#i never really worked through any of this like every therapist i’ve had i’ve skipped over this because i couldn’t face it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

troglobite · 2 years

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i doubt anyone will read this bc either tumblr is hiding most of my posts or ppl (rightly) skip over my read more posts bc they’re a bunch of fucking bullshit

but anyway warning i get extremely fucking depressed and talk about wanting to die. i’m fine, i’m safe. nothing’s going to happen. but fucking christ, man.

anyway on with the post--

i’m trying to figure out a productive and healthy way to express this

i want to be dead

i wish i was dead

i don’t want to be alive

i hate everything

it’s all hopeless and i don’t want to exist

i don’t necessarily feel like this all the time

i’m finding other jobs (my mom is, because i’m a pathetic useless lump who deserves to be summarily executed for the crime of ever having been born)

i’m working on my miss frizzle game (not right now, bc rn i’m struggling through a job app and fighting off the feeling of wanting to die)

i just sent an email about a possible commission of my clownsona

but ultimately

i have nothing to live for

the world is actively falling apart around me and I FUCKING KNOW i’m supposed to find something productive to do to help, something to focus on that helps the world in some way, so that i don’t feel this way

but there is nothing. there is nothing i can do.

the joke is that i have spent every day since JANUARY 2020 doing everything in my power to keep from getting sick and to keep from dying

and my desire to not want to be alive anymore doesn’t mean that i’m going out and huffing covid patients’ breath or licking door handles in public schools

in no way shape or form do i want THOSE (plagues) to be my mode of death

i haven’t really thought that far ahead, so i guess that’s something. i’m not planning much of anything. i probably won’t.

which is why i just.

need to say this SOMEWHERE where people won’t freak out and report me. because i’m not going to do anything.

but i don’t think i can say anything to my therapist on friday.

and my friends (the extremely small number of them that even exist) aren’t in any headspace to deal with this.

but i just have to PUT THIS SOMEWHERE.

i’m lonely. i have no legitimate prospects. i’m going to lose my job in two weeks even though my boss had 7 months to talk to me about any of this or warn me and she hasn’t, and she STILL hasn’t. i’m still, officially, completely in the dark about my job.

i’ve spent the majority of this year so far fighting with people at the university over this fucking lousyass job.

and now the first job i had lined up back in may stopped hiring, and they STILL aren’t hiring

and now the SECOND job i had lined up isn’t hiring anymore

and i’m having to cave to all of these fucked up questionable high stress positions that won’t pay much

i’m having to grovel on my knees, on my stomach, for any fucking job

because i have to work from home

why? because i refuse to get sick and die because of capitalism

but also that situation in and of itself makes me wish i was dead

my mom is leaving in two weeks, as well, right as i lose my job.

for the world’s most dangerous country-long road trip for a “celebration of life” for her older sister who was chronically ill for 20 year before passing. and somehow no one sees the fucking DEADLY IRONY of holding a CELEBRATION OF LIFE in the middle of TWO UNRESOLVED UNCONTROLLED HIGHLY DEADLY HIGHLY DANGEROUS PANDEMICS

so i get to sit ALONE in the house

in absolute terror and agony and fear and heartsickness

trying to figure out a new job on my own

and just. deal with. everything. on my own.

i don’t have anyone or anything.

what’s the point? what is the FUCKING point?

i look at myself and i hate myself with so much fucking virulent DISGUST

i’m so tired.

i’m so tired of trying and failing and being shit on or exploited or hated or disregarded

i took one voice acting/over class. that led nowhere.

i wanted to do this INCREDIBLE shakespeare course. it’s just never going to happen. i’ve asked.

i applied TWICE to a free workshop for people just getting into recording audiobooks. i’ve been denied BOTH times.

i tried a new job last year that went so poorly i quit in three months.

i applied to TWO editorial internships at publishing houses. i was rejected for one and the other one is w fucking PRH which is embroiled in that lawsuit right now. FUN.

i applied to a freelance editor position last year for a kids publishing house. after 6 months, they FINALLY rejected me because i “wasn’t up to their standards”. even though the application call went out on TWITTER and asked for ANYONE OF ANY LEVEL OF EXPERIENCE to apply, particularly from marginalized groups. it literally said we did NOT need to know ALL of their in-house editing rules on our editing sample test, bc we would be taught on the job. and then 6 months later they said “no, fuck you, you’re trash”

i ALMOST got a preceptor position at a university for a theater course with a GREAT professor who i really liked (based on our interactions in the interview), but then he ghosted me for 2 weeks bc his university stopped allowing out of state hires. i emailed him again recently and he said sorry, same problem. i’ll reach out if we ever solve it/can hire out of state again.

i’m just. tired of trying. and failing. and having nothing work out. or being rejected for stupid reasons.

and then this week finding out that my superior and EIC for the journal i work for at my job thinks that i was “mean” to a fucking lousyass student who CHEATED on their paper. i called them out on it--they didn’t read ANY of their sources and demonstrated a complete lack of understanding about rape, rape culture, toxic masculinity, power, and sexual assault, and i’m just supposed to LET THAT SLIDE? i don’t care if this is supposed to be a supportive and encouraging environment--I WAS BEING ENCOURAGING AND SUPPORTIVE BY BEING HONEST WITH THE STUDENT INSTEAD OF LETTING THAT SHIT FLY.

i’m just trash! i’m fucking trash!

no one wants to play my fucking miss frizzle game! no one wants to talk to me! or play games with me! I DON’T FUCKING MATTER!

I TRULY JUST DON’T MATTER!

my life is fucking pathetic and empty and useless and occasionally i try to do something to fill the vacuous empty void eating me alive and i just feel WORSE. more consumption and wasteful spending to try and make ME feel better. i deserve to die.

i deserve to be dead.

i’m tired of being here.

i don’t have any hope for anything. it’s just status quo until the majority of us go up in flames or underwater or away in winds or in a fucking shooting or a plague or a war or SOMETHING. WHO KNOWS.

i never, not once, thought that i would die young. i hoped i wouldn’t. i made it through my teenage years without any serious su/cidality.

and now here i am. 27, almost 28. in the middle of two plagues. fascism on the rise. no hopes or prospects in my personal life. nothing to really LIVE for.

it’s pathetic and disgusting and i wish i was dead. i wish i had anyone or anything to live for. not to put it all on them, but so that i could process this shit on my own and not feel this way.

but instead here i am. typing it all out on tumblr like some pathetic fucking loser.

i’ll probably fucking delete this, too, it’s fucking gross and embarrassing and it’s not anyone’s problem but my own. i know no one cares or has the energy/wherewithal space to care.

but in case you’re wondering why it might seem like i haven’t been reaching out or caring--

this is partly why.

the other reason is that if we mostly talk over tumblr then tumblr has cut off all of my major forms of communication with y’all. i’m being deliberately isolated even more than i already am.

this is just. pathetic. and hopeless. idk what to do with any of this. i want to break something. i want to take a sledgehammer and break things until my body falls apart.

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alsjeblieft-zeg · 2 years

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331 of 2022

made by audrey at hissstory

ONE OF YOUR SIBLINGS: Julie. 1. What is the age difference between you two?:

Five years.

2. Do you know what this person is doing right now?:

No idea, probably hanging out with her friends.

3. How often do you and this person argue?

Basically never. We argued maybe twice when we were younger.

4. What do you do together?:

Hang out, if possible. We haven’t seen each other for years.

5. Is this a step-sibling, half-sibling or full-sibling?:

We have the same parents, so full sibling I guess.

THE LAST PERSON YOU TEXTED: Kenny. 1. What was the text about?:

Some kind of a funny video.

2. When is the last time you saw this person?:

Last Monday.

3. Do you text each other more than you call each other?:

Definitely. I usually don’t do phone calls, unless absolutely necessary.

4. How old is this person?:

He’s 34.

5. What is this person’s favorite movie?:

No idea, but I know he loves Game of Thrones. It’s not a movie, though.

YOUR FAVORITE TEACHER FROM LAST YEAR: I haven’t had any teacher, so let’s skip this. 1. Did this teacher give a lot of homework?:

2. Did the other students like them too?:

3. What subject did they teach?:

4. Have they ever taught you before this year?:

5. Does this teacher run any after school programs?:

THE LAST PERSON YOU SPOKE TO: My therapist. 1. Was this in person, through the telephone or the internet?:

In person.

2. What was the conversation about?:

Adjusting my therapy to certain tasks so I can prepare myself better for coming back to work.

3. How long did it last?:

About 5 minutes because we needed to start therapy soon.

4. What was the tone / mood of the conversation?

Informing? Can’t think of any better word.

5. What is your relationship with this person?:

She’s my therapist.

THE LAST PERSON YOU KISSED: My husband. 1. Where did this kiss take place?:

On the couch.

2. Have you ever kissed this person before?:

Yeah, I’ve had lots of occasions for the last 4 years.

3. What were they wearing at the time of the kiss?:

Black jeans and a hoodie, as usual.

4. How long have you known this person?:

For many years.

5. How often do you talk to this person?:

Every day. It would be strange if I didn’t talk to my spouse, right?

YOUR FAVORITE BAND / ARTIST: HRFTR. 1. How long have you liked this band / artist?:

Found them this year, so a few months.

2. What is your favorite song by them?:

Can’t really choose. Prey, Husk, Withdrawal, Zealot... I love them all.

3. What city are they from?:

Paris. Yeah, they’re French.

4. Do a lot of your friends like them?:

Nobody even knows them, so.

5. What genre do they play?:

Djent. Since some believe it’s not a genre, let’s say some mix of prog metal and deathcore.

YOUR MOTHER: Ellen. 1. Do you spend a lot of time with her?:

I don’t even live with my parents.

2. How strong is the relationship between you two?:

Better than before.

3. Do you tell them a lot about your personal life?:

Nah. I’d rather go to my dad for this.

4. What personality traits did you acquire from her?:

Short memory. Thankfully nothing else.

5. What is the most frequent topic of argument?:

My appearance. Because “why can’t I look normal and wear what everyone else wears” aka “why can’t I be boring like everyone around”.

YOUR FATHER: Stefaan. 1. What does your father do for a living?:

He’s retired.

2. Is he considered the head of the household?:

We believe in equality in our family.

3. What personality traits did you acquire from him?:

Being nervous easily, but also getting calm easily.

4. What do you do together?:

Drink beer. He’s also the 2nd person I tell everything to.

5. Do you look anything like your father?:

Yeah, I have his eyes.

ONE OF YOUR EX-BOY / GIRLFRIENDS: Nielsje. 1. Who broke with who?

It was our mutual decision, although neither of us was particularly happy.

2. Have you kept contact?

Yes, we do until today.

3. Have you dated anyone since the break-up?

I’m married now, go figure.

4. Are you fully over him / her?

I love him as a friend now.

5. How long did you two date?

We’ve been together for 4 years.

#survey #categorised survey #q&a survey

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astaroth1357 · 4 years

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Demon Brothers Comfort an MC with Depression

As somebody who struggles with and has seen others battle depression, I know that it manifests in everyone a little differently and what works for some may not for others. Unfortunately, there is no cure-all. But if you're like me and some relief can come from comfort/being comforted, no matter how you find it, then I hope this helps you too. Please remember there's always places and people who wish to help out. Try to practice self-love and stay safe out there.

Warnings: Themes of Depression, Angst

Lucifer

His reaction to stress is work. If he’s stressed out, then he’ll do more work. It’s not that he enjoys it, it just keeps his mind distracted and he’d rather things get done. So he can recognize when someone else does the same.

Cooking, cleaning, homework, or other chores, he’s seen the MC go around doing this and that throughout the House. At first he was thankful, his brothers so rarely clean up or look after themselves, but after a while things started to seem off…

They started working themselves to the bone. He could hear them up in the middle of night sweeping or washing dishes. It was almost like they had forgotten how to sleep at night...

One night, when he left his study to go make some coffee, he found them in the library scrubbing the floors. Their shoulders were trembling with hushed whimpers and choked sobs...

He made them put the sponge away, walked them back into his study, and sat them down despite their protests. They explained their condition to him there through tears they seemingly didn’t want to shed... They’d been unable to sleep in days and were using cleaning as a distraction...

His first instinct was to put them to bed, but if they already can’t sleep then that seemed insufficient…

He ordered them to relax in the chair and played classical music as he made them some tea. He tried to calm them down as best he could and reassured them with quiet conversation and compliments to help them stop crying. When they eventually zonked out, he carried them back to bed then set to work.

Informed Diavolo the next day that the MC was having difficulties then sought out the best treatment the human world had to offer. He personally escorts the MC there for regular services.

Would not hear a word of protest on this. If they didn’t want to go, then he would just have kidnap a therapist and bring the treatment to them.

He instructed his brothers remind the MC to relax sometimes and watch closely for signs of overworking. They could let the house fall to pieces for all he cares, just as long as they’re getting enough sleep and feeling better.

“This simply won’t do… But that’s alright. I’ll make sure things here are better for you.”

Mammon

He's been with MC the longest, he knows what's up by now.

He wouldn't say they have mood swings but he's picked up on how their mood rises and falls over time. They may seem perfectly fine for a while, a week, sometimes two. Then suddenly it's as if they pull back...

They'll stay in their room longer, be a bit more quiet at the dinner table, or look spaced out all the time. Like they're there, but not really with him anymore…

At first he thought it was something he was doing but they’d always tell him he’s fine. Great even. So why did they keep pulling away…?

He got worried enough about it that he asked Solomon if it was just a human thing. He’s the one who told him what depression was and that the MC may have it.

Honestly, he can’t say that he gets it completely, but he takes it seriously. If it’s making the MC feel this bad then he’s got to try something, right?

He’s unsure of what to do, so he settles for just being there for them. Constantly. If he notices that they’re pulling back again, he’ll go to their room and just be there. Even if he’s only checking his phone while sitting next to them on the bed.

He makes sure to remind them that since they’re his human he doesn’t like seeing them sad. If they need to talk, he’s got it. If they need a hug, he’s got that too. He won’t let them feel like they’re all alone as long as he’s around.

“Tsk, look… You know you’ve got me here, right? I ain’t goin’ leave ya…”

Leviathan

Was pretty oblivious to it until he walked into their room one day to lend them a new manga and found them curled up, crying in bed.

Panicked right away because he thought they were hurt and almost called for Lucifer before they stopped him.

After they explained the situation and that sometimes the tears just happen, he felt awful for them. He’s not exactly an emotionally secure person himself so he could relate to feeling like your mind can be against you at times.

He offers them funny manga or shows them games that make him relaxed and happy. He takes their tastes into account and tries to craft them the best “feel good” media pack an otaku can ask for.

If they’re not an otaku like he is well… He doesn’t really know what makes normies feel better, but he’ll still try there too. He’s sure there’s probably some things on Akuzon that can help. Flowers? Candy? Do crystals work on them? He’s not very equipped, but he is trying.

Asks them over for a lot more anime/game nights because he thinks if he can get them distracted, then that’s a bit of relief in and of itself. Will try very hard to make them laugh when they’re together. Every little smile is a victory in his eyes.

“Okay, I brought this, and this, and this, oh and that too! It’s a good series. We can watch it together, okay?”

Satan

Sadness is sort of new to him. When you’ve been angry most of your life you end up not very familiar with other emotions, be they your own or other people’s...

He DID know about depression though. Or at least he knew what it was. He read about it in some human medical journals after the MC came to the Devildom, just to cover his bases.

When the MC started to show signs of having it, he was hesitant to say much at first because he didn’t think his place to do so.

He changed his mind after they began skipping classes. It started out pretty minor, they’d be late for class this week then maybe leave a little early the next… But soon it seemed like they couldn’t bring themselves to go at all.

He knew this wasn’t a Belphie situation. The MC wasn’t lazy and they cared a good deal about their grades. If something was keeping them from making it to class, it had to be serious and he wanted to help.

He read enough on the subject to be able to approach it tactfully, then presented the MC with his findings. He tried to be gentle, but he was worried and when he’s worried he wants to get to the bottom of the problem as soon as possible.

When his suspicions were proven true, he did everything in his power to help them. He read up on the condition for days and asked them a lot of questions about how they doing, how they’re feeling, what makes them comfortable, etc.

He begun looking into what treatments were available/able to be smuggled down to the Devildom while still being discreet, if that’s what they wanted. His brothers didn’t need to know.

Checks up on them a lot in the meantime and tries to cheer them up if he can. He’s not the best at it face-to-face but he may send them gifs and pics of kittens doing kitten things. That usually helps him, so maybe it will help them too?

“Don’t worry, you can get through this. There’s a lot of options available. Here, let me show you what I’ve found...”

Asmodeus

Even the most beautiful people can feel depressed sometimes and Asmo knows that.

It started with him fussing over their appearance like he does with all his brothers, semi-playfully of course.

“MC, are you getting enough beauty sleep? MC, why don’t you do something more with your hair? MC, you could look cuter than that! MC? Are you listening...?”

It didn’t take long, though, for him to notice the dip in their self-care was getting steeper… And it wasn’t like them. They didn’t put as much pride in their appearance as he does (who can?) but they had a style. There was a way they liked to present themselves to other people. They just weren’t doing that anymore…

Something was wrong and he was sure of it.

When he invited the MC to his room that day, he didn’t have any ulterior motives for once. He wasn’t looking for a night of fun, only answers to soothe his concern.

He had never been more gentle or considerate of their feelings than he was right then; coaxing but never prodding until finally they let him in wholeheartedly.

He held the MC as they cried, listened to every word they had to say, never interrupted or complained, and just brushed every tear away.

Makes it his mission to take care of the MC inside and out. Spa days become a regular occurrence where he will ask how they’re doing and let them vent whatever they need. If they don’t feel like talking, then he will take over and try to make them laugh with some embarrassing gossip about his brothers.

Wholeheartedly believes that one's mental health is entwined with one’s physical, so will make them feel the most beautiful and relaxed they ever have in hopes that it might soothe that emotional pain too.

“Go on, sweetheart, and let it all out… Don’t worry. I’m listening.”

Beelzebub

His first tip off was the food. They weren't eating.

Beel's pretty perceptive to what food is around him at all times so he’s the first to notice MC's portions getting smaller… then their plates stay half full.

That worried him enough but when they started skipping meals all together he knew he needed to step in and find out what was wrong. Were they sick?

He gently cornered them one day in the kitchen when they went to grab some instant noodles. It was well past noon and that was the only thing he'd seen them eat since yesterday's breakfast. He knows they're never as hungry as he is, but that has to hurt them too, right?

When he asked about their appetite they wouldn't meet his eyes. They tried to tell him that they were fine but that wasn't going to fly. He called their bluff immediately.

He didn’t expect them to start crying... Honest.

He felt horrible and just pulled them into a hug while they let it out, rocking them gently like he does with Belphie when he’s upset.

When they explained to him what depression is and how they don’t feel like eating sometimes it makes him more worried than before. He honestly can’t process the idea of not being hungry for such long periods of time but it sounds bad for them surely…

From that day forward he keeps a close eye on their food intake. He’ll be the first to encourage them to eat and even offer his own food if they haven’t had any yet. If they’re looking a little down, he’ll offer them snacks from his comfort food stash.

He’s always down to be with them when they need it. No questions asked. If they just show up at his room or send him a text then he’ll be there. He doesn’t mind if they don’t feel like talking, he just hopes his presence helps somehow.

“Do you need me right now? Okay. I’ll order us a pizza but you have to eat some of it too, alright?”

Belphegor

It’s not an unfamiliar feeling to him. He went through his own sad spells after Lilith died… Back then he coped with it through sleeping most of the day and being with Beel.

He started to notice that the MC was sleeping more. At first he was kind of happy because then they could nap together, but it started getting worse…

They’d sleep almost all day. Humans only need 8 hours but they’d go 14 or more… Not even he can stay in bed that long...

When they were awake they’d be quiet. They’d like to hold him but they weren’t telling him what was wrong…

After a while, he got so worried that he looked up what could be making them so sleepy. When he read about depression it all clicked in place for him, not just about them but about himself too.

One night, while they were having another afternoon nap/snuggle, he gently brought up the subject and they confirmed his suspicions.

What proceeded was a long conversation between the two where he admitted to sometimes feeling the same. They compared notes and thoughts, shared pain and scars, and talked about little things that might not mean much, but made them smile and feel happy to be in the world.

He made a deal with them to start staying up more if he did the same. He skipped class less often in order to wake up and go to school with them and stayed near them while they’re there just in case they started losing steam.

He wouldn’t force them to do any schoolwork or anything, but he would try to keep them up and about by inviting them in on pranks or talking to them so they won’t fall asleep until a good time for it. He just wanted them to be happy and healthy.

Promised that no matter how long the day took, he’d still cuddle them to sleep at night.

“Hey, if I’m not sleeping then you aren’t either. Come on… We can do this together.”

#obey me #obey me shall we date #shall-we-date-obey-me #obey me headcanons #obey me scenarios #obey me luficer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #belphie has depression #fightme #you'd probably win #non-confrontational

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whimsicallyreading · 3 years

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Part Four~

(Part Three)

Aelin loved Elide. She did. The tiny brunette was like a little sister to her.

But if she said Lorcan Salvaterre’s name one more time she was going to throttle her.

Aelin smiled through her annoyance, as Elide filled her in on her new boyfriend. They organized shelves, set up displays, cleaned couches, as she gushed on and on.

If it was anyone besides that walking, talking, ass, she would be thrilled for Elide. She didn’t go on dates often. After the car wreck when she’d lost her left leg, Elide became shy and timid with people she was unfamiliar with.

Aelin wanted to fill her in on what happened the night before. Tell her that exactly how her new boyfriend treated women when she wasn’t around, and the crowd he hung out with. She just- Aelin frowns and rubs the space between her eyebrows. She didn’t want to damper Elide’s happiness.

“He took me to this little restaurant on the Avery River last weekend. It was adorable,” Elide babbled as she rearranged the new releases. “He didn’t even blink when I told him I don’t drink and ordered a Shirley Temple.”

Aelin laughs. “Your ordered a Shirley Temple on a date?”

Elide blushes, “they look fancier than a soda.”

That was a lie. Elide just loved everything cherry flavored.

“Enough about me,” Aelin startled as the tiny girl turned on her. “Tell me how your night went!” Elide beamed. “You went to the rodeo with Aedion, right?”

She gasps as the realization strikes her. “Did you see Lorcan ride? I haven’t even seen him compete, yet! I’m so jealous.”

“Yeah, I saw him.” Aelin answers vaguely, hoping Elide would take the vague answer and carry on.

“He told me he came in second last night.” Elide frowns. “He was really unhappy about it, and I told him that second was great. I don’t think he believed me. Lorcan is such a perfectionist.”

Yeah. So perfect he does drugs with his crappy, friends in a dimly lit bar. Aelin shoves a book onto the shelf a little too aggressively.

“I wish he wasn’t so hard on himself. It’s such a competitive sport, though. His buddies ride as well, and I think that makes it worse. He wants to impress them.”

Aelin looks back, realizing she’d stacked over half the shelf by herself, and sees Elide sitting on the floor behind her. She had a far off look on her face, and her chin was rested on one knee while her prosthetic leg was stretched in front of her.

Taking a deep breath, she tries to swallow back the annoyance creeping up on her. “Elide.”

