#but seriously watering down this language is actively harmful
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Dude I've just been seeing the worst fucking takes ever in the internet these paste few days that come from a good place but are absolutely misjudged and just bad and I feel like I'm losing it
Saw a post about how Tom Hanks said he wouldn't play a gay character anymore which fuels the idea that an actor has to match the sexuality of the character it portrays which means an actor has to expose their sexuality and justify it to be able to play a character and it just sets the precedent for such a storm of shit and while it comes from a good palce it's just so very stupid and not well thought at all. Like don't people see the harm such a thing can do? Don't they see that demanding such things can only end up bad, including to the LGBT community?
I don't even know if you would agree with this but I just needed to rant because lately people's desire to be progressive have been so extreme they do a full 360 and end up being just a new shape of what they previously fought about and I'm sickkkkkk of these god awful takes that come from 2 seconds of reasoning
Also have a lot of thoughts about culture appropriation and how a movement that came to demand respect has become something that separates people and ignores the blatant human fact that culture's whole point is to be shared and it always has been and that is through cultural sharing we understand each other and why on earth would you want to segregate human interaction goes beyond me like honestly, especially the ones that approach your culture with appreciation and desire to partake (yes I did saw a post saying only Mexican people can cook Mexican food and lost it)
Anyways I think I'm officially clinically online but if those movements spread and stick, movements that come to segregate and categorize people, all in the name of diversity while being the opposite if it, I'm a legit lose it.
man, I get you. I've been saying shit like this will happen for years, and what do you know. I was right.
it really is almost comical how these people, in their fight to be progressive or improve things, will end up circling back around. they'll either start campaigning for the exact same thing as the people and causes they profess to be against, or they'll start using the same language/rhetoric and acting in equally harmful ways, or they'll actively improve the situation for the people they're supposed to be against. this is what happens no matter how seemingly small the issue is. forcing people to out themelves so they can write fanfic without getting abuse; expecting people to list their disabilities, triggers, and mental illnesses publicly just so they can feel "safe" knowing that this person isn't overstepping the mark; demanding constant reassurance and moralising and virtue signalling to make themselves feel better about associating with the "right" people; demanding everyone tags everything even remotely triggering no matter how vague the reference and disregarding that this is both horribly entitled and also completely ineffective; literally re-inventing segregation because of this "cultural appropriation" bullshit... they've been taking real issues and real terms for years and watering them down to such an extent that I don't take any accusations even remotely seriously anymore. it's caused exponential harm and has made it extremely difficult to know who's actually dangerous and who just likes a ship the OP hates.
really, it's all about entitlement and virtue signalling. I've said it before and I'll say it every fucking time: these people don't have the balls to do anything worthwhile, they can't be fucked to do real activism, they feel guilty about it, and so they focus all their attention on absolute non-issues so they can pretend like they're contributing. they actively make the world a worse place, and I hold them just as responsible for the state of things now as I do the alt-right. at the end of the day, they can dress it up under different politics, but they all want the same thing: complete censorship, complete control, people forced to out themselves, racial segregation, and above all else, power. maybe if they did something useful with their lives, and found a true sense of fulfilment, they wouldn't be so desperate that they act like this. people like this are genuinely just unintelligent. there's no other way to say it and no other way to explain it: they're thick.
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Tips for Telephonic Interview
Many organizations begin the interview process by calling a prospective employee. A phone call is a low-effort, rapid technique to see if an applicant is right for the job. They're also utilized to cut down on the cost of interviewing candidates from out of town.
It's critical to be prepared for a phone interview at any time during your job hunt. Many organizations begin the interview process by calling a prospective employee to discuss the job opportunity, assess if the individual is a good fit, and evaluate his or her interest in the role. In most circumstances, your interview will be booked via email or phone in advance. In other cases, you can get a call unexpectedly asking if you're available to talk about the job.
But why do companies conduct telephone interviews?
Telephone interviews are used by employers to identify and recruit individuals for employment. To narrow the pool of candidates who will be invited for in-person interviews, phone interviews are frequently utilized to screen candidates. A phone call is a low-effort, rapid technique to see if an applicant is right for the job.
They're also utilized to cut down on the cost of interviewing candidates from out of town. A phone interview may be the sole option for remote positions.
1. Be ready
More often than not, telephonic interviews can sometimes happen out of nowhere, so it is suggestible to you to be prepared. Prepare to answer all of the difficult questions that will be posted to you.
Also, make sure you have a copy of your résumé and other research materials on hand. Keep the following in mind:
During the interview, jot down notes.
Maintain a peaceful state of mind and body.
Make certain you won't need to take a break during the call.
Turn your phone's call waiting for the feature off.
Turn off your stereo, television, and any other possible source of distraction.
Always have a glass of water on hand. While you're waiting for the call, warm up your voice.
2. Stay focused
The more concentrated you are throughout the interview, the more rewards you shall receive. There should be no distractions or disturbances in your immediate vicinity. Never answer an unexpected or unscheduled phone call. If you're very busy and can't focus, excuse yourself and ask for the call to be rescheduled.
It is crucial to pay attention to what the interviewer says. If you have any other phone or device around you, it is advisable to switch it off; as a notification sound or ringtone may turn off the interviewer. Treat the phone interview with the same level of seriousness and preparation as a face-to-face interview.
Remember, this might be the first step in landing your dream job.
3. Pay attention to everything
During the telephonic interview, active listening skills are crucial. When the interviewer asks you a question, wait for them to finish it before asking them anything else. Your answers should make the interviewer feel at ease. You shouldn't make them feel like you're disobeying them.
If you ask a question in the middle of an interview, it may disrupt the flow of the conversation and the interviewer's mood.
The tone of your voice should be soothing and slow throughout the chat. You should not give the impression that you are dominating the interviewer.
4. Maintain a steady tone
Candidates frequently say "But, no, but, often," implying that they disagree with the interviewer or believe they are superior. These words tend to harm the interviewer. When you use such terms, the interviewer will typically assume you are overconfident.
Make sure you use the proper words to make your point. It's critical to speak slowly and clearly so that the interviewer can comprehend what you're saying. Avoid using unprofessional language and speak courteously. Most essential thing is to maintain a nice and warm tone. Most interviewers are seasoned and can quickly assess a candidate's level of comfort, so it's critical to smile and remain calm.
5. Do some research before the interview
Prepare for the interview by doing some preliminary research about the organization. Study the material ahead of time and conduct thorough research, just like you would in a face-to-face interview. The interviewer might be impressed with your in-depth understanding of the organization. For this, you can go to the company's website or contact a well-known employee who can best guide you through the process.
6. Prepare yourself for some frequent queries
Some questions are always the same, regardless of the job interview. Prepare replies linked to your achievements in advance, as this is a typical question and a fantastic method to impress recruiters.
Here are a few examples:
Can you come in at any moment when we need you?
What do you wish to do/do you have any hobbies that are relevant to this job?
When will you be able to join/start working?
What is your expected salary?
Why did you choose our firm?
Don't forget to thank the interviewer when the telephone interview is over, and also send a formal thank you letter to HR's official email address. This makes a good impact.
7. Don't forget to record the interview
It is a great idea to record your interview when conducting a telephone interview. This helps the candidate in recognizing their errors and ensuring that they do not repeat them.
We at Docthub, aim to bridge the gap in the field of healthcare, between individuals seeking employment and those seeking to hire. We bring job seekers, employers, recruiters together on a single platform by providing information that enlightens minds and empowers people. Check out jobs.docthub.com for more info!
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Witchblr (for the Most Part) Doesn't Have the Gatekeeping Problem It Thinks It Does
I've been seeing this crop up in more and more posts, bios even - anti-gatekeeping statements. And I've tried to keep an open mind about it, to go "well maybe I'm just not seeing what they're talking about" but as I run into actual posts where gatekeeping is claimed, I'm really starting to think that Witchblr might not fully understand what the term means and why it's essential we don't adopt it from the groups who need it to articulate a very specific experience, one that Witchblr isn't capable of having just within itself as far as I can tell.
I don't know for a fact where the term originates but my first introduction to the term gatekeeping was through the trans community. A friend of mine was having to see a therapist, weekly, for 6 months, before she could get her therapist to write a letter that would enable a doctor to prescribe her the hormones she wanted to take. She'd researched them thoroughly, knew the risks and benefits very well, was fully consenting - but was being denied a substance vitally necessary to her mental, physical, social, and emotional well being.
Gatekeeping usually best describes folks who are not a part of a group getting to decide who is a part of said group. In this example, cis doctors and therapists getting to decide who is trans enough to access medical care they need. This is especially potent when other folks outside the group have easier access to the means than the group being gatekept. Such as when cis women have an easier time accessing HRT than trans women. That doesn't seem to mirror what I'm seeing in Witchblr posts where the word is used.
The power behind gatekeeping requires a level of organization that Witchblr as a community doesn't seem to have. And what's being denied are not things that are vital to folks' material well being but rather recognition and validation. I understand the confusion on some level. When forces with organized power deny folks validation and recognition, it often comes with the denial of material and social goods they need to survive. But the individuals out here writing their blogs largely cannot withhold what is vital and necessary to your continued existence. While we all do better with support, not everyone owes us that support and it requires an exchange to make it sustainable. Reading someone's work, even regularly, doesn't fit the bill. In my book, if you're in need of validation and support, you go to those people who already do or cultivate new reciprocal relationships with people who will.
The few cases where I've seen gatekeeping used to describe intracommunal affairs is in cases where the community is not equally privileged. And while there are a mix of privileged and marginalized folks in the Witchblr community, as far I can tell there's not a cohesive group that is considered more acceptable by folks outside of Witchblr who, through that acceptability, are shielded from the full weight of community specific oppression and ostracize less acceptable folks from collective resources to maintain that sheild. The closest I've seen to this (that isn't rooted in other intersections of identity) is that folks who who maintain a psychological view - "It's all in our heads but isn't that still real?" - of deities, magic, and divination seem to get a better reception than those who believe in other models and sometimes distance themselves from folks who believe otherwise but even then...doesn't quite fit the bill.
For internet communities in particular, I have a very hard time seeing the structures in place needed to enforce gatekeeping. Someone doesn't agree that you are [insert term]y enough for the [insert term] group they're personally a part of? Well there are likely a bunch more groups already established who would accept you. You also have the power to create, grow, and maintain your own. You have both resources and agency.
What I think Witchblr's usage of gatekeeping more often speaks to is many folks crave the validation of other people. They stake their worth and well being on disproving people. When someone says "you're not a witch if you don't do xyz" = they don't stop to think about what power that person has over their power or their practice. They just react. Someone is wrong on the internet and it's perceived as a threat.
Part of the issue is that Witchblr has a tendency toward projecting a practice rather than actually practicing. It's been my experience that when you spend more of your time doing your practice and you have a deep sense of your foundations - whether someone agrees with you or not quickly becomes irrelevant. What so many of the conversations on gatekeeping show me is that many folks do not have a strong enough foundation in what they believe and what they practice to understand who they are and what's relevant to them. They're filling that void with external validation.
Where Witchblr's "gatekeeping" usage becomes outright destructive or even dangerous is with it's continual insistence that people articulating positions well grounded in research and primary records are some how gatekeeping other people they don't agree with. Previous education does help but acting like every person who can defend their positions with source texts automatically has a degree or several is weirdly classist to me.
I went to rural schools the vast majority of my life. I have multiple learning disabilities, struggled hard, and never completed a college degree despite attempting twice. Money and my health stopped me. I was working class and now unemployed. I did not have internet at home for most of my adult life (and only part of my childhood). Like I am so close to the examples I see thrown around in these conversations and yet I have been told that by citing reliable sources that I'm elitist and classist.
Something we don't talk enough about as a community is that expertise has a lot less to do with privilege and a lot more to do with sacrifice. I chose to spend what free time I could practicing and researching. I could have spent that time watching Netflix, hanging out with friends, going hiking, etc. While it was also out of poverty, I chose not to accumulate things in my home that would take a lot of time to care for. I had a second hand hospital mattress on the floor and that was it - that was a sacrifice of comfort. I did not have a pet for the majority of the time I did my most intense studying so I could focus on my work - that was sacrifice. I did not have internet at home, largely because I couldn't afford it, but I embraced it as it created the ability to download a work at a public connection and take it home and sit with it deeply so that I couldn't reach out for other people's comments to filter it through. I only maintained romantic relationships that were low energy input and were thus less satisfying or close so that I could focus on my work - that was a sacrifice.
All this is to say - you don't see half the sacrifices people who have a level of expertise make. There's an assumption of ease where there absolutely should not be one. No one is asking you to sacrifice like that. No one is saying you're lesser for not making that sacrifice. What folks are saying is respect the sacrifices they made to get the knowledge they're trying to share with you. They're often trying to give you what they had to pay with a good chunk of their lives for. Take it or leave it, don't attack them. It is not gatekeeping to recognize that, where spirituality overlaps with history and other topics, there are correct answers that can be found if you look. That's just reality.
Also learning on your own is not the same as having access to an education or to the internet even. Our ancestors did not always have people to study from. Practices like spirit work, divination, and magic developed independently all over the world. There were plenty of interrupted lineages in there too. I think people forget that you can learn these skills through experimentation and observation. People literally can't keep you from this path of learning. Whether you choose to take it is up to you. Whether it's worth the sacrifice - only you can say.
So vast majority of ways I’m seeing people use the word gatekeeping just do not meet the criteria. Watering that word down robs it of it’s ability to name a very specific threat which is especially damaging to use trans folks who use it to call out medical discrimination. The vast majority of instances I see it used in are where someone is expressing an opinion. They may be wildly off base but as long as they’re not spreading truly harmful ideologies, they're entitled to it. Different opinions are not gatekeeping - they’re a natural part of any community and we have to have a level of tolerance for that. That discomfort you feel is an invitation to meet your shadow, understand your discomfort, and prioritize what actually moves your practice forward.
#waking witchblr#witchblr#shadow work#gatekeeping#discrimination#I'm always so worried posting stuff like this#but seriously watering down this language is actively harmful#to trans folks in particular#I get some folks may not have known#and that's totally okay#we all grow and learn
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I absolutely loved the doll! mc one with the brothers and diavolo. Could I ask for the same idea with the rest of the undateables and luke? If it isn't too much though. Thank you very much, don't forget to take care of yourself and stay hydrated!
I’m glad you enjoyed the first part!! I hope you’re staying safe through this pandemic and that you’re drinking plenty of water. I’m so happy that people liked the Doll!MC scenario so much (it even became one of my top posts and I was NEVER expecting that to happen 😳 click here to read it with the Bros and Diavolo). I got an UR card for Barbatos today and immediately thought back to this scenario cause I was just imagining the different situations with Doll!MC. Hope you enjoy!
Also, Luke’s part is strictly platonic, just FYI!
The Undateables (Minus Diavolo) with Doll!MC
Barbatos
Let me just say, you make this man’s day so much better
Your presence is just so calming for him. You could just be standing there (which is heavily enforced in the kitchen), not doing anything, and he would still be fully relaxed
Definitely loves you being in the kitchen with him, and will find ways to invite you so that you guys can spend time together
“MC, the young master has a tea party planned for this afternoon, and I’m afraid I may need your assistance to help prepare.”
“But Barb, I thought you didn’t want me touching anything-”
“I don’t want you touching anything that can cause you harm. I can easily handle the labor, but I do have a task for you...”
Cue to you sitting perfectly still and taste testing his sweets
“Barb, are you sure that I’m helping you like this? I don’t want to be useless to you!”
“Nonsense, MC. This is perfect. I needed someone with an exceptional palette, and you’re just the right person for me.”
Just you and him, and his sweet creations. What more could he ask for?
Maybe being in a relationship with you, but he is very sure that it’s going to be happening in the near future...and he didn’t even have to use his powers to know that
He stares at you a lot. He can’t help it, he loves to just admire you!
Barbatos is the type of guy where he doesn’t have to rely on words to express his love. His love language is acts of service: packing you lunch and extra sweets every week, giving you recipes that he wouldn’t even share with Luke, and gifting you mini accessories that you can wear with your outfits!
He gave you this adorable three-legged crow holding a cupcake hairpin and you’ve been wearing it ever since
He tries to hide his blush everytime he sees you and now he has to work even harder because of the pin lmao
HAVING YOUR OWN TEA PARTIES WEEKLY
You both have a designated day and time where you don’t plan anything in order to have your own tea parties
No Diavolo, no noisy demon brothers, no other exchange students (sorry Luke). Just you and him, enjoying each other’s company and him basking in your glow
If someone did try to harm you, he would already know of it and properly disposes of the problem. Lord Diavolo can’t afford to have any issues interfering with the exchange program, and he can’t afford to have anything happen to you so...no harm no foul, right?
Please continue to do what you’re doing MC. Stare at him with your bright, doe eyes and give him that lively smile everytime. It makes his day go by much easier, especially since he knows that you’ll still be there, waiting for him with your own desserts and that smile reserved just for him
Simeon
Was convinced that you were an angel
Lowkey still convinced that you’re an angel
Really, you just look so...angelic
Wasn’t upset when you revealed that you were in fact human; he was happy because this meant that he could show you around the Celestial Realm!
Speaking of Celestial Realm, be prepared for Simeon to be your very own personal tour guide everytime. This could be your 50th time up there and he’ll still try to point new things out
“And over here is-”
“Michael’s favorite resting place, since the lilies always seem to bloom whenever he’s around,” you giggled. “I remember Simeon, you tell me this everytime we visit!”
He’s a tad embarrassed
“Forgive me, MC. It seems that I get so elated over the fact that you’re here with me, I tend to repeat some things over.”
“That’s okay! I still have fun with you everytime!”
Oh MC, you’re too adorable!
Which causes him to worry over you. While he knows that the brothers and Diavolo (along with Barbatos) wouldn’t dare cause you any distress, the same couldn’t be said for the other demons lurking around, both in and out of RAD
But not to fear, Simeon your friendly guardian angel is here!
I am so sorry for the rhyme lmao
He may not have been personally assigned to you, but that doesn’t mean he can just let anything happen to you! He’s only doing his heavenly duties in protecting you! He’s also being a good friend by watching over you too, his little lamb
He wouldn’t attack anyone, but if he made a complaint or a very serious concern to the right person (Lucifer or Diavolo), consider the problem handled
You have your own tea time as well, and Luke would join you sometimes. But, every now and then, Luke would have to finish some homework or study, or Barbatos would miraculously call for him at the castle, or if it was just too late and Luke just had to go to sleep, then it would just be you two. Sitting by the fireplace, discussing matters ranging from RAD to your life in the human world, drinking tea that you would take turns preparing
Not to mention the downright dainty little cakes you would bring. One time you brought him angel cakes and he found so lighthearted and precious that he requested you bring them everytime, just for him
May or may not base a character in his new story around you
Simeon wants to shield you from the horrors that are surrounding you both. You’re so pure, he just wants you safe. From the way that you would dress to the way that your eyes would just look so amazed and innocent at him, he just knows that he needs to watch over you, always. The brothers do get a little wary when they see how much time you do spend at Purgatory Hall, but they know that Simeon couldn’t possibly have feelings for you, and you were always so giddy after leaving there, they couldn’t bring themselves to say anything
And Simeon knew that he was starting to feel more than he should. He couldn’t profess his love for you now in risk of falling, but he can wait until you get your wings. Just imagining you in your cute little Ceslestial Realm outfit (which he hopes still mimicked your current style) with your very own beaming halo was enough to keep him waiting and to make sure that you stayed on the right path
He deemed that you were worth the wait
Luke
BFFs! BFFs!
When he first saw you he could just cry
Someone innocent like you got sent down here with these monsters?! He had to keep you safe!!!
Simeon thought you were angel and then realized that you were not; Luke thought you were an angel and refused to believe that you weren’t
You didn’t have it in you to burst his bubble so soon, so you just let him run with it until Simon broke the news
It was like telling a kid that Santa Claus wasn’t real; you can only imagine how Luke took the revelation
Not well from what Solomon told you. Simeon kept saying he just needs some time to process things, and you just felt so awful about the whole thing
Which lead to you bringing him so much sweets that it made Beel jealous and very upset
But we all know how Beel can be around food, so it wasn’t a huge surprise. He chased you around all day and you had to use your pact to get him to stop!
And you promised to make him double the sweets in he forgave you so all is well
Luke was still obviously sad, but he wasn’t going to stay sad forever. Especially not after you brought this many sweets just for him!
Lucifer was not a happy demon when Simeon arrived at the HoL’s doorstep with you groaning and clutching your stomach. And Solomon took so many pictures of Luke while he passed out from his sugar high that he dedicated a whole album in his phone to it
Favorite activity to do together: Baking! (Obviously)
Trading recipes, shopping for ingredients together, baking things for each other to try (where really it was just to have double the desserts)
When you two are in the kitchen together, no one else is allowed (except for Simeon, but only if he’s looking and not touching). It’s now MC and Luke time, everybody else is gonna have to wait!
Luke only wants you to do the the activities that he sees as harmless: which is everything that doesn’t include sharp items and anything else that can hurt you
“MC get away from that! That can seriously hurt you! Let me get it for you instead!
“Luke, honey, it’s just an oven it’s not my first time using one-”
Too late, he already took it out of your hands into his own, mitts already on
Speaking of oven mitts
You guys have matching aprons and mitts!!
Barbatos may be a little bit jealous, but he likes the bond that you two have. And he knows that Luke won’t be a romantic rival so he’s alright lol
Luke is your deemed protector/bodyguard, and he proudly wears the title since no one bothers you because of him (or so he thinks). Everyone makes fun of him calling him a chihuahua, but jokes on him, when Luke complains, he complains
Won’t take long for Simeon or even one of the brothers to pick up on his whines complaints if he thinks someone is bothering you
Luke believes that while he’s small, he can protect you and try to keep you free from danger. He may be young, but he sees himself as the older brother out of you both (even though it’s really you being the older sibling and him being the baby). Always looking out for you especially since you’re too fragile to be left alone!
You’re one of the only people that genuinely likes him and don’t make fun of him. You’re dear to him MC, please don’t ever change!
Also, he definitely talks to Michael about you all the time so excitedly and sends him sweets that you both made together. Michael is a proud dad at this point
Solomon
Knew you wasn’t a doll but loved to tease you about being one anyway
Was there a spell that can really turn you into a doll? You wouldn’t mind if he tried it out on you, right MC?
Don’t tempt him please because he WILL do it
“Tell me, MC. Hypothetically speaking, if I were to purchase-”
“No Solomon, you can’t shrink me down to fit me into a dollhouse, no matter how nice it sounds. Besides, I can’t bake in a dollhouse, the oven wouldn’t work!”
“I can fix that.”
You’re very amusing to him for some reason. Was it because of how doll-like you are? The fairytale way that you dressed? How you were still human and was able to live with seven of the most powerful demons and not die? Maybe it’s the way that you still radiated such positivity despite being in literal Hell?
Honestly all of the above
TEACHING HIM HOW TO COOK/BAKE
Poor Solomon doesn’t realize that his cooking isn’t...the best
And you took the best approach in helping him atleast cook something that looks edible
You didn’t say his cooking was disgusting like some people (literally everyone else), so he took that you giving him lessons was a date of sorts
He wasn’t complaining. Your time spent in the kitchen was scenes straight of a romcom (no matter how cheesy it sounds); his arms wrapped around your waist and dotting icing on your pretty nose
May or may not have licked some icing off of you at one point, will definitely do it again
Solomon is a very confident man, borderline arrogant (Oh who am I kidding he IS arrogant). So yes, while people may see you as an easy target, he’s here to remind them that you’re not. And that if they want to try, chances are they won’t be walking away in one piece
He’s powerful, too powerful in fact. He may not be the strongest physically, but if even the entire student council recognizes his knowledge and what he’s capable of, no one should be dumb enough to test him (keyword: try)
But he wouldn’t mind showing off if it’s for you
You’re one of the only beings to ever peak Solomon’s interest genuinely. Yes, he loved to tease and bug you whenever he pleased, but you also made him want to come around you more and more. He was drawn to you, and that doesn’t happen a lot with him (at least without ulterior motives)
*coughcough* making pacts *coughcough*
You were the only thing that made Solomon feel weak, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Don’t get him wrong, he’s still The Greatest Sorcerer, but he couldn’t help but feel himself get weak in the knees when you gazed at him with so much sincerity. He loves it and loves you
Once your back in the human world, he’s going to be so selfish with you. I mean, he already kinda was now, but this time there won’t be any interruptions or distractions around to take your attention
Us humans have to stick together, and what better way to stick together than to be together, wouldn’t you say MC?
#obey me x reader#obey me reader insert#obey me undateables#undateables x reader#obey me#obey me swd#obey me shall we date#obey me one master to rule them all#barbatos x reader#barbatos x mc#obey me barbatos#obey me solomon#solomon x reader#solomon x mc#simeon x reader#simeon x mc#obey me simeon#obey me luke#luke is baby
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Hello! I have a few questions related to your most recent post and the definition of torture. You said:
"A trained person who was never tortured will always out perform someone whose training involved torture."
According to everything else I have seen on your blog, this makes sense - the mental and physical trauma from being tortured have lasting effects which make certain tasks more difficult.
However, this seems to juxtapose certain tropes I've seen in US military training advertisements. For example, "Hell Week" in the Navy SEAL training seems like it would be torture if it was forced upon someone (like if the soldiers didn't sign up for it and didn't have the option to quit.). *Hell Week is when soldiers are training continuously for 5 days in freezing, wet conditions, with little more than 4 hours of sleep for the entire week, under insane amounts of physical and mental stress.
- If someone chose to be tested both mentally and physically, I feel like it wouldn't be torture. However, if the same exact conditions were forced upon someone else (testing their mental and physical limits without their consent or understanding), does your quote above mean that the person who did not have a choice would not reap the benefits of the training/testing? Or would the Navy SEALs be better soldiers if they didn't have to go through 'torturous conditions' during Hell Week, regardless of their choice to do so?
(I used Hell Week as an example, but I meant this question generally. I'm trying to figure out how to best train an elite soldier and avoid any harmful torture apologia tropes, while also making sure that they are able to handle insanely challenging situations)
- My other question has more to do with the definition of torture that you quoted from the UN in one of your master posts. If someone is being seriously injured (pulled fingernails, whipping, starvation etc), but not for the purposes of interrogation, punishment, or intimidation, is that still torture, or is that just abuse? And, regardless of what we call it, would the effects be the same as if it were torture for any of the three motives above?
Sorry if this is long and hard to understand, I can clarify if needed!
It’s not the longest I’ve gotten and it’s perfectly clear, duck*. :) Honestly this is a difficult topic with a lot of nuance, it’s better to take a longer and more thoughtful approach.
From the stand point of the legal definition and what we study/understand as torture any consensual activity, however extreme, is not torture.
But here’s where it gets interesting: consent and our attitude to an activity actually changes our response to pain. It may even change how much pain we feel.
I’m going to take a slightly different example to yours. There are a lot of cultures globally that have practiced scarification, ritual cutting to deliberately form scars. And this can be done for a lot of reasons: membership of a family or clan, coming of age, traditional medicine, religion, you get the idea.
A lot of people in these cultures describe their scars as incredibly important and the process of getting them as a moving, deep and positive process.
This does not mean they wouldn’t be traumatised if they were attacked by someone with a knife.
Being able to approach something painful and see it as positive really changes our perspective. It makes trauma and mental illness a lot less likely. And being able to back out, even if it’s just for a little while to take a breather, seems to make us able to withstand more pain then we would have otherwise.
The simplest and most famous experiment that dealt with this relationship between our mindset and pain asked people to keep their hands in ice cold water. They timed how long people could do it when they were told to stay silent and how long they could do it when they were allowed to swear. If they swore they could hold their hands under for longer. An average of forty seconds longer.
Looking back over O’Mara (Why Torture Doesn’t Work, a very good intro to how pain works and what it does to the brain) the way he describes it as by thinking of the experience of pain as a collection of three things. There’s the physical sensation itself, the nerves firing. But there’s also an affective component, how we feel emotionally about the experience and a cognitive component, how we think about it.
Did you ever play that game as a kid where you stuff as many chilis as possible in your mouth to see who would spit them out first? I… might have done. And from what I remember it hurts an awful lot. But those memories to me are mostly about messing about with my friends, I remember trying to be stubborn about it and I remember us laughing at each other.
This is a completely different experience to someone being held down and having chili stuff up their nose. But the difference isn’t necessarily in the physical damage done or the physical sensation of pain. It’s in the other components, the emotional response and the rationalisation.
I also had a filling drilled in my tooth without painkillers as a kid. I don’t know how common this is in the West? It happened in Saudi. Honestly my biggest memory of it is the language barrier between myself and the dentist.
These are anecdotes obviously but I’m trying to show that you probably also have experiences in your own life that back up the experiments too. The way we think about a painful experience really does make a huge amount of difference. And that means consent matters enormously.
These soldiers are going into this experience knowing what to expect, how long it will last and that they can stop at any time. That makes a huge amount of difference. Those same factors have drastically increased the time volunteers will spend in solitary confinement for research. I’m pretty sure if I dug even a little I’d find pain studies with similar findings.
Here’s the flip side: the physical factors are still in play.
Sleep is an important physiological process that’s essential to normal functioning. Studies on consensual sleep deprivation have shown massive negative impacts on memory along with a host of other things that you can read about here.
