.

And so, just as the rape-kit system began to succeed, police departments strangled it. They began hiding away thousands of untested rape kits deemed too expensive to process.

New York was among the first cities to set up a rape-kit system, and almost immediately it fell behind in processing. It amassed a huge backlog — 16,000 untested kits by the year 2000. The women (and some men) who submitted to rubber-gloved exams did so because they hoped against hope that the police might actually catch a perpetrator. Little did they know that their evidence could be thrown in a warehouse — or even in a trash can.

In 2000, Paul Ferrara, the director of Virginia’s crime lab, said that backlogs were growing all around the country and “cost lives.” The year before, the Virginia Beach police had had to release a rape suspect because potentially incriminating DNA couldn’t be processed quickly enough, and the suspect went on to murder a woman.

It is striking how much Ms. Goddard’s trajectory mirrored that of her invention. In the early 1990s, just when she might have risen to national prominence, she drifted south. She retired, though she was only in her early 50s, and eked out a living with some help from friends. By the 2000s, she had sobered up and spent her days clipping newspapers, tracking the issues that she most cared about. And then — this part hurts my heart — she pursued a degree in forensics at a local community college.

Ms. Goddard had founded sexual-assault forensics, and yet she now lacked any of the bona fides required to be recognized as an expert. Nothing came of her studies, and she never really worked again. Ms. Goddard herself had been warehoused.

I know all of this because just a few months ago, I finally cracked the case of why and how she disappeared, thanks to some clues I found in the announcement of her brief 1966 marriage in a Michigan newspaper. Working through a chain of obituaries and phone records and small newspaper items, I tracked down a number for Scott Goddard, who I thought must be Marty Goddard’s nephew.

One day I cold-called him and left a message. It turned out that he was the right Scott Goddard. His father had died in a freak accident in 1980, and after that, his aunt became like a second mother to him. “When I was 9 or 10 years old, she took me to the Grand Canyon. And I remained close with her for her entire life,” Mr. Goddard said.

He told me that his aunt — who’d always been so busy, so engaged — had turned into a hermit in the 2000s. She withdrew into her trailer in the mobile-home park, with her newspaper clippings fluttering everywhere, surrounded by the miniature model rooms she still loved to build. She was vanishing, shrinking down to nothing.

“When she passed, I inherited about 50 boxes of stuff,” he said, including a tiny toy chest filled with dolls for the doll children to play with.

He told me that when he was a boy, his aunt had taken him through the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago — a place she visited many times. Here they had lost themselves in those perfect shadow boxes, peering into, say, a Georgian dining room with crystal wine glasses, like fragments of diamonds, arranged on a silver tray. Beyond the chandelier and the French windows, a painted garden beckoned, with a lily pond and trees wilting in the summer heat, and paths you could follow into even stranger dreamscapes. You could imagine opening up one of the postage-stamp-sized books to hear the crack of its gold-leaf spine and read the secrets contained in its mouse-print text.

I can’t tell you what drove Marty Goddard into her dioramas. People around her tended to believe she wanted to escape into her imagination. But I think maybe she was exploring the dark magic of ordinary things, the way the most forgettable object can be converted into evidence. Some underwear, a pack of cigarettes, the note scrawled on the scrap of paper — how strange it is that any of these furnishings of your life could one day be used to reconstruct your own assault or murder. I wonder if she was building tiny crime scenes peppered with clues, if somehow she was leaving a message about what had happened to her.

Mr. Goddard told me that about 2010, “depression started to set in,” and his aunt became a furious alcoholic. Her once steel-trap mind wandered. Worse, she raged and accused, believed friends plotted to kill her. “In the last few years, she alienated most of her family and friends,” he said.

THE RAPE KIT WASN’T DOING SO WELL EITHER. In 2009, investigators toured an abandoned parking garage that the Detroit police had appropriated for storage and where officers had been dumping evidence for decades. In the dank building, with pigeons fluttering over their head, the investigators wandered past a blood-stained sofa and a bucket full of bullets and shells. In one of the parking bays, they found the rape kits — what would turn out to be a trove of 11,000, most of which had never been tested. Some of the kits had been collected as far back as 1980. The victims ranged in age from 90 to one month old.

It wasn’t just Detroit. Investigators in cities around the country had begun to open up their own warehouses, and they too discovered towers of untested rape kits.

By 2015, the backlog of untested rape kits in the United States had grown to an estimated 400,000.

In 2016, the Justice Department announced a new sexual assault kit initiative and $45 million to tackle the backlog. More than 25 states have committed to testing warehoused evidence. Despite the government funding, the cost of these initiatives still largely fell on women’s groups and the victims themselves, who organized dinner parties, Facebook charity drives and comedy shows.

So far, the efforts have paid off. Five states and the District of Columbia have cleared their backlogs. Testing thousands of kits has led to a bonanza of DNA identifications and hundreds of convictions. Scientists are also using rape-kit data to show that there are more serial rapists than we ever suspected. In one study of rape kits in the Cleveland area, researchers found that more than half of them were connected to other cases.

In other words, when a victim decides to go to all the trouble of driving to an emergency room and submitting to a rape-kit exam, it’s because she believes that her attacker will rape someone else. And quite often, she’s right.