“It’s just, a lot of peer pressure you know?” Elide continues talking as if she hasn’t heard her. “Despite all of that and the drama, he still makes time for me. It’s honestly really sweet and-“

“Elide,” Aelin tries to catch her attention gently.

“I still haven’t met his friends yet. I’m not sure if it’s just too soon for that, but his best friend Rowan is coming over tomorrow and-“

“Elide,” Aelin bites our sharply, cutting the girl off mid sentence. “I’m glad to hear you are happy, and that your boyfriend gives a shit but can you please help me do the shelving like I pay you to do?”

Guilt. Instantaneous guilt as the younger girl wilts like a flower under a gale-force wind. “Sorry, Lin.” Elide whispers and scurries away, her cheeks reddening.

Shit. Aelin taps her head against the shelf in front of her. She felt like a piece of shit.

Aelin has been dealing with her issues for years, going to therapist after therapist, but she was still prone to bouts of anger and depression. She had it mostly under control, but sometimes it slipped from her. Being tired and skipping lunch hadn’t helped.

As Yrene always told her- “The first step in better mental health is taking care of your body” Something Aelin had never been good about.

Elide hadn’t deserved her ire, she would have to figure out a way to make it up to her. Aelin sighs in resignation, already knowing what she’d have to do.

Aelin finishes the shelves first, figuring Elide would need a minute to compose herself. Her phone dings with the reply to her text message.

Lysandra- Tonight at 6:00

“Elide?” she searches around the shop for her and finds her sitting behind the computer at the front desk.

“Yeah?” Elide replies, her voice is a little gravely and she refuses to meet Aelin’s eyes.

Aelin slinks behind the desk and wraps an arm around Elide’s shoulders. “I’m sorry I wasn’t kind.” She wouldn’t lie, she felt a bit like a toddler having to apologize for her short temper. A little embarrassment was better than an unhappy friend.

“It’s fine, Lin. I know I’m a little much to handle,” Elide still doesn’t look at her.

“No, it’s not okay, but I’m going to make it up to you,” Aelin smiles even if inside she’s cringing.

“Yeah?” Elide finally looks her in the eye, curiosity sparkling there.

“I texted Lys about the party she’s having tonight,” Aelin starts and Elide’s grow wide. “Would you want to go with me?”

“To a party? You hate parties,” she questions but Elide is already thrumming with excitement.

Aelin grabs Elide’s hand and squeezes. She doesn’t hate parties. Contrary, Aelin loves night out a little too much. That was her downfall. Now she was wary of them, but it didn’t mean she hated them.

“Really? You will go?” Elide smiles and stands up. “I’m so excited. Wow. Okay. I’ll go do with you.”

“Great, we can walk over together at five-thirty?” They lived the in the same apartment complex, it was easy for them to meet up and go places after work.

Elide is grinning ear to ear now as she hustles to finish up her chores for the day. “Sounds great. I’m so excited!”

Aelin is feeling a little upbeat herself. Even if parties weren’t really her scene anymore, attending would be fun. Elide being there would keep her from getting into any trouble, so what’s the harm?

