trying to have someone pick me up from school because i’m having a major anxiety attack and my sister can get me but not for 20 minutes and i’m going to explode

The O’Driscoll Golden Boy: Colm O’Driscoll X Male Reader

Pronouns: he/him, Reader is referred to as ‘feller’ and ‘boy’ Physical Sex: AMAB Rating: E/Smut, murder, implied mutilation, references to castration Warnings: Power dynamics, power imbalance, oral sex, face fucking, deep throating, praise, abuse/unhealthy relationship, marking, possessive behavior, outdoor sex, semi-public sex, facial, humiliation, slight aftercare, hints of fluff if you really squint, homophobia, period-typical heavy homophobia Summary: Colm’s golden boy made a little mistake. The boss doesn’t like that.

Every job always goes smoothly. Every job. Not once have you ever messed up. Not like this. Riding with the O’Driscolls has always been fun so long as Colm is pleased, and Colm is always pleased with you. Pleased enough to drag you into his bed and show you what being the golden boy really means. But tonight… tonight you won’t even be making it back to camp, let alone your boss’s cabin and that big warm bed he’s had these past few weeks.

No, tonight you got caught.

Frankly you should consider yourself very lucky to be breathing.

Sheriff nearly broke your arm hog tying you though, probably shouldn’t be happy about that. He acts like he’s some god when he and his deputies get you in a cell. Something about a bounty having just been raised. Your head’s too fogged from getting hit and your arm hurts far too much to care anyway. Last poster you saw had upwards of a thousand, but that was about a big job further out West. Who knows which state you’re even in at this rate.

Then one of them says it. “Colm O’Driscoll’s golden boy!”

It’s a sneer, mocking and provoking, as they all turn to look at you. You’ve sat down on the floor of the cell, nowhere else to sit and your feet and legs are tired from running. You almost want to stand just so they’re not looking down on you, but in the end you find yourself much too tired to care.

“Should hang ‘em ourselves.” One of the deputies says. “Heard he’s done some sick shit.”

Of course you have. Colm asked you to after all. That’s your job. Whatever Colm wants.

Another deputy pulls a paper from the wall, tossing it on the table and letting it glide and spin. Your bounty poster, you assume. Terrible drawings really, they always are. It frankly surprises you anyone ever gets found.

“Wanted for murder, horse theft…”

You tune out the list of crimes, knowing all of them won’t even be listed on the little space. If they actually wrote everything out there wouldn’t be much room left to put your name and bounty, let alone a picture. It does leave out a lot of details though, important details in your opinion.

“He the one what did those robberies up along the forest, killed those families?”

Yes. You are. They had money, more than they needed. At first you asked nicely, then you didn’t. Business is business and it got you a nice reward from your boss.

“Couple damn orphans came outta that string.”

They’re fine. You even took them into town and gave them some bread and cheese. Boys wanted to shoot them too, you’re a saint in comparison.

“An’ he’s runnin’ with Colm O’Driscoll.” One of them glares at you. “Bet some a’ his charges could trickle down.”

Sure they could. You’ve helped Colm with plenty of things you’ve never seen yourself charged with. Not that you want to recall any of that or have it formally charged. You only kept your mouth shut about it all because you’re smart enough to be deadly loyal when it comes to Colm. You’d never say no to his orders or his requests. That would be stupid.

“I heard he got sodomy in the next state over too.”

Oh, that was a fun clash with the law. Colm fucking you in a back alley in some big city only for a lawman to find you, add charges for you but not Colm. Bullshit really, but it was such a good time that you recall it with fondness. You got rewarded for getting away when you got back to camp after all.

“Love ta see ‘em hang.”

If it would get them to shut up, you might opt for it. You’re starting to get a headache from all the hitting and incessant discussion of your crimes. Your guns aren’t that far away. If they just happened to drink a little more of that whiskey they pulled out to celebrate, got nice and distracted, you might be able to swipe them.

“It’s a three-thousand dollar bounty.” The sheriff snaps. “We’re takin’ ‘em ta the city.”

A trip to the city, a poorly guarded jail car, easy target. If not that, then easy lock picking. But you know the boys that got away will run back to camp with their tails between their legs, tell Colm all that happened, and seeing as Colm had said plenty of dirty things in your ear before you left, he will be a little upset that you didn’t come back like you always do. Cash in hand, happy to take the reward Colm is so desperate to give you. You used to think that’s all it was, the boss giving his best, his golden boy, a reward for doing well on a job. But Colm slips up in his facade sometimes, enough to see he doesn’t just want to fuck his golden boy.

There have been times where you’ve woken up, pretended to sleep, while Colm presses very uncharacteristically sweet kisses all over your face. There’s the occasional exchange before a shootout where he steps in front of you as if you need protecting. Little things a cruel outlaw might do when in love with his dear golden boy. Not that Colm would ever admit anything like that. No, he’ll hide it and let out his frustrations about not being able to act sweet by fucking you senseless under the guise of rewards.

And you have been well aware of this for years now. Not that you’d ever bring it up.

“Could at least let some widows an’ orphans rest a little easy…” One of the deputies says with a slur to his voice. “Hard ta shoot folk without no hands.”

A few of them laugh and you find yourself looking at your hands. You are quite attached to your hands, both in the literal and figurative sense. Though you can think of a few ways to pull a trigger without them, you’d still rather keep them.

“I’d rather castrate ‘em.”

That gets more laughter. It’s an idiotic joke in itself. Once again, you’re quite attached to your dick and would like to keep it and its friends. But, just like the shooting, there are other ways you can think of to get around the loss of an appendage. Colm hardly touches it half the time anyway. Still would rather keep it though.

“Who’s ta say he ain’t cause us some problems.” Another laughs. “Could give ‘em a good beatin’.”

At the rate they’ve gotten themselves drunk, you would like to see them try. One of the deputies stumbles past the others. They watch as he takes out the keys, snickering and giving light cheers as he glares down at you. The second that door opens it will become very easy to take his gun and shoot the drunken fools. Though it is tempting to only disarm a few, maybe pay them their own threats before finishing them off.

But then the large front door to the sheriff’s office opens and several men flood inside. All thankfully featuring green somewhere on their bodies. The drunk lawmen drop to the ground as the boys shoot out their legs. They cry and whimper until blows land on their heads and the boys tell them to shut up. The man by your cell sputters as he tries for his gun, the same one that recommended hanging you. A hole forms in his head and he falls, keys dropping to the floor. Of course it’s Colm that stands with his gun raised, an irritated look across his features.

One of the boys scrambles for the keys, unlocking the door as you stand. You walk out and stop yourself in front of Colm like the obedient dog you have become in his presence. Very slowly, he runs his hand over your chest until his fingers curl tightly into your shirt. He tugs you closer, glaring and angry in having to rescue his dear golden boy.

“Anythin’ ya wanna say, boy?”

You shake your head, knowing better than to say what needs to be said in front of the boys. Not that they don’t know, but that you’d rather hang than look as pathetic as you let yourself become in Colm’s hands.

“They treat ya nice?” He asks, his grip on your shirt loosening ever so slightly.

Your eyes trace over the men, finding the familiar faces that laughed about torture. “Sheriff’s fine, not those two.”

Colm follows your gaze. “Any recommendations?” He releases you, turning to look at the men cowing on the ground. “Boys deserve a little fun since we came all this way.”

And those men very much taste their own words. Colm doesn’t think you deserve to see such a fun little party, so he drags you outside by the collar. But the screams, they sound much better than the laughs.

“Ya wanna explain yerself, boy?” Colm seethes, throwing you roughly against the stone wall that makes up the side of the sheriff’s office.

It’s too dark to see his face. Too late for people to be out and about, even with the screaming. This town is small, surrounded by gangs, no one would be so stupid to leave their home right now.

You stumble a bit, settling yourself against the wall, knowing very well Colm wants you where he puts you. “Can’t explain it, boss. The detonator should have worked.”

His hand winds into your hair, pulling you towards him. The pain shoots through your scalp, a good half of it running down to your dick knowing Colm’s habits. In the dim light of a lantern you can now see his face with the proximity. Perhaps his habits won’t be holding up, he looks rather displeased.

“And why is that?” He asks and you can practically feel the mocking in his voice.

He knows. He must know you messed up. His golden boy made a mistake, something that’s never happened before. You’re not entirely sure how he’ll react to it. But maybe you can talk your way out.

“Seamus probably.” You say as smoothly as you can with the grimace on your face Colm’s rough tugging brings on. “He’s the one that wired things.”

Faster than you can blink, Colm shoves your head back into the wall. The impact with the stone does nothing for your headache, even makes you see stars a little. Your vision is double and shaky as Colm grips harshly onto your cheek to make you look at him, his other hand still gripping at your hair. For a few seconds you see two of his angry face, but as he speaks it settles into one.

“I ain’t a fool, boy.” He hisses. “Ya messed up, lost me a lotta money.”

You groan as his hand tightens in your hair, the stinging not bringing any more pleasure and solely burning through your scalp.

“Here I thought you was perfect.”

That almost stings more than your head. Colm’s praises always keep you going and disappointing him is not something you ever want to do again.

“‘m sorry, boss.” You rasp. “I-I…”

Colm presses his nails into your skin, deep enough to leave marks across your face. “Shut yer damn mouth, pretty boy.”

You nod slightly in his grip, only unable to keep yourself from whimpering at the fresh pain. You can feel something trickle, something wet. By the momentary smirk on Colm’s face, you guess he’s drawn blood, perhaps even done enough to leave scars. Scars embedded into your cheek, Colm’s nails forever digging into your skin.

“Get on yer knees now, boy.”

His grip releases, pain no longer focusing where his hands were and now spreading back to your head as you drop to your knees. You land rough, not wanting to make Colm any more upset, not wanting to disappoint him again. With somewhat hungry eyes, you watch as he unfastens his pants. He pushes his gunbelt up, situating things around as he pulls out his dick. Long and thin, achingly hard, everything you remember. But you’ve never been on your knees before, never had your face so close.

“Fuckin’s a reward, pretty boy.” He grunts, pressing his dick to your lips. “Ya haven’t been very good.”

You don’t dare move without his order. There have been times where he’s thrown you out of his bed for being too eager, made you sit on the floor while he dealt with himself. But that was when he was happy with you, when his dear golden boy hadn’t made any mistakes. You fear what he might do if you make even a single move of your own. So you sit on your knees, taking in the musky scent of the thing you’re supposed to put in your mouth. You wouldn’t particularly describe Colm as a clean man.

He drags his tip along your chin and up to your cheek. You’d give anything for a bit more light to see his face but you’d likely die on the spot if anyone saw you like this. For a moment it stings and you know it’s rubbing over one of Colm’s marks on your cheek, the one his thumb made by your eye. You make a note to clean yourself thoroughly after this. As much as you want to please Colm, to hear his praises, you don’t want some infection from his unwashed dick rubbing into a cut on your face. He seems to enjoy doing though, and for a moment you shutter at the thought of what he would be doing if you had something as large as a stab wound instead.

Then his hand returns to your hair, tugging roughly enough to snap you out of any thought and make your focus turn entirely on him. He tilts your head back and you provide no resistance. Every step of the way, he guides your head. Pressing softly to your lips and urging you down onto him, you open your mouth without question. As he slides through your mouth you taste every inch on him. He certainly hasn’t bathed in a while and you could guess that from his hair, but this really sells it. He tastes like sweat and dirt and dried pomade. And as he forces himself all the way in, hitting the back of your throat as tears form in your eyes, your nose is pressed against an even more foul bunch of pubic hair. It smells like the rest of him, but it’s not nearly as pleasurable as a normal musk might be with the unkempt hairs tickling your nose. For a few seconds he simply sits in your mouth, his dick fully enveloped. You struggle not to panic. You’ve always known he was long, loved it when it hits you so well deep inside where most men could never imagine fucking, but now that he’s shoved himself down your throat you’re not quite as keen.

You can hardly hear his words with how much your head pounds. “Be a good boy an’ sit still.”

Then he moves. You have air for all of a second before he rams himself back in and your throat closes slightly around his tip. It chokes you but it must be the feeling he’s chasing because he does it again and again. At this rate you feel much more like a simple dark, wet hole than a golden boy. But Colm keeps you eager with praises.

“Look at chu, pretty boy.” He mutters. “Such a good boy, always makin’ the boss feel good.”

Of course you do. Colm ordered you to after all. That’s your job. Whatever Colm wants.

“Shit, yer such a pretty thing.”

His hand still grips your hair as he forces your movements, fucking your mouth roughly. But his praises come with another hand, soft as he combs through your hair. Two sides of a coin, just like always, reward or punishment.

“Feel so damn good, boy.” He huffs, his hips starting to become erratic. “Always so good fer me, my golden boy.”

With that you can feel the tightness of your pants, but you don’t dare do a thing about it. Not without the boss’s permission, not without Colm’s smile and hungry eyes.

“Sit pretty fer me now.” He orders, pulling back.

His hands leave your hair, his dick slipping from your mouth. It takes a lot of control to stay upright, to not keel over and gasp for breath. Instead you stay as he left you, sputtering coughs and little gasps as your eyes fix on him. He works himself fast, his hand moving roughly against sensitive skin slicked by its time fucking into your throat. You close your eyes when he grunts, feeling warm streaks across your face a second later. As Colm hums to himself, you keep still. You feel the air around you shift as he kneels down in front of you. His lips press against yours, kiss slicked by his cum on your lips. He holds you still, his hand gripping that same spot in your hair with the same roughness as he kisses you deeply. Faintly, you feel something else against your skin. It rubs over your eyes and over your cheek. When Colm pulls back from his kissing you open your eyes.

He holds a rag in hand, running it over the cuts he made to keep them somewhat clean for the moment. His face holds a focus, but nothing else. No anger, no gentleness, simply focus as he wipes his cum off of some of your face. Not all, just what’s necessary, just your eyes and injuries. Then he tosses the rag to the ground, his other hand still tightly holding you in place by the hair. His eyes look over you, tracing along where you can feel the now cooling bits of him still on your skin. You take a sharp inhale as his free hand grips roughly onto your straining dick. His eyes bore into yours, anger now clear on his face.

“No more mistakes, pretty boy.” He warns. “I much prefer fuckin’ ya normal.”

You give him a small nod. “Yes, sir.”

He squeezes your dick. “My golden boy don’t make mistakes, do he?”

“No, sir.” You gasp out.

“An’ he’s gonna make that money back so I can fuck ‘em senseless, ain’t he?” His hand kneads down into your dick, giving it much needed friction.

“Fuck…” You groan. “Y-Yes, sir.”

He removes his hand, the other tugging tightly at your hair to make you focus on his face again. “Take them boys ‘n get me my money, pretty boy.”

You hold back a whimper from the lack of contact. “Yes, sir.”

He tugs again. “No cleanin’ up either, ya deserve what ya got.”

Then he releases you, standing as you fall on your hands and knees to the ground. You breathe heavily as he walks away, catching your breath and gaining your senses. You have blood drying along cuts from Colm’s nails, cum drying on your skin and likely your hair as well, no fit state to face a bunch of the boys. But of course you do. Colm told you to after all. That’s your job. Whatever Colm wants.

Clone genetic enhancement ideas

So the clones were genetically enhanced, but i don’t really see any writers (in fanfic or in published stuff) really exploring what that MEANS beyond “clone very stronk”. Here are some ideas that would actually make clones significantly different from just a regular-ass human in peak condition. 

-enhanced senses: eyesight, hearing, etc. I’m talking eyes like a HAWK

-better reflexes

-quicker information processing

-can hear sounds of higher and lower frequency than standard humans

-can see light of a broader spectrum than human standard

-learn quicker, retain information and skills better (potential problem: if you learn something the WRONG way, that way might stick really well)

-photographic memory (really useful for memorizing layouts and maps)

-immunity to various diseases

-can tolerate a wider range of temperatures and environments

-increased stamina and strength baseline. Clones can just run full-tilt for hours and hours and be like “ah a nice stroll”. Over long distances, they can out-pace jedi in the same way that humans can out-pace horses.

