#i would much rather use writing as a coping mechanism
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they keep the silverware in the same place. you forget about it a little bit when you move out, but during the holidays, it comes back. the way you smooth over your life for them, a gentle reckoning.
for a while, you tried to find yourself by being wild. throwing your body at the emergency exit. finding comfort in the sharpness of a held breath. you used to write wake up on the inside of your wrist. you couldn't calculate the weight of your own sorrow, only that nobody was looking at the anchor of it. you tried maladaptive coping mechanisms like catnip. got caught half-in half-out of them. felt, weirdly, like you should be embarrassed of all of it.
but it does get better. mostly it's just that you become a priority to yourself. it turns out that lending yourself the ragged edge is just cutting open more marrow. for a while, it felt good to see a physical representation of inward agony. but who was that punishing? you learned, slowly (so slowly it was almost invisible sometimes) that you could put love into the wound instead. that the floor was comfortable because it was certain - but it was cold, and unwanting. instead there is a warm bed. you learn to treat yourself like a kid again. gentle-parent yourself into the shower and over breakfast and into laughing without effort. you do wake up.
but then you come home again, and it is like everything is a strange kaleidoscope of childhood moments. here is how you inherited your mother's anxiety. there is the same music playing, and you can't sit down without worrying you forgot to do something. your mother's clipped words and hovering hands - are you sure? are you sure? birdlike, you find yourself seeing unwell and still end up repeating.
here is your father's anger. you are 16 again. there was a moment where you remember thinking - holy shit. i am so much more emotionally mature than you. how you have to talk him down from minor inconveniences, how you parent him like an errant and spoiled toddler who can't be told no, and i mean it. you feel the warp of you. why you can't be in the same room as people having a completely normal conflict. why your skin crawls if there's ever a hint of a fight. why you live with your hands up, placating. and god forbid you get angry. you feel that little spoiled kid rage against the iron will of you. not you, not your hands. you would rather cut your own tongue out of your head, no matter how valid her argument is.
and you're so fucking far from where you were as a kid. you've done so much healing. and there's this little sad part of you that can see the shadow of your past, and your hands wrapped into each other so tightly you made your knuckles white. and how much your parents are just people, and haven't changed much, and still keep the spoons in the drawer to the right.
there is a long dark tunnel here, and it has a name, but you haven't learned how to process that kind of speech yet. close the cabinet. make a note to go get more oat milk. close your eyes.
this place was never home, was it.
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Hi Neil.
I know you are flooded with asks and this somehow became extremely long. Too long. “Why am I suddenly telling this poor man my life story?” too long. “I think I’d rather he work on the GO3 script than read this wild beast” too long. “He’s going to think you’re criminally dangerously insane” too long. If you never get to it, I’m good with never seeing a response from you. Maybe it’s better that way? Maybe an anon would have been nice here. But, it’s 2024, so I say “we ball.” It’s a privilege to be able to send this to you at all. You get a lot to this effect and I hope they give you good feels, so maybe what’s the harm, yeah? Because this is not an ask. This is a thank you letter.
First, thanks for reblogging my therapist post, I hope it amused you. I nearly sent you “How am i supposed to explain this to my therapist?!” But refrained. At that time.
So, therapy. What is therapy really? Well…
Things have been really rotten for as long as I can remember. Bad health, bad doctors, bad relationships, bad coping mechanisms, bad all kinds of things. (Yeah, bad is a weak and unhelpful word, my therapist reminds me, but we’re doing this.)
Well, things got even more really really rotten and BAD these last few years. Health declined further, coping mechanisms declined further and more intensely, packed up my life, applied for disability, moved back in with my parents across the country.
Then 4 years ago last week I watched my fiance die of a sudden heart attack. I was 29. Two years later my best friend died. Then last summer I sauntered vaguely into a cancer scare. Not long before an operation my cat who has been my companion through so much garbage died as well. I’m not entirely in the clear on the cancer scare front. All my attempts at going back to work, volunteering, going to grad school - they collapsed on me because I couldn’t get through this STUFF.
(Sometimes when I talk about this, when I tell people, I think “they are going to think you are a raging pathological liar.” Because I’m not sure I would believe someone if they told me all of this happened to them. In such a short time period. All before they were 35. And hell if that hasn’t been isolating. You know how it sounds? Lonely. And it is.)
I did the hypervigilant and sensation/experience chasing stage of PTSD. It got me in a lot of trouble in all kinds of ways. I had to do a lot of medical and psych advocating because things kept getting worse. That was exhausting. Then that peaked. I went into the thick of the “I feel absolutely nothing” stage for a long time. I didn’t feel fatigue or hunger or thirst. Not people, feelings, a reason. Not hope.
But of course, like seems be for a lot of us, I somehow found Good Omens at just the right time. I was a very “I’m so cool and intellectual I mostly consume non-fiction media” person for too long. Like, what? How is that even a real thing? And it wasn’t real. It was just part of this curated autism mask that I don’t think anyone really bought anyway.
I think I got to a point where I’d just had too much reality. I needed fantasy. I didn’t realize I always needed it. But I denied myself for too many odd and painful reasons. Maybe I thought it was an escape I didn’t deserve.
But as it turns out, it wasn’t an escape. I watched both seasons last fall, and then this light came on. I watched it again and again.
I came to tumblr because I needed more. I found this fandom. I stepped into this beautiful world of fanart and fanfiction and brain flexing meta writing and a sense of community and wonder that you and Terry created - that everyone involved in the show inflated - exploded in the right way - like fireworks if fireworks were some kind of autocatalytic reaction - a self perpetuating force.
It’s not a “saved my life” feeling. Not a “getting my life back” feeling. It’s been a “maybe it’s time for you to have the life you’ve always been denied - that you’ve denied yourself” feeling.
I’m creating. I’m not “great” yet. Not terribly “good” at all. Maybe “behind” as far as the “proper” timeline for starting. I know there isn’t one, not really, but boy does that society machine make ya feel like there is. And sure, I started and stopped a lot in the past. But the second it got hard I always gave up. I felt like if I didn’t get it “right” to begin with, then I just didn’t have it in me at all. But for once I’m really in it. I’m writing and trying to draw things that look less like fever dream five year old drawings. (Not that there’s anything wrong with those, is there? 🙃) I’m eating better. I’m sleeping better. I reach out to old friends more. I’ve made new friends who share this love of Good Omens.
My therapist has been floored by the change in me. After that first funny mini flop, he has been so encouraging about it. I saw him this week and I said “Maybe this is helping me get prepared to start living again. Maybe it’s a springboard.” And he honest to god said “But You ARE living. This is YOU LIVING. Why does it have to be a springboard? Why do you have to turn this into ‘work?’ Just let yourself have this for once in your life.”
But there were two more added elements that made it all work. And I can’t help but think this whole brainrot thing wouldn’t have happened without them. So many things just happened all at just the right time - a proper coincidence.
In all of the madness of the last few years I finally got the memo that I'm autistic. i figured I was for a while. But it finally sunk in for me and my docs and my people. So I’d been working on unpacking that. Grieving the life that could have been entirely different, shedding the mask. I let myself hyperfixate openly instead of hiding it and hating myself for “spiralling” or “obsessing” like others -!like ‘I’ always punished myself for before we knew that it was a trait and not a personality flaw.
Then over the last few months my therapist and I started trying this new exercise. One session he stopped me and said “in the last 20 minutes you have responded to what I’ve said with 9 ‘I knows.’” My response to that? “Ugh, I know.” So we started this “I know” swear jar type situation. Really, I’ve been afraid of not knowing. I couldn’t let myself “not know.” Because it meant I was “dumb.” I was just drowning for so long in guilt and self loathing for the “I knew better and screwed up anyway.” Or “I should’ve known better - I should know that by now.”
As it turns out, there’s a lot of things I don’t know. That I didn’t know. Things I will never know. And refusing to admit all of that kept me from learning a damn thing. Kept me from asking questions. Kept me from trying new things because it was scary to do something new - something unknown - and I "knew" how it would all turn out anyway. Kept me from connecting with people because it was painful or embarrassing when they knew things I didn’t and it seemed like I already should have. Kept me from getting better at making art, music, writing. Kept me from forgiving myself. Kept me from growing. And kept me from moving forward. Maybe not on. I don’t know if we ever “move on” from things. But we can move forward as we carry them. And as we do, the weight gets less. We’re able to carry it better. But only if we can admit that we don’t know how. Only if we don’t treat ourselves like this is something we do know or should know and we’re just failing because we’re less than. Not good enough. Not strong enough. Not deserving. We have to be able to say “I don’t know how to do this.” And then we can start looking for the answers. We can ask. We can learn.
I thought about the apple. Being able to tell the difference between good and evil. Aziraphale’s years and years of watching what he “knows” to be true be proven wrong. Crowley’s need to ask questions…
The simple and enormous gift of “Knowledge.” The “Knowledge” of the difference between Good and Evil. The “Knowledge” that can only be gained by realizing, accepting, admitting that there are things we don’t know. Asking the questions. Sometimes we get answers we don’t like. Sometimes the consequences of asking hurt us. And unless you want to stay in that painful place that painful knowledge got you, well, you’ve got to let yourself learn how to get out.
So all of this good? I never expected this. I never thought I deserved it. Joy and belonging and this sense that “Yeah, maybe things can get better. Maybe things can be good.” Because I said those things, not truly believing them, to the people I thought needed to hear it. But it couldn’t save them. It was hollow. The proof for us wasn’t really in our orbit or on our radar at the time. And now they’re gone.
People always say “it’s never too late.”
One of the people I lost said “it’s later than you think.”
I jokingly would respond “it’s already too late.”
It was for him in the end. For them. For some people I guess it really is. But maybe a lot of the “too late” people are there because they think “they know” that things will never be good for them. So they stop looking, they stop asking, stop finding. And eventually they just stop.
Then there came Crowley’s “It’s always too late.” The first time I heard it I thought “For sure, Crowley-cakes, I KNOW.”
But then…I just needed to rewatch the whole thing. And lines like that…familiar things…familiar themes…I was suddenly identifying with these characters. I suddenly saw myself. And the realization hit - I connected with something! Something new. And I FELT THAT. And that tiny little crack that made in the wall was just enough to start breaking it down. Yeah, when you start letting yourself feel after not feeling for so long, opening up to the good feelings means opening up to feelings and then the bad ones come out too. But when there IS good … it helps you balance. You can deal with the bad a little better because you’ve got the good thing to lean against when it gets too much. And now you’ve got feelings. You’ve got good and bad. You’ve got sticky foggy grey. You’ve got life.
Whew.
So, TLDR, thank you. From the bottom of my slowly healing heart, thank you.
And to sign off with some shits and giggles… I couldn’t find this in existence as a sticker so I had to custom order. Perhaps this will spread misery and panic among the humans of my city - or at least a malignant and creepy sense of unease.
Or maybe they’ll say “wtf” and go home and google it and they’ll fall into the Good Omens hole they never knew they needed too.
Thank you for this. I never quite know what to say to messages like this apart from I am really glad that it helps. (It becomes the weird extra piece that I worry about when writing season 3 -- hoping that it will be that thing again. Not just a story, but something that helps people feel and helps with healing and helps with love.)
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More than friends, less than lovers. x.t
pairing: xavier thorpe x gn!reader
summary: the whole hyde ordeal has faded slowly in the background as life carried on, the student body ready to grasp onto some new drama. luckily for them, a love triangle is exactly what they needed to fuel the gossip.
warnings: fluff, angst, love triangle (kinda)
a/n: y'all this idea literally came to me at 4 in the morning so please bear with me (as i also wrote it at the ass crack of dawn) i am so obsessed with percy and xavier and wanted to write this desperately, he is all i can think about.
word count: 1,727
part 2 part 3
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You hated this. This, stage, between what you were and what you could be. Xavier was your best friend. He always had been, truth be told. Yet as soon as he broke up with Bianca your relationship had a shift. Suddenly somethings had a deeper connotation, a hidden meaning. You didn’t hate it. In fact, this was exactly what you had been waiting for for years. Until She came along.
You didn’t hate Wednesday, unfortunately. She had done nothing to spark your anger. It wasn’t like she was purposely making Xavier adore her. It looked like she would rather be without it, being honest. But did it annoy the hell out of you that he was so enamored with her so quickly, when she did nothing to give the idea that she would reciprocate? And yet he seemed to not want to give up on her? While simultaneously leading you on, making you believe you might have a romantic future with him? And being oblivious to the pain it caused? It was the only thing you ever thought about.
Genuinely, you wondered how he could still be so obsessed with her to buy her a phone, after she wrongfully got him imprisoned. If that wasn’t a walking red flag you didn’t know what was.
You and Xavier had stayed close throughout this internal turmoil you went through. It hurt like a bitch, but you’d be damned if you lost him over a girl he liked. Suppressing your feelings wasn’t anything you were stranger to, there were other ways to get out your thoughts.
Something you did often, that you’d never tell him was how frequently you abused mimicking his ability. At first he had found it interesting and expressed he had no problem with you copying his habits. But if he knew what you used it for he’d probably be mad.
Each night, after leaving his dorm and sneaking back into yours, you drew a photo from that day. What he looked like when he smiled. How he laughed. Taking into extreme detail his face, scrunched, while watching a show together. Though you weren’t really watching the show so much as watching him.
You kept these drawings in a box, under your bed, all the way in the back. It was hidden enough to never be seen or touched by anyone. So you used the late Rowan’s telekinesis ability to bring it out and put it back. Was this a healthy coping mechanism? Oh not at all, seeing as some drawings that originated from the latest of nights and most intimate moments, would have made Wednesday blush. Of course it's all innocent, right up until you put it down on paper.
"Drawing lover boy again?" Your best friend Val, barked at you from across the room.
"Lover boy? That's a new one," you softly put the new drawing of him in the box, and back under your bed in the furthest corner. "Not such an accurate name this time, you're losing your touch my friend."
"Well you wish it was, so close enough in my book," She shrugs and jumps onto your bed.
"Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades," you pull your laptop on your lap, and press play on your favorite show to watch together.
"You sound like your father," She gags and you playfully slap her arm before shushing her and cuddling into her side.
——————————————————————————
It was lunch the next day, you had a free period the class before so you were waiting for Xavier to show up at your usual bench in the quad. He was taking a little bit longer than normal so you started early on your homework.
"If it isn't Xavier's little girl," she paused. "friend."
"Bye Bianca," you waved and put the volume up on your phone.
“Where is he this time? With Wednesday maybe?" she crossed her arms and smiled maliciously. "It's already started!" She laughed.
You tried to mind your business, she only ever wants to cause problems and you know this. "What's started?" you kept your eyes on your work, putting the volume lower to hear her better.
“He's bored of you. Just like when he got bored of me and you two got closer? He's onto Wednesday now, and done with you." She raised her eyebrows and put on an innocent doe-eyed look. "Well, anyway, have a good lunch!"
She walked away and went back to her friends. You didn't want to believe it. Would Xavier really replace you with Wednesday? He couldn't, he wouldn't. Even when he was dating Bianca, sure you hung out less, but you were still in his life. She was just trying to get in your head right?
“Sorry I'm late, got a little held up in class," He put his stuff down next to him and grabbed some food from the lunch you packed for the two of you. Cooking had become a stress habit for you, so nightly you sneak into the kitchens and prepare something for the next day.
“What kept you?" You put your stuff in your bag and grabbed a snack from the pile.
"Class, I said that didn't I?" He talked through a mouthful of food.
“Yeah but, what kept you? The teacher? Extra work?” you tried to press while eating your half of the lunch.
“Uh, just some extra credit work, wanna bring my grade up you know?” His answer was strained, and his eyes looked anywhere but at yours. So you followed his gaze, to Wednesday.
“Yeah, for sure,” You mumbled and went back to eating. Even if you wanted to escape him for another hour, to try and calm the thoughts in your head, you couldn’t. You two had the same class next period and you always walked together.
——————————————————————————
The day felt strained, any conversation with Xavier fell off track and eventually died out too soon. It’d been too long since this pattern started. Ever since she came to Nevermore, things slowly got worse between you two. You weren’t as close as before and it killed you.
So like every night, afraid to break habit, you snuck out of Xavier’s dorm to hang out. Right before you were going to knock on the door you heard two hushed voices in the room.
“You can’t keep doing this Xavier, you’re hurting her.” a voice pressed him for answers, sounding upset.
“We’re fine, Ajax.” Xavier fought back, offended anyone would accuse him of doing anything to hurt you.
“How dense are you that everyone can see it, but you?” Ajax stressed the end of his sentence still trying to be quiet.
“See what!” Xavier was getting increasingly agitated.
Your grip on the handle faltered and it wiggled just loud enough for both boys to notice it. Suddenly the door was opening and you smiled sheepishly at Xavier, “Hi.”
“I’m gonna leave,” Ajax looked between the both of you and you moved out of the way for him to exit. He sent one last glance Xavier’s way before he closed the door and went back to his dorm.
“Sorry, did i interrupt anything?” You apologized, still feeling the tense air.
“No,” He ran a hand through his hair in the same manor that always drove you crazy. “Nothing important.”
And just as quick as your conversation, Xavier went to sketching as you made yourself comfortable in his bed with your book. How quickly he could make your heart speed up and then break it felt like a world record now.
——————————————————————————
It’s been two weeks now since you accidentally overheard Xavier’s conversation with Ajax that night. Things hadn’t changed between you two, and you can’t figure out if that’s a good thing or not yet. Val had been pushing you to just confront him about your feelings. She knew letting them simmer inside was doing no one any good.
So on a night similar to that one fateful evening, you mustered up the courage to finally ask him what you meant to each other.
“Hey Xavi,” you asked, leaning slightly to the side now as he turned around from the mural he was painting on his wall to look at you. “What do I mean to you?”
He seemed to freeze, face tinting slightly rosier, whether it was blush or anger you didn’t know yet.
“What do you mean?” He dipped his brush in the cup he used to clean them, going right back to his art. It made you study his face, his posture, before continuing your question.
“I mean, I know what you mean to me. I know what i feel for you,” you felt emboldened by seeing him try and play off his nervousness watching him tense and straighten his back. “But I don’t know what I am to you.”