She should know that’s the question that always goes before the fall.

~~~

Aeljn was feeling good.

She pulled on her slinky, green-velvet dress, and braided her hair into a crown like Aunt Marion used to do for her. Dressing up felt like armor to Aelin and she was a warrior who would turn heads tonight.

Elide has also done a great job dressing up. Billowing black pants and a silver singlet. She didn’t enjoy dressing up as much as Aelin, being the center of attention made her anxious, but she didn’t give herself enough credit. Elide was beautiful and Aelin would make sure her friend new that this evening.

Lysandra lived in a loft in downtown Rifthold. She was old money and Aelin was a frequent of her outrageous parties in highschool. Some of her most iconic teenage memories happened in Lysandra’s family home.

Not her proudest, but memorable for sure.

It was already in full swing when they arrived. Music played over Bluetooth speakers, various concoctions were passed around in red cups and people mingles and moved against one another in every open space.

Elide looked a little overwhelmed, but Aelin smiled at her reassuringly.

“Lin!” Lysandra appears from the crowd like a leopard from a jungle. She filings her arms around Aelin’s neck and kisses her cheek. “I’m so glad you are here!”

“It’s been too long since I’ve been to one of your get together,” Aelin wrapped her arms tightly around Lysandra.

“This is my friend Elide,” she gestures to the girl standing stiffly behind her. “Elide this is one of my oldest friends Lysandra. Possibly my soon to be sister-in-law.”

Aelin throws and wink at Lys who immediately retaliates with a pinch to her arm. “I love you and Aedion but I’m too young for that,” she scolds.

“Sure you are,” Aelin teases sliding back to Elide’s side and wrapping a comforting arm around her waist. “Those two are stupid in love don’t let her fool you,” she wiggles her fingers and Elide laughs.

“Stay right here, I’ll go get us some drinks.” Lysandra smiles and disappears into the crowd.

Almost as soon as she’s gone, there’s a tap on her shoulder. Turning around, absolute dread fills her gut. “I swear you all are stalking me,” Aelin moans.

Rowan Whitethorn is standing behind them, drink in hand and a scowl on his face. “What do you mean? This is the first time I’ve seen you since you ran out on me.” There’s an edge in his voice and Aelin knows he’s there for trouble. “I just thought I’d say hello and ask what the hell is wrong with you?”

“What the hell is wrong with me?” Aelin is indignant. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Um,” Elide stammers. “Should I give you two space?”

“I really liked you, and you stormed out on me.” Rowan growls lowly. “I don’t know what I did wrong? You humiliated me in front of my friends.”

Aelin throws her head back and laughs. A sense of satisfaction brews in her chest when she sees the forest fire beginning in his eyes. “I embarrassed you? Your friends treated me like shit.” She hisses between her teeth.

Rowan’s frown deepens into a near snarl, “I’m not responsible for what those idiots say.”

“You-“ she jabs a finger into his chest. “Stood bye and let them say it, that makes you implicit. If you respected me in the slightest my comfort and dignity would have mattered to you.”

Aelin makes to jab him again but his hand catches her wrist and she can’t control the flinch.

His eyes widen, but a body appears in between them. Elide Lochan stands like a solider in front of the man who is twice her size. “You don’t touch her.”

Rowan backed off a step, his voice raising. “She was prodding me-“ he stops himself and takes a breath, a crease forming in his forehead. “I’m sorry. I’ll back off.”

“What’s going on over here?” Lysandra’s voice cuts through the noise of the party. She doesn’t look happy.

“He put his hands on her,” Elide hisses and Rowan’s eyes go from anger to shock.

He holds up his hands and looks to Lysandra. “I didn’t. I swear.”

Lysandra stands next to Elide forming a wall between him and Aelin. As one of the few people who knew about Aelin’s drama of the last couple of years, the look of this situation boiled her blood.

“Lys, he didn’t-“ Aelin tries to douse the scene they were about to create.

Lysandra gives her a look that makes Aelin quiet. “I love you Lin, but I don’t trust your excuses.”

That hurt. Her heart feels like it was wrung in her chest. Aelin crosses her arms in front of her, suddenly feeling withdrawn from the situation.

Elide hasn’t broken her stare from Rowan. “You should probably leave.”

“What?” He flounders looking equal parts shocked and horrified. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare her. We know each other.”

“I agree,” Lysandra tilts her chin to the door. “You aren’t welcome here any longer.”

Rowan looks at her for help, and she feels bad for him. Aelin knows she touched him first, but Lysandra’s comment was like a cold knife in her side and she was still bleeding. She didn’t know what to do or say.

“Rowan? What’s going on?” Lorcan appears behind Rowan, placing a hand on his shoulder. Aelin knows the moment he sees Elide standing in front of her, because his face deflated.

“You know him?” Elide’s voice is cold.

Lorcan, a beast of a male, cowers in front of little Elide. His mouth gapes like a fish. He can’t deny her question, but affirming it seemed worse. “Ellie,” her name comes out strangled.

“These are your friends, Lorcan? The people you seem to be keeping me from?” Elide darkens further as she looks at Rowan. “I guess I understand why.”

“Both of you can leave, then.” Lysandra smiles maliciously.

“I’m sorry, Aelin.” Rowan rubs both of his hands across his face then through his hair. “Damn it, I didn’t mean for this to go like it did. I wanted to apologize.” He says mostly to himself.

“Elide. He’s my friend. I don’t know what’s going on-“ Lorcan scrambles to cover his ass, but Elide isn’t having it.

“This is Lysandra’s house.” Elide says so calmly it would have been kinder if she yelled. “She asked you to leave.”

Lorcan looks at her, absolutely fuming and Aelin knows he’s beyond pissed. “I don’t know what this lying bitch-“

A slap broke like thunder between them.

Lorcan holds his cheek as Aelin gapes at Elide in shock. There are no tears to be seen in the younger girls expression. Her shoulders are trembling, not with fear but anger.

“Let’s go.” Rowan chokes out. He grabs Lorcan’s shoulder and pulls him away from the trio of women.

Lysandra watches them like a predator until they clear her front door. Her tense shoulders only relax when they leave. She releases a breath and looks at Elide.

“You are hella cool, Ellie. You deserve something better than that piss-poor beer I brought.” She nods to the solo cups that had been abandoned on the table. “I’ve got better shit in my room. Let’s go.”

Elide looks follows Lysandra with an elated look on her face. Aelin smiles dimly, she could see them becoming fast friends. Elide would be a good addition to the group.

They pushed through the crowd, and up the stairs. Aelin wasn’t in the partying mood anymore, which was disappointing. She’d been looking forward to it, and so had Elide.

Shaking her head, Aelin decides she will take a small reprieve in Lysandra’s room then suggest they go back downstairs. Elide was only comfortable coming to a party because she was going to be with her. Now not only was her night ruined, but she was on the outs with Lorcan because of her.

The very least she could do was make sure the night ended on a good note for Elide. Lysandra would be totally willing to help Aelin get her to let loose.

When they reach the bedroom Lysandra stops the outside the door. “You can go in, Ellie. I need to talk to Aelin for just a second.”

Elide nods happily and shuffles inside.

“Lys,” Aelin starts before Lysandra can. “I’m fine. I promise.”

“You promised me before,” her voice is hard but not unloving. “Who was that Aelin?”

She doesn’t miss the use of her full name. “Just some guy I went out for drinks with one time. I honestly don’t even know him.” Aelin assures.

“Has he been bothering you? If he is I will castrate him and feed his own-“ Aelin covers her ears.

“No, no. We just bumped into each other, it was a misunderstanding,” Aelin swears. “Honestly, you didn’t need to kick him out.”

“Yes,” Lysandra hisses. “I did. You aren’t going through that again, Aelin. Not over my dead body.”

“I appreciate that you love me so much,” Aelin whispers, not wanting Elide to pick up on their conversation. “But I can take care of myself. I’m not broken, Lys. Just hurt.”

Lysandra groans sadly, her dark lashes fan against her cheeks as if she’s fighting tears back. Suddenly Lys is hugging her again, and Aelin sinks into her embrace like always.

“I know you aren’t broken. I’m sorry that I’m so fussy.” Aelin let’s her tuck itself into Lys shoulder, aware that she was a safe person to be open with.

After a moment they pull apart. “Please. Just be careful,” Lysandra pleads.

“Of course,” Aelin promises. “Thank you for always having my back.”

“Never again,” Lysandra reiterates, reaching out to grab her hand.

“Never again.” Aeljn squeezes it.

“Lysandra! Your cat is so cute!” Elide coos from behind the door. The tension is broken and the two of them look at the other and laugh.

“Let’s go.” Aelin says, and Lysandra holds the door for the both of them.

Never again would Aelin submit to a cruel man’s will.

Not even for a man like Rowan Whitethorn.

Part Two of the birthday mass update! Thank you guys so much for reading 💚

(Tag list- let me know if you would like to be added or removed? :D)

@charincharge

@westofmoon

@jorjy-jo

@classyclodranchparty

@morganofthewildfire

@ashleymariegriffin

@wordsxstars

@sjmships

@rolltide7

@surielandiareendgame

@jlinez

@rowaelinismyotp

@mariamuses

@swankii-art-teacher

@highladyof-erilea

@untoldstuff

@superspiritfestival

@tillyrubes10

@ghostlyrose2

@live-the-fangirl-life

#throne of glass #cowboy au #rowaelin #fanfic

127 notes · View notes

vergess · 3 years

Text

@autismserenity said: Your tags are the most American thing I’ve ever read, we are truly so screwed here

May I interest you in a more complete, and more excruciating, explanation of what I spent the last 18 months doing?

It is, I need to emphasize, fucking nasty. Don’t feel obligated, especiallly if you’ve already had A Day(tm).

There’s a lot of disease, a lot of worker abuse including sexual and racial abuse, a fine portion of letting people die for not being white enough for real medical care, all leading to homelessness.

For NDA reasons, because my former employer was just as vile as any tech company has ever been, I cannot be super specific about who I worked for. However, I can say that we handled the records and patient contact for all COVID testing for several states, as well as 2 of the 5 largest metros in the US, and several dozen smaller ones ranging from the approximate population of San Francisco, down to little towns, as well as the testing for several public school systems and at least two government agencies that I am not at liberty to disclose.

I tell you this for a sense of scale. When I say shit like, “my boss was more than happy to let thousands or hundreds of thousands die” I am not exagerrating for effect. We handled hundreds of thousands of tests a week.

Again, I need to emphasize, government agencies. Ones you would know if I named them. Ones everyone in the country knows.

And we were in charge of getting their test results from the already over swamped labs back to the patients, who often were not allowed to quarantine while awaiting results.

The fastest we got our turnaround time to on any consistent basis was about 30 hours. Often it ballooned well into weeks.

There were a number of factors for this, but the big one was always understaffing.

The staff we did have were treated like trash. One of the big selling points of this company is how “trans friendly” it is to work there. That is a lie. Every trans employee on payroll had their dead name displayed to all other staff, and until I personally changed the system setup on my arrival, patient facing trans people’s dead names were displayed to patients.

Remember that thing about “hundreds of thousands of tests a week”?

I was able to change the way patient-facing names were displayed. I was not allowed or able to alter the way internal systems displayed trans people’s names. But I was assured that it’s fine, because once you get a legal name change, you’ll be given new system accounts with your new name!

Your old accounts with your dead name would still be displayed and associated with the new ones though.

This is the “trans friendly” working environment. We were allowed to be out of the closet, as long as we were willing to put up with that. And any attempts to get it altered were the result of those nasty little transgender ingrates not being thankful enough.

Meaning that by asking to use our own fucking names we were already in the disciplinary shitter.

Another big selling point is the ~racial diversity~. The CEO was a man of colour, and so were like four other people on staff!! Wow!!!!!!!

This, too, was laughable.

Once numbers started coming in about the care gap for COVID between English and Spanish speakers, and our Southwestern US service area began to have a separate and brutal backlog just of Spanish speaking patients, my employer encouraged me to interview potential hires who speak spanish.

Fair enough! We all wanted to do our part to help close the already massive mortality gap.

So, I found candidates, did interviews, hired them, trained them, etc. But I don’t speak Spanish. As a result, I appointed 2 assistant managers who do speak Spanish to assist me in managing, you know, like the job name.

So when my super contacted them directly, completely skipping me on the chain of command, and told them to stop all of our Spanish speakers from translating helpful simple messages to send to patients, and instead start translating medical and legal documents, they very reasonably assumed I was in the know and went ahead with it.

TO BE CLEAR, that could have ended my life, theirs, basically everyone involved. Everyone in the company would have been completely fucked. At that point, my subordinates, the people for whom I am wholly responsible, were doing everything from practicing medicine without licenses, to encouraging spanish speaking patients to enter contracts that no one on the fucking executive tier could even read.

The moment I found that out, I and the A.M.s immediately started trying to get actual medical translation services to do our documents. We collected them in a neat folder. We queried translation services. We got quotes. We contacted my super and the CEO, about this over and over again for months. In the late autumn, we received approval for one of the translation services.

The CEO decided at the last minute that having people with no medical or legal training draft medical and legal forms was fine and good actually, and refused to sign the contract or send the documents for translation.

The excuse I received was that the COVID emergency HIPAA relaxations would protect us.

That’s not how that works.

Throughout all of this, Spanish speaking employees were told to either keep doing medical and legal translation work, or lose their jobs.

Oh, did I mention everyone was working between 30 and 80 hours a week, and all of us were marked as “contractors” so the employer could tax evade? Don’t worry, we filed complaints with the labour bureau.

So the entire department was let go, and “rehired” as temps through a temp agency, which because it was a temp agency could keep them marked as contractors regardless of the facts.

This change was presented to all of us, myself included, as the company getting a new accountant to handle payroll.

So if you’re keeping score, we’ve covered racism, queerphobia, medical negligence, fraud, and a frankly uncountable number of deaths.

Let’s talk about the sheer negligence towards employees ourselves. If you’ve worked in near-death medical care before, or any number of emergency services really, you know that the standard benefit suite includes either a dedicated therapist for your staff, or access to peer support groups with other emergency and medical servants through your employer’s benefits program.

Do you know what our mental health benefits were for this company?

The CEO got on a fucking zoom call with us all one (1) time, and said that if we were feeling suicidal or traumatized by the work, to talk to him about it, and he would be our therapist.

Do you know how many people per fucking day we had to contact only to be told they had already died because our understaffing delays killed them? He doesn’t. He never listened when we told him.

But let me put the cherry on the “Oh baby, you can talk to me, oooh” sundae.

Anyone who “looked” or “sounded” female, regardless of actual or assigned gender, was subject to constant flirtations and slimy, overly personal compliments about our appearances. Fortunately, at 3 levels removed from the CEO (Executives > Department heads > Managers > Employees), most of the people under my management had relatively little contact with him.

I was not nearly so lucky.

The CEO of this company has a watersports (urination) fetish. I know this, because he told me so and attempted to get me to join him in it. I have no idea how many other people in the company he did this to. I mean, what the fuck was I supposed to do, risk losing my job to find out? I have a fucking family to support, people.

Not that it mattered.

Eventually, all of these abuses became too much for my subordinates. Productivity fell off a cliff. Delays were getting worse and worse. In a medical emergency like this, delays=deaths.

So, like a fucking idiot, when the department heads reached out to me to ask what they could do to improve productivity, I shot down their frankly insulting suggestion of raffling a $20 amazon gift card to patient facing employees, and instead suggested a very simple, “enroll us with a peer support group, every single person in this department has PTSD from working in this pandemic.”

They were confused by my assertion of PTSD. I was asked to compile a document of complaints, concerns, and weaknesses in our patient facing services.

I and the A.M.s did so. It was roughly 40 pages long, with each page given a known problem, the reasons why it was a problem, and some potential solutions that might inspire further solutions or be able to be implemented. We submitted it. There was no response.

A week passed.

I had been working 80 hour weeks for most of a year. I hadn’t even been able to take weekends. I took my first sick day, in a company with “unlimited vacation days.”

I received a call at 3PM.

I had been fired for “differences in communitcation.” If you’ve ever seen that “Problem Women of Color in the workplace” chart? Yeah.

So had most of my department, including every transgender member of the department, and several of our extremely limited in supply Spanish speakers, who were presumed to be “on my side.”

Some of them, I barely even knew beyond the formalities of the job, and they were punished anyway.

I lost my insurance, and as a result I lost access to my medications.

But the real problem? I lost my house. And not due to lack of payment.

I lost my house, because when I got the job we waited 6 months for stability’s sake, and then readied to move out of the area. I got a mortgage on the basis of my employer’s written guarantee to the bank that I would continue to be employed for the next year at a minimum.

With the mortgage approval in hand, we entered a sales contract on our existing home.

We got and accepted an offer just days before I was fired. To keep our house meant paying a 25,000 dollar broken contract fine. We didn’t have that. We had a 10% down payment for a modest fucking place in a cheaper area, which is less than half that.

But without a job, my mortgage approval was also voided, meaning we couldn’t buy a house either.

All of a sudden, we were homeless during the plague, because my employer wrote and signed a letter to a bank guaranteeing my future employ, and then changed his mind when too many people died due to his own negligence.

Oh yeah, one last thing: the job paid less than Pandemic unemployment Assistance.

...After that, well, it’s homelessness until just last month. I... if you’ve never been homeless it’s.

It blurs. Everything is happening constantly, except for all the ways in which you are endlessly, mind breakingly bored. Bored, overloaded, and always uncomfortable.

Obviously my health would have declined regardless. Malnutrition, stress, everything.

But I was also unmedicated.

It was hell. I was in hell. I don’t know if I can recover from it, to be honest.

I bounced back from being homeless as a child. Children are as resilient as they are stupid, and the monstrosity of homelessness was little more than a vaguely remembered loathing and a panicky fear that it would ever happen again.

A child who is dying is worthy of sympathy, even if it is meaningless coos from passers by. If they have family, they may be able to rely on them too.

An adult with the indignity to die homeless and crippled, according to the average passer by, is worthy only of disgust and perhaps even punishment for being such a worthless waste.

My reward for nearly killing myself in a desperate bid to help stem the tide of COVID was the destruction of not only my life, not only my entire family’s lives, but the lives of every single family of every single employee who worked with me.

And you know what’s worse?

Each one of us still did more to limit the lethal impact of COVID than the entire united states government.

It breaks something in you, going through that.

It makes you realize that hope is a fool’s game.

But, I have ever been a fool, and so, I continue to play.

26 notes · View notes

purpletaecup · 4 years

Photo

10 ☾ he said that’s how he still remembers me

warnings: explicit language (cursing), mentions of miscarriage, mentions of infidelity (not rlly but on thin ice)

notes: you guys... this is a long one and it’s kind of fast paced, but we are finally getting some answers and the drama really begins! next chapter will be emotional, that’s all I know. I’m sorry for putting you through all this angst!! also, I wanted to bring some attention to the crisis in the Philippines right now with all of the dangerous typhoons. A lot of people need donations and rescuing, so HERE is a link to a twitter thread of donation drives! Please make sure to check it out, share and help spread awareness!

as always, come talk to me in my ask box! and if you want to be added to the taglist, please send an ask, or reply to this post or the masterlist!

not edited!! sorry if there are any mistakes lmfao i usually am sleep deprived when i write so yeah, there are probably some errors.

word count: 5,614

☾

The days following Jungkook’s visit were dull, if anything. You’ve received texts from Yoongi saying that he couldn’t come visit until that weekend because he had to finish wrapping things up in advance at the company so that he could spend some time with you. You had argued over the phone like teenagers when you insisted that he didn’t need to do that and you could take care of yourself until Jin came back. Of course, that led to him ranting about what the doctor said about monitoring you and your symptoms for concussion and to get him to just shut up about the medical stuff (it made your brain hurt more than it did usually), you reluctantly agreed to his ‘visits’, as you’d rather call them.

[nov. 20, 2020]

It was Friday now and you still haven’t gotten any glimpse of actual memories back, although you have been having these strange dreams that you couldn’t really remember when you woke up. You could only describe the feeling it gave you as ‘sinking’, like you were drowning and you couldn’t escape. As much as possible, you tried not to think about these feelings, and focused more on trying to get to know the version of you who lived in this amazing apartment.

The past couple of days that you spent at this apartment put you in awe. It really was the apartment of your dreams, from the color of the furniture down to the little plants stuck in the corner of that tiny shelf in the kitchen. It was beautiful and so you. The only problem was that you couldn’t find anything to help with your current situation. You scoured every nook and cranny and couldn’t find anything dated after your wedding reception. No pictures, no post-its, notes or anything past that date. What you had found in your apartment, you already knew of (aside from the wedding photos). Past photoshoots, high school photos, a notebook full of movie ticket stubs. There was absolutely nothing in this apartment that gave you a clue to the life you lived during the four year gap in your memory.

You even tried to get into your twitter and instagram from when you were nineteen but you couldn’t log in. Wrong password every single time. When you tried to change your password for social media, the email you used had a different password too. You couldn’t figure out what you could have changed your password to. Every password combination you could think of, you tried, but none worked, so you decided to just skip that and maybe go over it later on. Or make a new one. That could work, too.

You couldn’t even look at your twitter account because for some reason, it was private and that seemed strange for someone with almost 130,000 followers. You could see your instagram account from your browser, but it wouldn’t let you see the pictures and posts in full size with the captions and comments, so you were really stuck.

A quick internet search of your name yielded things you already knew. Former model, current writer (that fact was still surprising to you). Old news articles of dating scandals that weren’t true, except for the one with Yoongi. More news articles about your divorce with no further information than what Yoongi had told you already.

It’s as if any clue about your life during your memory loss is unaccounted for. It seemed like at this point, you could only rely on other people telling you about your life and pray to whatever higher power there was to give you your memories back.

This futile search was beginning to make your stomach churn. You almost couldn’t suppress the bile rising up in your throat. Hopefully Jin would return soon. Maybe he could put all of the pieces back together for you.

☾

Jungkook sat in on the uncomfortable leather couch in Yoongi’s office as he waited for the man to finish up whatever he was typing. He looked through his instagram feed and saw one of your posts from July. For a while, he was confused as to why this picture from July would end up on his feed, but he remembered the new instagram algorithm. Curious, he clicked on your profile and looked through it slowly. He couldn’t remember the last time he actually paid attention to your posts.

“I forgot to ask but what did you and Yn do at her apartment? She said you stayed over for a couple of hours.” Yoongi asked though his eyes never strayed from his paperwork.

Jungkook looked up at him and pondered on what to say.

“Hm, yeah. I got roped into staying. She asked a bunch of questions and we looked through her apartment and her photo albums. Her apartment’s cute, by the way. Way different from what your house looked like.” He comments.

“Really?”

“Yeah. It was bright. Lots of green. Nothing I’ve ever seen in the house you guys shared.”

“How was she when you picked her up? She told me a couple of things but I haven’t seen her yet so I can’t know if what she’s telling is the truth or not.”

It was quiet for a moment, with only the sound of turning pages filling the room, as Jungkook wondered what to say to this. He didn’t really know when to start with you, especially with how different you were acting.

“Well, she’s fine. The personality is definitely different. She seems a lot more outgoing, and she had a lot of questions but she didn’t push. I think she wants to try and figure things out on her own.” Jungkook replies as he continued to slowly look through your previous instagram posts.

“She’s been like that. She hates being a burden and gets really defensive about it sometimes.” Yoongi comments.

Jungkook pauses at your most recent post. He checks the date. September 22.

“When did you guys divorce again?” He asked.

At this, Yoongi looked up.

“The divorce was finalized on September 29, I think.” He answered, but looked questioningly at Jungkook as if to ask why.

“Did you know she was going to therapy?” Jungkook asked again.

Hearing this, Yoongi stood up abruptly and hurried over to where Jungkook was sitting.

“What? Where did you see that?” Yoongi asked as he looked over Jungkook’s shoulder.

Jungkook showed him the post. Yoongi took the phone from him and examined the post carefully.

It was a picture of clouds with text on it. Is this the life we really want? The caption read “as per the advice of my therapist, i’m just here to pop in and say that I’ll be going on a hiatus for a little bit”.

“What the fuck? I didn’t know this!” Yoongi yelled, evidently angry.

Jungkook looked at him confused. They were together for four years, how could he not know that you were at least going to therapy?

The same question was running through Yoongi’s head. He took a seat next to Jungkook to process this new information.

“Hyung, can I ask you a couple of questions?” Jungkook requested.

Yoongi could only nod.

“What was Yn like when you were together? Why did you marry her?” Those were the first questions that came out of Jungkook’s mouth.

He was truly, genuinely curious. Though he’s heard some things that Yoongi had said about you, he never knew the full story.

“We married each other because we loved each other. Wasn’t that obvious?” Yoongi retorted.

Jungkook pursed his lips at this. “Well that's what you tell everybody and yeah we get it, but considering the fact that I’ve barely seen you two together more than two handful of times in the past two years, I had to ask.”

“That’s because we were both busy, but that didn’t mean we didn’t spend time together. Of course you never saw it because you weren’t there and I’m not one to actively talk about my love life. Yn and I both liked our privacy.”

“Okay, then what was she like when you were together?”

Yoongi was quiet for a while. There were a lot of things he could say about you when you were together. He just didn’t know how to articulate it to Jungkook.

“When we were together… she was charismatic, beautiful and intelligent. Something about the way she communicated made you feel like you could forget about all of your worries and live life to its extent with her. She constantly dragged me out to picnics and made me forget about the business and my career. She made me feel young again. And she had so much love and care for people around her. For a long time, I felt like I would never be deserving of her. She was kind of like a sunflower. Or sunshine, you know what I mean?” Yoongi poured out.

Jungkook nodded. He realized that this was the time to try to figure out what happened to you in your marriage. From his conversation with you at your apartment, to the description of you that Yoongi had just given, he surmised that the version of you that he knew was someone different and he could only wonder if Yoongi saw it too.

“Did you ever feel like she changed? In the time you guys were together?” He probed.

Yoongi thought about it for a while.

“Yeah, I think so. I always found it strange that she decided to quit modelling. When I met her, she said it was all she ever wanted. I never asked because it seemed like a sensitive topic to her, but I supported her regardless. Writing seemed so out of nowhere for her. I don’t know where it came from. Then she stopped wanting to go to business dinners and events with me and after that we just drifted. And in between that, you introduced me to Yura.”