When Ms. Goddard died, she asked that her ashes be thrown to the winds in Sedona, Ariz., along the red cliffs. Old friends like Cynthia Gehrie and Margaret Pokorny didn’t even know she was gone. She left behind those boxes of tiny furniture. And, also, a nationwide forensics system that might never have existed but for her.

Writing this, I dreamed of one day seeing one of the original kits displayed in the Smithsonian, among the parade of great American inventions. Mary Dreiser told me she might have saved one of the kits distributed in 1980. I asked her to hunt for it, and there it was, in the back of a closet, yellowed after decades in storage. The kit was emblazoned with the logo of a female face, as if to declare that this — among all the man-made objects in the world — had been created by and for women.

Today, a new generation of inventors are figuring out how to speed up the testing of rape-kit DNA, to improve the design of the kits, and to draw new insights from sexual-assault analytics. This story of feminist technology is still unfolding. Half a century after Marty Goddard answered the calls of teenage rape victims, survivors and their advocates are assembling a vast net of evidence, and it is tightening, ever so slowly, around the perpetrators.

#history #rape kits #goddard

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talk-to-someone-or-me · 3 years

Text

TW// suicide

You want to kill yourself?

It’s 10:53 pm on a Sunday night. You’ve already said goodnight to your parents and siblings. They think you’re sound asleep. You sit at your desk twirling a pen in your hand. You stare at the blank piece of paper as tears refill your eyes for the fifth time tonight. You don’t want to do it without writing a goodbye letter. You want to make sure your family knows why you did it. The tears fall onto the paper and you can’t help the frustration as the tears begin to ruin the paper. You crumble it up and break down even harder. You realize you can’t write the letter, so you look in the mirror once more and watch as your final tear falls. Only a couple moments later your heart stops and the blood escapes your body to create a puddle on the floor. But nobody is going to care right?

It’s now 6:47 am Monday morning. Your mother waits downstairs in the kitchen to give you your lunch money. She’s already late for work but she doesn’t want you to stress about making lunch for yourself. She doesn’t know what’s taking so long. She yells your name a couple times, but there’s no response. She has no idea your cold dead body is lying in your bedroom. She thinks you slept in, so she runs up the stairs and knocks on your door. But still, there is no answer. She opens the door and screams, horrified. She runs to you and holds your body. The tears seem like a waterfall, everlasting. She sits there with you cradled in her arms for a good hour, before she has the strength to get up and call your father. Your father rushes home, and they cry together. They pick up your siblings from school and try to explain what has happened. Your older brother runs out of your room and into his. He slams the door. He thinks its all his fault. He’s always picked on you, calling you names and starting arguments just to push your buttons. He punches his walls and allows his tears to pour out of him. Your little sister doesn’t understand. She asks if it’s because she always tries to steal your stuff or because she never leaves you alone when your friends are over. It’s hard to explain something like this to a six year old. But she probably wouldn’t care right?

It’s now Wednesday and your mom finally goes to your school. She hasn’t left the house since you took your life, but she knew she had to go. She enters your classroom, only to see the teacher sitting at her desk grading papers. It’s 12:19 pm so your classmates are sitting in lunch. Your teacher greets her and asks where you’ve been. Your mother bursts into tears and your teacher is astonished. She has no idea what’s wrong, but she tries to comfort your mother. Your mom begins to explain what had happened, and your teacher starts to cry too. She begins to have flashbacks of all the times she yelled at you for not paying enough attention and not doing your homework. She thinks its her fault for being too hard on you. Your classmates return and are confused. A couple students recognize your mom and want to say hi, but they sense that something is wrong. Your teacher calls the vice principal and principal in and your mom explains everything. Everyone in the classroom is now crying. Even the annoying boy that sat behind you and threw gum in your hair is crying, thinking its his fault. Even the popular girl that wouldn’t give you the time of day is crying, thinking its her fault. Even the nerd that wouldn’t let you copy his homework is crying, thinking its his fault. They’re probably all faking, because nobody actually cares, right?

A week has gone by and it’s time for your funeral. Nobody has ever seen one this large. Almost every kid in your school and their families are here. Actually almost anyone you’ve come into contact with has come. It’s like a pool of black as one looks over the people sitting in the chairs as your corpse lies in the casket. Everyone goes up to speak. And after every speech, everyone begins to cry even harder. Even the emotionless jock is in hysterics. The funeral lasts many hours; nobody wants to get up, to move on, to accept what has happened is real life. All of them are just too lazy to get up, because they obviously don’t care, right?

It’s now been a month since your death. None of your family members have been in your room. The door remains shut. Your mom goes up to your dad and whispers, “it’s time”. Your dad looks at her with his lifeless eyes, nods, and slowly rises from the kitchen table. They enter your room slowly. Just stepping inside of it gives your mother the chills. Your father holds your mom as she begins to tear up. He’s trying to be strong, but he can’t, soon tears swell in his eyes too. They begin to pick up your clothes, dust your shelves, and make your bed. The stain on your carpet from your blood has been covered with a rug. Neither of them go near it. They clean in silence for the next hour. They don’t care that you’re gone; they just didn’t want a messy room, right?