He paused and blinked, it looked like he was going to say something but he made no move to speak. After two minuets he finally opened his mouth, “Where is this coming from? You’re my best friend, you’re.. I..” He trailed off.
“But it’s more than that. More than friends,” he flushed pink, taking in a large gulp. “But less than lovers.” His grip turned white on the brush as he slumped slightly. Still he made no move to speak, so you turned away and went to collect your things. Nothing was said between you two as you packed up what you brought and slung your bag over your shoulder.
As you slipped out the door and into the shadows, mimicking a poltergeist you had once seen and turning yourself almost completely invisible. No one could even hear you breath and you floated through the halls back your dorm.
And in the faint night hair, before you left the wing his dorm was in, you could’ve sworn you heard him call your name and try to get your attention. But it was futile as you just sped up and got back to your dorm quicker.
Val said nothing as you slumped into your bed, rolling your stuff off the side and curling up with a blanket in your arms. She must’ve been able to infer what happened, and she climbed in next to you to hold you as you silently wept. Not even a shake ran through you as the tears fell. No one could hear the sound of your heart shattering that night.
#xavier thorpe x reader#wednesday#peter hynes white#xavier x reader#xavier thorpe#im so in love with him#i wanna shift for him so bad
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infinity in the palm of your hand (eternity in an hour) | reincarnation AU
Johnny "Soap" MacTavish (OG) x Reader | Johnny "Soap" MacTavish (Remake) x Reader
You're grieving for something, someone—a man with kind eyes and a soft smile like the valley in spring: fresh rain over the boscage in bloom—that you've never met before.
And then you find him.
MATURE | 18+
—TAGS: AU, canon divergence: reincarnation; fluff; tagging as fem!Reader due to usage of "bonnie" (not a name—Reader is not named), and mentions of a dress but no other descriptive imagery is used
—WARNINGS: grief, loss, unhealthy coping mechanisms, existential crisis, allusions to smut; cosmic horror (but??? it's a romance????)
—WORD COUNT: 11,9K
—NOTES: I like the idea of fated pairs, soul mates, but I can't write this concept without somehow diving into the cosmic horror of something, someone, controlling you from behind the scenes. So. Um. Idk what to call this abomination. It leaks horror but is meant to be quite fluffy. It's romance. It's a love story. But it's also kinda eldritch. Oops.
This was also originally a request I got back in November (I'm so sorry!). I have since lost the request, but Reincarnation Anon, this is for you!!! 🖤
In Greek, there are two words for time:
Kronos—chronological, the clock: fixed—measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. The world runs on Kronos. On its merciless rigidity, it's apathetic, unending trek forward. It is cruel, sometimes, but it cares little for you, or anyone else who exists inside its unforgiving realm. Time is linear. A steady March.
And then there is Kairos. In its essence, and in utter simplicity: timelessness.
It's often found in grief when the world around you shatters and implodes. When it lapses into pain and agony. Into how and why and—
Nothing makes sense. Nothing matters.
You've never experienced any such loss. Gran, grandad, friends, family—all alive and well. And yet—
You're grieving for something, someone—a man with kind eyes and a soft smile like the valley in spring: fresh rain over the boscage in bloom—that you've never met before.
And then you find him.
Or, rather, he finds you.
(Over and over and over again—)
It starts in university.
Start, of course, is an operative word. It's an incipient event: a slow burn in the back of your head that gets hotter and hotter, but you can't quite discern why. You just feel wrong. Shaken. The foundation in which you walk wobbles. Crumbles.
There is an unseen precipice under your feet covered by cobblestone. You know it's there—are aware of the yawning chasm that wants to swallow you whole, but you don't know where it is.
And then—
There is no phone call, no blunt condolences for any particular loss, just—
A knock on your door. It's just your flatmate, but the rhythm cuts through your head, right down the middle.
Agony. The world around you flips, topples off its axis, and just keeps spinning, spinning, spinning—
It hits you with the force of a tsunami. A deluge of biblical proportions that uprooted everything you'd ever know, casting you out into a frothing abyss, ravaged by mountain-tall waves that left you asunder. Awash in a tumultuous sea.
It would make sense, you suppose, had you lost someone, but you haven't.
The most you've lost was a pet.
And yet—
You sob, scream, and claw at your chest until your skin is torn and shredded, trying futilely to get to where it hurts the most. It's agonising. Brutal. They sedate you—no choice is given when you're so frantic, so desperate. The world slips away. The pain abated.
But it doesn't stop it.
They call it grief, and you don't know why. You haven't lost anyone. Mum, dad, gran, grandad. All alive and well. All there, standing clustered around your hospital bed (admitted when you wouldn't stop screaming) looking quite bewildered by you. By the things you say—missing something, someone, gone, just gone—and the way you're acting.
And it scares you just as much as it does them, but you can't just push it aside, let it go. There is a gaping hole in your chest, one punched straight through your sternum. It's gangrenous, and rotting; the stench makes you dizzy, makes your head spin. Your heart is necrotising between your ribs and spine, but no one knows why. No one understands the agony you feel because everyone is alive.
They all say the same: we don't know. Depression, perhaps. You just need time.
Time does nothing to heal the wound. You can't run from the hurt—it's never-ending—but you get better at hiding it, at dealing with pulpy remains of your still-beating heart that slugs on despite the mouldering wound ripped open in the centre.
They tell you it's Thursday, now.
Before you'd throw something, thrash, and scream yourself hoarse because what does it matter when your heart is dying, decaying inside of your chest.
Now, you just nod. Thursday, is it?
Time doesn't exist to you anymore. It's just an endless stream of days and nights that get easier to withstand as the foreign clock on the wall ticks down the seconds you don't feel.
The world is a murky haze of confusion and pain. You move on only because you have to.
Things—
Well. They don't get better, but they get bearable, and you suppose that's the same thing, isn't it?
And then you dream.
They come in flashes. Snippets. Little moments of a place and time that doesn't exist, that isn't real. This life was not one you lived. The taste of elderberry has never graced your lips, but you think of the sweet, tartness like it's an old comfort.
It makes you ache.
Simplicity bleeds into familiarity into love into—
—you should… you should sit for this—
Crushing heartache. It carries the flavour of gunpowder, and is soaked in charcoal; the soot stains the tips of your fingers when you reach out, curling them in the rough lapels of a gunmetal grey jacket still carrying the scent of ichor, and loss.
—i… i can't promise you forever, but i can promise you now—
You dream of a man. Of hands on your body. Eyes gazing at you—an alluvial fan in hazel, green, and gold; the shadows cast in the shallow valleys make you yearn for something.
Something, something—
You wake up, hand to your splitting chest as the agony rips it into pieces. Heartache, grief. It drapes itself over you like a storm cloud. Looming there, ever-present, and ready to chisel open a deluge of pain so visceral you weep. And weep. And—
Your pillow is wet. Nose stuffed, eyes gritty. You've been crying, sobbing, in your sleep again.
It's a cycle. Memories flood your head until it's splitting apart at the seams, making room for that life it wants to force you to remember, acknowledge, and pretend exists, and one you're in now.
It breaks something inside of you. Cracks the levee. In the midst of crumbling concrete, and a roaring deluge, you hear a voice.
(You stare at the bottles lining the shelves in your vanity, and tell no one.)
—excuse me? You dropped this—
HERE
There is a tavern on High Street.
It's nothing special on its own. Just a building, just a pub. You pass it twice a day on your commute to work, and it should be background noise. A blur of scenery and objects as you stroll through the streets. A melding of the world around you, an inconsequential smear of cobblestone and brick.
And yet—
Your eyes keep finding it, seeking it out. It's involuntary. Automatic. You pass the grocer and the pharmacy, head angled down toward the grey stone below, and then, like an unignorable force, a gravitational pull, your head lifts. The fairy lights are strewn around the outside coruscate in the gloom. You nearly trip.
It's strange. Odd.
It's just a building. Just a tavern.
—got some of the best brews in town—
But you remember it. Are familiar with it in a way that makes absolutely no sense. You've never gone inside, never heard anyone speak about it. It's a building on a street of many. Ordinary. Plain. Nothing about this place should stand out to you. It isn't eye-catching or garish. It's—
—cosy little spot—
It's an anomaly. Much like—
Well. Much like everything in your life.
There is a gnawing in the pit of your stomach, one that's so achingly familiar that your head swims from deja vu that shouldn't exist. It fits inside like an augur. A portant.
How can the unknown be a comfort to you? How can it blister your heart with such ferocity that you find yourself pawing at your face to stem the deluge of tears that cascade down your cheeks in rivets?
Whatever it is, it's calamitous and entirely unignorable.
Your life is asunder, in shambles because of it yet each hiss in your ear addles your thoughts until you become overwhelmed by it all. Until the echoes that tell you to wander down a random side street, sign a lease for an apartment you can't afford, to leave the safety of your home country, and—
On a whim, you packed your things up on the behest of that strange, Eldridge feeling eating you alive that made you cut ties with your old, peaceful life, and book the first plane ticket to Elgin. No plan, no money.
(You'd call it an afflatus had it not been so drenched in the unknown.)
It's paradoxical: you cry when you see that stupid church in the distance, your feet drag you to places you've never been before, and now.
Now:
You can't stop staring at a nondescript pub in a sea of many.
Ignore it. Leave it. You take another route, head down, hands shoved deep in the pockets of your jacket to keep them from trembling. It'll pass. It'll go away.
It doesn't.
It pools in the pit of your stomach, noxious and rotten, until you wake up drenched in sweat, hands grasping for a phantom who no longer exists—
—wanna come with me?—
You break on Saturday.
—i like when you wear that dress—
You wear it, and hate yourself a little bit for it. It's stupid, and out of place, but you do it, anyway.
—booth in the back is where i always sit, want to come join me—
The inside of the tavern is just the same as you remembered it—
No. No.
You've never been here before.
You smell malt in the air; the same amber that spumes in your veins. You dance in circles between the tables, giggling at the people who smear by in a haze of gold and red.
A hand reaches, snags your waist. "Where are you going, pretty thing? Wanna come sit with us?"
It makes you laugh, and laugh, and—
"There a problem?" Heat against your bare back. Ironclad arms around your middle. His voice is a rumble. A thunderclap. "She's with me. Go on now. Get."
You pull away from him, smirking, and—
The air is punched from your lungs. Longing sits in your throat, heavy and thick. It aches. God, it aches. A phantom pain that never quite dissipates. A raw wound left to fester; exposed and open to the elements. It never heals. Never scabs. It oozes grief and headache into your bloodstream and makes you feel lost. Dazed. Confused.
It's silly.
Stupid.
The warm blends of burnt umber and gold make you tremble. Everything inside is—familiar, in all the ways it shouldn't be.
You can't be here. Can't—
Something quivers inside of you. The sting of a guitar being plunked by indelicate hands. It snaps, breaks. You turn, eyes wild, wide—
—hey, where are you—
"...goin'—?"
A chest. Warm. Familiar.
Your neck aches when you jerk your chin up, hands beaded against the hard, firm flesh of a stranger who feels all too familiar, too—
Hazel. A boscage in spring. Warm milk—
"Honey…"
It's out before you can stop it.
Green and golden widen until they're drowning in a sea of arsenic white. An island of bloom, spring, carved in the middle of a barren, icy land. Lids fall, lashes dust across the shadows of the valley smeared beneath the red seal of his lower lash line.
Your breath catches when they slide open, a slow crawl over a varicoloured plume of witch elm and wheat.
—dark eyes, a furrowed brow, long nose, a dusting of charcoal stubble along his cheeks and jaw, and full pink lips—
No. No.
It's different. This isn't the man who haunts your dreams and whispers sweet nothings into your ear. This is not the cut of a man who once curled his fingers over your hips, lips glued to your pulse as he spent himself inside of you—
Heat sears your cheeks.
His mouth opens, and closes. Opens again. No words spill out. His confusion is an oppressive silence.
You swallow down the bitter tang of panic that pools on your tongue, nails digging into the soft fabric of his shirt.
This isn't that man.
He just—
"Sorry," you think you say, but it's all a blur. There was a blue ravine in his eyes, one with shallow shores, and crystalline waves that rippled with the breeze. You're sinking in those waters, now. Dragged down to the murky depths of blue, blue, blue that once made you see samsara with just the brush of his lips. Everything sounds distorted. Hollow.
—you make me crazy. make me want things i shouldn't. Riley thinks i'm whipped. kinda agree with him, but i can't let you go. i can't get you outta my head, and i don't want to—
"Sorry—," you choke, the words a crumpled piece of paper lodged in your throat. Papier-mache seals over your trachea.
You push away from him, stumbling out of this paroxysm. Flames lick at your heels, carrying you further from the laps of blue that flicker over beige.
He chases after you. A warm hand around your wrist stops you on the corner outside of a pharmacy. The streets are dusted in white. It trickles from the sky in a thick hail of cosmic dust.
His breath plumes in front of him when he breathes, pure white tendrils ghosting into the midnight blue silk that covers the town.
"Hey, you alright? Can I—call someone for you, or—"
"No." You gasp, shaking your head so fast, you're nearly sick with it.
"Hey, hey." His hand moves, perches itself against your cheek, eyes brimming in the flushed lamp overhead. His brow is drenched with concern. With confusion. And anger. Anger—why, why—
"Did someone drug you? Did you drink anythin'?"
It rips a bark of laughter from your chest. "Drugs? No. I'm just—"
Spiralling.
You make a vague motion with your wrist, and hope it's enough to convey the absolute travesty of your life. It meets the mark.
The divot in his forehead softens, eyes creasing in the corners. Full pink lips knot to the side. Something passes his expression that looks a little too much like understanding to ever sit well in the pit of your stomach.
You swallow down the acrid residuum of panic, and nod. Why—who knows. It just feels appropriate.
"I need to go—"
"—I like your dress."
The words tumble over each other, barely coherent amid the amalgamated syllables, but ring with distinct clarity in your head. Your dress. Your brows knot, eyes dropping to the stupid little thing you'd picked out in a shop you had no business being inside. Led by the nose. A puppet on strings.
You scoff. "I hate it."
You don't. You'd have picked it out yourself if you had that funny little thing called freewill; that precious little something you'd left behind in a dorm on a university campus you haven't thought of in years.
"It's, ahh—," he rubs the back of his neck, eyes skirting toward the bar you fled from. "It's pretty."
Pretty.
"Oh…," you say, quite intelligently. "You can have it if you want."
It's only when his brows buoy to his hairline do you realise the innuendo within that.
The fire inside dies. Doused with the waters of Acheron.
"Sorry—"
"—'dunno if it'd look as good on me as it does you, bonnie."
Bonnie. Your veins crackle with ice. Bonnie.
"What—what did you call me—?"
He blinks. "Oh, it's not—," his hand slides away from his neck, scrubbing over the stubble on his jaw. He looks bashful, almost. The man in your dreams is—
Reserved. Cool waters. A rock.
"It's just a nickname, it's not—it's not anythin' weird, I promise."
A nickname. You should have known that, you suppose; but like many things, it slips, silken and liquid, through the cracks wrought by paradox.
"Right." Your nails dig into your palms, cutting the flesh until your fingers puddle with something warm, wet. Tacky. The breath you suck in between clenched teeth is a sharp hiss. "I should go."
"Ah, yeah," his brows tighten again, jaw ticking. He looks uncomfortable, unsure. Concerned. His arms come up, folding over his broad chest. And that—
That is familiar.
You swallow down mildew and honeysuckle. Heart lurching in your chest, a painful crescendo that echoes to the whispered beat of soft words in your head.
—you should stay, bonnie. stay with me—
"Can I at least make sure you get home safe?"
You can't. You can't—
There is a tavern on High Street that you've been to before in a dream, where you are taken to by a man with a distance in the crook of his smile; a degree of separation that makes you yearn. It pulled you in, gravity and magnetism and that primal something that they often talk about in wordy biology papers you can't understand.
Maybe it's the chemical slurry in your head—dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin—all mixing together, and polluting your rationale, but it made a shade of roseate fall over your eyes; veiled like a Magellanic cloud. Through the startling nebulae and cosmic radiation, he loomed. Your fingers reached out, latching on to him, and you pulled him into your orbit.
The reservations slipped, dulled by the way you fit against him. A missing piece. A complimentary artefact. His edges softened until he looked at you with nothing but warmth, affection.
And then—
Then:
Three knocks in halted succession. Military precision. Boom, boom, boom.
A man stood before you, achingly familiar in his mutton chops and hat. The gleam of his metals—chest candy—caught in the setting sun. Ochre, gold. You think of him, and you smile. Was smiling when you peeled back the curtain to greet him.
It wavers. Your heart aches for that person standing in the doorway; you from a dream.
It drags in slow motion. He takes his hat off, and cups it on his chest.
—look, i don't… i don't know how to tell you this—
Then—
"—don't." The word startles you as much as they do him. You baulk. "Just… no thank you."
Something rings in the cognitive dissonance that shrouds you.
It's your turn to walk away.
And so, you do.
(He doesn't follow. You don't know why you expected him to.)
—be patient with me, Bonnie. my job is my life. my everything, but you–you're my—
It doesn't rain—a rarity in Elgin—but the scent of wet soil, petrichor, clings to the air.
It isn't raining, but it feels like it should.
You don't expect to see him again.
And why would you? There are so many people in Elgin, so many men. The chances of finding him again—shaggy mohawk; kind, amber eyes—were nearly impossible. Infinitesimal, really.
So, you push him to the far reaches of your mind, and try not to dwell on the stranger that smells so strongly of coumarin that your head still feels dizzy from the scent of golden wheat fields in the spring and sycamore when you breathe in some mornings.
Out of sight, out of mind.
A familiar stranger in a foreign land.
But you should have known better than to expect anything in this strange purgatory you’ve slipped inside where dreams are sometimes a reality, and you can’t stop comparing a hazy figure in your mind, someone you might have loved in a distant life you have no memory of, to a stranger who slots himself into your path like he was meant to be there all along.
It starts three days later.
You tuck a book under your arm, and walk the unfamiliar path to a small cafe you’ve never dreamed of, have no lingering sense of recognition in the small building.