When Yoongi mentioned Yura, Jungkook winced. He had thought about it some nights ago, but he realized that he might have had a hand in your divorce by introducing Yura to Yoongi. Though he knows Yoongi would have never physically cheated on you, he could see how Yoongi and Yura gravitated towards each other. Jungkook had to admit that Yura was a sweet girl. She was beautiful, and when she smiled it was like sunshine.

Yoongi interrupted his train of thought. “Yura is kind of a complicated subject to our marriage. I would never, ever cheat on someone I loved. And I loved Yn, so much. When you introduced Yura to me, I was happy to meet a new friend and that’s all I saw, but the more you made me hang out with you guys, the more I started to see something in her that I stopped seeing in Yn. I never meant to have any sort of romantic feelings for Yura, but it happened and I feel so fucking shitty for doing that to Yn when I’m the one who promised her a lifetime together.”

Jungkook straightened his posture as Yoongi’s confession.

“Wait, what do you mean by that?” He asked.

“By what?” Yoongi looked at him confused.

“What happened to Yn that pushed you to Yura?”

At this, Yoongi scratched his head.

“I wouldn’t say that it pushed me to Yura, but remember when I said Yn and I started getting distant? As time went on, I felt like she changed and I didn’t know who she was. She used to be so bubbly and happy and always wanting to go look at flowers, but towards the end of our marriage, she stayed holed up in our room no matter how much I asked her to spend time with me. Yura, she was happy to spend time with me. She made me feel like I could forget about everything just by talking to me.”

“Yura made you feel like how Yn used to make you feel?” Jungkook cut him off.

“Well… I guess so.”

Jungkook thought about this for a while but narrowed his eyes at his hyung.

“Hyung, answer this truthfully; do you love Yura?”

The tips of Yoongi’s ears turned red after hearing this.

“Love? I don’t know. I like her? I like the way she makes me feel. She’s beautiful and smart and she makes me happy.”

“Hyung, I don’t know if you realize this, but the way you described Yura is exactly the same way you described Yn.”

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds like you started liking Yura because she reminded you of Yn when you met her. So, do you really, truly like Yura? Or do you just like her because she reminds you of what you don’t have anymore?”

Yoongi lowered his head.

“I-I don’t know. I never thought of it like that.”

Jungkook put his hand on Yoongi’s back to comfort him. Obviously, the man was confused.

“I don’t know if this helps, but I just wanted to let you know that whenever I saw Yn, during those dinners or events, she never gave off the vibe that you described her to be. To me, she was quiet, reserved and never bothered trying to get to know us, your friends, or your business. That’s what she came off as. When you told us that you loved each other and that you eloped, I thought you were joking. When I saw her, she just seemed like the typical trophy wife. Just for show. I never liked her and wondered what you saw in her all the fucking time, but now after hearing this, and after being with her for a couple of hours, it’s obvious that something happened that fucked her up and then fucked your marriage up.” Jungkook ranted.

“I think you might need to reevaluate the relationship you had with Yn so we could help her recover from this whole amnesia thing and hopefully figure out what happened. Something definitely happened, but since I don’t know your marriage like you do, I don't know what it is. I feel guilty now after realizing that I might have had a hand in whatever the fuck she was going through. And maybe figure out what you’re going to do about Yura. Can you keep dating her when your feelings for her are based off of your feelings for your ex-wife, who is currently pregnant with your wife and doesn’t know about it?” He continued.

Yoongi took a deep breath, taking all of this conversation in.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m almost done with the shit here at the company. When I go home, I’ll sort everything out and talk to Yn and Yura tomorrow. I don’t think I can keep seeing Yura with the current situation. I have to tell Yn about the pregnancy as soon as possible, but I’m scared because the doctor told me to monitor for residual symptoms for her concussion. I don’t even know where to begin with the situation.”

“It’s okay, hyung. I’m here for you. You have to tell her about the pregnancy before she finds out herself. In the meantime, I’ll help you out when you can’t take care of her. I already feel shitty enough for how I acted with her when you two were married. I feel like I had the wrong impression this whole time.” Jungkook offered.

Yoongi remembered the moment earlier when Jungkook confessed that he never liked you and that baffled him because he thought that you two, of all people, would get along well together. More often than not, he would feel jealous of Jungkook, who had your admiration when you first started dating. He remembered you always asking him to introduce you to Jungkook and it took a year for him to budge and actually make it happen.

“I’m sure you’ll get along now. I always thought you did get along. Did you know she liked you before?” Yoongi asked.

Jungkook shook his head. “I didn’t know until the other day when you had me take her home. It probably would have helped if you told me she knew who I was before you introduced us after you got together. She never acted like she was a fan of my music and admittedly, I was a dick to her.”

Yoongi glared at him. It was a first for him to hear about how Jungkook treated his ex-wife.

“Well, you should feel shitty because she really liked you and your music. For a while, I thought she liked you more than me. If I had known you were an asshole to her, I probably would have ripped you a new one. Hearing you admit you treated her like shit makes me feel like shit because I never knew and just assumed you guys were good with each other. You didn’t do or say anything bad to her, right? You’re not that type of person.”

Jungkook could only pretend to smile at Yoongi as he asked this.

He shook his head and lied. “No, never.”

Lying through his teeth to his best friend about how he treated you made his heart fall to his stomach. Well, Yoongi didn’t have to know because it was in the past. You couldn’t remember any of the mean things he’d said to you, so now was the perfect time to make a new, much better impression of himself to you. He decided days ago that he would be better, because deep down, he knew that you didn’t deserve to be treated like how he treated you.

[nov. 21, 2020]

Yoongi had taken the day off after his somewhat enlightening conversation with Jungkook last night. He decided that he needed to go see you and spend some time with you today, but before that, he needed to settle things with Yura.

They decided to meet up at his apartment for maximum privacy, just in case anything happened. He wanted to account for the worst case scenario of Yura probably getting angry and throwing things around, but he doesn’t think she’s the type of person to do dramatic things like that.

Turns out, she’s not. When he reluctantly tells her that he can’t continue on with what they had because of residual feelings for you, in addition to the fact that there were complications in that relationship that he can’t speak about carelessly, she had reacted calmly and amicably. Though Yoongi hadn’t expected her to throw a tantrum, he was expecting some kind of anger, but all he got was a sad look passing on her face followed by comforting words.

He apologized profusely for having dragged her around when he still had apparent feelings for his ex-wife and not figuring out his feelings for her, or lack thereof, sooner. She reassured him that it was okay and she’ll be fine.

“I’ll be fine Yoongi. I liked you, but it’s pretty obvious that you used me as some kind of rebound or replacement for your ex-wife, and I was okay with it. Truthfully, I was waiting for you to just come clean and break it off with me. I hope you and Yn figure things out this time, and I hope you can talk to her. Communication is important.” She reminds him before she leaves, but not before letting him know that she would always be there for him as a friend.

He had texted her after she left, and after a couple of minutes to himself, that he was thankful for her being so nice about the situation and all in all, he didn’t regret whatever short-lived affection they had for each other.

Yoongi still couldn’t believe how smoothly everything with Yura went. He hoped that the rest of the day would be the same.

☾

You woke up to a message from Jungkook asking if you were free, so you had to tidy up the apartment and yourself because you didn’t want to look messy in front of someone you had idolized for a long time.

Luckily enough, you didn’t have to cook since Jungkook offered to bring food. You thank your lucky stars for that because for some reason, you’ve been feeling incredibly sluggish and nauseous. It was probably some symptoms of the concussion you suffered. You remembered your doctor saying something about that the last time you were at the hospital.

About 20 minutes later, you heard your doorbell ring so practically skip to the door, excited to see Jungkook and steal the food that he brought.

You opened the door to see Jungkook standing there with a big back of food in his hands. He was wearing all black, with a leather jacket that looked a tad too big on him.

“You look warm.” You comment.

He rolled his eyes. “Are you gonna invite me in or not? I even brought you food.”

You laugh a little and move to the side to give him room to step inside the apartment.

“So, what have you been doing?” He asks as he makes his way to your dining room to put the food down.

You make your way to the kitchen to get some plates for the both of you.

“Nothing. I’ve been trying to look for some stuff but I don’t know where to start so I just gave up until you or Yoongi could come help.” You reply as you move to the dining room to set the plates down.

Jungkook takes the food out and puts some on the plates. Kimbap, like you asked, and some seaweed soup.

“How have you been feeling? Okay?” He questioned.

You nodded, though hesitantly.

“Eh, I’ve been feeling kind of tired. I think I might be sick because I keep wanting to vomit. Is that my wintermelon tea, by the way?” You pointed to the drink in his hand.

Jungkook poked the straw through the lid and handed it to you.

“Sick? Did you take any medicine? Are you feeling better now?”

You took a sip of your tea and sighed, missing the sweet taste of the drink. It felt nostalgic.

“Mhm, took some earlier and I'm feeling much better thanks to the food you brought!” You smiled.

Jungkook rolled his eyes jokingly once again. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

He didn’t think about your illness any further. It was probably a cold and nothing else.

For about 20 minutes, the two of you ate and spoke about little things, mostly about Jungkook and his career. It helped you get to know him a little bit better since he’s the only person besides Yoongi who could help you in your situation until Jin comes back.

After you finished eating, you told him that you needed his help going through your room in case there was anything that could jog your memory.

“I would ask Yoongi but he’s been busy lately.”

“So I’m just your last resort?”

“You’re literally the only other person in my contact list besides Yoongi and Jin.”

“Right, anyways, lead the way!” He exclaimed.

You laughed as you led him to the room at the end of the hallway.

“Sorry if it’s a little messy, I didn’t have that much time to clean up before you got here!” You explained.

Jungkook shook his head, telling you it didn’t really matter since it was gonna be a mess anyways while you two went through your things.

☾

When Jungkook walked into your room, he was once again hit with the feeling that he had no fucking clue who you were in the past years he’d known you. If he could describe your room in one word, it would be enchanting. White walls, white sheets adorn with a baby blue blanket, wooden floors, giant plants and a mirror much bigger than himself. Your desk was filled with different kinds of pens, different notebooks that look to have been trifled through, and an unnatural amount of books and crystals.

From the looks of the rest of your house, he probably shouldn’t be surprised at your bedroom, but it’s still a bit difficult for him to wrap his mind around the fact that you were this type of person. Bright, intelligent, and incredibly neat.

He walked up to your desk and picked up the different notebooks laid out messily on the table. When he opened each of them, he noticed that they were mostly blank, with the exception of a few doodles. There were some things he’d recognized as lyrics from songs he knew, but nothing truly relevant to the memories you lost.

You stood next to Jungkook and looked at the notebooks in his hands.

“I went through those already. Nothing but a few sad lyrics here and there. None of them triggered any memories.” You mentioned.

Jungkook put them down and started walking around the room with you as you talked about what you did find during the days that you were left alone. What he got from that conversation was that you had no luck with anything and that’s why you waited until either he or Yoongi could come over and help you. Jungkook knew that Yoongi was coming over later, so if he couldn’t help you find anything or answer any of your questions today, then maybe Yoongi could.

“Oh! I forgot to mention that I can’t even access any of my social media, so do you think I can look through my instagram through your phone? I mean, if that’s okay with you. I know some people feel uncomfortable giving their phone to someone else to play around with.” You asked.

Jungkook shook his head and stuck his hand in his pant pocket, reaching for his phone.

“It’s fine, you can look at your profile, I think I follow you. The password is 061313.” He stated as he handed his phone over to you.

You grabbed it excitedly, finally getting the chance to see what your life was like during the four years that were missing from your memory. You fell back onto your bed as you unlocked Jungkook’s phone and clicked on his instagram app quickly.

You took a look at his profile first, staring in awe at the pictures he’s posted. Most of his pictures are very dark and he had quite a few selfies. You smiled a little bit as you admitted in your head that he was indeed handsome.

Okay, Yn, onto the more important things! You thought to yourself as you quickly searched your username ‘faeyn’ on the search bar. At first you were excited, but it deflated when you saw just how many posts you had. 13 posts. And almost all of them were just landscapes. Some had pictures of you by yourself, or with Jin, but that was it. How the fuck were you supposed to try to figure out your life through 13 pictures?

Scrolling through each picture and their captions from the oldest to newest, you quickly realized that you must have decided that privacy was something that should be valued. There was nothing of substance to your situation in the captions you’d written. Just casual mentions of how your day was, or what you did that day. The only thing that caught your eye was the latest post you had, dated September 22. It was a picture of clouds and the caption said something about your therapist advising you to take a break, so you were going to be on a social media cleanse for a while.

Well, at least you learned one thing. Apparently, you started going to therapy again. For what? You don’t know. You only remembered going to therapy a couple of times after the whole incident with your bastard ex-boyfriend.

You filed this little detail into your brain and hoped that maybe it would make more sense later on. Swiping up on Jungkook’s phone took you to his home screen, but you paused for a little. Maybe you could snoop through some more apps and see if there was anything else you can find.

No, that would be an invasion of Jungkook’s privacy, you thought. Another part of you argued that he wasn’t going to know and he’s here to help you. If there was anything worth hiding, he wouldn’t have given you his phone and his password so easily. And if there was anything, it wouldn’t be incriminating since he mentioned that you two didn’t really know each other that well, so you shrugged and clicked on his messages.

I’ll just see if there are any messages to me. I won’t look at anything else, you justified, as if it made it any better.

After scrolling for a little while, you finally saw something worthwhile. A text convo between you and Jungkook and from the preview of the message, it looks like it was from the middle of September. You opened it, excited to see the contents, but what you saw made you furrow your brows.

What is this?

☾

After Jungkook gave you his phone, he continued walking around your room until he got to the side of your bed that was next to the window. He looked around for a bit and saw something in the corner of his eyes. Crouching down lower, he saw something on the floor behind your headboard. He couldn’t tell what it was at first, but as soon as he moved closer, he realized it was a thick notebook. Jungkook surmises that you probably hadn’t seen it despite telling him that you looked ‘everywhere’. He took the notebook and sat down on the floor, completely hiding his figure, but not before he could look at you. He wanted to see what was in the notebook before he showed it to you, and luckily enough, you had been facing away from him.

So he sat down and opened the notebook. From just the first page, he could tell it was some kind of diary or journal. There were lots of drawings and stickers and a picture of you in a field of flowers right in the middle of the first page. He flipped through the whole notebook really quickly and found that half of it was already filled.

A part of him wanted to read through the whole thing and see what kind of things you wrote, but another part told him that it wasn’t appropriate. Despite that, he convinced himself that he should read maybe just one entry, just to see if this notebook was something substantial to your current situation.

Jungkook took a peek at you again and noticed you still had your back turned to him so he took that as a sign that he could probably get away with reading an entry. He flipped to a page randomly and focused his eyes on the writing.

The entry was dated August 4, 2020. Fairly recent. He noticed that there were some dark blotches on the paper that made the ink bleed.

He began to read the entry, not knowing what he was going to find out.

It still seems weird to be writing about my problems in a journal. I’m still not used to it, but it’s been helpful since I don’t really have anyone to talk to about this.

That made him frown.

I went to my OBGYN today because I’ve been having severe cramps and bleeding, but I already had my period so I was worried. And the cramps were starting to really hurt, so I had to go get it checked out just in case. Well, apparently I was pregnant and lost the baby.

Jungkook’s eyes widened and he gasped audibly. Luckily enough, it wasn’t loud enough for you to notice. He clasped his hand over his mouth at the disbelief in reading this information. A miscarriage? And so recent, too. He didn’t know how to feel. Yoongi had never said anything about this.

Jin actually just left my house a couple of hours ago. I don’t think the news hit me until now. I texted Yoongi earlier to tell him but he was busy so I think that was a sign that I should probably not tell him. It’s not like it matters right? Since the baby was gone anyways.

I know my therapist told me to stop with the negative self-talk, but it’s moments like this that really push me to just keep thinking I’ll never be good enough for the men that I love. Thanks to my bastard ex for fucking my mind up like this. No matter how hard I try, I always just circle back to the fact that I wasn’t good enough for him, and that I’m not good enough for Yoongi. Even fate is telling me that I’m not good enough to carry a child with the man I love. How fucked up is that?

Jungkook’s heart dropped to his stomach. He felt sick. There were so many things going through his head right now. He felt like he was violating something that was so private. Yoongi didn’t even know that you went through this. You didn’t even know you went through this. He shut the journal quickly, wiping the tears that formed in his eyes.

At that exact moment, he heard your heavy breathing and quickly got up to check on you. He walked around to your side of the bed and found you trembling with his phone in your hands. He noticed that his messages were open and he began to panic.

“What the fuck is this?” was the last thing he heard you say before your eyes rolled to the back of your head and you fell limp into your bed.

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steve0discusses · 3 years

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Yugioh Season Zero: The Yo-Yo Crimes of Jounouchi Pt 1

It’s been a while since I visited the many times Yugi should have gone to jail, AKA season Zero, and I’m excited to visit it again.

If you just got here, this is Season Zero, which is very different vibe and a different direction plotwise than the other seasons and you can read the season zero recaps from the start in chrono order here: https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yuugi%20muto/chrono

So be warned, this is a 90′s anime, and it will do 90′s anime things, and I expect y’all reading this aren’t like 12.

Like I said in an earlier post, I wrote this out fully when I was going through the symptoms from my second dose--which PS, is worth it--but those symptoms knocked me out for 10 days. I was kind of a space cadet, and yo, I made some mistakes. Including writing this post out in full and then not clicking “save” on this post and then not realizing I had done that until several days later.

So long story short, I don’t remember what I originally wrote here, but lets all assume it was weird, and didn’t make sense and wasn’t funny. We’ll just assume this was for the best that it was deleted forever.

So this episode is about 2 things: Yo-yos and Jounouchi. Both get used as a tool for violence, and both need to get just a little bit cursed by Yugi to scale it the hell back. So, understandably, we start off this episode with Jounouchi, who has eagerly identified with this off brand yo-yo he apparently got out of a dumpster for being just a huge ass defect.

(more Yo-Yo crimes under the cut)

I see you dodging copyright infringement, Yugioh. Eireboy.

Also whenever I read “Eireboy” I do it in my mind in the same pacing and vocal tones that Pegasus uses to say “Kaiba boy.” Something about it’s conjunction to Yugioh, I see anything with “boy” at the end of it, and it’s voiced by a weird guy with one eye.

So I wrote these caps under the influence of my second dose, just assuming y’all understand the life I lived, but I realized writing this episode...traveling bands of yo-yo performers that go to your school and shill yo-yos with yo-yo shows in the hopes that it will get you so obsessed with yo-yos that you will not join a gang and do drugs and have sex may be just an American thing.

So when I saw a yo-yo episode I was like “Tight! Clearly, the yo-yo clowns have come to town!” and I assumed everyone in this class would be draped in yo-yos, because I just assumed that at some point at School you will get MAD OBSESSED with yo-yos for about 2 weeks.

But in this episode, everyone was like “Jounouchi, why are you playing with a random yo-yo?” and it didn’t occur to me until typing this out just now: only Jounouchi is doing this. He did this unprompted, without the encouragement of a bunch of middle aged performers doing tricks to techno music.

So instead, I have to think of Jounouchi as Ralphie in this scenario, and he just got a official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time for Christmas, but he’s gonna shoot his eye out.

Because yo-yos in this episode are basically guns.

...Kind of like a duel deck was also just a gun...

...or the wands in Harry Potter...

...which honestly...I’ve probably said this before but where I’m from, we just use straight up guns in these elaborate analogies because we freakin have to make the point crystal clear. The moment Ralphie finally got his hands on a bb-gun, he very nearly shot his eye out and broke his glasses. And that scene will haunt me until my dying day...

...but fine, we can use yo-yos, I guess it works, although to me, yo-yo’s are just teachers hoping you’ll become such a dork that no gang will accept you (and then in this universe, it does the opposite? So freakin weird).

The beginning of this episode is Jounouchi trying do his best to impress with his skills, but in actuality, getting very close to clubbing Anzu with a yo-yo. And, while Anzu is the strongest person in Yugioh in the later seasons, I feel like Season Zero Anzu is another level. It’s a serious tempt of fate that Jounouchi is doing, so Honda wisely cuts him off from doing any more of that so she won’t end up strangling yet another person in broad daylight in the middle of school.

Remember your yo-yo safety, children.

Straight up, Honda’s version of yo-yo safety is to just Never Use a Yo-Yo and that’s the most gun safety thing ever that they’ve slipped into this Yugioh Episode. I almost expected Yuugi to pull a “well, actually, I use a hunting yo-yo to get enough venison to feed my family.” But youknow, he lives in a city, so while Yugioh is pretty weird and Yuugi has to worry about a lot of things--he doesn’t have to worry about that.

This is actually foreshadowing, which I only realized in hind sight, mostly because I just can’t associate a Yo-yo with crime. Joey knowing how to use a yo-yo was foreshadowing that he was absolutely part of this gang in a past life.

Yeah that one went completely over my head the first time and the second time and it really wasn’t until just now that I finally caught it. Hoo boy, sometimes I wonder why y’all let me analyze this show.

Jounouchi decides to confront the yo-yo bandits and everyone else is like “Silly Jounouchi, he’s not gonna do that. That would be stupid.” And...in S0, they don’t know him well enough yet to know that he really is that much of a well meaning dumbass.

I think a S1-5 Yugi would have been sprinting out the door to keep Joey from killing himself (again), but Season Zero Yuugi had hope that Jounouchi would just naturally tucker out and fall asleep or something.

And he was so wrong.

Anzu’s “New Tricks” line was from the dub itself and man that’s a good line. I love Anzu’s sass in Zero.

So, Honda decides to help them find Jounouchi so all of them together could give Jounouchi an intervention for skipping school. This is the same Honda that once skipped school to babysit a tomagachi and said it was because of “Maternity leave,” but don’t worry about the hypocrisy, because from this episode we learned that Jounouchi needs a very short leash.

So this episode is a great Jounouchi episode to explain stuff that still hasn’t been explained in 5 seasons of Yugioh. In S1-5, we don’t get much about his home life other than his Mom left and his Sister lives far away and is like sickly as hell. We know nothing else. But this is the episode where we finally get to find out why Yuugi and his Grandfather decided to basically adopt him from S1 onward.

Yugioh is tackling some pretty heavy territory, but I respect the show for not trying to magically change Jounouchi’s parents like they did to Dartz. Instead, the crew decide to reach out and try to find their friend who clearly didn’t go home last night (and won’t be going back for a while), by checking every alleyway in Domino.

Fun fact Yuugi drops this episode, Domino is one of the biggest cities on Earth. This makes the Battle City Tournament even more crazy when you realize Kaiba shut down several blocks but, it also makes a tiny bit more sense how we have so many Millennium items in one place. (Yet...it still doesn’t explain Bakura and Joey’s accent.) And, I guess if your city is just extra large, you get an extra large warehouse district, too.

Speaking of, they eventually find Jounouchi at his new (but also old) crime antics mugging some random stranger next to this Game store that I just realized was cropped so it looks like it says “GANG.”

Say hello to our crime clown. He’s sort of like a discount joker, and that beanie is...man it is green.

I forget this green exists sometimes, but Season Zero has it as one of their prime colors. Good ol’ Retro Kaiba green.

I’m a little tempted to swatch Season Zero a bit and figure out their full color scheme--it’s really saturated, which is interesting when you compare it to the later seasons which are a lot more muted since...the 00′s were like that, they greyed a lot of colors out. But I’ll do it later if I do, maybe another post for another day.

Jounouchi and Honda, before they moved to the school with Yuugi in it, used to go to the same school and up until now I just assumed they were close friends. But apparently they were a lot more distant than that. I’m sure they met up several times as Jounouchi destroyed stuff and Honda came along in his volunteer janitor outfit to put the stuff the hell back, and maybe that’s how they got to know eachother better?

But basically, Jounouchi was the freakin worst, and Jounouchi’s best friend was Hirotani--this 45 year old 15 year old with the blue pony and turquoise fade--and Honda has SO MUCH hot goss to say about it.

I really get the gist that Honda may not have liked anyone else at his old school, like at all. Like maybe Honda likes cleaning up trash so much because his school was just trash top to bottom.

As is tradition, Yuugi got his tar beat in by Hirotani. Another concussion to add to his list of issues to tell his future therapist that lives in that puzzle he wears around his neck.

I still expect him to do a double cross, but it seems they wanted to keep it a relatable and more realistic fall-out, where Jounouchi has just bounced on them without even a goodbye. He and his Dad had a bad fight, and Jounouchi was like “well so long to all of this and everyone that has anything to do with it.”

In later seasons, Joey is the one trying to save other people. He’s saving his Sister, he’s saving Mai, he’s saving Yugi, but in this season Jounouchi’s friends had to save Jounouchi from himself a few times now.

I like this depth to his character, I’ll be honest. I can understand why S1-5 don’t touch on it, and I don’t think it’s because they didn’t want to have an abusive Dad storyline, because they did that several times over with Seto Kaiba (man the Dad situation in Yugioh is DIRE.) Instead they probably just felt like Season Zero already did it, so why do it again?

It’s just a shame that it wasn’t talked about in the other seasons. Joey makes a lot more sense to me now because we get to see why Jounouchi is so hard set on saving people. S4 Mai Valentine, who ditched everyone and joined a gang? That’s basically a Joey move, and that was why Joey Wheeler was all over that.

Really would have added a lot to that particular arc if the show...actually talked about Joey’s history at all rather than assume I would have watched something that was never released in the States. Instead...it just looked a lot like he had only romantic motivations, which may not have been what they were going for.

Speaking of romantic, check out this sunset. Like the sun is exploding for some reason--just a wild sunset you only see for a still frame before a commercial break.

As Joey, youknow, takes on an entire rival gang single-handedly.

