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maybedefinitely404 · 4 years

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Day 19: Prinxiety/Loceit (pt 3)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 is here, with a little added something thrown in! Hope you enjoy!

@tsshipmonth2020

Day 19 - Everyone is born with a compass on their wrist, the needle of the compass points towards your soulmate.

Trigger/content warnings!! Dissociation, PTSD, talk of conversion therapy and aftereffects/internalized homophobia, food mentions, nausea, anxiety/panic attack, unintentionally skipping meals, emetophobia/vomiting, pulling hair (does that count as self harm?).

Word count: 5k

He barely remembered the hospital. It was all just a blur of doctors and police officers and more sleep than he’d gotten in weeks. After the first night of twitching in the dark confines of his hospital room and waking up screaming from nightmares the few brief seconds his consciousness faded, he was given sleeping pills, and the rest of the visit was quickly forgotten. The clearest part of the two week stay was near the end, when he was deemed physically well enough to give a statement to his social worker and a policeman, describing his ‘therapy’ and his life at the foster home, which quickly dissolved into a panic attack. They had enough though, and he was left with a sick satisfaction that they weren’t getting away with what they’d done to him.

They’d lied to him. They had told him the system agreed with what they were doing, allowing it, condoning it. At first, he’d refused to believe them, because that made no sense. But they took his only form of contact, didn’t allow him to leave the house except for therapy, and his eventual addition of medication far too strong for him made him paranoid. Maybe he didn’t believe them as much as he was just trying to survive. He still didn’t know how they’d managed to keep up the charade when they were being checked on bi-weekly; he hadn’t even known when said visits were happening.

“They’ll be spending some time in prison for child abuse. Not nearly enough, but still,” A social worker said quietly as he drove him back to his old group home. Virgil stared numbly out the window. “The kids were taken from them for the time being. They were deemed unfit parents. Foster care until they can find either some relatives or the parents are allowed them back.”

He didn’t react, although his heart nearly stopped in his chest. The parents hadn’t been great, but the kids had been happy enough. And now they were forced into a shoddy system… because of him. Virgil blinked rapidly to stop the tears that threatened to flow.

“You alright, Virge?”

He finally turned from the blurry mass of green trees out the car window, turning blankly to the man driving. The worker glanced from the road to meet his eyes, sighing.

No, he wasn’t alright. But he’d never say otherwise. Volunteering information about himself was how he’d gotten himself into this situation in the first place. He wasn’t about to do it again.

----------

That had been almost a month ago, and he was still to break out of his selective mutism. It wasn’t as if he was choosing not to speak; it wasn’t stubbornness. He felt as if his brain and his mouth were disconnected, like his thoughts were less coherent and more just abstract emotion, and he couldn’t turn them into words. Any question that couldn’t be answered by a simple nod or head shake was met with a blank stare, a far off gaze, that was unnerving to anyone. They’d tried to put him back into therapy, but the moment it was mentioned, Virgil spiralled into the worst panic attack he could ever remember having.

He’d gotten his old room back, with two new kids as his roommates. He quickly built up the same reputation as before: this room is mine unless you’re sleeping. No kid wanted to be near him when he was awake, staring at nothing, his only movements being his occasional blinking. Frankly, the younger ones were scared of him.

And he didn’t care.

Some days he fell so deep into dissociating that he didn’t even react when he was called for dinner. The world around him dissolved, blurry and unfocused and just quiet, retreating into his own mind where he could breathe. Reality was too much. It was just… too much. One of his doctors had said it might be a side effect as they eased him off his criminally high dose of antipsychotics they’d hidden in his drinks, but that was an afterthought. He was warm, he was full (when he was aware enough to eat), and so he faded into his head. He’d cope with his trauma another day.

“You haven’t eaten all day, honey,” A soft voice said and he blinked, looking up from his bed sheets at the worker. She was one of his favorites; gentle, quiet, respecting his boundaries. In her hands was a plate with dinner on it.

He gave an almost imperceptible nod, barely more than a single bob, and she sat across from him on the bed, placing the plate in front of him. With heavy hands, he lifted a cold green bean to his mouth. It was gross, but the plate was empty in minutes. Apparently it had been a whole day.

“Virgil, I want to talk to you,” She said. Now full, his brain would let him stay present for a little while until dissociation took over again. He pushed himself back against the wall and brought his knees to his chest, watching her movements.

“It’s not anything bad, I promise. I’ve been talking with some other workers, some connections I have across the state.”

He didn’t like where this was going.

“One of them suggested a couple that’s fostered for over a decade. They have a fantastic record, so I got into contact with them-”

“No.” The first thing he’d said in weeks, his voice scratchy from disuse. For once, the mess in his brain came together to form the single word, an immediate rejection. He pushed himself farther away from her, shaking his head violently. “No, no, no.”

“Virgil, breathe,” She reached out a hand and Virgil flinched so hard his head hit the wall. The hand retreated. “You don’t have to go with them if you’re uncomfortable, hun. Please just trust me, though, they’d never do anything that they did.”

He glared at her, trying to read her expression in the dark room. Silence stretched between them as Virgil’s thoughts drifted back to their state of quietude, leaving him unable to form words, beginning to drift away from reality. His eyelids flickered as focusing became harder, his mind’s eye suddenly alight with the blinding white lights of the therapy room.

“Will you meet them at least, Virgil? Just for a few minutes? And if you still say no after, I’ll never bring them up again.”

He found himself nodding without properly meaning it. He just wanted her to leave… he just wanted to be alone. So he could drift away, without having to fear anyone hurting him anymore.

She left, taking the empty plate with her.

----------

Just because he knew today he was meeting his potential (not gonna happen) foster parents, it didn’t mean he was allowed to be present for the rest of the day. His favorite worker had come back again, motivating him to get ready and dressed, since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to find the energy to even just put on a sweater, much less get himself completely ready.

Looking in the mirror hurt. His hair was starting to grow back, just barely long enough to run his fingers through, never mind getting anywhere long enough to cover his eyes like it used to. The bags under his eyes were darker than he could remember them ever being and his hands shook as he brushed his teeth. Biting down on the bristles, he grabbed a towel and threw it over the mirror, feeling a slight tinge of relief when he was no longer forced to look at himself. The social worker watched from the doorway, silently.

He was tempted to go to sleep when he was done, completely exhausted from the little bit of work. But she brought him breakfast and his stomach growled in agreement, so he ate enough of the oatmeal to satiate his hunger, and not a bite more. A nervous nausea was already swirling in his gut and he didn’t need to add to it.

“Would you like to be left alone?” She asked, taking the empty bowl.

Virgil nodded, already feeling the heaviness and emptiness that came with dissociation starting to creep through his limbs.

“I’ll come let you know when they’re here, okay?” He had no recollection of her leaving the room, but the next time he drifted back to the present, she was gone.

He took a nap around noon, too tired and overwhelmed to stay awake for any longer. Plus, with new rushes of anxiety flooding his system every couple seconds, he was ready to not be conscious for a hot minute. He tried to convince himself that it would be okay, he’d struggle through an awkward meeting where the foster parents would eventually give up on him and leave, and he could spend his remaining year and a month in the system. Hopefully in that year he could figure enough out to survive when he was alone.

A joyous child screeching downstairs woke him up three hours later, jerking him awake with a pounding heart.

It wasn’t an hour later when there was a soft knock at his door and he threw himself into the corner, pulling his blanket up to his chest. No, no, no, he wasn’t ready- The door opened painfully slowly, spilling the light from the hallway into his pitch black room.

“Virgil? I’m here with one of the foster parents, can I come in?”

She poked her head into the room and squinted to meet his eyes in the darkness, eventually finding his hunched form on his bed. Wordlessly, she opened the door all the way and walked up to him, flicking on the bedside lamp. A pleasantly soft light filled the room, illuminating the man standing at the door. Virgil began to shake.

He wasn’t overly tall, probably just a head or so taller than Virgil, dressed in a plain yellow button up and black jeans. At first, he didn’t seem too intimidating, but neither had the other family at first glance. When he walked into the room, just so he was less of a silhouette, Virgil eyes were drawn to the large burn scar covering the left side of his face, just a shade darker than the right, but the skin mottled and textured.

“Virgil, this is Janus Oakmen. His husband was unable to join him today, but-”

Husband? Virgil’s breath hitched. His husband, his husband, he’s gay, gay gay gay- His anxiety skyrocketed, and he couldn’t help the electric-like impulses that ran up his spine and out his fingers. He clenched his fist to hide the remaining twitches.

She seemed to stumble over her words, trying to hide her shock. To her luck, the man interrupted, smiling softly down at Virgil.

“I’d like to speak to Virgil alone, if he’s alright with that.”

“I’ll be waiting just outside the door,” She said hurriedly, rushing out and closing the door behind her. And they were alone.

Janus looked at him for barely a second before taking a seat on the bottom bunk on the other side of the small room, folding his hands on his lap.

“Technically, I asked if you were okay with it, but…” He gestured weakly to the door. “Oh, well. I was told you don’t talk, Virgil.”

He stared in response, wrapping his fists up in the blanket. The man gave a breathy chuckle, but there was no animosity behind it.

“That’s okay. Just wanted to double check. Is it okay with you if I just talk, then?”

No adult had ever asked Virgil for permission for anything twice in under a minute. His social workers kind of just did what they had to, and he’d never been in a home where that kind of thing was the norm. It was more ‘the kids ask for everything, and the parents get what they want, no questions asked’. Needless to say, he was taken aback.

He nodded weakly, realizing the man was waiting for a response.

“Fabulous. Ignoring all the boring details you wouldn’t care about, my name is Janus. Like, from mythology, not a PTA mom. I’m thirty-five, and my husband Logan and I have been fostering since we were twenty-two, so we know what we’re doing. We love it.”

Virgil slowly let his legs unfurl, stretching them out in front of him under the blanket.

“We actually weren’t intending to foster this year, since Logan is looking for a new job. His current one just made it necessary for him to travel more than he would like to, so we wanted to press pause until he was happy at a new one. And then we got a call from good ole Bev out there.” He waved at the door again, cracking a smile. “She told us a little bit of your story, and Logan and I instantly said yes. If you’ll have us, that is.”

The vague idea of “why?” crossed Virgil’s mind, and it must have translated to his face, because Janus continued.

“When I was fifteen, I came out to my parents as gay. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but they weren’t such big fans, and they put me in conversion therapy.”

His heart stopped. Another round of shocks through his arms.

“We can talk about that more another day, if you want. I know that’s a tough topic for you. Needless to say, it didn’t work. Because it doesn’t work,” He shrugged, an annoyed tone finding its way into his words, “I understand what you’re going through, to an extent. If anyone can help you, it’s us. I’ve been there. And I promise, we’re fiercely protective. We’d never let anything bad happen to you.”

He stopped, leaning forward on his hands. Virgil realized he probably couldn’t see him that well except for his outline, due to him being pressed into the darkest corner of the room. Despite every cell in his body screaming that it was a trick, he scooted forward into the light of the lamp, still shaking.

“There you are. Hello, Virgil.”

Virgil raised a trembling hand in a half hearted greeting.

“I know this is a big, terrifying thing to ask of you. And I’ll understand if you say no. But if you feel safe, we’d love to have you for however long you’re comfortable with. Would you like to think it over?”

He nodded immediately. It wasn’t the hard ‘no’ he had expected himself to feel, and that was more unsettling than it should have been.

“Okay. You do that. Take however long you need,” Janus said as he stood up, straightening his shirt, “It’s been great to meet you, Virgil.”

And he was gone. The social worker came back a short while later, but Virgil was completely gone by the time she did. He didn’t respond to her dinner calls, didn’t eat when the meal was placed in front of him, safely retreated into the silent part of his mind where he was safe from panic attacks and hard choices.

---

He said yes. Of course he did. He was far too intrigued by the man he’d met to refuse. He was scared shitless, that was a given; the first week after meeting Janus, he’d refused to leave his bed, refused to eat or shower or leave his huddle against the wall until the caretaker was basically pleading with him. Even then, it was a struggle to not throw up from sheer terror.

But his social worker must have seen the way he was giving in, yearning for a grasp of hope in equal parts as his fear, because she set about to convince him. Promised more thorough checks once a week, daily phone calls to keep in touch, and an immediate pick up the moment he was unsure. Bit by bit his resolve was broken, until he finally agreed to give it a try, rushing from her presence moments later to hurl his dinner into the toilet. Hopefully his nerves would relax over time.

The day came when he was to leave the group home, and he spent none of it in the present. He was so dissociated, so deeply embedded within his own mind, that he wasn’t even able to pack his belongings. His social worker was kind enough to do it for him (though the task itself took less than half an hour- he didn’t own that much) and he didn’t even notice she was in the room, talking, until his black garbage bag was placed on the bed in front of him.

“ -unresponsive like this all day. We’re not sure what to do.”

“No doubt a response to his overwhelming fear of being placed in a new home after the disaster of his previous one. May I speak to him alone?”