Safe, you think.
And then—
Blooming honeysuckle. The heady scent of coumarin. Salt, amber.
He crashes into your life again, and again, always with the same expression of happy surprise when recognition bleeds into wheat-tinged eyes.
He offers a wide smile, a little wave, and seems unbothered by a dizzying sense of unease that sweeps through each uncanny meeting, each strange divergence of paths always, always, leading to each other.
In the produce section of the grocery store halfway across town, he holds an unripened apricot and grins at you over the yellow sign above (30% off!). The colourful anchor in Cooper Park, where he stands with his hands in his pockets, eyes listing toward the swans in the background, drifting idly over the dark water. At the counter in a Turkish restaurant, laughing at something the waiter says as he takes his bag of takeout.
You turn down a random sidestreet, trying to navigate the tight, claustrophobic streets of Elgin, and he's there, suddenly, at the end. Legs thrown over the seat of a sleek motorcycle, fingers toying with the clasp of his helmet. Wander into a shop, and he's already sat at the table. Reach for a carton of eggs in Tesco's and his hand bumps against yours as he tries to grasp the same.
You hear his voice crackling through the concrete. A whisper in the back of your head. The grit, the cadence, is so different from the man you dreamed about, the hazy spectre who haunts you, that you know, instantly, that it's him. The man whose only resemblance to the ghost latching onto you is his eyes, the hairstyle. The scent. The familiarity blooms in his proximity. Two strangers sharing the same essence of a soul.
He drives past you on his motorcycle, wanders down the same alleyway, boards the same train, and gets off at the same station.
A living phantom.
It's always the same, too. His eyes always shift, somehow catching yours. Easily, effortlessly, finding you even in the midst of a crowded shop, a bustling park, or a loud eatery.
Each time, you run. And keep running.
And then once, you catch him.
He leans with his forearm resting on the railing of a mezzanine at dusk. His wrist resting on the iron, fingers gripping the nozzle of a lagger that dangles over the edge.
Behind him, music spills out from inside the flat. French doors spread wide open, leaking the whisper of a party into the warm air.
No one joins him. He doesn't look back.
His chin is pointed up toward the varicoloured sky streaked with lavender and pink and blood orange. Eyes glowing brightly in the darkness. A field of wheat against the midnight blue gloom of an approaching storm.
It's mesmerising.
Despite the urge to run, you stop. Can't help yourself, really. Not when your heart cracks at the expression on his face, eyes drawn tight, brows pinched. Full of—
Longing.
Like a magnet, then, his gaze drops to the ground where you stand, clutching your book so hard, your joints ache.
His hand lifts, fingers still curled in a loose fist, and he gives you a lazy wave from above, lips pulling back into that same wide, infectious, grin. Happy—for some inexplicable reason—to see you, his own little poltergeist.
You hesitate for a moment, burning the image of him in your retinas where he'll stay, a permanent scar, in the black puddles for you to see again when you close your eyes, or look into a mirror. Another ghost.
And then you turn. Run.
(He doesn't try to stop you. He never does.)
It is almost clockwork.
The same soft hazel eyes creased lightly in the corners. Broad shoulders are hunched as he gazes down at his phone resting on the countertop. His brows are furrowed today. Irritation bleeds in the crevasse.
Your fingers itch. You want to smooth it out.
(It doesn't surprise you that you can feel the phantom warmth of his finger under your flesh.)
It's strange. All of this is. Paradoxical, really.
You know him. You don't. You've never met him before. You know he'd taste of honeysuckle.
There is a war in your mind. A long, drawn-out battle.
(No victor in the carnage.)
You should walk away, leave, like all the times before when you'd spotted him, and ran, but:
Frozen. Paralysed.
You can't move. Can't—
—maybe, you're just tired of running—
—maybe, i'm just waiting for you to catch up—
His head lifts, and he catches sight of you before you can run. Hazel flashes in recognition. Spotted, you think; but it doesn't matter, it doesn't.
He isn't waiting for you—
His chin lifts, a smile crooking on the corner of his mouth.
—you'll be waiting a long time, Bonnie—
You want to run, but you can't. Can't. All you can do is watch as he slides out of the booth, hands shoved into his pockets, and makes his way to you. Tucked into the corner near the counter, away from everyone, everything, but he still spotted you. Still noticed. Still—
"Hi," he greets, low and cautious, like he's trying his best not to startle you. His eyes crinkle. "Didn't expect t'see you again."
You shouldn't be here. "Yeah," you say, instead, huffing. "I, uh… life is pretty funny that way, isn't it?"
His brow furrows together at your words, eyes darkening with something you can't place. An unknowable emotion, hidden from your prying eyes. You think of him, then, and see the similarities you tried so desperately to ignore each time you saw him. Each time you ran.
"Aye, it does."
You should leave him here. Turn around, flee. Forget this place, this microcosm that blooms, and spreads over parts of Elgin you know so intimately; sure, somehow, that you'll find your fingerprints smeared across the ruins despite never having been there before.
Little pieces of yourself. Shedded skin, hope, dismay, peace. Longing. Laughter. It echoes through the tight webs of cobblestone buildings, bouncing playfully off of the pilasters and balustrades, the wrought iron fences, the fanlights, forever embedded in the grout.
If you go there now, in that beautiful divisional line between new Georgian and old Baronial, you'll hear it whispering through the alcoves, a tantalising sound that rents the air in two.
But it shouldn't. Can't.
You've never been there, or here, or anywhere else that wasn't the winding path from your rented flat to the tavern, and the place you eked out from stone to support the vagary of moving to a whole new place for a dream. A feeling.
And yet—
You taste malt in the air. Smell the barley, the sickly sweet scent of wet dirt on the slick pavement.
It's familiar in your olfactory senses. Petrichor. Loam. Humus. It congeals in the slick mortar, clinging to the moss that weaves over the old concrete.
If you looked down, you'd find a little weed growing through a crack beneath your feet, and so, you fix your eyes up, ahead, and try not to weep when the swooping sense of deja vu nearly knocks you off your feet.
But the only thing ahead of you is him. Expectant, curious. He looks at you like he knows you, like he can peel back the skittish layers that cling to your skin until you're shiny and new again.
It's too much. Intense. Hazel.
Your gaze drops, fixed on the rounded points of your shoes. There is no pavement beneath your feet—just scuffed linoleum.
"Do I, uh, know you from somewhere?"
His voice carries that same heft, that same weight, as the look in his eyes. A strange approximation of wariness and steeled scepticism, blanketed together by intrigue. Curiosity. Concern.
"No."
It sounds uncertain. A white lie that crackles in the air between you, nestled amid the sound of chatter muted in the background, as if someone turned the radio on in a different room. Everything seems to contort, and shift around you when he's near.
A little microcosm eked out inside a cafe you've never been to but know, innately, what you'd order, and what you would recommend.
"Well," he dips his head like he's trying to catch your eye, and when you lift your chin, the flash of teeth nearly makes your knees buckle. He's softer when he smiles. "How 'bout lettin' me get t'know you then?"
It's a bad idea etched into the cold marble of a headstone.
Your mouth opens, but the word that chews through your teeth isn't no, but yes.
And fuck—
Something in his gaze shifts. Noctilucent eyes widen, staring down at you like he somehow didn't expect a yes at all, and was bracing for the harsh impact of no.
"Well—" he starts, but the words fall into ash when you duck your head to avoid the crevasse of hazel washed out in flushed gold. "What's your number? I'll call you when m'free next, and we can—"
"Sure," you cut in, hand sliding into your pocket. The cold metal of your phone burns the tips of your fingers when you pull it out. It feels a little bit like a mistake when you hand it over, but he says nothing about the way your hand shakes when he takes it from you.
His brows draw together in a childish concentration as he taps away at the screen. The artificial light, dimmed as low as possible, brightens the craggy ravines that cut across an emerald tinged boscage; sunlight splitting a lush valley of yellow and green. His puckered lips, the flash of a deep red tongue swiping across his sun-chapped mouth, seems designed to appeal to your baser desires. The one that knows how he'd taste if you pressed you let your tongue grace the tip of his, and can feel the weight of his hands on your flesh.
He'd hold your hips like he was anchoring you to the earth: tight, warm, and a little bit desperate as he devoured you whole.
You shiver, and try to ignore the way his pupils bloom into pits of black eclipsing lightened hazel when his gaze settles, hot and heavy, at the brief brush of skin when you reach for your phone.
"I'll call you," he says, low and strained, like he was choking on the words he wanted to say. "I'll call you as soon as I can, bonnie."
You nod. It's all you can offer with your heart scrambling up your throat, pulsing furiously against your trachea.
His nails scrape the skin of your palm when he curls his fingers into a fist, and pulls away.
"I'll see you around."
It's not a choice, you want to say. You nod instead. Choke out an equally strained, yeah, and fight the urge to follow him when he finally pulls away.
"Are you ready to order?"
The world bursts back into sound, colour. You blink rapidly against the light that seems harsher now than that it did when he was blocking out the sun.
"Uh, yeah—"
The taste of freshly poured coffee blooms on your tastebuds.
You order tea instead.
(It tastes like defeat.)
You only stop running when you can't anymore. When the murmuration in your head turns into screams, and the white-hot agony of grief, of yearning, threatens to make your knees buckle and your bruised heart give.
You stop, letting him finally catch up.
(Somehow, somehow, you feel lost and found at the same time.)
His name is Johnny MacTavish. He tells you this over dinner at some upscale restaurant that feels out of place on the old side of Elgin where the walls bleed history, and stink of old bones, and funeral dirt.
Over a steaming dish of shrimp scampi and burgundy wine that makes your head spin and belly churn, you wonder why it doesn't feel new to you when he murmurs it.
(A bit late, you find, since you've been texting rather infrequently since you gave him your number three days ago.)
Names never mentioned. Somehow, they didn't have to be. Until now. Until there was emptiness at the end of his question when he posed it, hazel eyes bright and blooming under the hushed yellow glare of the coruscating chandelier hanging above your heads.
It feels a touch too late when you share your names over dinner despite already knowing he's in the military—opinions clenched between aching teeth and a strained smile that doesn't reach your eyes—and that he normally adorns a Mohawk when he's on missions, but grows it out, rather haphazardly, when he's home.
Everything between you and him seems to happen in reverse: fears, wants, and worries are known before his given name; the touch of his skin on yours, the taste of his lips, the brush of his tongue, the weight of his palms holding your hips as he buries himself as deep as he can go in a haunting sequence of memories that bare their teeth at the starkness of reality holding them at bay. All of this before you've ever even touched him with your bare hands.
There's a strange listlessness that envelopes you—a tangled web that spools around you, trapping you in this realm of hypnagogia. The lines between reality and dream blur until they're indistinguishable from each other. Knotted threads married together. Parallel. Concurrent. Where one begins and the other ends is as lost to you as the unfathomable uncertainty of the unknown universe.
It's not meant to be this way, you think, watching as he feigns not knowing the name that slips between your numbed lips in the same manner you had only moments ago. Traps surprise in the tilt of his chin, but the display is largely done out of some unspoken agreement that this paradox does exist, and the emotion is fleeting. Temporal. He cloves it down the middle, and discards the excess as soon as you look away.
(Your name fits in his mouth better than it ever did your own, like it was made for his mouth, preordained to play with the soft coil of his tongue.)
He knows more than he lets on, but you don't begrudge him his secrets—not when you have to turn your gaze back to the curled shrimp on your plate to avoid reminding him he prefers fish over crustaceans when he makes a face at the steamed scallops, and should have ordered the Maple Crusted Salmon instead.
Like he didn't before, in a life you've never lived. In a place that mirrors this world.
(It isn't something you should know, but you do. You do.)
You know more than that, too: whispers late at night when he couldn't sleep—internal clock still stuck halfway around the world—and urges you into playing a dangerous game of asking questions of each other when pieces of truth buoy in the dark like bobbing for poisoned apples in a barrel.
You have to erase the words when you type them out, preemptively answering questions he'd never asked yet, and filling in the blanks to ones you posed yourself.
Odd, you think. Strange, and weird, and macabre in that way that only deja vu gnarling between the broken crevasse of your grey matter can imbue.
People don't just—
Know each other.
And yet—
"They call me—"
"Soap."
Your eyes snap up. A misstep. A grievous one. You've both been content to ignore this paradoxical magnetism that draws you together like eager poles, unable to stay away (not by choice or freewill, but some design that has no place in rigid structures of reality), and you broke it. Trampled over the unspoken rule left to linger in the foreground while you navigated around it like some misshapen elephant in the way.
He tries to hide the suspicion, the surprise, but it falls between the empty space of his plate (food he only ordered because he's never been here before despite the familiarity that bleeds from the walls like condensation in June) and the ledge. A proverbial precipice that you leaped down; the steep incline filled with detritus and broken shale sharp enough to carve skin, muscles, from shattered bone.
You want to swallow the words down, but they sit—innocuous and damning—between the salt and pepper shakers where his hand twitches, curls into a tight fist, knuckles bleaching under the strain of reeling himself in. Joints, cartilage, bulging through translucent skin. Reddened around the angry peaks of distrust and wariness; a summit you're not sure how to descend from now that you've crossed the arching tops.
(Stuck, forever, at the peak.)
"How—" his voice is gravel, lavascape. Jagged rocks. Lakes of sulphuric acid. "How did you know that?"
His accent thickens when he's angry. You wonder if he knows that.
"I—"
Excuses float like moots in front of you. You reach out, grasping for one, but it dances away in the turbulent wake you leave behind. You bite your tongue until it tastes of oxidised pennies, and then shrug. Nonchalant. Indifferent. Fear curls in your gut. Military, right. You wonder what you'll say if they arrest you for treachery. That you dreamed about him? Stupid. Stupid.
"You told me," you murmur, eyes downcast and heavy, fixed on the bloody cup of wine you don't like, and trying to find solace in your downfall. "I think. I just remembered it from somewhere."
It makes no sense, and the weak explanation would crumple like damp papier-mâché if he pressed, even just slightly, against it. A single touch, and the house of cards you built from the ground up on nonsensical lies will come crashing down around you.
He shouldn't entertain it. Shouldn't let it go.
"Yeah." But he does. "I must'a, huh?"
When you look up, you catch keen hazel eyes, sharp and pointed like the curved talons of a hawk. Johnny MacTavish is many things, you learn, but stupid, guileful, naïve is none of them.
"Yeah," you echo hollowly, and give another shrug. "Guess so. It's, ah, an interesting nickname."
The clumsy barb seems to break the surmounting tension, and the pieces fall around you like poisoned raindrops, staining your skin.
A reminder, then, when it crawls down your throat, that this balancing act can't last forever. That, eventually, your excuses will run dry. Empty. They'll be picked at and poked until they burst like a waterlogged, bloated corpse drifting aimlessly down the Nile.
"Not the only thing that's interesting about me, bonnie," he says in a way that bleeds boyish charm, but his grin is wide, wild, and untamed. White teeth, sharp canines. You think of a wily fox on the prowl, and reach, reflexively, for the glass of wine, swallowing it down like a lifeline. "But I'm beginnin' t'think y'know that already, don't ye?"
It's a threat. A warning.
You stare down in the half-empty glass of burgundy, the same colour red as the papercut on your index finger, and try to read the beads of crimson that run down the glass in a bloodied rivulet as if the answer could be found somewhere in the liquid.
(Crystal Ball. Crystal glass. It's all the same, isn't it?)
"Not really," is what you eventually settle for, hedging through the murk that swims before you, an unsettling fen of unknowns and praeternatural happenings that you no longer than chalk up to happenstance.
Kismet.
Horror.
Some cosmic merging of the two.
It's all—
Absurd.
And when you politely whisper to him that he should have gotten the salmon, you can't help but notice the ravines in his eyes widen slightly, the chasm growing and gaping, and taking on new shapes in the boscage that blooms like a familiar friend.
(Kismet, indeed.)
He tries to pretend he doesn't know what the maple salmon tastes like, but slips up when the waiter passes by, and says it was good the last time.
You fight the urge to chew on your glass like rock candies between your teeth.
He stands with his hands in his pocket, rocking back and forth. The uncertainty in his brow is swallowed by the tendrils of pleased excitement that knot over his expression, unable to hide his glee when the hazel of his eyes glow brighter than the sun.
Isn't this strange, you ache to say, words painted with the aftertaste of brine—sea, salt, and sand that are so uniquely him—but they, too, are swallowed down.
The urge to lacerate the bubbles of complacency, feigned normalcy, are eclipsed by the raw shock of seeing him happy. Of wanting to make him happy. This stranger in a strange land.
So, you offer some facsimile of a smile when he asks, words pushed out through a wide grin; infectious, if you had a good time.
"Yeah," you say, and know that this word, this blase affirmative is quickly becoming your faultline through this mess. The thread keeping you sane, keeping you steady.
It's at the curve of the word when everything else in the world is devoured by the shadow cast under his magnetic glow. The bright yawn of the sun in shades of white teeth catching on some ephemeral magic still dancing within the aether. Atoms spark.
You try to run from it, ignore it, but your core teeters on the edge of instability. You think of neurons. Protons. Criticality. Something inside of you heats to almost half of the degree of the sun, sweltering and unrelenting. Pulsing, blue-hot.
"That's good," he husks, eyes lidded and heavy. "I did, too. Whaddya think about doin' it again w'me?"
It blooms. A great, scorching mushroom cloud plumes in midnight black in the milky white of your eyes.
You shuffle through the darkness, the artificial, comic night, and try to pat at the walls until you find something familiar in terror, the gnawing sense of loss that permeates through your pericardium, thrumming like a mourning toll.
Sightless, you nod. "I'd love to."
And you mean it, too.
(Damn you. Damn you—)
Despite that tangled web that snakes around your jugular, twinning threads between the two of you, Johnny MacTavish is relentless in his pursuit.
Where someone else might have shivered at the ghosts that brim in the tenebrous of your pupils, lurking in the untouched corners where your fingerprints stain the sediment, he lingers. Stays. Fixes himself in your path, and refuses to acquiesce to the whims of the world that keep stringing you along like reluctant puppets to some unseen, unknown marionette.