Hey guys, I lived near a pretty big city most of my life and I have been on a roof...once. Just the one time when I was doing an internship in SF with a painter and we needed to take a reference photo of his painting for a gallery (and it was hella sketch, and we weren’t exactly allowed up there). Who are all these people giving teens Roof Access? It’s so hard to get! Even if you live in an apartment of a tall building, I can count on zero of my fingers the amount of times I was allowed on that roof. But TV shows and movies--they freakin love roof gardens and roof hangouts and roof fights.

Am I missing out?? How did y’all get on the ROOF? I know I’m on S5 of Yugioh now and I have seen a lot of roof stuff, but like...is this normal for everyone else? I know there’s schools that have roof sport--that’s common in the city everywhere--but that’s like...specialized roofs with 30 ft chainlink fencing and really good supports to your body doesn’t fall straight through it when you jump too much. The hell is using their normal ass roof?

This gang should have their legs swinging halfway into the floor below them, is all I’m saying, if my roof couldn’t handle our solar heating, then a normal ass roof cannot support a gang fight.

But it does look really, really cool.

Anyway, Anzu does some offscreen snooping and finds out where the crime hangs out, and suggests that we step right into crime zone and just yank Jounouchi out of there. Which is something you would only do and say if you were Anzu and cannot fear death.

If it were Jay’s it would be with an ‘s. That’s how you do a plural Jay. But it’s the 90′s, so we put a “z” on the end of everything that should have been an “s” and that’s how you get the...

I mean, thank you, dubbers, for not saying “Jizz” but for reals...that be Jizz.

Please don’t flag me, Tumblr. (which, PS, I think they turned off the flagbot, Tumblr hasn’t flagged me in forever and I’m so thankful. Mods are asleep, we can talk about anime again)

So even though Honda decided that he was fed up with Jounouchi and didn’t want to save his ass, he decided to give it another go but complete with some new sash. He also did this without telling any of the others, who just kinda spectated him for a little while.

Honestly, if they weren’t laughing at him, I wouldn’t have known that this sash was any weirder than any of his other sashes. I don’t know really know what a school uniform should look like. It’s a shame, I feel like this series has a lot of jokes and puns probably soaring right over my head.

A little bit embarrased he was caught being vulnerable, Honda decides to give us a little more context to why he ever decided to give Jounouchi the time of day in the first place.

They had PE class once, and Honda apparently loves the hell out of PE. Jounouchi ran really fast in a straight line that one time, and that is why he’s trustworthy friend material. He just needs to stop joining gangs, and he’ll be solid.

I have no idea if the fandub put that in there or if that was native to the show, but Miho legit stans Honda/Jounouchi and acts as if she’s off to write some fanfiction about it. Honestly if she did, it would make her so much more interesting of a character.

And so, until next time, we shall have to wait and see exactly what Yami Yuugi is going to do with a freakin Yo-yo and I’m sure it’s all sorts of real effed up. Excited to get there, honestly. A shame it had to happen on the part that isn’t dubbed yet, but I’ve done these subbed before, it’ll be fine!

#Season Zero #Yuugi Muto #Jounouchi #Honda #Anzu #yo-yo #Jounouchi joins a gang #Gotta go save Jounouchi's ass I guess #Miho #she was here too I guess #Just a great Jounouchi episode for the Jounouchi stans out there

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honeypirate · 3 years

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Just In Case

Part two

Pro hero Bakugou x fem pro hero reader

in my world Recovery Girl lives forever and trains another who can replace her when she retires who she passes the hero title of recovery girl too.

Anyway on to the story that’s probably not as good as I want but oh well.

Warning- angst. Death. Blood. Ya know the works.

Inspiration- Murder In the City // The Avett Brothers

You write a letter every day. A new one so it stays relevant. Every morning you took ten minutes to quickly write out a letter just in case anything bad happens while you’re at work.

You see, being a hero isnt all rainbows and butterflies and ranks. Sometimes it’s boring. But other times, it’s scary and horrifying. Those days where you barely make it out on top because the villains were crafty.

After one hard therapy session filled with worries and tears, your therapist suggested letters. At least one. To your husband. Just in case.

This morning wasn’t different than your last, you can hear your husband in his office across the hall, humming a song you listened to at dinner the previous night. He made your heart happy with everything he did, minus the way he left his used teeth floss sticks on the counter or the way he could be a little loud.

Every morning you write this letter, periodically meeting his eye through your open doors and he’d wink, making you laugh and stick your tongue out.

Today you watched as he moved, methodical, he’s done this every morning and it shows but he still takes care with every movement.

“Are you ready?” He says as he crosses the hallway “we’re needed in half an hour so we should go soon” you smile at him and somethjng settles in your stomach. Something heavy and uncomfortable. Something wrong.

“Yeah I’m almost done” you say and he watches as you fold your letter and place it in an envelope, writing his name followed by ‘just in case’ then sticking it in your top drawer.

The letters he’s been told about. The letters he supports. He’s actually been writing his own to you as well but you both agreed that you can’t read then unless it’s actually happening.

You try to not focus on the hard substance in your stomach or the way it seems to ache. It’s a bad feeling but sometimes your anxiety could cause them for no reason so you tried not to pay too much attention to it.

“Ready” you say softly, pulling down your hero mask to press your lips to his for a moment. He helps you readjust your mask with a pink flush in his cheeks. You’ve been married for years but making him blush is as easy as it was day one.

(Skippy skip)

The villains were smart, drawing all the heroes to different locations. You were climbing the stairs of an abandoned building, going to see if the intel about a bomb on the third floor was true, which unfortunately, it was.

Your hands hovered over the bomb, using your electric quirk to cancel out the wires and stop the timer. A scuffing sound catches your attention and you’re dodging a metal rod that was thrown at you to only be stabbed by one from a different direction.

The villain could control metal with his quirk, throwing the rod at you from one direction when he was coming from a different side. “Huh” you say softly as you look down at the rod through your stomach, the pain not even registering yet. “Poor unfortunate hero.” He lifts you by the metal rod and you scream, white hot pain shooting through you as it tears your abdomen as he slams you into the ground, pushing the rod further through you until it connects to the concrete floor.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay long. I have a hot date later” he says as he restarts the bomb, placing it farther from you so you couldn’t reach it with your powers, then he’s hopping from the third story window and waving at you with a smirk.

Your hand flies to your ear piece “There’s a bomb! Third floor tallest abandoned building in the-“ and that’s all you can get out before the bomb goes off and the building is collapsing.

The area was covered in dust and smoke, ash falling from the sky. You ripped your mask off trying to get more air into your lungs but it didn’t help that a giant piece of concrete was crushing your right arm and part of your ribs and chest, not to mention you’re still attached to the rod.

“Bakugou” you say through your headpiece, coughing up blood and ash “where are you?” He shouts back “the bomb” you muttered back and it sounded wheezy, you could hear the fluid in your lungs. You heard more explosions before he was appearing right beside you.

“Hey there hot stuff” you say and chuckle softly as he brushes the dust out of your hair “I’ll get you out of here. You’ll be okay” he’s saying but his eyes are filling with tears and his brows are knit. “It’ll be okay” you say but he does not look in your eyes. He’s still fretting, trying to think of how to save you.

“Bakugou.” You say in a commanding voice and he looks at you “you’ll be okay” you whisper, your blood covered lips smiling gently. You reach up with your left hand and cup his cheek, brushing away the hot tears that have started to fall. “You’ll be okay” you say again, your voice sounding weaker “no” he whispers “no. I’ll save you. You’ll be fine. I’ll get you help” kirishima is in your headpiece, telling you how he’s sent first responders your way but you can’t hear him.

Your voice is quiet, your hand going limp and falling from his cheek “You are the best part of me”

He doesn’t know where he’s going. He left the police station and was just walking. He couldn’t go home. Not when it was your home too. Not when he knows he’ll just be reminded of you and how you smiled at him this morning. How he woke up to you kissing his neck. How that will never happen again.

Walking into the office he didn’t bother with any of the lights. He puts in his alarm code and numbly makes his way to your office.

If you’re reading this. That means I’ve died.

Oh god I’ve always hated these letters. It’s so dramatic. I’m going to be okay. I have to be.

But just in case, since were up against major villains every day, I’ll write this letter. The 54th I’ve written so far.

Anyway I would regret not saying anything if it was my last day alive. I know I’m going to go home tonight and hold you, kiss you, and spend it like it was my last. This won’t be different than the last 53 letters I’ve shredded.

But. Life is short. It’s short and before you know it it can be snuffed out like a candle in the wind. So here we go.

If I get murdered in the city tomorrow, don’t go revenging in my name. A person dead from such is plenty, no need to go get locked away. I know you’ll blame yourself and get mad and swear revenge. Bakugou I love you. Let go of the hate and the rage. All I want is you to be happy and you to be okay.

But there’s no need to get over alarmed, I’m coming home I know it.

(His tears start to hit the paper, hot big tears blotting the ink and making it hard to see. )

So if tomorrow is my last day. Ill leave this letter in my desk.

Don’t bother with my belongings. Things never really mattered to me, you know that. Donate them. Burn then. Whatever you want.

Tell my sister that I love her. That I’m sorry if she ever doubted that.

I wonder what my parents will say. Probably that they were proud of me. Please let them know how much I loved them. How much I loved my childhood.

Now for you, my love, my sweetheart. The love of my life I’m sure of it. There was nothing worth sharing like the love that let us share our name. The love that let me share your name for these few years.

Thank you. For loving me. For supporting me. For choosing me every day. I’ve never doubted it once. I’ll always be with you, even if you can’t see me.

I'm watching you in your office right now, youre humming that song that played at the restaurant last night.

If I had never seen your face this world would have been such a very different place for me. It would be quieter and colorless. You have truly given me so much in this life that I can never hope to repay you.

You can never know which way your heart will go, but you are the compass leading mine. It will always point to you.

You’ve made me feel alive made me want to live so I could experience all my dreams coming true with you by my side.

I don’t know what else to add

Please, if you know anything, let it be that you were my greatest happiness in life.

I’ll always come home to you

I love you

-y/n

His hand is shaking as he finishes the letter.

He takes a sharp inhale and his knees give out, falling to the floor beside your desk with a soft gasp that turned into a sob as he broke down.

“You. You promised” he whispered between sobs, not even bothering to wipe away the tears as he hugs his arms around himself, hunching forward as his tears make soft patting sounds as the hit the hard wood floor.

He doesn’t know how Kirishima found him but when he runs through the office and sighs with relief when he finds him, he doesn’t move. He stays, broken on the floor, sobbing. Kiri doesn’t freeze, he’s there in a second, wrapping his arms around his best friend. Trying to give him a little comfort.

Kirishima's phone rings and Bakugou growls, taking it from his hand as kiri goes to silence it, pressing answer without looking to see who it is “what�� he yells out, his nose stuffy and throat constricted showing how much he’s been sobbing.

Recovery Girls voice is stern through the receiver “You need to get down here right away. She’s alive.”

#bakugou katsuki fanfiction #bakugou angst #mha bakugou #bakugou fanfiction #bakugou x you #bakugou x fem!reader #bnha bakugou x reader #bakugou x y/n #bakugou x reader #pro hero bakugou #my hero academia fanfiction #mha x you #mha x reader #mha x y/n

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joshjacksons · 3 years

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Joshua Jackson interview with Refinery29

Against my better judgement, and at the risk of losing any semblance of journalistic objectivity, I start my conversation with Joshua Jackson by effusively telling him what a dream come true it is to be talking to him. See, like many millennial women who grew up watching the late ‘90s and early 2000s teen drama Dawson’s Creek, Jackson’s Pacey Witter means a lot to me. Pacey is one of the rare fictional teen boys of my youth whose adolescent charisma, romantic appeal, and general boyfriend aptitude hold up all these years later (unlike The O.C’s Seth Cohen or Gossip Girl’s Chuck Bass) and that is due in large part to the wit, vulnerability, and care Jackson brought to the character.

It’s the same intention he’s afforded all of his famous roles — Peter Bishop in Fringe, Cole Lockhart in The Affair, and even as a 14-year-old in his first acting gig as sweet-faced heartthrob Charlie Conway in The Mighty Ducks. Now, Jackson, 43, has matured into a solid supporting actor (with memorable turns in Little Fires Everywhere and When They See Us) and as a leading man who can draw you into a story with just his voice (Jackson’s latest project is narrating the psychological thriller and Canadian Audible original, Oracle, one of the over 12,000 titles available today on Audible.ca’s the Plus Catalogue) or find humanity in the most sinister men (he’s currently playing a sociopath with a god complex in Dr. Death). His magnetic pull is as evident as it was when he was the guy you rooted for in a show named after another guy’s creek. Jackson has never seemed to mind the fact that so many people still bring up Pacey decades later, and that’s part of why as an adult, he’s one of the few childhood crushes I still have on a pedestal. I tell him just a tiny slice of this, and Jackson graciously sits up straighter and promises to bring his A-game to our Zoom exchange. Jackson is in what appears to be an office, flanked by mess, like a true work-from-home Dad. He and his wife, fellow actor Jodie Turner-Smith, welcomed a daughter in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, and he tells me that fatherhood and marriage are the best decisions he has ever made. Jackson and Turner-Smith are a rare Hollywood couple who choose to let us in on their love, but not obnoxiously — just through flirty Instagram comments and cheeky tweets. Their pairing is part of Jackson’s enduring appeal. It’s nice to think that Pacey Witter grew up to be a doting dad and adoring husband, even if his wife’s name is Jodie, not Joey.

Jackson is an animated conversationalist, leaning into the camera to emphasize his points — especially when the topic of diversity comes up. White celebs don’t get asked about racism in Hollywood the way their counterparts of colour do, and when they do, they’re usually hesitant at best, and unequipped at worst, to tackle these conversations. Jackson is neither. He’s open, willing, and eager to discuss systemic inequality in the industry he’s grown up in. It’s the bare minimum a straight white man in Hollywood can do, and Jackson seems to know this. When he ventures briefly into trying to explain to me, a Black woman, the perils of being Black, female, and online, he catches himself and jokes that of course, I don’t need him to tell me the racism that happens in the comment section of his wife’s Instagram. The self-deprecating delivery is one I’m familiar with from watching Jackson onscreen for most of my life, and seeing it in person (virtually) renders me almost unable to form sentences. Jackson’s charm is disarming, but his relaxed Canadian energy is so relatable, I manage to maintain my professionalism long enough to get through our conversation. Refinery29: Your voice has been in my head for a few days because I've been listening to Canadian Audible Original, Oracle. What drew you to this project and especially the medium of audio storytelling?

Joshua Jackson: The book itself is such a page turner. I also love the idea of those old radio plays. It's like a hybrid between the beauty of reading a book on the page where your imagination does all of it. We craft a little bit of the world, but because this is a noir thriller married with this metaphysical world, there's a lot of dark and creepy places that your imagination gets to fill in for yourself.

I'm noticing a trend in some of the roles you've been taking on lately, with this and Dr. Death, these stories are very dark and creepy. But so many people still think of you as Pacey Witter, or as Charlie Conway, the prototypical good guys of our youth. Are you deliberately trying to kill Pacey and Charlie?

JJ: I'm not trying to kill anybody — except on screen [laughs]. It's funny, I didn't really think of these two things as companion pieces, but I won't deny that there may be something subconscious in this anxiety, stress-filled year that we've all just had. That may be what I was trying to work out was some of that stress, because that's the beauty of my job. Instead of therapy, I just get someone to pay me to say somebody else's words. So, yeah, that could be a thing [but] the thought process that went into them both was very different. Even though this is a dark story, [lead character, police psychic] Nate Russo is still the hero. [Dr. Death’s] Christopher Duntsch very much is not at all. I can't pretend to know my own mind well enough to be able to tell you exactly how [these two roles] happened, but it happened.

That might be something that you should work through with an actual therapist. JJ: Exactly. Yeah, maybe real therapy is on the docket for me [laughs].

So I was listening to Oracle and you're doing these various creepy voices — I’m sorry the word “creepy” keeps coming up.

JJ: Are you trying to tell me something? You know what? I wanted to skip straight to the creepy old man phase of my career. So, it sounds like I'm doing a good job.

You're doing amazing, sweetie [laughs]. So, I was thinking you must be really good at bedtime stories with your daughter doing all these voices. Or is she still too young for that?

JJ: No! She's all the way into books. Story time is my favourite part of the day because it gives me the opportunity to have that time with her just one-on-one. Her favorite book right now is a book called Bedtime Bonnet. Every night I bring out three books, and she gets to pick one. The other two shift a little bit, but Bedtime Bonnet is every single night.

I love that. Since you're married to a Black woman, you know a thing or two about bonnets. JJ: Yeah, well I'm getting my bonnet education. And I'm getting my silk sheet education. I'm behind the curve, but I'm figuring it out [laughs].

You said in an interview recently that you are now at the age where the best roles for men are. And I wonder if you can expand on that and whether you think of the fact that the same cannot be said for the majority of women actors in their 40s?

JJ: What's great about the age that I'm at now as a man is that, generally speaking, the characters — even if they're not the central character of this show — are well fleshed out. They're being written from a personal perspective, usually from a writer who has enough lived experience and wants to tell the story of a whole character. Whereas when you're younger — and obviously I was very lucky with some of the characters that I was able to play – you're the son or the boyfriend, or you're a very two-dimensional character. It's gotten better, but still a lot like you're either the precocious child or you're the brooding one. I will say that while I would agree with you to a certain point for women, I think that this is probably the best era to be a not 25-year-old-woman in certainly the entirety of my career. And it is also the best time to be a Black woman inside of the industry. There's still more opportunity for a 40-year-old white man than there is for a 40-year-old white woman, but it is better now than it has ever been. The roles that women are able to inhabit and occupy and the opportunities that are out there have multiplied. If I started my career in playing two-dimensional roles to get the three-dimensional roles, most women started their career in three-dimensional roles and end up at “wife” or “mom.” And that's just not the case anymore. There's just a lot of broadly diverse stories being told that centre women. So you're right, but in the last five years, six years I would say, there has really been a pretty significant shift.

And I think that shift is happening because who's behind the camera is also changing. JJ: Right? Who holds the purse strings. That's big. Who gets to green light the show to begin with? You have to have a variety of different faces inside of that room. And then, who's behind the camera. What is the actual perspective that we're telling the story from? The male gaze thing is very real. Dr. Death had three female directors. The central character of Dr. Death is an outrageously toxic male figure. Who knows more about toxic male BS than women? Particularly women who are in a predominantly male work environment. So these directors had a very specific take and came at it with a clarity that potentially a man wouldn't see, because we have blind spots about ourselves. We're in a space where there's a recognition that we've told a very narrow band of what's available in stories. There's so many stories to be told and it's okay for us to broaden out from another white cop.

I hope that momentum continues. Okay, I have to tell you something: I’m a little obsessed with your wife, Jodie Turner-Smith. JJ: Me too. As you should be! I love how loudly and publicly you both love on each other. But I need you to set the scene for me. When you are leaving flirty Instagram comments, and she's tweeting thirsty things about you, are you in the same room? Do you know that the other one is tweeting? What's happening?

JJ: We're rarely in the same room [writing] the thirsty comments because that usually just gets said to each other. But, look, if either of us misses a comment, you better believe at night, there's a, "Hey, did you see what I wrote?" One, she's very easy to love out loud and two, she's phenomenal. And I have to say, the love and support that is coming my direction has been a revelation in my life. I've said this often, and it just is the truth: If you ever needed to test whether or not you had chosen the right partner in life, just have a baby at the beginning of a pandemic and then spend a year and a half together. And then you know. And then you absolutely know. I didn't get married until fairly late in the game. I didn't have a baby till very late in the game and they're the two best choices I've ever made in my life.

I'm just going to embarrass you now by reading one of Jodie's thirsty comments to you. She tweeted, “Objectifying my husband on the internet is my kink. I thought you guys knew this by now,” with a gif that said "No shame." JJ: [laughs] That sounds about right.

She's not the only one though. There's this whole thirst for Joshua Jackson corner of the internet. And it feels like there's been a bit of a heartthrob resurgence for you now at your big age. How do you feel about that?

JJ: I hadn't really put too much thought into it, but I am happy that my wife is thirsty for me. What about the rest of us? JJ: That's great for y'all, but it's most important that my wife is thirsty for me. Good answer. You're good at this husband thing. You recently revealed that Jodie proposed to you. Then it became this big story, and people were so surprised by it. How did you feel about the response? JJ: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to give context to this story. So I accidentally threw my wife under the bus because that story was told quickly and it didn't give the full context and holy Jesus, the internet is racist and misogynist. So yes, we were in Nicaragua on a beautiful moonlit night, it could not possibly have been more romantic. And yes, my wife did propose to me and yes, I did say yes, but what I didn't say in that interview was there was a caveat, which is that I'm still old school enough that I said, "This is a yes, but you have to give me the opportunity [to do it too]." She has a biological father and a stepdad, who's the man who raised her. [I said], ‘You have to give me the opportunity to ask both of those men for your hand in marriage.’ And then, ‘I would like the opportunity to re-propose those to you and do it the old fashioned way down on bended knee.’ So, that's actually how the story ended up.

So, there were two proposals. I do feel like that is important context. JJ: Yes, two proposals. And also for anybody who is freaked out by a woman claiming her own space, shut the fuck up. Good God, you cannot believe the things people were leaving my wife on Instagram. She did it. I said ‘yes.’ We're happy. That's it. That's all you need to know. That has been a real education for me as a white man, truly. The way people get in her comments and the ignorance and ugliness that comes her way is truly shocking. And it has been a necessary, but an unpleasant education in just the way people relate to Black bodies in general, but Black female bodies in specific. It is not okay. We have a long way to go. Jodie is such an inspiration because it seems like she handles it in stride. She handles it all with humour and with grace. JJ: She does. And look, I think it's like a golden cage, the concept of the strong Black woman. I would wish for my wife that she would not have to rise above with such amazing strength and grace, above the ugliness that people throw at her on a day to day. I am impressed with her that she does it, but I would wish that that would not be the armour that she has to put on every morning to just navigate being alive. That's a word. That's a word, Joshua Jackson.

The 13-year-old in me needs to ask this. We are in the era of reboots. If they touched Dawson's Creek — which is a masterpiece that should not be touched — but if they did, what would you want it to look like? JJ: I think it should look a lot like it looked the first time. To me, what was great about that story was it was set in a not cool place. It wasn't New York, it wasn't LA, it wasn't London. It wasn't like these were kids who were on the cutting edge of culture, but they were kids just dealing with each other and they were also very smart and capable of expressing themselves. It's something that I loved at that age performing it. And I think that is the reason it has lived on. We have these very reductive ideas of what you're capable of at 16, 17, 18. And my experience of myself at that point was not as a two-dimensional jock or nerd or pretty girl. You are living potentially an even more full life at that point because everything's just so heightened. [Dawson’s Creek] never talked down to the people that it was portraying. That's one of the things that I loved about it as a book nerd growing up. The vocabulary of Dawson's Creek was always above my level and that was refreshing. To go back to the “diversity” conversation, you can't really make a show with six white leads anymore and that’s a good thing. But I also don't know how I feel about taking a thing, rebooting it, and just throwing Black characters in there.

JJ: I hear that. And there's certain contexts in which it doesn't work unless you're making it a thing about race, right? If you watch Bridgerton, obviously you're living inside of a fantasy world, and so you're bringing Black characters into this traditionally white space and what would historically be a white space. And now you are able to have a conversation about myth-making and inclusion and who gets to say what and who gets to act how. So that's interesting, but I don’t think you’re just throwing in a Black character if you changed Joey to a Black woman [or] Pacey to a Black man. What you're doing is you're enriching the character. Let's say one of those characters is white and one of those characters is Black. Now, there's a whole rich conversation to be had between these two kids, the political times that we live in, the cultural flow that is going through all of us right now. I think that makes a better story. All these conversations around comic books in particular like, "Well, that's a white character." It's like, Man, shut up. What are you talking about? It is a comic book character! Joey and Pacey don't have to be white. Dawson and Jen don't have to be white. And this is what we were talking about a little bit earlier. We get better the broader our perspective is, both as humans, but also in the entertainment industry. So if you went back to a story like [Dawson’s Creek], what was important in that show was class not race, which I think is true for a lot of small Northeastern towns. They are very white. But if you brought race into that as well, you don't diminish the amount of the stories that you can tell. You enrich the tapestry of that show. So I think that would be a great idea.

Make Pacey Witter a Black man in 2021 is what I just heard from you. JJ: Hashtag ‘Make Pacey Witter A Black Man’. There we go!

#joshua jackson #refinery29 #interviews #jodie turner smith #dawson's creek

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oo-hazel-oo · 3 years

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The Lucky Batch

hey y’all! i’ve been working on this for a hot minute — turns out i am incapable writing anything shorter than 5,000 words, so sorry in advance for how long this got. a huge thank you to @cosmicghostie for being the ultimate writer's cheerleader and to the rest of the lucky batch for giving me such amazing characters to work with! you all genuinely brighten my day, so i hope this brightens yours! ♥︎

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Lucky: a few days in the life of Clone Force 37’s unofficial therapist

content warnings: blood/injury, weapon use, lots of emotional distress (but also some fluff to make up for it!!)

Thumbs didn’t know when he had become Clone Force 37’s unofficial therapist. It just kinda happened.

His original role as the squad’s battle strategist shifted after he realized that his usual skill-set wouldn’t be helpful to a squad who typically threw strategy out the window.

Yet even without a set strategy, the unconventional group somehow had a relatively high success rate when it came to their missions. Thumbs had assumed it was their unpredictability that gave them an advantage. Or the fact that each of them had unique abilities, unlike any soldiers he had ever met.