“Of course.”

“Want me to leave too, Lo?”

“No, Janus, you can stay. It may be nice to have your expertise in the subject lest it become pertinent.”

There was some shuffling at the very corners of his consciousness, the light from the hallways lighting up the divots of his rumpled clothing bag, and one of the people were gone. His bedside lamp was flicked on.

“Thank you, Janus.”

A weight on the bed was the first thing to really snap Virgil back to the presence, for the first time noticing the two men before him. The one standing, he recognized as Janus. The other sitting in front of him, though, he didn’t know. Virgil blinked rapidly, slowly pushing himself further back into his bed frame, despite how it dug into his shoulders.

“Hello, Virgil. My name is Logan. I take it you’ve met my husband?”

Janus shot him a soft smirk, copying Virgil’s little wave from when they’d first interracted. He barely restrained a rush of twitches, playing it off as a shuffle to rearrange his blanket.

“Do you think you could move forward just enough to place your feet on the ground? You don’t have to stand, just to begin the process of grounding?”

Virgil didn’t trust this guy for anything. He didn’t know his intentions, knew nothing about him, and his repressed mental state wasn’t making his cognitive reasoning any better. If Logan could help him ground, maybe it would be easier to figure out if they were trustworthy. Odd, that for this to work, he had to trust them enough to ground around them.

He scooted forward, letting his feet flutter off the bed and rest on the floor.

“Well done, Virgil. Press them to the floor firmly. Janus, do you have- ah, wonderful.”

Virgil looked up, nearly throwing himself back as Janus reached out a hand to him. There was something clutched in his fingers, but all the youngest could suddenly think was electrode electrode it’s going to hurt they’re going to hurt you don’t let it touch you don’tletittouchyou DON’T!

“It’s just gum, Virge, it’s okay.”

Oh. His hand paused as he reached out for the offering, a new thought coming to mind. Should he trust food from strangers? What if they’d drugged it, like his old foster home? He bit his lip, slowly retreating back into himself.

The man seemed to see his hesitation, popping the piece into his mouth and offering one right from the package.

“I didn’t mess with it, I swear.”

He took the gum, recoiling at the harsh taste almost instantly.

“Yeah, it doesn’t taste great. But I chewed like a pack of this a day when dissociation was a bitch. Snaps you back to the present like-”

“Language, Janus.”

“I’m sure he’s heard worse.”

“That doesn’t mean we should encourage it.”

Virgil couldn’t help the tiny smile that tugged at the corner of his lips. He hadn’t seen just casual bickering in a long time.

“We brought one more bribe-”

“It is not a bribe-”

He outright snorted at Logan’s aghast tone, slapping a hand over his mouth to muffle the noise. Janus looked utterly pleased with himself, slowly handing over a bundle he’d had wrapped under his arm.

“Again, to help with grounding. And it’s a bit of a drive to our place, so maybe you can get some sleep in the car.”

It was a deep purple blanket, almost impossibly soft to the touch. Virgil couldn’t help run his fingers over the plush material, fighting the urge to just smash his face into it. Keeping an eye on the two, Virgil unfolded it and wrapped it tightly around himself, settling to just let his cheek rub against where it was draped over his shoulder.

It took another twenty minutes for him to feel able to walk without stumbling, but if he left the group home in a fuzzy blanket and starting to feel safer than he had in months, that was his to admit. And he wouldn’t… not yet.

-----------

Virgil stared down at the piece of paper clutched tightly in his hand, re-reading his shitty handwriting for the millionth time. He knew it was proper grammar, and nothing was spelled wrong, and it was clear and concise, but a part of him was still nervous about the idea of giving it to Janus. He was still hesitant to speak, and his new foster family was more than accommodating, giving him a small white board to write on, and even teaching him the most basic sign language for simple questions (courtesy of Logan). One day, he hoped he’d get his confidence back enough to speak, but right now, he felt no rush.

Being surrounded with these new people, even for the three short weeks he’d been there, had already been enough to minimize his dissociating spells. Logan didn’t have to leave for another work trip for another week, and Janus worked from home anyways, so he was getting way more love and affection than he was ever used to. He hadn’t quite given in to Janus’ offered hugs, or any casual touch at all really, but he was getting used to one of the two just sitting with him for hours, covering him with weighted and fuzzy blankets, and gently distracting him with puzzles or that god-awful gum or just repeating where he was, and that he was safe. Was this what being loved was supposed to feel like?

So he trudged down the steps, hearing the shower running as he walked past the master bedroom, and slowly approached Janus at the dining room table. The man turned to greet him, giving him that soft smirk.

“Morning, kid. Happy birthday.”

Virgil smiled shyly, remembering the sign for thank you after a moment, and dropped the note onto the table next to Janus’ mug. He took a seat across from him, hiding his shaking hands in his lap, and watched with bated breath as he took the slip of paper and read it.

“‘How long did it take you to feel okay with Logan after CT?’ As in, feel okay dating a man?”

Virgil nodded and then, just for practice, signed yes.

“The short answer? Probably two years, and I was still hesitant going into the relationship. It took us a longer time to get to the comfort level we’re at now. You need to go at your pace, Virgil. You shouldn’t force anything.”

And then, as he tended to do when no one was there to fill the silence, he began to rant. This was also something Virgil was surprised he had come to enjoy, pulling up his feet so he could sit cross legged on the chair and setting his chin overtop his folded arms on the table.

“I think it’s ridiculous that our basic human rights are still up for debate,” Janus sighed, taking a long sip of his tea, “Soulmarks are more than enough proof that we have no control over who we love- not that we should need that kind of proof to be validated. But people are afraid of what they don’t know, so they portray us as monsters who need to be fixed.” He’d begun rubbing absentmindedly at his wrist and Virgil’s eyes tracked the movement, noticing for the first time the small compass that was just a couple shades darker than the man’s skin. It almost blended in, and he probably never would have noticed it, if the small needle in the center weren’t slowly rotating towards the stairs.

Logan entered the dining room from that direction, greeting his husband with a small kiss on the head and his foster child with a relaxed smile. He must have noticed Virgil’s occasional glance at the other’s wrist, wordlessly flipping over his own arm. His matching compass was pulling towards Janus’, an ever present symbol that they were meant to be together. Then, he patted his husband’s shoulder, going to get the coffee his husband always made for him.

“You’re not broken, Virgil,” Janus murmured. Virgil’s head shot up, surprised at his bluntness, “You’re not. And if anyone tells you differently, they’ll have to deal with me,” He said firmly as he took a long sip.

“No threatening, Janus!”

Virgil snorted into his fist, grinning as Janus winked at him and said, “Sorry, Logan,” into his mug.

“Incorrigible.” Logan sighed as he exited the kitchen with his coffee, dropping into the seat between the two. “And happy birthday, Virgil. Would you like to choose what we have for breakfast, or would you like us to decide?”

That was something they’d learned about him quickly; he had awful choice paralysis. Choosing between two choices was already anxiety inducing, but a variety of things, like having to narrow it down to one food item? Lethal. Virgil quickly pointed to Logan, who chuckled.

“French toast, then?”

Virgil nodded.

“I’ll get started on that in a moment. Janus, do you have his gift?”

“It’s in the living room, let me go get it.”

And that got his heart racing. ‘Gifts’ weren’t good things. They were leverage, blackmail, with a promise of a ‘returned favor’ in the near future. Virgil didn’t like things held against him like that. What if they gave him a present, and then demanded he pay them back for it the moment things weren’t peachy? Who was he kidding, he was in the honeymoon phase of this new foster family. It would take a month, like it did with the others, and then they’d find something about him that they hated and they’d force him to change it and he wouldn’t be able to refuse because they gave him food and shelter and above all, a gift on his birthday, and he would owe them a debt and he was stuck and-

“Virgil? What are five orange things you can see?”

His head popped up- when had he grabbed his hair like that?- and he noticed how heavily he was breathing. His foster parents were looking at him in concern, not pity, but legitimate concern for his well being (wack), Janus holding his hands behind his back. It was Logan that had spoken.

“Five orange things you can see, Virgil. You can just point.”

Don’t disappoint them more, his mind screamed, so he pointed at the far wall, near the entryway.

“The bridge on the calendar picture, very good. What else?”

Point through the pass through window into the kitchen.

“The sponge, well done. Three more.”

In front of Janus’ empty seat.

“The letters on the mug-”

Quick point to the book shelf in the living room.

“-and the book on my shelf. Last one?”

It took Virgil a longer moment before he found a cup of pens on the small coffee table behind the sofa, gesturing to the orange capped pen amongst the others.

“Wonderful. Are you feeling a bit better now?”

He didn’t respond, choosing to track Janus’ movements as he sat back into his chair, adjusting his hands so they were on his lap, most likely holding the gift he was hiding. Logan leaned against the couch as his husband spoke.

“Kid, I need you to understand something, alright? You don’t owe us anything. We want to give you a gift because it’s your birthday, and we want to celebrate you. This isn’t some favor that you have to return.”

How Janus understood Virgil’s distress, the younger could only guess. But his words of reassurance were enough to get Virgil to accept the wrapped package as he presented it with minimal shaking, for once demanding his brain relax. Neither of the men mentioned how delicately he unwrapped it, carefully tugging at the tape as to not rip the paper. Why risk it?

His mouth gaped when he saw the present for the first time, holding the box in a white knuckled grip.

“We were told yours was taken from you and never returned, and figured that you needed a new one,” Logan said.

It was the first new thing Virgil had ever gotten. His clothes were from thrift stores or hand downs, his school supplies consisted of a found pencil and a ripped binder from the group home’s storage, forget ever having his own computer or video games or…

“This is a phone!”

“That it is.” Janus was smiling, taking a sip of his now lukewarm tea.

“I can’t- You can’t just- I don’t-”

“We can, and we did. You’re seventeen, you kind of need a phone just for everyday life. And unless you give us a reason not to trust you with it, we have no worries.”

Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t-

Janus slid the tissue box across the table, but Virgil elected to ignore it, refusing to take his eyes off the box in his hands.

“Thank you,” he barely choked out, “Thank you so much.”

“You’re very welcome, Virgil,” Logan responded for the both of them, returning back to the kitchen nonchalantly as if he hadn’t just given Virgil more than he’d ever gotten in his entire life combined. “I’m going to start on breakfast.”

“I can help you set it up. Then you can download some music… maybe contact the soulmate of yours again.” Janus switched chairs so he was next to Virgil, careful not to touch him, and Virgil couldn’t help grinning blindingly up at him.

It would only be after breakfast that Virgil would realize that he’d spoken. It would be a longer journey until he’d be able to talk again effortlessly, but he was a step closer.

Part 4 HERE!

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nctzendreamz · 3 years

Text

off the table — lee taeyong

genre: angst w/ hints of fluff.

warnings: language, mentions of drug abuse, and mental illness.

featuring: nct members + chan and felix from stray kids.

authors note: taeyong was perfect for this in my head. also, thank you ariana grande.

is love completely off the table?

will I ever love the same way again? will I ever love somebody like the way I did you?

it had been almost a year. almost a year since he had heard your laugh. you know, the one only he was capable of getting out of you. it was gentle, yet so vibrant that it could color even the most plain and unpleasant rooms. he had seen you do it a million times, but his favorite work of art of yours was the one you did on his heart.

obviously, he couldn’t see what the inside of him looked like. but he could feel it. before he met you, he was certain everything was pitch black. to be specific, the darkest shade of the night sky one could possible fathom. so much pain resided in him. some he brought to himself, some he did nothing to earn. regardless, it was there, and as anybody with demons did, he found coping methods.

that’s how he met you, actually. holed up a strip club he had no business being in. one, because there was no one here he truly wanted. he would never admit it outloud, but the thought of love warmed him. not much, but it did. more than silly one night stands that have soul ties no one wanted to keep.

you were clearly out of place in the building filled with the scent of marijuana and flashing lights, although it did perfectly consume your complexion in the most beautiful way. he observed you for what felt like hours, just admiring you. he had no idea he would want to do this for the rest of his life.

it didn’t take much liquid courage for him to approach you. he could sense your fear when his slender fingers touched your exposed shoulder. for some reason though, the minute your eyes locked it was as if you were looking at someone you had known for a million lifetimes. or maybe that was just Taeyong’s point of view. maybe, everything was all an illusion. meeting you. falling in love with you. you falling in love with him.

“it’s been awhile.” a voice snaps Taeyong out of his deep thinking. the minute his concentration breaks does his surroundings suddenly blast into the center of his cortex. the volume increases. he is in the real world again. he isn’t high, yet.