-higher tolerance of certain poisons/toxins (clones can straight-up drink ethanol, and get maybe a little tipsy)

-bodies respond quickly to physical stress, and slowly to the absence of it (basically, this means that physical conditioning results in stronger muscles and a stronger cardiovascular system really quickly, and it takes MUCH longer for a clone to lose strength and conditioning due to not exercising than standard humans. Think how much valuable training time is saved if they only have to go on a run like, once a month in order to stay in shape)

-increased ability to function through intense pain and acute injuries. Basically, semi-disabling the pain system so it’s less distracting. Probably not good for the survival of the individual in many situations, but an advantage on the battlefield. 

-heal faster and better, with fewer long-term complications. Clones can dislocate their shoulders and NOT have the joint be permanently fucked up, because the Kaminoans re-designed the whole damn thing to suck WAY less.

-actually, unique internal anatomy. There’s probably a lot about the human body besides the shoulder joint that is actually just really stupid, and something no intelligent designer would actually build. So the Kaminoans can fix a lot of that stuff. Better knees, maybe. Stronger ribs. Maybe Cody punches droids not just because he’s a mad bastard, but also because his metatarsals are literally as strong as steel. 

-Hearing loss/hearing damage? No problem, your ear can regrow those little hair-thingies that help you hear. 

-Of course, it takes energy to maintain muscle mass, which is why human bodies lose it if we’re not using it. Clones need significantly more calories than standard humans. However, their digestive systems are enhanced to extract calories and nutrients from food much more efficiently, so food goes much farther. Potential weird side effect: maybe clones only have to poop like, once a week?

-You could probably extend that into increased ability to tolerate long periods without food/on low rations, despite the increased need for calories. 

-wouldn’t it be NEAT if the kaminoans somehow designed self-repairing DNA. This would mean that others couldn’t take a DNA sample from a clone and modify it to create their own clones (basically, it protects their product. It’s like DRM for clones). This ALSO means that clones couldn’t get cancer, and that they’d be immune to radiation poisoning. So a clone could just walk up to a sphere of uranium at critical mass and pick it up. Maybe with oven mitts on if it’s hot. (this would also make it harder for a rapid-aging cure to be developed, but uhhhh fanfic writers find a way)

- “bred for obedience” I think most of this would have to be accomplished through tightly-controlled messaging and cultural norms as the clones grow up- basically, enshrining obedience as a desirable and almost sacred trait, to be prized higher than anything else, including the lives of your brothers. In the same way that we hear stories of people sacrificing their lives to protect their loved ones, the clones would grow up hearing stories of soldiers sacrificing their brothers’ lives to obey an order from a superior. 

-SOME of the “obedience” thing could be engineered, though. Humans are already super social, but it would probably make sense for the clones to have an even greater need for social bonds. This would make for greater teamwork and coordination, and better unit cohesion, since the clones would be more inclined to prioritize friendship/agreeing with someone over winning an argument. It would also make it so they’d bond with their natural-born generals more easily, so they would obey them not just because they’re supposed to, but because they’d be much quicker to see them as a friend, and someone who’s trust they want to earn, someone they want to incorporate into their group and make happy.

-consequently, clones who find themselves alone do NOT do well. Isolation has a much more profoundly negative impact on clones than on regular humans.

-Originally, clones designed to operate alone or in small teams would not have the social enhancement- ARC troopers, spec-ops teams, etc. There wouldn’t be much of a noticeable difference in everyday interactions, but they’d also be vaguely weirded out by what they interpret as aggressive friendliness from their brothers, and their brothers would think they’re a bit shy and standoffish. 

-actually this social modification would make it MUCH harder for clones to kill people. REGULAR HUMANS are already super bad at killing people- i remember reading this article about how as soon as soldiers have to point their weapons at actual people, their aim gets mysteriously much shittier. Even when compared to situations that are exactly the same, except they’re not shooting at other humans. So reconcile this how you will, idk.

-I imagine a lot of these enhancements would be accomplished not through DNA, but through microorganisms. Retroviruses could explain the DNA resistant to modification, and the increased healing speed, and possibly some disease resistance (do i know anything about retroviruses other than a vague concept of what they are? no i do not. will that stop me? also no.) Their metabolism can be partially explained through specially engineered gut microbes.

-not sure how they’d go about making clones “resistant to any stress”, because you can’t exactly turn off the trauma response in the brain without breaking a bunch of other things. They could probably do a bit of fiddling to make clones more resistant to chemical imbalances, and therefore more depression-resistant. I think most of the “stress-resistance” would have to come through training. Either they train the clones to basically suppress everything, which might work alright in the short term. OR they actually have systems in place that help prevent the development of things like PTSD and help treat trauma. Meaning the clones are literally trained in self-care, positive self-talk, talking about their pain with their brothers, and having community rituals around things like death and grief. I don’t think that’s super likely because one thing that’s integral to those concepts is the concept of “i am a person and i have worth, and if i feel angry about something bad happening, that is ok and valid” and considering that a whole lot of bad things happen to the clones all the time and their childhood is a whole boatload of bad all happening at once, i don’t think the kaminoans would want the clones realizing “hey wait a minute i’m a person and i don’t deserve to be treated this way and it’s ok for me to be mad at you”. 

- the clones were supposedly engineered to be “less aggressive” but i think there was literally nothing more to that than a cover story for the control chip. The clones wouldn’t be raised with a lot of the aggressive western concept of masculinity, where anger is the default reaction to like, everything, and your personal pride is extremely important and also fragile (no offense lmao). So you wouldn’t have clones posturing and getting angry over perceived slights and fighting each other all the time, like everyone in-universe apparently expects to be the case. Anyway, why would you want your soldiers to be less aggressive? they’re literally supposed to fight and kill the enemy. You want them fully capable of getting angry, anger is the human response to fear and danger that lets us DO something about it. 

-obviously the biggest component in how they behave would be how they are raised, but that’s an entirely different post

-Specializations! I imagine that initially, the Kaminoans had different clones with different traits engineered specifically to fill certain roles. However, as the war went on, they struggled to keep up with demand and had to start shoving clones into whatever roles were needed (hence Fives and Echo becoming ARCs, despite not being engineered as ARC troopers). 

-Command clones would have better abilities in the executive function parts of the brain that deal with extrapolation, planning ahead, spatial reasoning, etc. They’d also have increased visual pattern recognition (like a pigeon)

-search-and-rescue troops would also have the pigeon pattern recognition abilities. The coast guard literally strapped pigeons to helicopters who would tap a button when they saw orange in the water, because they were better at spotting it than humans. Pigeons can detect cancer in microscope images of cells, because they’re that good at pattern recognition

-Pilots would have hella reflexes, excellent spatial awareness and spatial reasoning skills, much greater ability to process visual information, stronger hearts and blood vessels (to resist greater Gs of force), and they’d also be much shorter, to better fit into a cockpit. Which reminds me of Axe, that poor bastard from Ahsoka’s squadron over Ryloth who was almost eight feet tall. rip poor Axe, how did you even become a pilot, you long bastard.

-medics who can smell certain diseases. If you want to get a little bit out there, make the medics able to purr so they can sooth stressed-out patients. 

-infantry would have even greater endurance than everyone else, as well as greater tolerance for, and ability to, remain constantly on alert.

-ability to fall asleep at will? that would be super dope.

-maybe more efficient sleep, so to an adult clone, 4 hours of sleep is genuinely sufficient.

-concept: clones can sort of turn down their bodily functions- slow their digestion, heart, lungs, the whole nine yards- to last longer in adverse conditions. Sort of a half-hibernation (or quarter hibernation- they’d still be able to talk and think, but they’d feel very lethargic). They wouldn’t be able to function very well, but it would be great for things like enduring intense cold, periods without food, low-oxygen environments, and it would be especially useful if you were wounded and waiting for help, since you could slow your circulation, meaning it would take you a lot longer to bleed out. This state could be triggered by a combination of physical actions such as sitting or lying still, breathing slowly and deeply, and focusing on slowing the heart down (humans can actually slow down their hearts consciously if you practice at it, this is basically that, but turned up to like 1100).

-one thing that never made sense to me was the whole “we’re running out of jango fett’s DNA, all the new clones won’t be as good, and we have to stop ventress from stealing the original DNA” because like, can’t they just, get the EXACT SAME DNA from the clones?? you know, the exact genetic copies? With all the enhancements already done? But now my idea is that the kaminoans have engineered the clones so their DNA straight up can’t be copied. The clone’s own body can obviously replicate it, but if you take a sample and try to extract the DNA, it just self-destructs or something. This is to protect their intellectual property, but also means that they literally have to use a couple of Jango Fett’s actual human cells for every single clone they make (and the fact that they then have to do all the above enhancements to every single embryo helps explain why there’s so many small mutations, such as hair color and height). So they kinda shot themselves in the foot with that one. 

-of course since things like ADHD and autism have a strong genetic component, the kaminoans could theoretically engineer those out of the clones, but actually FUCK THAT so for whatever reason, that’s just not something they are able to do, and neurodivergent clones are absolutely a thing

The Cult Girl (Hannibal x Female!Reader) pt. 1

This is my first time publishing any of my reader insert work so don’t be too hard on me. Y/N is a psych student that needs a favor and asks her therapist for help. Lmk if you want to see more.

It was an unmistakable conflict of interest, your relationship with Hannibal. He was your therapist, your mentor, your partner, and many years your senior to boot. You recognized this monumental power imbalance. You put on a façade of embarrassment for the people who expected it; people whose proclivities were done in the shadows and therefore easier to get away with. Why should you be expected to rationalize your loving, mutually beneficial relationship to a person who regularly cheats on her boyfriend?

You'd dated men your own age before, and without fail, you always found yourself waiting for them to grow up. Hannibal made you feel comfortable. Both emotionally and physically. You had a side of his bed and a spot in his arms to fall asleep in every night. Given the choice, you could truthfully say you'd never want to leave his arms.

Like many unlikely relationships, it didn’t start out in the most romantic of ways. Clutching your laptop under your raincoat, you hesitated knocking. Your therapist had, of course, seen you at your lowest points and was sworn to secrecy, but this was a low you didn’t want even him to see. Standing outside of his home, in the so-incredibly-not-business-hours dead of night with mascara running down your face. 

You finally worked up the nerve to knock, telling yourself that he was probably asleep and wouldn’t hear you. This rationalization fell apart when the interior light turned on and the door unlocked. Although you’d been seeing Dr. Lecter for quite a while, his presence never failed to intimidate you. Now it was even worse. His severe expression was fixated on you as he silently awaited an explanation. 

“Dr. Lecter...” You lowered your head and fumbled with your computer. You made a point to kiss your last shreds of dignity goodbye before you opened your mouth again. “...could I please borrow a book?” 

Dr. Lecter narrowed his eyes. “I take it by the hour, this is an urgent matter, Miss [L/N]?”

“My midterm. It’s due in...” You glanced at your watch. “Eight hours.” 

“Well you don’t have a moment to waste, now do you?” Dr. Lecter said, a slight upturn in his voice connoting amusement. “Come in. Let’s find you that book.” 

You felt your muscles relax as he stepped aside to let you in. The house was spacious. Much too large for one person. That was really the only thing you could bring yourself to notice before he shut the door behind you. 

“Now what is this all-important book of yours called?” He asked, pulling your raincoat from your shoulders like he always did. 

“It’s called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.” You explained, tucking your computer under your arm. “By Robert Jay Lifton.” 

“You’re in luck, Miss [L/N].” His thin lips turned up into a smile. “I have a copy from my own years as a student.”

You breathed an audible sigh of relief. You tensed your muscles and held in your excitement at the prospect of something finally going according to plan, even if that plan was your third or fourth backup.

You followed him into his office, which reminded you more of Belle’s library than any workspace you’d ever encountered. He must have had thousands of books in this room alone.

“It’s a fascinating read, but not one you could finish in eight hours.” Dr. Lecter's voice echoed from somewhere in the office, getting lost in the books. “Even for the most ravenous of psychology students, of which I know you to be.” 

"Hardly." You muttered under your breath. "If that were the case, I wouldn't be begging for help at 2am before the final paper is due."

"Procrastination is only human, my dear." He assured you, his voice drawing closer. "It's common in those with deep-rooted insecurities about their competency."

"Now that sounds more like me." You joked, leaning back on your heels. "Should you really be trying to validate my bad habits? I feel like that's counterproductive."

"Scolding you would be more counterproductive." He corrected. "You've been scolded many times before and you continue your bad habits. Only when we get to the root of your behavior can you begin to reverse it."

He emerged from the bookshelves and handed you a beat-up copy of Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which you graciously accepted. 

“Thank you so much, Dr. Lecter.” You said, placing your hand over your heart. "I owe you my life."

"I'd hardly equate your life to a used book, Miss [L/N]." Dr. Lecter said. "I feel like, as your therapist, we should talk about why you do."

You looked away, smiling sheepishly. "Maybe sometime in daylight. I've taken up enough of your time as it is. I'll get out of your hair now."

"It would take you more time to get back to your dorm that you could use writing." He said, matter-of-factually. "Write your paper in my office."

You looked at him in disbelief. Your judgment was clouded with energy drinks and desperation. So your usual self-sacrificing polite denial was steamrolled by a very enthusiastic acceptance. "I would be forever indebted to you, Dr. Lecter."

"Miss [L/N]," Dr. Lecter cut in. "You're a student, you need to study."

You didn’t really remember a lot of what happened after you wrapped your arms around his waist, too overwhelmed with gratitude to think if an embrace was even appropriate. It was the middle of the night, so you had an excuse if he shoved you off him. But surprisingly, he didn’t. 

You broke the embrace and gathered up your book and computer. “Seriously, I owe you big time for this. You’re really saving my life here.” 

“Go write your paper, [F/N].” He ordered. “We can discuss why you conflate your academics and your life during our next appointment. For now, make yourself at home.”

And that you did. Dr. Lecter retired back to bed and you spent a solid four hours typing away. An antique grandfather clock kept count for you. When you couldn’t keep your eyes open any longer, you sent the paper off to your professor, editing be damned. You let sleep compel you, comforted by the fact that you didn't have to think about your paper for at least another week before the grading period was over. 

Dr. Lecter’s desk was the most comfortable surface in the world to you that night, because you slept for six hours with only your arms as a pillow. It was the first rest your body had gotten in quite some time. You were gently coaxed awake by the smell of something delicious. 

You followed the smell into a kitchen that could rival those of Michelin-starred restaurants. Dr. Lecter was hard at work, cooking something that enticed your nose. He cracked an egg and looked up at you. “Good morning, Miss [L/N].”

“I’m sorry.” You said, shaking your head shamefully. 

“For?” He asked, fixing his attention back on his recipe.

“Falling asleep.” You dropped your shoulders.

“I told you to make yourself at home, did I not?” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. This time, he sounded like he was actually going to scold you. “Tell me, do you sleep at your desk at home?” 

“I try not to.” You answer with a shrug. 

“But when you feel yourself falling asleep, you usually put yourself to bed, right?” He continued.

You started to feel a bit stupid. “...yeah.” 

He poked at some sausage links in a frying pan, letting out a sizzle. “You could have taken the couch.”

“I guess I was just too sleepy to think of that.” You explained, preparing to be psychoanalyzed no matter what you said.

“No, you were just too polite to push the imagined boundaries of my invitation.” He concluded, busying his hands with plating whatever it was he was making. His tone was comfortingly familiar. “Miss [L/N], don’t sacrifice your comfort for what you think I perceive to be rude. If I found you rude, you’d know it.”

"I'm sorry." You repeated.

"Don't apologize." He said, reaching for the pepper mill. "I know your anxiety disorder makes you feel like you are a burden. I assure you, you are not. I want you to know for next time that the couch is open. Or you could take the guest bedroom."

You stopped yourself before you could apologize again. You momentarily pondered what he had to say before uttering a quiet but convicted "Thank you."

"You're very welcome." Dr. Lecter slid a plate across the table in your direction. "Eat, my dear."

You didn't need to be told twice. You usually didn’t care for sausage, but reconsidered when you took a bite. The meat was so flavorful and rich, a little noise of delight escaped your lips.

Dr. Lecter smiled, your little moan sending his ego through the roof. “You like it?” 