They miss you. Your smile, your laugh, the way your eyes light up when you’re happy. Do you want to take that away from everyone? From yourself? Never get to smile again, or see the person that makes your heart skip a beat, never get to live? Don’t do that to yourself. You have so much to live for. If you haven’t already, do you really want to miss the opportunity to meet your true friends? Have your first kiss? Fall head over heels in love? Get your heart broken time and time again? Go to college? Get an A+ on that final that you studied for days on end for? Get married? Have your own children? What would you do if you walked into your 14 year old daughter’s room and saw her lying there with no heartbeat, surrounded by a pool of blood? It would be no big deal right? You’d shrug and clean up the blood as you hum you favourite song that’s been in your head for the past couple days. No. You’d cry and clutch her lifeless body in your arms and cry. Cry, and cry and cry. You’d think it was your fault and a million thoughts would go through your mind. Why would she do this? Is it my fault? Why didn’t she tell me that she was depressed? Why didn’t I stop her? How couldn’t I have known? But she was thinking the same thing you were as a child. You know, that nobody would care?

So think twice. Take a deep breath. You’re worth more than this. Nobody should have to think that taking their life is the best thing to do. Anything you’re going through is temporary; the feeling won't last forever. You’ll get through this. No matter how long it takes you need to know, you’ll get through this, and you don’t have to face it alone. There are so many people that you can talk to. Family, friends, neighbors, teachers, counsellors, hotlines, me, etc. I will be here for you, no matter what. I will try my absolute hardest to help you. So please; do not ever, EVER, write that letter, or even think about suicide. Life is full of ups and downs for a reason. It makes us stronger, shows us what we can get through. It builds and shapes us into the next generation of parents, grandparents even. You might not see the end of the tunnel yet, but I promise its there. You just keep walking towards it.

This isn’t meant to offend anyone. I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I suffer from depression, and I have attempted suicide.

This was an eye opener for myself.

#suicide prevention #tw suicude #self care #self help #mental health #mental health help #mental heath support #you are not alone

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ythankucaptainmccoy · 4 years

Text

Commander Wolffe x Reader (Inadequate)

This one was next on the list, and it was an imagine from @gabrielewolffe. Imagine being bullied by some clones so you try to end your life, but Wolffe caught you before you can do it. Of course there will be a warning on this, and please if anyone ever feels like they want to end their life please seek help. There are several hotlines you can call or even text. While writing this I listened to Love Story by 2cellos because it is a mood setter. WARNING: Angst, Bullying, War, Death, Flashaback (italics) and Attempted Suicide.

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The last mission you had led was a complete disaster that caused the death of your entire platoon. You were sitting on the edge of the cliff still contemplating your decision. You were a bounty hunter you were supposed to be strong not weak like you were now. Your helmet sat beside you glinting in the light of the setting sun.

You were screaming at your squad to take cover as explosions were happening around you. The clankers had you all pinned and it didn’t look good. You yelled to the troops to run that you would cover them, but they refused to leave you alone to fight. You looked at them as the blasterfire drew closer. “If any of you want to retreat go now!”, you shouted. They all stood their ground and nodded at you. You gripped your blaster tightly and nodded back.

Jumping over the low wall that protected you; the troopers followed as you howled your battle cry. One by one your troops were blasted down and then a tank fired taking out more. It was now you and three others as you yelled for them to retreat. A tank aimed and fired at the four of you. A large explosion landed to your left causing you to go flying through the air. You hit the ground hard knocking the breath out of you.

You were trying to focus your vision, and you could see one trooper left. He was crawling toward you, and you started to crawl towards him as well. He was almost to you when someone kicked him onto his back. When you looked up Ventress was there, and she looked at you and chuckled. “How long has it been since I took your eye”, she laughed. “I’ll continue to kill all the clones you hold dear, and I will get that blasted Commander of the 104th”, she hissed.

She wrenched the trooper up and pulled his helmet off. “I want you to watch as I kill him”, she grinned. “PLEASE DON’T DO THIS!”, you screamed trying to get up. Ventress laughed and ignited the saber going through the troopers chest. “NOOOOOOOO!”, you wailed. Ventress was about to come towards you when several LAAT’s showed up laying down covering fire. She turned tail and ran like the coward she was.

You scrambled on hands and knees to the trooper as he gasped for air, wide eyed. You yanked your helmet off, and cradled him to you. “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. I should have made you all retreat”, you sobbed. The trooper shook his head, “It’s okay sir”, he said as a peaceful expression passed over his face. He stopped breathing and you rocked him sobbing, and begging for him to come back. That's how the rest of the 104th found you cradling the trooper as tears streamed from your good eye.

Sinker was the one to get to you first and Boost right behind him. Sinker had Boost pull the troop from your arms, and Sinker looked you over. You stood up shaking and you took a couple staggerings steps when you collapsed. You woke up later in a medical tent where your leg had been wrapped. The medic telling you that you had taken some shrapnel there, but it was a minor wound. You made your way out of the tent only to be pushed by some clones.