Let’s take a non torture example. A student who stays up all night cramming for an exam is not going to develop the symptoms of trauma that a torture survivors who was sleep deprived would. But the effect sleep deprivation has on memory is due to sleep playing an essential role in preserving memory (and learning more generally.) So they’re both likely to have difficulty remembering things in days just before and just after sleep deprivation. They’re also both more likely to have false memories and catch a bad cold.
As a result of this memory impairment I question the educational value of anything involving sleep deprivation: you can’t learn while messing up the processes that let your brain remember things.
There have been cases in the UK of people dying during training for the armed forces. Because while consent makes a huge difference, mindset makes a huge difference- our bodies still have limits. We can choose to push ourselves past those limits and, whatever our motivation or feelings, it can do real harm.
Personally? I’m unsure of the benefit of these kinds of exercises. As in I’m unsure there is a benefit. Learning is going to be shot, chances of injury are going to be a lot higher- I don’t see anything that could be improved by these sorts of exercises.
Anecdotally people do report feeling like a closer unit after going through these sorts of routines. That might be the benefit: moral and unit cohesion, possibly self-esteem too.
If you’re making up something for your story I think it’d be helpful for me to mention a little statistical effect that gets used to justify punishment pretty regularly. Get some dice out if you’ve got them and roll one. Let’s say the number represents performance in some kind of test (because effort and learning matter but our performance also varies because of things we can’t control.) A roll of 1 gets punished, a roll of 6 gets praised.
Now after you roll that first 1 statistically speaking the chances are your next roll will be better. And if you roll a 6 then statistically speaking the chances are your next roll will be worse. People observe this effect in real life and they often conclude that there’s no point in praising someone but that punishment leads to improvement. Really it’s just a statistical effect, after a particularly, noticeably bad day the chances are things will be better next and vice versa.
This effect can make it difficult for people to recognise overall, long term progress. Which is the kind of progress you should be paying attention to when designing a training program.
If you want good performance from people, whatever the metric, the most efficient thing to do is ensure that those people are; well fed, have access to clean water, get plenty of sleep, have breaks and have access to medical treatment when they need it.
I’d say the main things to keep in mind when designing this fictional training regime are:
Being honest about the effects you describe, ie if they’re spending long periods without shelter are they at risk from exposure? If they’re standing in cold water are they going to get hypothermia?
Remember that even if something is damaging or causes lasting trauma it would not necessarily prevent someone from doing their job. Torture survivors have serious, lasting symptoms but many of them still work.
I think I’m going to leave that there because I’m not an expert in militaries or training people. And keep in mind that I am a pacifist, read this with my biases in mind.
Getting to the second question, there is a little more to the UN definition then that. The primary factor is still who the abuser is. For it to be torture (legally speaking) the abuser has to be (or be ordered by) an on-duty government employee, part of a group that controls territory (ie an occupying force). Some countries also count international organised criminal gangs in this definition.
It’s also important to note that torture can be targetted at someone other then the victim. So if the police arrest the brother of a political opponent and beat him in order to intimidate the politician, that is still torture.
Basically there are a lot of factors in the legal definition of torture and it’s that way by design. The hope is that you end up with a framework that captures as much government abuse as possible.
But it also means that there’s a pretty high barrier when it comes to proving torture. Which means that things which are legally torture can be prosecuted as assault, bodily harm or equivalents to these, because it’s easier to get a conviction for those charges.
Technically you are correct: if abuse done by a government official doesn’t have one of the four motivations in the legal definition (attempts to obtain information, forcing a confession, intimidation or punishment) then it doesn’t meet the definition.
However in practice I’ve not heard of a case failing because of the motive.
I’m not a lawyer and I’m not an expert in international law. I won’t say it’s never happened. But it’s much more common for cases to fail for other reasons. Off the top of my head I’d say the most common reason is difficulty proving the abuse took place.
The most common types of torture today are ‘clean’, a term we use to indicate that they don’t leave obvious marks. If someone turns up with fingernails torn out or the skin of their back lacerated by a whip that is clear physical evidence of abuse. Nothing else causes similar injuries. But if someone turns up at a doctor’s with swollen feet or reddened skin, if they’ve lost a lot of weight or they’re so tired they’re struggling to stand… Well all of those things can be caused by common tortures. But they can also be caused by common illnesses.
A lot of the deaths from torture today are similarly hard to prove. Beatings and stress positions ultimately cause death by kidney failure. Which can mean that prosecutors are asked to prove a victim didn’t have an underlying health condition. Or take drugs.
Honestly my instinct is that the motive is the easiest thing to prove. It’s often harder to bring charges against people in positions of authority, regardless of the country we’re talking about. Bringing those charges, proving abuse took place and proving it was done by the person in question, those are usually the tricky parts.
The difference between torture and abuse is scale. Torture is industrial scale abuse.
The law doesn’t define that scale but that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about abuse from organised authority. Abusers might have dozens of victims. Torturers have thousands, tens of thousands.
If you want to explore a different motivation in your story, something outside the legal framework, consider the scale at which this abuse is taking place. Consider how organised it is. If it’s organised and large scale, with multiple abusers, with no prior relationship between the abuser and victims then torture will probably be a better model then abuse. If it’s smaller scale with a more personal relationship and if it isn’t supported by a legal framework/organisation then abuse might be a better model.
For victims and survivors the difference isn’t so much about the symptoms they personally experience as the… side effect of that scale. Abuse victims are often very isolated and may not know anyone who has had a similar experience. Torture implies a community of survivors and possibly generational trauma. There are also effects to do with access to support, access to medical care and how likely it is that someone will be believed.
Torture survivors are often systematically disenfranchised in a way that abuse victims are not. Torture survivors are often forced to leave their home country. Anecdotally, based on what I’ve seen globally over the last few years, I think that struggling to get citizenship is increasingly an issue for torture survivors. And without citizenship there’s difficulty finding legal work, getting accommodation, accessing medical care, accessing the legal system etc.
I do not know whether torture survivors are more or less likely to be believed by their community compared to survivors of abuse. I do not think any one has attempted a comparative study. I do know that the prevalence of clean torture means that many torture survivors are not believed and this puts up a further barrier, making it harder to access medical treatment and bring charges.
Rejali’s book was published in 2009, so things may have changed a tad. At the time he was writing the average wait for a torture survivor to see a specialist doctor was about 10 years.
Abuse is to torture what murder is to genocide. And there are difference on a wider social scale as a result.
I mention all that because I feel it’s relevant but the impression I get is you’re mostly interested in the long term symptoms? In which case, yes the legal definition makes very little difference. The physical injuries caused by particular kinds of abuse don’t change depending on whether it’s a private individual or a police officer holding the Taser.
The lasting psychological symptoms are not particular to torture; they’re what the human brain does when traumatised. The same symptoms can manifest in people who witness traumatic events but weren’t actually hurt themselves. They can manifest in people who were injured in accidents and they manifest in people who were neglected or abused. Hell, I have a couple of them, though no where near the severity a torture survivors would experience. A sufficient amount of stress is enough for these symptoms to start developing in anybody.
You can find the general list of symptoms here. There’s also a post specifically about memory problems over here.
The pattern I describe; that these symptoms are a list of possibilities not ‘every torture victim will get all of these’ holds true for trauma survivors generally. Anecdotally there is some variability with chronic pain being reported more often with some kinds of abuse. That might be because it can have physical causes, psychological causes or a mix of the two.
Whether it’s torture or abuse there isn’t any way to predict a survivor’s symptoms in advance. Much of the advice I have about writing torture survivors and their symptoms holds true for trauma survivors generally. Which is why I’ll still take a crack at some questions that aren’t about torture.
Pick the symptoms that you feel fit the character and serve the story. We can’t predict symptoms and that means that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pick the things that appeal to you.
And I think I’m going to leave it there. I hope that helps :)
Available on Wordpress.
Disclaimer
*This is a weird English endearment. I had someone ask if this was me trying not to swear.
#orphicphosphenes#writing advice#tw torture#torture as training#legal definition of torture#clean torture#military abuse#trauma#trauma and consent#pain#pain and memory#sleep deprivation#attitudes towards clean tortures#writing survivors#abuse within the military
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when time runs out | iv
⋆ summary: A young girl has fallen deeply ill with an unknown disease in her, so with all her free time spent in an empty hospital room, she spends it online playing video games. That's until she meets her cousins friends, one spiking her interest with his extremely vulgare language.
pairing: bakugou katsuki x reader
word count: 2.5k
warnings: none
authors note: I wanna say im so sorry for lying to yall about that extra chapter KJDFFF😭😭 ALSO @chibiiichann I APOLOGIZE FOR SPAMMING YOU WHENEVER I REPLIED TO YOU💀 A DIFFERENT ACC WOULD POP UP BUT THE FIRST CHAPTER WAS AN INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER EXPLAINING THE OC'S CONDITION JFJDJD
"HAHA! I GOTCHU NOW LOSER!" Y/N smashed the buttons on her controller, basically on the edge of her bed. A grunt was heard through her headphones, then a loud bang with laughing in the background. Y/N felt her stomach turn at the sound of this, feeling a little left out, but smiled nonetheless.
"HOW'D YOU EVEN DO THAT?!! YOU’RE DOING SOME HACKING MY GUY!" Denki yelled through the laughing in the background, hands pulling at his hair. He seriously couldn't believe it!
"I'm not! I just wanted to show Sero I'm way better at this game than you are. And turns out I am!" Y/N let out a loud laugh, falling backwards onto her pillow. After finding out that 'Tape Dispenser' went to her cousin’s school by hearing his voice in the back of Denki's room, she got to learn more about this Sero dude. She already knew this after their last game a few nights ago, but he was so chill. It was still insane for her to find out that her cousin and online friend went to the same hero school. The coincidences in this world. Y/N thought as she grinned.
"It's okay Kaminari, you still lasted a long time! But you did get brutally beat by Y/N at the end though..." Sero said, trying to raise Denki's low spirits, but only succeeded in making him more miserable. Rustling was heard through Y/N's headphones, making it obvious that there was movement happening.
"You don't understand Sero! THIS IS THE ONLY GAME I COULD FULLY BEAT THIS GIRL IN!" Denki shook Sero by the shoulders, quickly doing the action. Cackling was heard through the speakers while the girl wiped a tear from her eye. Sero laughed along, as he was pushed to the ground by Denki. His arms were crossed as he looked away, upset that Y/N managed to finally beat him in every game they played.
"It's okay Denki, not everyone can be as good as me!" Y/N exclaimed, getting up from her bed to start taping specific parts of her room. Kaminari continued to complain about his defeat to Sero, who only chuckled in response. As she finished taping the bottom of the walls, Y/N sat back on her bed, sighing in content.
"So, how are you? I'm doing terribly after being utterly destroyed by you, by the way." Said Kaminari, opening his water bottle and taking large gulps from it. Y/N felt her face light up as she remembered to tell Kaminari of her future activity.
"Bro, you won't believe this! So, basically, they're actually letting me paint my room! All by myself! How fricking cool is that?!" The girl laughed out loud, jumping on her bed in excitement. Kaminari's eyes widen, in surprise and slight fear, sitting up and taking in the new information.
"Wait, really? But isn't that like extremely dangerous? Cuz of the chemicals and what not??" He tried his best to keep his voice leveled, not noticing Sero look at him weirdly. That guy had no idea what was happening.
"Well, they said that they were gonna do something to the paint so it won't hurt me or anything, I don't know what, but-" Y/N was cut off by an extremely confused Sero. "Wait wait wait, hold on. I don't understand what's happening. How can paint harm you? Besides like...eating it. And what do you mean by 'finally getting to paint your room?’ Silence was the only answer he got. Sero gulped in embarrassment, thinking he asked a really personal question.
"Um, it's nothing du-" A loud 'shhhhhhh' was heard from Y/N, who let out a shaky breath. She never really told anyone, it's not like she could either way, being confined in the hospital room for a long time. She pushed a loose strand of her away from her face, preparing herself to tell Sero.
"Well, the reason is because I basically live in a hospital. I can't go outside, or have 'unpurified' air, as the doctors like to say, meaning my interactions with people and the outside world are extremely limited. That means anything that's not cleared of dust and germs, I guess, can be extremely harmful for me? As pathetic as it sounds, it could actually kill me, haha." It was quiet as Sero took in the information, a large wave of emotions crashing on him. A person shouldn't have to be locked in a room for the rest of their life. Especially someone who is such a sweet person like Y/N.
"I-I'm so sorry to hear that Y/N. If you don't mind me asking, how...how long have you been in the hospital?" The young girl answered with a quick 'Two years', and that's when Sero felt his stomach twist uncomfortably. Kaminari abruptly got up and headed towards his door.
"I'm gonna get something to eat, you want something dude?" Kaminari's voice was low and trembling. It didn't take a genius to see that the blonde haired boy needed some time alone. "No thanks." Kaminari let out a hum, quickly exiting his room and closing the door shut. Sero heard the loud sniffs that slowly faded away, as he hung his head down.
"Hey, you good Sero? That was probably a lot to take in, sorry." Sero shook his head, letting a sad smile adorn his face. "It's fine, really. I actually feel honored that you're comfortable telling me. Feels like we're getting closer, to be honest." He smiled happily, meaning every word he said. And Y/N knew that. "Ha, we are though!" The air was tense, despite the two teenagers being in different rooms.
Y/N went to clear her throat, but was interrupted when a light knock echoed throughout her room. "Someone there?" Sero asked, noticing her silence and hearing the very faint knocking.
"Yeah, um Sero, I'll call you guys later, my doctor wants to talk." Y/N quickly replied, seeing Receen open the door and walk in with his thin suit on. Sero let out an ok and they hang up. Y/N finally took in how the doctor looked, noticeable eye bags under his blue-grey eyes, from lack of sleep. His dark hair slightly tousled, probably from putting on the protective helmet that came with the suit, and a small smile on his welcoming face. And a large container of paint in his left hand. Her eyes immediately lit up.
"What’s up doc? I see you have something in your hand, can I see it closer?" The small girl asked, getting up and making a grabbing motion with her hands. Receen chuckled, lifting up the paint for Y/N to see. Even if he were to hand her the container, she wouldn't be able to hold. She was just too weak. Said girl let out a high pitch 'OOOO ' in excitement.
"I'm not sure if you wanted more, but we managed to get you your favorite color! This should be enough to paint the room, you can even put a second layer if you want." Receen walked over to where Y/N put all the equipment, opening the container of paint. And with a low grunt from him, the lid was opened. Y/N watched with amazement as the doctor poured the soft looking paint into a tray. She picked up a roller near her, and drowned the roller in paint, the white fluff getting covered in color.
The two began painting, Y/N's hand shaking every now and then. After painting half the room, they sat in silence, resting for a while. Receen seemed to be tense, though Y/N didn't seem to notice since she was too happy to speak. Receen let out a breath, breaking the silence, causing Y/N to look towards him.
"I didn't get to ask you how you were, did I Y/N? How are you?" Said girl let a beaming smile spread on her face, causing Receen to slightly squint his eyes from the intensity of her smile. "Honestly, I haven't felt this happy in a very long time! I actually still can't believe you guys really let me do this! Thank you so much!"
Receen gave her a small smile while rubbing the back of his neck. "It's not a problem, you could’ve asked sooner and gotten this done a long time ago. You've been here for two years, so please don't be afraid of asking for things!" At the mention of her time spent in the hospital, Y/N lowered her head, causing Receen to wince. Well, might as well tell her. The doctor cleared his throat and began to talk.
"Y/N, as you are aware, I, along with many other doctors and scientists, have been working hard for you to be able to go outside again. To see your family, hug them, be a normal kid again." There was a pause and that alone caught Y/N's attention. She looked up at him. "There is a way for you to finally do that, Y/N."
Shock evident on the girl's face, she abruptly stood up and faced the doctor. There was absolutely no way anyone could have found a cure for someone like her. Someone who had an incurable sickness. Someone who was too sick, to even have medicine. He's lying. Y/N narrowed her eyes at the grown man sitting in front of her.
"With all due respect Doctor, I highly doubt that that's possible. Cuz, y'know? I basically have an incurable disease? I mean, like, even if you did manage to find a way for me to leave this place, how do you even know it's gonna work? I don't think you've tried this medicine since no one in recorded hospital documents in the past have had people like that checked in before-"
"How do you even know that?"
"-so how do you truly know it'll work?" Y/N quickly finished, completely ignoring his statement. Receen sighed, scratching his head. "We live in a world where quirks exist. Would you believe me if I told you centuries ago that the human race would evolve to have super powers? It's kind of like that, but not really." Y/N eyed him suspiciously. He's avoiding the question.
Receen looked straight at the girl standing in front of him. He felt slightly intimidated by her piercing gaze. He quickly looked away and got up, towering over Y/N's small frame. Then he smiled. "Y/N, you are a very sweet girl, no doubt about it. I know how much you want to get out of here, and I want to help you. My team has created this almost perfect pill, especially suited for your sickness. I know you're very cautious, just like your mother, but I can only reassure you, that these are your ticket out of here." He pulled out the bottle from his protective suit, shaking it in front of [Y/N].
Her eyes widened as she restrained herself from reaching out and snatching the bottle. Her eyes slightly narrowed as she pulled herself together. Crossing her arms and slightly tilting her upwards, she looked into the doctor's bright eyes. "There's always a catch when it comes to these kinds of things. What's the price if I take these? My lifespan shortens, I only have five hours to go outside, it drugs me or something?"
"I'm hurt you think I would just give you these without setting out the consequences." There was a slight glint in his eyes before it quickly disappeared. Y/N hummed, urging the doctor to continue.
"There are exactly 15 pills in here. And consuming just one of these bad boys right here, would allow you to go outside! Though, time is very important when taking these. You'd have 10 hours before the pills effects wear off. These would dull your hypersensitive senses, but not to a point where you can't feel, smell or do anything. No no, it'd just be like how you were before. You'd feel slightly dizzy and be a little itchy, but besides that, nothing too extreme. It just dulls all your body senses down." Receen gave Y/N a small smile. She looked a little weary, unsure if what he said was true. She looked at the bottle then back to Doctor Receen, fingers twitching every now and then. Breathing in and letting it out slowly, Y/N stared straight into the doctor's eyes.
If I take these, I can finally go out. I can hug mom and dad, I can be around Denki again. I can meet Sero face to face and feel the grass again! I can be... happy again. But if these don't actually work, I'd immediately die on the spot. I'd be able to go outside though. Aah, so much going outside, I can meet new people! I don't wanna spend the rest of my days slowly rotting away in here anyway.
"So Y/N, are you going to take them or let all our time go to waste?"
Sero looked at his hands solemnly, thinking about what Y/N had told him. He swallowed the lump forming in his throat, then lightly slapped his cheeks to stop the wave of emotions from spilling out.
"Yo, you good dude? It's not everyday I see someone willingly slapping themselves." Kaminari chuckled, walking in and closing the door with his foot as he carried a soda bottle and a bag of chips towards the boy sitting on his bed. Sero grinned, feeling the sadness of everything wash away.
"Yeah, I'm perfectly fine. But what about you though? After we had that conversation, you were, well, umm... kind of out of it." Kaminari froze, letting a dejected smile appear on his face. Dragging a hand down his face, he let out a sorrowful laugh.
"She's my best friend. My first real, true friend. She's basically my sister at this point. So when she collapsed that day, I felt my whole world crashing down. She is the sweetest, the most kindest, person I have ever met. She never let me degrade myself, alway cheered me up when people called me stupid." Kaminari rubbed his eyes, opening the bag of chips and plopping one of them into his mouth.
"It hasn't been the same ever since she left, her parents barely come over anymore, and they're always so sad whenever I see them. My own parents aren't the same either, they treated her like their own daughter. I can't even begin to imagine how Y/N feels about this all. She was the top in our grade, highest scores in our test. No one could compare to her. M-my heart breaks for her. She lost everything." Sero let that information sink in, thinking about how she was before. He smiled as he saw Kaminari's shoulders begin to shake. He cares so much for her.
He put his hand on his shoulder, watching Kaminari slowly lift his face towards him. "Come here you emotional ball of feelings." Being the friendly guy he is, Sero gave the sobbing boy a hug, cuz hugs fix everything.
"No homo though bro." And with that, they both laughed out loud, continuing their bro day.
#bakugou katsuki#bakugou#bakugou x reader#bakugou katuski x reader#mha#bnha#mha angst#bnha fluff#bnha x reader#fanfic
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I'm having many thoughts on activism and radicalization and being a sell out and centrism and deradicalization and how opinions can be held without necessary hurting other people with them . . .
But most of those complex thoughts can be reduced down to how I think that "teenage anarchist -> adult libertarian" is incredibly reductive. We don't become changed fundamentally in what we believe in just to switch beliefs, nor do we become less committed to them. The change can show a deeper layer of what about anarchy was believed in to begin with, which parts were appealing, how the radical politics were appealing, and those things can exist in both radicalism and centrism.
Plus obviously I think it's ageist bullshit meant to water down genuine complaints of abuse and mistreatment of teenagers but that's a horn I'll toot long into the future. If I end up a guy that doesn't bring that up at every opportunity and it's still happening I don't want to know him.
But seriously though, anarchist is a shorthand. Centrism is a shorthand. The point at which people using that language makes people too pissed to speak about things in reasonable ways is the point at which they're no longer useful. There are so many anarchists I hate hate hate because anarchy is not a tool to enable more violence, it's to dismantle structural violence- to me! But that's not the only true definition of anarchists and as much as I throw my hands up in exasperation they aren't actually using my cause, because it's just a word. I make my cause. And I put the I'll fitting shirt of "anarchist" over it, spikes and weird slime and all, because I can't afford a proper tailor in this economy.
And as social justice becomes more popular in society I feel no more welcomed as I did when I was a teenager in normie spaces because it's the individuals who still believe things on fundamental levels that I disagree with who are simply adopting new acceptable language, they're not changing their beliefs or values in any particular ways.
And that is the problem in these conversations about radicalization. Yes, people can be spurred into radical actions, but their beliefs and justifications can remain as static as before they ever even touched any activist cause if they let it. And we let it by focusing so much on having the right talking points rather than having deep, emotionally fraught discussions about what actually fucking matters like how anarchy means productive agitation, while for a lot of people it's neither productive nor with the goal of productiveness.
But if you're going to read any paragraph on this post, I think the most important thing is this:
What I want to know from social justice is how do we make more people feel safe to give a shit about things in the same way I do, not how to make people stop calling people faggots or whatever or even to make them care about stuff the way I do. These things are the organic conclusion of deep introspection and they cannot be rushed and all the social justice movement has rewarded for over a decade now is the results of rushing it. It's empty. There's no internal motor driving it, and it gets out of hand so quickly because we only had the illusion of control over what messages we send outside of activist spaces and are amplified by allies in privileged groups. We say listen to only people within the marginalized people speaking because we are afraid. The thing we're afraid of is already happening en masse right now and we need to face up to that eventually. Denial that forcing people to only listen to marginalized groups rather than develop their own critical thinking skills is actually working is going to get us nowhere, mark my worms. It sucks but it's something that can be changed. Unlike a lot of harms this isn't irreversible.
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Stranger
summary: A night between the events in the bar with the townsfolk and the battle with the Karyt dragon. Cobb offers his home to the newcomers, with pleasurable circumstances that follow.
pairing: Din Djarin (The Mandalorian) x Cobb Vanth
warnings: smut, swearing
word count: 7.7k
rating: Mature
posted: 20/11/23
“It could have gone worse, ‘suppose.” Cobb kicked some sand as they exited the building, thumbing his belt and looking to the setting suns.
The Mandalorian’s gaze followed that of the marshal’s, and he sighed. “Just glad they’re willing to work together, for now.”
The heat of the day was still fresh, despite the cool evening creeping in. Din felt it under his heavy armour - sweat behind his knees, on the back of his neck, in his gloves - if time and privacy allowed it, he may stray away from the town far enough to take off his gear and wipe down a bit, get some fresh air. But as he looked at the ground, where the foundling was just at his boot, Din realized he would need to settle the child in before anything else. They didn’t have any food or water left with them, and that night, he would be relying on the generosity of strangers to feed the kid. His own stomach could wait, despite the faint hunger pang he felt.
The bi-sunset created a warm, orange glow across the desert dunes, casting a feeling of security, even with the next day’s task ahead. It had been awhile since the Mandalorian felt he had the time to appreciate the scenery; Always on the run, looking for a job, tasked with an adventure, it didn't allow for a lot of sightseeing.
The child cooed and grasped Mando’s boot, so he leaned over and scooped him into his arms, before turning toward Vanth.
“He needs rest, and nourishment. Is there somewhere-”
“Ha!” Cobb loudly interrupted, patting Din roughly on the back. “Any visitor in my town is a friend to me. That includes your little pet here, follow me.”
Mando had the urge to correct the marshal as he followed him that the kid wasn’t a pet, but he didn’t have an accurate description of what he was, so he left it, opting to stay silent as he crossed the town’s main roadway and into a hut tucked in the far end.
Inside wasn’t anything particularly special, just some basic furniture, some of which looked knocked together and recycled from scraps, but it clearly suited Cobb just fine, who placed down the green helmet that had been tucked under his arm, along with his belts and blaster.
“It’s not much,” Cobb pushed aside some glasses on the table, though he had no shame in his voice. “But we don’t need much out here. You seem like the kind of fellow who knows how to live off of bits and ends.”
“We manage.” Mando replied gruffly, adjusted the kid in his arms. He was feeling rather ansty on his feet - it had been a long 24 hours without much rest and a lot of travelling, and he was sure he would sleep a solid 10 hours if he allowed it, but the dread of facing the giant sand creature and gaining the armour back from the marshal lay heavy on his mind.
This deal didn’t only benefit himself and the child, but his entire culture. If the plan went awry and he couldn’t take the armour back, he wasn’t sure what he would do. It wouldn’t be fair to take it forcefully after the deal, but it felt even worse to think about leaving it behind. The recent loss of the allies back home (though he didn’t really think of it as home anymore) kept the bounty hunter on edge now, as if any bit that was left of his people inside him would crumble away if he wasn’t careful enough.
The marshal seemed much more relaxed, considering the circumstances, especially since he was ready for a faceoff with the town’s new visitor only hours earlier. But now, the silver-haired man was sporting a grin and a casual gaze that made Din feel like there was an ulterior motive to why he and the kid were now cornered in the marshal’s hut. Mando’s fingers ghosted the blaster in the holster on his side.
“Well, there’s green and blue milk for the kid,” Cobb gestured to the food bin, “not much to eat I’m afraid, except some Bantha veal.” He stood and pulled out a strip of dried meat and offered it to Din, who visibly calmed as he accepted it. No harm in trusting strangers, occasionally, he supposed.
The kid happily snatched the food and was placed on the table, as the marshal poured some floral green milk into a cup, which was also passed along to the foundling, who slurped it up quickly.
“So, uh, if that’s yours,” Cobb leaned against the counter, a little too close for Din’s comfort, and gestured between him and the foundling. “Is that what you look like? Under there?” He said this, referring to the hemet. “Or did you hook up with a..”
The Mandalorian had picked up a long time ago that despite wearing a mask, he was unusually good at reflecting his emotions, and others were very good at picking up on his body language. Vanth clearly got the message when he stopped talking and laughed, holding his hands up defensively.
“Sorry, that was rude of me. Never mind, hey?” He laughed, all charming grins. He struck Mando as the type of guy who thought flashing smiles and sly remarks could get him out of anything. “You wouldn’t be able to fit those big ol’ ears under there anyways, right?” The marshal reached out a hand to give a gentle tug on the kid’s ear, who cooed in response, green milk dribbling down his chin.
Din wiped it away instinctively, before picking the kid up, who had finished his meal, clearly grateful as he let out a quieter, sleepier coo.
“Oh!” The marshal stood up, looking around. “I’ve got a crate of sorts, he can sleep in it if he likes. Probably better than sleeping out on that old bike outside.”
Mando followed the man into a small room in the back that appeared to be fairly unused, just some old boxes and clothes, and a few weapons on shelves. The room across the hall seemed to be the marshal’s bedroom, but the door was only slightly ajar for viewing inside.
“Here ya go,” Cobb stepped aside to reveal a rectangular crate lined with an old blanket. “Little guy is all tuckered out.”
Looking down, Din saw that the foundling had fallen asleep while being held, so he was placed gently inside the crate, with Mando acutely aware that Vantha was watching, right behind him. He unwrapped the cowl from his neck and used it to wrap around the little green child, then left the room, closing the door behind him.
“I appreciate your hospitality,” Mando placed a hand on his hip in the main room, “if there's anything I can do..”
“No, no,” Cobb waved his hands cooly, walking into the kitchen. “You’ll be doing more than enough tomorrow, and now, you can sit and join me for a drink.”
“Marshal-”
The gray haired man laughed, pulling out a glass and a bottle of something pale gold and glimmering. “I know, I know, you can’t in front of me. Unless you want a straw to just suck up from under there?”
The look was given again, and the marshal couldn’t seem to stop laughing. Din didn’t see what was so amusing all the time, though he supposed the town didn’t get too many visitors, and perhaps Vanth had gone mildly loopy from seeing the same 30 people everyday.
“Just kidding, you take things too seriously. Sit down,” he offered, reclining himself at the table.
The Mandalorian took the offer, clunking down into the seat, and feeling heavier than usual. He still longed to go and take off his gear, if just for a few minutes, in the clear of any prying eyes. The recent missions had taken a toll on his body, while he was extremely well trained and adapted to his lifestyle, the peak in activity between the Guild and the business with the foundling - it was beginning to feel more like an ache in his bones, with no time to cure his exhaustion. The thought of sleeping in a warm bed without fear of his or the kid’s life could make him drool if he thought too hard about it.