“It’s delicious.” You put your fork down, your face flush with embarrassment. “Way better than the food at the dining hall.” 

“Miss [L/N],” Dr. Lecter began, putting an extra sausage link on your plate. “If you find yourself in need of psychology texts, I’d be happy to extend my invitation indefinitely.” 

You nearly choked on your eggs. “On god?” 

“Given that you arrive sometime before midnight and perhaps call ahead, yes.” He answered. “Your studies are your life and breath, after all. You would find yourself very accommodated to here.”

This time, you'd really take him up on his offer.

A Favor: Part Twelve

Nessian Modern AU

Masterlist

a/n: this took so long bc ive been reading chain of iron and in general agonizing over things i cant control instead of being productive 🥴 that being said, absolutely none of the events in this chapter were planned in my outline, but here we are with something new!

***

December brings more snow and bone chilling weather, to the point where Cassian has to drag Nesta out of bed, either physically or by phone call, to get her to therapy appointments on time. 

She’s in the waiting room one freezing morning when, in her utter boredom, she musters up the nerve to turn to the girl sitting next to her. “What are you in here for?”

The girl blinks her large blue eyes, taking notice of Nesta for the first time. Nesta uses the opportunity to take in her freckle-painted face, a little wan but beautiful. Reddish brown hair hangs around her face and shoulders, creating a thick curtain from the rest of the world, and Nesta’s curiosity piques like she’s just found a shiny new toy.

It probably isn’t right to compare people to toys, but then the girl says, “This isn’t prison, you know.” Her voice is deep, almost sultry— completely at odds from her huddled-in posture and sickened expression. “I didn’t commit a crime to have to be here.”

Is she insulted by Nesta’s question, or is she poking a joke? Nesta decides to play it safe by murmuring, “Sorry, never mind.”

She starts to turn away when the girl says, “We’re trying a new type of trauma therapy today. I had to get here half an hour early because I couldn’t swallow my nerves.”

Nesta might lack many social skills, but she isn’t stupid enough to ask what kind of trauma the girl is being treated for. Instead, she nods casually as if she understands the struggle. “I’ve been coming here for weeks now and I’ve barely discussed shit. That’s mostly on me, but you know…” She actually doesn’t know where she’s going with her train of thought. “It sounds brave to do whatever you're doing,” she states finally. “I don’t think I’ll be able to open up that much about myself, ever.” 

The girl gives Nesta a weird look that she immediately recognizes. Nesta uses it every time she doesn’t know how to respond to someone who takes her by surprise.

The door to Lana’s office clicks open, and the woman herself pokes her head out with a plain smile. “Ready, Nesta?”

Nesta bites down on her frown. She has a feeling today won’t be as easy as her past sessions.

She’s about to leave without another glance at the girl beside her when that low voice speaks up. “I’m Gwyn.”

Nesta looks back at her as she gets up from her chair, and says the first reply that comes to mind: “Good to know.”

***

Nesta is contemplative hours after she gets back from her therapy session, bundled up in her bed with a coloring book. The repetitive motion of filling in the mandala drawing lets her mind wander, picking up and dropping different thoughts like she’s inspecting stones. 

She keeps her wrist light as she colors in with red. She finally said Tomas’s name in therapy today, though the action left a slimy feeling in Nesta’s stomach that lingers even now. She also spoke about her sisters, which somehow ended up leading to a discussion of her uterus. 

“How have you been dealing with the endometriosis news?”

Nesta shrugged. “I’m getting treated, and my last period was more bearable than usual—”

“I mean mentally, how are you doing? With how your condition could affect your future?”

Nesta narrowed her eyes. “Affect me how?”

“Have you never considered the impact it could have on your ability to bear children?”

“Not everything in life is about bearing children, you know.”

“We’re humans. It’s definitely something to consider.”

“Not for me. I’ve never wanted kids.” A mistruth at best. “I don’t care what endo does or doesn’t do to me on those grounds.”

In a way, Nesta told herself, the health risks were actually for the best. If she ever did, by some stupid loss of sanity, try to have children, then her body would act as a safety net from her decisions.

Lana only said, “You’ll never know how much you care or don’t care until you talk out your feelings.”

“Then I guess we’ll never know.”

Nesta lets the memory of that conversation drop like a stone on a shore. That’s not something she has to face for a good long while. No, right now she has to face her past. 

Her sisters, and her ex, and even her father— 

I wonder if I came off too strong with Gwyn today. 

Her hand stops drawing, and she switches out her red marker for an orange one. This thought she doesn’t mind inspecting for a little longer: she and Gwyn ended up leaving their sessions at the same time, which meant they were forced into stilted conversation on the way down to the parking lot. 

Not forced, Nesta self-corrects. She willingly initiated a conversation, and it didn’t go terribly. She wonders if making friends in therapy waiting rooms is a real thing.

Her phone vibrates beside her, breaking her hours-long mental bubble. Blinking dazedly, she answers the phone call.

“How are you?” is the first thing Cassian says to her. He makes sure to ask her that at least twice a day, like a gauging of her temperature. It makes Nesta wonder what she’s ever done in her life to call for such… attention to her well-being. 

“I’m good,” she answers honestly. “My head’s a little loud right now, but I don’t mind it.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“No, I’d rather hear you talk.” She slumps back against her pillows, coloring book forgotten. “What’s up?”

“Ah...” Cassian sounds hesitant for the first time since their relationship started. “It’s just that I haven’t gotten my Christmas decorations up yet, and I was going to ask if you wanted to help.”

Nesta takes a moment to absorb his words. “It’s December fifth,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“You just seem like somebody who does their decorations the day after Thanksgiving.”

“Well, this year is a little different, with you moving out and being busy with school…” He pauses. “I was waiting to do it with you.”

When she doesn’t reply, Cassian adds, “I don’t even know if you care about Christmas. I know you and your family sort of ignored holidays. It’s fine if you don’t want to—”

“I’ll be over right now,” Nesta blurts. 

Half an hour later, Cassian swings open his door with a smug grin on his face; a vast difference from the stammering hesitance he displayed over the phone earlier. Nesta’s own lips want to pull up into a smile just at the sight of him, but she holds back and narrows her eyes instead. “What’s got you so worked up?” she questions as she steps into the warmth of the cabin and out of the freezing cold.

“The way you ran over here as soon as I asked.” He looks her up and down, still amused. “You didn’t even bother to change, did you?”

It’s true: she’s in the same sweatpants and long sleeved tee she wore around home, and her socked feet are shoved into slippers. 

“Get that smirk off your face.” Nesta flicks his nose before tossing her coat off. “If this is a competition about who’s got a bigger puppy-crush for whom, you already won when you delayed putting up your Christmas decorations for me.”

“Fair enough,” he grins. The words send an unexpected pang through Nesta, because it’s partly true, isn’t it? He cares more openly for her than she does for him. 

She looks away in guilt, not knowing how to fix the imbalance. Her eyes land on the living room coffee table, where their half-finished jigsaw puzzle sits. It’s been stored under the couch for the past few weeks, forgotten by Nesta and Cassian alike as they moved on with their lives, but now it’s sitting out again.

“Have you been working on the puzzle without me?” She raises an inquisitive brow, about to feel— hurt.

“Never,” Cassian promises, saving her from that irrational hurt. “I just brought it out because I figured we should get to finishing it one day.”

She pads over to the table, picking up a puzzle piece and turning it over in her hand. “I don’t know if you remember, but we had a terrible time working on this,” she scoffs lightly.

“Oh, I remember,” he says, coming up behind her and stealing the piece from her grasp. “I think it’s safe to say those evenings were the worst fights we’ll ever have together.”

Nesta leans back against Cassian’s chest and hums. “It made us a stronger couple, don’t you think?” She turns her head up and back to meet Cassian’s eyes, finding that he’s already looking down at her.

Hypnotized, she leans into his warmth. She only manages to land the smallest kiss against his lips when his hand squeezes her ass cheek. “You’re here for a job, remember?” He taps her butt before pulling away, gesturing to the Christmas tree in the corner of the living area with his chin. It stands bare. “You do tinsel, I’ll do lights.”

Tinsel is harder to work with than Nesta remembers. She only manages to get half the tree done before plopping onto the Persian rug, exhausted and covered in silvery material. She doesn’t mind laying there while Cassian continues working; it’s her revenge for when he napped on her bed while she moved in.

“You know the stair railings still need to be wreathed, Archeron.”

Nesta declines to respond, tilting her head on the carpet for a better view of her boyfriend’s ass instead. “All this decorating,” she starts. “Is it just for you?”

Cassian turns to her, surprised. “Well…”

She pushes up onto her elbows, catching her mistake. “Are we doing Christmas together? Or are your friends coming over?” She hasn’t bothered to celebrate Christmas in years now, and she doesn’t care much what Cassian’s plans are either way.

“I was hoping for both?” He sounds hesitant. “Christmas Eve is all the way over in Velaris, but I was thinking we could go together, open some presents, and come back and spend Christmas here.”

Nesta purses her lips. She doesn’t actually hate that plan. Both Feyre and Elain have been pestering her with the annual texts asking her to visit for Christmas, and for once, she feels like responding to them. The invitation is more of a formality than an actual request at this point; she doubts her sisters want her there after years of rejections, but… what’s the harm?

“Is that a yes?” Cassian asks at her unreadable face.

“Yes,” she states unflinchingly. She refuses to overthink the possible consequences of this choice and chooses to focus on the broad grin overtaking Cassian’s face. “Really?” he says.

“But there has to be rules.” Nesta sits up fully now. “No one can know we’re together, no matter how much you trust or love them.”

“We already agreed to that, baby.”

Yes, but Nesta knows the secret weighs on him heavier than he shows— even if he agrees with her that it's for the best. “It’ll be different when we’re together in the same room as everyone else,” she says. Cassian wears his beating heart on his sleeve, and she doesn’t think he’s ever had to hide it before.

“You’ll also be different,” she adds. “It’s a huge change of pace.”

Cassian drops the remaining strand of lights and smiles confusedly down at her. “What do you mean, I’ll be different?” He sits across from her, before the blazing fire. 

“You know how you get around your friends.” Nesta shrugs without a thought. “Like your personality readjusts to mirror the people around you. I used to find it a mix of sad and adorable, like a neglected puppy desperate for love, but now I— okay, I still feel the same way.” She waves a hand in a dismissive gesture.

By the look on Cassian’s face, he does not find her words so easily dismissed. 

Coldness curdles in the pit of Nesta’s stomach, the realization that she’s said something wrong. She can’t fix it until she knows where she fucked up, though.

“Is that what you think of me?” Cassian finally says lowly. His usually expressive mouth is drawn tight and narrow. 

“Um… What would you rather I think of you?”

His eyes widen in disbelief. “Seriously, Nesta?”

Nesta’s back stiffens, refusing to cower. “I only described what I’ve observed in the past.”

“And what you observed was a desperate puppy?” His voice is cold in a way she’s never heard before.

Okay, she’s starting to see how that might be offensive. She forges onward, “Tell me what you think about yourself in the presence of your family, then.” It’s a private victory that she says family instead of clown circus. But she’s not trying to turn this into a fight.

Cassian is silent, but his stare continues to rage at her.

“Tell me,” Nesta repeats.

His hands curl into fists on the rug. “I think I’m empathetic, easy to talk to, and easier to be around. Is it a problem if I’m likable?” Unlike you are the unsaid words.

Nesta inspects the space between them like it’s a chessboard. “And what part of yourself are you giving up to be so likable, Cassian?” she says quietly.

“Nothing.”

Nesta disagrees, if only because she’s been watching him out of the corner of her eye for years. “I think you base your personality off of those you love, and you lose a little bit of your true self every time you put others’ needs before your own.” 

She shuts her mouth, not having expected such honesty to come out of it. Cassian is taken aback, too, she can tell.

“And I guess it’s natural that you’d see all of that as a bad thing, considering your history of being closed off and self-serving to a fault,” he fires back with the flatness Nesta utilizes so often.

One for one. Fair enough. “We’re both right then,” Nesta says. “You work for your best friend because you have no ambition beyond serving your family, and I have no such family because I can’t bring myself to care about those things. Are we even now?”

Cassian furrows his brows, those defensive walls melting away as he realizes she’s completely serious. “What? No, Nes—” He shakes his head. “Okay, so maybe you’re right about me. Maybe I agree with you a little bit, but… If we see flaws in each other, then we should be working to overcome them instead of weaponizing them.”

Now Nesta’s the one shaking her head, quickly lifting a hand to stop him. “Relax there, sweetheart. I have no expectations from you or myself to go on some self-improvement journey now that we’re together. Talking about my feelings with a professional every week is hard enough.” Yes, agreeing to go to Feyre’s Christmas party is improvement. Slow, barely there improvement, but enough to wear her out for the rest of the month. For Nesta to fully let people into her life, to treat them as lovingly as she treats Cassian— that’s a long way away. She can’t envision it, doesn’t even know if she wants it.

Cassian must understand some of what she’s thinking, because he nods and backs off. He gets back up and returns to stringing lights, tossing a handful of tinsel at Nesta as if to say Get back to work. 

She stands and obeys, thinking their not-argument is officially over when Cassian says, “You’re wrong about one thing.”

She looks up from where she threads tinsel through fir leaves. He doesn’t take his eyes off his work as he says, “You do have a family. And deep, deep down, you care about them as much as I care about mine.”

***

Nesta catches Emerie’s eye as the dark-haired beauty walks into the pub. Raising a hand and waving, she gestures Emerie over to the booth she’s sitting in. 

“Look what I found,” Nesta says with a hint of pride, pointing to the redhead sitting beside her. “A third girl for girl’s night!”

“I was kidnapped,” Gwyn speaks up. “Jumped on the way to my car.” She’s out of her usual hoodie and in a tight-fitting blouse, looking stunning even while seeming out of place in the dim bar.

“She came here consensually,” Nesta retorts. “Emerie, this is Gwyn. We met at therapy.”

Gwyn offers Emerie an awkward smile.

Emerie slides into the booth across from them with raised brows. She looks between Nesta and the new girl and back again. “You invited her here? All by yourself?” she asks.

Nesta nods firmly.

Emerie breaks into a wide grin and reaches over the table to grab Nesta’s hand. “I’m so proud of you!” If Emerie were anyone else, she’d be squealing in excitement, but Emerie does not squeal.

Nesta waves off her friend’s praise, though a part of her wants to beam at it, too.

Gwyn glances between the two of them with slight amusement. “I mean, it’s not that impressive,” she says. “She came on a bit too strong, probably a five out of ten on the asking-someone-out scale.”

“‘A bit too strong’ is all you’re gonna get with Nesta,” Emerie says, lifting her hand to order drinks. “She’s all-or-nothing, and most people would pray she doesn’t give them her nothing.”

Nesta doesn’t know if that’s a compliment, but she supposes there are worse things that could be said about her.

“So, Gwyn, what do you do?” Emerie leans forward. “All our friends are law students and it’s starting to get boring.”

Gwyn goes off about her librarian job as Nesta orders their drinks, and Emerie rests her chin in her hand and listens eagerly. Christmas music plays softly in the background and snow flurries gently outside. Nesta thinks she can’t be doing that bad in life, if she’s managed to carve out this little slice of happiness for herself.

***

a/n: i promise shit actually happens next chapter! we're getting christmas with nessian and the ic in the same room for the first time

taglist: @ladywitchling @sjm-things @thewayshedreamed @drielecarla @valkyriewarriors @superspiritfestival @aliveahaahahafuck @cupcakey00 @sayosdreams @rainbowcheetah512 @claralady @thebluemartini @nessiantho @missing-merlin @duskandstarlight @lucy617 @sleeping-and-books @everything-that-i-love @cassianscool @swankii-art-teacher @awesomelena555 @julemmaes @wickedqueenoffantasy @poisonous-bloom @observationanxioustheorist @gisellefigue08 @courtofjurdan @theoverlyenthusiasticwriter @wolfiixxx @cass-nes @seashade @royaltykxx @illyrianundercover @queenestarcheron @monstrousloves-explodinggalaxies @humanexile @that-golden-lyre @agentsofsheilds @mercy-is-alive @cassiansbigwingspan @laylaameer01 @verypaleninja @maastrash @bow-dawn @perseusannabeth @dead-on-the-inside666 @jlinez @hungryreadingaddict @anidealiveson

Listener Mailbag - Sept. 30, 2019

Listener feedback is valuable to us, and we love it when someone takes the time to reach out and engage us in conversation!  