“yeah.” is all he can spit out. all of the different coversations he could hear take place all of a sudden was making him extremely frustrated and unable to form coherent thoughts. or maybe he wanted it that way so he wouldn’t have to think about you.

you loved coming here. he hated coming here. but he loved you, and your favorite thing to say to him was, “when you love someone, you do things you hate. just like me sitting and watching you smoke for hours without stopping.”

he never realized how much you hated his distractions.

the here, was a restaurant that resembled a sports bar back where you are from. the food was less Korean and more greasy chicken tenders. and you really admired their honey mustard. it was kind of ridiculous how much you loved this place. it was always crowded. the smell was odd - a mixture of people who can’t seem to do anything but drink beer and yell, and foreigners who hated living in Korea. this was the only taste of home they got, so they took advantage of it.

did you feel that way too?

he doesn’t know. and he doesn’t want to think about it. some soccer game was on. people were cheering. he was just waiting on his to-go order.

“how have you been?” the familiar woman asks behind the counter. she was definitely in her mid-50’s. he assumed. she always would be here when Taeyong was dragged along, and she was always nice. who wouldn’t be with all the money you gave to this place.

“i’ve been fine.”

taeyong feels a little cheery conversating with another human. if it wasn’t his dealer, there wasn’t anything to say if he was being quite honest. his relationship with his family died out a long time ago. the only person that he could talk to was himself. the guys who were constantly down in the basement at his dealer were cool, but they never really got him. they thought he was weird, violent. only you cared enough to see how sweet he was. to paint him.

“good to hear. you tell your lover that i miss them!”

his heart, still colored from the mention of you, breaks. it had broken many times from your presence on this earth being acknowledged. everytime his chest would explode into his stomach.

he couldn’t say anything.

he simply walks out the place, not caring about manners. he just wants to go home. he doesn’t even like these fucking chicken tenders, but he’s going to go home and eat them. in your honor.

“excuse me.” a voice exclaims as he finally makes it outside.

once again, words don’t leave his mouth. the woman was probably lost. he truthfully didn’t care. he didn’t care about anything anymore.

“sorry,” she begins. her hair is almost a white color. it’s clearly dyed, but she might have been naturally a darker shade of blonde since the coloring seemed too perfect. “i just...i’ve been watching you - wait, that sounds incredible creepy—“

no one could compare to you, but she reminded him of you. you always did this when you were nervous, or had a severe lack of sleep. you would say things you considered to be silly. fumble with your words. and you would always ruin it more by acknowledging it.

but he was never irritated. he thought it was the cutest thing in the entire world. you were the cutest thing in the entire world.

even now, he’s okay. maybe because he was reminded of you, he can appreciate the art.

“you’re really cute.” she finally spits out.

he couldn’t respond, for the third time today.

why was this so hard? it has almost been a fucking year. a year without you. a year without touching you.

yet, no one could ever compare. not the blonde woman standing in front of him. not the sky. not the stupid bar. even his drugs seemed lackluster to the high you gave him whenever you told him you loved him.

he walks away. he needs something. something to make him unable to think for the rest of the night.

never thought you’d be so damn hard to replace. i swear I don’t mean to be this way, if I can’t have you? is love completely off the table?

“y/n? you there?” you feel vibrations from snapping on your face from the man sitting beside you. he snapped three times, to be exact.

“yeah! yes.” you quickly correct, adjusting your posture along with it.

“i know you appreciate the arts, but that painting is nothing to stare at.”

the painting chan was referring to, seemed plain to a simple eye. it simply, was a black square. but you saw worlds in it. you saw him.

“you know christopher,” you cooed, giving his slim cheek a quick sqeeze before continuing, “just because something seems boring to the naked eye, doesn’t mean it actually is. sometimes, a simple work of art such as that lame black square can hold a thousand meanings.”

he smile is radiant. honestly, the neon colored walls in the movie theater couldn’t compare to it no matter how hard it tried. lately, you had been trying to predict what he would say when you tried to be somewhat of substance around him. you were truthfully scared of boring him.

maybe you saw yourself in the black square as well.

“you really find it interesting, love?”

his accent - God his accent. it had an effect on you that truthfully wasn’t healthy, but even so you always felt guilty when your heart would papilate as it touched your eardrums. but why? you were single. you were moving on.

you can’t even look at him anymore, so you settle on the painting once more. now that you think about it, it was kind of scary that it was in a movie theater. maybe chan was on to something - what was its purpose? to simply cause you pain? to make you think about things and people you could no longer have? a person who is the worst possible thing for your growth, but the best food for your pitiful, lonely soul?

“never mind, you’re right.” you stand promptly, suddenly wanting to get as far away from the evil on the wall. it didn’t matter how chilly it was outside.

“woah.” chan chases after you. you’re too quick though. you’ve practically swam through the crowd to escape into fresh air. what is wrong with you?

it doesn’t take long for you to find yourself at his car. his pride and joy by the way, in which he never let anyone else ride in yet. he had been saving for so long to get it. you didn’t know the model, all you knew was that it made loud noises when he wanted it to. the car was originally white, but the two of you agreed that it was the worse possible color for a car, so he got a paint job and now it was as black as a dark hole.

the stars are beaming, and it’s odd. you used to love nights like this. you preferred the day time, but it was something about a light in the dark, such as the moon that pulled you in. it always destroyed you in the end though.

“what did I do?” his voice snaps you out of your thoughts.

“huh?” you wizzle in confusion, not understanding why he believed he had done anything but gave you a peaceful night not lost in your thoughts.

his eyes tell you everything you need to know before his mouth does. he isn’t questioning your ever changing emotions and happiness to hear satisfaction from your mouth - to boost his ego. he truly feels as if he’s ruined any chance he’s had with you simply from being himself. even so, as he waits for you to answer he’s taking his bomber jacket off for you to wear. he was sweet like that.

“chris, you are always perfect. why would you think anything different?” you say as you put the jacket on.

he’s holding back a smile, but you can tell it’s more so from your proper word choice, and not what you said.

“you trying to sound English?”

“no.” you giggle, pushing his shoulder lightly. “I’m just trying to communicate with you.”

“then tell the truth.” he prompts, taking a step closer to you.

“can I lean on the car?”

“yes.” he laughs in a low tone. “you can lean on the car.”

“okay.”

silence is filling the air, and it’s making you sick even though it shouldn’t be.

“y/n.” he finally speaks. you decide you have the balls to look at him even though it feels so wrong. the stars - they’re sparkling right into his eyes and you know you are the dumbest idiot on earth.

why can’t you just choose him?

the question is repeating over and over in your head, but no answer comes. well, no answer you want to hear comes. this should’ve been easy money. the perfect guy, with a good family and solid morals is madly in love with you. he’s still here, even when you barely give him anything to work with, and you’re thinking about others who were nothing close to that no matter how they made you feel.

“my confession ruined everything, didn’t it?”

it was about two months ago that chan confessed his love for you. you laughed a bit, as it made no sense. the two of you had been in the same circle for awhile, and you had been notified of his appreciation for you long ago, but he had seen you break. he watched you go from happy soul to broken and he still liked you? in what world?

you enjoyed his company. that’s why you began to hang out with him practically everyday - doing whatever you two wanted. most of the time you two just watched movies, or played silly board games. but sometimes you would go shopping, or he would play you his music he worked on. you could tell he lacked confidence on what he could become, but you knew he had the potential to be so great.

his confession was short and sweet. and the way he approached you, you could tell he was somewhat confident that you would feel the same. you did feel the same, but you also still had feelings for others. when you declined his request to take things to the next level, he didn’t get upset. or at the least he didn’t show it.

he promised the two of you would move at your pace. and that was all you needed to hear to know that maybe one day, when you got yourself together, the two of you could be something.

chan always protected you. you never felt endangered, or unsafe when you were with him. to you, he was sweet, to others he was still sweet, but he knew when to be stern.

“no. i promise.” is all you answer. “it’s cold.” here you go again trying to change the subject. this wasn’t like you.

he promptly unlocks the door to his car, opening it for you as well. it isn’t long before he’s on the drivers side turning on the car so you could feel some heat on your body.

“i won’t bring it up anymore.” he sighs.

“no chris. you bring it up everytime you feel it. i like you, okay? i do. i know I’ve never said it out loud before, but I do. i just...i don’t know what I’m doing right now. there are some things I have to get over you know?”

you can tell the amount of words you used - probably the most you had spoken to him in months shocked him, and made him feel extremely guilty. you know he didn’t want you to feel like he was trying to pressure you. all he wanted to have was something. something that made him feel as special as he knew you had made others feel in the past.

“y/n I’m a fucking idiot. God, don’t listen to me. you are perfect okay? we are working at your pace and we always will. i - fuck.” his face goes directly in his hands.

it’s cute - the way he cares about his every move around you so deeply. you remember what it felt like to feel like that. it was the most nerve wracking, yet butterfly giving thing to experience when around someone you admired so much.

“chris...” you whisper, removing his face from his palms. he had the softest hands ever. “hey, don’t beat yourself up okay? i know what you want and I know you have nothing but the purest intentions. if I didn’t feel that way I wouldn’t want to spend everyday with you okay? whatever you think this is, it is. i promise.”

“okay.” he sighs the biggest breath of relief you had heard in a long time. “okay. i know what we need.” he offers. your hand lingered on his, and he decided it would be best to hold yours as the opportunity presented itself. it’s nice - the warmness. yet, it feels incredibly wrong.

you truly didn’t mean to be this way. you would do anything to not be this way.

“let’s go cop something from felix. hm?”

what chan was reffering to was the good ole’ mean green, weed. you smoked a lot more in the past than you did now, but you were still no angel. especially tonight did getting high sound like the best decision you could have made.

“yes please.” you say without hesitation, leaning back in the seat. your left hand is still in chan’s right, and you don’t plan on letting go. felix’s house isn’t that far from here, so you know your pleasure will be coming sooner or later. chan starts the car and begins the journey. usually, the two of you drive with music on, but tonight the silence was what the both of you wanted.

secretly though, chan snuck his AirPod into his left ear. he loved music, but he could tell you weren’t in the mood. and he didn’t mind that. he would do anything for you. the lyrics resonated with his with his soul so much that he felt it ache, even though he felt he had no right.

i’ll wait for you

even if I always feel like I’ll be number two

to someone you can’t hold anymore

taeyong can’t even recall how long he had been pent up here, high as hell. intoxicated as fuck. the chicken tender meal he brought had been long gone, but not from his mouth. the junkies smelt food, and took food like the animals they claimed to be.

this all sucked so bad. he hated being here. but he couldn’t move.

it was so loud in here. the boys he knew - johnny, mark, and jaehyun were all present. they seemed to be the leaders of the basement and they also seemed to be functioning quite well considering how high they also were. taeyong couldn’t fathom or make out what their conversation were, but he assumed it was about girls. he caught, “they’re supposed to be here any minute now.” from jaehyun’s lip. he seemed to be the strongest ladies man. all taeyong knew, was that he wanted no parts of the drug induced orgy he knew was going to take place. he also knew if he didn’t leave, they didn’t care. they were going to give a show regardless.

“taeyong!” johnny yells, bringing him back to focus. johnny was always very intimidating. he wore a smile when he got what he wanted, but if he spoke to you and you didn’t listen, he quickly got upset. maybe he was different when he was sober, but that was never.

“what’s up.” taeyong answers dryly, still not looking at him.

“you know,” johnny sits down in the dirty floor right beside him. “you’ve never been fun, but you were more fun before than you are now.”

“i went through this phase.” mark interrupts, taking the seat on taeyong’s opposite side. “what is it? mommy issues? a girl? or a boy? if you get spicy like that.” he chuckles. he coughs right after.

“how about everything. except the last part.” taeyong whispers.

“oh...you have it rough. was your mom a druggie too?”

“no - well, I don’t know. i met her like once when I was younger. she told me ‘i did it for your good’ and left.”

“so you were in a foster home? or did you get adopted?”

“foster home. neglected, so now I’m like this.” he chuckles. he’s laughing, but in reality to admit these things out loud hurt, even though he was sure the other boys had similar or worse stories.

“and the girl?” mark asks. he had began to roll up another blunt in the midst of taeyong’s life story. maybe it was too much for him. or maybe he was just an addict.

“i cheated. and i was mean. she was the best thing ever though. she got me clean.”

“for what? a day?” johnny laughs outloud.

“well, not clean clean.” he explains. “but off the hard stuck like coke, and lsd and shit. we both smoked weed. and I smoked cigs.”

“ew!” the two of them exclaim. “cigs?”

“so you’re telling me that the two of you do every drug under the sun, but cigarettes are where you draw the line?”

“duh!”

“have you seen all the commercials? with the person with the hole in their throat sounding like the old shriveled lady from spongebob going ‘chocolate!’ we don’t want that!”

“cigarettes aren’t the only thing that can cause that, you know?”

“whatever.” johnny shivers as if he had just gotten the worse news ever. “so this girl wasn’t a druggie? why did she even like you?”

“i don’t know. still to this day I don’t know. but she did. and she tried everything to make me happy. it just felt too good to be true, so I ruined it.”

“damn bro.” mark sighs, taking a deep puff of his blunt. “i thought people only did stupid shit like that in the movies or tv shows.”