However, the longer he was with Clone Force 37, the more he started to notice just how special his batch-mates were.

The twins, Foxy and Pepper, had caught his attention first. Both were skilled in their own ways, but what stood out to Thumbs was how each was fiercely protective of the other. He wasn’t sure what the pair had gone through to end up on the Clover, but he couldn’t help but notice the weight of Foxy’s quiet around strangers or the subtle promise behind each sticker that Pepper placed. Thumbs knew more than anyone, love was always accompanied by fear.

He saw this fear in Master Kenhla, every time she glanced towards the two padawans she had come to mentor. Despite her powerful posture, Thumbs could see how she carried the galaxy on her shoulders; not so that she could manage more, but so her brothers could bear less.

Brothers like Rane and Skip, who had lost everything, everyone, before finding their place with the Lucky Batch. Or Sparks and Ryder, both of whom blamed themselves for tragedies of the past.

They all had lost so much… Yet, by some miracle, they had found each other.

Thumbs would do anything to make sure it stayed that way.

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

This particular day had started normally, which for Thumbs meant wincing as three screaming forms barreled towards where he sat knitting at the back of the ship. He set his needles down, knowing he would not be getting back to work anytime soon.

“Here we go,” he mumbled under his breath as his batchmates shouted from across the hull.

“THUMBS!!!”

The small stampede, which was revealed to be Sparks, Ballast, and Luna, raced towards him, each one attempting to outpace the other.

“Oh Maker, Ballast, what did you do?”

The batcher in question skidded to a stop, mock-offense written across his face. “I didn’t-”

Thumbs gave each of his batch-mates a once-over, scanning them for injuries. “Should I get Pepper? Is anyone hurt?”

“Not yet,” the two mechanics both mumbled under their breath.

Thumbs sighed in equal parts relief and exhaustion. Ballast and Sparks had been ‘friendly’ rivals for as long as he had known the pair. Unfortunately for him, their rivalry often extended outside the realm of mechanics and into the everyday affairs of the Lucky Batch, with Thumbs usually acting as the chosen mediator of these disagreements.

Sparks pointed at Ballast, pleading his case. “He ate all the cookies Jack made me!”

“You’re overreac-”

“And drank all my caf.”

Now Thumbs understood the near-murderous look on Sparks’ face.

His brother had always done so much for the batch and asked for very few things in return, one of those things being his morning cups of caf: a simple but necessary pleasure that allowed him to function throughout the day.

Thumbs brought his attention back to the pair in front of him, wondering whose word to trust more. Then he brought his gaze down, to a much more reliable source.

“Luna, what happened?”

The padawan looked up nervously, her eyes partially hidden behind choppy bangs. Thumbs smiled when he noticed she was wearing the mittens he had knit for her. He had originally made pairs for both her and Brisk while they were stationed on a colder planet, but now Luna liked to wear them for fun, claiming they made her look like an ewok.

The young girl shrunk from the attention that was suddenly on her, moving closer to Ballast’s side.

“I…”

“What happened is he drank all my caf.” Sparks stepped forward, jabbing another accusatory finger towards Ballast. “The caf that prevents me from strangling my brothers when they get on my nerves.”

Thumbs spoke up, attempting to diffuse the rising hostility. “I thought you didn’t even like caf, Ballast. I always see you drinking that tea Jackal likes.”

The mechanic shifted on his feet nervously. “Well, I…”

Thumbs looked towards his brother curiously, confused by his sudden change in demeanor. Something about the whole dispute seemed off, almost like Ballast was covering for someb-

“Wait,” a small voice piped up from behind the three brothers. “B-Ballast didn’t take your caf, I did.”

“You-” Sparks spun towards the voice with an instinctive glower before recognizing its source. His features softened almost instantly. “What?”

Luna shrugged sheepishly. “I wanted to see if it was good… It was! And Master Ken said I was exceptionally energetic during our training afterwards.”

Thumbs fixed his gaze on Sparks expectantly, curious how he would react to the young batcher’s confession.

“I’m sorry,” she continued, wringing her mittened hands. “I know I should’ve asked.”

Sparks cleared his throat awkwardly as he waved off her apology. “No, it’s uh... It’s fine.”

Luna’s expression remained uncertain and Ballast elbowed Sparks in the side, urging him to reassure the young girl.

“Really, I mean... I shouldn’t even be drinking that much anyway,” he mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck guiltily.

Ballast grinned at Sparks, eating up the moment.

Thumbs couldn’t help the smirk that crept onto his own face as well. For a squad of soldiers who had fought countless battles and overcome powerful enemies, they sure did surrender fast when it came to their padawans. No one onboard the Clover was immune to their effortless charm.

Luna eventually looked up at Thumbs, seeking his own approval, which he happily granted with an encouraging thumbs up.

There was a welcome moment of silence before Sparks’ head jerked upwards once more.

“Wait, what about my cookies?”

“Hmm...” Ballast looked to the floor dramatically, feigning deep thought. “You mean the chocolate chunk cookies with sea salt and a fine caramel drizzle?” He smirked before continuing. “I have no idea.”

Sparks took two threatening steps towards Ballast and within seconds the two of them were chasing each other throughout the Clover with Luna giggling in their wake.

For the clones, who quite literally were forced to grow up too fast, the padawans’ presence reminded them of what a childhood should be. It kept them grounded, desperate to preserve that feeling for the young girls for as long as they could. And if that meant that Luna could get away with stealing Spark’s caf, then so be it.

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

That evening’s supply trip was supposed to be easy. A quick in and out operation to gather necessary materials for the coming weeks. But it had already been three hours since Ballast, Sparks, and Foxy’s expected return and no one on the Clover had received an update on their whereabouts.

Thumbs wasn’t someone who paced often. While the rest of the galaxy seemed to be in constant motion, Thumbs always tried his best to remain still at its center. But the longer he waited for his batchmates’ return, the more he felt like he was spinning off his axis, unable to stop the repetitive trajectory of his feet throughout the hull.

He wasn’t even aware of his own movements until they were interrupted by the sound of distant yelling. Strained shouts echoed from outside the Clover’s walls, nearly imperceptible amidst the intensifying wind. Their tone, panicked and desperate, was more bone-chilling than the rain that had started to fall around them.

Storms had always scared Thumbs. He hated seeing flashes of lightning, understanding that the explosion of thunder would follow, but never knowing when. Deep down he knew that thunder was harmless, that lightning posed the greater threat, but at least it was quick, unexpected, gone in a flash. Thunder was slow, deafening, inevitable.

When the Clover’s ramp finally lowered to reveal a bloodied Sparks cradled in Ballast’s arms, he knew that the lightning had passed.

This was the thunder.

Thumbs watched in silence as his brothers stumbled into the hull of the ship, a trail of mud and blood left in their wake. Ballast and Foxy eased Sparks onto the closest bunk, removing his armor to better assess the injury. Luna and Brisk dashed into the room, their eyes widening at the horrific sight. Luna’s breaths came in labored bursts as she called for Pepper, tears streaming down her face.

The squad’s medic came running, following the worried gaze of the two young girls who stood near the bunks. He spared a brief glance at Foxy before quickly donning a pair of gloves and shouting orders to nearby batch-mates. Hearing the commotion, Master Kenhla arrived and immediately ushered her padawans out of the room, not wanting them to witness the sight of their brother in pain.

While before Thumbs had been unable to sit still, now he felt frozen, cold as the ice on Hoth. His brothers were right in front of him, yet he felt as if he were watching the scene unfold from millions of miles away.

He kept thinking back to that morning — Sparks had been fine, albeit cranky over his lack of caf, and now…

Thumbs hated it. He hated how things could change so quickly.

He watched as Ballast, usually explosive in his mannerisms, now held Sparks’ hand in his own, whispering words of comfort as his brother lay motionless on the cot.

Thumbs suddenly felt sick to his stomach, a shrill ringing filling the air around him. The echoes of a memory that had been stagnant for years, forced into the depths of his mind, suddenly emerged:

An argument, a battle, another brother gone. A hand desperately squeezing his own before going limp, devoid of all life.

Another hand, this one from the present, landed on his shoulder, dragging him out of one nightmare and into another. A voice was speaking, asking if he was alright, telling him to sit down.

Thumbs’ guilt only increased. Hands that should be helping his fallen brother were instead on his own shoulders, urging him towards the nearest seat. He shrugged them off with an uncharacteristic roughness, finally taking a few shaky steps towards Sparks.

He had almost made it to the bunk when the same pair of arms wrapped around his torso, pulling him back.

“Thumbs, stop,” the voice urged. “You need to let Pepper help him. There’s nothing you can do.”

He knew the words were supposed to be comforting. He had spoken the same ones to almost every soldier who had come to him burdened with the invisible weight of survivor’s guilt. Sometimes it was what they needed to hear; other times, it wasn’t.

The last thing Thumbs saw was an oxygen mask being lowered onto his brother’s face before eventually succumbing to the arms around him, letting himself be removed from the scene.

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Thumbs woke up the next morning with a headache.

Foxy, who had been the one to escort him out of the room the night before, filled him in on what had happened during the supply run.

Apparently as the trio had made their way back to the ship, bandits had intercepted them. The ragtag group of thieves were lacking in both numbers and artillery and hadn’t been particularly difficult to subdue. Sparks had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the unforgiving crossfire of a supply trip gone wrong.

Thumbs wished he had been there. Maybe then he could’ve shouted to his brother in warning or pulled him out of harm’s way. Stars, he would’ve jumped in front of the deathly bolt himself if it meant Sparks was still standing at the end of the day.

The two of them had grown close over the past few months, especially after Thumbs learned the story behind Sparks’ name. He could tell that his brother’s outwardly gruff attitude was just a shield used to protect the sensitive, guilt-ridden soldier beneath. Even one offhand criticism of his work as a mechanic could bring him back to the accident and a past he wished desperately to forget.

Because of this, Sparks would often work through the night, losing himself in the wires and circuits of the ship to ensure he didn’t make the same mistake twice. Thumbs was always at his side reminding him to take breaks, to drink water when he was thirsty, to eat when pangs of hunger hit...

But there was little he could do for Sparks now as he lay unconscious in the hull of the Clover.

Pepper had done everything he could, luckily managing to stabilize their brother within a few hours of the incident. Sparks was slowly showing signs of improvement — he had even woke up briefly in the early hours, mumbling something about watering Percy, before slipping back into the depths of unconsciousness.

Percy was the name of one of Sparks’ plants, something Thumbs discovered after walking in on his brother affectionately repotting it in a moment of assumed privacy.

He smiled at the memory, shaking his head in disbelief. It was just like Sparks to be worried about keeping his plants alive while he was barely clinging to life himself.

With nothing to do but wait until his brother woke up, Thumbs made his way into the hull of the ship where he found most of the batch engaged in a lively game of Dejarik. It was a tradition, meant to keep the batches' spirit alive when faced with tough times.

He almost started towards them when he felt a presence to his left, distanced from the laughter of the others.

Thumbs’ gaze landed on Ryder as he stared out of the cockpit window absent-mindedly, though he knew from his expression that his mind was anything but absent.

Thumbs approached slowly, not wanting to startle the squad’s weapons specialist.

“Hey Ry, you alright?”

Ryder glanced up, a flash of surprise illuminating his expression, before looking back down, his face once again shrouded in darkness.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” A barrage of laughter sounded from the other side of the room, where everyone was still gathered. “Think I’m gonna go for a ride though.”

“Oh, okay…” Thumbs replied, wanting to say more to his obviously-distracted brother. “Mind if I tag along?”

“You always do,” Ryder said, shooting him a small smirk.

“Hey!” Thumbs laughed, punching his shoulder lightly.

Ryder chuckled, nodding for Thumbs to follow him to the far corner of the hull. Once there, he opened the weapons cabinet, extracting a couple blasters and holstering them on his form.

Thumbs looked at his brother questioningly.

“Just in case,” Ryder said, carefully checking over his chosen artillery.

Thumbs nodded quickly, admonishing himself for not thinking more practically, especially after what happened with Sparks. It was a dangerous thing to give the galaxy the benefit of the doubt.

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

The planet they were currently docked on was beautiful. The hues of its rolling hills were softened by the dying light, the gentle breeze transforming the tall grasses into golden waves. The sky’s colors evolved with each passing minute, all evidence of the previous night’s storm lost to its changing shades.

It was Thumb’s favorite time of day. At dusk the light never seemed harsh; it was sympathetic, understanding. It hovered, never fully settling, like a cloud. But dusky light was also ephemeral. Thumbs wished he could freeze it, trap it in a jar and release it when he needed its soft companionship.

He knew too many people like dusk: perfect, until they were gone.

“It’s pretty here,” Thumbs eventually broke the silence, a welcome distraction from his own thoughts.

“Yeah,” Ryder replied as his eyes traced the horizon, “It is.”

“That why you’ve been coming out here so often?”

Thumbs knew his brother liked to take his speeder out on rides whenever he needed a break from the confines of the Clover. He would even accompany him from time to time. But recently he had been escaping much more frequently and Thumbs couldn’t help but worry that something else was going on.

Ryder chuckled lowly. “I didn’t think anyone noticed.”

“Hey, you’re kinda hard not to notice.” Thumbs smirked, gesturing a hand towards his brother’s head: “Ya know, cause of the hair.”

Ryder grinned, blowing a stray strand out of his face. “Yeah, sure thing curly.”

Thumbs ran a hand through his own coily locks with a shy shrug.

The two brothers fell into a comfortable silence as fireflies blinked to life around them. Thumbs pretended they were shooting stars, closing his eyes and wishing for the speedy recovery of Sparks back onboard the Clover.

After a while, the air seemed to become heavy and Thumbs could tell that Ryder needed to get something off of his chest.

His suspicion was confirmed when he heard his brother sigh deeply, preparing to speak.

“Lately…” he started, tugging on the end of his turquoise braid. “I’ve been thinking a lot.”

Thumbs nodded and moved to sit beside him in a subtle gesture of comfort.

“About them?”

Ryder nodded, knowing Thumbs was referencing his past squad.

“I’ve been having the dreams again.”

Thumbs’ face fell. He remembered the night he found out about Ryder’s nightmares as if it were yesterday.

He had been awake in the hull of the ship, too afraid that something bad might happen if he allowed himself the privilege of closing his eyes. Ryder had started tossing in his sleep, muttering the names and numbers of unfamiliar clones. Thumbs shook his brother awake, eventually guiding him outside of the ship when he struggled to regain his breath. The two of them had sat on the Clover’s ramp until long after the sun rose, each finding comfort in the other’s presence.

Since then, the nightmares had decreased, but every now and again they would return. The guilt would return.

“In the dream, I’m back on the venator,” Ryder described, his voice hoarse. “First there’s the flashing lights. Then voices, their voices, but they eventually fade away and then there’s just static. For a moment, everything is quiet, just a faint buzzing...”

Thumbs gave his brother’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, letting him know he was still there, still listening.

“And then I’m in the escape pod. As I’m drifting away, I look back towards the ship, but it’s not the venator anymore. It’s the Clover.”

He paused, swallowing thickly.

“And then it’s just gone. Swallowed by fire.”

The unsettling images unearthed feelings that Thumbs never had the courage to voice out loud, but the anxious thrumming of Ryder’s fingers on the side of the speeder reminded him of his current task: to show his brother that he was there for him now, regardless of what happened in the past.

“Ry, I know there’s not a lot I can say. But know that they would’ve been so proud of you, of the soldier and brother you’ve become,” Thumbs reassured gently. “We all are.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Ryder mumbled.

Thumbs frowned, knowing his brother wasn’t convinced.

“Well, this was supposed to be a surprise, but it looks like you need it now.”

Thumbs pulled out the pack he had brought with him, rifling through it until he found a small bundle. He nervously presented it to Ryder, who observed the way it had been carefully packaged in colorful gift wrap and adorned with stickers, most likely donated by Pepper.

“I made this for you,” Thumbs spoke as Ryder opened the parcel. “It’s a blanket, obviously, but it’s… Well, it’s got a little more to it than that. Each row of stitches is made of yarn from all the different places we’ve been to as a batch. Thought it could be cool to see how far we’ve all come. But I also know how important it is to you that we honor our pasts, so down here,” Thumbs pointed at the bottom left corner, “I stitched in the names of CT-2019 and CT-1882. And over here is General Lyle’s.”

Thumbs looked up at Ryder, trying to gauge his reaction.

“I know it doesn’t change anything, not really, but I thought maybe it could help you sleep at night.”

There was a long moment of silence as Thumbs began to doubt the impact of his gift. The whole idea was starting to sound stupid now. Maybe if he had-

“I… Thank you, Thumbs.” Ryder finally spoke, his voice cracking slightly. “Really. It’s- It’s perfect.”

Thumbs grinned, glad to see the glimmer of hope return to his brother’s eyes. “Of course, anything for my vod.”

Ryder held the blanket close, tracing his finger over the carefully stitched names of his old squad. His eyes scanned over the various colors and textures that Thumbs had incorporated, recognizing yarn from planets they hadn’t been to in years. How long had his brother been working on this?

He was just about to ask when a subtle movement drew his own gaze downwards. Thumbs was quietly bouncing his right leg, a nervous habit that Ryder had picked up on throughout their time together. He doubted that Thumbs was even aware of his own anxious mannerism, but Ryder could tell that something was on his mind.

“Hey, vod?” Ryder placed the blanket down, his focus now on his brother.

“Yeah?” Thumbs replied, still staring straight ahead.

Ryder thought back to something his companion had told him just moments ago, something that had made him feel important, valuable, seen.

“People notice you too.”

Thumbs chuckled, thinking back to when he invited himself to join Ryder on his impromptu speeder trip just hours before. “Yeah, I guess my constant pestering makes it hard not to.”

“Yeah...” Ryder continued, almost hesitantly. It would be harder getting through to his brother than he thought. “But we also notice why you do that.”

“And why’s that?” Thumbs asked casually, not quite sure where Ryder was guiding the conversation.

“Because you care.”

At this, Thumbs finally met his brother’s eyes, confusion painting his features. The words were simple, yet something about them did not fully compute.

“No matter how many idiotic things we pull, you’re always there for us.”

Thumbs held his brother’s gaze, considering his words intently, before looking down to his feet. He frowned before mumbling something, barely audible above the light breeze:

“Not when it counts.”

The words sliced through the air, contrary to the soft tone in which they were spoken. Ryder couldn’t help the immediate snap of his head towards his brother.

“What do you-”

“Yesterday, with Sparks,” Thumbs interjected, his voice gaining strength. “No amount of pestering could’ve helped him.”

There was something about the way Thumbs was speaking — something that Ryder had missed before, something familiar — that was unravelling with each passing moment.

“But he’s okay now, he’s fine,” Ryder tried to console, his brow furrowed.

Thumbs scoffed. “That was just luck. I heard what Pepper said: If his injury had been just an inch to the left…” He ran a hand through his hair frustratedly.

“Well, luck is kinda our thing,” Ryder said, repeating words that Pepper had spoken to him when he first joined the batch.

“But I don’t want it to be!”

Ryder looked up in shock. In the entire time he had known Thumbs, he had never once heard him raise his voice. But shock soon turned to concern when he noticed the tears streaming down his brother’s face.

“I don’t want to rely on luck,” Thumbs choked out, his voice softening. “Not… not when it comes to the people I care about.”

Helplessness.

Ryder was well-acquainted with the feeling — the image of his former general on the other side, the wrong side, of an escape pod window, forever etched into his memory. He tried to think of something to say that could comfort his brother, but the only words that came to mind were the ones Thumbs had already spoken to him moments before.

The whole batch knew that Thumbs had always struggled to take his own advice and that reminding him to do so never seemed to have an effect. It was unusual to see him in such a vulnerable state, something the former-strategist was well aware of as he avoided his brother’s gaze, shame written across his tear-stained features.

Ryder cringed at the sight, knowing he would need to take a more unconventional approach to offer his brother reassurance, one that would hopefully provide him with a fragment of control in a galaxy that seemed to feed on chaos.

Ryder nodded once, steeling himself, before reaching down and pulling his twin blasters out of their respective holsters.

“You know,” he started, attempting to keep his voice level, “I got these from CT-2019 and CT-1882. They were graduation gifts.”

Thumbs turned his head curiously, wiping away a stray tear in the process. A small part of him fought back the urge to smile: unlike his brother, he had been given craft supplies and a book for graduation.

“I could teach you how to shoot ‘em, if you want.”

Thumbs looked towards his brother incredulously.

“Ry, I’ve shot a blaster before...”

Ryder exhaled breathily, a playful grin gracing his features. “Ah, not ones like these. These here are DC-17 hand blasters.” He held his weapons in front of himself reverently. “They’re more powerful than your standard blaster, more efficient too.”

Thumbs hesitated, his confusion at the sudden shift in topic still evident, before nodding slowly.

“Alright, sure.”

Ryder spent the next few minutes guiding Thumbs through the best way to handle the blasters — helping him correct his stance, improve aim, and prepare for recoil. The process was strangely reassuring, giving Thumbs something tangible to hold onto, something he could control.

“Hey, Ryder?” Thumbs asked, looking down at the weapon in his hands, the echoes of its former owners serving as a comforting reminder that those who were gone could still protect their brothers who lived to fight another day. Maybe when Thumbs was gone, he could do the same.

“Thank you.”

Ryder had just begun to respond when a noise sounded from behind them.

Thumbs startled and spun on his heel, impulsively throwing the first thing he could think of towards the nearby bushes: Ryder’s blaster.

He mentally facepalmed as his brother jumped off of the speeder, aiming his remaining blaster towards the sound. He held out a hand as he crept closer to the bushes, silently telling Thumbs to stay back.

A tense moment passed, before a tooka revealed itself from behind the bush.

Thumbs sighed in relief before looking up at Ryder guiltily.

“Probably not the best use of the blaster,” he said with a cringe.

“What, you wanted to shoot it?” Ryder questioned breathlessly, a smirk growing across his features.

“No, of course not!” Thumbs smiled, relieved that his brother didn’t seem upset over his moment of panic. The tooka sauntered up to him, rubbing its head against his legs.

Ryder retrieved the discarded blaster and walked back towards the speeder, the remnants of a smirk still visible on his face. “Well, looks like good things can come from bad luck.”

“Yeah,” Thumbs huffed, looking down at the small animal by his feet. “Guess so.”

And maybe that’s what Clone Force 37 was: a group of outcasts who were all in the process of turning their histories with bad luck into good things — good luck.

“C’mon, hop up,” Ryder said as held out an arm. “Let’s get back to the ship.”

Thumbs let himself be pulled into the speeder, the firm grip of his brother’s hand a silent reassurance: I’m here for you.

He leaned back, his eyes reflecting the stars that had started to appear above. He wondered how many of them he couldn’t see, how many millions of lives were being lived just out of his view.

Thumbs glanced over to the brother at his side, thinking about how lucky he was to have crossed paths with him, with all of them, in a universe of infinite proportions.

“We should probably pick up some caf for Sparks on the way back… I know he’ll want some when he wakes up,” Thumbs spoke, laying all the way back in the speeder.

Ryder nodded in agreement as they lurched forward. The sun had finally disappeared from view and the two soldiers soon became mere silhouettes against the dimming night sky.

But anyone familiar with Clone Force 37 knew that they were so much more than two small blips on the horizon:

They were brothers.

And Thumbs was positive that nothing in the galaxy could ever change that.

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

@the-lucky-batch @lavenderstaars @lynnpaper @foxlock @maygalodon @mango-peachjuice @radbatch @letsunity @burnthashbrown27 @generaltano @catboy-tech @cosmicghostie @namesmox @monako-jinn-stories @longearedowlfromouterspace @lusiawonder @just-another-dreamerr

#the lucky batch #clone force 37 #fam force 37 #cf37 thumbs #cf37 sparks #cf37 ryder #cf37 ballast #cf37 luna #cf37 foxy #cf37 pepper #cf37 kenhla #cf37 brisk

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imekitty · 3 years

Text

Ghost on the Couch: Danny makes a deal with Maddie to attend eight sessions of therapy.

This is the first (unedited) chapter. Enjoy the preview!

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Danny stared out the passenger side window and crossed his arms.

“You’ll like this therapist, Danny,” said Maddie as she drove through the rush hour traffic. “Dad and I met with him earlier today.”

Danny kept his body turned from her.

“He definitely knows what he’s doing,” continued Maddie. “You can just tell from talking to him. And he’s also got this full head of fluffy blond hair straight out of the eighties.” She sighed dreamily.

“Yes,” said Danny, still looking out the window. “Because good hair is so important in therapy.”

Maddie was quiet for some time. Danny tightened his folded arms against him.

“Danny, I know you’re unsure about this—”

“I’m not unsure. I definitely don’t want to do this.”

“I know. But I really think this could help you.”

Danny glanced at her with just his eyes before turning to face forward. “I just don’t understand,” he said, looking down at his lap. “Do you...think something’s wrong with me?”

“No, of course not, sweetheart.”

“Then why are you making me do this?”

“I just think you’re… You seem to be struggling. You seem stressed, overwhelmed. Especially since starting high school.”

“And is that abnormal to you? I mean, isn’t high school kind of difficult for everyone?”

“No. I mean, no, it’s not abnormal. It is normal. But… You didn’t use to…”

She frowned. Danny fidgeted, waiting for her to elaborate.

“What? I didn’t use to what?” he finally asked.

“All right, well, I guess I’ll just say it.” Maddie tapped her fingers against the steering wheel. “Your grades are terrible. You always look so tired no matter how early you go to bed or how many after-school naps you take. You’re often in your own world, distracted, distant. You go out a lot with your friends, but Dad and I usually don’t know exactly where you are, and you are always cutting curfew so close—”

“But I do make it back before curfew.”

“Not always. You’ve been late many times.”

“Yeah, like a few minutes, maybe.”

“Half an hour or an hour late is a few minutes to you?”

Danny sank back against his seat.

“Curfew is not a negotiable time, Danny,” said Maddie. “It’s a firm cut-off. And the time we expect you to be home each night is very reasonable.”

Danny shrugged.

“And school is definitely not negotiable. I get calls and reports about you being late or even skipping a class altogether. You’re lucky you haven’t been suspended yet.”

“I’ve been working on that.”

“It’s still not good enough.”

Danny scowled. Would anything he did ever be good enough?

“You’re also a lot more jumpy these days,” Maddie went on. “More nervous, more easily startled. And I thought it was Dash. I hoped it was Dash, that maybe that was why you would skip class sometimes. But even after talking to the principal and his parents about it, you’re still...like this.”

She glanced at him. Danny did not move his own gaze.

“And… You just… You don’t smile as often as you used to.” Maddie exhaled. “And I so miss your smile, sweetheart.”

Danny lowered his head and dug his nails into his arms still folded against him.

“Something is going on with you,” said Maddie softly. “I have no idea what, but you’re going through a hard time. Your teachers have noticed it, too. I get emails from them.” She paused. “Are you going to deny that you’re going through a hard time, Danny?”

Haunting memories, agonizing regret, terrifying thoughts, paralyzing fears, dark introspection, lonely isolation, hitting him all at once.

“No,” muttered Danny. “I can’t deny that.” He straightened. “But I can figure it out on my own. I don’t need therapy.”

“I’ve been letting you try to figure it out on your own for a year and a half now. You’ve only gotten worse, not better.” Maddie nodded definitively. “So we’re going to try something else now.”