This listener offers several compelling and interesting counter-points to the previous listener-letter’s assertion that the imbalances regarding McCartney’s critical reputation (and fandom toxicity regarding McCartney in general) have been redressed.  We don’t agree that they have, and this listener has made many similar observations.

Please feel free to email us at akompodcast at gmail dot com, send us an ask, or a Tumblr message. We love hearing from you!

Listener’s letter:  

Thank you guys so much for all of your hard work on this podcast! I’ve had an absolute blast listening to all the episodes, and I’m sure there are many who look forward to it just as much as I do. My letter is partially in response to another listener’s letter (the one who stressed that the jean-jacket narrative is no longer as prevalent as it once was).

I really loved your response, and I simply wanted to express that, whatever their experience with the Beatles’ narrative might’ve been, mine has been the exact opposite. I’m pretty young and my parents never really listened to the Beatles. I knew about the Beatles and Paul McCartney, but I was so naive to their story that it never really clicked that Paul was even in the Beatles until I became immersed in their lore (I had never even heard of George Harrison. Whoops, sorry Georgie). So, I was as blank a slate as they come.

I’ve been absolutely devouring Beatles media for the past three months. And being a Paul fan in 2019? Still really difficult due to the toxicity of the fandom. Obscure books about John Lennon or the group as a whole are far easier to track down than Paul books.

It took an embarrassingly long time to discover that Paul even had an authorized semi-autobiography. (The cringeworthy lack of attention toward Ringo and George hasn’t escaped my notice, either. Their legacy has been seriously neglected) And a lot of the books I’ve managed to get my hands on tend to take unprovoked jabs at Paul’s legacy: two of the “Paul books” I’ve bought recently were prefaced, essentially, with “I’ve never liked Paul because I resented the way the women in my life so obviously enjoyed him.” Both the Norman and Clayson biographies began this way, and it just seemed so unnecessary.

Now I have to do extensive research before purchase to avoid wasting money on books that disdain Paul for qualities outside of his control. It was baffling that these men thought, despite their personal jealousies, that they were qualified to not only write biographies but to include their personal issues in the preface without having their legitimacy questioned. I’d never seen anything like it.

When books or media praise him, the majority of it seems to be for his appearance. Even Cynthia Lennon, bless her old lady heart (loved her book John, by the way, read it ‘cause you guys recommended it), when it came to describing each Beatle in an interview, described a man who had been a true friend to her for decades as ‘Pretty… so, so pretty.’ The other three Beatles consistently get remarks as to their wit and talent, but few people, even some of his close friends, seem to get past Paul’s looks.

To the untrained, twenty-something eye, Paul comes across as something of an adorable, grandad figure, kind of oddly amorphous in his legacy, rather than the musical genius and powerhouse he actually is. When I started to seek out his music, I was shocked at all the familiar melodies that I’d heard hundreds of times before without ever knowing the artist. His music feels really fresh and relevant to me, not at all dated, a huge contrast to the affable, aging persona I’ve been fed by the media.

Paul is my favorite Beatle, but I’m not looking for media that overtly glorifies Paul in relation to his former bandmates. I just want to have historically factual, fair media that pays respect to the people who have shaped my life and occasionally comforted me with their art. And I don’t want to feel like I should have to be ashamed of my enjoyment just because a group of men found my appreciation vapid and aggravating, for one reason or another.

That’s why I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed the AKOM podcast: it feels like, in a room full of toxic men screaming at the top of their lungs about nothing at all and demanding it become truth, that women (and other varying genders) can still bravely sit down amidst it all, have tea, and breathe some sanity into the stupidity. Thanks again!

Our Response:

Thank you for your wonderful letter. We appreciate the feedback. We love long letters and certainly understand having a lot to say on the subject!

We have had very similar experiences to yours and agree: 

“Paul comes across as something of an adorable, grandad figure, kind of oddly amorphous in his legacy, rather than the musical genius and powerhouse he actually is.” 

This bothers us as well. Paul does not get the artistic credit he deserves. 

Paul himself has shown frustration with the label “the cute Beatle” —can you imagine having written some of the world’s most famous songs and being labeled “cute” while you partner is labeled “smart” or “intellectual” or “genius”? It must be hugely frustrating. Perhaps so much so that he has taken to giving HIMSELF the label of genius recently! We’re all for it!

Unfortunately, it a label and bias that exists. Problem is, Paul is cute and charming! But he is also deep and complex and brilliant and sexy, yet so many writers and observers aren't able to see beyond the surface-level read of him. This hasn’t always been the case though, when we examine contemporaneous reviews of the Beatles, we find that in the 60s Paul’s genius was taken more seriously by some (yes, he had the label “the cute Beatle” but his talents were also taken seriously, especially in the UK); the break-up seems to have altered his critical evaluation.

You said: “When I started to seek out his music, I was shocked at all the familiar melodies that I’d heard hundreds of times before without ever knowing the artist.”

 We are thrilled that you have discovered them. I felt this way about Paul’s solo work as well—I  had been led to believe, by critics, that Paul’s solo music wasn’t up to par with his Beatles work, so approached it with trepidation. What a pleasure it was finding out they were so very wrong. Paul’s post-Beatles work is a joy to explore. It is a treasure chest of incredible music. 

“His music feels really fresh and relevant to me, not at all dated, a huge contrast to the affable, aging persona I’ve been fed by the media.”

Exactly, and Paul’s post-Beatles story is very romantic and relevant as well. Paul’s post-Beatles period hasn’t been significantly romanticized or mythologized….yet. 

The McCartneys themselves do a good job of it, but it hasn’t taken hold in the popular imagination. Based on Paul’s "persona" as it is portrayed in popular culture, one would think Paul spent his entire post-break-up career pining for the Beatles and writing sub-standard but commercially popular music rather than having inspired a whole other music genre and created a goldmine of incredible music.

“Paul is my favorite Beatle, but I’m not looking for media that overtly glorify Paul in relation to his former bandmates. I just want to have historically factual, fair media that pays respect to the people who have shaped my life and occasionally comforted me with their art.”

Wouldn’t that be lovely! But it’s tough to find. It seems some of these biases are so deeply ingrained and embedded in the Beatles story that it colors the view of everything Paul-related. For example, what is this so-called “granny music”? This isn’t even a thing! It’s not a genre, yet Paul’s music is continually given this label. It's time to stop letting John’s labels, which were given in a fit of anger and defensiveness, define Paul and Paul’s music. Again, there are some deep underlying assumptions in this fandom that need to be challenged. 

“And I don’t want to feel like I should have to be ashamed of my enjoyment just because a group of men found my appreciation vapid and aggravating, for one reason or another.  That’s why I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed the AKOM podcast: it feels like, in a room full of toxic men screaming at the top of their lungs about nothing at all and demanding it become truth, that women (and other varying genders) can still bravely sit down amidst it all, have tea, and breathe some sanity into the stupidity. “

 Ha! Well, we are thrilled to have inspired enjoyment and relaxation with a good cup of tea! We understand the pleasure of not wanting to constantly throw your cup at the speaker!

“Can't wait for the next episode!!”

We hope you have enjoyed our latest episodes on the Break-up and LIB. We think we managed to challenge some deeply held believes and assumptions with our analysis. 

Thanks again for the letter, we really enjoyed it! Please continue to share your thoughts if you are inspired!

Best, 

Diana and the AKOM Crew 

I think I read somewhere that you don't particularly enjoy Snape/student pairings, correct me if I am wrong. Is this limited to the actual period that they are in a student/teacher relationship or you would also mind him hitting it off and/or be involved with an ex-student?

Ok, this answer has to come with a disclaimer, me thinks, because I do have followers and mutuals who are into those ships and I´m not here to police anybody´s tastes, so this is entirely my opinion, and I´m not trying to call anybody out or invite debate. 

But the answer to your question, anon, would be a a hard NO for ANY Snape x student pairing, even with the stipulation that the student is now grown and no longer a student. Actually, teacher x student pairings in general are huge NO for me, period. 

I´ve answered this before, but I think it bears repeating: I´ve been a teacher for years (now I´m moving to a different professional field), and for most of my teaching career I´ve taught children and teenagers from ages 9 to roughly 17/18, and I´ve also taught a lot of adults. Because of my personal experience, I just can´t find anything attractive or normal about student x teacher pairings. 

There´s  the thing, when you meet a person when they are 11 or 12 (like Snape meets Hermione or Harry, the characters he gets paired with the most), that has an impact on how you´re going to see this person for life. It REALLY does. I have met former students of mine who are now adults (I actually live in the same neighborhood of at least two of them and see them around somewhat regularly). To me these people will always be the same kids who played Pokemon cards I had to confiscate so they would pay attention to class, the same kids whose stories about fairytales and astronauts I´ve corrected and graded, the kids who dressed up and played games in Halloween parties I helped organise, whose parents I had to sit down with to discuss their behaviour, who did stupid shit in my classroom, who wrote cringe-wothy notes to each other, or argued about silly shit like video games or who would get to be which character in a play.  

To me they´ll always be kids. 

So, as far as I´m concerned, the mere concept of a teacher having romantic or sexual feelings for a student  they met when they were children is, even in fiction, is at best VERY  weird, and at worst borderline predatory and incestuous. TBH, even with adult students, there´s an inherent power imbalance in student/teacher relationships that all too often carries out to life after school (and with adult students there´s often the complicator that if the teacher has taught or trained them for a specific work field, they WILL meet them in work-related situations, and there will be work-related issues on top of whatever power dynamics they´ve brought from the educational setting. I´ve seen it happen in academic settings quite often.)

With Snape there´s also another aspect that irks me. Snape has a TON of emotional baggage. He´s immature, he´s stuck in the past, he´s still suffering from things that happened to him when he was a teenager. To pair him with a former student, somebody young enough to be his kid, I believe that would be reinforcing the fact that he´s struggling to grow into a functional adult. It would keep him in an eternally immature emotional state. Severus is a 30-something year old man who NEEDS to grow, to address his own demons, to let go of his teenage angst. The last thing he needs is the emotional mess that a releationship with a former student might cause both him and the person he´s paired with. (I won´t even go into how getting together with Lily´s son of all people would just get him perpetually stuck into a cycle of emotional obssession). Now, of course there will be writers out there who actually want to write that scenario. And that´s fine, literature is full of amazing stories featuring deeply flawed and problematic relationships. It makes for interesting reading. But it´s not what I want to write personaly. I want to write Snape growing out of his issues, not drowning in them. That´s just my personal writing choice

“But it´s not real life, people can ship what they want” some will say. 

I know. That´s why I don´t go around telling people to stop shipping these pairings. I just block the tag. And I really only address this topic when asked. 

I remember one time when I was a kid my mom and I wanted to go to this really cool hiking cave. It was a bit of a drive, but we wanted to make a trip of it and we were thinking of even staying overnight and exploring the area some because it was such a drive. I have a tendency to not handle being in moving vehicles for long periods well and thought it would be too stressful physically and mentally. My dad overheard our plans, invited himself along, and insisted we make it a day trip because it was "only a 4-hour drive." We get to the cave, my mom and I are having fun, and 30 minutes in, my dad says he wants to go back to the car. We were a little confused but we were like, "Alright, whatever. We want to keep going so we'll meet you there." He started getting agitated and said that we weren't wearing the right shoes. We were like, "okay we have hiking boots in the car, what if we go back and get them so we can hike some more?" He got more agitated and told us no again without offering any reason why and he started to do the "because I said so." We had driven all the way there and we weren't leaving just like that, so my mom and I left him and walked further into the cave. He went back to the car in a huff.

We walked for a while longer, but a lot of the fun had been taken out of the experience and my mom was feeling nervous so we ended cutting the trip short about an hour later. We get back to the car and it was honestly terrifying. I have never seen my father so angry in my life, he called us names, saying how selfish and stupid we were and how this would never happen again and we better listen in the future and if he says we're done we're done, he wouldn't stop yelling for over half an hour, I spent the rest of the car ride home shaking in fear. I'm honestly surprised he didn't hit me, even when I got spanked when I was little he wasn't that angry. I realized two things that day: one, that my father has claustrophobia and refuses to admit it and two, there was a serious power imbalance in my parent's relationship because my dad throws his weight around to get his way. I thought my parents at least talked with each other, but my mom didn't know he was afraid of enclosed spaces either and they'd been married for 30 years. It was really really eye-opening, and I absolutely wanted to avoid that type of relationship at all costs. If you can't be vulnerable with your spouse but demand their obedience, that is expecting a servant more than an equal. It sure seems like a lot of straight men think that's the way relationships work and that's honestly terrifying.

Following our recent posts marking the 60th anniversary of the wedding of Julie Andrews and Tony Walton, here we shine a brief spotlight on how the newlyweds were covered by the media in the early years of their marriage. Their May 1959 wedding was a definite high-water mark of media exposure for Julie and Tony but public interest didn’t end once they’d walked down the aisle. Newspapers and magazines continued to feature regular stories and photos about the ‘happy couple’, detailing what they were up to and how they were adapting to life as husband-and-wife. 

Much of the coverage presented the newlyweds as a quintessentially modern couple who were combining the twin demands of dual careers with companionate marriage. A multi-page profile in the January 1960 issue of British women’s magazine, Housewife serves a good case-in-point. Essentially a ‘celebrities at home’ pictorial, the article marshals the couple’s “delightful new home––a large flat overlooking Eaton Square––to which they went when they were married eight months ago” as a symbolic expression of the blended amalgamations of marital domesticity (Antony: 38). 

The “Andrews-Walton flat is a combination of their two careers,” the article chirps, “Julie’s piano has a prominent place and one room is made into Tony’s studio” (Antony: 40). Elsewhere it describes a cosy everyday scenario of domestic give-and-take as “Julie spends hours practising her singing” with Tony acting as one of her “sternest musical critics,” while Julie in turn “gets a thrill out of Tony’s work for the theatre [and] enjoys posing for his costume designs” (38-39). The image painted here is a transactional blend of conventional married home-life with newer forms of egalitarian coupledom: “two young people––both so young and in love––embarking on a duet” in “their lovely new home...a good basis for security in their marriage” (40-41).

Other profiles were considerably less blithesome. A recurrent refrain in a lot of the media coverage of Julie and Tony’s marriage was the perceived challenges faced by a couple in which, as one early newspaper report put it, “the wife’s name has embarrassingly eclipsed the husband’s” (Wilson: 10). In an era still tethered to orthodox notions of male breadwinners and female homemakers, a union in which the wife assumed greater professional and financial prowess than the husband was sufficiently novel to evoke both curiosity and, at times, unease. 

In the newspaper profile just mentioned, Cecil Wilson (1959) strikes a note of thinly-veiled anxiety when discussing what he apprehends as a gendered dilemma in the couple’s marriage. Titled “How Not to Be Known as Mr Julie Andrews”, the article asserts a very traditional view of marriage in terms of masculine dominance and feminine support. “No man could have done more in less time” than Tony Walton, it proclaims, “to rise above the reflected glory of being ‘Julie Andrews’s husband’ or, worse still, the ignominious label of ‘Mr. Julie Andrews’” (10). “Since his childhood sweetheart from Walton-on-Thames consolidated her...stardom in My Fair Lady, he has firmly established the name of Tony Walton by designing four West End shows...[and n]ow, to give Julie Andrews further pride in being known as Tony Walton’s wife, he has gone into management” as a theatre producer (ibid.).* 

It is a testament to Julie and Tony’s fortitude and well-grounded emotional security that, for the most part, they deflected such concerns as immaterial. Responding to a reporter’s question about how her status as “one of the country’s wealthiest young actresses” impacted her new married lifestyle, Julie  demurred: “I don’t know how much I’m worth...We haven’t a car, although I hold a licence. But Tony holds the important licence, the marriage one” (Hickey: 3). Later, on the eve of her departure for New York to start rehearsals for Camelot, Julie mused further on the ambivalent demands of career and marriage: “Of course it’s nice to get back to work. I love the stage. But what I really like and what I want to do is to settle down and be plain Mrs. Walton” (Tanfield: 12). 