“hey hey now, markie.” a voice speaks out of the corner. “be nice to our new friend.”

it’s jaehyun. funny enough, jaehyun tried to get at you once long before you met taeyong, but you had no interest in him once you found out his issues. then again, while he was attracted to you, he didn’t want you to love him. he just wanted to corrupt you.

“our boy is broken hearted. seems to me like he just needs some fun.”

“relax, jae.” johnny explains. “he’s not there yet. let him fall for us on his time.”

“what are you on right now?” jaehyun inspects.

“just a couple of blunts.”

“so just a starter?”

“hyung...” mark sighs.

“okay okay. fine. but when the heartbreak starts to kick in more, i got something that’ll change your life. you just let me know.”

“he will.” johnny and mark say once again in unison.

“boys!” a voice yells. it makes everyone stand up minus taeyong, as he had no idea who it was. he can hear feet coming down the steps. there’s a boy with blonde hair. the same boy who let him in. he was a new face, but clearly an important one from the way even jaehyun was waiting for his comment.

“hi felix!” everyone begins to repeat after eachother.

his voice is deep as he speaks, and his accent is thick. his face itself may have not been scary, but the way he carried himself was.

“clean up this fucking mess. i know you can’t do anything about the shitty couches, but make an attempt. i got some good people coming over and I need quiet. when I bring them down here to show them the product, i need everyone on their best behavior.”

“what exactly does that mean?” taeyong speaks. maybe he shouldn’t have, because everyone is looking at him as if he just called the president a bitch to his face or something.

“you’re new here.” felix explains as he finishes his strut down the stairs. he can be seen more clearly now, and his outfit reminds taeyong of someone you knew. he couldn’t remember his name, but it was chan or something. “well, new to me.”

“and?”

“and...” felix crouches to his level. “im the boss. and all of you do what I say. my brother ran this like a crackhouse. i want us to make some real money, therefore you all will be getting cleaned up. there will be people coming in and out, looking at what we have, so try not to act like the druggie you are. thanks.”

“yes sir.” taeyong says, although he has no intentions of respecting this felix cat.

the doorbell rings promptly. the house wasn’t so big that they wouldn’t be able to hear. clearly this felix had plans to change that, but for now he had to settle.

“that’ll be them. look like friends so they won’t be scared. they’re not like us. or, what you will be.”

with that he leaves. everyone is silent as they want to know who exactly is this person. they all expected some rich man with a million connections to be at the door. they hear one voice - an accent is present. he’s laughing, and they hear the sound of them dapping up.

“friend.” the voice says. they must have not seen each other in a long while. “what’s up? how have you been?”

“oh, I’ve never been better.” felix says. “and y/n.”

the sound of your name makes taeyong’s heart stop in his chest. what the? how could you of all people be here? you hated drugs. this was clearly a trap house. this is where taeyong would go to get everything you wanted, but you always refused to go with him. what male had you here?

jaehyun is smiling as he recognizes your name too. taeyong can’t notice though as he is genuinely about to have a panic attack.

“come downstairs will you? since chan told me it was a special occasion, I decided I’d let you two take a look.”

“felix...are you running a trap house?” you joke, not realizing how true your words were.

“not at all, sweets.” he relaxes you. “i just have good shit from my brother that needs to be sold. this is our little secret though.”

“we know.” chan answers for you. “snitches get stitches.”

“and end up in ditches.” felix finishes. “there are people down here, but they’re just chilling. don’t be scared.”

the three of you make your way down to the basement. jaehyun is the first face you recognize. you feel sick, but he didn’t phase you that much.

the black haired boy though, sandwiched between two other guys, makes your trip and fall on the disgusting floor.

it’s him. it’s really him.

why? all you wanted to do was have fun. all you wanted to do was forget him.

you can see in his eyes does he want to explode. but this was his fault. this was all his fault.

to be continued...

#nct #nct 127 #nct imagine #taeyong nct #NCT angst #nct reactions #taeyong series #taeyong angst #taeyong imagine #nct imagines #NCT series #stray kids #stray kids felix #chan stray kids

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zeebeebirdy · 3 years

Text

When Angels Fly

Summary: The Vault Hunters kill Angel, and Jack reacts as most parents would at the loss of their child. He doesn't expect however to take on her siren powers because...well, that's not how sirens work, right?!

(Alternatively: We were talking about siren Jack in a server and getting emo about Jack getting her powers after she dies and next thing I knew I was writing angst!)

[READ HERE ON AO3]

"Dad, I have to tell you something…"

Jack's panic is soaring through his veins like an unruly firework. He watches his daughter lay on the ground, staring up at the pixilated projection of himself, and tears begin collecting in his eyes finally. Her breath is laboured. Her eyes…

She looks too much like her mother.

"You're an asshole."

The scream rips through him involuntarily, full of rage and sorrow and regret. Angel falls limp, and Jack roars with such venomous hysteria, he threatens to tear his vocal chords beyond repair. He slams his palm down on the panel before him, turning off his projection into the chamber, and screams again.

He keeps screaming. His whole chest feels like it's shattering, the explosion of his heart having blown out the structure of his ribs. Every scream gets more hysterical, it burns so deep he imagines his lungs to be shrivelling up, turning black and crumbling as they weaken. Every coherent thought he might have been able to decipher before is now just tangled knots, taunting him.

This is a familiar pain, isn't it? He's known this before, this putrid, agonising darkness that consumes him, squeezes him until he's drained of any will to live. The thick melancholia infecting his senses, poisoning him beyond the point of death.

He didn't deserve it before. He didn't deserve to lose his chance at happiness. He didn't deserve watching his world be torn apart so easily after fighting for hope.

I'm not an asshole.

I was defying fate of breaking me.

He punches one of the metal walls to the room he's in, then rests his forehead following. Tears pour from his eyes like he's some kind of geyser, and the inability to stop just fuels his anger more. He's used to feeling anger, even if it's simply lingering, keeping him company, but this is increased tenfold compared to what he knows. This is terrifying, it stiffens his bones, expands to form cracks.

He didn't deserve it before. Did he deserve it now?

Did she?

She still sounds so close by. Her voice, infected in hatred, dripping with exhaustion, and it drowns his sanity. The sounds of her as an infant, babbling nonsense, they echo among her pained screeching. All her sounds, all his memories of her, they begin to blend together. They're blinding, they're deafening…

His arm is glowing.

--wait, his arm is glowing?!

Jack sees the shimmering blue peeking out the sleeve of his jacket, and quickly whips off the clothing in a frantic haste. He rolls up his shirt sleeve and jumper in one, and there, plain as day...her markings. The spiraling, icey blue that lit up her ghostly complexion, drawing itself into his skin. There's no physical pain that he can tell, but maybe he's just too heartbroken to even tell.

Her voice gets louder. It echos, talks over itself, screaming abuse at him, whispering for help, begging for release. He holds his arm up and stares at the tattoo as it continues wrapping itself around his arm. He can almost see his wide, glossy eyes reflected in the glow. Then he hastily unclasps his vest, unbuttons his shirt, and throws both to the ground. He lifts his sweater up over his chest and sees the same glow leading down his shoulder toward the top of his pectoral.

He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out. He looks between his chest and arm, touches it with his other hand - it feels smoother than the rest of his skin, almost like flesh fused with marble. It's impossible, surely, he can't be a siren. There's only six sirens in existence at one time, and he knows three--

No. He knows two of them.

No. He is one of them.

No…

Then all of a sudden, an agonising pain electrifies it's way up his spine. He thrashes backward and slams his back against the metal wall, attempting to reach back, trying to touch whatever it is that feels like drills going through his shoulder blades. He shouts out like a dying animal, panting heavily when his lungs demand a break, and then he stumbles over and falls with a hard this on his knees. He braces his fall with both hands, and freezes in the undignified position.

More screaming. The pain is torturous. It feels as if someone is drilling right through the bone in his shoulders, angling the tool to expand the point of pressure. A burning chill shoots through his blood and punctures his heart, and he feels it then, the distinct fizzling of electricity. Small bolts rapidly shoot through his veins over and over and over again, it’s like he’s being drugged, being forced to overdose on adrenaline and fear. He grits his teeth, trying desperately to disrupt the pain. It doesn’t stop, it just grows more and more aggressive. The pain in his shoulders broadens, forces his bones to shift and break. It’s a nightmare.

Pain has always followed Jack around. Pain is his stalker, his ghost, the curse befallen upon his family. Pain knocks on every door he locks and walks in without a key. Pain isn’t a stranger, but neither is it a friend. It’s a visitor someone else invited over, and that leaves in their own time

When he tries to speak again, all that comes out are pained wails. His words like static on his tongue. He opens his eyes and gasps. The room is blindingly bright, and as he glances around, blurring trails follow his line of sight. It’s too much. His whole body is changing. Is he floating? It feels like it - he can’t seem to feel the support of the floor beneath him anymore.

And then, in the blink of an eye, it’s just white. All the pain disappears without any climax. It’s just nothingness.

Except for Angel. She floats before him, the emptiness almost swallowing her whole. She’s pale, and thin, and frail, but her tattoos are gone. The bluest thing about her now is the sickly undertone of her skin. All of Jack’s senses have been frozen, and all he has is sight. She has an angelic glow haloing her body, ironically, and he wants to reach out and touch her. He wants to acknowledge she’s real - he wants to stroke her hair, hold her face, kiss her forehead, squeeze her tight--

He tries to yell for her. He tries so desperately to scream, but there’s only absolute silence. His voice has been stricken from him. He can hear the pain deep in his core, the yearning that burns him up.

I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY, ANGEL! SWEETHEART, PLEASE, COME CLOSER! YOU’RE MY BABYGIRL-- I’M SORRY! I’M SO FUCKING SORRY!

But nothing. He can feel, in the vaguest sense of the word, the ghostly trails of his tears from moments ago, but there’s nothing actually there. He reaches out, clawing at thin air, straining to grab her- grab anything! It’s just more nothing. Endless amounts of nothing but her presence haunting him.

She says nothing, barely does anything either beside stare at him with such wicked discontentment. It’s otherworldly, and confusing, yet somehow even in this plane of existence, where he can’t even feel the dull thumping of his own heartbeat in his ears, and he remembers the scorching pain from mer seconds prior, her scowl is the most painful thing he’s felt so far.

He wonders, in whatever consciousness he’s given in this non explicit realm of existence, if maybe this is a punishment for the things he’s done in his life. Sure, there’s no hellfire and brimstone, but the absolute absurdity of it all, and the suddenness of his depression crushing him without warning, it feels like torture. Maybe the shock of watching his only child - the only family he has left, as far as he’s been concerned for years - drove him beyond what he even knew to be insanity. He could be passed out, drooling on the floor, just vulnerable and waiting for someone to put a bullet in his head. Weird things have followed Jack his whole life, admittedly, so perhaps this is just another unexplainable alien entity.

He really hates not knowing. Worse though is not being able to ask.

Angel begins to move closer. The quiet is eerie, it unsettles Jack more so than he already was. She comes face to face with him, inches away from their noses touching. Her face hasn’t moved from it’s scowl, in fact it looks like it’s intensified. She stares deep into his eyes, and bleeds him of all his apologies, replacing those dark corners of his soul he tries to ignore with heavy, deathly guilt. She plagues him with the pain he gave her, attaches the tumour that was being a siren and let’s it possess him now.

She looks too much like her mother.

Without a word, she gently lays herself down, and on instinct Jack catches her. She’s weightless, like air, but he doesn’t pull away. Her scowl falls away and she closes her eyes. He cradles her, almost akin to the days she was a new-born, afraid he’d break her if he moved too quickly.

The next time Jack blinks, he finds himself plunged back into reality. There’s the broken hum of the control core, the creaking of metal all around, and looking down in his arms he sees Angel, completely void of life. Her limp body pours blood, covering his hands and clothes.

He can feel the electric wings sticking out of his back.

He can feel the electrical current pumping blood throughout his body.

He feels regret.

#borderlands #Handsome Jack #angel the siren #angel borderlands #borderlands 2 #borderlands fic #my fic

28 notes · View notes

yeah-klave · 3 years

Text

A Short History of What Happened - Chapter 5

Written, with love, for EnKlave Fest 2021.

Catch up with the story so far: Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4

Prompt: Omegas aren’t allowed to join the army, but then Omega!Klaus gets dropped into Vietnam and has to pose as a Beta. He manages quite well, right until he goes into heat. Alpha!Dave is protective and incredibly aroused/horny.

Genre: Omega verse, smut, developing relationships, slow burn, undercover, misunderstandings, secretly in love.

Word length: This chapter: 3.9k

Warning: Implied, canon-compliant abuse. Implied homophobia. Discussion of AU-specific political issues, including victim-blaming, gay-shame and dub-con medical procedures. The entire work, when posted, will contain explicit sexual content.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of The Umbrella Academy characters or settings.

***************************************************************

They walked on in silence for a while.