“You let them die”, one of the clones growled. “Your no good to us here bounty hunter if you can even call yourself one. She couldn’t even stop Ventress from taking her eye”, another hissed. You would normally say something back or even fight, but they were right. Everytime it seemed that you had screwed up. “You should just leave, and never come back to the gar”, the leader of the group growled. There were three of them, and you could take them, but you kept seeing all the dead clones that you had lead earlier.

You tried to ignore them as one of them shoved you again. “You should have made them retreat because if you had they would still be alive”, a trooper with a mohawk seethed. Every word felt like a punch to the gut, and your chest tightened. You wished that one of them would just hit you so that the pain would help you cope, but none of them did anything other than insult you, and curse at you. When you walked out of range you made your way to the cliff overlooking the sunset.

Looking down into the canyon below you kept thinking about ending the pain. Just one foot and then the other to plunge to your death. You should have died back there with your troops instead of alive, and watching the sun set on this planet. The one clone was right, you didn’t belong here with them, hells you didn’t belong anywhere, and you were a poor excuse for a bounty hunter. You got up as the breeze swept your hair around you. This was it you had made your decision; you were just so tired and ready for it all to end.

You stopped for a moment thinking about Commander Wolffe. You loved him, and you wanted him to know you would always love him. You picked up your communicator and left a message for him that what you were about to do you had thought through, and that you loved him. Also letting him know that he wasn’t the reason for what you were about to do. You were crying again as you hit the button on your com.

Wolffe had just walked into the med tent to look for you and his communicator chimed. He pulled up a message from you, and hit play to hear your shaky voice. He stiffened at the mention of going and never coming back. Wolffe knew what that meant and he wasn’t ready to lose you, and he wondered what had driven you to this point. He ran out of the tent and frantically searched for you.

Three troopers were talking about the encounter they had with you and Wolffe overheard. So they were the culprits, and he was determined to get to you before you did something irreversible. He rushed the leader and pushed him against a rock wall. “Where is she! Where is (Y/N)?!”, he growled. “She took off, and thats whats best for her hell hope she never comes back”, the clone sneered. Wolffe threw a punch right to his nose and heard the crunch of it breaking. “Where did she go!”, he shouted. “You broke my nose”, he groaned. “I’ll break more than that if you don’t tell me where she is”, he pulled his fist back again. “She took off toward the canyons”, one of the other three told him.

He didn’t wait as he rushed to the cliff overlooking the canyon. He could see you, and you were so dangerously close to the edge. He was almost to you when you walked off the edge. “NOOOO!”, he screamed as he launched himself to the edge landing on his stomach and grabbing hold of your armor. You gasped and looked up to see Wolffe holding the back of your armor.

You didn’t say a word as he pulled on your armor, and once back on the cliff he pulled you up. Taking several steps back he pulled your helmet off, and kissed you bringing your body tightly to his. “I’m just so tired”, you shakily told him. “Everything I do, and I still can’t save them. I’m useless and have no home. I’m a horrible bounty hunter”, you sobbed. “You aren’t useless. You have saved many troopers (Y/N). This is war we win some and we lose some it's just how it is. I never want to see you get hurt. I love you (Y/N), and those clones from earlier don’t know the real you”, he whispered in your ear as he held you close.

“And having no home is a lie. You have a home with me and the wolfpack. They adore you, and know that you would do anything to save them”, he continued. “Come on, let's go back to camp”, he told you, kissing you again. You picked up your helmet, and he picked you up bridal style to take you back to camp. He entered a large tent that had the wolfpack all curled up together.

You had noticed they slept like that most of the time, and Wolffe had told you that he, Sinker and Boost lost all their comrades to the malevolence. You quickly shed your armor and Wolffe did the same as he made some of the boys move over. They were all awake now, and realized that something was wrong. Wolffe didn’t give all the details, but they understood, and made room for you and the commander.

Wolffe lay down and pulled you to him as the wolfpack molded back around and on top of you in what you would later call the pack pile. Wolffe noticed how you relaxed and seemed to be content. He kissed the top of your head while you slept, and wanted to make sure no one could hurt you. Plo Koon had made his way into the tent to make sure the wolfpack were okay to see you glued to Wolffe’s side and the others draped over you in the pile of clones. He smiled at the sight, and could sense the calmness that surrounded you.

Once the wolfpack learned of what happened in detail from Wolffe they were ready to tear the three clones apart. The whole day was spent with them, and they made you feel wanted and needed. You would live for them, Wolffe and the troops that had fallen in battle. Any time you felt that you weren’t enough or depressed you would make your way to the wolfpacks quarters. When you would wake Wolffe he would wake the wolfpack and they would huddle around you settling back into sleep. You had never felt safer or content in your life.

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Alright I seriously had tears writing this one. The clones all deserved better, and Palpatine can suck a cock to then choke and die. Anyway guys hope you liked your ride on the angst train.