It's almost charming in its own right, and really—when has a man fought so hard just to simply coexist in the space you deign yours? When has he torn nails from their beds, clawing at the walls that stand tall and proud, a protective tower of ashlar and dread around you until it starts to give. Until the stone crumbles away under his bloodied fingers.
But as potent as his statement is, it gnarls inside your stomach like a poisoned seed.
Bending to the demands of whatever this paradoxical realm goes against every fibre of your common sense that you recoil, almost, for just allowing him the scant space he occupies in your proximity.
It's a deranged pantomime with some unseen force at the helm, conducting the madness with fingers drenched in whimsy and fate. Notched between its knuckles is the mockery of freewill and choice as it pulls you around a soundstage set in a place you've never been. It makes you dance. Amused god, eldritch horror. It takes pleasure in your discomfort, and glee in your fickle humanity. Weaving webs of tangled kismet until the silken threads are pulled taut and there is no more room, not a single atom, between your body and his.
A nameless, faceless playwright with you as its shining star.
Hapless leads stuck in an unending beat, a cantastoria, waiting for the shoe, the curtain, or anagnorisis to drop.
You want to run again, but your feet are glued to the floor. Tangled in webs, threads of abstract concepts your mind threatens to come undone at the mere thought of. A cosmic sense of surrealism: crushing helplessness.
This is horrific and terrific in equal measure, but the ache, the agony, of distance hurts more. And so, you stay. Watch as the curtain shudders over his eyes. As the etchings of complacency seem to gnarl in the tussock that line the expansive valley. He looks at you and doesn't see the awful truth nestled in the scant distance between your flesh, unable to be apart for too long. He sees you, somehow, and for him, that's enough. Enough.
Johnny smiles at you, seemingly unbothered by the precariousness of this dance you're caught inside. In this strange equinox where you can answer questions he hasn't asked, and know things he hasn't said. Where you catch yourself leaning closer, starved for a touch you haven't forgotten despite never experiencing yourself.
He's content, then, chasing the whims of a ghost, reaching for a fantastical dream in the head of another.
But as content as he is, Johnny MacTavish is a hard man to catch, you think, noting the distance in his eyes, the arm's length of space he keeps between the version of him not haunted by the wants of ghosts, but such an easy man to love. To fall for.
He balms the panic—that world-ending sense of uncertainty that nips at your heels—and makes you forget, sometimes, that there is more to him, and more to you, than anyone else could ever know.
He's kind. Charming.
A little space inside of your head is eked out just for him, and you find yourself hating that person for falling for some version of him first. Loathe them just a little bit more with each effortless grin he sends your way for tainting the experience of knowing him yourself.
But you wonder, when he turns away, hiding the shadows in his eyes, and the pinch in his brow, if you really, truly know him.
Or if the face he's wearing belongs to a phantom.
The dance continues.
Your feet move to a soundless beat, steps preordained in a sequence lived world's ago. Nothing can feel surprising when you know a man so intimately without more than a touch, when you feel the burn of winter's chill in the middle of summer, and long so desperately for someone you just met.
Nothing is new, and yet everything is novice. A paradox awakening with each gravitational pull to him, this man who looks only vaguely like the phantom who lives in your head, and tastes of longevity between your teeth.
An arranged romance. Possession by ghosts who want to drive your bodies until they can live again, and love in tandem, vicariously through your living flesh.
It makes sense to you, then, to call for an exorcism.
(It just surprises you that Johnny does it first.)
Johnny has his secrets, just like you have yours. A small morsel of agency after autonomy has been stripped from the bone.
You see the shadows of those hidden things etched in the topography of his valley-filled gaze, crevasses and canyons that pitch themselves in the tenebrous, uncrossable to even you.
He reaches for you through the murk, fingers threading through your own, hands trembling with the shock, the electric current that sizzles through your blood at the brush of bare skin against quivering flesh. His hands are rough—worker's hands—and chock full of callouses and cuts, multitudes of scar tissue packed tight on top of each other, a thick layer of a life you will never know. Don't want to know.
He seems settled when you touch, finally, thumb brushing your skittish pulse point as if he could somehow calm the acrid panic in your chest.
(And damn him, damn this, he does. He does—)
Magnets fixed together, locked tight. You feel like a conduit to his frenzy, his hidden mania, and feed your own through the line, the red string that ensnares you both in a tangled web, until it's buzzing with shared panic and serenity and joy and helplessness. A feedback loop of emotions too extreme, too flighty, to catch. They run in droves along the lines, weaving into your skin, your chest, your head, and then pulling away to do the same to him.
His eyes are heavier than steel when he gazes at you, expression caught between relief and longing and fear and—
Something, something. You can't pick it apart. Can't undo the tight knot until it spools, open and known, in the palm of your hands. Some unseen distance. It feels like standing at the highest peak of the valley and trying to make sense of the men in the tussock who look like mere ants from this high above.
Is it happiness, you wonder.
(Or maybe it's the same reluctance that wraps it's boney, gnarled fingers around your neck—)
It becomes too much. Too soon, too sudden. In the back of your head, you see images and flashes of a life not yet lived, a world still taking shape. You see him and you and a clock above some blue, broken bed. You see his smile, wide and elated, caught on the dawning sun spilling from the open curtains before it disappears under the covers, taking your laughter with it, stuck between his teeth.
You see the past, the present.
And your future.
Cold. Barren. Three sharp knocks echo in the emptiness of your head. A man, a familiar stranger. You don't know him. You'd die for him. He rents the air in two. Your world in cloves. They fall to the ground, leaving you stranded and alone in the middle.
Future. There's no future.
Your chest twists. You let go of his hand and find bloody crescent moons embedded in a ring along his flesh, knuckles whitening under your harsh grip. He said nothing about the pain. The flicker of worry across his face is genuine, you think. Real. Current.
You smell funeral dirt in your nose. The mud is called under your nails.
You pull away. He lets you go.
"I, uh," he breaks off into a soft huff, injured hand lifting to scratch at the back of his shorn nape. His eyes slide away from yours, listing seaward. Avoidance undercuts the arch in his brow, the sheepishness in his mien. It's his turn to run, you realise.
"Glad I met you," he says instead, and it's a confession and a curse.
A bonfire burns in the river that runs through the valleys in his eyes. It's pitched on the sandy shore: an ochre flicker in the cobalt hue that saturates the land. You see the dark peaks of the rolling hills in the distance, black shapes in draped blue.
The river is calm. The fire burns a smear of orange across the tranquil surface, meeting the milky white glow of the moon.
It makes you think of those nights in the zenith of summer, the ones that feel neverending. Timeless. A piece of your history etched in balmy melancholy. Alone in the great expanse with nothing but the trill of cicadas, and the echoing chirp of the crickets hidden in the lush grass below.
The sky shifts. His eyes plume with lavender-tinged stratocumulus.
"I really like you, bonnie." It's whispered in your ear, and you wish, oh, how you wish, you couldn't hear it. That you could block the words, and the world, out so that it never reaches you again.
Sweet longing. Beautiful agony.
Your heart races, and you wonder how an empty space can beat at all. Can feel anything when it's just a hollow chasm.
A heat blooms under your skin, desperate and aching. This, this, is everything you've been looking for since your heart split free from its fleshy prison, and ran away to find him, tucking itself in the boscage that glows in the flame on the shores. It's hidden somewhere. The palpitations sound like a song. You could follow it, you think, and find its lovelorn shell nestled amongst the grass that sways to its beat, and tuck it back into your empty chest where it belongs.
(But it belongs to him, now.)
And you—
You hesitate.
The words well on your tongue, but you think of fate, of choice, and swallow them down.
The flames in the distance flicker, growing dimmer and darker as the moments stretch on, unbroken and barren until it's snuffed out. Gone.
What can you say? What could you say?
Instead, you say nothing at all.
Johnny leaves a piece of himself on the table when he walks away.
(You don't pick it up.)
Johnny doesn't say anything at all when he brings you home, when he stands outside of the archway to your flat, eyes lidded and pensive. A smile snakes across his face, but it's brittle and full of uncertainty, and your fingers ache to smooth the rugged lines in his brow, in the stress in his shoulders. You push it down. Smile for him instead.
"I'll see you later," you say, and wish the ghosts wailing in your head would drop dead.
The valley is drenched in ink when he nods, catching your gaze.
All black, black, black.
No sounds escape.
"Sure, bonnie."
You dream, and when you dream, it's of him.
He stands at the top of a hill, and when he smiles it's full of starlight so bright it could eclipse the sun.
In his hand, you see a pair of shears. Your mouth opens, but no sound escapes.
He says just one word—your name—and then he lifts his hand, and cuts the rope. The sutures knit your bodies together, the string that holds him to this mortal plane, falls in swaths of golden thread to the ground where they're devoured by the earth, dissolved into nothing. Gone, forever.
There's distance now, and separation. Nothing ties you to him except space.
You wake up with the ghost of a scream on your lips, and the feeling of silken threads dragging over your flesh. You reach for them, and catch nothing but air.
Palm pressed to your chest, you feel the rapid pulse under your fingertips, and know that it's back. Back where it belongs.
Belongs, but doesn't want to be.
You think of Johnny.
And you weep.
He sends a text message, and for the first time since you've met him, it surprises you. Nothing should shock you with him, anymore. You know everything, anything, about him.
Gonna be away for a bit. Should talk when I get back.
You reach for answers but they slide like mercury out of your hands.
You don't dance, and you don't dream.
You wander down the streets of Elgin, and for the first time since you woke up screaming in your bed with ghosts wailing in agony inside of your head, you get lost.
Johnny comes back a week later, eyes heavier than you'd ever seen them, and shoulders drawn tight together as he asks you why—
"Why'd'ya keep runnin'?" He asks, words pitched and heavy with something lour and aching, a phantom pain you know all too well. There's desperation in his eyes, a low keen settling in the depth of his throat, echoing with the clamour of his despair. "If you don't want this—;" don't want me: "—then just say so, bonnie, 'cause I ain't forcin' ya t'be w'me, I ain't gonna make you stay. You wanna leave, you can just go—"
Can't. Can't.
"Johnny—"
"No, none o'that, now. You make up your mind, 'cause I ain't makin' it for ya. I ain't makin' ya do somethin' you don't want to, and I ain't—"
He's pleading, you think. Begging—
For this, this strange thing. This awful, broken calamity, this abomination in the face of free will and autonomy. Despite the rage that hums in your veins at the idea of being controlled, manipulated, he finds something worth chasing. Worth running for.
Why?
And what?
And—
It comes in flashes, snippets. Fragmented pieces of bright eyes—brighter, maybe, than the sun—and warmth, one hot enough to burn but it doesn't, it won't, it soothes instead. Eases coiled muscles, and absorbs the lactic acid that leaks from shredded, knotted fibres. Hands on your body, on your skin: the press of rough fingertips over prickling flesh. A whisper of curiosity, the slow descent into affection, adoration. Plush lips pillowing sharp teeth, too reverent to ever leave a mark behind—part in fear of marring fragile skin, and—
Letting the ghost of permanence fester, take root, inside his chest where his heart beats—
Jus' f'r you, bonnie. Jus' you.
For once, the phantom touching your body isn't a dream, a half-lived fantasy in another world where a man-made you whole and then ripped you into pieces, letting the scattered fragments blow with the sharp winds howling through the highlands. You know the touch, remember it. Felt it. New, and tangible. A touch that never lingered, too afraid of letting something, something, stick.
For once—
The snaps flashing, blindingly, through your synapses are not made of dream dust and kismet.
And—
All at once, it shatters.
—you know, i never thought i'd say this before, but i—
(You were lost in Elgin, but when you see his face, you feel found—)
THERE—
There is a lot to be said about Johnny MacTavish.
Good things—kind, dedicated, driven—and bad things—bold, stoic, dogmatic—but one thing neither have in common is tardiness. Broken promises.
So, when Johnny calls you in some distant land you've never heard of, and says:
Things got bad. I might not—I might not be coming home.
You believe him.
But the thing is: there's a difference between believing the words being said to you, and understanding their meaning. Your mind is not equipped to latch onto devastating blows with the same swiftness you do ignorant bliss.
So, when you hear I might not be coming home, you think, instead, of tardiness. Of a missed anniversary dinner.
(Of all the ones that came before it, and will come after it.)
And you smile. Smile into the receiver with your heart drifting down Lethe.
"Okay, Johnny," you say, and those words will come back to haunt you three days from now, when John Price shows up at your goddamn door, stupid bucket hat tucked tight to his chest, and rips your heart into pieces.
But for as much as you are blissfully ignorant, your mind still understands nuance. They used to call it foresight, a sixth sense; hindsight.
You add, softer than you've ever said the words: "I love you."
His breath stutters through the line in response. A brief pause. And then—
"If anything happens—" you hate him a little for even saying it; you really do: "just know that I love you, too. And that I hope—ah, Christ, bonnie, you got me all stupid, now—but, fuck, I hope we meet in another life."
It knocks something loose inside of you. Some primaeval thing that nestled in the safety of your ribs, moulting along your moon-white bones and glueing to the soft tissue that pulsed around it. It's shaken. Dislodged.
It feels a little bit like your soul is being scraped off of bone.
"Johnny—"
"—gotta go. We haven't heard from Roach or Riley in a while. I probably won't call tonight. So, don't wait for me, bonnie."
The line clicks before the words I've been waiting for you forever fall from your wobbling lips.
You hate Johnny a little bit for this. For digging his roots deep into the soft chambers of your heart where it gnarled around your pericardium. A perfect little knot. A bow tied nice and pretty just for him.
It makes it so much harder to bare when John fucking Price knocks on your door, stupid fucking bucket hat tucked tight against his chest, ghosts in his eyes, blood on his hands, and rips your heart into pieces until nothing but the rotten, dying roots remain.
"I hate you so much right now," you hiss at the tombstone—the only thing you have left of him. "I hate you and I miss you and I wish you were here so I could—"
John finds you with your forehead pressed against the brass plaque, cheeks raw from the rivulets of tears that feel endless—a baptism in grief; in your tear ducts, Noah battles the biblical flood, and loses.
Eyes that can't see past a shimmering hinterland of death and abject dismay are fixed, broken, against speckled granite.
It's agony. The kind that makes it feel as if the marrow in your bones turned into a corrosive liquid, molten and devastating, and burst through brittle, hollow bone.
Price, you've come to realise, seems to know things beyond what you tell him. Always picking up the shedded skin that falls from the people around him. Little pieces of them that he shoves in his pocket to ruminate on when he's trying to put together the puzzle of who they are.
Words won't penetrate through the haze in your head. It filters in like water through a rhyne, back out to the open sea.
(He knows this, of course, because you've been shedding pieces of yourself around him for years.)
It doesn't surprise you, then, when he says nothing. When he just falls to his aching knees in the soft humus, resting beside you as your world crumbles into ash and heartache.
You sit in numbed silence until the sun is swallowed by the dusk that creeps across the sky. The moon itself seems to mourn along with you, hiding her eyes behind a nebulous veil of gunmetal.
Price, without a word, helps you stand when the gravekeeper comes and ushers you out. He shepherds you into his Jeep and brings you back to the place that reeks of loneliness and dinners for one. A place that still carries the ghost of his presence around every corner, tucked away in each alcove and nook.
He might be gone, but his shadow still lives and breathes the dank, funeral air that clings to your sallow skin. A miasma of loss that tangles itself in every atom around you.
Price seems hesitant to step inside, but you'd rather sleep on the patio with the chirping crickets and the weeping moon than be inside where the echo of his voice whispers through the halls, and he knows this, because he knows you, and so he brings you in before you can entomb yourself in grief, lost to the elements. He sets you down gingerly on the couch, body now more fragile than fine china, brushing your tangled hair from your forehead. It catches on his weathered hands. You barely feel the pull.
He looks at you like you're a battle that can't be won.
"Take care'a yourself, yeah? It's what—" he chokes, then, and you feel the hiccup like a white-hot knife to your gut. "It's what he would've wanted."
What he wanted is gone, and it's dead—just like him.
You don't say these words, but you wonder if he knows them, hears them, anyway. He must, you think, watching as the ashy, smoked cedar of his beard twitches. His mouth gnarls to the side in grief, uncertainty.
He says your name. You know this because you know the shape it makes of his mouth, but don't you hear it. All it sounds like is a nail scraping over waterlogged, mossy wood.
Price leaves.
A part of you goes with him.
You rest your forehead against his pillow, the one that smells of him still—warm milk, honeysuckle—and you wish so hard on broken promises, unfilled dreams, to see him again, to hold his face in the plinth of your palms, that your heart feels like it might burst—
—break.
But it's already broken. There's nothing left to shatter. The pulpy mess he left behind beats not because you want it to, but because it has to. A biological failsafe that does not care about your human emotions even as it quivers and shakes at the loss that tipped your world upside down. A gaping hole sits in the middle in the shape of his smile, and your stubborn heart pulses around the wound.
Sometimes you think it would be easier to feel nothing at all. To shed the agony like a rotting limb, cutting it as close to the bone as you can, and watching it fall, blackened with decay, and postulating with infectious spores that bud, devouring unblemished, unhurt, flesh until you're a pristine corpse.
Grief twists you into the living dead. Breaks your head in two, cloved clean down the middle of unrelenting panic and anger—anguish so severe, you can easily convince yourself nothing at all is real.
But it is.
And then there is only denial and abject horror at that unimaginable nothingness that looms, blooming in your insides until they turn into a gaping, festering maw. One that makes you feel like you could swallow the whole world and still feel empty.
No longer a human on the inside but a chasm. The person you were before died the moment his heart stopped beating. Irrevocably changed with three, stark knocks against the door he painted yellow because it reminded him of the way you looked standing in a field of sunflowers. Gone. Gone—
A barren void with its insides scraped out. Hollow. Wind rattles through your chilled bones. It sounds like his voice when it ghosts over your ribcage.
You chase the sound.
Running, running, running. Going so fast, it barely feels like your feet touch the ground. A wingless bird soaring across the valleys that gleaned in his hazel eyes.