Dave wasn’t quite sure why or how, but he felt more content in this moment than he had in months, years even. Maybe ever.

It was ridiculous. The man walking beside him was practically a stranger. A mystery; with secrets and a painful history and – quite possibly – more than a little darkness inside him.

Dave couldn’t explain it, but somehow, he still felt a… pull.

Perhaps Klaus did live in a world of shadows, but maybe Dave could turn on the light. Maybe Dave could be the light.

Dave heard a gentle inhale next to him and turned to see Klaus breathing deeply, his eyes closed and his heard tilted back slightly.

Dave faltered, was he… scenting the air?

Klaus’ lashes fluttered and he opened his eyes and caught Dave’s gaze. His irises were thin green disks around the dark pools of his blown pupils.

“Whaafght,” Dave stuttered.

Klaus blinked.

Dave composed himself, took a deep breath and started again.

“What,” Dave swallowed, thinking frantically and eventually grasping at the first coherent thought that came to him, “what kind of music do you like?”

Before him, a smile spread slowly across Klaus’ face and a twinkle lit up his eyes.

“Buckle up, David,” Klaus smiled, “I’m about to take you on a wild ride.”

And he did.

Dave hadn’t even heard of most of the songs Klaus listed off. In fact, he didn’t recognise them to all, even when Klaus sang bits aloud in a breathy, enthusiastic, but slightly off-key voice. Dave was feeling light and relaxed, but he didn’t start getting giggly until Klaus began adding the accompanying dance moves – a series of shimmies, little hip rolls and dramatic arm movements. Dave started laughing. And once he started, he found it really difficult to stop. The sound of Dave attempting to supress his giggling seemed to spur Klaus on because he just started hamming it up even more.

Dave tried to get himself under control a couple of times, glancing around nervously, aware of where they were. But the coast looked completely clear and then he’d look back at Klaus and the expression on his face would set him off again.

“I’ve never,” Dave wheezed between peals of laughter, “even heard of these songs. My favourite song is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Where you’re from must be much hipper than where I grew up.”

“Ohmigod, Dave!” Klaus choked, “Hip! You’re just too precious!”

“It means trendy or… happening,” Dave helpfully supplied.

Klaus’ faced creased and he doubled over in silent giggles.

“That’s perfect,” Klaus choked out, gasping for air, “absolutely spiffing! Completely ripping! Positively groovy!”

Dave didn’t quite get the joke, but grinned along with him.

“It must have been, though,” Dave bobbed his head earnestly. “We must be pretty out of touch with the cool music where I’m from.”

“Where’s that?” Klaus asked.

“Near Dallas,” Dave supplied.

“Ooh, a Southerner!” Klaus said. “So, Dave, are you more a smooth Southern gentleman or rough Texas cowboy?”

Dave paused. “Neither,” he said finally, “I’m just me. Just boring old Dave Katz. There’s nothing interesting about me. I’m just… a plain hamburger kind of a guy.”

Klaus looked at him steadily. “I don’t buy that at all,” he said. “There’s nothing plain hamburger about you, Dave.”

“Well,” Dave corrected himself. “Actually, my order would probably be plain hamburger with two pickles, if I’m being exact. And picky.”

“Exactly,” Klaus grinned. “See, just what I said! Flavour! Dave Katz likes to slip a bit of pickle in his hamburger!”

Klaus wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. Dave coughed uncomfortably. This conversation was straying into dangerous territory.

“How do you take your hamburger, then?” Dave asked.

“I like a little pickle,” Klaus said. “Well actually, I like a big pickle. A big, hard pickle.” He waggled his eyebrows again and then did an adorable little two-eyed wink. Dave felt his cheeks heating up at the same time his heart clenched a little at the cuteness. “The cheese can go take a running jump, though,” Klaus added, “and it had better come with fries and ketchup or else heads will roll. To be honest though, hamburger probably wouldn’t be my first choice for favourite food.”

“What would be?” Dave asked, interested.

Klaus pondered. “I knew someone once who made amazing ossobuco, that was pretty good. And I’ve always had a sweet spot of doughnuts. My siblings and I used to…” Klaus trailed off.

Dave held his breath, but Klaus didn’t add any more. Dave chanced a glance sideways. Klaus had a distant, faraway look in his eyes.

Dave racked his brain for a change of topic.

“Have you ever read Dune?” he asked.

Klaus appeared to give himself a little shake.

“No,” he said, “what’s it about?”

“Well,” and with that, Dave launched into a monologue about his favourite ever book. As he talked, he saw Klaus’ eyes flitting over his face, smiling and nodding along. There was a warmth and fondness there that took Dave by surprise; an unguarded acceptance. The mutual respect of a new friendship. It made Dave feel giddy and drunk, a bubble of happiness growing inside him.

Dave was just wondering whether he should start telling Klaus about his interpretation of the ‘fear is the little death’ line, when he suddenly noticed in the distance, the location of the new camp they were travelling towards.

Reality hit him like a punch to the face.

He’d had all this time alone with Klaus to talk about the difficult things, the things they couldn’t speak about in front of the others and they’d wasted it on hamburgers and silly dance moves. In fact, he’d hardly got any answers to the multitude of questions that has been plaguing him since Klaus first arrived. They still had so many practical things they needed to discuss.

“Klaus,” Dave said, his voice low and urgent.

Klaus flinched and looked around quickly for the danger.

Guiltily, Dave backtracked.

“No. Sorry. It’s fine. It’s just, we’ve almost arrived and…” he paused, usure how to phrase the next bit. “There are still a few things we should probably talk about first.”

“Like what?” Klaus asked, his voice innocent and confused.

“Well…” Dave started slowly. “You know…” He looked at Klaus hopefully. Klaus looked back, nonplussed.

Dave shifted uncomfortably, then whispered. “You know… omega stuff.” He swallowed. “Like… how we’re going to mask your scent and keep you safe.” He shifted uncomfortably again. “And then there’s,” he gave an embarrassed little cough, “there’s your…. ummmm…” his cheeks were bright red now, “there’s your…” he looked down and finally mumbled, “your heats.”

“Oh,” Klaus said breezily. “No need to worry about that, I have the suppressor implant.” He waved Dave’s words off with a distracted flap of his hand. “And the IUD, too” he added as an afterthought. “With the scent thing, though, I thought you said the others were all betas? They won’t be able to smell me. Only alphas can smell omegas. And there’s just you, so I’m all good.”

Dave frowned, confused. “What do you mean implant?”

“The heat suppressor implant,” Klaus clarified. “I have been – almost exclusively – since I was in my teens.” His face darkened. “My dad made me. He didn’t trust me. I mean, it’s not like I wanted to get bonded to the first alpha that came along, or get myself knocked up at seventeen. But I would have liked the chance to masturbate my way through my heats in my locked bedroom like a normal teenage omega. What I really needed was a whack-off dildo. But, oh no! That’s not okay for Number Four. He had to have the medical implant instead.”

Dave frowned deeper, trying desperately to keep up.

“Are you saying,” he said slowly, “that you have something implanted in you that’s stops you going into heat?”

“Umm, yeah,” Klaus drawled, looking at him as though Dave was the one talking nonsense. But then his eyes got really wide and he snapped his mouth shut.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath, staring into the middle distance. “They didn’t start doing that until…” he paused, “So nobody here has…” he trailed off again.

“Klaus?” Dave prompted.

Klaus gave a deep sigh. “Look,” he said. “I can’t explain it. But we don’t need to worry about my heats. I’m good for easily another few months.” He sighed again deeply. “And by then I expect Five will have… done something anyway... probably come and got me. So, I’ll be long gone before that’s an issue.”

Dave choked. “There are five of them after you?”

“What?” Klaus frowned. “No, Five. My brother Five.”

Dave was completely lost. “Okay,” he said slowly, still not quite sure what had happened but somehow trusting that Klaus knew what he was talking about. “Okay, that’s good, I think. So unexpected heats is something we can cross off the list of worries.”

“Yes.” Klaus gave a definitive nod. “So go on, what else did you have on that list?” Klaus asked. “It was my scent, wasn’t it? I don’t get what’s the big deal is if we’re just surrounded by betas?”

“Everyone else in our unit are betas,” Dave confirmed. “But there are alphas in the other units. I mean,” he added delicately, “I don’t know if any that are openly… you know…” he trailed off.

“Gay?” Klaus supplied.

“Yeah,” Dave said thankfully. “But, I mean, that’s not to say there aren’t any. If they were they’d probably – no definitely – try to hide that.” Dave twisted his face in discomfort. Klaus was looked at him unblinkingly, a question lodged behind his slightly furrowed brows.

Dave swallowed again and tried to steady his breathing, determinedly not making eye contact. He couldn’t let Klaus know that he was talking about himself. Not after everything Klaus had said earlier about manipulative alphas only being kind to omegas for sex. He wanted Klaus to feel safe. He wanted Klaus to trust him.

So Dave couldn’t let him know that he was one of those kind of alphas. The ones who were attracted to men. The alphas who were almost as rare as male omegas. After what Klaus had shared about his past, he didn’t want Klaus to feel scared of him. He didn’t want to make him feel like… prey.

Klaus was one hundred percent safe with Dave. Dave knew he would never force himself on anyone. But Klaus didn’t know that. Klaus would just see him as a potential threat. Even worse, he might think that he was manipulating him, that Dave had befriended him on false pretences, only to get close to him and... and… Dave shuddered.

Klaus had made it very clear – he was running from an abusive alpha. So absolutely under no circumstances could Dave let him know his preferences. The competing alpha urges battled inside him again: desire and protection. Protection won.

“So,” Klaus said slowly, “you’re saying I need to be careful to hide the fact that I’m an omega from the alphas in other units, not because they’d want to fuck me – because they’re probably not interested in that – but because they’d out me as an omega. And I’d then be sent… back.”

“Yeah,” Dave nodded. “And if back isn’t safe for you, then we need to make sure they don’t find out, so that you can stay here where you’re safe. Safer.”

“Okay,” Klaus said. “How do we hide my omega-ness from them, then?”

“Well,” Dave said, “for a start, don’t tell anyone you’re an omega.”

“Good one, Sherlock” Klaus grinned.

“Secondly,” Dave said ignoring Klaus’ comment with a small shrug and a roll of his eyes, “I guess, try to keep the scent glands in your neck and wrists covered as much as possible. Clothing is okay for a start, but if you’re going to be around alphas for any length of time, it might be a good idea to cover up even more… bandages or dressings maybe? Or – at a push – a layer of mud might work.”

“That sounds gross.” Klaus wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“I know, it sucks,” Dave pulled a sympathetic face, “but it’s safer.”

“It sucks to be safe!” Klaus huffed in frustration. “And you have no idea how much it really sucks. I’m not really one for coving up. I like to live my life scantily clad.”

Dave swallowed and looked resolutely ahead.

“You know…” Klaus said in a sing-song voice, “bare chested twink, make the boys wink…”

“Twink?” Dave frowned.

“That would be me, Dave,” Klaus said, waving his arms in a flourish that took in his whole body. He did a quick twirl on the spot.

“Oh.” Dave could feel his face heating up again.

“Or,” Klaus carried on, “if you want to sin, show some skin… to make him cum, bare your tum.”

“They’re,” Dave swallowed, “interesting rhymes.”

Klaus let out a musically little giggle and batted his long eyelashes theatrically. “All of my own creation, Davey. And anyway… what more do you expect? I’m just a little omega sex toy, there’s nothing up here in my head. I’m only good for one thing… pleasuring horny alphas.”

Dave frowned. “Omegas are worth so much more than that,” he said seriously. His mouth had gone very dry.

“Dave, it’s fine, I was joking.” Klaus said with a little shrug.

“No,” Dave said. “It’s not okay. I know what the law says, but general perceptions aren’t so fast to change. And it’s not fair that omegas are still treated like second class citizens. You shouldn’t feel like you have to act a part just because it’s what’s expected of you. You should be able to be exactly who you want to be.” Dave’s voice had risen and he was breathing deeply. The ironic weight of his words rang in his ears long after he’d finished talking.

“I completely agree,” Klaus said seriously, all frivolity stripped from his face. He looked vulnerable and open again. “I’m absolutely an advocate for omega rights. And it’s good to know that you’re an omega ally. Those rhymes though… I know it might seem like that’s me conforming to an expected stereotype, but actually, it’s the opposite. I hate being told that I shouldn’t embrace my sexuality because it negates years of omega rights protests. Acting like a flirt doesn’t mean I don’t believe omegas should have equal rights in society, whether they’re bonded or not. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a world of difference between choosing to act like a sex object and being forced into it. And I hate it when other omegas imply I’m being a bad omega, like there’s a right way and a wrong way. Fuck everyone who says acting like a stereotype propagates the wrong impression and makes it okay for alphas to treat us that way. That’s just victim blaming. If alphas act like fucking dicks, that’s on them, not us!” Klaus took a long, shuddering inhale.