#star wars clone wars #commander wolffe x reader #suicide #angst #Commander Wolffe #Boost #sgt. sinker #wolfpack #pack pile

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lupin-for-president · 4 years

Text

before you keep scrolling, please stop to read this. it’s important.

this isn’t the type of thing i would normally post, and to be quite honest i promised myself that i would never even talk about this, but given the state that the world is in i feel the need to share this story. (tw)

a few years ago, three years and eleven months to be exact, i met a boy. (for the sake of privacy issues, and the fact that i can’t even type his name without my throat closing up, i will be referring to him as nick.) upon first meeting him, i came to the realization that nick was a beautiful human being. i don’t just mean appearance wise —though he was absolutely stunning— but this boy had such an overwhelmingly beautiful soul that captivated me from the start. never in my entire life have i met someone as pure and loving as nick.

we met in the summer, at a camp that we had both attended, and i mentioned to my friend that i thought the blonde boy playing basketball was attractive. she then yelled at him from across the court and i was immediately embarrassed. what teenager wouldn’t be? when he jogged over to us i couldn’t help but notice the wide smile on his face and the way it made the corner of my own lips curl up. my friend elbowed me in the side before going off to the snack stand and leaving us alone. i felt awkward at first, i mean i didn’t even know this boy, but that awkwardness soon faded when we started talking. we found out that we actually had a few mutual friends, and it was just a crazy coincidence that we hadn’t met before. i soon realized i had no reason to be nervous around nick at all.

a week went by and camp was over. nick had given me his number and assured me that we would be keeping in touch. throughout the following days nick and i would message each other nonstop. soon the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months. as time passed, we grew closer, closer than i had ever been to someone before. before i knew it, nick was becoming my best friend. he only lived two and a half hours away, which isn’t a lot, but feels like so much more when it’s separating you from the person you care for most.

after a while, my feelings eventually evolved. i no longer just cared for him and loved him like i would a friend, i loved him more than life itself. and the best part was, he loved me too. we didn’t ask each other out, or try to make things official, but neither one of us really cared about that. nick was the first person that i have ever loved. the first person i would sacrifice everything for. the first person i would do anything for. the first person i would be anything for. what i felt for nick was possibly the most raw form of love anyone could have to offer.

but then came time, and along with time came a few problems. most relationships have them —actually, all relationships have them— so at first i didn’t think much of it. i just kept waiting for the storms to pass, and eventually they did. we worked through everything and pulled through, things were good again. until they weren’t. the argument was my fault, i’m the one who brought up the topic to nick, but at the time i refused to admit that. we had a fight, a big one. it wasn’t the first time, we had had plenty of fights before, but i could tell this one was different. this time we didn’t make up.

we stopped talking, all forms of communication ceased to exist. our friends would ask if things were okay, i would just tell them that we needed time apart. that time lasted a lot longer than either of us intended. what we expected to be just a few weeks, turned into months without a single word to each other. i was shattered, broken, and hurt. i missed him and i knew he missed me too. yet, neither one of us made an attempt to fix things, we were both waiting for the other to make the first move.

but like i said, nick has the most beautiful soul. months later after no communication, he reached out to me on my birthday. we talked for the first time and i literally felt my heart swell. but it was only for a day, because after that it was like the phone lines were cut again. eventually we both moved on. i still held a place in my heart for nick and i would like to believe he held a place for me too. we found new people, got our hearts broken by those people, and started really working on ourselves and who we were as individuals. well, i was, nick found another way to cope.

he turned to drugs, alcohol, sex - things that the old nick would never have dared to use as a coping mechanism. i watched from afar, wanting nothing more than to reach out to him, but it was no longer my place. then, this past year, he wound up in another relationship, one that wasn’t particularly the healthiest environment for him to be in. she was emotionally abusive to him, it was quite obvious to be honest, but he still managed to love her regardless.

a funny thing, isn’t it? love.

a few months ago i suddenly had a bad feeling. it started out as just this tiny grain of wariness at first but soon evolved into a raging pit of worry. something felt off to me and i couldn’t figure out what it was. i couldn’t focus on anything, my mind was going completely haywire, and i was slowly becoming unable to function. then, i had this weird feeling that i needed to reach out to nick, just to see how he was doing. i needed to ask him if he was alright, make sure he was okay. but i decided against it, it wasn’t my place. so i shoved that worry deep down inside and pushed away the thought.

i was in the middle class when i got the text.

one of our mutual friends, a girl that nick went to church with, texted me and asked if i would send thoughts and prayers because someone in their church had passed away. i immediately asked who, the pit in my stomach instantly returning, but she simply said she couldn’t say because all of the family hadn’t been notified yet. i refused to think it was nick, there was no way it could be him. he was too young, too happy, too full of life to be dead. right?

she texted me back that night. at first i wasn’t really processing what the words of the text message said, it’s like my brain refused to read it. but when i finally was able to understand it, i screamed. i screamed for what felt like hours, my heart clenching inside of my chest, heavy tears staining my face, arms wrapped tightly around my body. there on the phone screen in plain words read, “nick passed away last night. he shot himself around two in the morning.” he had just found out his girlfriend cheated on him and that was the breaking point.

i instantly blamed myself. of course it wasn’t my fault. i wasn’t the one who held the gun to nick’s head. i’m not the one who drove him to that point. i’m not the one who told him that would be the answer to end all of his suffering. but i am the one who didn’t text him. and that, that i could take responsibility for.

i decided to share this story for one reason: please check on others.

i had no way of knowing just how bad nick really was because i chose not to reach out and ask him. we’re in a tough time right now, everyone is. everyone is hurting and pained over something that they’re going through. and you never really know just how bad it is. so please, check on the people you love and care about. it doesn’t matter if you haven’t talked to them in three days or three years, just make sure they’re okay.

thank you for listening to my story.

suicide prevention hotline: 1-800-273-8255

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leilakisakabiri · 5 years

Text

I Only Want You (d.d)

SUICIDE HOTLINE: 1-800-273-8255

REQUESTED: I really hope you like this, if not let me know and i’ll make another one.

plot: the reader lets a few comments believe she isn’t good enough for David.