Running, running—
Your feet slide against marshy peat. A hidden bog gurgles beneath your soles.
You don't scream when you sink.
(The bubbles sound just like him—)
You smile.
—NOW
Eldritch machinations, some fanciful god playing a chaotic game of matchmaker, a dizzying sense of folie a deux—you haven't quite determined what the reason for this is, who or what might be behind it, but one thing you do know is this:
Something might be aligning your paths until all trails lead to him, but when you wander down those Wonderland roads, your heart beats for him.
A second heart pulses under your skin. One slipped inside when you cupped his cheeks in your palm, and told him when you looked, you saw only him.
It might not be a choice you've made in this lifetime, but it's certainly one you can't bring yourself to regret.
You run, but this time, it isn't away from him, but to him.
He tastes of coumarin when you press your lips to his, a kiss met in the middle.
You're lost, now, in the swell that gusts across the boscage. A breeze dances over your ears. A thousand starlings coo in the clear blue aether above. You feel the tickle of barley against your knees. Rasping tussock sedge curls over your ankle, weaving together until you're tied to the ground. Anchored against the stalks of wheat that shiver in the wind.
His hands are warm, solid, on your skin. One hand braced on the small of your back, keeping you pressed firmly against him. The other cups your chin like you're made of fine china, polished crystal full of precious gems and rare metals. He holds tight as if he's afraid you'll drift away when he lets go.
Your head is blooming full of sunflowers. They germinate in your thoughts until the petals burst through, lifting high to the heavens where the sun burns half as hot as his body angling against yours.
His atoms sing, calling to yours. A buzz, a hum. You feel them stretch, shifting from the prison of you until equilibrium is reached when they merge, tangling together. A new being, a new entity is born from the collision—a person made of two with lungs and hearts that breathe and beat in the same cadence as it's ghosts. Woven together with marionette strings.
It feels like coming home and getting lost all at once.
Etched in the delicate flesh of your heart sits a kairos moment. A brief period of nothing that runs as deadly and tumultuous as the Swillies. An upheaval.
Time is tenuous. Broken. Fragmented.
An arm stretches out, anchoring across your waist. His mouth presses a kiss to your bare shoulder, eyes glossy in the mid-morning sun.
"Wha' time's it?" He slurs out, words thick with sleep.
Your eyes cut to the alarm clock on the end table. A slow, languid smile curls across your kiss-bruised mouth.
"Eleven-fifteen," you breathe, eyes fixed on the red lines. Your heart stutters when it flickers. "Eleven-sixteen."
"S'too early," he moans, lips rubbing over your flesh. "Stay in bed with me."
You peel your gaze away from the clock ticking down the seconds (minutes, hours, days, months, years), and turn to him. Hazel in bloom. A boscage in spring. Your eyes mist a little from the morning dew.
"I love you, Johnny."
His breath ghosts over your skin. You hear the hitch in his voice when he speaks.
"Been waitin' a long time t'hear you say that, bonnie."
"Sorry to keep you waiting."
—don't wait for me, Bonnie. i'll come find you—
—THEN
"Excuse me? You dropped this."
It's raining. Pouring, really. The droplets are the size of pennies and pelt the top of your umbrella with an unforgiving force. It sounds like the clatter of a mourning bell, and drowns everything else out.
But it catches. Clear. Low.
You turn, blinking through the thick fog that congeals around High Street in a dense, white blanket.
"Sorry?"
A man. He's towering above you, cut off at the chest by the fine points of your umbrella. You lift it, and—
Your wallet is the first thing you see. Wet, covered in grit from the cobblestone. It's clenched between a thick thumb and forefinger, held delicately together. You baulk.
"Oh, shit—," it's snatched out of his hand, and pulled into the sanctuary of cover. You can feel it already. The mess inside. Still. You hope—
The leather peels back. Mush.
You groan. The meagre bills you'd pulled from the machine are now wet, sticking together in a papier-mache square. Useless. No one is going to accept sopping wet bills.
"Alright?"
"No, I—," you glance up at him, irritation cutting across your brow. No, you're not alright. You're shit out of luck, and stranded here, now. And—
And—
Hazel. It's the first thing you see. Mountains of brown slope into a lush green valley. A cool blue lake cuts through, splitting off into a ravine.
Your breath catches.
"Sorry, umm. Yes. I'm—"
Attractive is the first word that springs to your mind when you stare at him—dark eyes, furrowed brow, long nose, a dusting of charcoal stubble along his cheeks and jaw, and full pink lips. Kissable is the second one.
And then—
Oh, God.
"Sorry," you murmur again, cheeks heating despite the chill. "I'm fine. Thank you, I'm—"
"You're not," he says, and it's uttered so assuredly that you can't find it in yourself to lie. As if he is somehow able to chisel into your head, and rifle through your problems with ease. "It's all wet, isn't it? Were you heading home, or—?"
It's cliche. Stupid. Your belly rumbles.
Mortifying. Absolutely—
His lips quirk up. A soft, almost secretive smile. Reserved. "Well, I know this place around the back. I could use the company, if you wouldn't mind."
You should say no. No, thank you—because you were raised proper. But all you can think about is the deep, brassy tone that tickles your ears when he speaks. The distant, almost careful way he regards you, as if he's putting himself at arm's length so you aren't scared off by his brawn.
Hazel is dusted in gold. You want to bask in his warmth for just a moment longer—
"I'll pay you back, I promise."
His brows raise. Hazel framed in white. A soft huff leaves his full mouth before his lips pull up in a slow, genuine smile.
"Y'alright, bonnie. I'll hold you to it."
(And so, it begins.)
#john soap mactavish#soap x reader#Johnny MacTavish x reader#og soap x reader#og soap#john soap mctavish x reader#john soap mctavish x you#cod fanfic#AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH#this took me forever#idk why#i just?? expected more fluff but instead we get horror and grief and eventually fluff#kinda#like#sorta#idk#enjoy
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I've got a pride month request coming along as well, I'm just getting lots of writing juices back. So don't mind me, sorry, a little "fun" mental health post. Don't take all of this as 100% as I'm not a mental health professional but I do study psychology for leisure.
Dissociation and indifference.
While able to crack jokes and engage with others, he's generally learned to keep his hands out of hot water, and if he does, he doesn't show that it burns him. On top of many mental health medications causing fatigue, distance, and emotional lows, Ghost does his best not to express the stress that work brings to him. Which is something that can be seen either as a strong male role model, or the less healthy version, evasion of one's emotional needs over physical.
Let's be honest, Ghost spends most of his time in the gym rather than talking to a therapist. And while working on yourself physically can be a breath of fresh air, sometimes it's good to let the mind breathe too.
It takes him a lot of time to open up. For a lot of people, recognizing that trust is trust no matter how close you are to the person. Ghost's lack of trust does not distinguish between blood or friend. It has to be him that makes that step, but it's working through the indifference that helps get to the core of his pain. As indifference to topics like mental health discussions can be a coping mechanism against how one feels.
"Simon, can I get you some tea?" You asked when you looked over at him and saw him sitting silently on the couch. He rubbed his knuckles as he stared at the wall, then shrugged.
"Are you hungry?"
Another shrug. "Depends what you're making." He finally responded, deadpan and unenthusiastic. You frowned softly and decided to make him some tea. Soon heading to the couch, you set down the cup and sat next to him.
You quietly relaxed. "Would you like to talk about anything?" You knew you had to let Simon come to you. It was difficult, but extending that offer and reassuring him you were there was always the first step.
He was quiet for a moment. "No."
"Ok... When you're ready." You gently rubbed his shoulder. You relaxed next to him and turned on the tv. The faint glow of the passing frames flashed against his pupils but his reactions to it were minimal.
After some time, he reached for the tea and took some sips. "Y/n...?" He shifted slightly.
You looked over at him and nodded.
"Can we... Talk about something?"
You paused the movie and shifted to sit facing him some more, giving him your attention. "Of course, what do you need to talk about?"
His shoulders relaxed slightly at the reciprocation, and slowly brought his needs and feelings out, letting you see the inner workings for a little bit. And you listened.
Dramatic emotional switches.
Sometimes this is harder to analyze or to catch, but this can be a sign of stress or like indifference, a cherry aversion to the hectic world around us.
While this can absolutely just be someone's nature, mental health is most times disguised within layers of regular everyday emotion that not even the person doing it may realize.
I think Johnny's cheerfulness comes from his nature, but under stressful circumstances it can come out as a way of attempting to feel in control of his hectic environment. We don't see this often, but it is common amongst individuals struggling with stress and anxiety.
But after these stressful happy sprints, it can lead to an emotional low due to stress catching up, or being too much to ignore and push aside. Leading to days of not feeling happy at all. Common themes of depression can be random emotional highs, followed by feeling like the world is horrible and you'd rather die than do anything else.
Like with Ghost, this can absolutely be a character trait to boost morale in friends, not wanting to see them fall into the emotional state they are wishing to ignore. During work, Johnny comes off as a strong and intelligent role model, and I think he knows how to distinguish work and personal life better than the others. Willing to confront the bulk of his feelings and stress when in an environment where he doesn't feel the need to constantly be the last line of morale.
It had been a while since you'd seen Johnny. You'd recently come back from a pretty excruciating mission and you couldn't blame him for wanting rest. When dinner rolled around you headed to his room and knocked. "Johnny?"
A minute of silence before Johnny perked up. "Come in."
You shifted the door and headed inside to see him relaxing on his bed with his sketchpad. "Hey y/n." He smiled warmly, sharing his warm presence with you.
"Heh Johnny, food is out in 20, guy hungry?"
"Yeah! I'll be out in a bit. I've just gotta finish this drawing."
"Cool, can I have a look?"
He hesitated slightly, then nodded, his smile returning. "Yeah sure." He sat up and let you come over and see his sketchbook. You looked down at the drawing and smiled softly. "I keep forgetting you're so good at that."
He looked up at you, the smile on his lips not fully translating to the lost expression behind his eyes.
You looked at him, and gently touched his shoulder. "You good? I know you had a close call, even if the medics said you were good."
"Yeah, I'm feeling good. A little sore, but it comes with the territory." He closed his sketchbook.
A moment of silence came between you two, and the look you gave him made tears spill into his eyes. "Johnny..." You opened your arms.
Johnny hesitated before hugging you tightly. You held him back, gently stroking his back. "You're ok... We're all ok." You assured him as his tears wet your shoulder. "You did amazing.."
Johnny let out the burst of emotion, finally allowing himself to come down from that false high, and rest in the knowledge that he was ok here.
Overworking, trouble distinguishing work from personal life.
Price has a tendency to overwork himself when he's feeling stressed or agitated. Oftentimes indulging in one or more cigars to momentarily get a hit of relief for a much more extensive problem. When growing up with role models that pushed for perfection and hard work it can make it hard to distinguish the stresses of work from personal life. Price ends up taking a lot of the work stress home, and vice versa.
This can lead to him feeling even more stressed or striving to trap the things going on around him in both personal and professional settings under his thumb. Burying himself in his work can help him feel like he's being productive or that he has control over what happens in that space.
He's constantly reassuring his team, as captain even if he feels out of control it's his job to keep his head on and make sure his team feels like he has both hands on wheel, which can be stressful. Over time this is a tactic that has been branded into his behaviour and he is always doing this.
In his home life this can affect how he acts in the home, including feeling a need to take control more often to feel that people he loves in his environment are properly taken care of.
This can also lead to his underlying anger and tendencies to push down his frustrations and work it out through physical activity or cussing at a wall until he's tired. But, also not the type of person to go to therapy about this, as he may not even realize it's a problem if it's so deep in his routine.
You leaned on the doorframe of Price's study as he worked away. He'd had dinner in there, and the plate was still stacked on the edge of the desk where he'd mentally told himself he would take it back.
"You doing ok, John?" You asked, and walked over to him.
"Mhm. Got stuff to do for Laswell..."
"Important report?"
He shrugged. "Something like that. Just need a bit. I'll come away soon."
You nodded and gently rubbed his shoulder. "Well, don't work yourself stiff, ok?"
He nodded after a moment, his eyes not leaving his computer. You didn't say anything else and left him to his work. Around an hour later you came back. "How's it coming?"
"Mm... More stuff to finish." He muttered, still glued to the screen.
"It can wait, you're off duty... I'm sure Laswell knows that."
This time Price didn't respond, and you knew you needed to step in. "John." You came over and gently touched his shoulder. Finally, he looked up at you, searching your eyes for anger.
You gently squeezed him. "Why don't we play a game together?" You gave him a soft smile, and his shoulders tempted to give way under your touch.
"Why?"
You gently took his hat off and brushed his hair away. "Because, I know you need to do something, so come do something with me. I want to spend time with you."
He leaned slowly into your touch, allowing you to close his laptop. "Can I pick the game?"
"You know you can."
Price stood and you wrapped your arms around him, and he hugged you back. "We can do this together, you're home..."
Mistrust, underlying frustration and vocal outbursts.
Life can be extremely stressful in their line of work and from my perspective, this shows in Gaz's contrast between his calm collected nature and the vocal outbursts he has. This is no doubt because of stress and building frustration that he is struggling to control.
His mistrust in authority or inability to understand or rationalize his surroundings can lead to these outbursts. Kyle's calm and collected side is something to be desired, but when he's alone and has nothing to focus on, that anger can quickly turn unchecked. Whether it be beating a punching back or spending most of his time angrily analyzing interactions or comebacks to conversations in his head for hours.
It's a constant loop, while working, while trying to relax, he's always got an interaction that irritated him running through his head. Or feeling like he isn't smart enough because he couldn't come up with the answers for the conversation at that moment.
Kyle was beating himself up. He felt like such an idiot. I had the bastard right in his hands. He frowned, throwing another furious kick at the punching bag. "Bloody- stupid bastard!" He ground his teeth angrily.
By that point his frustration was obvious. You went over to check on him. "Everything ok, Kyle?"
"I fucking had him!"
You nodded a little. "Hey, can't blame yourself, we all have mishaps."
"Not this time." He said with exasperation. "I had him right there! I had him in my hands! And he still got away..."
You reached over and gently took his arm. "Kyle,"
He moved away, but you gently touched him again. "Kyle, look at me, please."
He exhaled heavily and looked at you, the frustration evident. "I know it's frustrating. But we'll get him. We always do."
"I know..." He hung his head. "I wish I could have done more... The look on the captain's face.."
You gently took his hand and squeezed it. "You're strong, Kyle. You're the best of the best." You gently rubbed his knuckles. "But even the best of us make mistakes, and mess up. You don't have to worry about being perfect."
He blinked, his frustration filtering out from anger, to tears. "Bloody... Hell.."
"Can I give you a hug? You look like you need one."
His shoulders dropped, and with that you gently hugged him. "We'll get him... I promise. But we aren't pinning this on you, ok?"
He squeezed you, a tear rolling down his cheek. You'd stand there as long as he needed, as long as he knew the weight wasn't on him to be the perfect soldier.
#call of duty#simon ghost riley#john soap mactavish#johnny soap mactavish#captain john price#ghost x reader#call of duty headcanons#kyle gaz garrick#simon ghost riley x reader#kyle garrick x reader#kyle garrick#john price headcanons#captain john price x reader#john mactavish headcanons#john mactavish x reader
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Caregiver Katsuki Bakugo Headcanons
A/N: Hey!!! This is my first like. Writing related post. In a WHILE. Sorry about that!! But please feel free to request anything, I’m kinda bored. :P
Warnings: Minor swearing but I think that’s it ???
Bakugo is very aggressive. We all know this. Pretty much all the time, he’s aggressive and seemingly angry. And this does not waver or change, even when you’re regressed. So if you’re super sensitive, he probably wouldn’t be the best for you.
However, that’s not to say he doesn’t care. Quite the opposite, actually. He would die for you and actively goes out of his way to protect you.
Oh, he would get SO mad if anyone ever said anything remotely negative to you about your age regression. He wouldn’t even try to reason with them or have a debate he would straight up just tell them to kys 💀 (me core)
He does better with toddler or kid regressors, but baby regressors are fine as long as they can tolerate his naturally rough and callous behavior.
He did not know what the hell age regression was before he met you. Honestly, I feel like he’d come off as judgey at first. He doesn’t mean to, it’s just how he is. But then he’d go and research it a bit and realize that it’s not anything weird or fetishy and is instead a healthy coping mechanism.
He’s a little hesitant to be your caregiver at first. He says it’s because he isn’t sure if he wants to focus on anything other than training right now and being a caregiver is a lot of responsibility. That’s partially true. But it’s mainly really because he’s afraid he won’t be good at it and will just end up hurting you and potentially ruining one of your only healthy coping mechanisms.
It takes a lot for him to be able to open up to someone and take care of someone like that, but eventually, he does it. And he finds he enjoys it. He finds your little antics and your dependency on him really adorable.
He’s not embarrassed or ashamed that you age regress. I feel like nearly half of class 1-A regresses so it’s not unusual at all for you two to be in the common room, you sitting on his lap with a sippy cup in hand.
Sets you up on play dates with Kaminari and Mina all the time. He wants you to have fun and interact with other littles. Plus, they’re his friends and their caregivers are his friends too.
Takes a little bit to get used to nicknames as well. But finds he likes parental nicknames a lot more than he thought he would.
The first time you called him dada was something he will never forget. You were half asleep, snuggling in his chest, when you realized you were thirsty. You lazily grabbed his shirt and gently tugged on it and went, “Dada…juice…?”. He immediately knew what you wanted and he gave you the juice. He didn’t even register the nickname until a few seconds later and was really shocked. He didn’t say anything about it in the moment, though. He talked to you about it when you were big again and he clarified that he was okay with it and it didn’t make him uncomfortable.
Midoriya and Kirishima are his go-to babysitters. Mainly Midoriya because he’s more responsible than Kirishima. But Midoriya can get busy quite a lot. And Bakugo’s also a little anxious about you possibly liking Midoriya more than him, although he would rather die than admit that out loud lol.
He can cook. This is canon. This mf can cook like a 1950s housewife it is INSANE. He makes all your food for you, especially when you’re little. He likes taking care of you, even if he won’t really say it.