But now, he watched Cobb down one, then two, small glasses of the gold liquid without so much as a flinch, even though he could smell the bitterness of the alcohol from across the table and through the helmet. The marshal was impressive, for sure, even despite their stand off earlier. Really, to the defense of the marshal, he had only been looking out for his fellow man, and not having understood the intricacies of the Mandalorian culture, thought donning the armour would help that along. He wouldn’t have known the offense behind it, and perhaps Mando had been a bit harsh, before. But with his recent revelation with his worry for loss of connection to his people, he himself also couldn’t be blamed for his reaction.
“Thank you, again,” Mando leaned forward, elbows on the table. He watched Cobb’s face carefully for any signs of dishonestly, but there wasn’t any - just that same, genuine toothy grin.
The marshal laughed. “It’s all good, friend. New faces are more than welcome, even if at first they’re a bit..”
“Standoffish?”
“Yeah,” Vanth swiped a hand through his silver locks. Mando swallowed hard. “I was ready to blast your helmet off straight. Could have done it, too.” Cobb knocked back the rest of his drink.
Din had to chuckle. It was evident to the both of them that Cobb would not win hand to hand, or even with blasters, but he allowed the man a small victory. “You must be familiar with a weapon, to have fought off the mining corp yourself.”
“Mostly thanks to your peoples’ fashion choice.”
“Were you trained?’
“Me?” Vanth choked. “Maker, no. I was no better at shootin’ than Kalaks are at simple thought. It was a lot of chance - I was determined to make sure this town was better than how I had grown up. No person deserves to be a slave.”
This peaked Mando’s otherwise tired attention. “You..”
“Yep. Lots of us around here were. There’s been liberations, freeing the people and what not, but it’s still there, y’know? It doesn’t just leave overnight. Hasn’t left me, I don’t think it ever will. Even if I’m not a physical slave anymore, I still have..” He swirled his cup around the table for a moment before seeming to snap out of his daze. “Well. All that’s in the past now. I’m much better with my hands now,” he added with a wink and that damn smile again, and Din felt hotter under his mask than he had all day. He could punch out Cobb’s perfect teeth. “So tell me about you, then.” The marshal added with another sip of his drink.
“Not much to tell.”
“Come on, there’s got to be something. We’ll start nice and easy. What’s your name?”
Mando cocked his head. He wasn’t getting that comfortable.
“No? Okay,” Vanth smacked his lips. “Are you human?”
“Yes.”
“There we go!” Cobb threw a hand up. “Now we’re getting somewhere! How old are you? You seem young, pretty fit, wouldn’t see no guys with aching joints doing your kinds of jobs.”
Din thought of his tiredness. He wasn’t old, but he didn’t feel young anymore either.
“I’m not too old myself, don’t worry, the hair is a misnomer of its own.” The marshal ruffled his own haircut, and Mando wondered what he had meant by ‘too old’. For what?
There was an animal howl from somewhere deep in the wastelands of sand dunes around them, and the Mandalorian clenched his jaw to suppress a yawn. He wasn’t sure he was going to make it the whole night without falling asleep. He looked around the room. There was a tattered chair that had a cushion, he could maybe doze in that for an hour or two before sunrise.
“So how come your armour’s so much nicer than mine?” Vanth pointed at the chest plate, a look of genuine curiosity on his face.
“Mine didn’t come from a Jawa’s trashpile.”
“I mean seriously-”
“It’s beskar. It has a long history with my people, and is nearly indestructible. Which is why it’s so valuable.”
“More indestructible than what I’ve got on?”
“Yes.”
“Wow,” Cobb smirked. “So it stays on.”
“Yes.”
“All the time.”
Mando sighed. “Yes, in front of others.”
“Like, even during..” Vanth gave the Mandalorian a knowing smirk, and Din felt that familiar heat on his face return, and he turned his visor away, giving the marshal a good chuckle. “I guess that means you don’t get around much then.”
You don’t know me, Din wanted to say, but Cobb was right. The lifestyle and religion certainly didn’t allow much leeway in terms of physical relationships. Not that it mattered, he was never in one place long enough to even entertain the idea. Not that it hadn’t happened before, though it was very rare. The last time was more than a year ago, on Ithor. It was quick and messy, and she had barely touched him, save for her legs wrapped around his hips desperately. A quick lift of her dress and it was over in minutes, he hadn’t even had time to take his gloves off. He supposed it could have been the nature of her species, and he certainly didn’t like to discriminate, but the ache he had deep in his soul, a longing to just be held-
He thought then of Omera, left behind on Sorgan, when she had tried to make him stay, and how gently she had touched his hands and helmet, and a deep longing stirred in the pit of Din’s stomach. It was not the time or the place to be thinking like that.
Instead he watched Cobb’s gaze, which was lowered beneath thick eyelashes. He was playing with his glass again, before his eyes flicked up to meet the Mandalorian’s behind the mask. Din couldn’t deny that the marshal was ruggedly handsome, with a certain charm that could melt his beskar armour away to reveal the reserved man beneath. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds of eye contact before Cobb leaned across the table, swaying slightly with presumably the influence of alcohol in his system. “What do you look like, under there?” He asked quietly, his drawl less pronounced with his whisper. “Has anyone seen you?”
“Not since I was a child.” Mando replied, lowering his own voice to match. He felt a lump in his throat and a rise in his heart rate. He had been with men before - not many, but it was the little experience he had that kept him planted in his seat, despite the logical side of his mind telling him to leave before things escalated. He knew what the marshal wanted, he could see it in those glazed and squinting eyes, in the way his hand creeped across the table, and how his gaze swayed from the tip of the helmet to Mando’s hand which rested on the surface of the table in front of them.
Ever so slowly, as if trying not to scare away an animal, Vanth reached over and touched Din’s glove, and he flinched away, but Cobb seized his wrist, touched that little bit of skin that poked out between his glove and sleeve. Their bare skin was melding - the marshal’s fingertips caressing the inner exposed arm of the Mandalorian.
“Vanth-” he said shortly, unmoving.
“Mando.” Cobb replied with a flash of teeth. His grip tightened slightly, urging Din to react. “Don’t be nervous. You won’t break my heart if you say no.”
I can’t say yes is the problem. Heart racing, the Mandalorian closed his eyes behind the helmet. He relished this small contact, the way Vanth thumbed beneath his sleeve, which was pushing it, but a welcome intrusion. Somehow, Din knew the marshal needed it just as much as he did. The tell tale sign was the shudder that came from Cobb’s finger.
“Nervous?” Mando broke the silence. “That’s saying a lot from someone who’s shaking.”
Cobb playfully squeezed where his hand rested. “Shakin’? Nah,” he stood suddenly, his chair almost falling back, but it stayed upwards, and surprisingly so did Cobb, despite the alcohol he consumed that evening. The marshal walked around Mando’s chair, and leaned in close to the helmet, where Din’s ear would be beneath it, and whispered, “I’m just thinking about how good you’ll look sprawled on my bed.”
Without another word, he walked down the short corridor and turned into the bedroom. The swagger in his walk said, I know you want me, with a thumb in his belt and the slow thunking of his boots against the stone floor.
Din stayed in his seat, his hand still on the table, wrist exposed, and a stupid expression on his face behind the mask. He supposed he could just stand and leave, collect the kid in the morning, and forget this ever happened, but something kept him in the hut; Desire, loneliness, a sense of duty or repayment, a yearn to feel something more than he had before (as if this
stranger could give what he was looking for, but it was a start in the right direction).
Wanting to slap himself, Din resisted the urge to laugh aloud. Was he the one who had drank half a bottle of whiskey? His ache was getting the best of him. Better to deal with the issue in the bedroom before he began fantasizing too much about an easier life where he could be held whenever he desired.
“You’re drunk,” he stated, and felt stupid after, standing in the bedroom doorway, since it was an obvious statement, but he didn’t know what else to say as he watched Cobb sitting on the edge of a bed, pulling his boot off.
The marshal laughed mirthfully. “Yeah, well,” his second boot thumped onto the ground. “I often am. Ain’t no bother, I know what I’m doing.” Standing, the silver haired man crossed the room, standing before the Mandalorian, a bit taller, and he ran his hands down Din’s arms. “Thing is, I don’t know much about you. Tell me your name, at least, stranger.”
He contemplated this for a moment. It couldn’t do too much harm to tell him the truth - the chance of it causing any problems were slim to none. No one else had to know. But, it would be against…
He didn’t have the chance to answer before Vanth tugged him closer towards the bed, and eventually was on his knees on the thin mattress, so they were about eye level. Cobb ran a hand over the shiny Beskar of Din’s helmet, and held either side of the mask. For a moment, Mando was worried he was going to yank it off, and instinctively, reached for his blaster, but the marshal laughed, grabbing his hand gently.
“Just calm down, ‘kay?” He unbuckled the belt and holster from Din’s pants and cast them aside. “Don’t talk much, do you? All action?”
“Not much to say.”
The marshal laughed at this, and the Mandalorian wondered if he found everything funny or if he did it to cease awkward silence. “Well, you don’t gotta say anything except my name tonight, stranger.” He added with a wink, and reached forward to unhook Din’s chestplate.
“Wait,” He stopped him with a hand on the sternum.
Cobb instantly froze, matching Mando’s gaze in the visor, “Not okay?”
“Not the plate. Not the helmet.”
“Rest is fair game?” He smirked, Maker, the smirk, and tugged Din’s belt loops so he stumbled forward and fell flush against Cobb. “Just cause you don’t got much to say doesn’t mean you can’t say anything. Let me know if I, uh, cross any Mandalore lines, okay?”
Din didn’t reply and stayed stiff for a moment, before reaching to unclasp his arm gauntlets, and Vanth took the message and helped him and himself taking off various weapons and belts and shielding. They did this in a comfortable silence until it was just them, the pile of extremities on the floor, and Mando’s chest armour and helmet.
Cobb thumbed the thin fabric of the long sleeved shirt Din was still wearing, along with his pants. As they were the two items closest to his bare skin under layers of other clothes and armour, the Mandalorian was acutely aware that he probably smelled a bit ripe from the hot desert, and felt embarrassed, but if Vanth could tell, he didn’t seem to care. His bare hands rubbed across Din’s stomach and he got a glint in his eyes. Clearly, whatever Din was doing by just standing there, straight as a board, was getting Vanth off, because he moaned quietly before meeting Mando’s eyeline.
“You’re a real work, y’know that?”
Din wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but he let Cobb guide him to lay down on the bed, and watched as the marshal straddled him, then reached to grab the hem of his own shirt and pulled it over his head.
His sun kissed skin gleamed with the warmth of the desert sky, and his toned chest tensed as Vanth shifted his weight to get more comfortable in the Mandalorian’s lap.
“Enjoying the view?” The silver haired man teased.
Mando hummed in response, placing his ungloved hands on the marshal’s hips. “Be a lot better if you weren’t being so kriffing slow.”
“Wow, eager much, stranger?”
“Stop calling me that,” Mando squeezed Vanth’s hips a little harder. ‘Stranger’ made it feel wrong.
The marshal laughed, ever amused. “Well, you won’t tell me-”
“Shut up, or I’ll leave.” He retorted, a little harsher than intended. “Just..”
Cobb smiled gently this time, his hands gently meeting Din’s on his sides, then nodded in understanding. “S’okay. Lemme show you what I can do.”
Leaning down, the marshal brought his face into the crook of Din’s neck, and the Mandalorian tilted his helmet away to allow excess. His breath hitched as he felt the kind lips sucking a spot on his throat. A deep groan left his chest as Cobb rotated his hips in place, grinding against Din’s lap.
Vanth tugged the collar of the other man’s shirt, kissing along his collarbone and licking sweet stripes anywhere he could reach. He tugged at the chest plate, back and forth, before sitting up and swiping his flopping hair out of his face.
“You gonna keep that dinner plate on or are we gonna man up about this?”
Mando rolled his eyes behind his visor, but couldn’t help his own small smirk. He unfastened the armour with a sigh, and gently cast it aside on the bed, then sat up to pull off his shirt, carefully, over the helmet.
Adjusting himself in the lap, Cobb wrapped his long legs around Mando’s waist. “Hot damn. Open the chest, and reveal the treasure within,” he joked, running his hands up and down Din’s front. “Nice tits.” He playfully squeezed a pectoral, and he wriggled, making the Mandalorian hard in his pants, faster than he would have liked to admit. Cobb could obviously feel him underneath, and gave a knowing smile, before pulling them close together, their bare chests touching each other.
Vanth had less chest hair than Din did, but it tickled a little nonetheless. The marshal kissed his bedmate’s shoulder, then bit it playfully, before whispering into his ear.
“Maker, you’re so hot,” he muttered, rolling his hips again. “Bet you’re strong, too.” He ran a hand up Mando’s bicep, stopping to squeeze the muscle there. “But you ain’t gotta do any heavy lifting tonight. Just relax. You’re wound up tighter than an ignition coil.” He rubbed Din’s shoulders, letting him know he was safe - they were safe, in this moment. Maybe Mando would never be able to let his guard down fully, but he would try, tonight. He also enjoyed that Vanth was implying there would be another night, where Din’s strength would be needed.
He looked down as Cobb fiddled with their pants, before reaching into the Mandalorian’s briefs to stroke him a few times. A sense of embarrassment fell over Din as he panted, feeling very warm under his helmet. It had been awhile since he was on the receiving end of intimacy, usually opting for showing others a good time, but Cobb had a sly look of determination that told him it wasn’t the marshal’s first rodeo when it came to taking charge.
The dry contact on his cock was a bit uncomfortable, but Din braced himself on Vanth as the marshal pulled it out from the confines of his pants, stroking a little harder now.
“Nice,” Cobb flashed his perfect teeth again.
“Shut up,” Mando inhaled sharply at a particularly painful tug of his skin, and Cobb pulled his hand away, his stupid grin still growing, ear to ear.
They sat in silence for a second, the room warm and their skin beginning to perspire. Suddenly, the silver haired man ran his hand up to Din’s collarbone, before touching his jaw beneath the helmet.
The Mandalorian tensed, used to the concern that his mask would be ripped away - it had almost happened far too many times recently, more than he could recall - but instead the marshal’s fingers found Din’s mouth.
“Suck,” he ordered, with a tint of that sheriff attitude he had seen with the townspeople earlier that evening. Not used to being submissive, Din hesitated, and when Cobb didn’t break eye contact, the bounty hunter obediently parted his lips and brought the digits onto his tongue.
They tasted rough and vaguely of alcohol, but his tongue swirled around them before releasing, feeling a bit of drool escape his lips.
“Well, at least you ain’t got fangs,” Cobb muttered with a laugh.
“I told you I’m-”
“Human, yeah,” the marshal’s wet fingers resting on Din’s jaw, “but you could say anything to ride one out.”
“You’re vulgar.” Mando didn’t say this with any particular venom, and he wasn’t sure why he had said it, considering he himself had spoken some pretty crass comments in moments of passion, but he found himself now wishing that Cobb would just shut up and get a move on.
The marshal didn’t reply but drew a wet stripe down Din’s chest with the saliva before capturing the dark haired man’s cock once more, this time slick for ease. “There, that’s better, innit?”
The Mandalorian did not justify this with spoken words but a tightening of his muscles in response to the pumping of Vanth’s hand and a quiet gasp, amplified through the helmet’s modulator.
“There’s a good boy,” the marshall encouraged, licking and biting his lip. “Maker, I wish I could see you under there, writhing - bet that mouth can do a lot.”
Shutupshutupshutup-
“I would love to feel your pretty lips wrapped around-”
“You could.” Mando interrupted. Fuck. Too late now. “You can. If you want.”
The hand stopped moving and Cobb shifted in his lap. “I thought..”
“If, uh,” the bounty hunter paused for a moment. This was so stupid. He felt stupid. Embarrassed, even. The last time he had done this it was a wild night full of handcuffs and blindfolds and rough play, but it had worked. It felt really against the creed, but technically it was a loophole. Cobb would never actually see him, and that was most of it, anyways. “If you wear something over your eyes. I can take it off.” He finished plainly. His heart was beating so hard against his ribcage. “Like, your..your scarf, or something.”
The marshal’s eyes widened a little and a cat like grin spread wildly across his face. “Whoohee!” He clapped his palms together loudly, like he hadn’t just been giving Din a handjob five seconds before. “You’re just full of surprises, stranger!” Cobb clambered off of Mando’s lap, rifling through the clothes they had tossed around, “I’d be happy as a bantha in Winter to, a minute now, to take you up on your - aha!” He pulled up the red garment triumphantly. “I didn’t peg you as the kinky sort, but then again, I haven't pegged you yet, have I?”
“Don’t make me take it back.” Din warned, pulling his pants down but keeping on his briefs, after having tucked himself back in. He stood to offer to help tie the scarf, but the marshal stepped back and held out a hand to stop.
“Wait a minute. Oh, yeah.” He looked at the Mandalorian, who was standing in nothing but underwear and his helmet, and he rubbed his chin and bit his lip with a smirk. “I’m just taking it in. Gotta give me something to think about if I’m going blind in a minute.”
Not feeling one way or the other about it, Din let him gawk for a minute, his arms sitting lamely at his sides for a minute before he sighed. “Are you done?”
“No rush,” Cobb laughed, but turned around nonetheless, offering the cloth over his head, and with nimble fingers, Din tied it tightly around the marshal’s eyes. The silver haired man turned slowly, his arms out like a bird to feel the space around him. “Mando?”
“Yeah. Can you see?”
“Nothin’. I swear.”
There was a comfortable quiet in the air, as Cobb relaxed and stood still, clearly waiting for a go ahead. At that prompt, Din reached up and carefully pulled his head free from the Beskar and knelt down to place it on the floor. He inhaled a deep breath of mildly fresh air, and ruffled his curls, knowing his helmet hair was probably terrible. At least Vanth wouldn’t see.
Cobb stood with a goofy grin, and only flinched slightly at the unexpected contact of the Mandalorian touching his hands. He ran his fingers up and down the marshal’s forearms twice before using the connection to bring the older man closer - and slowly brought their hands to hover above Din’s cheeks.
With a sharp inhale, Mando melted skin to skin, and gasped quietly at the sensation of Vath’s palms flush against his face. The feeling of having his head cradled in someone’s hands was unmatched - the marshal gently brushed his thumbs across his lips, then touched his nose (where underneath he was sporting a pretty decent moustache), ghosted over his eyelids, and ran his fingers through the bounty hunter’s hair, playfully tugging when he was done.
“ ‘Feel handsome,” Cobb whispered. “Ready to fuck now?”
“Shut up.” Mando growled low, roughly yanking open Cobb’s pants, to which he only got a snort of laughter.
“Whoa now,” he said, as if calming a taun taun. It was a hopeless cause, trying to get the man to be quiet for longer than five seconds.
Din switched their places, so the sheriff was closest to the bed, and eased him into a sitting position. The marshal warily held his hands hovering above the mattress, before relaxing and wiggling a little in the spot.
“The suspense is killin’ me,” he whispered, his eyeline upwards as he waited for Mando to make a move.
Din moved down onto his knees in front of the marshal, gently running his hands up and down his thighs. The silver haired man gasped in reaction, and moved quickly to take off his pants. Once they were thrown away, the bounty hunter gave a gentle kiss right beside the other man’s belly button, then another just below. With a gentle and soft movement, Din pulled the cock from Cobb’s underwear and gave it a firm tug.
“Ah-” Vanth grunted, his beautiful mouth hanging open, then found the Mandalorian’s hair with one hand. “Please..”
“Please what?” Din found himself taking his usual charge, which caused the marshal to giggle and grin.
“Slow down there, stranger, I thought I was the big man here.”
“Then act like it and tell me what you want.”
Cobb gripped Din’s hair tightly, earning a groan of surprise, but also arousal. “Take my cock in your pretty little mouth and suck like a good boy.”
Mando attempted to pull the grip from his curls away. “Don’t do that.” He growled.
“Like you don’t like it,” The marshal grinned, “stranger.”
Din wanted to slap him and his stupid goddamn smile- but he opted to not do anything drastic and instead took Cobb in his mouth, deep and fast, earning a second hand tangled in his hair. He gripped the man’s thighs hard as he bobbed his head up and down, taking in the marshal’s taste and girth.
“Pfassk-” Vanth moaned. “Oh, fuck..Maker-” His grip tightened in the Mandalorian’s hair.
Din hummed in reply, running his hands to the marshal’s waist and keeping him still while he worked his tongue around the head of the older man’s cock. He felt dirty and debauched to be on the marshal’s floor with his member in his mouth. Someone who he had only met a day ago, grasping at his body desperately under his lips. It was exhilarating if not madly loose of him.
Cobb’s gasps grew faster. “Kriff, kriff, kriff,” he used the hands in Din’s hair to move him away, and the bounty hunter stopped, with some drool escaping his lips. “Wait,” the marshal panted.
“What’s wrong?” Din rasped.
“I don’t want to finish yet. I’ve got a good time to show you as well, partner.”
The Mandalorian paused for a minute, letting the air return to his lungs, and gently smoothed his palms down Cobb’s thighs. “Sure. Where do you, uh,”
“On the bed. Come on now,” Vanth patted the mattress and stood, carefully, his lack of eyesight clearly a mild hindrance as he tumbled across the room to get something from a drawer. The bounty hunter laid back on the bed, and took off his underwear, now completely nude in the presence of the silver haired man, who was none the wiser. It felt fairly freeing, but Din knew it was a dangerous game. If he got too comfortable with the beskar off, he may never put it back on. That was a terrifying thought, because as much as he could pretend to deny it, it was something he could see happening if he did it too often.
This was interrupted as Cobb practically fell into the bed, bracing himself with his hands, with a small jar of what Din assumed was lube in his palm.
“I’m back. Did you miss me?” Cobb grinned in the direction he must have thought was the bounty hunter, but too far to the right and Din felt a wave of warmth run through him. Unfamiliar but kind.
The Mandalorian gently took Cobb’s cheek in his hand to turn his face in the right place. “Immensely.” He joked with a small smirk, and ran his thumb down the marshal’s cheekbone. There was a moment of comfortable silence, the two of them sharing the warmth together.
“Are you gonna kiss me?” Vanth leaned forward a little. “Or were you waiting for me to be the big man and tell you what I want?”
With that, the bounty hunter captured Cobb’s mouth with his own in a passionate kiss. The moment their lips touched, Din gasped and pressed harder, grabbing both sides of the Marshal’s head. Vanth returned the passion, with a hand in Mando’s hair (Din was beginning to think Cobb really liked his hair), and rubbing Mando’s back with the other.
They moved their tongues together, engaging in a long, hot embrace, before Cobb’s hand wandered down to discover Din’s nakedness.
“Oh, hello,” he purred. “Nice buns, stranger.” He squeezed a cheek much to the bounty hunter’s unamusement. “Really cheeked up back there. I love a good set of-”
“Shut up.” Din hissed, moving to nibble the marshal’s ear. “I thought you had something you were going to do.”
Cobb laughed. “Oh yes,” he was holding up the jar that had been set on the bed. “Time to oil up, stranger.”
Pushing Din down, Vanth settled on his knees between the Mandalorian’s legs after pulling off his own underwear, then spread some lube into his palm, lathering his cock in it, completely blind behind the red scarf. He kept grinning, excitement beaming off of him. The bounty hunter was on his back, propped by his elbows, and watching the display. Cobb’s confident movements and beautiful body, sprinkled with gray hair and tanned skin, was truly a sight to behold. Din felt a tad self conscious about himself, if just for a moment. Did he hold up to Vanth’s standards? Clearly he did to some extent, but their bodies were different in ways that the Mandalorian thought too hard about.
The marshal was lanky, though toned, with graying hair and smooth movements. He was tall with sharp cheekbones and a handsome smile. Din had never smiled in a mirror. He didn’t know what it looked like. He had once noted his nose curved in a way that made him think of a bird. Din’s body was thicker, and he was shorter. His wild curls often tickled his forehead under the helmet, and his facial hair was nowhere near as well kept as Cobb’s marvelous beard.
Din laughed quietly. How stupid. It was ridiculous to compare his own beauty to someone else’s - no one had seen him in over a decade and nobody ever would. These were the sorts of thoughts that would emerge when his armour was off. More reasons to get it over with quickly and into the comfort of his usual beskar shell. Underneath it, he paid no mind to things as petty as looks.
“Okay, relax. Lay back.” Cobb felt outward until he touched the bounty hunter’s chest. He then pushed the Mandalorian down onto his back, and hooked his leg over his shoulder. The marshal took a moment to get comfortable. “Do you need me to rev you up a little, stranger? Get a finger in there?”
“N-no,” Mando swallowed hard and looked at the ceiling. “No, just do it.”
“Alright, stranger. Goin’ in.”
“Din.” Dank ferrick. Fuck. Fuck. Stupid.
The marshal paused. He cocked his head, and turned his face downwards, as if he could see, and for a moment, Mando wondered if the sheriff had lied, and was staring at the man beneath him now.
“What’s that? ‘Din’?” Cobb was grasping the bounty hunter’s leg.
Din took a deep breath and sighed. “My name. Din. Please- not ‘stranger’.”
“Din. Din, Din. Huh.” Vanth smiled widely. He said it a few more times. “Thank you.” He whispered sincerely, and leaned down to kiss the Mandalorian, who quickly moved to meet his lips, or else he would have gotten a wet one to the eye.
The marshal’s blindness was rather amusing as he felt around him to move the jar out of harm’s way, before repositioning himself with a sturdy grip on the Mandalorian. “Alright, Din.” Another smile. “Ready?”
“Yes,” Din replied, and hissed through clamped teeth as he felt Vanth push into him eagerly. His fingers curled around the sheets harshly, and his back arched with the movement of Cobb burying himself deep inside. “Maker-” he gasped.
“Kriff, that’s good. Oh, yeah.” Vanth panted for a second, before pulling out almost all the way, then pushing back in. He did this twice more slowly before picking up speed. His thrusts were precise and confident, like the rest of his personality. His hands moved to either side of Din’s head, adjusting his body, and Mando moved his leg from the shoulder and wrapped his thighs around Cobb’s waist.
The new angle brought a wave of pleasure to crash over the bounty hunter’s body, he spread his arms out, arching and writing in arousal beneath the sheriff. “Fuck- Cobb-”
“Yeah? You like that?” The marshal panted with a wide smile, rolling his hips into Din. “You take it good.”
“Come on,” the Mandalorian grunted, wiggling his hips to encourage his bedmate to move faster. “Move.”
“Oh, kriff, yes,” Vanth withdrew and pushed back in, and began that quick pace again, pounding into the bounty hunter with such speed that the mattress groaned horribly beneath them. Din briefly thought of the kid, wishing he had brought the egg shaped carrier for him to sleep in, lessening the chances of him waking to the sound of the men in bed together. But he knew the child was a fairly heavy sleeper, which settled his mind a bit to allow him to focus on the situation at hand.
A deep warmth shuddered through the Mandalorian’s abdomen, and he moaned louder than intended, grasping at the sheets with renewed desperation. He wished then that he could meet the marshal’s eyes - those striking hazel eyes - but that was too much. He already had the blessing of a name, and Din couldn’t risk giving more than that.
Cobb picked up on the direness of Mando’s need and sat up, gripping Din’s hips with his sturdy hands, allowing the bounty hunter to arch his back, supported by his broad shoulders, and the marshal pushed a few deep thrusts in, grinning ear to ear.
“Come on, baby, come on,” Cobb purred as he went for it, pushing and rolling to get the most out of their new position. “You like that? Oh, you feel so good. Din. Come for me. Come for me.”
The Mandalorian panted and moaned, sweat and sex and heat filling the room, that wonderful tension pooling inside of him and he pushing himself as well as he could to meet the marshal’s perfect thrusting, and he shuddered and gasped as cum shot all over his own stomach, warm and more than eupphric as he rode out the high of his orgasm.
“Oh fuck, yes, Din, good boy,” Cobb kept pounding, quickly, hitting those sensitive spots until Din felt himself fill with warmth as the marshal came hard, shaking and groaning, before he collapsed on top of the bounty hunter was a quiet sigh.
They laid in silence, both panting and hot and sweaty, but together. Din found himself reaching for Cobb’s hair, gently running his hand through it. It was soft and fluffy, and his fingers were able to comb through it seamlessly. This brought a gentle smile to the bounty hunter’s lips.
In turn, Vanth made little circles with his fingers on Din’s chest, humming in satisfaction.
“That was good,” Cobb whispered, seemingly content with not moving. “Nice. Very nice. You’re not half bad.”
“Your thoughtful words are inspiring.”
They both chuckled, and Cobb adjusted himself, slipping himself out carefully, then settling back on the Mandalorian’s chest to continue their post-sex cuddle.
He liked to think of that. That they were cuddling. He couldn’t remember the last time he had let someone cuddle him. Certainly not any of his previous endeavours, though to be fair, he had never had sex on a bed with them, so there hadn’t been any chance for something so intimate. Din shifted his weight a little and sighed contently. He figured it must have been his mother or father who had last held him lovingly, but he tried not to dwell on that.
Now, Cobb, still with his scarf on (Din thought the world of that - the marshal was incredibly trustworthy), seemed to be close to sleep, so the bounty hunter gently nudged him.
“I should put something on. The kid might come in here when he wakes up,”
“Hmph.” Vanth huffed against the Mandalorian’s chest, before rolling over to release his bedmate. “Fine, but come right back.”