SEND REQUESTS

warning: angst, insecurity, hate comments,

word count: [ 1697 ]

“I don't want somebody like you. I only want you”

You hated yourself for doing this. For getting sucked down the rabbit hole of hurtful messages and insults, but you couldn’t tear your eyes away.

You read the same comment over and over, eyes glazed over as you engraved it in your brain, “You’re honestly such a big waste of human life. Honest to god you don’t deserve David in your life, he’s way too good for you, you’re just holding him back, everyone can see in the vlogs that every time Y/N is near David he looks so uncomfortable. She should just be selfless for once and disappear. Everyone would be better off without her in their lives, especially David.”

You let out a quiet sob as you stared at the message, you felt hopeless. You had known the second you had started dating David that the hate would be insane, however, you had not expected that even after a year of you two dating and three years after David and Liza broke up, the hate would still be a daily occurrence, flooding your dm’s constantly. Everyone loved David and Liza, and everyone hated David and Y/N, or the rebound as they liked to call her.

You scrolled through the comments soaking in all the nasty remarks as you went, god why were you such a pussy?

You shut off your phone, tossing it on the bed next to you. You harshly rubbed at your face, trying to get the tears to stop. You looked around your bedroom, everywhere you looked all you could see was David. His clickbait sweatshirt lay on the floor from when he came over a couple of days ago, a picture of you two sat atop your dresser, both of your smiles wide as you posed at the beach, a velvet box with the ring David gave you for your one year anniversary rested on your desk. Reaching over you grabbed the box and opened, watching as the sunlight hit the ring making it glisten.

You chewed on your lip. a sense of dread filling you the longer you stared at the ring. They were right. David was too good for you.

You bitterly chuckled to yourself. He was a successful millionaire while you were just a broke college student, struggling to make ends meet. While he got you, Cartier, all you could afford to give him was a shitty Target gift card, and you hated that. David deserved so much better than that, he deserved to be showered in all the luxuries, and unfortunately for you, you couldn’t give him that.

You felt yourself go numb as you realized what you had to do.

This wasn’t about how you felt, this was about ensuring that David was happy. If there was one good thing that you wanted to come out of your life it was that at least you made the boy you loved happy. You weren’t going to be selfish anymore.

Standing up you grabbed your keys and headed out the door towards David’s house, somehow you had gone from sobbing hysterically to feeling oddly calm.

You arrived soon after and let out a sigh of relief when you saw no cars parked in the driveway. You opened the door to his house with your spare key and walked inside, the nostalgia hitting you immediately, Even though you had only been here a couple of days ago it felt different now, it reminded you of the past, not the future. There wasn’t a future here for you anymore

You passed the living room and were reminded of all the times you and David had laid on the cloud couch, him editing while you did your school work, or when you watched horror movies together, David screaming in fear but still pretending to act manly to impress you.

As you opened his bedroom door you were reminded of the sweeter, more private memories, like when you told him you loved him for the first time, hands shaking and heart beating violently against your chest, or when you lay in bed together on rainy nights, the lightning from outside illuminating Davids features with your limbs tangled together as you talked about whatever was on your mind.

You pulled yourself out of your thoughts and started collecting your things from his room, removing all traces of you. Once you were finished you quietly made exited his room taking one last glance before you shut the door.

You almost dropped your bin of things when someone called out to you,

“Y/N?”

You spun around and found Joe staring at you quizzingly, “What you got there?”

You roughly swallowed, opening your mouth to say something but no words came out, “I-uh-uh I um didn’t know anyone was going to be here.”

Joe shrugged, “Ya I just came to grab my laptop, left it here yesterday. What are you doing?”

You nodded your head, shifting your weight from foot to foot, “I-uh uhm nothing.”

Joe raised your eyebrow at you playfully, “Really? Then what’s in the bin?” he said pulling it from your grasp before you could object.

His face scrunched together before he looked up at you, a serious look plastered on his face, “What’s going on Y/N? Did you and David have a fight? Why are you taking all your stuff?”

You suddenly felt like you were two again being yelled at for spilling juice on the carpet. You shrunk into yourself and your voice came out small, “We didn’t have a fight, not yet anyway.”

“Then why...” Joe started to question you more but you had you didn’t want to answer anymore of his questions, “Bye Joe.” you called out, willing yourself not to cry in front of him.

You walked past him and got into your car, glancing up at Davids house one last time. This is it. You weren’t going to turn back this time.