“I’m sorry I said anything,” Dave said sincerely. “I’m sorry if I upset you or I said the wrong thing. I’m not always the best at talking about this kind of stuff. All I meant to say was… I think omegas get a raw deal and… and… and I’m on your side.”

Klaus smiled contrite. “I know, I’m sorry that got a bit heavy. And don’t worry, you didn’t say anything wrong. It’s just omega politics!” He blew out a frustrated breath.

Dave pulled a sympathetic face.

“Anyway,” Klaus said, gathering himself again, “where were we? Oh, yeah, slathering me in mud and making me cover up like a nun.” He grinned and did his funny little two eyed blink again. “Any other ideas about how to mask me up and make me the least fuckable guy in the country?” His voice was light and Dave knew he was only joking.

Dave cleared his throat. “Umm,” he started, “I thought maybe… you could wear my clothes?” He could feel his cheeks heating up again. “After I’ve had them on, I mean. That way my natural alpha smell might cover yours a bit. But you don’t have to,” He added hurriedly, “if you think that’s weird or gross or whatever. It was just an idea.”

Klaus shrugged. “Nope, I mean, that’s a perfectly logical idea. To other alphas, a faint alpha smell mixed with a fait omega smell will probably come out smelling like… well, probably like a bit of a funky smelling beta. But I can deal with that.”

Dave nodded. “I know it’s less than ideal, but I think that’s probably the best option. Other than that, I guess we’ll just have to play it by ear.”

Klaus paused, then said slowly. “So, basically, I’m not really safe here unless you help me. I have to stay on your good side, or else bad things could happen to me? That sounds like it’s come straight from victim testimony.”

Dave grimaced. “Yeah, I totally see where you’re coming from with that. All I can say is that… I’m not like that. I genuinely just want to help you. I know that sounds pretty pathetic and not very reassuring. But the bad things are genuine threats, and we’re in the unusual situation where I actually am the only one who can help. So hopefully you can learn to trust that I am actually an okay guy.” He gave an apologetic little shrug and looked over towards Klaus. “I’ve got your back, soldier. Whether you believe me or not.”

Klaus cocked his head to one side and appraised him seriously, but Dave thought he could smell something light and teasing in the air.

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we… soldier?” He said eventually.

“I’ll take that,” Dave said calmly, his face soft and open and honest. Klaus just looked back at him, his expression unreadable.

They had walked on a few more paces before Dave looked over at Klaus warily. “There is something else I should probably tell you.” He said slowly.

Klaus’ ears pricked up and he looked over at Dave quickly. Dave’s nostrils flared, expecting a wave of apprehension from Klaus, but instead all he caught the scent of was… hopeful. He faltered and looked over at Klaus, whose eyes were large and fixed on Dave’s face.

“There is an alpha in another unit,” he started and watched as Klaus’ face fell slightly before his eyes. “I don’t really know, but I have heard… rumours.”

Klaus frowned again. “What kind of rumours?”

“Well,” Dave said. “I heard that… when he was back home… he was arrested a couple of times for abusing omegas, but he got off on technicalities.”

Klaus swallowed and his upper lip twitched in suppressed anger. “Bastard,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” Dave intoned flatly. “But look,” he added quickly. “I don’t know if that’s true. It could just be an ugly rumour.”

“All rumours start with a grain of truth somewhere. Except when Allison’s involved.” Klaus grinned. “Man, I wish I could introduce people like that to Allison. She’d sort them right out!” He barked a laugh.

Dave fought the urge to ask who Allison was, and instead said, “I just thought I’d give you a heads up. Just in case, you know. Just to be extra careful around him. He’s big. And not just alpha big. I mean, he’s big big. He could probably snap you in two with his little finger.”

“And by that you actually mean he’d split me in half. Right up the middle.”

Dave grimaced. “Well, I was trying to put it delicately.”

“Yeah, I know you were. Thanks though, I’ll watch out for him. Maybe you can point him out to me?”

“Sure,” Dave agreed.

They walked a little further in silence. It wasn’t exactly the comfortable silence of earlier, but Dave at least felt content that he’d said what needed to be said and was happy they’d come up with a plan. After a few more steps, Klaus chimed up.

“It really doesn’t seem fair that omega biology makes us so much smaller and slighter alphas. I mean, why do we have to be as small as betas. We’re the ones expected to mate with alphas. Alphas who are biologically huge!” He turned towards Dave and looked up into his eyes. Dave looked down at him, really appreciating for the first time the size difference between them. “I mean, everything is just so big about alphas. Their height, their build, their personalities, their cocks…” Dave choked slightly and Klaus grinned, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t get me wrong, I am into alpha cocks, but biologically they really are unnecessarily enormous.” Dave looked resolutely ahead, but dimly he was aware that Klaus’ gaze had travelled down to his crotch and the noticeable bulge in his uniform pants.

“The size thing is all very well when it’s an alpha you’re into,” Klaus continued, his gaze still lowered. “But when it’s a predatory alpha throwing his weight around, it’s a bit disconcerting. Omegas should at least have some sort of biological defence mechanism to protect ourselves from alphas like that. Like skunk stick gas, or retractable cat claws.”

Dave let out a loud laugh. He brought a hand up to cover him mouth.

Klaus watched him with a twinkle in his eye.

“Oh my god,” Dave huffed out a chuckle. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I’m just picturing you with tufty ears and a tail, like a hybrid feline-man… or a cat-boy or something. That’s so wild.”

“Wow,” Klaus said under this breath. “Just wait ‘till you realise what that means, it’s going to blow your mind.”

“What?” Dave asked.

“Oh, never mind, ignore me” Klaus said hurriedly. But he was still grinning.

They turned a bend in the track and suddenly ahead of them they could see the camp site and others in their unit already hard at work.

“I guess it’s back to war now then,” Klaus said shakily.

“I guess so,” Dave replied slowly.

“I’ve got to say,” Klaus grinned, “I really can’t wait to wear that shirt tomorrow.” He nodded at Dave’s chest and furrowed his brows in a mock thoughtful look. “I just don’t think clothes feel right unless they’ve been worn in first by another man during a six hour hike through a tropical rainforest. Clothes are just missing something if they don’t come dirt encrusted and pre-stiffened in dried sweat.”

Dave grimaced and looked down at himself, noticing for the first time his pit stains and the dampness across his chest and back.

“Maybe I’ll give this a quick rinse first,” he said sheepishly.

“Don’t you dare,” Klaus said firmly. “I need all the alpha musk I can get, remember. Come on, Dave,” he said biting his lip slowly and looking up – way up – into Dave’s face, “you have to mark me. Cover me in your scent.”

Dave swallowed hard and forced his breaths to come evenly. As he looked down into Klaus’ breathtakingly beautiful face, he thought there must be some sort of trick of the light as the sun set slowly beneath the horizon in a pool of blood red light, because he could have sworn he saw a faint blush spread across Klaus’ nose and cheeks, the flush working its way down his throat.

“O-okay,” Dave stammered.

Klaus just blinked slowly and raised his gaze from Dave’s lips to his eyes.

Maintaining this charade, Dave thought ruefully, is going to be much harder than I thought.

#klave #klaus hargreeves #dave katz #the umbrella academy #klaus/dave #klaus x dave #tua

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slasherholic · 4 years

Text

synopsis: Michael bullies the shit out of you and then finger-fucks you into oblivion.

Just Another One of Those Days | Michael Myers x Reader | NSFW

You aren’t awake when Michael digs his fingers against your scalp and wrenches you off your pillow, dragging you out of bed by your hair alone.

You are only half awake by the time he starts to tow your body like a ragdoll across the carpet, rug burns searing your skin from the friction; despite that, some self-preservation instinct kicks in, compelling you to clutch at his thick forearm and hold on for dear life.

Michael’s strength is monstrous and he does not let you forget it. He hauls you into the bathroom and hoists you to your feet and bends you over the sink and plants his elbow squarely between your shoulder blades and shoves your head beneath the faucet—and for a moment time hangs still, frozen, leaving you blinking in a stupor up into the empty black spigot above you, your heart skipping beats—until your brain finally catches up with the rest of your body to form its first coherent thought;

god help me, it’s one of those days.

Not one of those days when Michael’s wolfish urge to hunt and stalk and kill pervades his frame like a raging fever, the only cure being to step out into the dark cold night and dirty his hands and his clothes and his knife with red; today is not that day.

This morning, Michael is afflicted only by innocent, honest boredom; and his cure is both simple and rewarding.

He’s going to turn your every waking moment into a living hell.

Simply for the sheer fun of it. Simply because you can’t stop him, although you know he’d love it if you tried—if you thrashed in his steely grip and resisted him and begged for the cruel treatment to end—if only to indulge himself in your cries, to study the way your lip quivers and your body quakes and your eyes wrinkle shut as you struggle and struggle and then go limp.

There’s a rusty squeak as Michael turns the faucet on. Freezing water rushes down and gets in your nostrils and floods your lungs and you jerk away hard, sputtering violently.

Michael seizes your hands behind your back and secures you rigidly in place beneath the flowing water. He watches you thrash. His face is blank and stony and his eyes are too; but you know it’s a ruse.

You know that just beneath his empty veil, Michael is harboring all the detached amusement of a child burning ants with a magnifying glass.

For ten wretched seconds Michael lets you drown; after that his hands come entirely free from your body and he lets you crumple.

With a gasp and a sputter you collapse to the floor, hacking up water until its coming out your nose. You watch Michael’s boots and don’t dare to lift your head any further than that. He towers above you, monstrous. You know that he’s inspecting you. Drinking in the results of his work. Satiating some carnal hunger—or maybe just stoking its flames.

You stay on the floor and don’t pick yourself up for another five minutes after he leaves; a simple precaution. Michael will be back for more. If not right this very moment, then soon enough. Soon enough.

The day drags gruelingly on, and Michael’s bullying ranges from downright wicked to alarmingly petty. He seizes you up against walls and strangles you there until you teeter on unconsciousness; he snatches objects from your hand and holds them up where you can’t possibly reach; and when you go to wash your clothes he appears like a phantom in the doorway, blocking your exit, holding you captive in the laundry room to do nothing more than stare at you and breathe, and blink occasionally, and stare at you some more until you give in, and give him what he wants.

You try to push past him. You plant your hands on his thick chest and shove with all your might until you are huffing and puffing and your face is beet-red, but Michael doesn’t react. Doesn’t budge a single centimeter.

And then he steps briskly to the side. And you fall flat on your face.

Come afternoon, Michael has thrown his usual ambush tactics to the wind. Now when he approaches you he does so in plain sight, eyes locked on your bruised and battered form like a lion, presenting you every opportunity in the world to flee from him—no doubt trying to spur you into a chase.

Good, you rejoice. Great. He’s getting excited. He wants a hunt.

With any luck the torment will be over soon; because this sort of ruthless, non-stop bullying always culminates in Michael bending you over and fucking you raw. Until your muscles are putty and you can’t think nor see straight and all you know is Michael’s cock rutting into you, stabbing your cervix, over and over and over again. And with a bit more luck, that will be the end of the torture.

For today, at least.

You guess the most fucked up thing about all of this is how badly your body wants it. How your cunt seems to know that Michael’s abuse means a good, long fuck is in your future, and prepares you for it accordingly, leaving you to suffer with that terrible heat pulsing through your pelvis and pair after pair of soaked panties.

Evening draws nearer with no relief in sight. And another pair of underwear is damp with your slick.

You haven’t seen Michael in over half an hour and you suspect he’s back to his old tricks, crouching in some hidden place, poised to strike, waiting for you to open the wrong door or enter the wrong room.

Well good for him; but you’ve long since grown tired of waiting.

You sink into a heap on the couch and shuck your pants down your legs, reaching with two fingers to massage your throbbing clit through your panties, the silky, slick cotton clinging to your folds. You arch up into your own touch and murmur swears beneath your breath, taking care to keep your voice hushed.

You’re not even sure if Michael is listening. And it doesn’t matter. Sooner or later your mewling will reach his ears and when that happens, you know his curiosity will get the better of him.

Truth be told you’ve never pulled a stunt like this. You’ve touched yourself before of course, but only when you were dead-certain that Michael wasn’t around. Right now, you’re stumbling through the dark without the faintest idea of how he might react to finding you like this; with your hand on your cunt and his name on your lips.

You slip a finger down below the fabric of your underwear and hook into your warmth, coating the digit with slick. You slip two more in after that, rubbing along your plush walls, feeling them contract and spasm around your own hand. Your pussy is throbbing.

You tilt your head back on the armrest and scrunch up your eyes—pretending the fingers in your cunt are actually Michael’s—and you fuck yourself like there’s no tomorrow.

It’s nowhere near enough to get the job done. With a frustrated hiss you open your eyes again to sulk up at the ceiling.

And you nearly wet yourself when you discover that Michael is standing over the couch, staring down at you.