Din climbed off the bed and found his shorts and shirt, and after climbing into them, he picked the helmet off the floor and stared into the visor. The armour felt heavy in his hands, and the idea of placing it back on was less than appealing after a, dared he say it, fun evening. He glanced back at the mattress, where Cobb lay with his hands behind his head and everything on show, and Din smiled lightly.
A gentle kiss was placed on the marshal’s lips, and when he pulled the scarf from Cobb’s eyes, the bounty hunter had returned the beskar to its usual spot on his head. The sheriff blinked a few times in the dim light as he sat up, with Mando moving to let him past. Cobb slipped his underwear on before climbing back into bed, this time moving the blankets and crawling under.
An extended hand from the marshal was an invitation for the Mandalorian to join him back in the warmth of the bed, and without hesitation, Din joined him, tucking them into the sheets and settling down. The silver haired man wriggled next to Din, resting against his broad chest.
Still sticky with sweat and cum, it was only mildly uncomfortable not to shower immediately, but the bounty hunter knew there was always the morning. The next day would be wildly unpredictable and full of danger, but deep in his gut, the Mandalorian knew it would end well.
As if reading his thoughts, the marshal shifted slightly. “Nervous for tomorrow?”
“No,” Din answered honestly. “We’ll have what we need to defeat the dragon.”
“I’m worried about those damn Tuskans.” Cobb huffed. “If something goes awry-”
“It won’t.” The bounty hunter assured. “They’re..a little rough around the edges, but they’ll keep their word and help. Don’t worry about it. Just rest now.”
“Alright,” Cobb laughed a little, rubbing his hand across the other man’s waist. “Din, the Mandalorian. Hell. You’re quite something. It’ll be an honour to take down that Krayt menace tomorrow by your side.”
“Same to you. Rest well, Marshal.”
“Goodnight, Din.”
Cobb drifted to sleep quite quickly after that, leaving Din with his arms wrapped around the marshal and his late night thoughts. He deeply inhaled, smelling the desert winds in Cobb’s hair. The cool evening breeze that drifted from the window was comforting, and the only noises to be heard were crickets, and the drifting of the thin curtain blowing quietly in the wind.
Din was at peace, on that evening, content to lay with a man he enjoyed the company of curled in his arms, and the child safely sleeping in the room next to them. The next day would bring adventure and battle, but now, Din was safe and happy, as he drifted into a deep sleep, in the sanctuary of the marshal’s home.
#Lavina's Fics#Lavinia's Fics: Stranger#dincobb#din djarin x cobb vanth#cobb vanth x din djarin#the mandalorian x cobb vanth#cobb vanth x the mandalorian#pedro pascal#timothy olyphant#the mandalorian#the mandalorian season two#chapter 9 the marshal#din djarin#cobb vanth
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29 Things I Think Allistic People Need To Hear
From an autistic person
Not my usual content but I felt it needed to be said.
Saying “everyone is a little autistic” is really hurtful. Yes, everyone has their struggles but these struggles are far different for autistic people. Saying everyone experiences it is invalidating & harmful.
Being graded on eye contact & standing still is wrong. I’m pretty sure at one point or another we’ve had a project we were graded on & one of the grades was eye contact & not fidgeting. These things are extremely hard for autistic people & they are practically second nature. It’s like holding in a sneeze.
Stim & figget toys in schools. Of course fidget spinner’s & stim cubes can be bought & should be bought by anyone. If you want one, get one. But the way schools are banning them is crazy. They are very necessary for autistic people & it’s so much harder for them when schools ban their use.
QUITTTTT BABYING US!! We aren’t ‘uwu babies’. We are humans. We are perfectly capable of functioning without allistic people’s pity & looking down on us. We are our own people that don’t need a hand to hold in every damn situation. We aren’t cute because of it. 
Listen to autistic people. Everyone is all for advocating for people until that group of people want to advocate for themselves. So shut up & listen once & maybe you can learn something you didn’t know.
Creative writing in class is difficult. You don’t know how many bad grades I’ve gotten on because I can’t think of a good story out of my ass. It’s extremely hard for autistic people. Please give us a prompt it’s more helpful than you know.
Role playing in class. I think we’ve all had to do something where we research a famous person & have to assume their identity. This is again, so hard for autistic people. It’s hard enough for us to be ourselves. Most of us can’t understand these actives enough.
Slurs. Quit saying retard. It’s not an insult. It’s not funny. It’s offensive & every time you use it you’re hurting a disabled person & spreading harmful stereotypes. It’s not just a word. It’s not just a bad word. It’s a slur. Same as the f word or any other slur. Don’t use it.
People talking over us. No I dont mean just in conversations. Although that is another issue. I mean organizations like autism speaks that put words into autistic peoples mouths instead of letting them speak for themselves.
Stop making fun of our special interests. Whether you find anime cringey or think an adult loving Aladdin is childish just stop it. These things being extreme joy to us. They make us happy in a word that we don’t understand. So just leave us alone & let us be happy.
Don’t stare at us if we’re stimming. Especially in public. If you see me flapping my hands. Don’t stare. If you hear me humming quietly, don’t judge. These activities aren’t for your viewing pleasure. They’re for autistic people to regulate & express how they’re feeling.
Normalizing ableism. It’s so normalized. Whether it’s phrased like “suffers from autism” or how regularly ‘retard’ is used in classe; ableism is so often over looked especially by adults. There are no many micro aggressions they are just passed off as us not having a thick enough skin. When in reality it’s really damaging.
People first language. If you ever correct someone by saying “no, they’re a PERSON with autism. Not an autistic person”. Literally shut up. We’re autistic. We’re people. Being autistic doesn’t make us any less human so you don’t need to make it seem like it does. We’re still human no matter our disably. People don’t have to be reminded of this.
Using words like psychopath & sociopath. Calling autistic people these things just because you don’t understand us is disgusting. If you don’t understand these terms don’t use them. Just because we aren’t good at showing empathy in some cases doesn’t make us ‘psychopaths’.
Tone indicators. This is both the over use & not using them that’s an issue. Saying things like “/j /hj /sarcasm /srs /lh” all in one post defeats the whole damn purpose of them. & not using any at all especially when joking around or using sarcasm can lead to a lot of misunderstanding. It’s not that hard to use one or two at the end of a post. /srs
Picky eating. Literally stop making fun of autistic people for not liking a lot of foods or ordering the same thing at every restaurant. A lot of textures & flavors are very bothersome to autistic people. They can cause overstimulation or even panic. Just let us be. So I eat mac & cheese 4 times a week. I didn’t know it effected you so much.
“Ugh you’re so annoying you can’t ever get a joke”. No hearing that is what’s annoying. Tones are hard for us to understand so while most people pick up on it autistic people are more likely to read too much into it or take it seriously. It’s simple to use tone indicators in text or even to say “I’m joking”. It won’t make your joke less funny. It’ll just help us understand more.
Be specific if you want things from us. Don’t just say “hey I need a pencil”. Or “the dishwasher needs put away”. Most likely we’ll just be like, yeah, ok, and? Be specific please. Say things like “can I borrow a pencil?” or “can you undo the dishwasher?”.
Faces seeming to look weird. A lot of us having facial stims that can alter our faces. Whether it’s excessive blinking, eyebrow raising, or face scrunches. Don’t ask us what’s wrong with our face or what we are doing. For me, because of my facial stims & tics my eyes/eyebrows are permanently uneven. Don’t bring it up.
Classroom behavior charts are horrible. Autistic people don’t behave the same as allistic people. Simple as that. What they see as ok behavior, others don’t. & some times they don’t realize these behaviors will get them in trouble.
Police brutality. Especially in black or brown autistic people. It’s so common that people call the police on autistic people stimming in public because they are seen as dangerous. & when these autistic people can’t understand what’s going on or can’t make eye contact they are labeled as more suspicious. Especially black autistic people. Just look at Elijah McLean.
Feeling dumb. Especially in schools or other scholarly conversations. Some autistic people aren’t able to keep up or fully understand everything that’s being said or presented. Which leads to us feeling dumb. Give us time to process or aso questions please.
Feeling robotic. You’ve most likely heard autistic people being compared to robots at one point or another. Whether that’s for the impaired ability to establish empathy or something else it’s an extremely negative & hurtful stereotype. Especially in media.
Saying ‘I forgot’ is a valid excuse. There is so much going on in our heads. So much to process & remember. We forget things. Everyone forgets things. Especially autistic people. Please don’t yell at us for always forgetting to do the dishes. It’s not like we chose to forget.
The harmful effects of the vaccines cause autism jokes. Aside from the whole anti vaxers debate, perpetually the idea that we shouldn’t be vaccinated because it causes autism is disgusting. It’s treating autism like a disease. Like the person who has it isn’t worthy. Or that autism is so chronic it will ruin everything. It’s like people avoiding cheese burgers because it’s rumored they make you ginger. It’s preposterous. 
Yelling at autistic people for struggling to want to learn new concepts/concepts at all. This not only goes for in school but in just normal conversation. It’s hard for autistic people to grasp things they don’t have an interest in learning. So please don’t yell at us for not understanding everything about a band that we don’t care about, we would if we could. It might not seem like a big issue but it happens more than you’d think.
Intrusive thoughts. (Tw: rape mention & violence) Most of the time autistic people experience extreme spells of intrusive thoughts “omg he’s going to rape you image him raping you” or “stab yourself in the side right now” or much worse. & when autistic (and other) people try to talk about it they are labeled crazy or insane. It’s a normal occurrence to have these kinds of thoughts. We don’t want to. But they happen. That’s why they’re called intrusive.
Executive disfunction. This is basically when autistic people are views as lazy but we physically & mentally just can’t. Where tasks as seemingly simple as going to get a glass of water feels like a mountain to autistic people. It’s not that we are lazy. We physically & mentally can’t work up to it.
Class rank & graduation requirements are unfair. Autistic people socialize differently. It’s just a fact. Our brains work differently in classes & outside of it. We could be working our asses off to understand our English class book, but we get an F. Not to mention how most schools require community service hours to graduate. Yes community service is good but it can be very hard for autistic people.
Please feel free to add on but a lot of these are drawn from personal frustrations. Please listen to autistic & other disabled people more. All these also applies to those with ADHD/ADD or any other mental illness where the situations apply. You’re all valid & amazing.
I love you all. 💕
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sorrow that you keep
March 2021 - Sollux Captor
“Vitals!” Dirk announces, rapping on your door with his knuckles. “C’mon, let’s get this over with so I can serve breakfast!”
When you walk out of your room, there’s already a line leading out of the treatment room. The person in front of you, a dark-skinned kid with an Angela Davis-style afro - Karkat, you think his name is - curses up a blue streak while he waits in line.
“I don’t see why I had to get a prissy fucking bastard with insomnia as my goddamn roommate. I didn’t ask for any of this fucking shit. Fucking involuntary status, fucking dumbshit Eridan, I hope this fucking hospital burns down.”
It’s too early to put up with this guy, especially with the migraine you woke up with.
“Not tryna piss you off or anything but do you think you could keep it down with your tirade?”
If looks could kill, the glare Karkat shoots you would have rendered you to a pile of smoldering ash.
“I haven’t had a cigarette in six days, it’s seven oh fuck in the morning, my roommate wakes up seventeen times a night, and I might be losing my job because my shithead brother signed me into this fucking place, so you can go straight the fuck to hell,” Karkat replies.
“Are you this obnoxious later in the day, or did they just forget to give you your ativan last night?”
“I don’t even take ativan, dumbfuck.” He squares up. Maybe if he weren’t five foot one, you’d actually be afraid. “I’ll knock you out if you keep talking, though.��
Behind you, a guy with eyes so dark that they might be violet moves to plant a hand on Karkat’s shoulder. It’s your roommate, Gamzee Makara, who appears to sleep for fifteen hours a day. Karkat surprisingly refrains from flinching or scowling. You probably wouldn’t scowl at this guy if you had the opportunity either; he’s easily six foot four, his hair curling around his ears and sticking out worse than Karkat’s.
“Now there’s no reason to get up an’ motherfucking truculent with the new guy so early in the morning.”
Karkat rolls his eyes. “Makara, if you tell me to calm down and wait for the morning miracles, I’ll kill you too.”
“There’s no need to wait, Karbro. The sunrise is a miracle in and of itself. When I looked at the ceiling in my room, I saw miracles. Everywhere.”
“They need to put you on haldol, man.”
“I don’t need no helldogs telling me what to do. I just go with the flow.”
“Of course,” Karkat says, almost fondly. “You and your motherfucking miracles.”
When it’s nearly Karkat’s turn for vitals, Dirk escorts Roxy over to the nurses’ station. She blows a kiss at Karkat, who raises his hand in half-salute. Ignacio walks out of the charting room and takes a look at her.
“Miss Lalonde, I have medication for you. This’ll help with the shakes, hypertension, and sweating.”
Roxy puts her hands on her hips and winks at him. “Again, cutiepie?”
Ignacio rolls his eyes at her and shakes his head, his mohawk moving slightly with the motion. He hands her a medication cup and a paper cup of water. She swallows her medication down fluidly, without drinking any of the water. That has to be an xbox achievement.
During breakfast, as Eridan continues to scowl and bitch about his lack of breakfast (he has ECT today), and Karkat tells him to stop being an overdramatic fuckass before he stabs him with a fork, Dr. Vandayar pulls you aside for one of his “no big deal” discussions.
Otherwise known as morning check-in.
Truth be told, you rather like Dr. V, or Krishna, which is what he told you that you could call him, even though he has a doctorate.
He got you access to sharps, your body wash, and your clothes. He means well, and aside from when he checks in every morning, he doesn’t force you to talk if you don’t want to.
“How are you doing today, Mr. Captor?” he asks.
You shrug. “I’m okay, I guess. Pretty much the same as yesterday.”
Then come the “one to tens”, as you’ve come to think of them. Krishna has his little clipboard balanced on his thigh.
“Urges to hurt other people, one to ten?”
You think of Karkat Vantas and that smug fucking look on his face.
“Two.” It’s always less than three. Maybe that’s why he starts with it.
“Urges to hurt yourself, one to ten?”
You contemplate yesterday’s DBT handout, Roxy’s outburst about self-destruction, and its many varying connotations.
“Eight,” you reply.
“Suicidal thoughts, one to ten?”
“Nine.”
“Active or passive?”
“Passive, mostly. Fleetingly active. I don’t want to live if I’m going to burden people, the usual.”
“Do you have any plans to seriously harm yourself on the unit?”
“No. Not here,” you say. “Everything I’d want to do would require me to be outside.”
“I see,” Krishna says. “Have you been seeing or hearing things that aren’t really there?”
“No.”
“What about feeling like people are out to get you, or sending you special messages?”
“No. Nothing like that. I get enough of that shit at home.”
Dr. V does not laugh at your attempt to joke about your chaotic home life.
If you were to be completely honest, you’re wondering when your medications are going to start working, or if they’re going to start working. Talking to the other patients has been a double-edged sword. So many of them have been on a million different drugs without relief.
Logically, you know that it’ll probably take whatever you’re on more than a week to cure you, but… You’re scared. You’re not in full control and it scares you. There’s a reason you slit your throat. There’s a reason you’re here.
You’re scared the melancholy will wrap itself around you like a shroud, and never relinquish its hold. You’re scared you’ll hate yourself and this life forever.
“I thank you for your honesty, Sollux,” Dr. V says, once he makes his notes. “Any uses of target behaviors that I should be aware of?”
“I cut myself with a plastic knife on Friday evening. Not deep enough to need medical attention, though.”
You scan his expression for evidence of emotion, but he has the mother of all poker faces. All he does is write your answers down in his incomprehensible shorthand,
“How did that make you feel?” he asks. “Remember, it didn’t necessarily have to make you feel anything.”
You shrug. “It helped relieve the tension in the moment, I guess.”
“But it also made me feel disappointed later on,” you go on. “Disappointed at myself. I’m such a fucking idiot for relapsing.”
Dr. V jots this down as well, and shuffles through his papers.
“I wouldn’t use that language to describe yourself. Ridding yourself of maladaptive coping mechanisms can be quite difficult, especially if they have worked for you in the past,” he says. “Nevertheless, do you think you need to be on one-to-one for a few days? So that you stop hurting yourself while you’re here?"
You shake your head vehemently. “Absolutely not. I won’t do what I did again.”
“That is reassuring to hear. I’ll refrain from filling out the paperwork that would put you on constant observation for self-injury. That said, though, there is something you also need to do to prevent that.”
You roll your eyes a little. “You want me to contract for safety, don’t you? Like, filling out one of those sheets that says I’ll grab someone else before I decide to hurt myself. Otherwise I end up on one-to-one, right?”
Dr. V nods at you, before going on. “Yes, that is the general idea. You may either fill it out with me later on in the afternoon, or with a member of the staff with whom you are more comfortable.”
“I’d rather fill it out with you, to be perfectly honest. I trust you.”
He smiles. “I am very glad to hear that, Sollux. I don’t have any further questions for the moment.”’
You get out of your conference with Krishna, and walk into the dayroom.
Gamzee sits there, watching Good Morning America. He’s got a small smile on his face, and a faraway look in his eye, like he’s both here and not. You call his name to get his attention. It works, his dark eyes trained on you.
“You mind if I sit down?” you ask.
He shakes his head. “Naw, it’s cool. You can even change the channel if that’s somethin’ you wanna do.”
He’s built like a linebacker, all broad shoulders and muscles. He could probably snap you in half if he wanted to. You take the seat next to him and he smiles serenely at you.
“So what’s up?” he asks.
“Nothing, man. Just got outta session with Dr. V. He wanted to make sure I didn’t want to hurt myself.”
Gamzee looks thoughtful. He pulls a red paper flower out of his shorts and hands it to you.
“I folded that a couple days ago. You can have it, if you want.”
“For what?”
“For when you need to up an fuckin’ remember the miracles. Like we talked about last night.”
Last night, Gamzee harangued you at length about the Mirthful Messiahs, and the Dark Carnival, and with a practiced skill you have learned from your sibling’s rants about the NYPD following them, you tuned him out utterly. You really hope he doesn’t count you as a believer in his weird ass faith, which seems like some kind of psychotic juggalo cult.
He’s a nice guy, though. You know he’s not utterly harmless, but he seems easygoing enough. You fiddle around with and tear at a piece of paper until you have a square, which you then use to make a paper crane.
“Hey, Gamzee,” you say. He glances up at you.
“Yeah?”
You hand him the paper crane. “You know, the Japanese believe if you fold a thousand of these, you get a wish. I’m not folding a thousand cranes, but this is for you.”
“I will cherish it every day of my motherfucking life.”
You think he means it, too.
Art group is at 11. Katya herds everyone who wants to show up into the art room. So far, that’s you, Roxy, Karkat, June, Gamzee, Calliope, and Porrim. Karkat nods his head at you, and then inclines it toward the door. He wants to talk to you one-on-one. Whatever the fuck about?
He looks like he’s swallowed a lemon before he deigns to speak to you, all pursed lips and narrowed eyes. You’re tempted to ask him what the fuck’s eating him, and then he speaks.
“Listen. I want to apologize about earlier this morning,” he says. “I was in a foul fucking mood, and I need to work on not taking that shit out on other people.”
Wait, seriously? He can’t actually think you’re still upset about that; you get cursed out worse by your sibling on a daily basis, and that’s when they’re in a good mood.
“Accepted,” you reply. “Don’t worry about it, man.”
Faint relief breaks out on Karkat’s features.
Katya has all of you gather around before she constructs a box out of a weirdly shaped piece of cardboard that looks as if it’s been cut so that a small briefcase sized box could be constructed.
“These are what I like to call coping boxes. You make the box, and then you decorate it. You can put anything in here. Things that make you feel good, or that make you think, or handouts you get during other groups. Whatefur you want!”
She hands a box to each of you, after she puts out tempera and acrylic paint, colored markers, gel pens, and colored pencils.
You weren’t planning to keep any of your distress tolerance handouts in the box, but maybe you should. Gamzee’s staring at you while he paints, and that’s kind of weird, at least until you get a good look at how he’s decorating his coping box.
He’s painting halfway decent pictures of you, Roxy, Karkat, Calliope and Eridan on the front part of the box, with the word “friends”, in purple cursive.
He counts you as a friend even though the only thing you’ve really had to do with him was vaguely listen while he spouted his weird theories about the mirthful messiahs?
You have to hand it to him, though. Kid’s a real artist, probably - no, definitely - good enough to paint portraits for money over in Washington Square Park or something. Karkat gets a decent look at what Gamzee’s painting and blushes.
“Oh, come on, you didn’t have to put me on the damn box,” he says.
“But you are my best friend in the whole wide motherfucking universe,” Gamzee replies.
Karkat splutters something and looks like he’d like to object, then just sighs, and tells him to make sure he gets Karkat’s good side.
“Hey, Gamzee!” Roxy calls.
“Yes, Roxybro?”
“Does painting that mean you’re gonna paint me like one ‘a’ your French girls one of these days?”
Gamzee gives this a good half-minute of thought.
“I ain’t up an’ got any motherfuckin’ French girls.”
Meanwhile, you focus on your tree. It looks like a lollipop with antennae, but whatever, that’s going to be as good as it gets. You ask Katya if you can get a piece of paper to paint on, she “of course”s you and hands you a piece of printer paper.
What will you paint today, Sollux Captor? More trees?
Tears spring to your eyes, and just when you think the worst is over, they start trailing down your face. Roxy recoils and apologizes to you, thinking she’s done something, and all you do is cry harder, you fuckup. You can’t do a goddamn thing right. Only things you’re good for are fixing computers and having nervous breakdowns.
Katya looks up from praising Calliope and Gamzee’s collaboration, and walks up to you.
“Hey - no, it’s okay, mew don’t have to cover your face - what’s wrong?”
She crouches so that she’s eye level with you as you sit in your chair. It somehow makes you feel even worse, like you’re some small child that can’t control their emotional outbursts. Come to think of it, you were like this as a kid, too. Tuna was the outgoing twin who made all the friends, and you were the twin who would start crying if you accidentally colored outside the lines.
“It’s alright. If you don’t want to paint, maybe you’d like to go for a walk?” she asks. You shake your head emphatically.
“I’m sorry,” you say. “It’s just that I’ve never really been good at artistic stuff. Sorry I suck so bad.”
“Art group is not about being good or bad stylistically,” Katya says. “It’s about expressing yourself. As long as you’re doing that, you’re fine. I like your tree. You and Roxy are both excellent at trees.”
Roxy, who has been sitting next to you, using highlighters to draw what looks either like a really bad tree or a neon colored mushroom cloud, gives you a small little smile.
“Wanna draw with me?” she asks.
At first, you assume she’s found some oblique way to hit on you the way she does everyone else, but then she hands you the bottle of black tempera paint and a couple of colored markers. You don’t know what she expects you to do with them. Your tree sucks way more than hers.
“If you can’t think of anything to draw, why not try making patterns?” Katya asks.
You guess you can do that. You start drawing red and blue circles on your piece of paper, clustering them closer and closer together.
Apropos of nothing, you remember the time in undergrad where you and Ray couldn’t get back to campus in time to beat the blizzard. You and she slept overnight in your car, parked in a gas station. Outside, nothing but a vast, enveloping white, what you imagine death or infinity must look like. The whole world rendered down to the slope and curve of dunes and valleys.
If you think hard enough, you can feel the wind rocking the car, can imagine the sound of Ray’s teeth chattering, or the occasional slip of her hands as she does a tarot reading. Another one. Another one down, another one down, another one bites the dust, Queen playing through your radio speakers. She sits in the front passenger seat, one leg bent beneath her.
“You think we’re ever gonna get out of here?” she asks.
At this moment, you ask yourself that same question. It’s a little different, now.
You wish you could take your seven eighths of a computer engineering degree and come up with a way out of this, but you can’t. That’s your problem. You’re only you, and you’ve never been good at managing your emotions.
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Another commission for a lovely customer who requested a man who gets desperate at the waterpark with his girlfriend! Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy it!
Read it on Ao3
“Are you having fun, babe?”
Alex grimaces, doing his best to smile as he turns around in the pool, ignoring the way the cool water brushes up against his chest. He’s been at the waterpark with his girlfriend Nadia for four, maybe five hours now--it had been her idea, as a final end-of-summer activity before the two would have to return to their last year of university together--and for the first three and a half or so, he’d been having a great time. It’s sunny out, the perfect weather to go to the beach or the pool or a waterpark, they’ve already knocked all of their summer homework out of the way, and he’d just turned twenty-one earlier in the summer, meaning he’s finally legally allowed to drink.
Nadia has made sure to celebrate that last part over the course of the day, always ushering him back towards the bar at the far end of the park to grab more drinks. They’re not trying to get drunk--Alex is pretty sure he’ll want to remember what happened today when he wakes up tomorrow, and with his past experience with alcohol, anything past a few beers will probably make it so that he won’t remember a thing--but Nadia had been so convincing, always offering to pay and promising that she’ll stay sober enough to drive home without getting pulled over by the cops. And besides, it is their last week of summer break before school starts again. Doesn’t he deserve to live a little, get a little tipsy and have some fun?
That had been his mindset two hours ago, anyway, when he’d drank with no precautions. Now, he’s not thinking about having a good time before school starts. Now he isn’t thinking about anything that isn’t the throbbing ache coming from his bladder, reminding him every second of exactly how much beer he’d had throughout the day. Four big, viking-worthy glasses, probably closer to half a pitcher than a mug, plus the water he’d insisted on having alongside it to keep himself from going too far too fast. God, no wonder his need is so strong. He can’t even remember when it was he last went to the bathroom, either--was it all the way at the beginning of the day, so many hours ago?
“Alex?” Nadia sing-songs, snapping him out of his trance as she swims closer to him, pressing a hand to his chest. “Are you having a good time?”
“Of course,” Alex says automatically, squeezing his legs tight together under the water. They’re situated roughly in the middle end of the wave pool, where they’ve been wading for about a half an hour, diving under the water and chasing each other around, having races to see who’s the faster swimmer. (Alex, being on the swim team in high school, usually won, but sometimes he let Nadia win just for fun.) The waves are turned off right now, but he’s pretty sure they’re gearing up to come back any second now, as they’ve been coming and going in fifteen minute intervals since they arrived.
It’s fairly easy to move around right now, too; the water is calm, the floaties and foam toys spread around the pool are all at a standstill, and there aren’t many children darting around in the shallow end, blocking the path to get out. It would be a perfect time to excuse himself to the bathroom and take care of his rather pressing need, which is pretty much the only thing he wants to do at the moment.
But Nadia is here, smiling up at him happily as she treads water (it’s cute that she’s so short she can barely stand in the deep end, but he can’t focus on that right now) with an expectant look in her eyes. She’s having fun where she is, in the pool with him, and the last thing he wants to do is ruin it for her over some silly need he should have more control over as a twenty-one year old man. He can hold it for just a little bit longer, if it means she’ll have a few more minutes of fun.
“I bet I can beat you to the deep end!” Nadia exclaims, her mouth curling into a little grin as she pushes her dark hair, sleek with water, over her shoulder. “Come on, before the waves start up again!”
“What are you, five?” Alex laughs tightly, even though he’s the one in the childish situation. He feels more five than he has in a while, all thanks to the urges coming from his abdomen. There’s no way he’ll be able to race her again without making himself seriously desperate, but he doesn’t want to flat-out say no to her. (Saying no to Nadia is probably his least favorite thing in the universe, and it shows.)
“Scared you’ll lose?” Nadia taunts, eyes glimmering with mirth as she does so. “Come on, it will be fun!”
And it’s that sight, the look on her face which she’s given him a thousand times before, that finally makes Alex put aside his uncomfortableness and agree. “Alright, fine,” he sighs, playing along with her challenge. “Last one to the deep end is a rotten egg.”
“Yeah!” Nadia crows triumphantly, before running a hand across the surface of the pool towards Alex, splashing him in the face with drops of cool water before she takes off. Alex laughs, diving into the water and chasing after her, putting all his strength into kicking beneath the surface with his muscular legs.
Fuck . If he’d thought treading water with a full bladder was hard, it’s nothing compared to actually swimming. With each kick he feels like he’s about to leak, his legs spreading apart and muscles growing tired with every stroke. Having his legs forced apart over and over again is borderline painful, and since his arms are busy propelling him forward in the water, there’s nothing left to keep the pressure on his crotch from the outside. God, he can feel the pee just sitting there, begging to be let out.
But he can’t pee in the pool! There are so many other people there, enjoying their family vacations together in the same body of water that he’s in. It would be more than rude to contaminate the water they were swimming in with his body’s own type of water, regardless of whether anyone else could tell or not. And besides, he wouldn’t want to be swimming in it, either.
“I win!” Nadia cries as he surfaces, his hands shooting up to hold onto the wall when he wishes they could shoot down to hold his penis instead. He settles for crossing his legs under the water and moving his hips back and forth as gracefully as he can, hoping that the wave of pressure he’d just felt goes away as quickly as it had come. “You know what that means. Loser buys another round of drinks!”
“Ah,” Alex pants, glancing warily towards the bar as he continues to fidget underwater. “More drinks? I’m not really thirsty, you know…”
“You don’t drink beer because you’re thirsty,” Nadia points out with a pout. “You drink it ‘cause it’s fun. Besides, it’s hot out! Don’t you want to stay hydrated?”
I’m plenty hydrated enough, thank you! his mind protests. I don’t think I could put more liquid in me if I tried!
“I’ll buy something for you,” he reasons instead, hoping his voice doesn’t give him away. “I’m already feeling buzzed enough.”