Hours later, and you had gone through multiple cycles of tears, eerie calmness and then nostalgia. You had finally started to drift off to sleep when you heard loud frantic knocks on your door, confused, you got up and swung the door open ready to swear off the person behind the door, however, your words got stuck in your throat as you realized who was standing in front of you, David.

Before you could say anything he pushed past you, running his hands through his disheveled hair, “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Goddamnit Y/N,” his voice was wavering now, “Joe called me this morning panicking because he told me he saw you take all your stuff from my house and leave, and then he asked if we had a fight and I didn’t think we did so I-I didn’t know what to do. So I came here.”

You were still in shock that he was here, “You flew all the way from Chicago to come to talk to me?”

He looked at you, his voice softening as he took you in, “Of course I did, I love you.”

You sat on your couch, glancing up at him, “Do you though?”

Now it was his turn to look shocked and within a second he was sitting on the couch next to you, pulling you into his arms, “Of course I love you, I love you so much, you mean the world to me.”

You sighed falling into his embrace, willing yourself not to do what you were about to, but the words spilled out of your mouth before you could stop them, “I think we should break up.”

You felt his arms loosen around you, and you halfheartedly pulled out of his embrace, “Whaa- Why? Did something happen? Did I do something wrong? I- I thought everything was good.”

You felt your heartstrings pull as you watched the boy in front of you slowly break, but you needed him to know that it was you not him. “No, you didn’t do anything. It’s all me.”

He huffed, “Oh don’t give me that bullshit Y/N, why are you actually breaking up with me?”

You swallowed, you could always lie so easily but somehow David could always see right through it, “I think you should go.”

He started shaking his head rapidly no, as you pulled him up and led him towards the door, “please, please, please don’t do this, I love you, I want to be with you, Y/N please, at least tell me why.”

You felt yourself start to cry as you watched David beg, why did doing the right thing have to hurt so much?

You watched him step into the hallway, head held low, your hands shook as you closed the door after him and at the last second you heard him whisper, “Why wasn’t I good enough for you?”

Your body froze, you couldn’t let him believe that he wasn’t good enough for you when the truth was that he was too good for you.

Noticing that the door still hadn’t shut fully, David pushed it open slightly to see you sitting on the wood floor near the door, legs pressed to your chest, you looked up at him, “I’m not too good for you, you’re too good for me. You deserve so much more than I can give you, you would just be better off without me.”

David sunk down on his knees, his hands gently grabbing your face forcing you to look at him, “Hey, I’m not too good for you okay, I don’t want anyone else. Fuck Y/N, I don’t even want somebody like you, I only want you.”

As you stared into David’s eyes you felt so stupid, the love for you was evident and you couldn’t believe you had let some nasty comment come between you two.

You felt yourself fall into him, the sobs racking through both your bodies, “I’m so sorry, I love you, I just let some things get to my head,” you hiccuped.

He let out a small laugh and then brought you flush against his chest rocking you both back and forth, you could hear his heart beating erratically against his chest and you felt a small smile grace your features, he really did love you.

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pinkykitten · 5 years

Text

I’m here for you

13 Reasons Why

Clay Jensen x female! reader

Warning: did not re-read, sexual assault, mentions of suicide, takings of sexual assault, cursing

Specifics: angst, romance, one-shot, race neutral reader

People: clay jensen, bryce walkers, jessica davis, parents

Words: 1,398

Requested: By anon can you do an imagine where you go to clay after you’re sexually assaulted and he comforts you and everything? it happened to me somewhat recently and idk i just need like comfort. it’s okay if you don’t wanna write it.

Authors Note: now this has a lot of stuff in it so if you cannot read this i totally understand so i put all the writing under the cut so you would have to see anything if you didnt want to. i am so sorry anon that you again had to go through something like this. its not easy and is so terrible and heartbreaking, my heart is with you in these tough times. if you need to maybe read this with somebody near by you, maybe a friend or adult if these trigger you. If you need to as well talk to someone pls do, call the hotline and talk with a trusted person. if yall dont have that you guys can whenever talk to me about whatever i am here for you 24/7 no matter what.

He touched you. You didn’t want it. It wasn’t love and it wasn’t normal. He didn’t listen to your cries; your screams; your protests. He didn’t leave you alone or move. He knew you didn’t want it, him, but yet he chose to keep touching you.

You crouched by Bryce’s closet; sobbing into your hands. Your mascara dripping down your face and landing on your carpet. Your lips quivered as you replayed what happened moments before.

You had gone to Bryce’s house to finish a project you had with him. You didn’t really know him so you were not worried. As you entered into his house you then started to have an unsettling feeling. He was alone and it was just you and him.

“It okay y/n. I’ll take good care of you,” he would say to you. Feeding your expectations of him and lying to you. “This is normal. I know you want this.” He whispered into your ear as you tried to push him off. He was greedy and selfish not caring about you. Now you understood why Hannah killed herself.

After Bryce took advantage of you he pushed you off like a piece of trash. Like you were an object instead of a person; a woman. Thoughts raced into your mind as you thought of the way his hands pinched and hurt your skin; leaving bruises littered all over your body.