For his part, Tony Walton struck a particularly mature and, for the time, progressive attitude to the unorthodox dynamics of his and Julie’s marriage. When asked in a 1959 interview if he experienced “professional jealousy” of Julie, he replied with categorical pragmatism: “Not a bit. After all, Julie has one career and I have another. But I still wouldn’t rank my fame with hers” (Wilson: 10). It was a consistently balanced approach he maintained––at least publicly––right throughout the marriage, even after Julie had graduated to the exponentially increased fame and fortune of film stardom.  “[T]he embarrassments people see for me are easily coped with because they’re so absurd,” he remarked in a 1966 article, “I’d be stupid if I let them affect me” (Leslie: 8). If there is any problem, he ventured in an admirably democratic take on modern marriage, it is 

“who at any one time is going to be the support. I don’t mean financial but emotional––which is the basis on which the whole marriage is built. When Julie and I were both in the theatre, and she was rehearsing at something and I was working at something else, the pressure times would swing back and forth between us. And at times I’d find myself taking on an almost feminine role, trying to calm, soothe, protect or whatever. And then as soon as I was deeply involved and under pressure then the roles would be reversed. I think if I were an over-dominant kind of male I’d find this situation harder to cope with. But neither of us is over-poweringly masculine or over-poweringly feminine” (ibid.)

That the marriage of Julie Andrews and Tony Walton ultimately didn’t last is a matter of historical record. Following extended periods of separation, the two officially filed for divorce in November 1967, eight and a half years after they were wed (”Julie Andrews Suing”: I-23). But the pair have, by all accounts, maintained a strong and enduring friendship, even after both of them found and subsequently married new partners (Robins: D-6). In fact, Julie is fond of recounting how Tony and his second wife, Gen LeRoy-Walton, affectionately refer to her as “our ex” (Andrews: 323). “They’re best friends and they gang up against me,” explains Tony Walton of the relationship between his former and current partners (McDonnell: 3D). As Julie observed in a 2001 interview: “[T]he divorce was extremely sobering but I've known [Tony] since I was 13 and he was 12, and you cannot undo that knowledge” (Birch: 16).

Notes:

* This kind of angst-ridden discourse about the perceived gendered power imbalance of the Andrews-Walton marriage intensified once Julie made the move to Hollywood and the even greater success of global film stardom. “When a wife starts earning much more money than her husband,” wrote one especially egregious example, “the marriage is not long for the lasting” (Shearer: 15). Such sensationalist commentary was evident even in international reports.”Julie Andrews and her prince-consort” was how one French-language article billed the marriage (Von Cottom: 22).

Sources:

Andrews, Julie. Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008.

Antony, Jonquil. “Theatrical Duet in Eaton Square.” House Wife. March 1960: 38-41.

Birch, Helen. “Truly Andrews.” Daily Telegraph. 7 December 2001: 15-16.

Hickey, William. “For Julie it’s the Beginning.” Daily Express. 8 August 1959: 3.

Jordan, Ruth. “No Fashion Fuss for Julie.” Woman’s Journal. December, 1959: 26-27, 134.

“Julie Andrews Suing Designer for Divorce.” Los Angeles Times. 15 November 1967: I-23.

Leslie, Ann. “Beating the Hysteria: ‘Mr. Julie Andrews’.” Daily Express. 19 April 1966: 8.

McDonnell, Brandy. “Tony Time.” The Oklahoman / Sunday Life. 27 May 2018: D1-D3.

Robins, Cynthia. “When Art and Love Meld Successfully.” San Francisco Examiner. 6 September 1992: D-6.

Shearer, Lloyd. “When a Wife Earns More than a Husband.” Parade. 9 July 1967: 14-15.

Tanfield, Paul. “My Year of Bliss...by Julie Andrews.” Daily Mail. 18 August 1960: 12.

Von Cottom, Joseph. “Julie Andrews et son prince-consort: le pitoyable drame des maris de vedettes.” Ciné-Télé-Revue. 4 August 1966: 22-23.

Wilson, Cecil. “How Not to Be Known as Mr Julie Andrews.” Daily Mail. 24 September 1959: 10.

Photographs by John Dixon, George Konig, and anon.

© 2019 Brett Farmer All Rights Reserved

Kintsugi: Chapter 5

Warnings: panic attacks, drug use, and adult language.

Summary: Final Crisis/Red Robin AU. Dick admits Tim to a psychiatric facility after Bruce is lost in time. Jason finds him suffering at the hands of a Scarecrow-copycat and breaks him out. While safe in Jason’s apartment, Tim still struggles with panic attacks and drug withdrawal. At a loss for what to do, Jason calls Roy Harper.

Pairings: Jason Todd & Tim Drake, Tim Drake & Roy Harper, Roy Harper & Jason Todd.

As Roy drove them back to the safehouse, casually inquiring about some recent news stories that he’d seen coming out of Gotham, Tim stared out the back window feeling spacey and drunk. He squinted at the passing buildings and the brilliantly illuminated billboards, but couldn’t focus his eyes enough to read any of the signs and advertisements before they streaked past him into the gloomy distance.

“Could you turn up the heat?” Tim asked, acutely aware that Roy had complied with this same request only five minutes earlier. While the cool spring air had felt like a relief from the stuffy diner only a moment ago, Roy’s car seemed to trap in the cold air despite the number of bodies in the car radiating heat. Though it was a lie, Tim was almost starting to believe the story Jason had sold to the stranger in the parking lot. He really did feel sick; suffering from clammy palms and brisk shivers seemingly all at once.

Tim caught the flash of Roy’s eyes in the rearview mirror but it was hard to tell who his concerned gaze was directed at. Perhaps, both of them, thought Tim. He knew his withdrawal symptoms were getting worse and would only continue to get worse until his body recovered from its current chemical imbalance.

“Hey, Tim,” Jason slid off his leather jacket. “Take my jacket instead.”

He pressed Tim forward slightly with a hand between his shoulder blades so he could flip it over Tim’s shoulders.

“You sure?” he asked, though his fingers were already curling into the smooth brown leather and pulling it tighter around his frame. He felt bad taking Jason’s jacket since he was already wearing a pair of Jason’s old sweats as it was, but he didn’t know if he could play down his reluctance if Jason changed his mind and asked for it back.

Jason smiled, with a hint of knowing humor. “Yeah, I think I overdressed. That’s my bad, I never know how to dress in the spring. One moment it’s cold and windy, the next it’s raining and it’s up 15 degrees.”

Roy pulled the car around to the back of the safehouse and into one of the old loading areas previously used for stocking shipping trucks. While the trucks had been cleared out when the facility went out of business, it seemed Jason still put the space to good use as a makeshift garage. As Jason slipped out of the back to pull the rolling steel door down behind them and lock it with chain and padlock, Tim caught sight of Jason’s motorcycle propped up on its kickstand across the room, part of it’s red trim visible under the sheet covering it.

Tim pointed a thumb back over his shoulder at it as Jason straightened up from the floor. “How come you didn’t take the bike to come find me?”

Jason laughed and shared a smile with Roy over the roof of the car. “Oh, man, wouldn’t that have been a sight! Me trying to make a discreet getaway with your skinny ass flopping around all unconscious over the handlebars.”

“I’m pretty sure we’ve pulled off bigger stunts than that with just a motorcycle,” said Roy. “I’m sure you could have made it work.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered. Bike’s in the shop after a nasty run-in with Clayface. I’ve got to take the whole thing apart and clean it piece by piece before I can see if it’ll even run again. Who knows, might have to buy a new engine if there’s clay in there as well.”

Roy whistled, “Damn, Basil.”

“If you’re taking it apart anyway, I could make some upgrades to the tech. If you want, that is?” offered Tim.

Jason walked over to him and didn’t stop until he was close enough for Tim to smell the faint lingering scent of coffee on his breath as he exhaled a tired smile. He reached out and tugged his jacket by the collar so it rested further onto Tim’s smaller form. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m poor.”

“No, I’m offering to work for free.”

Jason rolled his eyes before leading the way out of the loading area and up the concrete stairs to what had been converted into the first floor living area of the safehouse. “I know, but I wouldn’t be able to afford the tools you’d need to make anything with. Circuit boards, soldering iron, electricals wires that kind of shit.”

And Tim was beginning to understand what Jason was talking about as he looked around the first floor. It was comprised of three loosely formed sections. The first area was a living room consisting of a worn-looking leather couch, a threadbare rug, and a small TV propped on top of a stack of wooden crates turned sideways to double as a bookcase. Next to this was a workspace that was just a wooden table with three Mac desktop computers placed on top and an office chair in front. Finally, in the back corner of the large space was the kitchen (probably the most lavishly furnished area out of all three sections of the first floor) sporting a butcher block table, a dangling array of pots and pans, and floating cabinets stocked with chipped coffee mugs, plates and bowls, and your grandmother’s finest depression glassware in all it’s emerald greens, deep blues, and salmony pinks.

Tim, honestly, stood there in shock at such an eclectic sight of homegoods and turned away from it to look around, if only to spare his eyes. He caught sight of a bin shoved against a wall next to a bank of windows.

“Why do you keep a bin full of your broken Red Hood helmets? Do you fix those up as well?”

Jason came up next to him and offered him a glass of water in a decoratively cut salmon tumbler. “Oh, I sell them off to Red Hood fans as ‘found artifacts’ on Ebay. I usually can get a couple hundred for the heavily dented ones. Maybe a solid fifty bucks if it’s shattered and missing certain parts.”

“Oh, you still do that?” asked Roy, coming over and taking the glass of water Tim had waved off. He drank heavily from it before continuing. “I tried that for a bit but nobody really cares about destroyed baseball caps, even if I do specify that they were cut in half by alien death lasers.”

Tim glanced between them, thinking only of how horrified Bruce would be if he learned about this side hustle Jason had going. “But… aren’t you worried about people getting access through your old comm links inside the helmets?”

Jason made a face. “No. I rip out the comms myself before I sell them. I’m not stupid, Tim. I just have bills to pay. Welcome to the vigilante life without Bruce Wayne’s trust fund to fall back on.”

Without Tim even noticing, his trembling had subsided for a period. It was only now, as he felt a chill race up his arms, the hair bristelling, that he realized another spell had started up again. Tim stumbled back so he could lean back against the edge of the butcher block table on trembling arms, he sucked in a sharp breath in an effort to steady his sudden nausea.

“Hey guys, I— ” Tim looked up towards the two older boys and regretted it almost immediately as the room lurched and sparkled with pinpricks of light.

“Tim? You good?” Roy’s eyebrows were drawing together as he gave him a once-over.

That growing buzzing in his ear was rising high enough to block out whatever Roy was trying to say to him. He tried to shake his head no, but found his head just as uncooperative as his tongue. He was aware of the heavy weight of his limbs, a feeling like he was sinking into mud, and of Roy’s sudden appearance at his side as he took Tim’s dead weight over his shoulder and half dragged him up the stairs. They laid him down on a narrow bed, and Tim watched Roy and Jason as they stood over him arguing with sharp gestures and vivid expressions, a tv drama with the sound cut off.

He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. He felt like some large invisible hand had dropped out of the sky and pinned him to the mattress. Tim was used to fainting from blood loss: the dizzy spells, the loud thump of blood in his ears, the weakness in his limbs, he had experienced it all before. But this sensation lingered for so long that Tim feared he’d suffocate under the crushing weight bearing down on his chest.

Roy cut off his argument in mid sentence and looked sharply down at Tim. Perhaps he’d made some sound of distress without knowing it? Before he could ponder it further, Roy’s strong fingers were digging into his shoulder and pulling him up and over the side of the mattress, pushing Tim’s head down between his knees.

Tim was surprised by how quickly the worst of his symptoms abated after that. He experimentally tried to move his hand and watched as his fingers gave a hard twitch against his bent knee. Noise, too, was slowly creeping back into Tim’s ears. He definitely wasn’t back to normal, but it was significantly better.

“ — I’ve got some Benzos from a dealer I’m familiar with. Pills— he didn’t have whatever Tim was given at Breckenridge on hand. But what was I supposed to do? I had no idea how much to give him and he was unconscious at the time.”

Roy grunted, fingers sliding free of Tim’s hair.  “Could have gotten him tested when he woke up. A urine sample at least.”

“Listen,” snapped Jason, his jean-clad legs visible from Tim’s upturned position. Tim watched him shift his weight onto his other foot and then back again just as fast. “I was just happy he did wake up. Do you want me to go get the pills? I can get them they’re right—”

There was a sudden burst of movement and Jason cut off abruptly. Tim raised his head, curious. Roy had seized at one of Jason’s gesturing hands, stilling it in a tight urgent grip. “Don’t tell me where you keep them and don’t tell him.”

Roy’s eyes cut to Tim. He swallowed hard when he caught sight of the look in Roy’s eyes— a look that showed that Roy knew just what he was capable of losing to another relapse if given half the chance.

“Go get it from wherever you’re keeping it, but it stays in your hand or locked away at all times. Do you understand me? No matter what I say to you. You never hand those drugs to me and you never put them down out of sight.”

Tim wondered what it was like to be so distrustful of your own body and its cravings. To feel like human and demon cohabitating one frail form. The demon half— resistant to exorcisms— always waiting for the perfect opportunity to take control of your limbs and lead you into disgrace if you let down your guard. Tim was beginning to understand why addiction organisations had adopted the serenity prayer into the very fabric of their programs.  

Jason pried his wrist free of Roy’s hold and attempted to rub away the lingering pattern Roy’s fingers had left around his wrist like a bracelet. “I’ve got it, man. I promise I won’t let you get tempted.”

Roy shoved up to his feet. “No I will be tempted, Jason. This whole fucking situation is one big horrible temptation for me. Which is why I shouldn’t be here!”

“Then why did you come, huh?”

“I came because you asked me! Because you’re my best friend and I was worried sick about what would happen if I left you on your own with this. I mean, just look at him, Jason— ”

Tim cringed as Roy flung an hand in his direction.

“ — It’s only been a day and a half and already you’re doing so well!”

Jason wouldn’t be swayed from his original argument, even to defend his own actions.

“You came to Gotham because you wanted to help. No just for one day, not just to set up, but to really help Tim— to help the both of us when we’re days into this mess of a situation and worn down by it. You know the process better than anyone and how to help on the worst of Tim’s days because you’ve experience it too.”

“I can’t do it, Jason. I can’t be responsible for someone else’s recovery—”

“You know just as well as I do that sponsoring someone else is the best way to stay clean. And your sponsor is closer to you now more than ever. If you need more support to fall back on Croc’s—”

“Do not spit that NA bullshit at me right now! I’m not ready to sponsor anyone when I feel like I’m one misstep away from using again.”

Jason’s tone had lost its anger but not it’s earnestness. “You’ve been clean for three years, Roy. You’ll ready to take the next step.”

“You don’t get to decide that for me.” said Roy.

“I know,” said Jason. “I’m just presenting you with the opportunity to step up to it.”

Roy dropped his gaze to a stack of books piled up in the corner. He rubbed slowly at his crossed arms. “Just—” he sighed, hand rubbing at his eyes. “Just go get the pills, please.”

Jason stared at Roy’s averted back for a long moment before turning and heading back downstairs. The sounds of objects being shifted around floated up to them in the echoing space of the safehouse.

Roy said nothing.

Though he hadn’t been yelling at him, Tim felt called out by his previously harsh words all the same. He dropped his eyes to the floor, not daring to move until he heard Jason thumping up the metal staircase, feeling burdensome and unworthy of causing such a rift between a two longtime friends like Jason and Roy. He was dirt— less than dirt, even. Should he just take the pills and leave? Trudge back to his apartment, file the emancipation papers, and ride this out alone with the doors locked and the shades pulled down until he was clean? Save everyone the trouble.

Would Jason even let him? He’d said no, but maybe it Tim really pleaded with him...