Nadia’s pout deepens, but she moves on fairly quickly as the water around them shifts. “Oh, the waves are starting again!” she exclaims excitedly as the pool around them begins to fill with movement. “Come on, let’s swim back to the other end so I can stand!”
With that, she turns around in the water and kicks off from the wall, gliding through the waves effortlessly, like some kind of Grecian goddess. Her long, dark hair trails behind her, clinging to her back when she resurfaces, but Alex doesn’t have the capabilities to appreciate his girlfriend’s figure right about then.
His entire body is frozen against the wall as his head fills with the sound of water splashing against water, crashing upon the sides of the pool and lapping at his chest. All of a sudden the only thing he can hear is dripping, churning, running water, and the noises seem to be going straight from his brain to his bladder.
God, he hadn’t realized how seriously bad he needed to go until now, with waves upon waves of liquid moving around him. His bladder feels so full and heavy inside of him, like a water balloon that’s overfilled and ready to pop at any second. All those beers, all that water… It’s all still inside of him, and he’d bet that there’s even more still traveling down from his kidneys into his bladder, ready to overinflate it even more than it already is.
He sucks in a deep breath and presses the front of his body further against the wall, trying his best to create pressure against his crotch. He doesn’t dare grind down--the wall of the pool is rather gritty, and he’d prefer not to harm his genitals in any way if he can help it--but it’s a tough battle to fight. He wishes the water weren’t so clear so that he could reach down and grab himself without anyone there to judge him, but the waterpark is so crowded, and he’s sure he wouldn’t be able to get away with it. (Oh, but holding himself sounds absolutely heavenly right about then.)
Nadia, who had already swam a few feet away, turns back to give him a questioning look. “Aren’t you coming?” she asks, thankfully not noticing his strange body language, his hunched shoulders or gritted jaw. “Come on, my legs are getting tired.”
“C-Coming,” Alex says, thrusting his hips forward against the wall one more time before pushing off towards the shallow end. He doesn’t dare front crawl his way over this time--that would be much too much for his poor, swollen bladder to handle. Instead he doggy paddles towards the shallower side of the pool, trying his best to appear normal in front of the families that are watching him.
Inside his body, his bladder throbs agonizingly, demanding that he release its contents as soon as he can. He sucks his lip between his teeth as he paddles over, clenching his sphincter muscles as hard as he can until he makes it far enough that he’s able to stand. As soon as he does that, he crosses one leg over the other and bobs up and down in the water, breathing heavily as he shifts his hips from side to side. He needs to get to a bathroom as soon as possible or he’s going to get wet in an entirely different way (one that will be much less fun for everyone involved).
Reluctantly, Alex uncrosses his legs and moves forward, but every step sends tiny vibrations up his legs and across his abdomen. He gasps as a strong urge hits him, bending forward at the waist and locking his knees together under the water to fight against the throbbing pressure. His hands ball into fists at his sides, nails digging into the skin of his palms as he does his best not to let them fly to the front of his swim trunks. If he was worried about people seeing him in the deep end, there’s no way he’d be able to go unnoticed in the shallow side.
He’s just deep enough for the waves to crash straight against his abdomen, water licking at his bladder from the other side, tempting it to release without his permission. “ Ah, ” he gasps, grabbing the front of his thigh and hooking one knee over the other in an attempt to keep himself from going right then, right there. He needs to get himself under control, and soon, before his desperation reaches uncharted levels. Unsteadily, he staggers forward, only to suck in a sharp, pained gasp as his lower body leaves the water.
If he thought his need was bad before, it’s absolutely nothing compared to what he’s feeling now. It feels as if another pint of beer has just been dumped straight into his bladder, filling it to the brim and stretching it to its utmost limit. He realizes with a start that the water from the pool had been the only thing keeping him on the safer edge of desperation--it had made the gravitational pull on his bladder feel lesser, creating a buoyant effect on the poor organ without him noticing, and now that the pressure of the water isn’t on him, gravity is catching up.
His hands begin to fly to his crotch, only to flutter away at the last second as he uses his last bit of willpower to keep them at his sides. Insteadhe sucks his lip between his teeth and stifles a moan, half-falling back into the water around him and sighing with relief when the agonizing pressure goes away. He can still feel hot, throbbing pain coming from his abdomen, but now that he’s surrounded by the pool water again, he doesn’t feel on the verge of exploding anymore.
Still, he needs to get to a toilet as soon as possible, and it’s not likely that he’ll be able to hold it if he lifts himself out of the pool again. What is he supposed to do now? The nearest bathrooms are on the other side of the waterpark, and there’s no way in hell he’d let himself be seen hobbling around a family gathering area with his hands between his legs like some kind of pervert. Besides, he isn’t even sure he’d be able to make it to those restrooms without completely losing control along the way. He’s so desperate, he can barely think straight, and he knows for sure his face must be all red and twisted up in pain by now.
As much as he hates to admit it, he’s pretty sure that he’s only got one option left: he’s going to have to pee in the pool. It’s something he’s never done before--even as a child, he’d always held it in long enough to get to the bathrooms, even though he’d thought they were pretty gross. (And doing that had sure given him some close calls, and a few extra wet spots on his swim shorts, but hey, it’s probably best not to think about those right now.)
So, he’s going to contaminate the pool with his own bodily fluids. It should be easy--the sound of roaring, splashing water surrounds him, teasing him with the premise of relief every second, and the pool water itself is cool enough that it’s making his bladder more than a little uncomfortable. But it’s hard , trying to consciously pee where he’s not supposed to, when he knows it’s taboo, especially for a full-grown adult such as himself. He sighs again, squatting down in the shallow water and doing his best to relax, unclench his muscles, and think of the promise of relief he’s only seconds away from…
And at last, he feels a dribble of urine escape from his bladder and trail through his urethra, creating a tiny spot of warmth in the pool water at the head of his dick. He sighs, letting his head fall back and his arms float to the surface of the pool as his stream picks up, his bladder just starting to become a bit less swollen, a little bit emptier. He can feel the water around him, still rocked by waves, growing warm with his own piss, and… To be honest, it’s a little bit hot. He’s always been a bit of a stickler for the rules, but now, doing something so naughty as peeing in a public pool, without anyone else knowing that he’s doing it… He’s just starting to enjoy the feeling when he feels a pair of arms wrap around him from behind.
“Ah!” he exclaims, jumping forward, but the arms around his middle stay secured. His body freezes, locks up again, the stream of urine stopping abruptly as he stiffens up under the touch, and immediately he misses the relief he’d only just begun to get. His penis throbs, aching in time with his abdomen, and he hisses in pain as the arms around him tighten.
“Alex,” Nadia whines, pressing her front side against his back, molding herself to him. “What’s going on? You were just standing there with your eyes closed.”
“Nadia…” Alex breathes, shifting his weight from foot to foot underwater. He’s uncomfortable, he’s so uncomfortable , seconds away from peeing full-force into the pool again, but he can’t, not with Nadia so close to him.
“Aren’t you having fun?” Nadia asks, and he knows her so well he swears he can hear the pout in her voice. “You seem so stiff, babe. What’s wrong?”
With that, she tightens her hands around his waist, pulling him closer to her body… and subsequently squishing his bladder under her fingers. Alex gasps sharply, curling in on himself and finally letting his hands fly to the front of his swim shorts to hold onto his crotch. Even with the added external pressure, he can feel the water around him growing warm, the pressure on his bladder far too much for him to handle.
“Stop, stop!” he pants, but doesn’t dare push her away. Even if it cost him his own life (or in this case, his dignity) he would never even consider pushing Nadia away. Instead, he shifts his hips from side to side, leaning forward so far his chest touches the water and hooking one leg over the other, bobbing up and down urgently as he does.
Thankfully, Nadia picks up on the problem quickly. She loosens her arms around him, keeping one hand pressed to his chest while the other sifts through the water in front of him. “Oh?” she questions, and this time Alex is sure he can hear mischief in her voice. “What’s this? The water’s all warm over here…”
“I-Is it?” Alex repeats, keeping his hands glued tight to his crotch as he stems off the flow. (It hurts, he’s still so desperate, but now that he’s been caught, it just feels morally wrong to keep going.)
“It is…” With that, Nadia lets her hand trail down to the front of his stomach and pushes down once again, just once. Her other hand comes down to cup over his fingers as his breath hitches and he lets out a short spurt of pee. It takes an immense amount of effort to cut himself off once again, and his bladder protests with a series of agonized pulses, but he refuses to let himself continue to go.
“I see what’s going on,” Nadia says coyly, and Alex thanks the heavens when she removes her hand from his stomach to glide around to his other side. “Alex… You’re being a bad boy, aren’t you? Doing something like that in a public pool?”
“I-I couldn’t help it,” Alex stammers, biting at his lip until it turns red.
“Couldn’t help it?” Nadia repeats teasingly. “Couldn’t help but get all of us in here dirty? The waves are on, you know. That stuff you’re putting in here is gonna spread.”
“I’m s-sorry,” Alex gasps, hooking his knees together and bobbing up and down once again. “I just- I needed to go, and-”
“No, no,” Nadia shushes him, sticking a pool-slick finger to his lips. “No excuses, babe. You’re a grown man, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be able to hold it until you get to the bathroom?”
“But I-”
“Shh… Come on, you know I’m right.”
Alex inhales shakily, his whole body still tense and rigid from desperation. The warmth of his piss has been washed away by the waves at this point, but he can still feel the urine inside of him pushing to get out. “You’re right,” he says, hoping that she’ll leave it at that and finally allow him to finish what he’d started.
“Did you let go completely?” Nadia asks, her gaze dropping to the area just above his swim trunks. “Are you empty now, you little rulebreaker? It certainly doesn’t look like you are.”
“I- I’m not,” Alex admits, his voice going high-pitched as another wave of need overtakes him. He whimpers, clutching his dick tighter between his hands and pressing the front of his left thigh into the back of his right with all the force he can muster. “I still need to go, bad .”
“Well,” Nadia says, sounding all too pleased. “I certainly can’t allow you to keep going here , of all places. You’ll need to make it to the bathroom if you want to finish relieving yourself.”
Alex jerks his head up to meet her gaze, his eyes going wide. “But- But-” he stammers, a protest half-formed in the back of his mind, but one look from Nadia has him biting his tongue instead of continuing his sentence. The game is afoot now, and no matter how much pain and embarrassment it might bring him, he knows he’s going to play along anyway, for her sake.
Still, it doesn’t make the idea of walking to the bathrooms any more appealing. He already feels like he’s on the verge of spurting again, and if he gets out of the water and forces himself to walk normally, he’s sure he’ll have a full-on accident within the next minute.
“Isn’t there any other way?” he asks shakily, staring off in the direction of the restrooms. If he were in his normal condition, it would probably only be a three or four minute walk, but with the ball of hot, acrid piss inside of him controlling his every move, it’ll probably take at least double that to even reach the other side of the park. And what if there’s a line? Is he supposed to stand there and wait when he’s on the brink of pissing himself for all to see?
“Do you see any other bathrooms around here?” Nadia challenges, raising an eyebrow at him. “Come on, come on! The sooner you get out of the pool, the sooner you get to go!”
She grabs him by the arm and pulls him just a tad too roughly towards the shallow exit of the pool, where the water is just beginning to settle down from the waves. Alex reluctantly lets go of his crotch, and immediately lets out a strangled groan as he experiences the effects of gravity on his body for the second time that day. He wonders how the hell it feels exactly the same as it had before he’d “contaminated” the pool, despite how much he must have let out. Is his last beer hitting him already?
“Nadia, can you… slow down a little?” he manages as his girlfriend struts ahead, beads of water dripping down her body from her one-piece swimsuit. Normally, Alex would take this opportunity to stare at the amount of skin she has on show, but he’s too distracted with his own body. Every muscle he has is clenched tight, his arms and legs stiff and rigid, thighs pressed close together with every step. It’s absolute torture, having to walk like there’s nothing wrong, when it’s all he can do not to grab himself and dance around like a little kid.
They’ve made it maybe ten steps, and each one has sent extremely unpleasant vibrations up through his leg and straight into his core, jostling the liquid inside of him each time his foot lands on the ground. He winces, keeping his eyes trained on the floor to avoid any strange looks people might be shooting his way, and attempts to take a larger step to make it to the bathrooms as fast as he possibly can.
His foot lands on a particularly cool puddle of water, and all of a sudden he feels a hot jet of pee squirt out of his dick and onto the floor. He freezes in place, eyes going wide as he draws his legs in quickly and presses his thighs against each other, doing everything he can mentally to keep himself from breaking out into a full-out dance of desperation. Warmth runs down his legs from inside his shorts, and he barely manages to cut off the flow this time, so paralyzed by fear that he can barely get his body to listen to him.
“Nngh… Nadia, ” he hisses, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “I can’t…”
He hears footsteps pad back towards him through the shallow puddles on the floor, and then a hand comes to rest gently on his shoulder. “Come on, babe,” Nadia says, half-encouraging, half-commanding. “You can make it. Do it for me, okay?”
“But-”
“I’ll be so happy if you make it all the way,” Nadia says, her hand reaching around to curl at the back of his neck. “Won’t you at least try? Just for me?”
And fuck, if that doesn’t strengthen Alex’s resolve just enough to keep him going despite the raging need overtaking him, he’s not sure that anything will. With a muffled moan, he straightens up from his twisted, bent-in-half posture, takes a few shallow breaths, and opens his eyes. The sight of water flowing all around him does nothing to help his current situation, but he determinedly fixes his eyes on a dry spot on the wall and takes a shaky step forward, ignoring the wetness beginning to cool and become sticky on his legs.
He will make it to the bathroom, if only just to get far enough to wet himself somewhere private. If Nadia asks him to make it, he’s determined to do as she says, no matter if he thinks it’s within his capabilities or not. Even though his bladder is straining out from the waistband of his swim trunks, sending urgent messages increasingly quickly that he needs to let go now , or else. Even if he feels five seconds from exploding on the spot, so filled with beer and water that he isn’t sure how in the world he’s still hanging on. There’s nothing he won’t do for Nadia--he’s sure of that.
Another jet of hot, wet piss escapes him, but he grits his teeth and clenches his sphincter muscles together with a groan that gets lost in the sounds of the waterpark, and cuts it off once again. He can’t help but pause mid-step and shift his hips around in small, quick circles, and wish as hard as he can that he could put pressure on his crotch, even for just a few seconds . Any outside help would be much appreciated at the moment, but he knows if he lets himself grab his dick now, there’s no way he’ll be able to let go without losing the battle entirely. So instead he clenches his fists at his sides and bites down hard on his lip, taking another step towards the bathroom, a step towards release.
“That’s it, baby,” Nadia encourages him, her voice dropping low and smooth as she guides him through the crowd. “Just a little longer, and then you can pee to your heart’s content.”
“Ah… Ahh… ” he pants, eyes fluttering as they pass another section of the park. This one he’d noticed when they first walked in--it’s the kid’s area, complete with a wooden play structure and several buckets that fill to the top before tipping out onto the ground and the children below it. Were he in a better state, he’d compare his bladder to the buckets, as full as it can get and seconds away from wobbling over and spilling all over the ground in a loud rush of warm, sticky urine, coating his legs and his feet and spreading into a huge puddle on the ground.
“ Mmh !” he gasps, catching himself on Nadia’s shoulder as he bends forward. His knees turn inwards, locking together like magnets as he curls an arm protectively around his stomach, squeezing his eyes shut tight as he tries to rid himself of the mental image. Thinking about relieving himself, wetting himself at that, is a definite no-go right now. His body surely won’t be able to handle thoughts like that while battling a bladder this full.
“You have no idea how good you look right now, Alex,” Nadia says breathlessly, close to his ear. He feels her breath ghost over his cheek warmly, and raises his head just enough so that he can look into her eyes.
I’m doing this for you, he thinks passionately, too unsteady to trust himself to speak. It will all be worth it, when I make you proud…
“Come on,” Nadia says again, lower this time. “Let’s get moving. I want to get there as much as you do, you know.”
It’s a strange sentiment, but Alex can’t bring himself to think much about it right now. Instead he hobbles forward, taking smaller, more delicate steps to keep his bladder from being jostled around too badly. “Okay,” he agrees hoarsely, his voice shaking from want. Nadia smiles at him, secretive and seductive, then turns back around and continues on towards the bathrooms, her hips swaying back and forth as she moves. Alex stumbles after her, keeping one hand wrapped around his stomach. Maybe if he looks sick enough, people will move out of his way and leave him alone, and he’ll be able to get there faster.
They’re maybe a minute’s walk away from the bathrooms now at the rate he’s going. Every step is torture, feeling the slickness of tiny puddles under the pads of his feet, and hearing the rush of water, seeing it splash and flow everywhere he looks, but the look in Nadia’s eyes when she turns to check on him keeps him going. He’s not sure why, but he feels like she’s promising him something, if he can make it all the way there.
He counts the seconds to keep his mind from turning traitor on him, and just when they’ve reached fifty-two, he raises his eyes and almost starts to cry from relief. There, right in front of him, is the sign pointing to the bathrooms, located just around the corner. Finally! he thinks, a smile melting across his face. I can finally go! I’m so close! I just need to round the corner, and then I’ll finally be able to…
Oh.
No.
As he turns the corner, his eyes land upon the men’s bathroom, just a few feet down the hall… And the line that trails out of it. His bladder screams in horror as he takes in the dozen or so boys and men who are waiting patiently for their turn in the bathroom in varying levels of discomfort. He can see a few young boys shifting their wait around awkwardly, and even one or two of the men have uncomfortable grimaces across their faces, but none of them seem to be in the state of pure, anguished distress that’s wracking through him at the moment.
“No…” he whimpers, eyes beginning to water as hope seeps out of him. He’d been so close , so close to relief, to finally being able to empty himself… Now there’s no way he’ll be able to make it into the bathroom with his dignity still intact. And here, far away from the roaring water of the pool, everyone will be able to tell if he lets go and re-wets his swim trunks where he isn’t supposed to.
“Don’t worry,” Nadia says, and then a cool hand is sliding around his arm and pulling him in a different direction. “I have other plans for you, baby. Come with me.”
At peak desperation, Alex has no choice but to follow limply. His eyes light up as he notices where she’s dragging him; he can make out a sign proclaiming Single Stall Family Bathroom further between the walls of the park’s end, and if the little green tag on the door is anything to go by, it must be vacant. His bladder practically gives out the second she throws open the door, his eyes immediately hooked on the toilet in the corner of the room, and he can’t help but reach down to squeeze himself with all his might to keep the flood at bay for just a few seconds longer…
But before he can rush forward and whip himself out, Nadia is closing and locking the door behind him, and immediately pushing herself against him, locking her lips with his as she presses him into the door with a bang . “ Oh ,” Alex moans, eyes fluttering as he clutches himself through his shorts. “ Oh, Nadia, stop… I’m going to wet myself, I’m going to have an accident! ”
“No, you’re not,” Nadia says in a voice that screams sex. “Here, I’ll help you.”
With that, her hand dives down and joins his at his crotch, her fingers brushing up against his penis through the saturated fabric of his shorts, and the sensation of his girlfriend’s hand on him combined with the unbelievably urgency of his bladder is almost too much for him to handle. He lets out a cry of need, louder than he’d ever want to in a public space, and bucks up into her touch frantically, searching for more, more, more .
“Nadia, please,” he begs, a tear forming in the corner of his eye. “Please, I need… Oh… Ahh!”
“Shh,” Nadia shushes him, her other finger coming up to press against his lips as she continues to fondle him delicately. Her hand slips around his dick, fitting it within her fist as he starts to fill out despite his body’s needs. “I know just what you need, baby. Let me give it to you.”
“ Mh… Ah- Ah! ” Alex moans, surprised to find that he’s actually becoming quite hard. He’s never really tried to get hard while he’s desperate to go before; normally, Nadia has him hold it for her, and then they have sex. He’s also surprised to find that he kind of likes it, the experience of being full to the brim, bursting at the seams, and being touched like this at the same time.
“That’s right,” Nadia coos, then presses her lips to his again, fitting her body flush against his and grinding her leg against his crotch. Alex manages to tear his hand away, if only to get more friction from his girlfriend’s thigh against his cock. He doesn’t even care that there’s a toilet less than five feet away from him… He’s so turned on that the need to pee has come second in his mind’s ranking of what’s important right now.
In fact, he can feel himself start to lose it once again, his bladder rejecting the urine it’s been forced to store for so long. He moans hotly into Nadia’s mouth, and she clenches her fist tight around him, cutting off the stream as soon as she can feel it on her hand.
“Who said you had permission to go yet?” she murmurs seductively, her lips brushing his. “Come on, babe. You know better than that.
“S-Sorry,” Alex pants, eyelids fluttering as Nadia trails her fingers up his body, stopping at his bladder. “Please, no… If you do that, I’ll-”
“Don’t worry,” Nadia whispers, “I’m not that cruel. But I do think you need a punishment for letting go without permission.”
“Wh- What?”
“Hm…” Nadia taps her finger against her chin a few times, before her eyes light up once again. “I know,” she says decisively, and begins to move even closer, pressing her body against his. His hardness slots between her legs perfectly, the insides of her thighs warming the tented fabric of his swimsuit. She must be standing on her toes to get this angle on him, and even through the haze of desperation and arousal, he can’t help but find it cute.
“Wh- What are you d-doing?” he manages, but Nadia doesn’t reply. Her body is molded to his, chest pressed against him, legs squished up against his. Her weight settles lightly on his bladder, and he flinches back further against the door, but she doesn’t put any more pressure on it than she’s putting on the rest of his body. For one holy second, he wonders if he’s safe from her teasing, if maybe his “punishment” isn’t going to be so bad after all.
That’s when he feels the wetness start to collect in his swimsuit.
Alex gasps, his hand flying down to the front of his shorts to clutch himself, cut off the flow of hot, golden piss that’s somehow escaping him--only it’s not . It takes him a second to realize that he isn’t the one who’s peeing; Nadia is. Crushed up against him, with his dick between her legs, she’s the one letting go, getting her fluids all over the floor of the bathroom, and all over him. He lets out a strangled moan as the sound of splattering fills the room, as urine soaks the fabric around his incredibly sensitive penis. His bladder contracts harshly, and he can’t help but add his own little burst of piss into the mix, but being as hard as he is, it’s not as easy for him to let go as it might have been a few minutes ago.
Somehow, despite being the worst kind of torture he could possibly imagine, the idea of Nadia releasing herself onto him is almost… kind of hot, as well. He’s never really been into this kind of stuff the same way that she has, but something about her giving him a punishment for disobeying her command reminds him just how much he wants to please her, to make it up to her. He sucks in ragged breaths of air as she continues to go, pressed against his body so that the urine runs down both of them, and squeezes his eyes tightly shut, biting his lip against the need to relieve himself with her.
It feels like the moment never ends, and yet within half a minute, Nadia’s stream is tapering off, and she’s pulling away from him, using her pointer finger to trace a line down his cock, which is still straining hard inside of his shorts, oversensitive to the touch. He’s pretty sure his erection is the only thing keeping him from losing control of his body entirely, making him needy and desperate in a different way from before.
“Keep going, please ,” he pants, lip caught between his teeth as his eyes flutter open to meet Nadia’s. She smiles at him sweetly, and for a split second he’s sure she’ll indulge him just this once, but instead she steps back a few paces, drawing her hand away from his body and towards her own.
“I would,” she starts coyly, “but where’s the fun in that? I mean, what kind of reward would that be if I didn’t even give you a challenge?”
“ Nadia ,” Alex groans, reaching down to stroke himself without thinking. He’s so hard, so painfully erect, and combined with the fullness and sensitivity of his poor bladder, he’s pretty sure he won’t last another minute without coming or peeing, or both.
“What about this?” Nadia grins wolfishly at him, and he just knows something bad is coming. He can see it in the way her eyes sparkle mischievously, in the curve of her smile. “If you can make it back to the car, I’ll give you something even better than a handjob. You know what I mean?”
She winks, adorable, terrible, and teasing. Alex whimpers as she reaches out to remove his hand from his penis, where he’d been stroking it up and down almost without meaning to. He’s so overstimulated, he feels like he’s going to combust if he doesn’t come soon… But the idea of having sex with Nadia sounds all too tempting in the moment…
“C-Couldn’t we just do it here?” he asks shakily, eyeing the all too inviting toilet over her shoulder. He’s pretty sure he’ll start pissing the second he’s allowed to come, and he’d prefer to have somewhere to go nearby for when that happens. Plus, he really isn’t sure he’d be able to make it to the car--the parking lot is just outside the waterpark entrance, which is on the other side of the park. Walking past all that splashing, flowing water again… He shudders violently just thinking about it.
“Absolutely not,” Nadia says, mock offense in her voice. “There’s not enough privacy here! What if some family is standing outside right now, waiting to use the restroom, and they hear somebody moaning and panting from inside?”
“B-But-”
“It’s either in the car or not at all, Alex,” Nadia tells him firmly. Her voice has that kind of subtle command to it that most people don’t notice, but most people aren’t Alex. He’s had years to learn all about Nadia’s subtly voiced commands, and he’d consider himself an expert on this tone in particular at this point.
He must be absolutely insane, to give up the chance for the release he’s been craving for almost an hour and a half now, just to chase a different kind of release he hadn’t even wanted up until five or ten minutes ago. Any sane person would have kindly declined, let their body decide which need was more important, instead of letting what’s between their legs think for them. But Alex is so incredibly turned on right now, hard and straining visibly through his swim shorts, and every breath makes the fabric brush up against his dick so tantalizingly… He doesn’t think he can handle not taking Nadia up on her offer.
“Okay,” he pants, completely out of breath. His face feels flushed redder than a ripe tomato, and he’s sure he looks like a total wreck, even to people who don’t know he’s seconds away from exploding in more ways than one… But he doesn’t have it in him to care anymore. Even if he has to clutch himself all the way to the car, even if he has to stop every few seconds to dance around like a little child… He’s determined now more than ever to make it through the parking lot, and get his reward.
Nadia draws closer, leaning up on her tiptoes to press her lips against his one last time, before she pulls him away from the door and latches onto the handle, holding it open and swinging herself around to the other side. Alex takes as deep a breath as he can, trying his best not to squish his bladder any further, and casts one long, wistful glance back at the toilet sitting mere feet away from him, practically calling his name. He must be insane… But if there’s anything that sounds better than pissing his need away right now, it’s having the hottest sex of his life with his girlfriend.
With his mind made up, he turns and exits the bathroom once again, his bladder absolutely screaming in protest as he once again denies it the release it craves. He glances down and catches sight of the gentle swell of his bladder poking out from his stomach, as well as the not so subtle tent at the front of his shorts. He grimaces at both sights, hoping no one will pay him much mind as he hobbles out into the passageway behind Nadia. They must seem suspicious, a young couple walking out of a single-stall bathroom together, one with a clear erection and the other with an air of satisfaction about her. It’s crazy that they seem like that before they’ve even had a chance to have sex.
Alex has never been much of an exhibitionist; usually, his logic prevents him from doing anything as risky as this, but he finds that he doesn’t have it in him to care at this very second. Half of his mind is focusing on not coming in his shorts, the tantalizing brush of wet, saturated fabric against his most sensitive area a kind of torture he’s never known before. He’s pretty sure he’s never been this hard before, never needed sex so urgently. He feels the same way actors pretend to feel in cheesy pornos, where they beg and plead for their partners to let them come this very minute , or they’ll simply explode.
The other half of his brain is having relatively similar thoughts, although these are coming from his bursting bladder rather than his raging erection. His mind is occupied with keeping every liquid he can inside of his body, denying himself even the tiniest of leaks. He feels seconds away from losing the battle and flooding the floor around him with warm, golden urine, creating a pool of his own and at last feeling comfortable and empty again. The thought is so tempting that he feels himself spurt, despite his hard on, and has to bite his tongue hard to keep him from gasping out loud.
Uncaring of what anyone else thinks anymore, he shoves a hand into his crotch, squeezing his cock as hard as he can and hooking one leg over the other, making low whimpering sounds in the back of his throat as he tries to regain control. It feels like he’s holding back a literal ocean, and he’s reminded once again of the pints and pints of beer he’d ingested earlier, without ever once considering the desperate state they might leave him in. God, he can’t imagine that there’s even an ounce of space left in his poor, overfilled bladder. What if all of the beer hasn’t made its way inside yet? Can he possibly fit another drop?
He doesn’t ever remember being this desperate before, and there have been plenty of times when he’d lost control from less. Nadia likes to make him hold it at home, although she usually drags him into the shower with his clothes still on before he reaches this level of need. And even before he’d met her, there had been times when he’d been too busy at work or studying to get up and take care of his situation, which had left him feeling plenty full. Still, he doesn’t think he’s been this bursting in his entire life, in all twenty-one years of existence.
“Come on, babe,” Nadia says from above him (he must have hunched over at some point, because she’s usually about a head shorter than he is). “You’ve gotta keep going if you want your reward. Don’t worry, I’ll walk fast. I want to get there, too, you know.”
Alex can’t decide if it would be better for her to walk fast, and get him to the car quicker, or walk slow, and give his overworked body a break. He settles for clamping his mouth shut and hobbling after her, half-bent over and with a hand clutching his penis through his shorts. With every step he takes, the friction from his hand and swimsuit drive him crazy, and he feels tiny drops of urine escape from the head of his dick at the same time. Positively sure he can’t stop them, he settles for clenching his jaw tight and praying that the little dribbles don’t become a stream anytime soon.