If you’re like me, and you tend to have really bad rage episodes and outbursts when you’re overstimulated or upset, he’s got you. He knows how to deal with that. He’s got a punching bag in his room that he lets you beat the shit out of if needed. He can make you laugh too. You’ll be beating the fuck out the punching bag and he’ll pretend like it’s a real person and say shit like “YEAH‼️‼️‼️ BEAT HIS ASS‼️‼️‼️🗣️🗣️🗣️” and it makes you giggle.
Surprisingly okay with physical affection. You wanna cling to him? That’s fine. Just listen to him if he tells you to get off of him. Respect his boundaries and don’t get in the way when he’s doing something important and it’s cool. 🙏
#age regression#agere#my hero academia#MHA#MHA agere#my hero academia agere#katsuki bakugo#bnha bakugo katsuki#bakugou katsuki#katsuki bakugo x reader#mha bakugou#Bakugo#Katsuki Bakugo agere
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Hello hello,dearie!!
How are you,good?
My name is Nina or Weewoo,self proclaimed platonic (Hazbin) asker!
I have seen your platonic works,and I have to say,you've peeked my interest,darling!
The way you write is very wholesome and cute,so please,indulge me in an ask!
May I request a Zestial,Rosie,Alastor,Vox,Husk,Charlie and Carmilla (you may remove,replace or add character as you so please! I simply like to give a character list so you can choose!) with a platonic!child!reader that loves art but gets really messy with it? A little energetic artist.They're all giddy and happy getting everywhere with the rainbows and sunshines. Maybe one time they get really upset because they messed up,and they start to cry? (If you need an age approximate,maybe 6-10 years old?)
I hope that not too much info!!
Have fun writing this,don't forget to drink,eat,and take breaks!!
Have a fantastic day,honey!
Stay proud.
-Nina <33
A/n: My shift key fell off so I'm having a hard time with that. Sorry if I accidentally didn't capitalize something! (I planned to also do Vox but I couldn't think of anything, I'm so sorry!)
!!not proofread!!
Roise: Doesn't care that you are messy with art at all! She'll make sure you don't stain or break anything but besides that she lets you go wild. Would probably give you your own art room. Is also very sad when you mess up. She hates seeing you sad. She draws with you to help you feel better.
Alastor: He likes you but stay away from him when painting. He would rather keep having a red suit, rainbow wouldn't suit(ha) him. Though he does give you room to paint and draw where you want. All those spaces are suspiciously close to Husk. Tries (and likely fails) to comfort you when you mess up. Might draw with you to help you smile again. After all, you're never fully dressed without a smile.
Husk: Talks to you while you draw. Kind of like you are a drunk bar patron lol. But instead of their insecurities it's what animals you like (or maybe about your insecurities too.) Very grumpy especially when you get paint on him but he does care deep down. For example, when you mess up he helps you calm down. Gets you some chocolate milk or apple juice or whatever you want <3.
Charlie: Very supportive! She'll draw with you!!! Happy to help get you supplies. While she gets that you're a child and usually wouldn't be that upset about making messes, Nifty keeps giving you death glares and she doesn't want to risk anything. Feels bad when you're upset. She'll get you anything that she can help to make you calm down, and also does a group session on learning about healthy coping mechanisms. It's supposed to help you not break down but everyone in the hotel, including her, could use it.
Carmilla: She has two kids so I'd imagine she has some experience. Hangs your art on the fridge like a true mother. While she does like you being hyper and happy she doesn't think the house needs a new paint job. She'll try to make sure you get most of your paint and markers on the paper. Like I said she has two kids so she is great when comforting you when you mess up. She'll encourage you to try again and might even draw with you if that helps.
#hazbin hotel x reader#alastor x reader#carmilla x reader#charlie x reader#rosie x reader#hazbin hotel alastor x reader#husk x reader#charlie morningstar x reader#platonic#child reader#No YOU reblogging about 100 k0sa things to your fandom blog and didn't do fandom content for weeks
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Dany fan here: I think other Dany fans think Jonsas are over the top with Dany hate because of pol!Jon. I follow many Jonsas because I’m perfectly fine with Jonsa. It’s not for me but I see the vision. That said I’m a bit of an unusual Dany fan in the sense that I’m a big fan of the Meereenese Knot essays and think the interpretation of Dany presented there is pretty spot on. I personally think Dany has a good heart but that circumstance and experience and terrible coping mechanisms have led her to act in villainous ways and whether or not a character is a villain is determined by their actions regardless of whatever goodness is in their heart. But anyway I do not like the pol!Jon theory. I think it’s out of character for Jon and needlessly cruel to Dany. I think it’s possible that he ultimately kills her and that could be fine and I don’t reject that theory, but I think the idea of Jon deceiving and sexually abusing Dany and then killing her for the sake of Sansa is what Dany fans think of when they think of over the top hate because they assume every Jonsa shipper also believes in pol!Jon.
I do understand why people thought Jon was deceiving Dany in the show though because their relationship was just so poorly executed and Kit and Emilia had no chemistry on screen. Imagine fucking up your show’s romance so badly that people think the script confirming that the love was mutual must have been tampered with.
Hi there!
(I think Dany is a compelling tragic villain, and it's lovely seeing someone loving her for it!)
I do think that pol!Jon (under duress, esentially) is a not unreasonable theory that grew out of the way the show presented their relationship. If there was sexual abuse I think it's fair to say it was in the hands of the more powerful party, though.
That said, I don't see it happening that way in the books at all and I think all characters will be better off for it. I agree it wouldn't feel right.
Certainly not in a punitive "you thought he would love you but he really loves Sansa, now die!!!" way. That cheapens jonsa as much as it cheapens the complexity of the conflict between Dany and Jon.
It's just a deeply uninteresting way to explore their existing conflict or their respective strengths. Not to be a hater but it's not exactly riveting literature watching Dany be manipulated by Daario and it's unlikely to be more so in a repeat performance with Jon who isn't even her type. Same as watching Jon go through a repeat of the abusive Ygritte plotline would be less than compelling.
We'll have instances of romantic manipulation. Littlefinger is practically begging Sansa to use his own obsession against him, and Arya gives us a preview when she lures Raff to his death wearing "Mercy's" face. That's been set up since the first book, and it works as a satisfying response to the way everyone has been telling Sansa how weak and simple she is. It's very personal, very steeped in their respective histories, very poetic.
But for Jon and Dany I think we can expect something more universal and even-handed than that. They are both at varying points manipulative and earnest, highly clever or unexpectly outmaneuvered. And neither will be in this conflict all alone and without advice. Not to mention, we have both of their POVs and watching one just miss all the clues of the other manipulating them would be flat. This only ever works with one POV withheld. The show tried that with Jon Snow live on the screen, to disastrous results. No way is that GRRM's plan.
I'd rather watch two clever adversaries play a big game of chess. And given GRRM's love for that game, I am certain it's also what he would prefer to write.
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Stressed Out
adaman x reader
(after a hell of a long hiatus, i am back from the dead! kinda. so, i'm not going to promise anything anymore as i apparently never know when inspiration is going to strike, and i never know where the hyperfixation will take me. i was trying to get this out for nine months now, but this was... not coming until tonight. sorry y'all for the wait, but here it is after all this time! also, this is my longest one to date. the others barely scratched 1000 words, some managing 1700, but this one... is a beast. it's near 3000 words. the inspiration to write struck me hard. hope you guys enjoy! )
reader is gender-neutral. they/them pronouns will be used if any pronouns at all.
finally, i bring to you this prompt
—
Everything was overwhelming.
The past few weeks, the stress had been mounting as you fought tooth and nail to be seen as an asset rather than a nuisance. You wore yourself down to the bone, putting your heart and soul trying to please everyone so the suspicion would die down only for it to mount more and more with people with each passing day. You had already been cast out once, and earned your way back into the Galaxy team. So why were people still suspicious? How much would you have to do to gain everyone’s trust? Why did you constantly have to fight for everyone’s approval?
Why did the other clan leaders believe in you more than your own clan did?
All you craved was somewhere to call home again. Somewhere you could rest your head at night and simply sleep, rather than spending all your time being anxious about one wrong perceived move and you’d be kicked out of the village again. The stress felt like it was piling up on your already tense shoulders, and you felt so overwhelmed.
Everything was overwhelming.
Instead of slamming your fists into the first and cursing everyone to please, for the love of all that is holy, give me some credit — you got to work. Like always.
You’d overheard about a Zorua outbreak in the Alabaster Icelands, which was exactly what you needed. A young man in the village had asked to see the completed entry for Zorua, so this would be the perfect opportunity to finally cross this Pokemon off your to-do list. So, off you set toward the Pearl Clan settlement so you could check in in case something goes wrong. Even though you were far more trusting of Pokemon than others around you, you still didn’t underestimate the ones that were absolutely ready to kill you in a moment’s notice. Alpha Pokemon were far more angry than any other Pokemon you’d come across in your time.
Arriving in the Pearl settlement, the snow softly crunching under your boots, you hear not one, but two familiar voices to the side. Oh, Adaman is here as well. You vaguely remember them talking about a meeting about… something about traditions, or something? The details were fuzzy. You have been focusing far more on your own tasks and stresses than anything else.
Irida noticed your presence almost immediately and smiles, waving you over. Adaman joined along when he sees you as well.
“Well, our favourite Galaxy member is here! How are you?”
“I’m good, Irida, thank you.” You offer her a kind smile, keeping all your stresses tucked away neatly into a corner of your mind. Put them in a box, and file it away. Not the healthiest coping mechanism, but one that’ll at least get you through this. “How are you guys doing?”
“We’re just discussing our cultures and possibly having a party to mingle the clans a little easier,” Adaman responded easily, throwing up his three fingers as a hello with his signature grin that never fails to make you smile in return.
“Sounds like fun.”
“It isn’t.”
“Hey!” Irida responded, stomping her foot down with her hands clenched at her sides. “I’m not the one being unreasonable!”
“Yeah yeah,” he waved her off, then turned his attention toward you. “What brings you here?”
“There’s a Zorua outbreak around the Bonechill Wastes area, and I wanted to complete my research on this guy while I still have the chance.” You neglected to tell them someone from Galaxy wanted the information as well.
Adaman raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you have someone to come along with you?”
You opened your mouth to say no before Irida cuts in. “You volunteering? Provided you don’t freeze to death first,” she teased as she jabs him in the ribs playfully, and grinned at his responding yelp and pout. “Jesting aside — you really should have someone to accompany you. An Alpha Glalie tends to roam that area, and no one has dared to come close to it. It seems really powerful. I wouldn’t be comfortable with you going alone.”
Adaman pursed his lips in thought. “Yeah, now that you mention it, I feel like I’ve gotten a glimpse of that Glalie before.” He turned to Irida. “You said no one has come close to it before to know its true strength?”
She shook her head. “We’ve all been too scared to try.”
“I’m sure it won’t be a problem for me,” you interjected, trying to quell their fears. “After everything I’ve faced, it feels like I should be dead at minimum four times over.”
The clan leaders share a glance to each other. It seems they’re talking through just their looks, but what they could possibly be communicating is lost on you. “Adaman, please go with them. I would go if I didn’t have a meeting later on that I cannot miss. But I know you’ll keep them safe.”
“Do I get a say in this?”
“No,” both clan leaders respond at the same time.
You were split on this decision. Deep down, you did really like Adaman — and not just as a friend. Any time spent with him you keep near and dear to your heart. His smile that could light up a room and his long hair that you wanted to card your fingers through. But with the stress you’ve been under and how overwhelmed you’ve been, you’re unsure if you can handle a couple hours of him bitching about how cold it was. One too many comments and you weren’t sure if you could keep it all bottled anymore.
Yet, you also knew having someone with you would be more helpful than not. You didn’t know how strong the Zorua were going to be after all. If they ended up being feisty and ganged up on you, there’s no way you’d leave the battle unscathed. Add an Alpha Glalie to the mix and you’d be dead as dust in less than a heartbeat. You weighed your options (which, technically, they weren’t giving you any) and finally caved in. You weren’t gonna win this fight anyway. “Think you can talk about more than how cold it is?”
“I’m sure I can come up with something. But if it wasn’t so damn cold I wouldn’t complain about it all the time.”
“It’s not even that cold!” Irida scoffed, throwing her hands in the air. “I don’t know how you don’t boil over in the Crimson Mirelands!”
“It’s barely warm enough there for me. It can get really cold by the water, y’know.”
“You’re both impossible,” you cut in to break off the sibling-esque fighting before it can truly start. “Now c’mon, I wanna get going before it gets dark outside.”
And off you and Adaman went, hands in your respective pockets.
You didn’t expect to fall in love with the Zorua like you did.
They were so cute with their flowy hair and expressive eyes. Most were on the attack if they saw you, but crouching down from a good distance away and just watching seemed to be okay. One had strayed away from the group toward you and Adaman, and you both held your breath so it wouldn’t notice you. It failed, as it did notice you, but it didn’t seem to be angry. It walked up to you slowly, and out of habit you gave it your hand to sniff so it wouldn’t see you as a threat.
It rubbed the side of its head against your hand, causing you to smile from ear to ear.
“You really do have a way with Pokemon, don’t you?” Adaman commented, watching everything with a small smile of his own. “They just trust you so implicitly. It’s one of the many things I love about you.”
Your cheeks went up in flames at the compliment, but the cold would cover it up as they were already pretty red. “I think they can just sense that I’m not here to harm them.” You started to pet the Zorua behind its ear, causing its eyes to close. “Sometimes I feel like they’re the only ones that can.”
“What do you mean?”
Oops. You hadn’t meant for this to be a therapy session. “I just… I don’t know. I guess it feels like humans always think they’re about to be betrayed, stabbed in the back. One wrong move and you’re crucified. But Pokemon… They don’t seem to be that way. Some Pokemon can sense a good person when they see one. That seems to be… a lot more rare in humans.”
“I know you’re a good person,” Adaman said softly, putting one hand on your arm.
Before you can even think about a response or the fact he’s showing a more sensitive side of himself to you, a noise catches the three of you off guard.
“Shit,” you breathe, feeling your entire body freeze with fear. “The Alpha.”
You both bounce to your feet as the Alpha comes over the hill behind the Zorua and Adaman. You can see the Glalie is pissed off that people are invading its territory, and wants to get rid of the intruders. An ice beam begins to form, and before you can think, you jump in front of Adaman and the Zorua.
The blast hit you in full force.
Your fingers and feet go completely numb almost immediately, though it almost feels like you’re not even cold anymore. You almost feel warm, actually, and you know that’s an incredibly bad sign. The sky is a beautiful haze of orange and purple as the sun is setting behind the clouds, and for a moment you just take in the colours swirling in your vision. It feels like everything has a layer of clouds over it, and your mind feels stuffed full of cotton. Oh, this is probably a very bad sign.
You can hear a call of your name, as warbled and muffled as you heard it, but can’t really respond to it. Adaman lifted your torso and pressed your back against his chest, his arms wrapped around you with his haori encasing you against him. The Zorua was curled in your lap, and you just felt… warm. You try to say thank you, but your lips feel tingly. Funny. You know you’re slurring even if you can’t hear much yourself. You try your hardest to communicate one word to Adaman.
“Camp.”
With that, though, you go unconscious.
—
You have no idea how much time has passed, but the next thing you know, you’re nice and warm in a tent. Blankets are stacked on top of you, and the fire in the furnace is crackling softly. You’re cozy and warm, but something feels… different. You sit up a bit, and promptly look down.
Oh. You’re definitely not wearing the clothes that you were wearing when you were out hunting for Zorua. You were wrapped up in a yukata that you didn’t recognise, but definitely knew the pearl clan symbol and colours. You wrapped it closer to yourself, then wrapped the blankets around you tightly for warmth. The clothes you had been wearing were hanging over a rack by the stove, seemingly drying off after the long day they’d been through.
You didn’t really know what to do. You’re not even sure what you managed to accomplish for research, or what you’re wearing, or what time it is, or really… anything. You don’t know anything that’s happened since you were out with Adaman. Now, it seems you’re alone in this little area.
The tears fall before you even really mean them to.
When the first teardrop hit your hand, you realised what’s going on. The stress of everything was finally boiling over now that you feel comfortable and safe. You’re confused, but you’re comfortable and safe which is all you’ve wanted to feel for a while.
You allowed yourself to cry.
Trying not to be loud, you cry silently to yourself while wrapped up in blankets and the yukata, pulling the items tightly against you so you feel swaddled. You rock back and forth and let yourself have your small breakdown.
Until Adaman popped open the tent flaps to check on you, apparently.
Almost immediately your hands fly to your face to cover your tear-tracked cheeks and red eyes, burying your face into the softness of the blanket. You don’t say anything, and neither does he. But all it takes is him walking up and gently touching the top of your hair before you break completely.
The stress of everything came boiling over the edge, the fear of almost dying, the unknown of whether the research you obtained was enough to complete the entry on Zorua, whether you would have a home to go back to in Galaxy. Everything boiled up and you pressed the top of your head into Adaman’s stomach to cry.
He rubbed your back and shoulders gently as you sobbed, gently shushing you and reassuring you that you were safe, you were okay, everyone was okay. He was the much-needed rock in your mind to cling to so your head stayed above the water of emotions. Everything was going to be fine.
Everything was going to be fine.
Eventually your tears slowed and your breathing evened out, pulling away from Adaman to give him room and let him back up if he wanted. (You couldn’t help but notice he didn’t.) “I’m sorry. I didn’t… mean to break down.”
“You’ve been through a lot today, it’s understandable why you would.” Adaman sat down on the bed next to you and handed you a towel to wipe your face. “You’re in a spare tent right now, one they have set out for visitors or harmed individuals found in the wild. Do you remember what happened?”
You nodded, refusing to speak any words.
“You really scared me, y’know. When I saw that ice blast hit you, I… I saw you skid backward in the snow, and your lips were already blue. That was one of the scariest moments of my life, but I’m glad I went with you to keep you safe. Makes me want to go everywhere with you to always make sure you’re safe.”
An eyebrow raised as you look at him. “Wouldn’t that be a waste of your time?”