He couldn’t hide the fact that the prospect of setting out on his own, in his current condition, scared him more than anything. He was vulnerable in a way he’d never been before, and doors and locks would do nothing to stop Ra’s and his men from coming to collect him if Ra’s wanted to. The only thing that Tim had previously had going for him when he was locked away in Breckenridge under a false alias, was the knowledge that Ra’s didn’t know where he was— but sick and alone at home was another matter entirely.

Jason appeared at the top of the stairs and approached Tim, a tiny plastic bag filled with little white pills in one hand, a glass of water in the other. By the time Jason crouched down in front of him, Tim’s heart was pounding an aching thump inside his chest and his stomach was coiled tight with knots.  

“Just give him one for now, just to ease his symptoms.” said Roy from the corner of the room.

“Here, Tim. Take this,” Jason said.

Tim felt ready to die from his panic. He stared between the single pill resting in Jason’s palm and the pills inside the small bag, counting how many were there. He was afraid to take the one Jason offered out to him— afraid of prolonging this process, and at the same time he wanted to tear bag out of Jason’s hand and tilt a few into his fist and swallow, to drown out the world until it faded into a tiny buzz at the back of his head. Something that he could ignore for a bit until he felt more up to it.

“I’m sorry!” Tim burst out all at once. He curled inwards, pulling his legs up onto the mattress, unsure of when exactly he’d started crying. But his breaths came heavy and ragged and the tears in his eyes washed out Jason from view.

“Hey, hey,” Jason had put down the glass and Tim found himself pulled against Jason’s chest, his face awkwardly pressed against Jason’s breast. “Shh, it’s gonna be okay, Tim. Here just take this and you’ll calm down a bit.”

Jason slipped a pill past his lips and tipped his head back to catch a sip of water. Tim swallowed reflexively, mostly afraid that he might choke on the pill if he didn’t with the way his chest was spasming through sobs. Jason pulled him close again and Tim heard but couldn’t make sense of the murmuring conversation that occurred between Roy and Jason, for it sounded horribly technical and out of place with what Tim was feeling in that moment. He was transported back to Breckenridge, remembering the constricting sensation of orderly’s hands pinning his own to his sides, a needle sticking into him, and the voices of a station nurse and his doctor exchanging notes over his head that sounded like they came straight out of a medical textbook.

What do you mean? Tim wanted to cry at them but he could already feel himself slipping down into the mattress beneath him. Jason’s hands tucked a blanket around his shoulders and then they were gone.

And then he was gone.

  Jason left the safehouse, and in that moment he felt that it was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

Only minutes ago, he’d looked down at Tim, tucked under a blanket with tear tracks still staining his ruddy cheeks, looking younger than Jason had ever remembered seeing him. Just a kid, a horribly fucked up kid that Jason was trying to save.  

“You need to go back to Breckenridge,” Roy urged. “Keselman’s office is the only place we have that could give us the record of Tim’s dosages.”

“Go back to an active crime scene? Are you kidding me? I might as well walk myself into a Bludhaven police station.”

“It’s suicide.” Jason stressed for added effect since it seemed like Roy wasn’t getting that.

 “Not necessary,” said Roy, “You killed him in the basement where he was working off the books. Those notes might have been overlooked as irrelevant by the detectives at the time.”

Jason’s eyes lingered on Tim.

Roy stood up from his crouched position on the edge of Tim’s bed and walked over to Jason. He gave his shoulder a squeeze. “He’ll be fine. I’ll be right here to look after him.”

“But the pills— you said you couldn’t— what if he needs more—”

“He’ll be fine with what we gave him for now. It’s enough to take the edge off and help him sleep for a bit.”

Jason nodded, if begrudgingly and went to get changed into his full gear for he was unsure what he would find waiting for him back in Bludhaven. With the pills safely locked at of reach, Roy tossed him his car keys and Jason drove towards Bludhaven with his utility belt and helmet resting next to him in the passenger seat. He parked the car a few blocks away on a side street with little traffic and slipped into the rest of his gear under the shadow of a broken streetlight.

From his previous research of the psychiatric hospital Jason understood the medical offices to be on the upper levels and on the other side of the facility from where patients were housed. Jason guessed the idea was to keep patient and visitor interactions as separated as possible unless visitations had been scheduled. Much like, Jason thought with dark irony, the way a prison facility was arranged.

But even with that thought lingering in the back of his mind, Jason was glad for the enforced separation since it meant that Jason was able to stay far away from the added security and police tape that blocked off the lower levels that Jason had explored the night before.

He entered the building through a service door whose locked he picked with ease. Then came the slipping and ducking again, this time past the doors of the medical staff— their office aglow in overhead lighting as they busily held conference with other psychiatrists or typed away at their papers. Jason found himself having to duck low under the windows placed in their doors so his shadow couldn’t be seen moving past.

When Jason found Doctor Keselman’s office, he saw that Roy’s argument had held up. While the doctor’s office wasn’t the prime scene of investigation, it had still been picked over by the detectives on the case. The sheer mess of paperwork and empty filing cabinets was enough to tell Jason that. But even still, much of the doctor’s paperwork and patient files remained.

Alvin Draper’s file, however, was not among the stack on the floor. Jason stood and surveyed the room with a critical eye, humming the jeopardy theme song to hurry along his slugging and distracted brain. It was hard to focus on anything in particular in the current darkness of the space but he dared not turn the lights on and risk attracting curious eyes to a dead man’s office.

 “If I was a mad scientist where would I hide my notes?” Jason asked himself, his hands sliding underneath the bottoms of the desk drawers, hoping to find a hidden cache. Jason picked open locked drawers and slid the couch away from the wall, but continued to find nothing but lost paperclips and dust bunnies.

He let his head fall back against the arm of the couch with a thud, staring disparagingly up at the water stains overlapping on the ceiling tiles and contemplating his remaining options. “If I have to go back down to that creepy fucking basement again there’s gonna be another murder I swear to god.”

Jason tilted his head to the right and squinted. “Oh, don’t tell me he did a Breaking Bad. What a fucking idiot.”

Jason jumped up and grabbed one of the guest chairs from around the front of the desk and dragged it up again the wall. He stepped up onto it and as quietly as he could, worked the screws out of the wall vent with the back of his knife, collecting them into the cup of his palm. He pulled the cover off of the vent, his breath held tightly in his chest, hoping beyond hope that it didn’t make any noise. Jason crouched down and laid it on top of the desk before shining a light up into the vent.

The sight that greeted him made his heart soar for deep at the back, duct-taped in place, was a clear case holding a series of papers and an audio recorder. Jason shoved his arm into the vent and ripped it from its hiding spot.

Standing over the desk with it, he cracked it open and skimmed through the papers tucked inside. Scanned copies of Alvin Draper’s medical records— pulled straight from his file and promptly returned as if nothing was amiss, handwritten pages full of calculations and notes, and finally tucked underneath it all a small field notebook. Jason unwound the cord ties and flipped through it hungerly, feeling excited— in a way that would have almost made him feel uncomfortable if he’d stopped for long enough to think about it— as his eyes skimmed down through the diary entries noting the strategic increases in the listed dosages and their side effects.

Jason stared down at the final entry, dated only a few days ago, for a long time. He tried to wrap his head around the last noted dosage that Tim had been given while mentally comparing it with the one on the first page of the journal. His mind drifted back to the scene that he’d left unresolved in his safehouse, pushing away the background noises of the stirring papers on the desk and the the tick of the wall clock at his back, in favor of recalling how quickly Tim’s panic had increased to the point of spilling over into a panic attack.

 Jason’s thoughts jumped backwards with a jolt. Stirring papers… he’d placed them on the desk but he hadn’t open the window—

Jason jerked his gaze up from the notebook and found Damian’s katana drawn and held ready to cut his face in half. Dick, in Batman’s suit, was just slipping his other foot over the window sill and straightening up to regard him. “Motherfucker.”

“Where is he, Jason?” Dick growled in his best Batman voice. Close, he thought, but not nearly as intimidating. “Where’s Tim?”

Jason tucked the notebook into an inside pocket of his jacket. He held up his hands, arms spread wide in a gesture of peace.

“Okay,” he said. “So here’s the thing—”

He flung the chair he’d been standing on at Damian’s chest and bolt for the door.

To be sure, this is a man speaking. But the fundamental quality of this kind of approach to art, culture, the public square, and the rest of it, is evidence of a disordered and out of control femininity. And an equally dysfunctional and abdicating masculinity. A comment left by Youngamconreader on another thread got me thinking about this. I think there is a direct connection between the sexual orientation and gender identity and "alternative family" topics that this blog often discusses, and what's going on in a story like this one, here. I think we are collectively experiencing a massive breakdown/derangement of sex, of masculinity and femininity, and the damage is felt in every single corner of our society and our politics. The "pink police state" (Poulos--check him out) that is coming into being is the product of a miserable and frustrated femininity, which holds the field almost without opposition due to the near-complete abdication of men, who are, sometimes I think almost "to a man," in today's society, nihilistic and disengaged. For those who would say Trump proves that this is not true, I would say look at how he stands alone--at least in America and indeed in the Anglosphere. Everybody agrees that he is sui generis; all of the establishment of his own party just wants things to go back to the way they were; there is nobody who even remotely resembles something like a successor. Also, it is telling that one of the major reasons he won is because he is an online troll, but rich and famous enough to do it under his own name; he is the stand-in for huge numbers of men who have nothing but contempt for today's world but who only reveal their views and feelings anonymously. In large measure, men are opting out. Our bourgeois and hugely wealthy and powerful nation is decadent and its people are soft and domesticated; and, what is worse, the men of sensitivity and intelligence, of taste and discernment, are disgusted by what they see -- a rotten culture of placelessness, hideous architecture and built environments, unbelievably bad art and culture, degenerate music, films made for lowest-common-denominator global audiences, films that are so much more hideous than what was being done for decades, even as early as the 1930s, that it boggles the mind (every single person involved in CGI production should be lined up and shot), universities that have destroyed their own liberal arts programs -- OK, I need to stop myself, but you get the point, they are disgusted by what they see -- primarily they are disgusted by the *domestication* of the people they are supposed to look up to and/or emulate -- and they withdraw. We know about the video game and pornography addicts, the shut-ins, the "incels," but there is very much more to it all even than that. In the meantime, there is relentless, endless, earnest propaganda directed at women like a fire hose, constantly telling them that the essence of their own womanhood is bound up with their bourgeois career success. Nonstop messages received during their schooling, on TV and the movies and the internet, from bougie parents, tell them that they should reach for the stars (by *working*, always by working) and never to settle for just being a mother or just a wife. This has been going on for a long time, and many Boomers are certainly true believers in it -- my Boomer mother certainly believes it like a religion, God bless her -- and it is certainly true that if you have no training or career you are going to be more financially dependent and/or more financially precarious, and the Boomers, who divorce at the drop of a hat, greatly fear that. But my generation and the generations after (I was born in the early/mid 80s) have been taught constantly and relentlessly that work/career is identity, is the *point* of life, and quite frankly women got it MUCH more than men did, since the idea was to correct or change the unfairnesses/biases/power imbalances of the past. And it has resulted in a huge number of women who are unhappy and unfulfilled. It turns out that a life of making PowerPoints or pushing papers or running workplace conflict-resolution trainings or whatever do not really fulfill people; those women who substitute career for family entirely, or who find themselves torn between the two and not very sure they are finding a balance that they will ultimately be very happy about when they look back on their life, know that something is not right. I think we all used to have a much saner approach back in the day, before "career" was a word much used, and before resume/CV culture was so widespread; people may have been a lot poorer, but at least they understood that a job was about doing something that somebody or other had to do, and putting food on the table and a roof over the head of their kids; at least people weren't being sold a bill of goods by their parents, their teachers, authority figures, and the culture as a whole about what the point of being human and living life really is. I don't blame women for being unhappy -- I think the way our culture *relentlessly* propagandizes women that their very femininity and their very identity is bound up in bourgeois career success is one of the very cruelest aspects of life in "late capitalism." It is worse for them than for us men. It is not just that there is nothing wrong with having and raising children -- an incredibly difficult and honorable job. It is that the vast majority of people are not going to find true purpose and meaning in a consumer capitalist society (or probably any other society) just via their work alone. Selling phones or cutting hair or writing ad copy or processing loan applications or playing the Pachabel Canon for the three billionth time at weddings might not be so bad, you might even like it OK most of the time, but it is not the same thing as, say, raising your child, at least not for most people, and certainly bourgeois career success should not be so incredibly inappropriately stressed in our society to the point where increasing numbers of women -- women who want kids! -- are waiting until they are 37 to start families and freezing their eggs and the rest of it. It is just cruel and it alone by itself is enough to make me strongly dislike this consumer capitalist system we live in. Women are unhappy and are sort of flailing about projecting their unmet needs and frustrated desires in numerous directions. They are frustrated with the aforementioned nihilistic and disengaged men, they are pissed that they work outside the home and inside it too and they still struggle to make ends meet and especially to find the time they need, they lose out because a consumer capitalist society constantly f***s them over by creating an arms-race situation for intrasexual competition. In a more conservative and traditional society, say a society that frowns on makeup, women do not have to compete in that sphere. But in a society like ours, if certain women have the money and time to do a lot with makeup, then suddenly large numbers of women have to spend the time and money on it too just to compete or keep up. This does not make women better off. A consumer capitalist society squeezes them constantly. A society in which the health-care system is a disaster -- and I don't care if you hold the typical liberal views about why it's a disaster or the typical conservative views about why it's a disaster -- hurts women more because they rely on it more for basic biological reasons. Woman carry a human being inside them for a significant period of time (if they have kids) -- nothing men have to deal with ever compares to that health/biological-wise. All that said, women today -- who are not being well served by our current economic/cultural/social orthodoxy, at all -- are playing a major/primary role in this disordered and I think semiapocalyptic woke politics. Chesterton was not afraid to write, and did write, about why he opposed women's suffrage, and he said that in human history, women *have* been queens (including some very good ones), have been monarchs, have certainly wielded power -- but it is precisely in the context of *democracy* that they have not had the vote, not in human history or at least Western history. And, indeed, as he put it, women have/had not been given the vote precisely because they are in some sense too powerful, they are absolute rulers in their bones in a way that men are not. There is something to this, even if in our age we cannot tolerate or hear it. One of the things that amuses me is the way -- and they used to do it more often than they do now, but perhaps you know what I mean -- conservatives often lament or attack depictions, in TV or movies, of the married couple where the man is a stupid shlub while the woman is the smart, knowing, sensitive, and competent one. I agree with the conservatives who see this as anti-male---sure. But to me, it really means something else. The reason we see men depicted this way and women depicted that way is because men tolerate it and women would not tolerate the reverse. What it means is that men give in, don't want to deal with it, don't want to fight, while women will NOT let it go, will do what it takes to make the man understand that it is NOT worth his time and energy to go there, to do X annoying or undesired thing, etc. So, we have men depicted as losers, and women depicted as anything but. There is a lesson here. This is *exactly* the same dynamic that we see with conservatives and liberals, with the Republican and Democratic parties! If, for example, Roe v. Wade was overturned, there would be an efficient, effective, organized, identify-every-single-pressure-point-and-*squeeze* response from upper middle class women that would bring the entire Republican Party to its knees within days. It would be a massacre the likes of which you have never seen. Every single HR and public relations department of every single company on the Fortune 500 list would tell the wholly owned and wholly craven Republican Party exactly what to do--stand now right now-- and that would be that. I don't mean to say that conservatives are all men and liberals are all women, but the conservative "spirit" of the current moment is very male (the natural law arguments! Good Lord!) and the liberal "spirit" of the moment is very female. And it is no contest, at all. Women understand that men are less socially adept (quick: what is the ratio of male autists to female autists?) and that men, while unquestionably stronger physically, are more conflict-averse and more predictable (as everybody knows, men want certain things and it's pretty easy to know exactly what they are and to use that information to one's advantage; whereas, as Freud so perfectly distilled, the question of what women want is itself so difficult to answer as to be a kind of female superpower) -- and women use this for everything it's worth. And today, in our democracy, we see the consequences, as a kind of feminine disordered or frustrated impulse holds the field basically unopposed. This idea that this mural -- to get back to the topic of the original post! -- needs to be torn down because "it makes the children feel unsafe" -- here we see a feminine sensibility both disordered and displaced but winning the field because there's hardly anything else with the will to stand up to it. The masculine counterpoint to this smothering mother has withdrawn -- perhaps to 4chan, perhaps to Pr0ntube. Conservatives used to love pointing out that in the inner city, the family had completely broken down to the point where the matriarch/mother was the only influence in childrens' lives and husbands and fathers had ceased to exist. Well, we see that now in our society/culture as a whole. Somehow, the mother alone, the feminine quality alone, does not yield great results, when not counterbalanced with the masculine.* Things become disordered and even monstrous. I am a gay man, and I can't help but think that, when I do this, when I write about this stuff, Camille Paglia (PBUH) should be my model and my inspiration, because she saw so clearly, and so strikingly, from the outside, so to speak, the great and immortal interplay and relationship between male and female that produces *all* of us, and that is essential to -- not only beauty and art, but order, form, and *lastingness*, things that do not die. We all and every one of us need a society in which the male and the female are counterbalanced and juxtaposed and brought together in a great tension and a great union. The disordered and indeed cataclysmic collapse of the male and female counterbalance is impacting us everywhere, and in ways we do not even realize -- I firmly believe that. There must be a return and rediscovery of the masculine force and the masculine will -- to connect this to the posts about open borders, to a masculine will that says "no, I am drawing a line" -- how many of you have read Sexual Personae, and the CENTRAL role that the idea of "drawing the line" plays in that book? Men "draw the line," which is why men have dominated almost beyond measure the realm of visual art in human history. There must be a return to this, or the nation will dissolve into the primordial swamp that Paglia says represents--not the feminine, but the feminine when outside of civilization, the feminine in a state of nature and crude and unformed.