He knew that tone. He knew that expression. And he knew her accusations were all sound and that he could never adequately argue against them.

“How often do I have to do this?” he asked in defeat.

“Every Monday.”

“Every Monday?”

“Yes.”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t want to do this every Monday!”

“I’m not giving you a choice, Danny.” Maddie pulled into a lot and parked facing a small two-story building. “I almost decided to have you go twice a week, you know.”

“Oh, well, how thoughtful.”

“Hey, watch that tone.” Maddie unbuckled her seatbelt and gave him a disapproving look.

Danny recoiled slightly. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He unbuckled his own belt. “But what makes you think this will even work?”

“I don’t know if it will work, but I think it’s important to try.”

Danny shook his head and moved to open his door but stopped when he noticed his mother was still in the car. He turned to find her staring at him pensively.

“Look.” Maddie sighed and held up her hands. “How about we just try this until school’s out for the summer? That would be a fair trial.”

“School won’t be out for like two months!”

“Danny, I’m offering you a deal here, okay? Can you just work with me, please?”

Danny thinned his lips and waited for her to continue.

“If by the time school is out you think therapy is not helpful and you really don’t want to continue, then I won’t make you go anymore.”

Danny considered this offer. With an ending in sight, maybe he could do this, especially if it would make her even just a little less disappointed with him.

“Okay,” he said simply. He pulled out his phone and began scrolling through his calendar.

Maddie brightened, then turned serious again. “But you have to give this a fair try. You have to be respectful and cooperate with the therapist. Otherwise the deal is off, and I’ll make you continue.”

“Fine, fine,” muttered Danny, still looking at his phone calendar. “But how about until the week before school ends? I mean, the last week is finals week. I need to study. I don’t want to be overwhelmed that week.”

Maddie narrowed her eyes and scrunched her mouth. “Right. You’re going to study,” she said with a sarcastic edge.

Danny gave her a sheepish look. “Well, I mean… That would make it an even eight sessions.”

Maddie exhaled loudly and opened her door. “Fine, okay. The week before school gets out.” She met Danny outside by the hood of her car. “But then you absolutely have to study that Monday finals week.”

“Sure thing.” Danny placed his phone in his pocket.

“Actually, let me have your phone.” Maddie held out a hand to him.

“What? Why?”

“You won’t be needing it for the next hour. I don’t want you to have any distractions.”

“Oh, come on. I promise I won’t use it.”

“Danny.” Stern. Her hand didn’t waver.

With a loud and irritated sigh, Danny pushed his phone into her hand. She put it in her purse and placed a hand on his back to lead him toward the building.

Danny cocked his head as he read the name above the door. “Wait, is this a pizza restaurant?”

Maddie chortled and gestured to a set of stairs nearby. “The therapy offices are on the second floor.”

Danny stared at the metal steps. Maddie prodded him forward and up. He gave in and allowed her to guide him.

Eight weeks. Eight sessions. Eight hours. He only had to do this eight times.

Manageable.

-------------

If you want to read more, let me know!

#danny phantom #danny fenton #maddie fenton #imekitty writes #ghost on the couch #fanfiction

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itmighthavebeenintentional · 3 years

Text

Shadows And Pills - 1

Summary: Some people come away from the Battle of New York with scars and broken bones. Some come away with nightmares and years of therapy ahead of them. Some don’t come away at all. Alexa comes away with a shadow.

18+ ONLY, MINORS DO NOT PROCEED

Warnings: RAPE, Torture, Abuse, Self Harm, Negative Images of Psychological Services/Mental Health Professionals, Hallucinations, Stalking, Supernatural Horror, Prescription Drug Use and Eventual Abuse, Mental Illness, PTSD, Flashbacks of Violence, Flashbacks of Tragedy, Starving Oneself, Isolation, Physical and Mental Exhaustion, Denial, Self Neglect, Gaslighting, Mental Spiraling, Mental and Emotional Abuse

18+ ONLY, MINORS DO NOT PROCEED

Author’s Note: This is not a happy story in any sense, at any point. I could only write this at my lowest places, emotionally and mentally speaking, and I had a hard time coming back from it. This is dark, and it does not at any point get lighter. I relied heavily on my own experiences with mental struggles and took a few pieces here and there from my own experiences with mental health professionals. MY EXPERIENCES ARE MY OWN AND ARE NOT TYPICAL, NOT EVEN FOR ME. If you need mental help of any kind, please DO NOT HESITATE TO REACH OUT TO GET IT. This story was an exercise in mental exorcism, in a sense.

For all the Loki lovers out there, I do not shine him anything like a good or redeeming light here. He is evil incarnate, more or less. I love Loki, I love good Loki and redeemed Loki and misunderstood Loki and just about every incarnation thereof. I needed a villain, and he fit the story.

Above all, please be kind. This was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written, and it took me years to work up the courage to post it. If you have any questions, please feel free to message me or send me an ask.

Thank you to @thoughtslikeaminefield and @glassjacket . I would not have made it through this story and would honestly not be here today with the two of you. I will never be able to tell you how much you mean to me.

18+ ONLY, MINORS DO NOT PROCEED

Word Count: 1 - 3785; 2 - 3513; 3 - 1068

In Case You Missed It: ItMightHaveBeenIntentional’s Masterlist

...

Shadows and Pills

Some people come away from the Battle of New York with scars and broken bones. Some come away with nightmares and years of therapy ahead of them. Some don’t come away at all.

Alexa comes away with a shadow.

In the weeks following the disaster, the public equally lauds and decries the Avengers, but while their opinions are divided over the heroes, the villain is universally denounced as nothing short of Satan himself, and the city throws an actual celebration the day Thor takes Loki back to Asgard to face the justice of their people.

Alexa, having not turned on her television since the day she got home from the hospital, ignores the boisterous celebrants and goes about her shopping, earbuds firmly in place, frown lines now permanently etched between her eyes and around her pinched lips.

“Routine will help you through some of the worst days,” her therapist tells her during one session. “Something familiar and safe to retreat to when the flashbacks are the worst. Just give it a try,” he adds at her disbelieving grimace.

And so she sets a routine.

Morning Routine: wake up. Ignore alarm, lie in bed an extra thirty minutes or so. Shower. Pretend to eat breakfast. Take meds (this one she never skips or shirks). Find something to wear. Stare at it for another ten minutes. Eventually get dressed. Contemplate keys for another fifteen minutes. Leave the goddamned apartment already.

Her routine has varying results, although she does admit to her therapist that life is marginally more bearable with the routine than without.

“It’s nice to have something to look forward to for the next day.”

Her therapist can’t quite hide his grimace at her flat, deadened tone, but she’s not being sarcastic or rude. She finds that going to bed at night is a trifle easier when she knows what’s going to happen the next day.

“So, who are we up to today?” the doctor asks, switching the subject with awkward abruptness. It’s been six weeks since Hell came to New York, and during their twice-weekly meetings, her therapist suggests going through each of the people she saw die in front of her that day, to get closure...or say goodbye...or something.

Sometimes Alexa wonders whether he just wants to hear the details for his own perverse pleasure.

“Brenda.”

Alexa robotically begins to list the personal details she knows...knew...about her floor manager. Unlike the mail room intern she discussed at their last meeting, the list for Brenda goes on for a while. She’s worked with Brenda since she started at the company, learning most of what she knows about her current job from the woman.

Brenda was kind, sharply intelligent, and mothering to everyone under her supervision, and yet she did it in a way that didn’t make anyone uncomfortable. She balanced work and a family long and well enough to both receive regular promotions within the company and also, very recently, become a new grandmother.

The backs of Alexa’s eyes sting as she remembers the photo Brenda showed her not twenty minutes before part of the building collapsed on top of half the department. Her jaw locks as the scene plays before her eyes again, the explosions and shrieks of metal drowning out the shrieks of the people only five feet away.

She closes her eyes, but there’s no pause button to freeze the scene, no power button to shut the images off as she turns in her memory and runs, making it to the stairwell and slamming the door open, turning back and screaming for Brenda, straining her eyes through the smoke and dust and mountains of falling debris. Brenda is running, reaching for Alexa even though she seems miles away, and then one of the file cabinets is thrown over, propelled faster and harder than should be possible, and...and…

And then Brenda isn’t running anymore. Her outstretched hand, the only part of her that wasn't crushed by office furniture, spasms against the ruined carpet, as if it thinks it’s reached its destination and is grasping at its savior.

Alexa’s hand tingles, and her fingers lock into her palm, nails fitting easily into the little grooves she dug there weeks ago. No blood, she only dug that deep once, but the furrows remain as permanently etched there as the frown lines on her face.

Alexa struggles to take in a labored breath as her therapist watches her with the appropriate amount of professional, clinical sympathy and detachment.

“Do your counting,” he reminds her.

How could she forget? She counts to three once, letting a breath out at the end. She repeats the process twice more, ignoring her therapist’s brief flash of annoyance at her departure from his “system.” But, for once, he doesn’t ask her why she has to deviate from the standard one-to-ten method and just lets her do the goddamned counting in peace.

Small blessings.

“Have you had any flashbacks since our last session?”

She stares at him, letting her gaze rest heavy and disbelieving as she turns his question over. She’s been averaging about five flashbacks a day, triggered by everything from accidentally brushing a stranger on the sidewalk (Jim knocking past her to get down the stairs just as the door on the stairwell behind her explodes inward; more shrieking, then falling, then dark) to lifting a carton of cold milk from the shelf at the grocery (that impossibly cold hand grasping hers, pulling her up from the rubble, bringing her face to face with...something...something in the...shadows, it was so dark there, and…).

“Yeah. I’ve had some flashbacks since our last session.”

“What sort of coping strategies did you use?”

He’s not even meeting her eyes now, just getting notes down on that damned pad. The scratching of his pen grates into her bones, and Alexa grits her teeth as she glares.

One, two, three.

Breathe.

One, two, three.

Breathe.

One, two, three.

Breathe.

She slowly recites the list of strategies he suggested during a previous session, none of which have proven particularly effective at lessening the frequency of the episodes, but most of which she grudgingly admits provide some slight relief afterwards and allow her to refocus her mind on the present rather than dwelling in the memory.

“And the shadows?”

How can he get this wrong every time when he’s taking all those fucking notes?

“Still just the one.”

“Has it manifested in any other way? Asked you to do anything? Do you feel different in any way when you notice it?”

There’s a distasteful eagerness to his words that always turns Alexa’s stomach, and she has to physically bite into her tongue to keep from asking what kind of bonus he gets for each symptom she shows of different mental illnesses.

“It’s just there sometimes. I..” She hesitates, feeling vaguely nauseated from his questions, but she has to be honest, right? Because, ultimately, it’s his job to help her, and she’s never going to get through this by hiding symptoms. He can’t help fix her if he doesn’t know what’s broken, and he did suggest the routine, so, okay, he gets a pass for this one.

“I still mostly only see it before I’m falling asleep. I’ve started seeing it in the late afternoon, as well, not often, but sometimes. Always in shadows that are already there. It doesn’t talk or anything, doesn’t really have any face or form except for vaguely person-shaped, but it...it watches me. And it’s...denser than it was last week. More...it’s thicker than it was, like when you see wispy clouds kind of...gather and turn into storm clouds?”

He nods, his pen whizzing over the legal pad he records their session notes on. “So, you feel threatened by the shadow? Like it’s storm clouds gathering to...what? It feels menacing?”

But, like most of the questions Alexa fences in this office, this one isn’t easily answered.

“It feels like it’s watching me, waiting for something. I don’t know what. I don’t...I don’t know if it’s menacing, exactly. Like, it feels potentially dangerous, but I can’t tell if it’s for me. I don’t know. It’s just...darker and more there this week, but it doesn’t do anything, and I don’t feel different, and it doesn’t speak to me. I. Don’t. Hear. Voices.”

She clips off each word at the end of her rant separately and precisely, repeating her counting in her head, and she forces her breathing to even out. The doctor is just doing his job, he’s just trying to help, he’s supposed to ask these questions, it’s how he helps-

“Hmm. I’ll have to consider that between now and our next meeting. In the meantime, go ahead and move up to the next dosage step with your meds, keep it on the escalating schedule we set.”

You set, she thinks mutinously for a moment before internally shaking her head. She nods, biting her tongue once more. She’s going to have a permanent indentation there as well, at this rate.

“Any side effects? Itching, swelling, difficulty breathing? Any unreasonable lethargy or detachment?”

“I mean...I don’t really have anything to attach to at this point, so…”

He frowns at her again, and she wonders if he’s going to crank up her dosage two notches instead of one.

“Are you having what you feel are typical emotional responses to everyday stimuli? Have you laughed or smiled at anything yet? How long has it been since you emotionally felt anything besides the frustration and panic?”

And, somehow, this question is difficult, too. She struggles through, trying to find a balance between honesty and not making herself look like a complete failure who can't function in life. She doesn’t help her case when she admits she hasn’t followed many of his suggestions beyond establishing a routine.

“Not even exercising?” he asks, his disappointment palpable.

When she silently shakes her head, her lips pinched tight against his disapproval, he shakes his head with a sigh that sings of ultimate betrayal. Instead of berating her as usual, the doctor frowns and looks down at his notes, considering them silently. He clicks his tongue against his teeth for a moment before switching over to end-session mode, robotically delivering his closing remarks, his typical reminders to keep her meds on a strict schedule at the exact time every day, to avoid all alcohol and unprescribed drugs, to keep her diet as clean and unprocessed as possible, and to get plenty of exercise. Even this last bit is delivered with a sharply clinical detachment, as if she has driven him to the brink of her own psychoses by stubbornly refusing to accept his help.

There is a short, silent moment between them where they refuse to look at each other, the doctor perusing his notes once more while Alexa examines the wrinkles creased into her jeans from lack of folding. The doctor flips pages over in his legal pad and slaps the cover shut sharply, breaking the standoff with one last, dismissive comment.

“Routine, Alexa. Stick to the routine. If it’s what brings you comfort, if that's the one thing you’re taking away from these sessions that actually helps, then stick with it. I’ll see you Thursday afternoon.”

….

Her afternoons vary, according to her therapy schedule. Her sessions take roughly an hour and a half, so that’s one block of time she doesn’t have to try and fill. On the days she isn’t having her skull cracked open, she can sometimes force herself to work on the files her company sends her way. Grunt work, brainless stuff that any first-year intern could do, but it keeps her on the payroll and covered by health insurance until the doctor clears her to return to the office.

Not that there’s an office to return to yet.

Grocery shopping for food she’ll pretend to eat later, making excuses to stay out of the apartment a little longer each day, watching the shadows of the buildings grow darker and longer until the sunlight disappears from the streets.

And the other shadow, the darkest of all, thick and solid against the brick and stone, pacing her, keeping track as she wanders through the broken city blocks. Sometimes she walks a little faster, pretends to not notice the black spot. Sometimes she pretends it’s keeping her company. With the most conversation she’s had in weeks taking place in her therapy sessions, she occasionally finds the imaginary company of her shadow stalker to be more pleasant than menacing.

Occasionally.

Eventually, though, she and her chimerical companion head back to the silent, encroaching walls of her apartment to begin the night routine.

…

Night Routine: laundry. Pretend to eat dinner. Shower. Finish laundry. Clean already clean kitchen. Another shower (on the bad days, the ash and debris won’t wash off). Rearrange already arranged closet. Braid hair. Take meds, do not skip, no matter how much they screw up her sleep, because they help. They do. Settle into bed. Stare at the wall. Adjust pillows. Re-settle. Stare at the shadow. Start to drift off, slide into a flashback, scream back to full consciousness. Watch the shadow. Doze. Awaken from a fucked up nightmare she can only partially remember. Repeat ad nauseum.

Really, if Alexa could just skip the nights and go straight into morning, that’d be great. Mornings are tedious but tolerable. Afternoons are blurry and tense, especially therapy days, but nights…

Nights just won't shut down.

The drugs are partially responsible, the doctor has told her multiple times. The medicine can either make sleeping more difficult, or it can act like a sedative, dragging and holding her down. Honestly, she’s getting kind of mixed results. It’s difficult to stay awake, easy to slip under, but then she can’t stay asleep for very long, jerking back to consciousness in something close to full panic, unable to figure out if it’s the drugs or the dreams that’s pushing her to the edge.

Because the fucked up dreams...well, that’s all on her and her broken brain. She stopped bringing up the dreams in therapy after the first couple of weeks of sessions. The doctor seemed hell bent on steering Alexa towards the possibility that she was experiencing waking hallucinations, but there’s no way she could possibly be awake for all this shit. Maybe some of the flashbacks, but not…

Not…

Her brain isn’t that broken.

No. No, she can tell from the way she jerks to consciousness afterwards, she knows she’s asleep. Yeah, she’s unstable and has flashbacks, but she’s not delusional. They’re dreams.

Every night.

About…

Something.

Okay, sometimes she can remember. Sometimes the meds dull her down so much she forgets what day it is, but sometimes she can hold on to a detail or two. Cold, slender fingers, impossibly strong. A flash of bright blue that sends nausea racing through her entire body (who knew your toes could feel nauseated?) or a glimpse of bottle green that, conversely, thrills her to her soul. A smooth, velvet voice that penetrates every layer of her being, down to the deepest recesses. Darkness descending...a sense of dreadful awe…

And sometimes she can remember every unhinged detail with a terrifying clarity that she will never even consider mentioning to the therapist. Not if she likes her jacket sleeves to fit properly.

There’s honesty, and then there’s idiocy.

The shadow is larger tonight. Taller, a little broader, definitely denser. She would say looming, even, but it’s not quite that large.

Not quite.

She stares at it openly, no longer trying to avoid acknowledging its presence. What's the point? The doctor knows about it, and it’s not like she’s talking to it. She’s not that far gone yet. And she hasn't lied to the doctor, either. The shadow does watch her, like it’s waiting, gathering. Convalescing. But it hasn't ever talked to her.

She does not hear voices.

She yawns and rolls her shoulders, left then right, sliding a little lower in bed, searching for a cooler place between the sheets. Movement catches her eye, and she looks up as the shadow shifts, leaning left then right, and seems to…

Grow?

No, it’s never moved before. She’s pretty sure she’s never seen it move, but now it pulses and raises up, stretching-

No. No. Sourceless shadows don’t move. They don’t grow, they don’t shift, they don’t-

The shadow stretches upwards abruptly, definitely looming now, and Alexa hits the wall behind the bed, scrambling backwards in a blind panic as she realizes the shadow isn’t growing.

It’s coming closer.

Her breathing speeds up, but her limbs are heavy and dull with narcotic stupor. The foot of her bed darkens as the shadow creeps even closer, and she opens her mouth to protest, to scream, to say something, but her tongue is numb and stupid with the acrid, coppery tang of fear and pharmaceuticals, and she hates, hates this kind of dream where she can’t speak, can't move and she can barely breathe, and...and…

The shadow reaches out, stretches over her foot and slides up her calf in a clammy, viscous caress that tightens on her knee and pulls her several inches down the bed as her throat closes.

Do not shrink from Me. It is not your fear I crave, but your adoration. Come to Me, allow yourself to move past the fear and embrace what I wish to grant you.

Horror, deep and instinctual, floods her veins. Alexa feels the voice more than hears it, and it awakens an ancient fear that finally, though futilely, awakens her drugged limbs. She claws at her sheets uselessly as the shadow moves over her, a freezing oil slick that oozes against her skin as if her blankets and clothes weren’t even there, sending shivers to the very marrow of her bones as her gorge rises, and she chokes on the bile that singes the back of her throat. She can’t fight, can’t move against this intangible force, but neither will her terror let her sink past the fear to blissful unawareness.

Give over. Let go of your stubborn fear that tethers you to this useless reality. Allow Me entrance, and I will grant you the relief you seek. Release your grip on the world that cares nothing for you, and I shall bestow upon you the peace you so desperately crave.

Her skin raises in gooseflesh everywhere the shadow crosses, and her stomach turns as it squeezes its way up her torso, her chest, her throat, slipping over her lips in a sick parody of a lover’s caress. She opens her mouth - to scream, to breathe, to do something - and the shadow plunges inwards, invading her mouth, her throat, coating her inside and out with a thick, glutinous sensation that leaves her mouth hanging obscenely open, tongue thrashing, while her mind screams useless denials.

Submit to Me what you see I can easily take, give Me My due. Give over, drown in Me, and I will save you from this miserable existence.

And she is drowning, the air pressed from her lungs as a dark heaviness settles solidly over her. Her arms are forced over her head, and she is strung out on her twisted sheets, writhing under the weight of the shadow as it presses over every surface, against every entrance. No matter how she strains, her legs are gradually forced apart. The darkness’s lack of speed is affected, some barely functioning bit of her brain whispers to her; it could take her as swiftly as it cares to and is only moving slowly because it wants her to suffer, wants to taste her anguish. She has no chance against the shadow, she can’t even touch it, really she could just save herself the anxiety and fear and just-

NO.

She twists as hard as she can, but the shadow simply moves with her, flows over her, waits until she takes another breath, and then surges between her thighs, driving her torso off the bed with the force of its thrust. Every cell in her body locks, not in pain, but in complete revulsion. And then again, and again, cruel in the thoroughness of its violation, covering and saturating every crevice of her being, coating and tainting everything it touches.

Wrong, can't...stop, stop, stop, wrong, can’t...God, please…

You cannot rely on yourself, on your own mind for proper guidance. Let Me protect you. Let Me save you from yourself.

How long...minutes...hours...years...just stop, please…please-

The alarm clock shrieks right in her goddamned ear, and she can breathe and move and scream and goddammit, she fucking hates those dreams that send her careening onto the floor, scrambling for cover when she can’t even remember what she's running from.

Her morning routine is already in shambles. There’s no ignoring the alarm clock today. A morning shower maybe, to wash off the sticky aftermath of night sweats, definitely, but no lying about, staring at the walls in a sleep-daze. Definitely washing the sheets tonight, too.

She surveys what she can see of her bed from her crumpled position on the floor in front of the closet and sighs. Must’ve been a hell of a nightmare to tear up the covers that badly. She thinks for a moment of trying a little harder to remember, to recall some piece of the dream, but then her stomach flips over, and she summarily rejects that idea in favor of caffeination and medication.

She allows herself another few minutes on the floor, waiting until her respiratory and heart rates return to a less alarming pace before climbing to her quivering knees. The shadow darkens the far corner of the room, as innocuous as always. Though she doesn’t know why, she can’t help an involuntary flinch when she first sees it. It’s not normally present in the morning, at least, she doesn’t think so...well, she can't remember the shadow being so dark in the mornings, at least. But...

She clears her throat against the thickness that seems to coat it suddenly, and readjusts her plan to include a glass of water before she starts in on the coffee. She realizes after another long moment of staring that her hands are trembling along with her legs. Her jaw clenches, and she knows she’s being ridiculous. It’s a damned shadow. It just sits there. It’s a minor manifestation of a mild psychosis secondary to major psychological trauma. It’s just a damned dark spot; it doesn’t change, doesn't want her to do anything, and it definitely doesn’t fucking talk to her.

She. Does. Not. Hear. Voices.

…

Up Now: 2

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anti-porn-unicorn · 3 years

Text

I’m a girl (18 now) who got exposed/addicted to pornography at a really young age, and I wanted to share my specific story on this blog so that the platform can get it out there.

Under the cut is my full story, and it’s a little long winded, so if you don’t want to read the whole thing, I bolded in purple the general topic/idea of that section. Just look for whichever of those interests you and the section will be about that. The first and last paragraph are good for context and end goal, though.

Thank you.

I don't fully remember my first exposure to porn. I know I was in third grade (6-7 yrs old, I had skipped a grade). The reason I had wanted to share my story, in fact, is because I don't see many stories with circumstances similar to mine. Most I see have at least one of the following 'modifiers', for want of a better word. Most I see have at least one of the following 'modifiers', for want of a better word. Most I see have at least one of the following 'modifiers', for want of a better word. 1. The person is a victim of CSA/grooming. 2. The person was at a generally pubescent age (~11-14). And/or 3. The person experienced porn as a quick disturbance. To be clear, these stories are as valid and important as mine, and I simply think more perspectives make evidence of the effects of porn more airtight. I've never been the victim of SA, harassment, or grooming, ever in my life. My story shows the effects of exclusively porn.

The first memory I can recall about this was actually the first time I got caught. I was 6 yrs old, and very into video games,so on this day, I was playing a 3D porn game on my crappy hand-me-down laptop. I kind of knew that what I was doing wasn't acceptable, so I was sitting in my room in the corner as far from my door as possible. My mom walked in so I just slammed the laptop shut because I wasn't that good at hiding things. My mom obviously asked what I was doing, and I tried to keep her from looking, but it was right there when she reopened it. This is where the battle of it begins.

From ages 6-14 I don't have a good timeline of events but a few pop out that exemplify the severity of the issue. These are very probably out of order.

I got an iPod Touch for Christmas (~6-7), and every night I would watch porn on it until they caught on. I literally still remember some names of the sites, most that don't even exist anymore. My parents have always been amazingly caring. I couldn't ask for more. During the earlier ages (~6-8) I was put with a child therapist for fear of a deeper issue. My parents started either taking technology away in the night and/or setting restrictions on the internet. Unfortunately, between my slight tech-savvy, and my crazed addiction at this point, this wasn't a solution.

The addiction got DEEP. It warped my brain. When I had no technology, I used everything I could find.

Whenever I had access to less restricted internet, I used it. Once I asked my older cousin to use her iPod and watched it on there.(she noticed and told my mom. I remember my mom had asked me "Is there anything you need to tell me?", and I knew what she meant, but I just said "nope!" and walked away. At one point my dad's work provided him with a Blackberry, and I asked him could I play one of the built in little games. Once I had it, I watched porn. (when I gave it back to him he pressed the "back" button, and I was caught.)

I used Youtube. This was when YouTube was way less moderated (back when the app was a little old timey TV). I learned I could look up "striptease" and "nip-slip" and other stuff like that, finding more soft-core videos that could suffice when the internet in general was locked down.

I straight-up found out ways to disable the restrictions. Once I found out my mom's PIN for the controls, I went and disabled them, but changed the PIN so it would look like they were still on, and so that she couldn’t access and re-enable them. (I made it 7399. Spells "sexy". My mind was a mess.)

My parents bought a book called "The Classical Tradition". I'm just learning now as I'm looking it up that it was a Harvard Reference Library book (probably why it was so damn thick) about ancient Greek and Roman culture. I didn't know that. I had realized that sprinkled throughout the book there were pages that were more glossy than the rest, which you could see from the sides of the pages (the book was HUGE). These were the photo paper, which had the classical paintings and sculptures. And because these had nudity (Think "The Birth of Venus" type) I would regularly flip through this book when I needed a "fix". Absurd.