“Saving you wasn’t a waste of time. And I’d do it all over again, and again, just to keep you safe.”
You’re stunned speechless. You don’t know how to respond with words, so you do the next best appropriate thing — hug him. It starts as a side hug that quickly develops into a full hug, and by the way you’re both gripping each other… it seems neither one of you wants to let go.
“Adaman…” you whispered, holding him tightly. “Thank you. I couldn’t ask for a better —” you pause. You can’t say friend. He’s more than a friend at this point, in your heart, but that’s not something you can say. “— for a better person in my life. You’ve been so helpful to me, and I just… I’m so thankful for you.”
You can feel him smile against your shoulder, which makes you smile. “And I, you.”
He pulled back from the hug slowly, as if he was fighting himself. But he let go and instead stood up, grabbing the bowl he’d at some point set on the counter next to you. “I brought this in to try and wake you up to get something in your stomach, when… well, y’know.” Adaman rubbed the back of his neck. “You should get some warm food in your system though. It’ll help out.”
You grabbed the bowl of what appears to be some sort of soup, and you’re glad to have something else besides potato mochi to eat tonight. “Thank you.”
As you began to eat your soup, Adaman began to explain everything. “So that Zorua you saved came back with us. It’s sleeping with all your Pokeballs in Irida’s tent so she could keep an eye on them, and so they didn’t try to warm you too fast.” Ah, that explained the lack of Pokeballs with your clothes. “That Zorua seems pretty attached. I think you found yourself a new buddy.”
Both of you talk about the Zorua, about the research of all types of Pokemon and how it’s all going, talk about how cold it is and how much warmer the Crimson Mirelands is, how the clan meeting seems to be coming along well even through the bickering Irida and him do. Eventually, you finish your soup and set the bowl onto the chest next to you. Adaman clears his throat and begins to stand.
“It’s about time for sleep, so I guess I’ll —”
“Please stay with me.”
Adaman’s eyebrows shot through the sky as he looked at you. “What?”
“Please, stay with me. I could use another person here so I’m not… I’m not alone.” You bowed your head. “And I don’t want you to go. But if you do, I understand.”
Hands rest on your shoulders and you looked up, meeting his eyes and matching his smile. “I would love nothing more than that. I don’t want to leave your side. Not now, not…” he stopped, but you finished it.
“Not ever?”
He smiled warmly, and it warms your soul. “Not ever.”
“Then stay with me. Tonight, at least. We’ll figure out the rest later.”
“You got it.”
He slid under the blankets with you, and without a second thought, you curled up next to him for warmth. You were warm, but after how cold you were today… warm didn’t seem to be enough. Adaman’s arms wrapped around you protectively, and with your head on his chest, the sound of his heartbeat gently lulled you into a peaceful slumber.
#pokemon x reader#adaman x reader#reader x adaman#vaughnwrites#gender neutral reader#rises from the dead after nine months. finishes this all in one go. slumbers
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Angels, demons, language, and culture: part 3
(Part 1 and Part 2 for those interested.)
"I play an ineffable game of my own devising. For everyone else, it’s like playing poker in a pitch dark room with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules and who smiles all the time." --God, Good Omens
This is just. Creepy and awful and so, so wrong for a quasi-omnipotent being. Ugh. Good Omens!God is an abject horror.
But if you're one of the poker players at that table, what do you do? You try to figure out the rules and mark the cards, naturally. Especially if leaving the table only happens via swan dives into burning sulphur, or getting kicked out of the only home you've known into a hostile desert with lions in it. While pregnant, yet.
So, I did a Bat Mitzvah back in the day, as it happens, and my Torah portion was from Deuteronomy. Which is, as I am hardly the first to notice, chockablock full of rules. Good Omens definitely leveraged (rather than inventing) the idea of trying to figure out Her rules and codify them in writing! Note, however, that the Bible per Word of Gaiman is a human thing. Codifying divine rules? Therefore also a human thing, minus I suppose the Ten Commandments -- though I can certainly envision a Good Omens in which Moses was, um, not exactly telling the truth about the source of the tablets; we only really have his word for it.
Angels and demons, who have a low opinion of literacy and just generally don't seem to be very good at it, never did this. We see that Aziraphale, Before the Beginning, has intuitively figured a few rules out: don't question Her, don't comment on (much less critique) Her decisions or designs, don't ever ever piss Her off. The Starmaker hasn't gotten this far, tragically, and our Crowley remains confused throughout the show as to what rule he can possibly have broken that earned him the identity-changing torture She inflicted on him.
Fundamentally, Crowley doesn't want to -- perhaps can't -- believe that She is capricious and cruel. He thinks there are rules, "don't test to destruction" being a major one. We know he's wrong, however. She straight-up told us so, in the quote at the top of this post! Aziraphale, too, knows, though he buries this knowledge as deep under the words "ineffable" and "Great Plan" (there is no Great Plan, She told us so, it's all a game to Her) as he possibly can -- I think as a coping mechanism -- and does his best to avoid drawing Her attention again after the Sword Incident.
But we see angelic and demonic confusion about the rules of Her game again and again. It's at the root of Aziraphale's successful Great Plan/Ineffable Plan hairsplitting at the airbase. It's why Aziraphale has to (with Muriel's help) dig through the contract for Job, and why Gabriel and Michael can't even be arsed to, even revising Job's reward on the fly. They're guessing! They're guessing about the rules based on what they've seen of Her caprices! She likes sevens!
It's how Crowley rules-lawyers the demons into letting the Whickber Street tradespeople go. If there are actual rules of Heaven-Hell engagement -- and there may not be! Crowley's pulled plausible-sounding lies out of his arse before! -- I'll bet you anything you like practically nobody in Heaven or Hell has actually read them. (My top picks for rules-of-engagement authors, if those rules actually do exist, would be Satan and the Metatron.)
And it's why Uriel has to ask the Metatron, as unsure and afraid as Uriel has ever looked in the entire series, whether the remaining archangels have done something wrong. The Metatron's response refuses to clarify what's at issue -- he, like Her, won't tell anybody the rules. If I'm feeling extremely cynical, I think She and he refuse to explain the rules because they're more powerful if there's no rulebook that rank-and-file angels can use to contest them with.
It makes me so sad. The legions of Heaven would assuredly have followed Her rules, if they only knew what those rules were! Fanart of the just-fallen Starmaker routinely breaks my susceptible heart, not least because the commonest expressions on his face are agony, sorrow -- and confusion. It's just all so damn unfair.
Same with Job, and Peter Davison sells it beautifully. Poor Job assumes he must have broken Her rules somehow, and blames himself for not even knowing how. That's totally on Her, though! If Her rules aren't clear enough for righteous Job to be able to trust his own righteousness under a horrible test, that's Her fault, not his!
The closest that Heaven and Hell -- and humanity, for that matter -- have to Her rules is prophecy. I probably don't need to spill many pixels on how vague and confusing prophecy is, how often it's counterfeited, and how pointless it is to try to live your life by (or trying to avoid) true prophecies; prophecies will invariably gotcha you. Good Omens is hardly the first work of literature to point this out. (Try the story of Oedipus. That's a good one. Yeesh. Or, if we want to be all Biblical about it, Moses again.) Agnes Nutter may well be the only genuinely well-meaning prophet in the entire history of prophets! Even so, her book is incredibly bewildering! Generations of her descendants try to figure it out, and mostly they fail -- look at the annotations we see on Anathema's index cards.
So when @thundercrackfic asks me what Aziraphale gets out of books, my first (though not only) answer is "rules for living." Not just rules for living as safely as possible around Her, though -- rules for living among humans, too. I headcanon (and posited in "Endgame") that Aziraphale has been collecting human etiquette manuals as long as humans have been writing etiquette manuals. Codified rules, like the ones in Deuteronomy, likely help him feel more secure.
I think this is also why Muriel characterizes books as portable people. Muriel is trying their sweet adorable best to figure out the Earth rules on the fly, since nobody Upstairs told them (or indeed knows, the Metatron aside) what those rules are. They do have Aziraphale to help them along -- Aziraphale is so much better than Upstairs! he doesn't condescend or insult, he just gently instructs -- but Aziraphale can't teach full-time, he has other things on his plate. So Muriel the scrivener, one of the few angels who would have a clue about literacy due to the nature of their job, gravitates to books and discovers that they too can be gentle and compassionate teachers.
The final question outstanding is how well Aziraphale understands and assimilates human books, especially fiction, especially especially non-literal figures of speech. It's an excellent and complicated question, and I don't think I have The Answer to it, but I'll see what I can do.
#good omens#good omens meta#rules rules rules#good omens god is a horror#aziraphale#crowley#the starmaker#angel muriel
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Nova’s Notes - DD - May 8th
That’s right, I’m deciding to give my thoughts a cheesy name because why not (also it’s late oops).
So this may be one of my favorite entires of the entire book. My first go-around it was for the mirror-yeet scene (because that’s iconic) and Dracula being The Housekeeper of all timeTM, but now it’s also one of my favorites because of how much we learn about Jonathan.
They say you learn the most about a person when they’re in crisis mode, and while I don’t always think that’s true, Stoker definitely wanted to let Jonathan’s personality shine through here.
From the first passage, he’s literally guessed that Dracula is undead. “I fear I am the only living soul here.” Sure, he might mean that he’s the only present soul, if Dracula’s left the building, but since he describes the mirror yeeting scene right after…idk, I’d like to think he knows way more than we ever gave him credit for. “Clueless Jonathan” who? Is the clueless in the room with us?
Also going back to the first sentence where he describes worrying he was getting too wordy, but now being glad he did…oof. I feel for him here. If my theory is correct that he was initially writing in a more detailed way for Mina so he could remember his travels for later…I’m sure it’s hitting him now that while it may be saving his life that he’s more detailed, it’s so twisted that something he did as a note of affection has soured. I wonder if he’s thinking about how he may never get out of this, or if that hasn’t fully hit him yet.
Moving on to everyone’s favorite mirror-yeet scene, think about how Jonathan reacts when he’s caught off guard by Dracula because he didn’t see his reflection. How would most protagonists react? Probably laugh nervously and brush it off. Attribute it to some mistake on his part, which is exactly what Jonathan does *at first*. But after, he looks at Dracula and then looks back at the mirror to confirm his suspicions are correct, which they are. It’s an interesting moment and not one I think we see often at the beginning of a horror story (I don’t consume much horror though, so correct me if I’m wrong!). Usually, a character won’t get to this level of observation until towards the middle/end, when more supernatural elements have occurred. Jonathan may have second guessed his instincts, but checking them again is what makes him more likely to survive Castle Dracula.
Plus, when Dracula makes a move to attack him, his first instinct is to dodge the attack, showing that he’s not just going to freeze up at the first sign of trouble (which I want to emphasize isn’t a problem normally, but he is dealing with a thousands-of-years-old vampire…so, he has to be quick on his feet to survive).
Afterwards, he says he is annoyed at losing his mirror rather than disturbed, but I saw another post saying he’s repressing his panic as annoying (I’ll link it if I find it again) and I definitely think that’s true!! I can totally see that as his coping mechanism. Plus, compared to the rest of what happens for him today, it really is more of an annoyance than anything else. Would you rather your host throw away your mirror or lock you in a castle?
So after that horrific scene of terror, Jonathan is proactive in searching the castle. After finding a beautiful — but slightly horrifying landscape (you know it’s bad when he doesn’t stop to describe the view) — he decides to explore further, which leads him to figure out almost every other door is locked, including the front one to find, yep you guessed it…he’s a prisoner in the castle.
As I imagine most people would, at first he reacts by frantically running around trying to open locked doors like “a rat does in a trap.” The fact that he admits this in his diary (and, by extension to Mina/us) is admirable because it already shows he’s not afraid to be open about his emotions, even if it makes him look weak (which — unfortunately, he would, considering the time period). Most heroes of this period were expected to accept their fates with stoic determination, but that’s not human and that’s not how Jonathan is, either. We’ve already seen that he’s more open-minded than most English men by accepting the crucifix even if he doesn’t understand it and of course the way he shows his love for Mina is atypical for Victorian men as well. Most men wouldn’t go to the trouble of writing down descriptive notes just to recount it for the benefit of his fiancée later. It’s sad, but true.
Once he’s able to regulate himself a bit, it’s time for thinking and strategy, determining that he needs all of his wits to get through this! Once he sees that the Count does the cooking AND the cleaning, though, is when my love for Jonathan reaches an all-time high. He comes to a series of conclusions most protagonists don’t figure out until the end of a novel after way more obvious clues have been laid out for him and it’s only his 3rd day of being in the castle!! They go as follows:
A) Dracula = servants
B) Dracula = driver
C) Dracula = control wolves
D) Villager’s concern/gifts = this is worse than I thought
E) Crucifix = actual help?
F) Get Dracula to talk about himself (not hard) = find more information, but not in an obvious way
I also love that he questions his own biases about the crucifix he was given!!!! When else do you see an Englishman do that in the 1890s of his own volition (aka without someone snarkily telling him to - see BBC’s Dracula if you want an example). I certainly haven’t!
He also noticed that Drac talked about his “ancestors” as if he had been present for their battles (hmm wonder why that is). Hasn’t quite figured it out yet, but there’s evidence that he doesn’t write something down as a fact until he knows it is a fact, so perhaps we’ll see him write more on this later.
Final thought - his reference to Arabian Nights and Hamlet is significant and tragic, but also relatable. I too like to relate my life to my favorite blorbos, Jonathan!
All in all, we learned that Jonathan is very good in a crisis. He’s not stoic like most protagonists of his time period, but he is instead strategic and observant, willing to play the part of oblivious to keep himself alive another day and keep Dracula’s trust. This is likely what’s keeping him alive right now, as an aggressive approach would get him killed. Dracula is all about playing with his prey and keeping the illusion of benevolent host and willing guest — it’s a game of control for him. Breaking this game would mean it’s no fun and no fun would mean Jonathan is no longer needed….
While I know how this story goes, I’m as excited as first time readers to see how Jonathan plays what is, essentially, 4D chess with Dracula!
#dracula daily#dracula#jonathan harker#may 8th#sorry this took so long#I kept rewriting this#my poor friend Jonathan Harker just wanted to enjoy his business trip#novas notes#long post#cw violence mention
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Appreciation-141 & Konig
Based on a request:
Hello! I had a question, could you perhaps do HCs with the 141/Konig and a AMAB GN! reader who has tics, but not Tourettes? Specifically, tics where they hit things? Thank you so much! I adore your writing!
-Rai
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AMAB!GN!Reader, tics, platonic!friendship, HC, fluff?
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A/N: I just want to emphasise that I am not fully educated in how tics affect most people or how they look on those who have this so if this is in someway offensive or incorrect, please be kind, correct me and educate me in a kindly manner, let's not spread hate those trying to learn <3 And Rai, I hope you adore this one<33
Ghost:
he has gotten used to your sudden tic attacks, so much so that at some point when you say or do something he ignores it as if nothing is going on.
There are times when he gives people a cold glare when you begin to knock on the table in the meeting room.
"Mate, what are you doing?" A recruit tries to suppress a chuckle as the others glare at you with judging stares. "Leave them alone, soldier," Ghost replies with his cold and commanding voice.
Anywhere you go, he goes and this is to ensure you don't end up hurting yourself. For example, there are times when you knock things out, occasionally it's your cap when you hit your head and sometimes when it's bad, he is there to help you not harm yourself.
He sees you as his close friend. Soap could even argue that you are his only friend from all the times he has seen Ghost talk so much about you.
"Yeah, they are the best soldiers I've worked with. Your soldier is better? Maybe, but have you seen my soldier, they are way better."
The cute thing about him and you is that you are the one person who is allowed to touch his mask. In private, there was one time when you pulled on his mask and all he did was chuckle. "Trying to see my face, R/N?" he smiles and you fluster, unable to find the right words to apologise.
Soap:
I feel like he would be so unserious with you. Like him, you have to at some point be separated in a meeting because you keep getting tics that make you hit him and sometimes all he can do is gasp and laugh.
But, I have to say that he is very much aware that if someone tries to mess with you, he would most likely be sent to Price's office afterwards.
There are times when your face grimaces and he won't acknowledge it and if there are people who call you out for it, he, like Ghost would stand up for you, which leads to a literal roast towards the soldier.
He is so unserious with you, as a coping mechanism to be honest, that he calls your tics 'tic tac toe' only because every time he does this, you and he get into a hysterical argument. Don't worry, you win but only after you say his head looks like a white tic tac.
The winning streak had gotten to a point that now in the common room, there is a wall dedicated to the wins and losses of Soap and you.
Gaz:
Gaz gives me Golden Retriever vibes and he is the most loyal person, so of course, his traits with you are similar to those of Ghost and Soap.
With him, it's a little different though, as he asks so many questions that you have a small window to actually and thoroughly answer the questions regarding your tics.
Sometimes, if someone dares to mention your tics but in a negative light, Gaz will deadass stop the person and like with Graves, he will not even dare shake the person's hand or be kind to them.
Because of you, not the helicopter, this man has lost and has had his caps destroyed from the many times that you have knocked them off his head that now you have a monthly gift for him.
I think there are times that he chuckles a little when you clap in a silent room when there are serious matters to be talked about, mainly when Graves talks and you interrupt him with clapping or knocking down something, usually an empty cup Gaz keeps around. He doesn't laugh at you but rather at how annoyed you've made Graves since you don't let him finish his 'All-American hero' speech.
Price:
This man is THE father figure when your tics go off. I can't explain any further but you know what I mean…I hope.
Like Ghost, he also brags and gives people a death stare when they dare to comment on your tics negatively.
I know for a fact this man is all about being so inclusive towards everyone like no one should be alone, it's mean and that won't happen on his watch. So when you were introduced and he found out you had tics, better believe this man read all there was to know about your syndrome and how to make an environment better for you.
Also, you better believe this man has a class in which not only does he teach the rude and disrespectful soldiers about manners but he also teaches those on how to be around you and make you feel at ease. And may I add that he is the first captain, at least on base, that in this class teaches others about LGBT+, social and racial problems, like this man is THE man when it comes to absolute kindness. (to those that work with him….so…fuck you Makarov, Shephard and Graves)
König:
I think that because he has social anxiety and prefers to be more of a serious man to others, he is very calm and educated on your tics.