They’re almost at the entrance to the park, and Alex is starting to regret letting his dick do the thinking for him. Sure, he’s still incredibly horny, and slipping inside his girlfriend would probably feel like heaven right now, but he’s pretty sure wetting himself in front of a thousand strangers at a kid-friendly waterpark would kill any erection he might have had before.
And oh , is he close to wetting himself. His abdomen feels like it’s been filled to the very top with water, and it’s all racing to get out, filling out his dick both with blood and with a thin stream of pee. He feels a longer jet escape and moans embarrassingly loudly, letting his other hand join his first clutching at his penis as he bobs up and down on one leg. He feels like a little kid, forced to hold it until he has permission to go, with a tiny bladder and a one-track mind. (Well, he supposes he’s a little more evolved than that--he is focusing on both not peeing himself and not coming, after all.)
With his hands between his legs, bent over forwards with his legs locked together at the knees, he presses on. People must be giving him the strangest looks, but he doesn’t pay them any mind, intent on getting to the car and finally taking care of his still raging erection. His eyes focus on the shape of Nadia’s body as she leads him out through the gates and into the massive parking lot, trying to keep his mind off of his bladder and think about his incredibly sexy girlfriend instead.
His foot hits the pavement, and immediately he’s hit with a gust of cold air as his body leaves the walls of the waterpark. Alex feels a full-body shudder and gasps as his bladder contracts sharply, eyes widening as he feels a long, three-second burst of piss explode past his sphincter muscles and re-wet his previously cold bathing suit. His legs, already sticky from half-dried piss, wobble under his body, and he moans once again, clutching himself as tightly as he can to get the flow to stop.
“Nadia, Nadia !” he whisper-shouts, eyes practically crossing with the power of his desperation. “I need to go, I- I need to pee , now! I- haaah- can’t hold it!”
Nadia turns around, one hand on her hip, looking thoroughly unimpressed, yet he can tell from the spark in her expression that she’s still just as turned on as he is. “What, you can’t make it to the car?” she challenges, raising an eyebrow at him. “We parked so close to the entrance, though. It’s only what, thirty or forty feet away?”
“I can’t ,” Alex cries, tears forming in the corners of his eyes. “I- I need to go so bad , I- haah, I have to go!”
Nadia steps forward and reaches down, pressing her own hand against his penis, and Alex moans again, torn between wanting friction and release. “Come on, baby,” she says, her voice low and sultry. “Don’t you want me? You know you can only have me if you make it.”
“I’m trying , b-but I’m so full ,” Alex gasps, panting, eyes rolling up to meet Nadia’s. “ Please, just let me-”
“No,” Nadia says. “You don’t have permission. You can’t go yet.”
With that, she removes her hand with a single upwards stroke, sending Alex’s mind into overdrive once again. Shakily, he takes a step forward, and feels a long gush of pee burst into his shorts and splatter tellingly onto the ground. He takes the shallowest breaths he can, feeling as if anything deeper than a short huff of air will cause him to burst on the spot.
He should have just taken the opportunity he’d had before and pissed in the family restroom when he’d had the chance. Now he’s out in the open, holding himself for dear life and mere seconds away from disaster. He’s not even sure if he’d be able to have sex with Nadia in his current state, no matter how aroused he is. What if he really does piss himself in front of everyone, all the innocent kids and judgemental parents? How will he ever live it down?
He supposes there was a reason why Nadia wanted to come to the furthest waterpark away from them, after all.
Another step sends another burst of pee splashing down onto the ground, and for all that Alex has leaked and spurted, he certainly doesn’t feel any better. He has to pause, bring one leg up off the ground to press his thighs together and bob up and down, shifting his hips this way and that as he makes quiet little panting noises, doing his best not to moan and sob out loud. He’s so full, he’s much too full , and he knows he won’t be able to last much longer at the rate he’s going.
But Nadia wants him to keep going, to push himself further than he has before. She’s fixated on him, he’s sure, even though it might not seem like it right at that moment. He can tell from the little looks she shoots him over her shoulder as he stands behind her and squirms frantically, and he knows the only thing on her mind right now is him.
It’s this thought that motivates him to untwist himself from the human pretzel he’d become and inch forward, trailing after his girlfriend with a string of pathetic, embarrassing whimpers and gasps falling from his lips. He thanks the stars that they actually did park relatively close to the waterpark’s entrance, only a few rows away from the gates. It gives him at least a little peace of mind, that he won’t have to stagger through the entire parking lot with two hands on his dick, vigorously avoiding eye contact with confused children and their scandalized parents as he goes.
He’s panting now, from the strain and effort his body is putting into staying upright, standing normally, and clenching every muscle he has control over. His body is shaking all over from the stress he’s putting it through, and his jaw is clenched so tightly that it hurts, but he hardly notices. All of the focus he has left is spent putting one foot in front of the other, and over, and over again, until he catches sight of the car about twenty feet away, just one row over.
He’s sure now, that he won’t be able to make it through sex. As painfully hard as he still is, the tiny part of his brain that’s still thinking rationally reminds him that he’s still leaking every few seconds, and that the pressure sex would put on his bladder would ultimately be his end. His new goal is to make it to the privacy of his car’s row, where he’ll be hidden between
Finally! he thinks, relief washing over him all at once. Finally, he’s at the car, the final destination, the last goal for his tired, tortured body to work through. Soon he’ll be there, hidden amongst the tightly packed cars, and he’ll finally have the privacy and time he’s been denied for so long, he’ll finally be able to relax, let go, and let it all out…
It’s the thought of relief after hours of holding in so many pints of beer and glasses of water that ultimately proves to be too much for him, the final straw on the camel’s back--or rather, the last drop to make him overflow. He lets out a startled cry as he feels his muscles weaken for just a second, and a long, forceful stream of piss is suddenly flooding his cupped hands and splattering onto the ground noisily.
“ Ah! ” he gasps, squeezing his dick as tightly as he can and dancing about wildly, lifting his left leg to curl around his right and hunching over as he rotates his hips in frantic little circles, but it’s no use. As soon as he thinks he has the first stream under control, a second, longer spurt re-wets his hands and continues to puddle around him.
“Nadi- nngh, Nadia!” he exclaims, hunching over as more piss splatters onto the ground. “I’m- I can’t h-hold it anymore! Ahh, haah, I have to go!”
“Wait!” Nadia commands, whipping around and darting forward, one hand outstretched like she wants to help but can’t. “Alex, we’re in public. Don’t you want to make it back to the car?”
“I-I can’t ,” Alex sobs, letting out a shuddering breath as his body convulses. He’s too full, too filled, there’s too much water inside of him and it needs to get out now , or he’s going to explode.
He clenches his muscles as tight as he can, cutting off the third stream, and pain spikes through him from his abdomen into his stomach. Gasping, he falters, and urine gushes out of his cock like a faucet’s been turned on. “No, no no no ,” he pants, eyes wide as he crushes his cock between his hands, doing everything he can to stop the flow of pee from coming out. But it’s no use. His body is too tired, too overworked to even entertain the idea of holding it in for another second .
With a final pang of agony, his bladder contracts once again, and this time there’s no stopping the torrent of piss from splashing out of his still hard penis and onto the ground below him. He lets out an absolutely devastating moan of pleasure as his legs give out beneath him, landing on his knees on the rough pavement of the parking lot as urine pours out of him in buckets. The relief he feels is absolutely overwhelming, whiting out his brain and making him forget where he is, forget that people might be looking at him, forget everything that isn’t him focusing on the all-encompassing pleasure wracking his body.
He’s never felt this kind of release before, never experienced something so intense and mind-numbingly good . Even some of the best of his orgasms have never felt as wonderfully pleasurable as this moment, pissing to his heart’s content after over two hours of holding it in. He feels his flagging erection start to grow harder once again as the relief hits him head-on, leaving him loose-limbed and with an almost high feeling as he goes. Somewhere in the back of his mind he registers Nadia’s hand on the back of his neck, her hip against his shoulder as she stands in the puddle forming around him, but he can’t bring himself to open his eyes and apologize just yet.
After what must be over a minute of him going and going and going , his stream begins to weaken. Alex sighs, squeezing experimentally to get the last few drops out so he knows he’s completely and blissfully empty, and one by one his senses come back to him. The first thing he feels is rapidly cooling, sticky wetness from the crotch of his shorts all the way down his legs, pooling under his feet as he kneels in his own bodily fluids. The next thing he realizes is that he’s kneeling not only in a puddle of his own piss, but also in the middle of a public parking lot, with families and couples all around to see his shame.
His face flames red as his eyes fly open, and he makes horribly embarrassing eye contact with one or two shocked waterpark goers before his head turns to meet Nadia’s gaze. She’s smiling down at him, looking somewhere between exasperated and pleased, and that expression alone makes up for all of the embarrassment he’s suffering at the moment. She strokes his sweat-damp hair back from his face and bends down to press a kiss to the corner of his lips, but she pulls away when he chases after her for more.
“Not yet,” she tells him in the same sultry voice from before. “You’ve been bad, Alex. Bad boys don’t get any rewards, now, do they?”
“N-No,” Alex replies, eyes darting down to meet his own gaze in the reflection of the pool of piss. “I’m sorry, Nadia. I really couldn’t hold it any longer.”
And he really had wanted to please her, too. He’d tried so hard to hold on just for her, to be a good boy and do as she asked him to. He’s disappointed in himself that he couldn’t make it just the littlest bit longer, just to make her happy.
“It’s alright, baby,” Nadia whispers, brushing her fingernails against his cheek. “You’ll just have to try again once we get home, won’t you?”
“Try again?” Alex repeats, perking up just a little bit. Nadia giggles and reaches out a hand to help him to his feet. Cool urine rushes down his legs and he shudders from the feeling, as well as from Nadia’s touch against his chest as he rises.
“It’ll be even better when we’re at home,” she says lowly. “I’ll be able to make you hold it for as long as I want to, and we won’t have to hide from anyone anymore. You’ll be able to squirm and dance and moan as much as you want to… Doesn’t that sound nice?”
Despite the ache in Alex’s abdomen, and the overall bone tiredness throughout his body, he feels his dick react just the littlest bit at her words. His face is still flushed with embarrassment from having an accident in front of so many people, and he’s still sore and exhausted from coming down from such a long, tiring hold, but surprisingly enough, he finds that the scenario she’s describing sounds rather nice.
“Y-Yeah,” he agrees shakily as Nadia leads him to the car, a promise on her face. “Sounds good.”
Now he really can’t wait until they get home.
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Wᴇ Cᴏᴍᴇ Rᴜɴɴɪɴɢ - Tʜᴇ 100 Bᴇʟʟᴀᴍʏ x OC - Cʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 21: Gᴜɴsʜᴏᴛs Iɴ Tʜᴇ Dᴀʀᴋ
Masterlist
Episode: Day Trip
Rating: Mature
Summary: During her time in the Skybox, Indigo formed a precious friendship with fellow outcast Octavia Blake, the girl under the floor. At first they thought their departure from the oppression of the Ark was a blessing, but quickly came to rely on Indigo's keen survival instincts. The 100 struggle to meet the challenges of Earth whilst Bellamy strives to lead the wavering teenagers and his irresponsible attitude fuels constant conflict with Indigo. Their only shared interest is in protecting Octavia and Indigo beings to suspect that there is a deeper cause to Bellamy's seemingly irrational choices. As the consequences of his actions mount up around him, he finally begins to confide in her and she discovers more than she ever bargained for.
Fandom: CW’s The 100
Pairing: OC x Bellamy Blake
LONG TERM ONGOING PROJECT :)
My writing is entirely fuelled by coffee! If you enjoy my work, feel free to donate toward my caffeine dependency: will work for coffee
Warnings: Mature content. Non-consent, language, sex, self harm, suicide, anxiety, helplessness, torture, captivity/confinement, alcohol/drug use.
Chapter Twenty-One
I hurried as I travelled back to Raven and Finn, who were gathering a small group at the far end of the camp. The light was fading rapidly from the sky, so I occupied myself with building a fire that I could settle people around to keep them warm. Raven approached me with confusion.
“What are you doing back here? I thought you two were dealing with the ship side?” She asked and my stomach lurched as I realised that my lies were starting to clash. I mentally cursed Octavia for cornering me into this and tried to think of a believable answer.
“There was hardly anyone left over there so I bought them over this way, I thought it would make sense to keep everyone together.” I commented, using some honesty to buy myself time. I had checked that there was no one near the dropship before returning, so I was confident in sharing this information. “Octavia’s staying there a little longer to double check there’s no leftovers.” I surprised myself at how easily I lied and I continued with my task to ensure that my words seemed casual and authentic. “Okay, the fire’s going, it’s getting darker so it’ll get real cold soon. Could you send anyone who is calm enough over this way and I’ll start wrapping them up. We also need to get water, we might as well try flushing it out of people. The sooner we can get this out of their system, the better.” I instructed as I tried to both change the subject from Octavia’s whereabouts and consider the needs of the camp simultaneously.
“Yes ma’am.” Raven replied willingly and I was surprised not to find any sarcasm in her tone. It was unusual for me to take control of a situation but as our normal leaders were off jaunting in the woods, I didn’t have much choice but to step up. My stomach lurched as Bellamy’s strange behaviour earlier flitted through my mind and I had to force it out so that I could concentrate on the situation in front of me. Finn slowly made his way over with several containers of water and I smiled at him as I took them gratefully.
“Thanks. Are you sure you should be up and about just yet, Mr Big Hero?” I asked as I assessed him with concern. He seemed to be moving fine but I was uncomfortable allowing him to be so active without Clarke here to clear him for action. He smiled bashfully at the name.
“I think I’m ready to manage a little babysitting.” He chuckled under his breath. “Raven said that you helped a lot with the surgery and all that. Thanks for keeping her calm, I know it can’t have been an easy task.” He spoke evenly and his tone was genuinely thankful. I cleared my throat awkwardly and decided not to mention that we likely wouldn’t be sharing a moment like that again for a while.
“You’re welcome, we’ve gotta keep our numbers up.” I replied as an excuse and he laughed. “Besides, I hardly did anything. Raven and Clarke were the real MVPs.” I replied gingerly, rubbing the back of my neck and hoped to scare off his kindness.
“I don’t know, I heard some pretty tough radio talk, even through my coma.” He laughed playfully as he peeked at me. “I think you might have missed your calling on the Ark, communications could have made great use of you.” He winked and I laughed in response to his assumption. “I’ll get you some blankets.” He stated as he shuffled away.
Soon people started to arrive following Raven’s directions and I wrapped them up in the makeshift blankets that Finn delivered and settled them around the fire with some water. It wasn’t long before I had my hands full with a confused group to babysit and Finn and Raven took up positions nearby to help keep an eye on the more active members. I no longer had to focus on distracting anyone, as the wanderers kept us plenty busy. It had gotten properly dark by the time Octavia sauntered over to the fire and I was growing restless as I considered that Bellamy and Clarke still hadn’t returned. Octavia nodded subtly from the edge of view, acknowledging a job completed. She then casually approached as Raven and Finn watched and I had to quickly remind myself of the narrative that I’d spun.
“Hey Tavi, no stragglers left on your side of camp?” I asked, trying my best to seem casual as I hoped she would understand what I was doing and not accidentally reveal my lies.
“No movement that way, and I just dropped Jasper at his tent to join Monty for a nap. He’s finally stopped screaming about grounders so I think we’ve got a rough time scale for when it wears off now.” She laughed as she made her way over to sit beside me, and I was impressed at how naturally she caught on to the situation. I was also pleased to hear that the boys were safe and sighed in relief.
“Any sign of Clarke or Bellamy over there?” I asked with genuine concern as my mind returned to their absence. Octavia shook her head and I only grew more unsettled. “Okay, do you think you can take over here? They’re mostly all chilled by now but it sounds like effects should be wearing off soon anyway.” I asked as I got to my feet but she grabbed my arm and glimpsed up at me in concern.
“Of course, but where are you going?” She asked, checking me closely.
“I need to look for our missing leaders.” I smiled gently in the hope that she wouldn’t cause a scene but to my disappointment she glared back. I didn’t want to draw any attention to the fact that I was leaving and sat back down before anyone could notice that we were behaving strangely.
“No, absolutely not, you can’t go alone.” She spoke adamantly as she studied me and I sighed deeply. I didn’t have patience left to argue with her today and wished that for once she wouldn’t make things difficult.
“We don’t have the manpower to launch a full search party right now Tavi. I don’t even know where they went, so it’s not like I can go far. I’m just going to do a small venture in their direction and hopefully I’ll bump into them on their way back. If I don’t come back quickly enough, you’ll have more people back to normal to send a rescue group.” I smiled gently and she frowned back at me with an unconvinced face. “Come on, your brother’s out there and he could be hurt.I need to see what’s going on.” I reasoned as I gazed at her but she continued to frown at me. She sighed as she reluctantly let go of my hand.
“Fine, don’t take too long, or I’ll send the whole camp.” She threatened and I didn’t doubt her seriousness for a moment. I got to my feet and I crept out quietly so as not to draw attention. I gathered some limited supplies and snuck into the woods.
I wandered aimlessly in the direction that I had seen them leave in and within no time struggled to tell where I was in the darkness. I tried to look for any signs of them, but it was much harder to track than Finn made it look when he led the group. I couldn’t ignore the building anxiety in my gut the further I went and kicked myself for believing that I would simply bump into them out here. I stopped walking and stared out into the dense gloom that surrounded me from all angles. I considered turning back, but I was haunted with horrendous images of the things that could have happened to them out here if they’d taken the nuts with them. I hesitated, frozen to the spot as I deliberated with myself. With no better ideas, I called out into the trees.
“Bellamy! Clarke!” I shouted into the shadows and waited nervously for a few moments, but nothing changed. I couldn’t think of anything else to do and I knew that if I got lost out here there would be a frantic search party sent by Octavia. I was about to turn back towards camp when a gunshot rang out in the distance. I didn’t waste a second in reacting to it as I took off in the direction of the sound. My feet pounded in the mud at the same pace that my mind obsessed over the million awful scenarios that could surround the gunshot. I strained to keep my focus in the moment as I rushed blindly into whatever danger awaited me. Just as I started to worry that I may have lost the trail, two more gunshots carried between the trees and I followed them with a terror gripping my chest. My heart raced wildly and I panted in a mixture of exhaustion and fear.
“Get the hell off of him!” I recognised Clarke’s panicked voice immediately and forced myself into a manic sprint. As I drew closer, I could hear the sounds of a struggle and I prayed that they were safe. Moments later I fell into a clearing and I could barely comprehend what I was seeing. There was a dead body of someone I didn’t recognise sprawled out in the middle of the clearing, and leaning against opposite trees facing each other were Clarke and Bellamy. Bellamy was screaming wildly and clawing at the air around him, whilst Clarke yelled over in his direction with desperation. As she was closer and seemed to be more lucid, I dropped down to her side first.
“Hey! Clarke, you’re okay, look at me.” I spoke firmly, taking her face in my hands and forcing her to meet my eyes. Her face felt warm in my hands, but she seemed to be past the point of fever and from what I could tell, she was able to concentrate on me. “You’re alright, what you’re seeing and feeling is just the effects of the nuts we found earlier, they’re causing everyone at camp to trip bollocks. Here.” I handed her a bottle of water from my belt after removing the cap to make it easier for her. “Start on this, you need to rehydrate all that fluid you’ve sweated out with your fever and we want to try flushing this out of your system as soon as possible.” I spoke firmly but slowly, ensuring that she was absorbing the information and she nodded in acknowledgment. Bellamy was getting louder behind me and I could hear that he had started to hyperventilate. “You just sit there and keep drinking, stay calm and let me know if you start seeing anything weird. I have to deal with him.” I explained quickly, watching her reaction to check that she would be okay alone.
“I’m okay, I can help.” She whispered in a hoarse voice as she tried to lift herself from the ground and I firmly pushed her back into a seated position.
“Clarke, the best thing you can do for me right now is to sit there and get sober so I can concentrate on Bellamy. Can you do that for me, please?” I stayed in her eyeline and waited for her to nod reluctantly. As soon as she did, I turned on the spot and began to approach Bellamy. He was screaming out gibberish between jagged breaths, and he repeatedly appeared to lash out at thin air. He didn’t seem to notice my presence at all, as if he were seeing straight through me. “God, he’s having a really bad trip, almost everyone else at camp is just having pleasant hallucinations.” I commented, as I slowly tried to enter his space and moved carefully in an effort not to startle him. “Has he been like this for long?” I called back to Clarke in question as I kept my eyes fixed on him. I reached out to touch him as gently as I could, but he immediately flinched away from me. Although our contact was brief, I was able to feel the scolding heat that poured off his skin and I could see the sheen on his face that indicated he was still running an extreme fever.
“Hours, I can’t get through to him, it’s like he can’t even see me.” Clarke explained quietly between deep, steadying breaths. “He was lucid for a little while when we were fighting Dax, but straight after he went back into panic. This is the worst I’ve seen him yet.” She confirmed and I sighed regretfully as I processed this information. As I got closer, I could make out the obvious signs of a struggle, as there was hardly any part of his face that wasn’t swollen or blood smeared and I was saddened to see him in such a state again.
“What have you tried already?” I asked, watching closely as he attempted to defend himself against whatever attack he was experiencing in his mind.
“I’ve yelled at him, shook him, I even tried slapping him to shock him out of it.” Clarke breathed, sounding remorseful about this choice. I sighed thoughtfully as I studied him and his jagged movements caused him to hit himself. He didn’t even seem to notice the impact as he was so lost in the visions and inspected him sympathetically. “He’s going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t calm down, hours is a long time for the human body to deal with that level of panic.” Clarke added poignantly and I wrecked my brain for a way to reach him.
“He’s too deep in the hallucinations, he might be too overstimulated already to react to shock.” I muttered, pacing around as I considered any other possible options. I didn’t have enough knowledge of drug use to know what would usually be recommended and I wished that I’d learned more useful skills before we were sent to Earth.
As I observed his movements, he reminded me of Octavia as he began to scratch at his arms. During the beginning of our friendship in the Skybox, Octavia would have frequent panic attacks about returning to her cell. All of her years of hiding from the guards in her mother's quarters had left her with a residual fear of being contained. It took a while for us to find coping mechanisms to help her manage this fear and in the meantime, I had to learn how to calm her during an outburst. When I looked at Bellamy, despite their many differences, I noticed some similar behaviours in their panic and I began to wonder if the same method would work on him.
He was hyperventilating hysterically now and his lips were turning blue, a telltale sign of lack of oxygen that I remembered from Octavia. With little time left to hesitate, I approached him and fell into his space. I crouched over him, placing my knees either side of his thighs and pulled him into my arms. At first he fought me and only seemed to be more panicked by the sudden contact. It was substantially harder to contain him than it ever was with Octavia and I didn’t allow myself any time to doubt, as I knew I had no other ideas. I pulled him in tighter as I remembered that Octavia would continue to lash out with her arms until I stopped her and so I pulled his arms down to his sides and embraced him around them. I held him tightly in place, allowing him to feel the pressure around him and tried to speak gently in his ear.
“It’s okay, you’re safe. What you’re seeing isn’t real, it’s not real Bellamy, you’re safe, shh.” I whispered gently as I felt his arms finally calming and after a few moments I dared to risk releasing them. They flopped loosely to his side and he didn’t attempt to hit anything again, much to my relief. Instead, he continued to tremble in my embrace and I slowly moved a hand to his neck to feel his pulse. It was hammering so fast that it was hard to even count and the heat that poured off him made me sweat. He was no longer shouting, but he continued to hyperventilate and I knew that we were still in a risky situation.
“You’re safe Bellamy, it’s okay, the threat isn’t real.” I spoke in a slow, calming manner as I held him to me, hoping to draw his attention to me over whatever horrors were happening in his mind. “If you can hear my voice, I need you to concentrate on it. Don’t listen to anyone else, listen to me.” I asserted and I felt his breathing hitch. I took this break in gasps as a sign that he was listening to me. “That’s it, you’re safe. Everything is okay, you’re just hallucinating. You ate some bad food and it’s messing with your head. I promise, what you’re seeing isn’t real.” I explained gently as I waited for him to calm. I moved my hand slowly to feel his pulse again and I noticed that it was finally starting to slow down. I let out a small sigh of relief and gripped him to me again. I cradled his head with one hand, tenderly stroking his hair in a soothing manner as I continued to talk to him.
“That’s it, you’re doing well. Try to slow your breathing down for me. You’re safe. Raven and Finn are taking care of everyone back at camp and Octavia didn’t eat it, so she’s safe with them. Everything’s okay.” I spoke slowly as I tried to clear any concerns that may be bothering him and felt that his breathing was finally starting to become more regular. He didn’t seem to be any more lucid yet unfortunately, so I decided to try implementing some of the methods that I’d learned to refocus Octavia when she was lost to panic. “Listen to my voice, I want you to really focus on it. Good. Now, focus on the other things you can feel in your body. The cool, wet ground beneath you, the cool crisp air on your skin. Listen to my breathing, the wind in the trees. Can you feel my arms around you, my hand in your hair, my breathing near your ear? I need you to focus on those things around you Bellamy, what you really see, hear, smell, taste, feel. Pick them out in your mind. You’re safe, come back to us.” I have clear instruction and prayed that it would be enough to bring him out of his mind. As I finished guiding him through the technique, he finally spoke in a small, exhausted voice.
“I-Indigo?” He asked with such deep uncertainty that my heart broke for him. I finally released him from my grip, leaning back into his lap to view his tear streaked face.
“Hey you.” I smiled warmly and he stared back at me in wide eyed confusion. “Here, drink some water, you’re dehydrated and I need you to start flushing this crap out of your system.” I handed the open bottle to him and he took it from me with shaking hands, sipping from it delicately. “You just sit still and drink that okay? I’m just gonna go check on Clarke, I’ll be right there and then I’ll come straight back to you.” I explained quickly.
I moved before my heart strings could stop me and rushed back to Clarke’s side. She looked much calmer now and I checked to find that she had drunk almost the whole bottle of water that I’d left her with. I held my hand to her forehead and felt that she was almost back to a normal temperature. As a last precaution, I took the flashlight from my belt and gently flashed it at one eye at a time, confirming that she was back to normal dilation.
“Okay, you’re good. You can start gathering stuff to go back to camp. I’m gonna check on Bellamy and once he’s ready, we’ll move.” I ordered. Clarke nodded and started to get to her feet. I turned back to Bellamy, who was staring wide eyed at the body and was slowly losing control of his breathing again. I rushed back over and sat beside him on the opposite side from the body. I gently took his face in my hands and guided him to look at me. “Hey, no, don’t look at that, look at me. I need you to stay calm, it’s gonna take a little while for this stuff to fully work itself out of your body, so you can’t get too panicky or you’ll start tripping again. Stay focused on me and take some deep breaths. Alright, good. See, surely I can’t be that scary?” I smiled gently and felt a twinge of worry when he didn’t even flinch toward a smile back. It was unusual for him not to respond to humour, even in the most stressful situations. “You’re okay.” I breathed as I regarded him with sympathy.
“No, I’m not.” He whispered with fresh tears rolling down his cheeks as he panted for breath. “My mother...if she knew what I’ve done, who I am-” He choked up momentarily with emotion, the pain of the time here crashing down on him all at once. “She raised me to be good. And all I do is hurt people.” He paused to sniff as his desperate eyes met mine. “I’m a monster.” He spat with a devastating conviction.
“No Bellamy, that’s not true!” I gasped as I wiped his tears away and gazed at his broken expression with an aching heart. “Your mother raised you the best she could, as all parents on the Ark struggle to do in that stifling environment. But she also crushed you under the weight of the responsibility that you were far too young to bear. You have done everything in your power to keep Octavia safe and I know that she would be proud of you for that. None of us ever expected to be here in this situation, and I’m sure if she could see you now, she wouldn’t see a monster. She’d see a survivor, she’d see the man who made the difficult choices to keep us alive. We wouldn’t have made it this far without you. We need you Bellamy.” I spoke earnestly and even surprised myself at my own honesty. Bellamy scoffed and looked away from me. My stomach churned as I processed the self loathing of his words and I was compelled to guide him into a more beneficial thought process. “I know my words don’t take away the guilt and the pain you’re feeling. I can’t even begin to imagine what you feel, with everything that is on your shoulders. But it’s time to stop waiting for forgiveness for your mistakes and start facing them.” He looked back at me with fear in his eyes and I sighed. “And you know what, you may not want to hear this, but it’s time for you to forgive yourself. You are only one person thrown into a situation that is impossible to have prepared for. You made mistakes, yes. Shockingly you’re not perfect. But it’s time to stop beating yourself up over them and start acknowledging them. Take responsibility and face up to the consequences. You can’t run forever Bellamy.” I finished gently as I gazed into his eyes and he sighed, watching me with a terrified expression.
“How do I do that?” He asked in a small shaky voice and I smiled at him with gentle encouragement.
“One step at a time, but you’re not going to be doing it alone. I’ve got your back.” I asserted as I reached out to squeeze his hand.
“Jaha will kill me when he comes down.” He breathed and my stomach lurched at the mention of the Chancellor. I hadn’t even considered yet that he would be one of the people to come down and I felt a fire burning inside of me at the thought.
“I won’t let that happen.” I growled with more fury than intended and he finally showed a hint of a smile at my veracity. “How much does Clarke know?” I whispered as I leaned into him inquisitively.
“Everything.” He sighed and I raised my brows in surprise. I guessed it was hard to keep secrets when you have crazy hallucinogens in your system and tried to be understanding about him involving her in his crisis.