Matt in VA

The Results of Concussed Confessions: Chapter 2

AO3 link

So I get one comment on this and suddenly get inspired for a second chapter. I don’t know how my brain works. 

Sephiroth looked at herself in her bathroom mirror for a moment. Then she snorted deeply and spat into her sink. She rinsed the mess down the drain and looked back up at herself.

She noticed the bags under her eyes. Noticed the hairs that seemed more dull grey than metallic that were escaping from her nighttime braid.

She tried to smile at herself in the mirror, tried to get warmth into her eyes, get them to crinkle as she curled her lips upward.

It looked like a wince. She let it go. She wasn’t one to change easily. She wasn’t like other people and that wouldn’t change with five minutes work in her bathroom.

With that she shut out the lights and went back to her bed. The person currently in it certainly wouldn’t mind what she hated about herself.

Cloud snores stopped, but didn’t stir when she pulled the bedspread off of him. He made a groan when her cold feet touched his warm legs, but didn’t pull away. She tugged one of his arms around her waist and settled in. He squeezed her once and continued his snoring. She had been lulled to sleep by the sound, on and off, for nearly four years. The realization suddenly hit her. It had been four years since she and Cloud started…whatever this was. She wasn’t sure it was dating. Wasn’t sure Cloud was okay with the idea of her claiming him as his boyfriend. But they would meet up at different places, have dinner, talk a little. Sometimes pull each other into corners to make-out quickly, or meet up for longer periods for sex. And then suddenly they would just…stop.

One would leave for a long period of time…and they wouldn’t talk for a while when they came back. Sephiroth would be dragged down to the labs…and she would fume alone for a few days. Cloud’s SOLDIER results would come in, and he would say bluntly that he didn’t want to see Sephiroth.

Or on occasion, Zack Fair would butt in, remind Seph about the power imbalance between them…and she would try to stay away.

But here they were, back again, and the sex was still pretty good. Sephiroth kissed Cloud’s nose, not realizing she was smiling the way she wanted as Cloud’s wrinkled his nose in protest, and started to doze off again herself.

Cloud woke up before Sephiroth. It happened fairly often after Sephiroth had a lab appointment. He learned not to take it personally. Zack was like that too, when he had to go down there. It wasn’t a happy time. He hoped Sephiroth stalked off alone because she didn’t want to take it out on him. And she was kind of cat-like when she was ready to see him again; cuddly…and sometimes very stupid.

He remembered the first time he spent the night at Sephiroth’s apartment. He had tried to sneak out before she noticed him, but of course she did. She asked him if he was okay, if something was wrong.

At this point, he just got up and raided her fridge. If she wanted him out, she would have kicked him out last night.

Sephiroth shuffled out not long after he started cooking bacon. She looked exhausted, her scowl tempting him to scratch under her chin like he would a kitten. He never really had the courage. He set a hot mug in front of her and she picked her own tea bag to steep. They didn’t talk, just sat and listened to bacon and eggs sizzle, Sephiroth in more of a hungry stupor. She looked exhausted.

Cloud dressed as he ate. He was signed up for materia testing for the SOLDIER exam today, his third attempt now. Materia was always the easy part for him, but he didn’t want to risk being late. Sephiroth seemed to realize he was ready to go when he jammed the last piece of bacon into his mouth.

“You’re leaving?” she asked.

“I’ve got an exam today,” he said simply. She was high up enough in the ranks to know what he was up to…when she was awake that was. Thank the gods she never took part in grading those SOLDIER tests. She’d fall asleep halfway through in her current state. The thought almost made him smile.

“I had a question for you,” she said, but obviously couldn’t remember what it was. He fought not to smile at the great Sephiroth looking so put off by not remembering what she wanted to ask.

“Text me when you remember,” Cloud said, “and eat your breakfast. And drink your tea.” Sephiroth nodded and started eating as he turned around.

She’d be fine in a few hours.

“I don’t think that’s a question you should ask Cloud,” Zackary Fair told his commanding officer. To her credit, she didn’t dismiss it, she seemed…deflated.

“Oh,” was all she said.

“That’s all you have to say?” Zack said.

“I don’t know what else to say,” Sephiroth said, “you know I’m not good at these sort of things. I can’t read social situations. I won’t understand why it’s a bad idea…that’s why I asked you first.” Zack bit his tongue. Ever since he had walked in on Cloud and Sephiroth…this was not a fun can of beans to be a part of. Sephiroth had tried breaking up with Cloud dozens of times, most of them successfully, keeping Cloud’s self-esteem intact. But within three months, the two of them would be back to sneaking off together. Back and forth they went.

Zack worried for Cloud. Young and in love with an emotionless brick was tough on a kid like that…but it didn’t seem to stop him either, no matter the talks Zack tried to give.

“I mean…he is trying for SOLDIER again,” Zack said, “it’s his third try…most people give up after try three. Perhaps…the timing just isn’t ideal.”

“I didn’t think about that,” Sephiroth said.

“Why did you want to ask him?” Zack asked.

“Because I don’t want to ask anyone else,” Sephrioth said, “I never really have.” And Zack felt horribly guilty.

“What the hell,” Zack said, “He is a twenty year old man now…I mean…a text won’t hurt…just…make sure he can back out of it.”

Cloud was wavering in front of the exam sign up lists, trying to find a time that fit into his schedule when his PHS finally buzzed. He narrowed it between two as he pulled it out. He had to read the message twice.

“Do you want to go with me to the Autumn Equinox Company Party? No obligation, I don’t mind going alone.”

And Cloud stood there for a long time, unsure of what to say.

He really didn’t know.

Sephiroth was cleaning her blade after a very quick mission to the slums to take care of some sort of Monster House. It had been…morbidly fun. Then her PHS buzzed back.

“Sure,” was all Cloud said in reply.

Oh gods what did that mean?

Cloud learned from Zack that it was a white tie sort of affair, not the business casual he had been expecting. Thus, Cloud raided Zack’s closet for something that could be hemmed down.

“Did she say why she asked me?” Cloud asked.

“Just that she didn’t want to ask anyone else,” Zack offered. Cloud nodded. Zack had no idea what that nod meant, just assumed that Cloud did.

“That’s usually a good thing,” Aerith offered with her mother’s sewing supplies in tow, “Usually you only ask that from someone you’d consider a friend.”

“I didn’t say it was bad,” Cloud said, “this one is the smallest. Do you even fit in that?”

“No,” Zack said.

“Then why do you have it?”

“For this very occasion,” Zack said. Aerith smirked and shook her head. Cloud pulled on the coat, and buttoned it. The sleeves were long, but fit perfectly around his arms.

“I can work with that,” Aerith said, starting to add pins, “though I guess you’re used to dressing up huh Cloud?”

“That was one time!” Cloud protested. He had gone on exactly one date with Aerith after falling through her roof during a patrol. The date included cross dressing, theft, and a lot of running…and after that Cloud knew someone who was right up her alley.

“I’m still so sad that I missed it,” Zack said, “you had to look amazing.”

“Pretty as a peach,” Aerith said, “though this will look mighty dapper once I’m done.”

“I’ll still be a country bumpkin in a big city party,” Cloud said.

“Seph never stays long,” Zack says, “an hour at most…but she never has brought a date before.”

“I’m not sure I’m a date, Zack,” Cloud said.

“What did she say?” Zack asked.

“Nothing, just asked if I wanted to go,” Cloud said.

“Do you want it to be a date?” Aerith asked. She was sometimes a little too smart about these things. Cloud didn’t answer right away.

“I don’t need it to be anything,” Cloud replied. Zack and Aerith shared a look.

“If she wants it to be a date,” Cloud sighed,” then it’s a date, otherwise…we’re just going to a party together.”

“You don’t…really date anyone else Cloud,” Zack offered. Cloud pointedly did not answer.

“I’m just saying…she might not know to tell you,” Zack said, “you should ask her.”

“I…I just don’t want her to take it the wrong way,” Cloud said, “she’s…she’s tried her best to be nice to me, I just want to return the favor.” Aerith nodded.

“Pants off,” she said, “Slacks on.”

Sephiroth owned a grand total of five dresses and couldn’t decide between any of them. She hated these equinox and solstice parties. She was needed for two minutes and then spent the rest of the time chasing after the people carrying food that never really filled her up. She didn’t really have many people to talk to, and usually those people were drunk. She wasn’t sure how having Cloud would change things.

“So…is this a date?” Zack asked from her kitchen.

“I don’t know,” Sephrioth said, tossing her red one behind her and looking at black one number two again. The red one was too short.

“Do you know if Cloud thinks it is?” Zack asked.

“No,” she said. The green one was too gaudy. The blue one was too pretty. Back to the two black dresses she had.

“Do you…want it to be?” Zack asked. Sephiroth bit her lip.

“I don’t know,” she said. They looked the same to her, how was she supposed to know which one was better.

“Seph?” Zack asked.

“Given the choice between not knowing and having Cloud stalk off when he’s taking his exams…I’d rather just not know,” Sephiroth said, “this could be the one. I don’t want to be the reason he fails again.”

“You mean…you don’t want him to quit and go back home,” Zack said. Sephiroth didn’t deem that with a response. It had been four years on and off but that was more than what most people gave her.

“I don’t think Cloud would quit,” Sephiroth said, “I think if he did fail he would be the first SOLDIER to take the exam four times…but I’d rather Cloud not fail because I’m…distracting him. If he doesn’t want it to be a date, I’m not going to push it.” Sephrioth shoved both dresses out of her closet.

“Pick one,” she demanded. Zack handed number two back to her.

“This one looks more comfy,” he said.

More comfy it is.

Cloud’s thought was that she looked…lovely. It was very often his first thought. He had seen her in a dress before…just not in person. Nor in such obvious eyeliner either, or in any lipstick besides chapstick.

It took him a moment to realize she was looking at him too.

“You appear…quite sharp,” she said. He almost laughed at that statement.

“Is that a good thing?” he asked.

“Well…you won’t fit in,” she said, “but I don’t care. I think it looks best on you.” He did crack a smile then. He nearly giggled again when he realized she wasn’t wearing heels, but ballet flats.

“The president hates that I already tower over him,” Sephiroth said. And Cloud did burst into giggles, covering it with his hand. Her mouth twitched in a way that told him she didn’t mind the laughter in the least.

“We may as well head up,” she said, then grumbled, “I’m already hungry.” He started walking. He stopped when he felt her hand on his arm. She took the inside of his bicep and he blushed and held out his arm properly. They walked to the elevator like that.

She noticed Cloud close off when they stepped off the elevator. She wished she knew how to flip that switch, to turn off her emotions rather than just hide them. And then she wished that Cloud would stay open a little so it wouldn’t leave her so alone.

But they walked in together, despite some stares and gesturing hands and that had to mean something…whatever it was.

Cloud struggled not to think to hard about it. He was a captain in a sea of generals, but he had to fake it through, especially after Sephiroth was pulled away from him for her two minutes of fame. He tried to think of something else, but all he could think about was that his results for SOLDIER would be coming in soon.

He grabbed something off one of the plates walking by. It tasted okay, but did nothing to fill the pit in his stomach. He knew better than to go for the champagne. Perhaps saying yes had been a mistake after all.

He wandered through, trying to seem invisible and trying to find Sephiroth again. He noticed the flash of silver and rushed to it, then froze. She was with a navy blue suit. Turks.

“Interesting date you’ve brought,” Tseng said, “I didn’t realize you interacted much with the infantry.”

“I never said he was my date,” Sephiroth said.

“No,” Tseng replied, “but you do spend…much more time than appropriate with him.”

“But that doesn’t necessarily imply it means anything,” Sephiroth said. It stung for as long as it took Cloud to realize that Sephiroth honestly hadn’t admitted to anything.

“It implies some measure of trust,” Tseng said.

“You know I hate this company politics,” Sephiroth said, “If you’re trying to get some more power over me, fine. Threaten Cloud’s wellbeing and see how that goes. Because I can promise I don’t have a problem turning your intestines into a nice turban for you.”

“I didn’t threaten him,” Tseng said, “And I won’t, I’m not that stupid, I just would be willing to offer Mr. Strife…some mild assistance.”

“You mean fake his SOLDIER exam scores,” Sephiroth said.

“They’ll be close,” Tseng said. And Sephiroth snorted.

“I know,” Sephiroth said, “but I also know this much: if I do let you fake those scores and Cloud finds out about it…that will hurt him more than failing again. Cloud would rather be the first SOLDIER to take the exam four times than cheat. And I believe he’s stubborn enough to do that. So no, I won’t take that offer.”

“He won’t find out,” Tseng said.

“Now that I find unbelievable,” Sephiroth replied.

“You seem to put a lot of faith in his…persistence,” Tseng said.

“I don’t just spy on him from a distance,” Sephiroth said tersely, “And I don’t care if he makes it into SOLDIER or not. Cloud is my…friend. And I have enough experience with his persistence to think that will stay the same regardless of those exam results. Now please excuse me, I’m starving.”

Sephiroth saw him and immediately walked up to him.

“Have you seen any of those plate carriers?” she asked, “I want to steal the whole thing.”

“Seph?” Cloud asked, “am I…your friend?” Sephiroth froze.

“I…I had hoped so,” she said, “you heard me with that Turk…I didn’t mean to make a presumption…”

“No!” Cloud said, “I just…I didn’t want to make that assumption either…but we’re on the same page.”

“Oh good,” Sephiroth said relaxing. Cloud felt foolish asking his next quesiton.

“Is this…this this a date?”

“I…I don’t know,” Sephiroth said, “did…you want it to be?” Cloud’s eyes got wide.

“I…I don’t know,” he said, “I mean…what if I did?”

“I don’t know,” Sephiroth said, “I wouldn’t have…minded.” And Cloud felt something settle down inside of him.

“Seph?” he asked, “Do you want to go on a dinner date to that pancake place in Sector 8.” He watched her eyes widen and settle. Then she nodded.

“I’m really hungry,” she said.

“These hors d’oeuvres suck,” Cloud agreed. He offered his arm. She took it. They walked out as regally as they arrived. When the doors closed she let him go.

“Are you worried about the exam results?” she asked

“If I don’t make it I will next time,” Cloud said. She kissed him on the nose. He wrinkled his nose in protest and she smiled that warm smile. She never seemed to do it on purpose and he liked that. He pecked her on the lips and she let him. The elevator stopped and they walked into Midgar in full formal wear, to their first date.