-Since he is friends with you and has grown accustomed to your tics he knows how to keep things under control if they happen to be out of norm.
Because he is a colonel, everyone respects him and he has ensured that you, as his second in comment have the same level of respect.
-He has yelled, like yelled and people who witnessed him get this angry were terrified. They saw him as a very stern and serious man on base so seeing this part of him when yelling to others to respect you and be able to keep in their rude comments towards your tics, they surely kept quiet.
I chose to believe this man likes his helmet more and more when you are around because you tend to knock his helmet off when one of your tics gets more… intense.
A/N: I don't know if this could be accurate but i hope i did okay with this request
Tags:
@liyanahelena @hilmiponken @natashamea18 @demonic-grace @sans-chara @rougeripoff (didn't tag those on my list since I'm not sure they would be comfortable with this one)
#cod#cod x reader#mwii#cod mw2#ghost cod#task force 141#cod 141#mw2 141#141#141 x reader#amab reader#konig x you#konig x reader#konig cod#konig call of duty#konig mw2#cod konig#141 task force#tf 141#call of duty#cod fluff#cod x gn!reader#cod x you#cod x y/n
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hi! I really love your posts 💓 could I request a Sana as your girlfriend headcanon?
hiiiiii thank you sm i try to be interesting on here >.<
i think for headcannons i would write up a drabble but since this is more of a 'what they would do' sort of thing i think it's better for me to list the things out that sana or anyone from twice would do in a relationship so here we go :3
sana's duality scares me she could be top or bottom it's unpredictable
--
sana's safe side:
quite a straightforward relationship
sana won’t be the type to waste her time with you
will very quickly let you know how she expects the relationship to progress etc.
a lot of her time will be spent trying to find out everything possible about you
believes that is the best way to show interest in someone
and whatever you let her in on, expect her to use it in the future
tell her your favorite meal? expect her to try and cook it for you on bad days
it probably won’t turn out well but it’s the thought that counts
mention a specific place you want to travel to? she’ll book the tickets
extremely clingy
so if you’re not into that, learn to get used to it or move on
because she is RELENTLESS
but in reality, it’s actually a bit of a coping mechanism for her
if she’s stressed or worried about something
you must hold her close and reassure her things will be fine
has a bit of a thing for nuzzling her forehead into your neck
that same clinginess will lead to a few jealous moments
and she won’t hesitate to let you know when she doesn’t like the way someone is eyeing you up
thus will become even more clingy than usual to show them you’re together
loves to send you cute texts whenever she’s away that she hopes brightens your day
“i found this flower and it reminded me of you”
the true test in your relationship will come when you’re introduced to her parents
it’s important to her for both sides to understand each other and get along
and she respects their opinion so it means a lot to her to see you trying so hard around them
tries her best to be romantic too
enjoys writing the words “i love you” rather than saying it too often
she thinks it loses it’s meaning if you throw it around all of the time
and she’ll love it if you keep her little notes
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sana's crazy side:
life in the bedroom depends entirely on her mood
can either be the biggest pillow princess when she’s grumpy
and expects you to just go to work and give her everything she wants
very demanding about it too just so she can keep a bit of control
or the most dominant and giving person alive
and like her clinginess she’s relentless
the type to want to have sex on every single surface possible
when she’s in this type of mood do not even dare try to pleasure yourself
that is a job just for her and may get a bit offended if you do try to
massive hand fetish thus fingering is a huge turn-on for her
LOVES to tease ALL of the time
especially in social settings when she knows you can’t do much about it
likely will progress this into the two of you having sex in public at some point
highkey likes the thrill of potentially being caught
but if you ever are she may be too spooked to do it again
absolutely has sent you numerous nude photos from backstage areas
“bet you wish you were here right now”
quite loud and expects you to be the same
again, will be a bit offended if not
not easily put off by new things being introduced to your sex life
loves orgasm control, and wax play (giving)
but toys are usually reserved for her receiving which includes impact play and bondage
she prefers pleasuring you herself
but doesn’t mind you using extras on her if you wish to
bit of a masochist
doesn’t mind role-playing but likes to remind you she’s in control
overall an experimental relationship
aftercare will be spent bathing together as she holds you in her arms
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The thing I find fascinating is that the show runners are fully capable of writing engaging couples. Henren, Bathena & Madney – their relationships are beautiful. And then we have Buck and Eddie with their respective LIs. It’s almost as if they want the relationships to fail.
This season, they had every chance to set up Tommy as a suitable LI for Buck. But they didn’t? They didn’t even have to show a grand love confession or the likes, but at least some small gestures. Them holding hands in the hospital, Tommy dressing up for the bachelor party, being a little more sensitive when they ran into Eddie during that first date… Just a few simple things that would have made all the difference.
I feel like most of the love for Tommy comes from headcanons the fandom accepted as universal truths, while there isn’t much in canon to support it.
This isn’t meant to be hate on the character (though it probably will be taken that way by certain people), it’s just that I don’t think he is a good fit for Buck. He’s guarded and deflects with a dry sense of humor, when Buck needs a person to be vulnerable with. You know, someone who is so soft and sickeningly sweet with him. So far, I didn’t get much of the sorts from Tommy. But then again, we didn’t get to see a whole lot of the relationship actually playing out on screen, so who knows.
And the other thing that started to bother me is about the daddy issue thing. There is nothing wrong with showing (or alluding to) a couple having an active/kinky sex life. In general, I’m all in favor of it.
But looking back at season one, Buck used sex as an unhealthy coping mechanism to feel a connection to people. And he doesn’t have the best relationship with sex to begin with (Remember 7x05 and the talk with Eddie, where it hadn’t occurred to either of them that saying no is an option? Doesn’t sound healthy to me.) If they wanted to set Tommy apart, they should have put all their efforts into building an emotional connection between the two. I’m not saying that sex can’t be a part of it - not even that it can’t be kinky - but that the show should have put much more emphasis on the emotional aspect of it rather than the physical attraction.
Maybe it’s just wonky writing due to a shortened season but the relationship between the two isn’t half as good as it could have been.
No, but I made a post about this during the s6-7 hiatus, because it's not like the show doesn't know how to establish a love interest, bathena and madney work because all of them exist individually and Henren was introduced to us in a way where we would side with Karen, so even tho Karen only exists to be Hen's wife we care about her in a deeper way because Karen has never done anything wrong in her life. With Buck and Eddie all of the love interests are presented to us with something wrong with them. Shannon never had a fighting chance because she left and Eddie himself was never sure about her, Eddie was dating Ana and Marisol because he thought he had to, and I'm not even gonna go there with Kim. Abby breaks every possible protocol to call Buck, and she's never in it in the same way Buck is, Taylor tries to take advantage of Bobby's addiction for her personal gain and continues to take advantage of him to get ahead, Ali is never there, Natalia is too interested in Buck's death and Tommy is callous. There's a weird metaphor in there, but the basketball scene, the way Buck hits Tommy and ricochets back and Tommy doesn't even flinch. Buck needs someone who will bend. But the show didn't even try to establish an emotional connection between the two of them, everything comes back to the physical and with a character like Buck, who was shown using sex as a bad coping mechanism, to constantly make it seem like this new relationship isn't going beyond the sex is concerning. There were better ways to imply they are having sex. Even more considering the way the show had the opportunity to make it seem like they are building some sort of emotional connection and just chose not to. Every scene we had with the 2 of them could be rewritten adding the idea that they actually care about each other beyond the attraction, and that's a choice. To go the route they went is a choice. I'm still not over the way they had Tommy not dressing up and then Eddie suggesting matching outfits in the next scene. Like, it was that easy because they showed Eddie doing it. And I don't wanna compare, but with the constant triangle formation and the way they were showing Eddie as the person who understands Buck and Tommy as the dude Buck is fucking, we have nothing happening in our screen that makes it seem like Tommy is even a little fond of Buck and all I can think about is Buck standing in front of a hot air balloon with a huge bouquet of flowers for a woman who referred to him as a boytoy. Buck deserves someone who's gone for him and none of his canon love interests gave me that impression. And they make a very explicit choice to not make that implication. They could've been something, but right now they aren't. If you just watch the show you don't know why they are dating. They are just there. And coming from a show that wrote bathena, madney, and henren, and the way that Tommy being a firefighter gives him a fighting chance because it's real easy to make him exist outside of Buck, it's on purpose.
#i think there is a wonky writing aspect#i dont think they thought bt was going to be well received and decided to capitalize on the publicity for longer#but they are not putting any effort into it#911#911 spoilers#i really need a tag for asks#anti bucktommy#intellectual-applesauce
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Hunter is not a villain for his caution….What did you take away from Ep 16?
A lot of people have been vilifying Hunter these past few episodes and while we love characters, they have flaws. I’m not saying he doesn’t. I can make fun of Hunter and will definitely call out his flaws but people are putting a lot on his shoulders. Do you not think he’s doing that as well?
“When will it be enough” when he’s talking to Echo. This statement seems cold but maybe he wasn’t talking snotty like us fans are doing so that’s why we took it that way? Fans are at each other’s throats. I saw disagreements but both loved and respected each other. Maybe he wasn’t saying “when will you have saved enough people” but rather “Echo when will you be at peace with all you’ve done?” Because Hunter knows this isn’t a winning fight. He knows the guilt Echo carries. Notice how it’s not a problem for Rex? He asked Rex once why fight and Rex has a totally different aura about it. He just knows it’s what he’s supposed to do. Echo is passionate and angsty. He’s driven by another force. Echo thinks about his time on Skako Minor a lot, as shown in S2 by his comments. How much has he shared with Hunter? Hunter still looking out for him?
I already shared a post about Hunter’s cautions about Crosshair’s warning here.
“I don’t know if it’s worth it” we literally watched Tech fall to his possible demise. THIS IS WHAT HE WAS AFRAID OF. The man wasn’t saying Crosshair wasn’t worth it, but maybe this chance was a foolhardy one to take and wait it out till they had a better one. He knew how sketchy it would be and it’s his call. He wasn’t going to take it lightly because the brothers and sister who are all he has left in the galaxy might be taken. The man is literally paralyzed in fear. We’ve seen him running and not facing problems. It’s not good but it is his coping mechanism. He’s not being mean, he’s choking up and dying inside. And he doesn’t argue when everyone of their own free will wants to go because he does want his brother safe.
“We’ve decided to settle on Pabu” he wasn’t giving up on Crosshair folks. Do you think Echo would drop the hunt not just for Crosshair but because there is a base full of clone prisoners somewhere? They thought Hemlock was killed in the explosion so there’d be time. He was a prisoner now not a lab rat. Once Echo had news, he’d probably share it and they’d bust their brother out. In the meantime….they are grieving Tech! Hunter literally shut down! His face when he told Omega he didn’t make it?! His eyes? And Omega didn’t handle it well when Tech fell OR when she woke up, adding to the fact SHE almost died. Think about someone you lost/almost lost. I know my thinking got emotional and protective when I was in that situation with people I knew.
Hunter is going after Omega, and is seemingly more determined to find her than Crosshair because he has nothing left to lose. Find Omega and find Crosshair. Omega was Hunter’s weakness in a way. If she wasn’t with them, he might have been more along Echo’s line of thinking earlier. Now that she’s taken, that last scene? Hunter’s face, man? That guy is out for blood. It is the first spark of determination and not tiredness in a long time. He’s getting his muster back. The baddassery is about to get real because he’s freakin sick of his family getting torn from him. Hunter needed to be pushed this way for the sake of his character writing. He needed to come to a breaking point. He lost so much when he was desperately trying to hold it together. That’s why he was so cautious. He didn’t want to see his brother fall. He’ll dream of this and blame himself because he sent Tech. He won’t sleep well because he’ll blame himself for Omega getting caught because he chose to go back to Cid’s right after her Almost dying. Sitting by her bed? That was one worried dad. So you expect him to want to keep fighting after she was hitting him because Tech didn’t make it?
We as fans need to stop thinking the worst right away. We need to be kinder and more cordial. We don’t have to agree because that’s the fun of it, to debate friendly certain ideas but the intense hatred for fictional characters who have real human flaws (which is what makes the writing intriguing) needs to end. You don’t have to like him, but please be fair, that’s all I ask. Crosshair has done plenty but it’s forgiven and overlooked (I love the man too guys, but let’s be honest, he’s morally grey.) we’re all grieving. I love Tech and that really hurt to see. Whether or not he’s really gone, I don’t know. But we’re all grieving so I understand being hurt.
I just needed to let it out.
#the bad batch#tbb crosshair#tbb hunter#tbb tech#tbb wrecker#star wars the bad batch#tbb echo#tbb omega#star wars#the bad batch season 2#the bad batch season 2 spoilers
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Hiii! Love your works a ton <3 Can I request a yandere concept for my boi Levi from fear and hunger?
Looking into his lore is sad because all he's ever known is war/trauma and now he has to deal with... the festival- What's worse is he is only about my age too :( But yes, I'll see what I can do for him! I enjoy writing Funger despite how dark it is, lol
Yandere! Levi Jořdán Concept
Pairing: Romantic/Platonic
Possible Trigger Warnings: Gender-Neutral Darling, Obsession, Trauma, Unhealthy coping mechanisms, Drug use mention, Violence, Murder, Stalking, Mentions of war related trauma, Blood, Apathy to death, Corpse mention, Death, Overprotective behavior, Dubious companionship, Jealousy mentioned.
I already feel like, regardless of his intentions Levi is going to come off cold and distant in his obsession.
He is one of the youngest contestants of the game and most of his life was literally as a drafted soldier at a young age.
Not only that but his father killed his mother and he was put in an orphanage before being drafted.
He actually grew up where the Termina Festival takes place, too.
Levi is a character I imagine would come off rather broken.
It would take time before he could cling to anyone, be they friend or romantic partner.
However he isn't going to be as hostile as Pav, just distant and out of it.
The drugs running in his system all the time doesn't help either.
Although at the same time he's just so scared.
You're most likely a contestant too and find him cowering in a house, expecting you to kill him.
Yet once you show you have no intentions of harming him he'll decide tagging along with you may be for the best.
While I do think Levi is distant at times, trying his hardest to ignore the voices in his head like you, he wants to be able to rely on someone to get through this.
He's solitary but appreciates the company... safety in numbers.
He struggles with friends and struggles to talk with others, including you.
Not only that but he has some self worth issues to top it all off.
Levi wouldn't understand why you pay attention to him.
He appreciates it but doesn't get why you try so hard to protect him.
Although he is happy he doesn't have to attack you.
In terms of the type of yandere Levi would be I can see him as clingy, paranoid, and protective.
The moment you become party members he feels obligated to keep you alive as long as he can.
With his skills in firearms it shouldn't be too difficult... hopefully.
Levi struggles to hold long conversations with you but slowly gets better at it as you encourage him.
You would obtain his obsession by slowly encouraging him out of his scared shell.
You're both scared, yes, but finding comfort in one another soothes you both.
This connection as teammates would cause Levi to view you in two different lights, depending on your preference.
Levi can either see you as a partner to fight alongside and a friend to aid him in hopefully surviving this festival (Platonic).
Or Levi can see you as a romantic interest, someone he didn't think he'd ever have the chance of having.
Levi also appears to be someone who has a chance to be a horrific threat when he finds his obsession.
I imagine before he even met you he felt drawn to you and followed you before hiding away to be found.
Plus with the constant mental strain of the voices, his trauma, and his fear... he'd be desperate to keep the one he loves safe and may even hurt other contestants.
He says he doesn't want to hurt anyone.
But he won't hesitate as much when he sees another contestant try to take a shot at you.
His response is simple.
*BANG*
The blood doesn't affect him, the corpse doesn't either.
All he knows is you could've been torn from him like so many others.
The voices only encouraged him to stop that from happening.
Levi is ashamed when you catch him try to... "relieve his withdrawal symptoms"
It's just that he's had no other way to cope with his pain-
Although... you don't judge him.
Based on what he's told you, he's been through a lot, especially now.
You instead try to help him through it.
His urge to take the needles lessens when you distract him.
But he can't give it up completely.
As a romantic yandere I imagine Levi struggles with affection.
Yet like a drug, when he first hugs you he craves for more.
When you're alone and safe, Levi encourages you to hug him.
He doesn't really to let go... ever.
Levi would also be hesitant to kiss you but would do so for the same reasons.
If he just sees you as a friend he's less affectionate but certainly still enjoys hugs.
Killing for you to protect you soothes the voices in his head just a bit.
The Festival makes him yearn for the death of his fellow contestants.
Protecting you... satisfies such an urge.
Plus, it keeps you and him safe...
So he'll head into battle if it means the survival of both of you.
Losing you in the Festival may break Levi.
He becomes overcome with the urge to avenge you and the voices become too strong for him.
It wouldn't be that surprising if he got rid of the rest of the contestants if they took you away.
Another thing to think about is if you became Moonscorched.
Levi would struggle with the idea of that... he'd also struggle with the idea of himself becoming Moonscorched in front of you.
Levi doesn't want you scared of him.
You trusted him enough to accept him into your party.
He's going to try his best to prove his worth to you because of that.
Plus... he loves you, one way or another.
If you had other party members then Levi may cling to you more.
Even more so if you picked him as your first party member.
He doesn't trust them but will fight beside them because they're following you.
Levi is loyal to you.
He'd kill to defend you as an ally and would do anything to see you trust and smile at him.
He hopes you'll reciprocate how he feels towards you.
Be it his feelings of companionship or romance.
If not... then he can hope that changes, right?
You don't have much time in this festival... so maybe make the best of it? With him?
Levi would never want to turn his guns on you.
He doesn't want you to hate him, either.
Levi would be a yandere who feels he should give you everything he has to offer.
It means a lot to him that you haven't decided to kill him... instead choosing to help him through everything...
In return, he'll kill for you like he's your weapon... because in the end he feels he's yours to use.
#yandere fear and hunger#yandere fear and hunger 2 termina#yandere levi jořdán#yandere fear and hunger levi#yandere fear and hunger 2
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