My parents got me an American Girl book that was made to ease worries about the developmental years. The pages on breast development / the anatomy of the vagina were what I looked at the most. When my parents had gotten me the child therapist, there was the logical fear that I might have been molested. The therapist gave me a book where there was a page with two cartoon mice, a boy and a girl. They were wearing swimwear/underwear and the point of that was "anywhere the clothing is covering is somewhere that adults can't touch you without telling.” They might as well have been stick figures, there was NO detail. But since they were in ‘underwear’ I'd always look at that page a lot. Anything barely vaguely sexual.

During this part of my life, I got no real pleasure out of this, I was just obsessed. For the first year I even watched it on mute out of fear of being caught. The lowest point during this period was when I very unfortunately filmed a video of me touching myself. I got nothing out of it and had no intent on ever sending or posting it. I was just emulating what I had been seeing. I deleted it the next day. I was 9 then.

From puberty until now (11-18) is when my sexuality was shaped by it. The addiction was far more controllable, I could spend a couple weeks to a couple months without it, but I'd always come back. Because it was now tied to my body. And while my need for it to be constant was gone, now I had to deal with the tolerance issue.

Over time what I watched became more and more depraved. I had the personal preference of hating anything amateur, because of the low quality, so I managed to avoid anything obviously non-consensual or involving visibly underaged girls, but that doesn't really mean much with the stuff the studios were putting out. During the middle points it got REALLY violent and disturbing. Bordering on torture (extreme kink) and even bodily deformation. As a young woman, I couldn't really tolerate any of the role based Kinks (father-daughter, babysitter, schoolgirl), so more extreme for me meant more extreme acts. Just absolute destruction of women's bodies for the purposes of sex. I moved away from that when tumblr banned porn and I started using reddit for it, and also during that time I was realizing how fucked up of an addiction that this was, even before I found feminism/anti-porn. I actively started trying to quit it, for good. But I always went back.

One big effect is heavy confusion with my sexual orientation. A lot of people face this, but the addition of porn for me really throws things off. Like: Am I bi, and a form of comphet/denial/inexperience keeps me from seeing women in a romantic way? Is it a mix of that and porn? (relatively likely) Or am I just straight, and the porn has completley shaped my mind (likely). 90% of the time I watched solo female content or lesbian content, and could only stand to watch certain specific forms if it included men at all. In real life I find a fair amount of men attractive but their bodies in a sexual sense are tolerable at best, but usually cringe inducing. l've never been attracted to a woman romantically, but exclusively women's bodies are sexual to me. It feels like everything in my brain that I would have been able to use in order to figure myself out has been permanently overwritten with incorrect information. Because of porn.

I've still got it bad. Every once in a while, I’ll read something vaguely sexual, or see a woman in a risque photo, and then the seed is planted. I'll always say "I'm not going to do it, I always feel disgusting after, it’s not even really enjoyable at this point, I can do better than this”. I always give in the end of the night. I'm 7 days off of it. I've been on this earth for 18 years. 12 of those years I've been cripplingly addicted to pornography. Two thirds of my life, and for as long as I can remember. I can never undo it. Just like an alcoholic will always be an alcoholic, only able to achieve remission, I will always be a porn addict. I have to be careful. But I have to hope for the future. And with finding the community that is speaking the truth about this, I'm heartened to do better. To no longer be held down by an addiction to consuming my own oppression.

#thank you for sharing #you’re not alone in this #I’m glad you escaped the addiction!#submission

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boltwrites · 4 years

Text

Warm Hands, Warm Heart

Fandom: The Legend of Korra Pairing: Bolin / Reader (feminine firebender) Rating: T Tags: Massage, Pre-relationship

fakelavish requested: first of all, i speak for all of the Bolin Lovers when i say we ✨live✨ for your account and writing, our mans deserves sm, THANK YOU! 🥺 i have a request for when you have the time for our 1# Himbo, something maybe borderline nwsf but really tender for a female reader who’s a firebender and gives really nice massages? 👉👈 like, heated hands w/ massage oils? anyways, our King needs to relax, he’s carrying the whole ass show on his shoulders 😌 just have fun with it, can’t wait for more content!

A/N: this was very fun to write! I decided to make Bolin a pro-bending personal trainer and reader a masseur that works at the arena sometimes! I hope you enjoy!

A/N 2: I saw this post get removed from the tag with my own eyes, so I’m posting again :/ tumblr! why!!!

You stretched, taking a deep breath as you loosened the muscles in your shoulders.

As a massage therapist, you traveled all across the city for different clients. However, your rotations at the pro bending arena were always eventful. Usually you were tasked with relieving factory workers of their pain – Future Industries treated their workers well, enlisting your services to assist with their work. But you also saw your fair share of rich families and hard working professionals, all whom carried stress in different ways.

But the arena was a different beast entirely. The patients you saw there were always stressed, and more than that, sometimes they needed serious physical therapy and extensive healing that their hectic schedule didn’t allow for. Your coworkers at the arena in particular all had their own horror stories – Raye, specifically. She was a water healer you coordinated with often, and whenever you saw her, she looked exhausted.

However, not all your coworkers at the arena were such downers. There was a specific personal trainer who always had a smile on his face, even when he referred patients to you. He would guide them into your workspace with a hand on their shoulder, giving them a hearty pat before telling them how you were the best that Republic City had to offer, and that you’d get them fixed up in no time.

You shook your head, trying not to blush as you thought of Bolin. You knew that catching feelings for a coworker wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, but he was just so charming. Whenever he passed by your small massage room and you weren’t with a client he would poke his head in and ask if you needed anything, sometimes bringing you an extra cup of tea from the concessions stand that he “ordered on accident” for you. He always greeted you with a beaming smile, and you had to admit, his work certainly kept him in shape.

You slapped both of your cheeks, shaking your head. You were here to work! You didn’t have time to be worrying about-

“Hey, Y/n!”

You jumped at the sudden introduction, clutching at your heart as you turned, only to be faced with the object of your desires. Your cheeks flushed, but luckily, you could explain it away through shock.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you,” Bolin apologized, shuffling his feet as he stood in the doorway. He held a small bag in his hands, still in the loose clothing he wore to train his clients.

“It’s alright, I just wasn’t expecting you,” you assured him, crossing your arms and holding them close to your chest. Bolin only smiled, a small, gentle smile that made your heart skip. You wondered if he knew how handsome he was, especially when he directed all of his attention at one person in particular. He made you feel like the center of the world when he smiled at you like that.

“I just wanted to stop by and give you this,” Bolin placed the bag on the high table near the door, and you picked it up, peeking inside. “Haru – you know, from the concession stand – said he made extra, and I didn’t think I saw you get dinner tonight…”

The bag was filled with at least four dumplings, and you knew they weren’t the cheapest thing at the concessions stand, especially tonight, when there had been a double-header match. It was why you hadn’t gotten dinner – you didn’t feel comfortable spending that much money on yourself. But Bolin had gone out of his way to get you something nice.

You blushed, closing the bag and shaking your head at him in wonder.

“Oh – is that OK? Are you allergic? Aw, I should have known-“

You giggled, and Bolin’s eyes widened at the noise.

“I’m not allergic,” you laughed, covering your mouth with your hand, “I just feel like such a burden – you bring me tea, and dumplings, and water, and I haven’t done anything for you.”

Bolin waved his hands back and forth, denying your insinuation. “Oh, don’t worry about it! I just get worried about you all the way over here, since you’re so far away from all the other stuff. You don’t have to do anything for me, I swear.”

“I know I don’t have to,” you replied, tucking a stand of your hair behind your ear. Your cheeks reddened and you looked downwards. “I want to. What about this – I’ll take your dumplings, which I know weren’t just extra, by the way, if you’ll let me give you a massage.”

When you looked at him again, Bolin was as red as a beet, shaking his head as he wrung his hands.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t – “

“You spend all day training others, lifting weights, and trying to coach pro benders, and you’ve never once asked for my services,” you continued, frowning at him. “You’re probably just as tense as any patient you’ve referred to me – if not more. You need to take care of yourself!”

“I do take care of myself! I floss every day!” Bolin countered, and you had to stifle a laugh. What a dork.

“I’m sure you try your best, Bolin, but we all need some help every now and then. Let me help you,” you offered, gesturing to the massage table.

Bolin swallowed, tugging at the neck of his undershirt, unsure of the whole situation. You wondered if the reason why he had never asked for a massage was because of this – because he was so embarrassed at the thought of you touching him. The concept warmed you as you unpacked a few of the oils you thought he would benefit from, laying a blanket across your table. Bolin still stood in the doorway, pressing the tips of his fingers together.

“Uh, do I have to do that thing where I take all my clothes off and you put a towel over my butt? Because I don’t know if I’m comfortable with butt towel stuff-”

You snorted, shaking your head at him.

“No, don’t worry. I usually don’t ask patients to undress fully unless they need specific work – like a pulled muscle in the thigh,” you explained, rolling your sleeves up. You lit a stick of incense with the tips of your fingers, because the routine of it helped calm you as you worked, even as the thought of touching Bolin sent shivers through you.

“You’ll only need to remove your shirt. Please,” you gestured to the table again, and this time Bolin took a step forwards, undoing the clasps of his outer tunic.

“Once you’re ready, please lay face down on the table,” you instructed, as you turned back to your oils. It was typical procedure for you not to watch your patients as they undressed for you, but you made a conscious effort not to look as Bolin shed his tunic and undershirt. You needed to at least remain professional until he was on the table, then he wouldn’t be able to see your blush as you worked over his body.

You truly did just want him to take some time to unwind for himself. He was always so concerned about the young men and women he trained, so kind to you and the rest of the staff he worked with. He spent so much time thinking of others that you knew he didn’t take care of himself. The other trainers had stopped by your room before, had taken advantage of your service, even if they didn’t refer as many of their trainees to you. But Bolin had never graced your door except to give you food or drink, or refer a patient to you. It was actually a bit concerning, considering the amount of work he did. He was always in the arena, always helping someone, or training – he needed to take a moment to relax. And if you could get your hands on his broad shoulders while you helped him with that, well, that was just a nice bonus for you.

You rifled through your collection of oils before you found one that you thought would be soothing, and picked up the bottle, turning to the table. You took a deep breath before you finally looked up.

Bolin was laying face down on the table, his head snug in the headrest. You had to bite your lip when your eyes grazed over his shoulders and back – you knew he had to be muscular, what with his job, but you had never seen the source of his strength up close.

“Have you ever seen a firebending masseur before?” you asked, trying to start a pleasant conversation. Hopefully it would help Bolin calm down if he realized this was normal, for people to get massages.

“No, I’ve never had any kind of massage before,” he admitted, his voice a little muffled by the headrest. You smiled at that. Then he was in for a treat.

“The benefit of a firebending masseur, is that we can heat our hands,” you continued, rubbing the oil between your palms. “A trained firebender can regulate their own body heat, and that adds an extra layer of healing to our treatments. So, don’t be shocked.”

You took a breath, and placed your hands on Bolin’s shoulders, near his neck. You knew this was where a lot of men carried stress, especially those that did a lot of weight lifting. As you pressed your hands into the muscle there, Bolin gasped at your touch, tensing for a split second before you saw all the nerves seep out of his frame.

“Oh, that’s – that is nice,” he hummed. You grinned at him, working your fingers slow and gentle to loosen the tense muscle there. You were right – he was very tight here, and you would need to spend some time there to help him relax.

“Feels even better than water healing,” Bolin mumbled, wiggling a little as he relaxed into the table. You quirked a brow at him.

“Oh, you’ve been healed before?”

“Yeah,” Bolin groaned as you pressed your thumb into a particularly sensitive area, but continued, his voice only shaking a little bit. “I messed up my shoulder pretty bad in a match once.”

“It’s a completely difference experience when you’re not injured,” you agreed with him, taking a detour to work at his shoulder muscles, digging your fingers into the thick muscle there. He was built like a tank, but when you pressed into the muscle, he purred like a kitten, the tension leaving him in waves.

“Maybe you’re just good with your hands,” Bolin offered in rebuttal, and you were very, very happy that he couldn’t see your face as you pressed your fingers into his back. It was also a good thing that you could regulate your temperature under pressure, or else you were sure you would have burned him on accident.

“That’s very sweet,” you replied instead, your voice soft. He was very sweet, in general. But, at your words, he tensed again, his shoulder blades stiff and pressed closer together.

“I- unless that’s a rude thing to say!” You giggled at him, pinching at the back of his neck in jest. He was such a sweetheart.

“No, it really is sweet,” you assured him. “You’re too nice, Bolin, you know that?”

His skin felt hotter under your fingers as you worked down his back, over his ribs and to his waist. He was so strong – his muscles were firm under your hands, his chest broad and solid. His breath hitched in a few places where he was tense and sore, but other than that, you two settled into a comfortable silence.

It was awkward, in a way, because now you were alone with your thoughts. The only thing within your field of vision was an expanse of smooth skin, and you wondered what you would be able to do if you and Bolin were dating and you were to give him a massage. Would he let you press kisses between his shoulder blades, would he let your hands dip below his waistband?

Your cheeks flushed as your massage reached said waistband, fingers digging in above his hips.

Bolin moaned, his hips twitching at the attention, and you gasped, stilling. You both froze, before Bolin spoke up, trying to explain himself.

“Sorry! I- uh- I’m ticklish!”

The explanation was an obvious lie, and you could tell even if Bolin’s head didn’t thwack back into the headrest with such force. You turned away, doing your best not to laugh.

“It’s alright,” you assured him, chuckling a little. You lowered your voice, almost to a whisper, as you pressed your fingers against his hips again, this time softer, deliberate in a different manner. “You’re allowed to enjoy yourself.”

Bolin’s breath hitched, and you bit your lip, paying special attention to the muscles just above his hips. He shivered as you kneaded his sore muscles, and you grinned. Usually you wouldn’t focus so much on such a spot, but you had to admit that teasing Bolin was very fun. He was such a sweet boy – you wished he would stop by more often.

“That should just about do it,” you stated, wiping your hands on a small towel you kept tucked into your waistband. Bolin’s back shone with oil in the low light, and he had all but sunk completely into the table, completely relaxed. He tilted his head to the side to look at you, a little bashful.

“I feel like I should have bought you dinner first,” he admitted, with a dorky laugh. You replied with your own giggle, covering your mouth.

“You did, remember?” you gestured to the dumplings still sitting on the high table, and Bolin shook his head, sitting up, rolling his neck as he adjusted to his loosened muscles.

“No, I mean, like, properly,” he elaborated, scratching the back of his head. You smiled, looking up at him shyly.

“You mean, like a date?” you pressed. You wanted him to ask you out – you wanted to get to know him.

“If you’d want?” he replied, shrugging. You smiled bright at him, nodding.

“I would like that, very much.”

#bolin x reader #bolin x you #lok bolin #bolin #mine

207 notes · View notes

takerfoxx · 3 years

Text

So long as I'm getting caught up on all my stuff, here's the next installment of the Walpurgis Nights girls watch The Rebellion Story, this time stretching from Homura shooting herself in the head to her talk with Sayaka the vague-poster!

Reminder:

G=Gretchen

H=Homulilly

Op=Ophelia

Ok=Oktavia

Ca=Candeloro/Mami

Ch=Charlotte

...

=still screaming=

G: Turn it off, TURN IT OFF!

Ok, panicking: I got it, I got it! Off!

=TV winks out=

Ch: Sweet Christ!

=long pause, and then Gretchen gets up and runs off. Homulilly quickly follows=

Ch: This was a mistake.

Op: What. The fuck?

Ca: I should have known. I should have known it would go this way.

Ch: Candy, there’s no way you could have-

Ca: No! There was! I knew how bad it could get! I knew how far we could have fallen! I shouldn’t have let you guys see any of this.

Ok: It’s not your fault.

Ca: I still should have known. I should have at least screened this!

Ch: Yeah, one of us probably should have.

=another long pause=

Ok: So, uh, are we, like, done?

=suddenly Gretchen reenters the room, followed by Homulilly. They silently return to their seats=

G: Okay. Play it.

Op: Gretch, are you sure?

G: I need to know. I need to know what happens to her. I need to know if we turn out okay. Play it.

=everyone exchanges uncomfortable glances, and then look to Homulilly, who slowly nods=

Ok: Okay, if you say so…

Op: We’d better ease it with the commentary. I mean, this isn’t something we can-

G: No! Please, no. The talking…and the jokes…well, it makes it easier.

Op: Sure.

Ch: It’ll be kind of hard to find anything funny about this.

Ca: We can try to do what we can.

=they start the movie, and silently watch as Homura falls in slow motion, blood and brains spewing out. And then…=

Op: Wait, hold up! How is she still moving?

Ca: As I said, something like that won’t kill her. You would need to destroy her soul gem.

Op: So she can straight up just blow her own head off and walk it off?

Ca: So long as the act of healing didn’t use up too much magic, yes.

H: Okay, but why? Why would I do something like that?

Ca: Let’s find out.

…

Ok: Uh…Ooooh.

H: Oh. Really?

G: What’s going on?

H: I couldn’t get rid of the ribbon on my ankle. Every time I tried to shoot it off, Mami would just grow it back. So I tried shocking her so badly that she wouldn’t think to regenerate the ribbon long enough for her to be caught in the time-stop.

Op: By shooting yourself in the head?!

H: Clearly, I have a considerable amount of emotional issues.

Ch: You know, it’s really starting to concern me how you keep referring to her as yourself just now.

H: I apologize. I will try to differentiate between my alternate selves.

Ok: Oh great, now I’ve gone cross-eyed.

…

Ch: So…this is really uncomfortable. Again.

G: Is she going to shoot Cand-I mean, Mami?

Ca: I mean, there’s clearly a moral struggle.

H: Well. At least I didn’t turn out as a complete sociopath.

Ok: This is seriously gross. Can we just skip this part?

Ca: No.

Ok: But-

Ca: No.

Ok: Okay.

…

Op: In the leg. Well, I guess that’s not as-

Ok: HOLY!

G: What’s happening? What’s going on?

Op: Sweet flames, she’s…a ribbon monster? The fuck?

=pause, and then Charlotte starts laughing hard while Candeloro just sighs=

Ok: Charlotte! Explain! Now!

Ch: She did it! She actually did it!

Ok: Did what?!

Ch: You’ll see!

H: Wow, I am…I mean, she is just all tied up now.

G: Wait, Mami’s there? But I thought…then what was…

Ca: Oh, good grief.

Ok: Wait. Wait a second, you can clone yourself?!

Ca: It’s…not so much a clone as it is a puppet.

Ok: Since when could you do that?!

Ca: Um, well, I had figured it out a short time before our, um, deaths. I was training with Kyo…with Ophelia, and we were practicing with her illusion magic. You know, the duplicates?

Op: Uh-huh.

Ca: Well, she suggested that perhaps I could do something similar with my ribbons, since I could use my ribbons to form other objects. And, well…it worked.

Op: Ooooh. Okay, that’s actually kind of awesome.

H: I was fighting a copy the whole time?! How is that fair?

Ch: You can literally freeze time!

H: Hey, wait. How do you know that she could do that, Charlotte?

Ch: How do you think?

Ca: Like we said: our therapist suggested building positive associations around my change. We had to get creative.

Op: Oh, come on, that’s not fair!

Ok: Wait, you were the one betting on her!

Op: I’m not talking about that! When I do my duplicate trick all I can do with them is give Tavi a show! It’s not like she can touch any of them!

Ok: Babe. Relax. It’s honestly fine.

Op: All I’m saying I should be able to give you a lap dance while the striptease is going on.

G: TMI! TMI!

Ch: You, uh, do know that you can give her the lap dance and let your illusions handle the striptease, right?

Op: Do you know how hard it is to handle two kinds of dancing at the same time when you’re horny?

G: Please, I am begging you to stop!

…

Ch: So…I think someone owes me and Fee-Fee some talents.

Ok: Fight’s not over yet!

Ch: It clearly is…

G: You don’t know that! Maybe Homura will drop a hand-grenade to blow the ribbons up! Or maybe Kyoko will come to save her.

Op: Look, if other-me tags in, that’s an automatic forfeit. This is supposed to be one-on-one, and that clone trick is stretching things as it is.

H: Wait, wait, shut up. Wraiths? What are wraiths?

Ok: Dunno.

Ch: Did we miss something? I get that that nightmares replaced the witches, but what are wraiths?

G: Maybe…after I erased witches, wraiths are what replaced them!

Op: We should’ve just watched the damn show first.

Ch: Do you really think it’ll make things make more sense?

Op: Probably not, but at least we’d know about half of these names!

Ch: Jesus Christ, the fuck is that?

Ok: The sky wants to eat that giant walnut, apparently.

Ch: I can see that, but what does it mean?!

G: I think that’s an eye, actually.

Ok: An eye with teeth.

Ch: None of that answers any of my questions.

Op: Nope, this would still be just as weird even if we watched the show.

…

Ch: And here comes the rescue! Via…fire extinguisher for some reason. Sorry girls, Mami takes this.

Ok: Fine, fine. Thanks a lot, Homulilly.

H: Not my fault. None of us knew about the duplicate thing. I had her beat until then.

Ok: Wait, is that a sword?

Op: Guess it ain’t me with the steel chair, then!

G: Well, of course not. It’s a sword.

Op: That’s not…never mind.

Ok: It’s me! I’m coming in to save you!

H: I’m touched. But…why?

Ok: Because I had fifty talents riding on you, and you let me down.

H: Oh, don’t start.

Op: Wait. That ain’t your voice, Tavi.

Ok: Who else has a sword?!

G: Um, who is that?

Ch: Some kind of kid. Candy, do you recognize her back from before?

Ca: No, I really don’t…

Op: Wait, BEBE?!

Ch: Excuse me?!

H: Um…this is…a turn.

Ca: Don’t look at me, I’m as bewildered as you are.

Ch: Oh, so first I’m a creepy idiot doll, and now I’m a fucking child?!

Op: What is this, some kind of alternate universe bullshit?

Ok: I mean, basically. Uh, you okay over there, Charlotte.

Ch: Nope!

Ok: Wanna take a break?

Ch: Yes!

…

=everyone returns after half-an-hour=

Ch: I think I’ve figured it out.

H: Oh?

Ch: Butterfly effect. Like, okay, in this universe, Madoka somehow erased all witches, right? I mean, made it so magical girls don’t turn into witches anymore, right? And did it all through history, right?

H: Presumably.

Ch: So that means that there has to be major repercussions! Like, like, this girl doesn’t turn into a witch fifty years ago, so she doesn’t eat some random passerby, and that rando goes and marries someone that would have married someone else in the original timeline, so they have a completely different set of kids, so the kids they would have had originally don’t get born! So somewhere down the line, things got all screwy and I ended up being born a few years later!

G: Wow, that actually makes a lot of sense.

Op: I guess we’re all super-lucky that we got born at all. And that the rest of us ended up more-or-less the same. Um, no offense.

Ch: Right. That’s all it is. Different timeline, things happened differently, and I’m a little girl in this world. That’s it.

Ok: So…are you okay with this then?

Ch: Oh, absolutely not! But I can at least deal with it now!

Op: Bet’cha anything that good ol’ Bebe here still has a major crush on Mami.

Ch: Oh, God! Don’t even go there!

Op: I’m just sayin’…

Ca: Ophelia…

Op: Stopping, stopping.

H: Shall we continue?

Ch: Yeah, I guess. I’m gonna need major therapy after all this is over, though.

G: We all will.

…

Ok: Okay, I know this is probably a bad time to point this out, but Sayaka has style!

Op: I mean, you’re not wrong. Look at you, being all effortlessly cool! Not that you aren’t already.

Ok: Nice save there.

Ch: Haha, Sayaka’s got it right! Taking on Mami was a dumb idea. Speaking of which…

Ok: Oh, come on! That clone trick was dirty and you know it!

Ch: Oh, I’m sorry. Are you upset that she so happened to have something that counters Homura’s extremely unfair timestop power?

Op: She’s got a point. A bet’s a bet.

G: All right, I guess it’s official. Mami won.

=Candeloro smirks=

H; You don’t have to be all smug about it.

Ca: True. I don’t.

…

G: Wait…

Op: So, what, Sayaka knows what’s going on?

Ok: Of course I do! I mean, I’m the brains of the bunch!

=Homulilly coughs=

Ok: I heard that.

H: I didn’t say anything.

Ch: Well, finally some exposition!

G: I do sort of wish that she’d just tell Homura what is going on without being so vague about it.

Ok: Look, I’ve been pretty much on the wayside this whole movie. Let me have my monologue.

Ch: What’s she getting at though?

H: Oh.

Ch: Huh?

H: I think…Never mind.

G: What is it?

H: I just had sort of a realization, but I’d rather not say it now.

Op: Eh?

H: Hang on. Let’s just watch a bit more.

…

Op: Jesus, Tavi! No need to show Homura up like that!

Ok: Let! Me! Have! This!

Ch: That was pretty cool, though. Shwing! Stopped her cold!

G: Wait, so one of us is the…

=voice trails off=

G: Is it me?

H: Um…

Op: Oh.

Ok: Oh.

Ch: What? Oh, okay. I get it now.

Ca: I sort of put it together too.

G: What? What are…Oh.

=everyone looks at Homulilly=

H: Well, it only makes sense. I guess.

Ch: You don’t seem all that upset about it.

H: Well, at least I get to become my best self in this movie.

G: But…how though? I thought I erased witches or whatever!

Ok: Let’s find out.

Ch: If your other self can ever get to the point.

Ok: Shhh…

…

Ca: Wait, I’m the witch? Is that what she’s implying?

Ch: Pretty sure that’s just a red herring.

Ok: You know, it’s nice that Sayaka is actually being all sympathetic toward witches. I mean, it’s kind of fucked up, isn’t it? That even the magical girls that know the score still hunt down witches instead of trying to help them.

G: I mean, it can’t really be helped, can it?

Ok: I know, I just like that I’m saying it.

G: The Law of Cycles? What’s that?

Op: Probably whatever trippy business you replaced the witch stuff with.

H: Oh, now I’m finally just saying it out loud! Madoka erased witches. Took us long enough to get to that point.

Op: Wait, sacrificed herself? Only Homura remembers her? What?

Ch: Pretty sure this was all explained in the show.

Op: Well, that’s what we get for watching this first. Should we go back and-

Everyone: No.

Op: Cool.

…

Op: Oh, freaky!

Ok: Wait, so I’m the witch now?

Ch: Could mean that in this timeline you turned into a witch before Madoka did her un-witching…thing.

Ca: That is what you looked like. Right before you became one with Charlotte, I mean.

Ch: Er…

Ok: Phrasing…

Ca: Oh, for Heaven’s sake. It is literally what happened. You turned into a witch while we were fighting Charlotte, and then the two of you fused. Then I became a witch and fused with that witch. And then Ophelia became a witch and we all fused together.

Ok: Yeah, but the way you said it…

…

H: Where’d she go?

Ok: Clumsy? You have the gall to call me clumsy? Who just saved who’s ass, just now!

H: Cut me some slack, it’s been a long evening.

Ch: Y’know you still got blood and brains all over your cheek, right?

H: I am certain that Homura does not care.

Op: I am certain that Homura is about to blow the brains out of the first punk-ass that looks at her wrong right about now.

Ok: Headshots for everybody!

H: Except Madoka.

Ok: Except Madoka. She can be the token un-brain-slushee.

G: Gee. Thanks.

Ca: I’d like to just point out that Homura came very close to turning me into a brain-slushee, but changed her mind.

Op: I doubt she’ll let you off so easy a second time.

Ch: Easy. Hey, may I remind you who won that fight?

H: You’re not going to let that go, are you?

Op: Tell yah what. Losing party treats the winners to dinner at the Tradewinds. Fair?

H: Fair.

Ch: Seriously? With the prices they have down there it’ll be cheaper just to cough up the fifty talents.

G: Yeah, but onion volcanoes!

Ch: Hard to argue with that logic.

Ok: So…on a scale of one to ten, how badly is Homura going to flip out when she realized that she’s the witch.

H: I will accept nothing less than a massacre.

Ok: Cool. Just so long as it’s not of us.

Op: I don’t know. The way this movie is going I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned into a straight-up snuff film.

#WN Rebellion MST

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