“Okay, in that case, we’ll work it out on the way back to camp. Come on, up you get.” I helped him to his feet with difficulty as Clarke carefully approached us. “Let’s get back to camp, people are going to be getting worried.” I suggested as I supported Bellamy to find his balance weakly.
“We have to go back to the building we found first, there’s supplies to collect. We can’t afford to risk anyone else finding them first.” Clarke stated firmly and I stared at her in surprise. I couldn’t imagine how we were going to transport them with them in such a weakened state but I reluctantly agreed so that I could get them moving.
We walked slowly as we wandered in a tight formation back to their discovery. I reluctantly assisted in packing up the supplies they’d found, which mostly consisted of copious amounts of guns and we spread the weight between us as we started on our return to camp. Bellamy was unusually quiet during the walk and I noticed that he kept glancing back over his shoulder fearfully. I wanted to believe it was due to the paranoia of his earlier visions, but I’d been considering his strange behaviour this morning alongside some information I’d gathered since seeing him again and I had a suspicion that I knew what was really going on with him. Now that he was calmer, I couldn’t hold in my thoughts any longer and turned to look at him with impatience.
“You weren’t planning on coming back to camp, were you?” I asked quietly to keep Clarke from hearing our conversation. His eyes shot to me in surprise and as he realised that I was awaiting an answer, he looked away in avoidance. I scoffed in response to his unintentional confirmation of my theory. “I knew something was wrong when you left. Were you even going to say goodbye?” As the question left my lips, I heard the hurt in my tone and inwardly kicked myself for allowing that to show. Bellamy stared at the ground with a guilty expression, his head hung low in a silent answer. “Did you really think you could just hide out in the woods? You must’ve known that I’d look for you?” I quizzed him before quickly stumbling over my words as I realised exactly what I’d said. “Among others of course.” I added hurriedly.
“I didn’t think about it in any detail, Indigo. All I knew was that Jaha was making plans to come down here and if I stayed in camp I was a sitting duck.” He mumbled in a poor attempt at an explanation and I sighed deeply at him. I could tell that this fear of inescapable punishment was still messing with him as we marched back in the direction of camp.
“Hey Clarke?” I called out to her as she walked with purpose just ahead of us and she slowed to meet my side. “You know all about this mess now, have you got any bright ideas for keeping Bellamy alive and in camp?” I asked as I shot an accusing glare at him for trying to abandon us, implying that I could tell that he was still considering running at this very moment. “Jaha isn’t known for his mercy and if he tries to punish Bellamy the way he would on the Ark...well, there’s gonna be more than one life lost, that’s for sure.” I spoke honestly as I imagined the guards trying to take him for execution and I couldn’t even account for the damage I’d be willing to do to stop it. She stared up at the sky thoughtfully for a while as we trudged through the forest.
“I’ve known the Chancellor most of my life. I don’t approve of most of what he does, but he’s actually a much more reasonable man than most of the Ark realises.” She spoke in a distracted voice as she explained and I scoffed at her words.
“Yeah, cuz the death penalty for any and all crime is totally reasonable.” I spat and she squinted at me in a defensive manner. “I’m sorry, I know you’re not the enemy. What was your point?” I spoke sheepishly following my unintentional attack.
“Jaha is always willing to discuss terms, trades and compromises. I know him well enough to know how to convince him. I could help you talk to him.” She flashed Bellamy a hopeful smile but he only responded with confusion.
“What could we possibly trade him for? I can’t imagine we have anything he would want in this paradise.” He asked with a bitter tone as his exhausted face revealed his doubt.
“Information; you offer to tell him who asked you to shoot him, but only in exchange for a pardon.” Clarke sounded genuinely enthused with her idea and I felt a small shred of hope blossoming in my chest. Bellamy stared at her in surprise, and I joined him, before breaking into a wicked smile.
“You know what, that could actually work. You’re secretly sly Clarke! I’ll have to watch you in future.” I chuckled as I was hit with a feeling of genuine relief. I turned back to face Bellamy. “What do you think Bellamy? Are you ready to deal with this?” I asked as I watched him closely, hoping with everything in me that he wouldn't turn and run. He finally broke into a smile and my heart fluttered at the sight.
“Let’s do it. Nothing else left to try.” He answered and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
The remaining walk to camp felt easier and I was more relaxed than I had been in days. I knew that this was still a gamble, but I trusted Clarke’s judgement and her history with Jaha to pull this off. As we approached the edge of the fencing I split off from them, allowing them to make their grand, victorious entrance without my interference. Instead, I went to find Jasper who was finally back to his normal self and happily sleeping. Monty was also sitting in the tent and when I entered he shifted awkwardly.
“Hey, if it isn’t my two favourite troublemakers.” I chanted with a smile as I sat beside him. “Are you guys feeling okay?” I asked with a hint of concern as I looked between them.
“I’m fine. Jasper was feeling pretty exhausted, but it sounds like he spent a lot of his day panicking, so I don’t really blame him.” He explained as he watched Jasper with care. He cleared his throat and avoided looking back at me as he spoke again. “I’m really sorry if I came across as weird earlier, I tend to say some pretty wild stuff when I’m...you know.” He spoke in a small voice and fidgeted his hands awkwardly. I struggled to stifle a giggle as I remembered the numerous compliments he’d given me during the day and instead I focused on trying to ease his entirely unnecessary embarrassment.
“You think you were wild? Did Jasper remember telling Octavia he loved her yet?” I asked playfully and Monty snorted in laughter. “Twice!” I crumbled into giggles at the memory and was glad to be able to share some humour after such a difficult day. “Seriously, we’re good, don’t worry about it. I’m just glad you’re both okay. I’m gonna find Octavia and I’ll leave you to comfort your friend here. I get the feeling his ego’s going to be a little bruised when he wakes up.” I winked, before heading back to the main activity of camp.
I glanced around to seek out Octavia and I had already begun to approach her when I noticed Bellamy hovering awkwardly nearby, observing her with a beaten puppy expression. He hadn’t noticed my presence, so I quickly stepped to the side to remain out of his line of sight. I watched as he gingerly wrapped a blanket around her and she glanced back at him in annoyance. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened between them in the last few days, but I had the impression that some hurtful words had been exchanged. I hoped that they could find a way to trust each other, but I knew that it would take time for this to build. I was too far from them to hear what was said, but I could tell from Bellamy’s body language that he was trying his best with her and I smiled at the sight.
“Bellamy!” Clarke called as she emerged from the tent where the communications with the Ark were stored. Unfortunately this was right beside the spot I was hiding in plain sight. Inwardly, I cursed her for interrupting their bonding moment until she spoke again. “It’s time.” She said with a significant tone and I glimpsed over in shock. I didn’t expect them to launch into their plan so quickly, I hadn’t had a chance to even discuss it with Bellamy yet. I made the quick decision to not involve myself in the situation. If he felt ready to do this now, then I was glad that they were immediately getting it out of the way before he could change his mind. He didn't notice me as he turned from Octavia and took a few steps toward the tent and I considered backing away. He suddenly stopped mid way and turned back to face her.
“The grounder escaping, was that you?” He spoke with an accusing manner and my blood felt like it turned to pure ice at his question. Octavia didn’t even turn around, keeping her back to him and I found myself thanking every star that he wasn’t facing me as I tried to force myself to behave normally. I knew that he wouldn’t approve of my part in it and after how close we’d grown tonight, I was terrified of disrupting this hard earned peace. I genuinely couldn’t tell any longer if he’d be angry or if he would allow me the time to explain. I felt myself spiralling into panic as I awaited her response.
“I had nothing to do with it.” She replied coolly and my heart skipped a beat. I didn’t know how to feel about her involving me in her lie and I despised that I’d found myself caught between her and Bellamy. I forced the feeling to the back of my mind to deal with later as Bellamy sighed and continued toward the tent. I startled as he finally noticed me and I considered simply walking away, but his vulnerable eyes drew me toward him. I walked to him as if in a trance and simply put a hand on his forearm. I steeled myself as I stared up into his eyes with a confident smile.
“You're going to be fine.” I spoke with an assertive sense of belief and he smiled nervously in return. “I’ll see you on the other side as a free man.” I breathed, releasing him to enter the tent. I tried desperately to force myself to leave, to trust them to manage the situation and fill me in after. I couldn’t help the slideshow in my mind of all the times things had gone wrong and Bellamy had run off, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave the edge of the tent. I waited right outside, straining to hear what was said.
“Mr Blake, I’ve wanted to talk to you for some time now.” The chancellor's voice was clear and assertive and it sent chills down my spine.
“Before you do, I’d like to say something. When you sent us down here you sent us to die, but miraculously, most of us are still alive. In large part, that is because of him, because of Bellamy.” Clarke’s voice was calm, but her words made it clear that trusting her was the correct choice here. She knew exactly how to present her case. “He’s one of us, and he deserves to be pardoned of his crimes just like the rest of us.” She asserted and I couldn’t help but to be impressed by her.
I felt like I could barely breathe as I waited for the Chancellor’s response. Although I knew that this was the best chance for Bellamy, I was also terrified that this was the moment I would find out that there was no hope for him here; I wrestled my anxiety at even the thought of it.
“Clarke, I appreciate your point of view, but it’s not that simple.” The chancellor replied and I felt like I might heave at any moment. I reminded myself that they hadn’t thrown in their trade yet, it wasn’t over.
“It is if you want to know who on the Ark wants you dead.” Bellamy spoke assertively and I felt my heart swell with pride. I waited for what felt like an eternity for a response and couldn’t even move a single muscle in my body.
“Bellamy Blake, you’re pardoned for your crimes.” The Chancellor’s answer was firm and decisive, and I felt myself gasp out for air. I dropped to a crouch, just catching myself before I hit the ground and held my head in my hands. I felt tears freely roam down my cheeks and the relief poured over me in an overwhelming wave. I forced myself to a standing position so that I could rush to the tent to compose myself.
#the100#cw#oc#fanfic#fanfiction#writing#indigo#originalcharacter#wecomerunning#bellamy blake#bellamy x reader#bellamy x oc#bellamy x you#bellamy blake fanfiction#bellamy blake the 100#the 100 fanfiction#bellamy blake series#the 100 insert#the 100 rewrite#clarke griffin#octavia blake#raven reyes#finn collins#jasper jordan#monty green#lincoln#john murphy
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Cancer
an unpaid therapist
terrifying when angered
there for you when no one else is
loves sleep
laughs literally at anything
selfless
quite but smart
speak their mind
fall in love quickly
supportive
introverted
reliable
sometimes over emotional
really strong under pressure
overthinks a lot
honest but secretive
cut people out of their life easily
worried about future
sensitive
apologizes too much
so sweet unless you trigger them
can understand others really well
polite
faithful
stylish
19/25
Scorpio
straightforward
can be stubborn
passionate
observant and cautious
opinionated
sweet if treated well
love and hate with their whole heart
secretive
feelings are intense
over protective
mysterious
has a really strong personality
hate losing
true and loyal friends
likes to be in control
brave
savage
mature
can be brutally honest
emotional but doesn’t show it
can get obsessed fast
dark humor
their emotions are so deep
they seem tough from outside
can go from cute to scary in a second
18/25
Pisces
generous
don’t tolerate rude and judging people
good at telling stories
escapist
get used by some people a lot
empathetic
introverted and quite
artistic
sensitive
sometimes selfless
always daydreaming
hopeless romantic
loyal to a fault
not argumentative but stand up for what they believe
like to help people
mature
get along with different kind of people
forgive fast but doesn’t forget
sweetest if well treated
feels other people’s emotions
can spot fake and lie easily
great sixth sense
scary when angry
secretive and vague
independent
16/25
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I am happy right now.
I am 5’6” or taller.
I have a boyfriend/girlfriend.
I like to read books for fun.
I like horror films.
I like science fiction films.
I like romance films.
I have been in a car accident.
I believe in ghosts.
I like Nicholas Sparks novels.
I believe in reincarnation.
I have had my wisdom teeth pulled.
I pray on a regular basis.
I have a bible.
I read the bible.
I have been to another continent.
I have a crush on one of my friends.
I am not a virgin.
I have lived in the same house my entire life.
I like talking on the phone.
I have read comic books.
I collect something.
I have done drugs before.
I have smoked before.
I have gotten drunk before.
My parents are still together.
I have written a song before.
I think I can sing well.
I have blonde hair.
I have brown hair or black hair.
I have red hair
I have unnatural coloured hair.
I have freckles.
I have stretch marks.
I am straight.
I am gay.
I am neither or somewhere in between.
I have been in a fist fight before.
I have performed something in front of 20 people or more.
I have self harmed.
I have attempted suicide.
I have been abused by a relationship partner.
I have been abused by a family member.
I have run away from home.
I have self harmed for more than four years.
I like to cook food.
I like to bake food.
I have a dog.
I enjoy camping.
I can fit my hand inside a Pringles can.
I have changed for someone else.
I like to read fanfiction.
I like to write fanfiction.
I have used a typewriter before.
I have skiied before.
There is someone I’ve had a crush on for more than four months.
I have talked to that person today.
I live on my own.
I prefer texting over calling.
I talked to my dad today.
I’m keeping a secret from someone I care about a lot.
I like to sing in the car.
I hum a lot.
I had a bully in school.
I was a girl/boy scout.
I am Batman.
I’ve stolen from my parents before.
I’ve stolen from a store before.
I have a favourite piece of classical music.
Chinese food is my favourite.
I have a favourite ninja turtle.
-
You pretty much always have a cup of tea or a bottle of water with you.
You think enjoying the moment is more important than catching it on camera.
You enjoy watching documentaries.
You spend most of your time alone and have no close relationships.
You joined Pottermore and were sorted into Gryffindor.
You have a dry and sarcastic sense of humour.
Long, dark winter nights drain you.
Summer is by far your favourite season and lifts your mood a lot.
A lot of the time you have to laugh at your own bad luck.
Your mood plummets if you don’t follow a health and fitness routine.
Your favourite ever music video is Lana Del Rey’s Ride.
You love lazy summers spent going for walks and lounging in the garden.
You love to spend your time lost in a good book.
You watch American Horror Story and Asylum is your favourite season so far.
You’ve overcome a lot over the last year but have slipped up recently.
You prefer sitting exams to completing coursework.
You love long car journeys spent listening to music.
You find learning about how people lived in the past interesting.
Your parent’s closed-minded attitudes frustrate you.
You’ve grown very used to loneliness.
You prefer getting up early and having productive mornings.
You try to enjoy dancing in public but you still feel very awkward.
You can’t even be bothered to hold grudges and find them pointless.
Winona Ryder is one of your favourite actresses.
You don’t find award shows very interesting.
You have no patience for people who are glued to their phones.
You’re a bit of a hypochondriac.
You enjoy warm evenings spent doing yoga in the garden.
Sunsets are one of your favourite things about the planet.
You prefer to avoid medication but appreciate it’s necessity sometimes.
You find talking to older people easier than talking to ones your own age.
You’re naturally quiet and content with being that way.
Your handwriting seems to change every time you pick up a pen.
You dislike the thought of ever being dependent on anybody.
Texting bores you and you’d rather just make a phone call.
You like to hear about other people’s music tastes.
You prefer to keep your living space clean and tidy.
Anxiety controls you more than you’d like to admit.
You can hardly even cope with being around people because of it.
You can’t decide whether you prefer cities or countryside.
You’re pretty much incapable of ever relaxing.
You like discovering and being introduced to new music.
Your favourite song by The Smiths is What Difference Does It Make.
You procrastinate things you don’t feel capable of doing perfectly.
You keep pretty much everything to yourself.
You have quite a temper but you’re good at controlling it.
You much prefer skirts and dresses to jeans.
You’re not really a fan of alcohol anymore.
Your parents let you down when you needed them the most.
You have a pretty awful relationship with your mum and it upsets you.
You dream of finding a sense of belonging somewhere.
You’re a fan of The Cure.
You love doing toning exercises, especially stomach workouts.
Patience is definitely not a trait of yours.
You don’t expect anybody to take an interest in you or be there for you.
The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me is one of your favourite albums.
You’re a university student.
You waste too much time on Tumblr and the internet in general.
You’re an Arctic Monkeys fan.
You’ve read and loved The Outsiders by S.E Hinton.
-
I AM: outgoing, a sister, overwhelmed, helpful, kind, overweight, tall, caring, a shopaholic, energetic, hopeful, smart, over 18, religious, sexually active, a mother, a good singer, ugly, insecure, a natural blonde, a leader, shy, inquisitive, determined, thirsty, frustrated, registered to vote, independent, hungry, self-conscious, a hard worker, skinny, paranoid, in love, a college/uni student, a dreamer, a movie buff, usually happy, easily entertained, quiet, a daddy’s girl, a smoker, employed, happy with my life, anxious, a pothead, healthy, on a desktop.
I HAVE: an iphone, a laptop, anxiety, drugs, a tumblr, an addiction, a dog, my own car, a degree, a job, trust issues, a temper, a brother, a big house, blue eyes, a lot of clothes, a twin bed, a big family, netflix, to pee, odd taste in music, a large book collection, fast internet, a big imagination, my license, curly hair, short hair, a messy room, acne, a phobia, a medical condition, an awkward smile, some kind of collection, taken over 1,000 surveys, a personal blog that nobody sees but me, gotten lost while driving, been to warped tour, big feet, bills to pay, a lot of strong opinions, a pool, an xbox, a cold, a lot of music, more than two piercings.
I WANT: a boyfriend, more money, a better body, to adopt, to move out, a new computer, to lose weight, something I cannot have, food, a baby, my hair to grow out, a new life, to be more confident, a tattoo, fast food, alcohol, more friends, to go on vacation, to see a new movie coming out, to go shopping, a new phone, a piercing, concert tickets, someone to hang out with, to start working out, to be famous, to see a certain someone, more clothes, to donate blood, bigger boobs, someone to cuddle with, a job, smaller thighs, to learn how to play an instrument, my favorite band to release a new album, someone to love, a new pet, to go to sleep, to grow up, to change something about my personality, breakfast food, them to make a new pokemon game, a new ipod, a popsicle, to learn a new skill, to be more organized, to go to college, someone to bring me breakfast in bed.
I THINK: abortion is wrong, xanga is dying, I’ll die young, I’m a good person, too often, I’m going to hell, pickles are gross, a lot of popular things are overrated, people underestimate me, my taste in music is perfect, I need a new layout, I’m pretty responsible, gay marriage should be legal, I’m going to dye my hair soon, I’m funny, I’m going to make a huge decision soon, my parents hate me, I’m pretty, I have a mental disorder, I annoy people, something is seriously wrong with me, of better days, a lot of Disney Channel stars grow up to be trash, The Hunger Games is overrated, the best things in life are free, popular music is pretty awful, I could be a vegan, I’ll make a good mother, I spend too much money on clothes, I’m too good for guys my age, I worry too much, goths are scary, the survey community is dying, politics are stupid, foreign languages are interesting, hipsters are annoying, bolding surveys are the best, everything is better with cheese, Twilight is overrated, I will be alone forever, I might go to bed soon, I may try something new soon, I’m pretty boring, I may never stop taking surveys, McDonald’s is gross, celebrities are overpaid, people use me a lot, Valentine’s Day is a joke, nobody is truly original.
I LOVE: animals, shopping, cooking, going to concerts, jewelry, glitter, reading, bright colors, make up, taking pictures, hot showers, texting, going to the theater, children, anime, being girly, working out, my life, where I live, summer, fruit, candles, photography, eating, learning, rainy days, walking, painting my nails, doing my hair, music, xanga, facebook, feeling needed, getting comments, tumblr, helping others, volunteering, cuddling, chewing gum, youtube, dresses, touch screens, decorating, writing, finding money in my pockets, Comedy Central.
I HATE: cleaning, driving, big crowds, politics, religion, musicals, talking on the phone, crying, fast food, going to the doctor, meat, vegetables, sitcoms, my body, my life, my parents, long fingernails, bad grammar, cocky people, being single, facial hair, having no signal, losing, working, doing the dishes, bugs, children, straight edge kids, racists, going to the dentist, going to school, arguing, hospitals, being pale, having scars, hot weather, wearing socks, listening to the radio, animal cruelty, stretched ears, wearing glasses, when nobody texts me back, anime, having nothing to do, when I have stray hairs stuck to my shirt, waiting, bad hair days.
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Day 2 of @madatobiweek. Prompt: Blind Tobirama.
Pairing: MadaraTobirama
Word count: 2585
Chapter: 1/7
Rated: T+
Summary: An accident at work leaves Tobirama blinded while his eyes are bandaged to heal from some rather nasty burns. Too busy with his own job to play the role of caretaker, wife too pregnant to place the burden on her, Hashirama calls upon his best friend Madara to stay with them and help Tobirama out in anyway he can. Madara isn't exactly thrilled to play babysitter but he can see an opportunity when one comes along; this may be the chance he's always waited for.
Follow the link or read it under the cut!
KO-FI and commission info in the header!
Focal Point
For someone who had been largely MIA over the past few days Hashirama was disgustingly brief in his request for Madara to come over. He hadn’t even offered so much as a single excuse for his behavior beyond a few murmurs about some family emergency and needing to be home while everyone available tried to pull together and help out. What they were trying to help with Madara had no idea since his idiot best friend had talked around himself several times before asking with uncharacteristic seriousness whether he could come over or not.
Of course Madara had said yes because despite the fact that he would never lower himself to actually admitting to it he did miss his best friend, the man he had spent time with nearly every day since they were around twelve years old. When he got there, though, the first thing he was going to do was badger an explanation out of him for the sudden disappearance. Normally Hashirama was blowing up his phone with meaningless texts from the moment the sun rose over the horizon. To his shame it had actually taken until noon for Madara to realize his pocket had been suspiciously quiet all day and fire off a few texts of his own that never got replied to.
The subway obviously had to be extra crowded when he hopped on because that was just his luck. Only a few days of separation and already he forgot why it was always better to take a cab to Hashirama’s neighborhood. Madara buried his face in the neck of his sweater to block out the stench of body odor and other things he didn’t want to think about until finally he was at the stop closest to his friend’s home. The rush to disembark nearly sent him tumbling off the platform and down on to the tracks but he managed to pull himself out of harm’s way by taking a solid grip on a passing stranger’s backpack and letting himself get dragged along for the ride. Only once the crowd had moved on and he was at least semi-free of the bustling masses did he finally dare to move out on his own again, heading for the western exit.
Since Hashirama’s house was still a fifteen minute walk in to one of the nicer neighborhoods, Madara spent the whole time kicking up fall leaves and going over all of his guesses for what the idiot might have been doing in the past few days, everything from spontaneous amnesia to randomly deciding to join a drug cartel and run coke in to another country. Granted, the second one wasn’t very likely since the man was more terrified of his wife’s wrath than death itself and Mito would certainly have a few things worse than death to rain down upon her husband if he decided to get involved with those sorts of seedy activities. Of all the things Madara had ever threatened his friend with nothing would ever compare to an ominous ‘I’ll tell your wife’ and yet he’d never seen a happier couple.
He would almost be jealous if they weren’t so disgustingly schmoopy about it.
By the time he arrived at the right house on the right street there were several leaves caught in his hair and he was cursing himself for not remembering to restrain it before going out in the wind. The door was unlocked so he let himself in and deliberately kicked his boots off in a messy heap, knowing Hashirama would be the one to get in trouble for not reigning in his guest properly.
“Where are you, dipshit?” he called in to the eerily quiet house. Something thumped on the second floor so he headed that way, thinking perhaps that he might not have heard Hashirama’s response.
Al the lights were off, he noticed. Well, not all of them, but enough of them to make him wonder if Hashirama had gotten in trouble again for being unkind to the environment. It gave the whole place an eerie vibe to follow the singular trail of light from the kitchen close to the entrance all the way up the massive sweeping staircase. Really Hashirama had too much money but at least he had a wife classy enough to know how to show it off properly instead of the three tiered bouncy castle Hashirama used to dream of living in.
Once he had climbed all the way up to the second floor he paused to look left and right down the hallway, wondering which direction to try first. He used to think that a house this big was too much space for just the two people who lived here even with a baby on the way but somehow Hashirama always found a way to fill every damn room in this place – and use them all! He even had a whole room just for his stupid plants where he could be found each day watering them and chattering away like it would help them grow.
Just as Madara decided left was as good a direction to try as any Hashirama popped out of the room right in front of him and shrieked in his face with frightened surprise, probably not expecting to see him there. Startled, Madara shrieked back.
Like idiots the two of them stood there shrieking back and forth until finally Madara could think around the panic enough to clap one of his hands over Hashirama’s mouth, cutting off all sound and plunging the long hallway in to sudden silence. His friend offered him a sheepish look before clawing the hand off his mouth to grin in apology.
“I didn’t realize you were here already!”
“What do you mean ‘already’? I rode the subway, it took forever!”
“Sorry, sorry, I’ve been losing track of time lately. Things have been really…difficult. But I’m glad you’re here. Would you like some coffee?” He sighed and Madara realized the other man did look incredibly tired. “I could really use some myself.”
Grumbling, Madara stepped back and waved for Hashirama to go ahead of him. They wandered back down the stairs and in to the kitchen where his host went straight for the coffee pot. Once it was set up and burbling away he slumped down in to the closest chair, running both hands through his uncharacteristically tangled locks with a harried expression. The bags under his eyes were deep enough to be suitcases and Madara found that sort of offensive; eye bags were his shtick, Hashirama had no right to pull them off so well.
“I meant it, I’m glad you’re here. With Mito as pregnant as she is I’m having trouble dealing with this situation myself and juggling work at the same time.”
“What situation? You’ve been giving me the silent treatment for days, I don’t know what’s going on!”
Hashirama wilted like a flower. “It’s Tobirama. There was an accident at his lab and he’s…” Fear gripped Madara and squeezed tight, choking his heart and closing his throat. Every second that passed without an explanation left him more and more tense until finally he exploded.
“He’s what!? Spit it out!”
“Oh he’s fine!” Hashirama said. “Mostly. He’s in one piece, at least! But the explosion–”
“Explosion!?”
“–burnt his retinas. I know a specialist who owed me a favor and she took a look. Everything should be fine but Tobi isn’t allowed to remove the bandages for a couple of weeks. So he’s effectively blind for a little while, which means he needs a bit of help. He’s staying here with us in his old room and I’ve been trying to take care of him but you know what it’s like when I’m on call. Babies are born when it’s convenient for them, not when it’s convenient for the doctor.”
Madara’s voice was faint as he murmured reflexively, “You’re the one who wanted to be an obstetrician.”
Whatever whining answer Hashirama gave went in one ear and out the other as Madara immediately disappeared inside his own head. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have his sight taken away so suddenly and so completely, the terror that would fill him as he worried over whether or not he would ever see again no matter how much the doctors reassured him. Good eyesight was almost a family tradition. He couldn’t think of a single Uchiha who had ever even had to wear glasses let alone gone blind or something. If he had to choose a sense to lose it would not be his sight. Maybe hearing. He could still read if he had his hearing and learning sign language couldn’t be too hard, he thought. Learning English had been a nightmare but he’d gotten through that well enough.
Eventually he tuned back in to the world to hear Hashirama going on still about how hard it was to be on call while also trying to care for his pregnant wife and how adding an injured sibling on top of that just made everything twice as hard to figure out. The flow of words only stopped when Madara reached out to clap a hand over his mouth again, this time with a frown.
“Get to the point already,” he snarled. Hashirama pulled his hand away and tittered.
“Sorry. I got carried away. I called because I need your help. I can’t be in two places at once and I know you have to work too but you can work from anywhere as long as you have your laptop! Could I maybe convince you to come stay here and…keep an eye on Tobi?”
Madara blinked. “You want me to what now?”
“Please!? Tobirama really needs someone to help him out with things and I already worry for Mito when I’m not around but I can’t just ignore my patients–”
“No, stop.” Rubbing at the bridge of his nose, Madara demanded, “Are you asking me to come stay here so I can babysit your little brother? Have you gone insane?” Of all the stupid favors he had been asked for during their long friendship this definitely ranked among the stupidest.
“Come on, it won’t be that bad! He just needs someone to cook meals and help him get around, maybe entertain him a little bit. It’s not like it would be super hard!”
“Have you forgotten the part where he can’t stand me?”
Waving his hand dismissively, Hashirama laughed. “That’s not true at all! You just need to learn how to read him properly. Believe me, you would know if he couldn’t stand you. He’s not afraid to be vocal about that sort of thing.”
Madara shook his head doubtfully but didn’t bother arguing further. Apparently Tobirama was already here in the house somewhere and he’d always had abnormally sharp ears – useful now that he would need to rely on them a little more than usual but even blinded he was unlikely to spare any sharp words if he overheard Madara talking about him.
A cringe put a stop to that line of thought, bringing him up short and forcing him to take a hard look at the reality of what Hashirama was asking him. Friends weren’t something Hashirama lacked but people he could trust to take care of his precious sibling? After the rest of their family had all been taken by the same sickness a few years back Hashirama had seemed to cling to his last brother like a lifeline, holding tightly as though afraid that if he let go he would lose Tobirama as well. Knowing that he was among the few this man would trust with the last of his family was unsurprising, of course, but still touching.
That didn’t mean he was in any way excited to do this. In all the years they had known each other Madara have gotten no impression from Tobirama other than disdain and distaste. Younger he might be but his brain could outrun the both of them put together and he was always quick on the draw to point out when he thought Madara was doing something stupid – which was pretty much all the time. Even if he thought about it Madara couldn’t think of a single pleasant interaction between the two of them. Usually they just avoided each other as much as possible and left it at that; it was easiest.