It was hard to stand up. You were shaking. You looked beyond the doorway and noticed he had left somewhere else. With everything that you had you sprinted to his window. Unlocking the hinges made a noise and you heard Bryce yell.

“Hey what the f*ck are you doing?” He screamed as you heard his footsteps near you.

With everything that you had you unlocked the window and opened it; jumping out. You ran down the street away from the monster.

Bryce saw you leave. His eyes squinting as he licked his lips. Proud and satisfied with what he did to you. Drinking the last bit of alcohol he had in his cup. He had to make sure you didn’t say a word; that you kept your mouth shut.

You ran like he was still behind you; never looking back until you reached home. Your parents were out of town for the week so you truly did feel alone. You locked your doors and fell into your bed; crying. You sobbed into your pillow. You felt the innocence drain out of you. Your trust in people disappear.

“Why me?” You groaned as you felt sick to your stomach. The moments, the feeling, the words, smell, taste, everything never leaving you. It was as if it was engraved in your mind. You wish you could forget it; leave it. Dig it up somewhere far away. You remembered every second of it.

You wanted to call Clay; your best friend but you were afraid as to what he would say. Afraid he would want to start a fight with Bryce. Maybe even afraid he wouldn’t believe you. You stared longingly at his number on your phone; wishing he was here with you.

“Clay you haven’t seen y/n, right?” Jessica asked, lifting a piece of paper to show him that they have a science project to do together. “I haven’t seen her in like forever.”

Clay licked his lips. Trying to remember the last time he did see you. Its been a while. You hadn’t gone to school in about 3 days already and Clay was worried about you. “Yeah, you’re right. I haven’t seen y/n at all actually. Maybe she went with her parents.”

“Well I just wonder because we we’re supposed to go over this yesterday.”

“Maybe she’s not feeling good. I’ll pass by her house today.”

After school Clay got on his bike and rode off quickly to your house. A part of him felt at ease and another felt worried. What if something happened to you? He would not be able to live with himself knowing two of the most important people in his life had something bad happened to them. Hannah and now you.

“Y/n!” Clay said as he motioned over to your door. He rang the doorbell and waited. His feet tapping gently against the cement floor. “Y/n open up please!”

He looked at his phone and noticed you never texted back all those texts he sent you. Concerned, he started knocking then knocking turned into pounding. “Y/n I said open the God d*amn door please!” Clay walked back and was about to run into the door but you opened it just in time.

“Clay! What the f*ck?” You asked, surprised. You were wrapped up in your pajamas. Your face all gloomy looking and not kept up with. You looked like you hadn’t seen the sun in ages as your eyes squinted at the light. You looked like a mess. “What do you want?”

Clay thought it was odd that she was acting fine when he knew something was up. “I just, you didn’t come to school today or the other days and I just wanted to check up on you.”

“Well you did and I’m fine.” You tried closing the door but Clay stopped you, putting his hand out.

“Y/n, whats really going on?”

You bit your nails as you looked down; trying not to cry. “I’m fine really. Now just leave me alone.”

“No, I’m not going to. Y/n you’re pretending. You’re pretending to be okay when you’re not. I know somethings up. You usually text me and you didn’t this time. You usually tell me everything and now you’re keeping sh*t away from me. What the f*ck is going on?”

“Its him okay!” You cried out, rubbing your forehead from the pain increasing there. “It was...him.”

“Who’s him?”

You looked left and right outside and brought Clay in by the sleeve. “Clay...Bryce...Bryce did stuff to me.”

Clay knitted his eyebrows and placed his hands on your arms. “What do you mean y/n? What did Bryce do?”

“He,” tears started to poor from your eyes. “He sexually assaulted me Clay. He did things to me that I didn’t want. I said no Clay. I said no.” You sobbed harder as Clay brought you to his chest. Your face pressed against his chest so you could hear his heart beat quicken.

Clay’s face reddened as he became so angry. All he wanted was to protect you and now you were hurt. “I am so sorry y/n.” He was so irate that he couldn’t search for the words at the moment to help soothe you. He just let you cry into his chest as he patted your back.

“Clay, he took that piece away from me. That piece of myself. I wanted to tell you this for a while but I like you Clay, a lot. You are a good guy, you’re kind and sweet and you’re always making sure I’m alright but now I can’t be with you. I’m wasted. I’m disgusting. I’ve been touched and I’m vile now. I’ve been spoiled. I’m a wasteful mess.” You fell onto your knees as you cried into your hands.

Clay was so shocked. He never knew you felt that way about him. He also got on his knees and brought you onto his lap, rocking you as he embraced you. “You’re none of those things. This is not your fault, this is Bryce’s. He will pay for what he has done I will make sure of that. As for you, you are more than enough. I don’t deserve you. You are strong to have gone through this. You are powerful. You will achieve and make it on top. I am here for you y/n. I will make sure no one ever touches you again. You mean so much to me y/n. You are perfect in every way. I love you for the woman you have become. You are incredible. Don’t let him take control of you. You did not deserve this but you do deserve happiness and love. If you want me I am here for you.” Clay kissed your knuckles as he soothed you on the floor, tears dripping from his eyes as well. “You mean so much to me and so much to others in your life. Just know that. I’m here for you y/n, I am here for you.”

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