December 28, 2020

So as it turns out, I’ve done a bit of reflecting and I think the hottest dynamic in my opinion is jock/nerd.  I think I’m just naturally drawn to power imbalances, but this is a bit different than that?  Like for a while I was into whump (not so much anymore, but a good whump prompt is still a good whump prompt, feel me?), but I think the jock/nerd teasing is just super cute?  Like this was totally the Caleb/Adam relationship in The Bright Sessions, and honestly Vex/Percy was sort of jock/nerd in CR C1 (but I think they switched between the roles sometimes?).  Maybe because I’ve always seen myself as a nerd and because I’ve always been smallish I’ve just accepted that a future partner is likely to be able to crush me in a hug and generally that physique is found amongst your typical “jock”... yeah.  LET ME BE, OKAY.  I am absolutely independent and desire to be for quite a while but that doesn’t mean I can’t fantasize, as long as it’s healthy.

Along similar lines, I’ve realized that I’ve got some really bad intrusive thoughts?  Like, even the minor ones are really damaging?  I thought my main issues were with calling myself dumb/stupid but really my subconscious apparently has a knack for reminding me of social interactions that have gone wrong and also I apparently have taken to sort of attacking my appearance and then reasoning with myself as to why I attack my appearance almost as if if trying to subvert my own goals.  For example, I caught myself today thinking that I was a 5/10 on the beauty scale or whatever, and my reasoning was like “well a 5 is average and I’m average so really it’s just me being realistic with myself” but like ????? okay??????????  I had to catch myself in my tracks because I know that a 5/10 translates to a 50% and I know that I view that score as a failure.  Whether or not it’s true, it’s simply not useful to me in my self-esteem journey.  The whole point of policing my intrusive thoughts was to minimize their negative impact on how I think about myself which would in turn hopefully make me present myself in a more confident way, but I’m apparently trying to get around my own rules in sneaky ways argh. 

Anyway, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that, in many cases, wool is probably to expensive for me to try to invest in for all of the things I’d like to make, so I think I might be better off looking at cotton flannel for a wool-esque type of feel.  It’s still warm and soft and, most importantly, can be washed in a washing machine without causing anxiety (a very important quality).  Also!  It’s fairly inexpensive when on sale!  So, yeah, I’ll be on the lookout for some nice flannels over the next few months that I may make some skirts and underskirts from them for the winter/fall/spring periods of the year.

Speaking of seasons, I don’t know quite how I’m going to dress in the summer.  Like, that’s too hot for the three wool skirts that I own, so I might have to make a few cotton circle skirts (and half circle skirts and pleated skirts and gathered skirts, probably) from some cotton fabrics.  Might have to use quilting cottons, since they tend to be cheaper than fashion fabrics.  I have some short sleeved dresses that I can employ for the “dress-under-a-skirt” Maksy Method, but I might have to make some more that can double as vintage-looking dresses and blouses that can be worn with skirts.  Frankly, the fact that dresses can be used to perform double-duty is still astounding to me.

I also started watching Bridgerton on Netflix and WHEW I love me some period drama.  Honestly the Duke/Daphne pairing reminds me a lot of Beatrice/Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado which is really funny.  Anyway, apparently there’s been a lot of dissatisfaction with the historical costuming of the show, and some people are insinuating that this dissatisfaction is a byproduct of racism.  The show is much more diverse than actual 19th century London was (probably idk I wasn’t living there at the time), and, honestly, for me, since this is a drama taking place in historical times rather than being a documentary on what the period really looked like, I’m perfectly comfortable with thinking of this show as “Regency-era Fanfiction,” you know?  Like, they’re playing Vitamin String Quartet renditions of modern pop songs.  So, I mean, go off with your costuming criticisms, if that makes you feel better, I suppose.

That was my original critique of the discussion surrounding Bridgerton’s costuming, but I think a better critique might surround why a show that has people of color in some of its lead roles is less likely to have the same attention to historical detail as a show with a fully white cast (like, say, Outlander, I suppose (which I still do need to watch)).  Idk.  Jingle Jangle was great because it blended African prints and colors with Victorian stylings to create Afro-Victorian, but frankly this is beside the point because that movie was meant to be fantastical from the start, and there was no need for it to be historical.  Idk idk idk I suppose I’ll just enjoy my romantic historical drama in peace (though this very well may be the first of many seasons, as it is based off of not just one book, but an entire series).

Speaking again about the content and plot of the series itself, I’ve only learned that straight men are trash.  They simply cannot see beyond their own pride.  As a matter of fact, this ineptitude that the male lead characters (Anthony, Lord Featherington (as we found out at the end of episode 4), the Duke of Hastings (Simon), Nigel, and (as we know of at the moment, though I suspect that this may change) Marina’s baby daddy) exhibit is what really pushes the plot forward.  Honestly they cause all of the trouble in the series.  Frankly, were it not for the quick-witted mother of Daphne, the diamond of the season would have been married off to that horrid fellow Nigel.  Oh, how I love a woman’s cunning spirit.  Anyway, maybe this is just because I’ve never fallen in love or maybe it’s because I’m not quite as repressed as Daphne, but I seriously didn’t see why she let her feelings for the Duke overcome the fact that she could have married a super sweet prince and become a literal princess.  Like,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, what?  Maybe this is just exposing me as a person who would do hypergamy at a moment’s notice, but also,, like,, the Duke literally told her that he didn’t even actually like her?  And you want me to believe that she still was willing to let herself hold onto the feelings he had for her???????  Nuh uh.  Nuh uh not me.

Today I’m thankful for this pretty show with pretty dresses and pretty words.  I’m also thankful for Lady Danbury who I should think is my favorite character.  Penelope is probably my second favorite.  I think it’s partly because I pity her, but I’m also rooting so hard for her to get the happy ending she deserves.

You know, on that note, I think casting was intentional when it comes to making the pitiful, best-friend, puts-others-above-herself, ultra-supportive-but-never-receives-the-same-in-return character a bit plus-sized.  In my examination of my own immediate reaction to Penelope, I did pity her.  I don’t think I would’ve had that reaction if she was thin.  I think that’s a commentary on my own implicit biases.  And also how fat people in media are so often portrayed.

Oh, oh!!  Also!!!!!  (Bonus thank!!)  I went on a, like, three hour walk around our neighborhood and down to the historic city with my puzzle- and cello-friends and it was fantastic.  I had to much fun just chatting with them as I almost always do.  Don’t worry, we were wearing our masks and staying somewhat distant, though we’d all been taking precautions with covid, anyway, but it never hurts to be safe.  I need to start going on walks more.  I used to walk a ton each day when school was in session, not to mention weekly workout classes.  Now I do none of that and I wish to return to my former glory, or, perhaps, surpass it.

Finally, finally, I’m giving myself another $100 for clothes this Christmas (plus my Amazon and JoAnn gift cards).  I’ve got some slacks lined up, and I’m desperately looking for a houndstooth wool blazer.  I think I’ve found one that has all of the colors and stylings I’m interested in, but I’m afraid it may be a tad too big.  I’ll have to think on it.  I’ll ask about the item and see if it’s lined.  If not, I may be able to take it in in the places that matter.  If so... well... the item is cheap enough even with shipping that I may get it anyway and simply live with the consequences.  Actually... in keeping with my desire to buy fewer items made of the polyester plastic that has infiltrated my closet, I shall also have to ask if there is a materials tag present.  I do not quite know what I will do if the seller responds that there is no materials tag.  Lust after the item and die, I suppose, is the only real option I have.

Well, you shall be updated.

I’m off to put away some dishes and watch a bit more Bridgerton.  

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Hello! Thank you so much for your blog. It really opened my eyes to the sensors and how capable they are- particularly the SJs. That’s what my ask to you is about…I believe I’m an ESFJ, but am not sure. I read your post about emotional abuse SFJs undergo, which I relate to…I’ve suffered from low self esteem + depression all my life. Where I have trouble relating to Fe-doms is popularity: I was never popular and was absolutely obsessed with it. I have terrible social anxiety and am very sensitive to changes in someone’s face or how they text me which indicates whether they are getting bored with me. I believe I fixated on this aspect of my life to the point where I began to “detach” from reality: forming very narcissistic daydreams to escape real life where I am amazing to others, they are in awe of me for whatever reason, etc. I began trying to analyze/determine a way to have a good life “without” people. Naturally, I try to act compassionate and polite, but there are times I’m not, and I question why I don’t feel anything towards someone’s situation. Is this normal for ESFJs in my situation?

Sensors are awesome. Just saying.

Being a Fe-dom doesn’t necessarily indicate you will be popular; but the fact that you wanted to be and felt something was missing because you weren’t does indeed indicate Fe-dominance.

Healthy F-doms are all very sensitive (to their own feelings and being aware of and considerate of others’ feelings), seek harmony / to avoid conflict, and want to be accepted for who they are. Most of them champion the right to be unique. So, wanting to be popular / liked / etc is all normal behavior for a Fe-dom.

I have terrible social anxiety and am very sensitive to changes in someone’s face or how they text me which indicates whether they are getting bored with me.

This makes sense given your social anxiety; the less secure Fe is, the more it will adopt behaviors and/or study other people’s reactions as its guideline, rather than the more secure Fe-inclination of ‘reading’ what other people want and need and figuring out how to harmonize with them. Here’s an example: the Fe-dom waitress who gets a read on everyone at the table and drops in to fill cups and fulfill the table’s needs but never interrupts (the unseen pair of hands that gets a big tip at the end of the night because they never had to ask for anything... but she was not the center of attention either) vs. the anxious Fe-dom who is more concerned with fulfilling needs than reading the people at the table, so she hovers / interrupts to ask if she can refill drinks, rather than just doing it, thus consciously bringing the attention back to herself all the time, with the result that the table may be annoyed because she ‘intruded’ on them.

So, how do you figure out how to be the former and not the latter? You use Fe to pick up on what they need and want, you do not ‘guess.’ Guessing people’s motives is your enemy; you need to catch yourself doing it and ... stop. Assume if someone IS texting you, they WANT to be texting you. Watch their face, but focus on what they are SAYING and on LISTENING and RESPONDING, rather than being distracted in trying to read them.

Here’s a common rule: people love it when other people listen, and make them feel valued / special / heard. People are starving for attention, and if you need and want it, you can get it by being someone everyone loves to talk to, because you listen to what they say, you respond to what they say, and you take a genuine interest in them. Many people only care about themselves; the people who care about others stand out, because they ask questions. If you can focus on another person, find out what they like, and ask questions to get them to talk about it with you, they will think you are wonderful -- and you will establish an actual bond with them, as opposed to a superficial interaction.

For example, you get seated at some function next to a stranger, and you find out they like to fish; now you may know nothing about fishing and care about it even less, but you could also say, “Oh really? What do you love most about it?” and then a little while later, after they tell you that they used to fish with their grandpa, who is now gone, you say, “It’s really cool that you had a special relationship with your grandpa. Do you have a favorite memory of him?”

The next time you stress over a text message maybe not sounding enough like they want to talk to you, ask them about their day. You may find out they’re in the grocery line at the store, or their tire just blew out on the freeway, or there’s nothing wrong at all.

Remember this: people get bored with people who are self-absorbed. Choose to take an interest in THEM, and they will not get bored with you; and the smart, healthy persons will respond in kind, by taking an interest in YOU.

I believe I fixated on this aspect of my life to the point where I began to “detach” from reality: forming very narcissistic daydreams to escape real life where I am amazing to others, they are in awe of me for whatever reason, etc.

This is a Fe/Ne loop. To break it, you need to re-engage Si and focus on introducing yourself to new situations and building confidence through social interactions as you put your detail-skills to work. High Si means you can remember things really well about people; you know what makes people feel good? If you run into them two weeks later and say, “Hey [insert their name, because you used Si to store it in your brain], been fishing lately? Did you buy that new tackle?” This broadcasts to them: I really did listen to you. You are worth remembering. And having them feel good will make you feel good.

I began trying to analyze/determine a way to have a good life “without” people.

I understand your desire to do this, because rejection and anxiety is painful, but as an extrovert, being alone will never make your content. You cannot cage the inner tiger; those wants and needs you have are for a reason, and if you deny them, you will cope with your loneliness in less healthy ways. Because Ti is inferior, over-using it will result in an imbalance of the sort you describe below (not caring about people and lacking compassion for them); it is also not a reliable judge of others’ behaviors. The solution is not to avoid people, but ask yourself, “What do I have to offer that will improve both our lives?”

Naturally, I try to act compassionate and polite, but there are times I’m not, and I question why I don’t feel anything towards someone’s situation. Is this normal for ESFJs in my situation?

Okay, here’s the thing.

This COULD be an inferior Ti loop, but ONLY if it means you feel nothing for anyone for prolonged periods of time, you are extremely critical of everyone and everything, and you rationalize all of your decisions. If that happens, you will have to re-engage Fe by putting yourself out there and becoming involved in projects, and with people, in order to re-activate your Fe.

OR... this could be called “being human.”

Being a feeler does not automatically mean you are compassionate and polite all of the time; that is a myth. Fe is a judging function -- it seeks external group consensus but also judges things based on their collateral damage. So, if someone does something stupid and hurtful that winds up hurting a lot of people, Fe is not going to feel sorry for someone who did that, are they? No, they are going to say, “You did it to yourself... and tragically, to everyone around you, which makes you a jackass.”

In other words, context matters. The next time you feel ‘nothing’ for someone’s situation, ask yourself what caused their situation and whether it involves a moral judgment on your part? If you tell someone not to play with fire, and they burn their hand, you’re likely to be a lot less sympathetic than if they knew nothing about fire and innocently put their hand on it.

Everyone learns to put up emotional barriers -- if you didn’t, you would curl up in a ball of feels and die. When I heard about the Texas shooting, I cried -- I was so angry, I burst into tears over a family meal. I don’t know how the people who were there feel (and don’t have to), but I was so angry that these kinds of cruel injustices happen that the floodgates that have been building for months burst. This is unusual for me. I’m usually more detached than that. I care in as much that I wish bad things did not happen -- but if I made an emotional investment in every person I meet, in every tragedy I hear about, I would be an emotional wreck and no use to anyone.

So not feeling anything for a situation doesn’t matter -- what you DO for them or about it matters. =)

- ENFP Mod

My mom’s blaming me for her eating my stupid food because I forgot to put a sticky note on it. It’s not like there’s a freezer full of shit she could have that I can’t eat due to diet restrictions of this dumb medicine I have to take. Fun story about the medicine and my thyroid condition: It’s utter bullshit. All of it. I had huge stress and anxiety issues in seventh grade (I still do!). This stress and anxiety caused me to have a constantly upset stomach and really fucked up my internal temperature. How do I know it was stress and anxiety? It happened only in my sixth period class where the teacher scared me half to death and when I got up to go to school. Wow, such specific times! I wonder if it means anything… My mom had the brilliant idea that it’s whatever thyroid condition that she hasn’! She of course took me to the doctor and, guess what! My brain apparently thinks that my thyroid is some invasive entity and needs to be destroyed. Sure am glad we found that out! -_- That was the end of that. She didn’t even stop to think, “Hmmm, Maybe it’s this stress that my kid keeps talking about… hmmmmmm…” Not once. She instantly assumed it was a physical problem. There can’t possibly be something wrong with her daughter’s mental health. That is fucking bullshit. I’m not her daughter. I’m not a girl. I’m not okay mentally. I need some fucking help and all she’s doing is blaming my mental issues on some shitty hormone imbalance. She says she’s supporting but she’s not. She bought me one binder, said it makes my chest look bigger, never washes it when she gets on to me for wearing it a lot, called me out when I wore it, won’t buy me a new one, constantly asks me if I’ve found a boyfriend or some shit, “Do you just like girls now or would you like some man who could sweep you off your feet?” I never told her that I ever had a crush on a girl or boy. None of it. She read over all my fucking texts and emails. Every single one. Asked me about all of them. Still asks me about who I’ve been texting and then says when I’m lying. So that’s the tea or whatever. ‘Mom blames kid’s mental health issues on hormone imbalance and proceeds to give the kid even more anxiety and stress because she doesn’t know how to trust her own child.’