He’s probably been there for awhile; watching and waiting. Waiting for you to feel his presence, waiting for your heart to plummet, waiting for you to gape stupidly up at him just as you’re doing right now and to say your silent prayers that you didn’t just hammer the final nail in your coffin with your little stunt.

He looks at you for a few seconds more and his eyes are paralyzing. Unreadable.

When Michael strikes it’s faster than a cobra.

You yelp as his dangerous hands seize your shirt. One hard tug is all it takes him to sweep you clean off the couch.

You flail to get your hands beneath your body and stop your fall, managing to catch yourself just before your head bashes against the tile.

Michael sinks down in your place on the couch. You race to scramble out of his way, clambering to your hands and knees; too slow. His hot palms close around your ankles and envelop them with ease. You squeal in alarm as your lower body is hauled up between his legs, forcing your naked ass straight up in the air. He rips your panties away like paper. One of his hands grips your ass cheek and he squeezes hard, powerful fingers digging deep down into the muscle. You grimace and choke back a whimper and try not to imagine the ugly blue bruises you’re going to be dealing with tomorrow.

And then, perhaps just to add insult to injury, Michael plants the heel of his boot on your head—right down on your temple—smushing your cheek hard into the unforgiving tile.

For the third time today you find yourself face-down on the floor; and a sinking, hollow feeling in your gut tells you that you won’t be getting up anytime soon.

Michael knows by now where your clitoris is and he finds it with ease. Your heart races as he gives the hood a lazy, taunting flick, making it undeniably clear how easily he could have you screaming. Blood rushes to your head and your chest heaves up and down with your strained breathing and tears shimmer in your eyes. You steel yourself for the worst.

Instead of furthering the torment, the pressure on your clit vanishes. You can’t help but shudder when you realize what it means; Michael is saving that part for later.

His index finger slides down the length of your sex to explore your dripping slit. He prods your opening for just a moment—rubbing around it in a brief, tight circle—before growing impatient. Your pulse throbs in your cunt and in your face as Michael fills you to his knuckle, a wave of heat sweeping your entire body.

He doesn’t move it at first; he seems almost intrigued by the feeling of your walls clenching around something other than his cock. But Michael’s curiosity fades as quickly as it sparked.

You let loose a choked sob as he rams two more fingers up inside of you, just as you had done; and yet it feels nothing like what you had done. You’ve never had to think about just how much Michael’s fingers dwarf yours in comparison; not until right now.

His fingers plunge in and out at a pace that puts your own to shame. You quickly become a whining mess, a rivulet of drool dribbling past your open lips and down your chin and pooling on the floor beneath your cheek; but still, it isn’t enough.

In your moment of weakness you make a horrible mistake. There are rules you’ve set for yourself when it comes to dealing with Michael and now, your dumb ass just has to go and break the golden fucking rule:

Never beg. Because begging never works.

“Please Michael, please just give it to me, I swear to god I’ll do anything you want just please—nngh!”

Your begging is cut short as the pressure of Michael’s boot heel on your temple turns agonizing. His weight bears down on your head like a press. You know that if it tickled his fancy he could crush your skull like a watermelon.

And you could do absolutely nothing to stop him.

A horrible tightness spreads throughout your chest. You give one more whimper, a frail and shattered sound, just because you can’t help it.

In response, Michael withdraws his fingers. He takes your clit between his thumb and index. And he pinches so hard that stars explode across your vision.

You writhe on the floor beneath his boot, sniveling like a kicked puppy, your fingernails clawing and clacking against the tile. Michael’s savage treatment is just that; cruelty for cruelty's sake.

He doesn’t let up the pressure. The tortured little nerve-bundle throbs beneath his hot fingertips. Your pussy clenches around nothing. Blood rushes to your head and it makes your world spin. Your orgasm is building like a tidal wave, sweeping in a sickening crescendo of pain and pleasure and delirium until it is hanging over your head—

And then Michael lets go. You make an utterly broken sound and tremble against the cold floor and sob.

“No, no no no, don’t stop… please just fuck me…”

When you hear him fidgeting with his clothes you go limp in utter relief. Michael’s erection bobs out against your ass and finally, finally, you’re going to get the stretch your body aches for.

You feel him line up with his target; your eyes widen. A realization hits you like a brick wall.

Fuck. Wrong target.

Oh, Michael is going to fuck you alright. Just not where you want it.

#michael myers #michael myers x reader #halloween #Slashers #fanfiction

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juleswritesthis · 4 years

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Hollywood: My Thoughts

I feel bad because I didn’t love Hollywood. I liked it but didn’t love it, not even close. There were touching moments for sure. A few characters that I liked and scenes that moved me to tears or anger and some laughter. But overall? I feel it could have been better written and characters better developed. Also the acting was either extraordinary or just plain bad. Some interesting casting choices that led me to scratch my head in bewilderment.

Rest of my thoughts below some positive and some negative (fair warning)

The Good:

1. Avis Amberg/Patti Lupone: my fav from the show and the best developed character. Her journey from sad, rich, lonely woman who thought she was too old to achieve her dreams, to a strong and powerful woman who uses her voice to not only fight for herself but for all those oppressed giving them the opportunity to achieve their dreams and thus her own. And Patti was just incredible. Can’t say enough about her acting!!! 2. Archie Coleman/Jeremy Pope: my fav character from the younger cast. Though I wish the writers had better developed his character (maybe spent more time on him than Jack), Jeremy brought the emotion to every scene. The scene with Avis when he tells her he is coming out at the Oscars...amazing! Also Jeremy’s eyes...gorgeous 3. Music, cinematography, costumes and directing were wonderful.

4. The overall arc: I loved the idea of this show. A revision of what the world would be like if Hollywood had the courage to do the right thing and tell the human stories of characters from diverse race, sexuality, & gender. I did love seeing how the Asian, black and gay children experienced the Oscars with wonder and so much hope! Finally they saw themselves represented on the big screen and what that would have meant for the world if those kids felt that over 70 years ago? What would the world be like today?

The Bad:

1. Camille/Laura: Many of the younger cast were not very good actors. But the one that bothered me the most was Camille. She had one of the most important stories, definitely a central character with several pivotal scenes. And she just could not deliver the emotion. That Oscar speech? Agh why? 2. Jack Castillo: Now the actor was good or good enough and definitely fit the part. But the character? I couldn’t understand why they focused so much on him? The 1st episode was almost all him, and the only time I wasn’t bored was when Archie was introduced. Jack was such a bland character and I just couldn’t bring myself to care even a little about him, or his story or his boring marriage. And it’s more that I feel they wasted valuable screen time on him when they could have better developed some of the more interesting characters like Archie or Raymond.

3. The execution of the arc: the writing was at some parts amazing and some parts just bad. Stories felt disjointed and many of the characters were given moments but for some reason the writers forgot to connect those moments together to make a coherent, well developed story arc. (It so reminded me of another show I spent 6 seasons watching 😉)

The Okay But Could Have Been Better If:

1. Raymond/Darren: I like Ray. But only because Darren Criss is a great actor that oozes charm and charisma in every scene. He did what he could with the very limited material he was given. I don’t mean scenes because he had a lot of those. But most of his dialogue was a few words, a 30 second scene that was only meant to move the story forward. His character was given nothing yet had so much potential. Seems like a waste of a strong emotive actor if you ask me.

2. Rock Hudson/Jake Picking: the opposite of Darren/Ray. The character was given an interesting arc but the actor wasn’t strong enough to deliver. It wasn’t that he was terrible it was his acting was wooden & he couldn’t quite bring the emotion. Rock did provide a great deal of levity in some of his scenes though..

3. Henry WilSon/Jim Parson: Though I couldn’t root for the character, he was definitely one of the more interesting ones and Jim Parsons did an amazing job as Wilson is very complex. My only issue, a big one, is that the character had a positive ending. I know he is based on a real person but this was a revisionist story. Though he had a sad life he was a bad man, that used his power to sexually abuse young gay men. I didn’t like the message that in the end he thought amends was to make a movie and cast one of his victims...dude deserved jail time or to lose everything. Also the predator got to make a gay positive movie, and the gay man who tried to be good ended up finding happiness for less than a year then dies? I mean....

Moments of pure genius (if not already mentioned):

1. Anytime Anna May Wong was on screen. I so wish we had gotten more for this character. What we did get? All full of awesome.

2. Ellen and Dick confession scene: one of the saddest and best acted scenes in the movie. I felt so much for both of them in that moment!

3. Hattie MvDonald walking into the Green Room at the Oscars: yeah I felt that! Though it makes me annoyed that Camille wasn’t better cast...again.

4. Pure joy of Raymond winning the Oscar and walking into the green room welcomed with so much celebration! 5. the older editor...that guy was a hoot!

6. When the older cast were onscreen: it’s amazing how great actors can just about elevate any scene and this show had an unbelievably group of talented older actors. It’s too bad the younger casting was as well done.

I’m sure there’s more but those are top of mind. So yeah I liked it but hate that I didn’t love since it had so much potential to be great.

#hollywood netflix #my review #my thoughts #patti lupone #darren criss #jeremy pope #I would love to discuss if folks have diff opinions which probably do #not tagging all actors mentioned since not all of it is positive

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ashintheairlikesnow · 4 years

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Met You Tonight: Kauri and Jack

CW: Electroshock, referenced abusive relationship, pet whump, dehumanization, referenced conditioning/brainwashing, frank references to prostitution, very brief reference to assumed drug use

This piece is a collaboration with @spiffythespook featuring Jack/Reid! Takes place immediately after Kauri escapes, five days after he gets away from Owen Grant. This collab has multiple parts, so you’ll see Spiffy and I posting them as we get them edited!

Tagging Kauri and Jack’s crews: @im-not-rare-im-rarr, @maybeawhumpblog, @pepperonyscience, @haro-whumps, @18-toe-beans, @burtlederp, @finder-of-rings, @giggly-evil-puppy, @whimpers-and-whumpers, @moose-teeth, @whump-it, @lumpofwhump, @pumpkinthefangirl, @castielamigos-whump-side-blog, @rivertamandspike

It had been raining most of the day. It was the kind of pounding, pouring rain that hit hard enough to splatter and splash back up, collected outside sewage drains and ran like miniature rivers along the gutters.

By the time midnight came around, though, the rain had stopped, leaving the sound of water rushing through storm drains along the side of the streets and a heavy, oppressive humidity hanging in the air. The streets were shimmering wet, reflections from headlights bouncing right off the road, and streetlight circles looked more like puddles than actual illumination.

People found their way out onto the streets anyway. They came in cars and on foot, walking to bars or racing each other into clubs. They stumbled drunk or walked sober, congregated into clumps that giggled and talked and danced and laughed.

In rougher parts of town people still walked to the bars, but there were plenty who simply stood, too.

Women and men walked slowly along their chosen corners in the glow of streetlights or in the dark, hips jutted out or with a certain kind of stance that gave away what they were selling. The occasional car cut through the night, came to a stop along the curb. Sometimes the john got out - sometimes the woman or man on the corner got in - before the car drove away.

From one dark alley the sound of harsh, ugly laughter echoed from two or three voices at once. Underneath the laughter was scraping and whining, thumps and a soft pleading for them to please, just st-stop, I don't have any money, please.

Eventually, one of the three, a nondescript and muscular guy in a plain shirt and jeans who could have been anywhere from a rough 30 to a pretty good 45, stepped out, lit a cigarette, and glanced over his shoulder. "Come on, guys, that fucking tweaker doesn't have shit anyway. Look at him twitch, he probably spent his last dime on whatever shit he’s got in his system.”

The two others with him laughed, coming out into the light themselves, arguing good-naturedly over their destination before heading on foot towards the nearest bar.

Their noise drew the attention of a young man, clearly one of those who had been busy walking the streetcorner, still wet from the earlier weather. The young man stayed well out of view until they departed, eyeing the raucous group until the sound of the men’s voices had totally faded and they turned a corner.

From the alleyway came the sound of low, broken cursing. The young man blinked and headed a little closer to try and take a look and see what exactly had gotten the attention of the three men that had just left.

There was a boy curled up in the alleyway - a man but barely, and he was soaked to the skin. The expensive blue cashmere sweater he'd been wearing was ripped, torn, and bloody. Soft black pants were so wet they clung to his legs, and the flat slide-on sandals on his feet were at least two sizes too big.

Bloody and bruised, the boy began to push himself back up to standing when suddenly every muscle went rigid. He let out a cry and his back arched as he dropped with a hard crack of his knees back to the ground.

"Ow, ow, n-n-no, st-stop-... please, stop, pl-please," The boy begged no one who could hear him, clutching at a spot just below his neck on the right side, pressing hard with the flat of his palm. His other hand was flat on the alleyway ground, his black curls plastered to his forehead with a mix of sweat and rain.

He felt a throbbing pain in one eye that told him he'd be bruised by morning, but it was nothing compared with the agony racing through the nerves under his skin.