“Don’t you have a cousin who lives in town?” he asked as a last ditch attempt to avoid the awkwardness he just knew was bound to come with agreeing to this stupidity.
“We do but she’s out of the country on a work retreat and they weren’t even allowed to bring cellphones or anything. She would come home in a heartbeat if I could reach her – probably more to get out of there than for Tobi, to be honest – but I just don’t have a way to do that.” Hashirama sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve had several coworkers covering my ass as much as possible over the past few days but they’re all just as overworked as I am and they can’t keep this up. Please? Please?” Like an inevitable tide he went for the same old move he’d been perfecting since they were twelve, the infamous puppy eyes, at which point Madara understood that he had lost. He gave a sigh of his own and prayed for patience.
“I’ll need to pack some clothes and shit. And it’ll take a while to get all my notebooks together and grab my laptop. Honestly, you could have asked me over the phone so I could do all this before coming over. Now I’ve got to pay for a cab both ways just to get back here!” Grumbling, he shoved his hands in his pockets and spun around to head for the front door.
“Wait! I can give you a ride home! I’ll just need to run upstairs and let Tobi know that I’ll be gone for a little while so he doesn’t try anything adventurous.” Hashirama paused to wrinkle his nose. “The first night I brought him home he tried to find the bathroom by himself and ended up weeing in the hall closet. I had to rewash all my linens and some of those sheets still don’t smell right when I make the bed.”
Madara blinked twice and then roared with laughter. It did make him feel better to know that his new ward had already made a fool of himself a time or two.
Not wanting to waste a good brew, the two of them sat down and enjoyed the coffee Hashirama had been making before they left. It was nice to catch up after several days apart. Trading gossip as they usually did, reestablishing the bond several people in their lives had dubbed worryingly codependent. When they were finished he took the mugs to the sink while Hashirama trotted upstairs to speak with his brother for a minute and then Madara allowed himself to be led outside and piled in to the stupidly expensive car in the driveway. On the way back to his apartment he made his friend regale him with all the silly idiot mistakes Tobirama had made so far in his adventures as a temporary blind man, laughing without shame no matter how he was scolded for it.
With those images in his mind the next couple of weeks were looking a lot more fun.
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Just Keep Swimming
Sorry not sorry. Also, this version has a read more. I swear I put one on the original post. :p
Summary: Virgil is the new kid (adult? kind of?) in school, and he’s still trying to navigate in unfamiliar waters. Thankfully, some more experienced fishies are more than willing to help.
Word Count:
1954
Genre: Teacher!Human!AU; slice of life
Characters: Virgil (Anderson), Logan (Foley), Patton (Thompson), Roman (Prince), Sleep (Remy Cordova), Deceit (Declan Anwir)
Warning for DECEIT and a lot of dumb teacher humor. School stuff. Self doubt. IDK what else.
Twain uses syntax. Twain also uses many different types of sentences-
“Oh my god if I read this repetitive garbage one. more. TIME.”
Virgil Anderson threw down his pen, sighed, and leaned back in the plastic chair, roughly running his fingers through his hair.
“What’s got you all worked up?” Roman Prince queried from the copy machine across the sizable work room.
“Apparently, Mark Twain uses syntax. Of course he uses syntax. Syntax is sentences. My god-”
“I hear he also uses diction and chooses his words.” Roman teased as he strode past his co-worker with a mountain of copies in his arms.
“So I hear.” Virgil mumbled, allowing the grin nipping at his lips to come to light. Roman could win every once in a while.
“How long have you been at that?” Roman paused at the door, cradling his papers on his hip like a baby.
“Not too long. Just long enough to be fed up already. These are honors kids, for crying out loud. I know they have better thoughts than this.”
“They do. They just don’t know it yet. Who’s giving you trouble?”
“Giselle Wilson.”
“Oo yeah, I had her last year. She’s a smart girl, really, but very much a verbal processor. Try doing writing conferences and talking through her thoughts. She does better that way.”
“I don’t have time for that though. We’re already behind as it is-“
“Lesson plans are a formality, Virge. Lighten up.”
“Says the man who’s been teaching for 5 years already.”
“You’ll get there.” Roman flashed him one of his obnoxiously bright smiles. “I suppose losing your classroom during your planning period doesn’t help, but…it all settles in after the first few years.”
“Yeah, if I last past the dropout stats. What is it? 20% in the first 3 years?”
“It doesn’t matter because you won’t be one of them.” Roman replied shortly but not unkindly. “As I said, you’ll get there. As for me, I must get back to my domain before the serfs run amok.”
“Oh my god, Roman; you left them alone?!”
“Just for a few minutes.”
Virgil eyed the precarious stack he was hauling.
“They’re fine. They’re seniors. Some of them can vote and serve; they can handle themselves for 10 minutes.”
“Whatever you say.” Virgil rolled his eyes as the other sauntered away, turning back to his grading with another sigh. “Another day, another assignment to grade.”
Virgil had just lapsed back into the flow of grading when the tap of footfall pulled him from his focus.
“Oh, hello, Virgil.” Logan Foley paused inside the doorway. “I forgot you do your planning in here. I can come back later if you are trying to concentrate.”
“No, it’s fine. I need a break anyway. Papers are painful.”
“I understand the sentiment.” A shadow of a smile graced Logan’s lips as he sat across from Virgil. “My AP Language students are writing responses to past AP Examination prompts, and reading through them is taxing. My students often do well, but…I do always worry.”
“That’s fair. But hey, Mr. Teacher of the Year, I think you’ll be fine.” Virgil nodded slightly. “They couldn’t have anyone better.”
“Unless they have me.”
Virgil visibly tensed as their red-headed colleague slunk into the room.
“Your students’ scores have certainly been quite comparable to my own.” Logan conceded.
“Of course.” Declan Anwir chuckled. “This place needed me desperately. You’re doing great and all, Logan, but one man can only do so much. Especially after all of that-“
“Do you mind? I’m trying to grade here.” Virgil snapped, gesturing to the papers spread out in front of him. “Not all of us have the luxury of a classroom during all periods.”
“Of course. My mistake. I thought this was the teacher workroom, after all.”
Virgil rolled his eyes after Declan rose and turned his back on them.
“Anyway, I have a lot of grading to do. Those AP essays won’t score themselves.” He gave them a sharp wave and went out.
“God, that guy gets on my nerves.” Virgil filed below his breath. “Sure his AP scores are high, but the kids hate his class. He’s a dictator. One of my past honors kids from last year broke down in Anime Club because of the workload in his class. It’s nuts!”
“His methods may be…strict-”
“Tyrannical.”
“But the data is unarguable. His students get top scores.”
“And that makes it all the worse…”
“He is not a bad teacher, Virgil.”
“He’s not a good one, either, though!-” Virgil caught himself and snapped his mouth shut; he inhaled deeply through his nose and unclenched his fists. “…So anyway, how is everything going? With….you know-“
“Clear as of the last check.”
Virgil physically relaxed, his sharp gestures softening. “Good. Glad to hear it. But don’t hesitate to let us know if things aren’t good.”
“Of course. I cannot thank you enough for everything you did for me when-“
“Well, hello, gentlemen!” Patton Thompson breezed into the room. “No one told me we were having a planning party!”
“Not a party, Pat; just…a chat.”
“Nice rhyme, Virge; you just might be a poet after all.”
“Never again.” Virgil’s lip curled, and Patton exploded into giggles.
“You teach English, silly goose; you’ll have to deal with it eventually.”
“Yeah, Yeah-“
“So how are our freshman, Patton?”
“Oh, they’re fine, as always!” Patton laughed as he headed toward a copy machine. “My precious babies. Still adjusting to high school life. It really is so hard.”
“Pat, they’re 14, not 6.” Virgil muttered, the grievance not at all expressed in his expression. “They’ll be fine.”
“Ooooooh I know, but I just want to scoop them up and take care of them, you know? They’re so helpless-“
Logan sighed. “They play on your kindness like a harp, Patton, and you know this. Yet you still give in.”
“It’s just because they need the push, but they’re too scared to ask.”
“Sometimes, I think you’re too soft for your own good, Pat.”
Patton flashed his co-worker a grin before removing the warm papers from the finishing tray. “Soft inside; tough outside.”
“Soft inside; soft outside, is more accurate.” Logan interjected seriously.
“We’ll work on the tough part, Pat. I’ll teach you how to do a teacher scowl.”
“Don’t need it, but thanks for the offer!” Patton saluted. “They’re just fine with me as their Captain-”
“Don’t.” Virgil quipped.
“What?” Patton peered at his co-worker with his signature doe eyes.
“Don’t do it. I heard ‘Dead Poets Society’ through my walls yesterday. How many times a semester do you use that movie, anyway?”
“I use clips every chance I get! It really is a versatile film. I thought you liked that movie?!”
“I do, but hearing it quoted weekly makes it lose its appeal.” Patton’s jaw tightened, and Virgil backpedaled. “Sorry, Pat. I didn’t mean to go off on you like that. I just….It’s been a day.”
“Mass grading. I counseled you against such practices, Virgil.” Logan interjected. “It is not only harmful to you, but to your students’ grades-”
“I know. I know! I just….god, I agonize over grading. I start out so harsh, but then I worry that I’m too soft, and it’s all just so much.” Virgil slumped dejectedly, eyeing the stack of essays with malice. “And I have no one to blame but myself because I assigned them.”
“True that.” Patton shrugged. “That’s why I assign stuff that I’ll enjoy grading. And that meets standards and is good for the students, of course!” Patton giggled, swiping up his copies from the tray.
“But you’re experienced and just…talented enough to do that. I’m not there yet.”
“But you will be one day.” Logan replied softly. “It takes time. Remember, you just got your Bachelor’s Degree. Patton and I both have our Doctorates and years of experience to drawn upon. You will get there. Be patient with yourself. Besides….if your students’ reactions to your activity last week was any indication, you are already off to a satisfactory start.”
“What was your activity?” Patton called over his shoulder.
“Nothing that great, really. It’s basically four corners. I put a scenario up on the board, and they go to one place or the other depending on their opinion. I try not to let them be in the grey area, and they have to argue their points to each other. It’s like an informal debate, and they get really into it.”
“I do not believe I have seen or heard your honors students be so rambunctious.” Logan commented.
“Yeah, sorry about that. They’re really passionate about Of Mice and Men, apparently. And the death penalty.”
“That one can definitely get people stirred up!”
“Shaken or stirred, Patty, because there’s a difference.”
“Hey, Rem!” Patton greeted their sub-turned-part-timer. “Ready for the day shift?”
“You know it. I’m joe’d up and ready to flow!” Remy snapped a finger, the other hand grasping a coffee cup, as per usual. “Whatchya got goin’ on here, Toddler Teacher?” Remy gestured to Virgil’s piles.
“Honors Lit. essays. This batch hurts.”
“And so did the last one, but surely they’re getting better!” Remy pulled out a chair and sat backwards, resting his chin on his arms. “Shoot.”
“Twain uses syntax-”
“That’s all I need. You’re in for it, baby boy, but it’s normal. They’re still adjusting.”
“It’s week 3.”
“And they’ll be adjusting at week 13, too. They’re teenagers. It’s normal. You just gotta know when to hold their hands and when to let ‘em go.”
“You talk like you have teaching experience. Or parenting experience.”
“We’re their school parents, in a way, you know. Or at least, we can be.”
“I don’t think I’m at that stage yet. I think I’m still in the ‘weird older brother stage.’”
“Now don’t you say that, Virge!” Patton cut in. “Your kids love you!”
“Yeah because I’m…unconventional, I guess.”
“Because you’re a good teacher who does your best and cares about them! That’s all they want and everything they need.”
“True dat, Patty Pat.” Remy sipped at his frozen coffee.
“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough.”
“It is. Trust me.” Patton smiled warmly and jumped a bit when a sharp ringing sounded overhead. “You’d think I’d be used to that darn bell after all this time-”
“Well, they did change out the system this year. The pitch is higher and more shrill than it has been in the past.” Logan sighed, hauling himself from his chair.
“It does it’s job, though.” Patton left with a wave, easily weaving into the sea of students in the crowded halls.
“Time to get to it.” Remy slapped the back of his chair and rose, shouldering his laptop bag before placing a hand on Virgil’s shoulder. “Have a good one, kid.” He gave it a squeeze and disappeared into the mass of bodies as well.
“Are you managing well, Virgil?” Logan asked in a low tone, making direct eye contact. “Really?”
Virgil sighed deeply and gathered his papers and pens. “Yeah. ‘Well’ is a relative term, but I’m managing, that’s for sure.”
“Remember to inform me if that changes. We are here for you if you need us.”
“Thanks, Logan.” Virgil’s smile reached his eyes as he fell into stride beside the older teacher. “So, what were your kids doing yesterday? They got pretty loud, too.”
“Peer editing argument papers.” Logan replied, traces of a grin gracing his lips. “Some of them had opposing stances on the same topic, so I paired them together to gauge the result.”
“You’re a mad genius.” Virgil laughed out loud as they merged together into the current of teenagers, chatting until they reached their shared hallway and parted ways into their respective domains.
#sanders sides#sanders sides fanfiction#sanders sides fanfic#thomas sanders#thomas sanders fanfic#teacherau#mine#tsfanfics
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The droning voices threaten to send him to sleep, but he's familiar with the beating that will earn him. He concentrates very hard on the glittering motes of dust that spin lazily in and out of the thin streams of light filtering through the screened windows. He imagines he can follow the journey of one individual as it's buffeted by updraughts of a wind he cannot feel. The heat is stifling; he wishes he were a dancing mote that didn't have to wear robes and a stupid hat and could ride the breeze. If he were, he thinks, he would try his best to land in Adminstrator Park's eye so he had to break ceremony and rub it.
He giggles, and realises his mistake. Park doesn't even look at him but the room seems to become much darker. He can see Park's nostrils flaring, a sure sign of his anger, even though his face remains impassive and the tone of his voice, expressionless and dry as he dictates tributes and taxes, never wavers. The boy shivers, despite the oppressive heat.
Park never beats him. It's always one of the women, a concu-something that the six-year-old hasn't figured out a role for, other than whipping him with a thin bamboo cane around his thighs. It's a crime to hit the king, of course; the real punishment comes afterwards with the ragged cry, gush of blood and the hideous tearing noise as a soldier slits their bellies open in front of him. If he doesn't watch properly, eyes wide open, he gets another beating. There's always a second woman in the room.
It only had to happen once. Now, he watches like a king as royal justice is dispensed in his name.
"See, your Majesty," Park tells him. "These loyal women sacrifice much in order to further your education. In a few years you will learn what else they can teach you. She will be reincarnated and will be pleased to rejoin their number to serve you."
He doesn't know why he feels sad at their deaths. It's only temporary, right? Their pain is fleeting and their reward is great. But the look on her face as she writhes in front of him, a girl only a few years older than he is, just makes him want to scream and hide. The soldiers scare him too, the ceremonial guards with covered faces and shining, bloody swords.
There's only one who doesn't. Gerralkim's been his friend since before he can remember and it's still easier for his tongue to wrap itself around the name he gave before he was properly articulate, but the tall man who kneels down to his level when he speaks to him doesn't seem to mind. He's never told Gerralkim about the beatings but when he's finally allowed to flee, the man's quarters are his preferred destination. He's not always there, but Wang Yeo has a child's active imagination.
This time, he's sitting cross-legged at his low lacquered desk, penning a letter in slow, deliberate strokes of a bamboo-handled brush. He half turns and smiles as the boy approaches him to watch characters form under the bristles.
Yeo finds it calming. Watching this is never dull, unlike sitting in the audience chamber, and he can pick out some of the meaning.
"Who are you writing to?" He asks, wide eyed.
The general smiles at him. He's a young man, younger than Park, perhaps twenty five at most. Years in the sun and in battle have darkened his skin and etched fine lines of worry between his brows and around his mouth. Unlike the officials he wears his hair down, dark waves falling off his shoulders and roughly cut shorter at the front. Today, he's wearing a pale cotton robe, wrapped at the front and belted. Yeo is relived he's not dressed as a soldier.
"I'm writing a letter to my father," he explains. "Remember my report to Administrator Park two days ago, about the battle against the Qidan?"
Yeo does. He always pays attention to General Kim, even though the thought of battle scares him. He nods.
"Well, my father worries about me. I write to tell him that I am unhurt and victorious."
"I worry about you too," the boy says seriously. "It would cause me sorrow if you got hurt."
Kim Shin grins, and ruffles his hair with a large, calloused hand, stained with ink. "You shouldn't worry about me. If anything happened, I would write you a letter so you would be the first to know."
"Of course. I am the king," the boy replies, all innocent and pompous, just as he should be. "But you should wait until I have learned all my letters, so I can write back by myself."
General Kim bows from the waist, arms folded in front of him. "It would be the utmost honour, your Majesty."
"Who's that?" asks the boy suddenly, pointing to a charcoal drawing of a woman and a young girl.
Kim pulls it towards them and straightens it between his hands. "That's my mother, and my little sister, Kim Sun. She's about your age."
Yeo studies it intently. It's an unusual drawing, life-like and untutored and utterly different to the heavily stylised scrolls hanging around the palace. He's drawn to the smiling faces of the little girl and the woman, shining with a happiness he's not used to seeing.
"She's pretty," he murmurs. "I want to meet her." He's never had playmates, wouldn't know what to do with them, but he yearns to see that beaming smile for himself.
"I'll let you in on a secret," Kim says solemnly. "Can you keep it?"
He's used to keeping secrets. Unconsciously he shifts and his bruised thighs protest. The stinging is turning to a profound aching, deep in his bones. He nods.
"Your half-brother, Wang Gang, willed it that you should marry my little sister when you grow up. What do you think?"
Yeo pretends to mull it over seriously, but can't keep the shock and delight off his face. "I can visit her?" Maybe, just maybe, there's a place Park doesn't have all the power.
"It's a bit far," the big man says. "The king should stay safe in the palace. She will come to you when she's twelve, and be trained how to look after you as a good wife and Queen." His face grew serious. "But don't tell anyone that you know, your Majesty. I don't think Administrator Park likes me very much."
He knows it's true. He's a sensitive child, schooled to be quiet, and taught by experience to read the unspoken language around him. He knows that Park hates the warrior like no other, but his close friendship with the previous king and his victories make him popular with the army. Apart from the handpicked palace guard, regular soldiers distrust civil servants like Park. He worries his lip as he considers the girl. The thought of her being beaten or treated like the other women is even more scary than what he endures.
He thinks he's hiding it, but he's transparent to an adult. Kim says, gently, "You and I will protect her. I promise."
"Tell me about her," the young king commands.
"She loves persimmons, fresh or dried. My father's last letter describes how she refused to eat anything else for a whole week, even when they made her ill."
"Persimmons make you ill?" He was doubtful.
"Anything can make you ill if you eat too much of it. Diet must be balanced."
"Tell me more."
"She feeds my horse persimmons, too, when she thinks I'm not looking."
Yeo was entranced. What freedom! "Did he get ill?"
"No, he just got fat. I scolded him for being so greedy but he didn't care."
Park hears their laughter, and scowls.
----------
The week Kim spends in the palace is the most fun he's ever had. Park doesn't dare threaten him when Kim's around, tall and imposing and cloaked in authority. His soldiers rest in the barracks, and sometimes Yeo sneaks over to listen to them sing and tell stories before he's inevitably discovered and carried back by Kim. They know interesting words, and talk about things he's curious to see; the ocean, barbarians on little ponies with tattoos, legends of gods he doesn't know.
Kim plays little tricks on him, pulling cards and coins out of his hair or from behind his ears, making him giggle with delight. Yeo uses his tall hat to scoop out a squiggle of tadpoles from the inner palace pond and dumps it in Kim's basin. He watches, wedged inside a tall chest and peeks through the hinge gap, as Kim bends to splash his face before the midday meal, and gasps in exaggerated horror at the squirming water. That earns him a rough capture and a serious and slightly painful head rub, until he's wriggling as hard as the little creatures in the sink.
Kim has to steal him a new hat.
But weeks come to quick ends, especially the best ones. He mopes in the doorway as a servant packs Gerralkim's traveling trunk, and the general dons his armour.
"A king shouldn't pout like that," Kim gently chides him. "You must be strong, no matter what."
"Must you go already?"
"I must. One of your towns in the North has been attacked, and I have to go protect the people there. Then I must retaliate so it never happens again."
"Will you kill people?" He asks in a sniffling whisper, the pink Cupid's Bow of his lips quivering.
Kim sighs. He can protect the young monarch from many things while he's there, but the realities of rule, and the war that allows it to continue, are hard truths the king must face. The servant finishes, and carries the trunk outside.
Kim bends down and kneels in front of the boy. "Yeo," he says seriously, using the given name reserved only for parents and close family he's technically forbidden from. He does it anyway in private sometimes, because he knows that it makes Yeo feel safe. "I won't lie to you. I have to kill lots of people to protect our own. We live in dangerous times, and if we don't kill our enemies, they might come and kill us. That town has children in it, so I have to go and make sure they don't come to any harm. Please understand."
Yeo nods. It's easier to accept when stated simply like that. Park sometimes tells him that General Kim kills in his name, as if Yeo's responsible; maybe he is, but he didn't ask for it.
Kim pulls him unceremoniously into a last rough hug, and holds him close until the child stops shaking.
----------
He's away for several years. His letters, delivered by suspicious-eyed warriors, tell of continuing unrest and the need for more soldiers at the front. After a while, they dwindle in frequency and no longer go directly to him; Park receives them first. Yeo is shocked when Park passes along a blood stained scroll in shaky handwriting detailing a massacre of a barbarian village, women and children subjected to torture and worse before being burned alive. Park says, nonchalantly, that Kim's acting on his own; that orders have been sent to have mercy on the barbarians, but the people of Goryeo call for revenge, and General Kim gives them what they want.
Yeo doesn't know what to think about this, but he's not given time to consider; when there's a botched attempt on his life by one of the couriers, the palace is locked down and he's placed under armed guard permanently. His food is tasted, his servants are replaced, and Park himself moves into the annex of the king's quarters.
"Your Majesty," Park tells him, a week after the attempt. "We cannot, of course, be sure that General Kim sought to take your life. It is true that the people are starting to worship him as a second sun in the sky, but we should not be hasty in judgement. Please have patience and mercy until the truth is revealed."
Yeo's mind is foggy, a result of sleepless nights and the restless paranoia of his guards. It's all he can do to sit straight on the hard throne, and at the age where his bones sometimes feel like they are breaking and knotting themselves back together constantly, he's rarely inclined to introspection.
He's twelve just before he sees Kim again, walking alongside the palanquin containing his new bride. It's a pretty box, carved but not lacquered like his own, carried by four stocky men. Not a commoner's carriage, but not royalty. Tradition forbids him from rising to greet them, and despite his constant fatigue he's eager for it to be over so he can take advantage of the freedom Kim's visit should bring.
He is disappointed. Hard-eyed guards keep them separated except in formal situations. He is desperate, bursting to ask so many questions, to ask if Kim tried to have him killed, why he sends his letters to Park now, why he has to kill children in the name of Goryeo. If Kim notices the pleading in his eyes he doesn't react to it, just stays his tongue and speaks formally, steady voice echoing in the audience chamber. Park keeps Yeo away from battle accounts, claiming that he should not sully his mind with the unnecessary details.
----------
It's well after Kim has left that the guards make an error of sorts. There's a commotion in the kitchens, the loud crash of celadon pots meeting an untimely end, and the guards reach for their swords, drawn to the sound. Yeo sweeps from the room before his servants can object and flees, followed by his indignant shadows, to the outer wall of his courtyard. The palace walls are low, barely taller than him at twelve years old, and he gets a leg up on an obliging flowerpot to peer over at the ladies' domain.
She's beautiful, is his first and only thought.
She's trying to walk with the grace of a queen, a small dish balanced on each of her shoulders, but her face is sort of squished up with the effort of concentration. Several pinch-faced women watch her, whispering to each other behind their long and loose sleeves. His heart goes out to her; she must feel judged, like he does. It looks hard, walking so straight over the uneven stone slabs, with that bunch of harridans silently laughing at you, in those tiny ridiculous shoes.
His hand grates over a stone; she looks up startled, and meets his eyes as the plates go crashing to the floor. She offers him a small, uncertain smile and he grins back, amused and confusingly aroused at her clumsiness.
Insistent, unwelcome hands help him down from the wall.
----------
Their wedding night, two years later, is the first time they get to speak in private. Unsure of what he's meant to actually be doing, the two young teenagers simply spend the time in their sleeping robes talking into the small hours of the morning.
She's terrified of Park. So is he, of course, but he's sworn to himself to protect her and he can't tell her the worst of it. Some things are his burdens to bear. So he instructs her to just do as Park tells her and he hopes with all his heart that this will be enough to keep her safe.
----------
She's too much like her brother, he realises as he matures into his fifteenth year. She's grown up with freedom and love and doesn't understand his kind of survival.
She shouts at him, "Why do you always side with Park? Is it too much to ask that I go outside these dark walls once before I die? The people are loyal, they love you. Nothing will happen to me!"
"Be quiet!" He hisses. "If Park hears you question him-" The room echoes with the sound of the chopstick snapping in her hands.
"I don't care what Park hears! You are the king, I am the queen! What does he matter?"
His mind whirls; images of bloody concubines and sharp swords crowd behind his eyes. The ghosts of pain around his lower body makes him tense. She has to submit; it's the only way she can survive. For her own good, he grabs her by her slight, narrow shoulders and pushes her into the floor pillows.
"I am the king," he growls in her face, his teeth grinding together with every word. "And you will obey me."
His breath is hot and stale, and his long pale fingers dig bruisingly into her flesh. From so close, she can see the tiny red veins in his eyes, dark-rimmed and intense. He's never been physical before, or hurt her in any way, so she's shocked at his sudden ferocity and can't find the right words to calm him down.
Still gripping her, he says quietly, "I can only protect you if you obey me."
She's still in shock, even after he releases her and steps back. His own heart is pounding loudly in his ears and he clenches and unclenches his fists to exorcise the tension.
"My brother," she says in a small voice. "He can protect us both. Call him back from war."
Yeo shakes his head. "He leads the army but too many of the men belong to Park now. Even if he came back, the palace guards would keep him out. He has to stay away. I can't protect him either, if he comes back."
It earns him a sniffle of temporary defeat, but he knows she's too stubborn to give in easily.
----------
It's checkmate, and he knows it, signing the order that will keep Kim Shin away from the capital for good. He's back for a brief respite, sanctioned by Park, though he doesn't know it, in return for the royal seal on that scroll. Yeo bargains for an audience alone, and gets it, but he knows there are ears and eyes in the walls.
Kim doesn't understand, but he doesn't have to. It's enough for Yeo that he's going away to be safe, because he has enough faith to know that Kim is unkillable in battle.
Through clenched teeth and on his knees, Kim accepts the sword that Yeo has had made for him. It has a tiger on the hilt, because that's how Yeo thinks of him; ferocious, graceful, and gentle.
Kim thanks him through gritted teeth. His parting words are cold and sarcastic. Yeo's heart breaks as he speaks, equally coldly, of his coming sorrow at Kim's death, praying silently, fervently, that it will be many years before coming. He desperately wants a last embrace from the man he thinks of as his only friend, and tells himself that his life is the only thing that matters.
----------
In the middle of winter, he finds out that Kim has disobeyed him. He rushes to Sun's rooms, intent that somehow she can write and dissuade him from his self-destructive path. In the presence of the servant-spies, he calls Kim a traitor, acid burning his throat at the lie.
He knows she loves him, but she's far braver than he is.
----------
As General Kim Shin approaches the heavy wooden double gates, the court waits in silence within. Behind Park, Yeo sits beside Sun, close but no more able to touch her than reach the moon. She is staring straight ahead, back ramrod straight, breathing a little too fast. As the gates swing open she rushes forward and halts at the top of the stone steps when the archers draw their bows in unison, the creaking of strings the only noise in the icy courtyard.
Kim ignores Park; his eyes flick between Yeo and his sister's as he approaches, slowly, wearily, his lieutenant at his heels. He's wearing only his black padding, no armour; he's got the sword Yeo gave him but no means of defending himself.
Yeo's heart gives a painful twist. He doesn't really hear what's being said, but there's nothing he can do to stop what he knows is coming when Sun takes an arrow to the chest and tumbles, soundlessly, to the ground. Around them, bodies fall. The screams reach him curiously delayed, muted as though underwater.
As the gifted sword is driven through his friend's chest, he finally crumbles, and flees.
----------
The years that follow are lifeless and grey, as though that winter day never came to an end. The decoction tea Park sends him every day is numbing and he welcomes the oblivion it brings him each night. His second wife has somehow conceived a child; he doesn't know how, and he can't even recall her face or name, so he doesn't care. The servants stay away from him except for necessities; dressing, eating and bathing. His presence is rarely required in the throne room.
Park takes care of all that.
He's still got that charcoal drawing in a secret drawer, now yellowed and smudged with old tears. On his better days he pulls it out and takes a cathartic comfort in the fresh guilt it brings; he craves the crying, the cramps, the nails he digs into his palms until they bleed.
He draws, seeking a nameless meaning in his work. He mainly draws Kim Shin as he remembers him, tall and dependable, strong enough to conquer the world and carry it on his shoulders.
Sun evades him, as if refusing to materialise on paper out of spite. She is clear in his mind's eye but his hands shake too much.
In his thirtieth year, enough decoction tea to kill him in burning agony keeps his hands steady enough to finally capture her.
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