"Stop, I w-won't come h-h-home, stop it I w-won't," he pleaded, in his surprisingly deep soft voice, to no one, to someone, to anyone. "Y-you lied, you lied to me, you lied, I won’t...”

From the end of the alley, pressed into the shadow of the wall, the young man stepped out slowly and cleared his throat to draw the boy’s attention. His wet hair was pushed back, combed through messily with fingers and a couple wet strands hung in his face. If his tight, cropped shirt and jeans didn’t give away his profession, his naturally alluring posture did... but there was no desire in his expression, only concern.

“Hey, buddy. You look like you’re in pretty rough shape. Need a hand?”

Kauri flinched away from the voice, trying to scramble backwards, but his muscles were still so locked from pain that all he could manage was a foot or two before he froze again. He looked up, teeth ground together, to show wide, frightened blue eyes.

He had a circle of red around one eye beginning to darken, and the young man in the cropped shirt put his hands up, trying to show he was harmless, taking in the other man’s disheveled, sopping wet appearance.

"N-no, pl-please!” Kauri’s voice was thin and strained, and his hands kept shaking, nerve endings twitching long after the pain had ended. “I don't have any m-money. I d-don't have anything! Pl-please don’t hurt me!”

He put his left hand out in some kind of supplication, sweater sleeve riding up his arm, the hint of a barcode tattoo on the inside unmistakable. "Please! Please, j-just, just ow, fuck-... aftersh-shocks, ah-”

“Did I ask for money? I don’t want anything from you, man,” the young man said. He froze at the sight of the tattoo, biting his lip anxiously and glancing over both ends of the alley to check that no one was nearby. He crouched down a couple of feet - a good safe distance - away. With his work boots on, he couldn’t quite lay his feet flat - instead, he perched on his toes. “Hey, it’s okay. Listen, um... I used to be a box boy, too, okay? I can’t prove it, they… my owner was pretty shady. The company took off my tattoo so they wouldn’t be associated with him. Anyway, I’m not gonna hurt you. I don’t… believe in that shit.”

“B-Box…” Kauri’s voice trailed off, confused. “I d-don’t-... how do you-... Oh, fuck, the news, he told the news or something…” He moved back a couple of feet, nearly crawling on his hands and knees. “D-Did you see me on the news? Is, is that how you kn-know about me?”

“Shit, no. I don’t have cable or anything-” the young man said, almost laughing. The sound died as the boy’s muscles locked again, spine curving as his head dropped towards the ground, forehead nearly touching the dirty alley pavement.

Kauri whimpered, rocking back onto his knees, unconsciously bending forwards to move into Respect.

The young man grit his teeth and hesitated, an expression of mixed distaste and old fear on his face. Again, he moved forward - nearly on his hands and knees, too, now. “Hey. I know because I saw your tattoo. I’m not gonna turn you in, man, but I can guarantee someone’s going to notice if you’re this fucked up out here alone. Lemme help you out, I’ve got an apartment. What’s happening? Is that... electroshock?”

Kauri gasped in a breath and nodded without coming up from position, trying to calm his mind, to keep a single coherent thought through the sudden rush of pain. Just as quickly as it had come, it seemed to fade out, and his breathing changed, from shallow quick gasps to deep gulps of the humid air.

“It’s-... a n-new product, I just… here.” He pushed himself up and back, kneeling resting on his heels, slowly looking back up, searching the other man’s face for a sign that this was any worse a decision than anything else he’d done in the past five days.

All he saw was concern - genuine honest concern.

He pulled the neck of his sweater down on the right side, exposing his collarbone to nearly halfway down his chest. Along the bone ran a small line of perfectly spaced circular dots, glinting like metal in the light, glowing with a faint blue light against his skin.

“I ran away from my owner,” he said, a little hoarsely. “He’s trying to get me to come home.”

The young man’s eyes widened, brow rising at the sight of the… well, they looked like piercings, but he knew better. “Damn. That’s a fancy fuckin’ product, isn’t it?” He leaned back, sat on his heels, and sighed. “Good for you, for running and not going home. You got a place to stay?”

“W-Would I… would I look like this if I had a place to stay?” The boy flinched as soon as the sarcasm was out of his mouth, like he expected an angry reaction or even for the pain to start again.

The young man grinned, tilted his head, looking happy that the other guy had a bit of spunk in him. “...fair point. But if you didn’t want a place to stay, you’d tell me you already have one.” Kauri moved to push himself weakly to his feet, and the young man watched him closely, ready to reach out in case he stumbled.

Kauri swayed a little, pale and lightheaded, but he made it to standing, one hand on the brick wall next to him to hold himself up. Some of the aging brick crumbled around his fingers as he scratched into it. “I don’t have anywhere, I’m not… I don’t know anyone. I jumped out of, of a moving car, I just have…” He looked over his shoulder. On the ground behind him, mostly hidden in shadow, was a blue backpack. “I just have that.”

The other man nodded. “Okay. So...you want a place to crash for the night or not? In case your psycho master decides to lay it on thick again. ‘Cause, uh… lemme tell you… this district is not one you wanna be stuck in overnight unless you plan to have sex of one kind or another.”

“Psycho… Mr. Owen’s not psycho, he just-” Kauri jerked again, but it didn’t last this time and he was only rigid against the wall for a few seconds before he let out a shuddering breath and turned, scooping the backpack up by the straps. It hung with surprising weight off of him when he pulled it on over his shoulders.

Sure he’s not, the other man thought, but let it slide. The shock was bad enough without someone rubbing in how warped it was that you could have electroshock piercings… maybe they were even screwed into the bone. He made a bit of a face at that idea, feeling pain in his teeth like in response to nails on a chalkboard. The heaviness of the boy’s bag told him that the guy didn’t have nothing, but that was none of his business, either.

“Um.” Kauri shifted, a little uneasily, from foot to foot. “If you… d-don’t mind, I can st-stay? Just, just for tonight? I don’t have any money, I d-don’t have anything, I j-just…” His voice trailed off, considering. “I’m… I’m Kauri.”

“I’m Jack,” the young man responded, and then promptly grinned and quirked his head. “And I’m filthy rich tonight, so don’t worry about money. C’mon, let’s go. Wanna lean on me, or are you okay?”

“I’m... okay to walk.” Kauri’s teeth were gritted, his jaw set, and he walked with a pained stiff movement that made it clear the three in the alley had landed at least a few pretty good kicks while they were having their fun, but he stayed up.

For a second, they walked in silence, Kauri glancing sidelong at Jack, curiously.

“Hey. If you were, were really… like me… then you’re n-not rich,” Kauri said, but it was with a little bit of humor lacing his voice, a hint of resilience under everything else. “We can’t live on our own, we d-don’t know anything, it’s in all the… things they made us know, to say.”

Jack nodded, then shrugged. “Speak for yourself. I am the proud possessor of one month’s rent and enough grocery money for the next couple weeks. On a rainy day, no less,” he cocked a crooked grin. It faded after a moment or two. “I dunno, man. I think my order was really strange. I’ve got memory gaps from the drugs, but all my skills are intact… well. Except the writing, still.”

Kauri was a little slow, having to move carefully against the ache from the earlier assault. It gave him time to look at Jack and try to decide if he was just lying, if he’d just turn him in. Jack didn’t seem all that bothered by the pace. He shuffled along slow enough to stay right alongside him.

“I can’t write either. If I do, um-” He gestured at his collarbone again, the little glowing circles hidden now under the wet sweater. “These go off. But I couldn’t before… is Jack your before-name? Kauri’s my name he gave me, I d-don’t have another one anymore.”

Jack nodded in understanding. How they managed to tune an electroshock device to someone’s writing, he didn’t know. It was weird. Renford could do it if she wanted - she could do anything, as far as he could tell.

“Yeah,” he nodded, shuddering for too many reasons thinking of her face… being wet and cold was the least of them. “I had a, uh, a pet name. I don’t like it. Took me a while to remember myself, but the other guys in the district knew who I was. They helped. Sorta.” He snorted. “There’s some loyalty among whores, but us gay prostitutes have too much competition and too little market, so I still watched my back.”

Kauri stumbled to a stop all at once, turning to look at him again more clearly in the light that shone from a streetlamp above their heads.

He took in the cropped shirt and tight pants, the shoes, then slowly raised his eyes back up to the man’s face. “I-I didn’t…” His voice trailed off again, staring blatantly, but the look on his face was more like wide-eyed surprise, like a child that had never seen a dandelion before, rather than any kind of judgement.

Jack turned, surprised that Kauri had stopped. When he realized why Kauri looked so surprised, he grinned and put a hand on his hip, cocked it, and smirked. “You like what you see?” Kauri’s surprise was hilarious. But that was okay...he didn’t seem grossed out.

Kauri went red. “I, um, I just… I-I, you’re… you’re okay, I just-... you went from being a, um, a pet to being… on purpose?”

Jack blinked at the question, and then gasped in understanding and shook his head. “Oh, no. I started on the streets long before I was legal - don’t tell anybody that - and then one day they picked me up. Special order for Cori fucking Fisher. You seen him on the news? Bastard. They fixed up my looks and made me take an oath, then dumped me back here - home sweet home.”

Kauri bit down on his lower lip in thought, cocking his head to the side, trying to think. Finally, he shook it. “No, sorry. Mr. Owen doesn’t watch news, I don’t… I don’t know anything. You had a bad owner? I mean, not just to you, to other people?”

Jack snorted. “Yeah, that’s putting it lightly.”

Kauri seemed to be thinking, taking Jack in. Then he started walking again, the heavy weight inside his backpack smacking against his lower back a little as he moved. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a, a gay, um, prostitute, uh… before.” Kauri’s face flushed red, visible even in the yellow streetlights they moved under. “I mean, I don’t know if I’ve seen anything before but… I feel like this is new.”

“You probably have and just couldn’t tell.” He smirked a bit at the flush on Kauri’s face. Man, he looked cute.

“So when you s-said you were rich…”

“Oh, I said I’m rich tonight. I’m a tiny bit sore, but I’m paid up for the month.” If it was possible, Kauri’s face went even redder, and Jack’s smile wider. “Worth it. Means every night I can work for the rest of the month, I’m saving. It also means we can stop at the store for supper. You hungry?”

Kauri swallowed, eyes widening a little at the offer, looking at Jack sideways again like he wasn’t sure what he should say. There was a muffled sound from inside his backpack - a soft faint beeping - and he twisted back to look at it, jostling it a little until the beeping went quiet again. “I, um. Y-Yeah, I haven’t… it’s been a, a while since I ate. This guy bought me crackers, but… Do you… I don’t have any money. I took s-some cash from Mr. Owen but, um, some people took that like the, the first day I was out. I can maybe help you? Clean or something? I have some Domestic training…”

Jack glanced uneasily at Kauri’s backpack, but decided to leave well enough alone. “Don’t worry about it, man. Like I said, I made enough today to eat for a while. I’ll make enough after a day of recovery that I won’t even worry for next month. Anyway, I had Domestic training, too, so the apartment’s in great shape.”

There were others out - women and men, some Jack’s competition probably, Kauri thought, eyeing them in a whole new light. When he’d found his way here it’d been because he’d been kicked off a bus, he had no idea where he was. He hadn’t known he was in a bad neighborhood other than the worn-down buildings and empty storefronts.

The bars all seemed to be doing well enough, at least. And there was no shortage of cars stopping at streetcorners to pick the men and women lingering there up.

There was one woman with hair that made Kauri stare as they moved towards her, hanging most of the way down her back in shades of purple, green, and blue, nearly iridescent. She was wearing a short, tight minidress that mirrored it, the sequins almost like fish scales. “She looks like a mermaid,” Kauri breathed, but then caught himself. “I… don’t know what a mermaid is, I don’t know why I said that...”

“Uh-huh,” Jack said softly, almost under his breath, already starting to steer Kauri away.

Too late.

The woman heard them, glancing over and tossing hair over one shoulder.. “Oh thank you, honey. I worked hard to buy a wig as nice as this one.” She raised two thinly plucked eyebrows at Jack, shooting him a smile that wasn’t quite kind. “Look at you, Jack-Jack, picking up strays. Takes one to know one, I guess. Adopt don’t shop, that’s what I always say. This one’s cute.”

Jack smiled tensely back, the look a caustic and distinct leave us alone that had a mean little smile twitching onto the woman’s face in response.

Kauri shifted himself a little closer to Jack, and when the woman’s eyes went back to him, Kauri moved until he was behind the other man completely.

The woman pouted, a little, as if sad that he would hide from her. “Geez, Jackie, where’d you find him? He looks like he’s been standing out in the rain all day long.”

Kauri fought the urge to mumble two days actually, and hid himself a little more thoroughly behind Jack.

“I found him in the rain. Duh,” Jack responded, reaching back with an open hand for Kauri’s, hoping he would give it. Kauri gripped tightly onto him without hesitating, twining fingers around his and stepping as close to him as he could get. “Speaking of, I hear it’s gonna start up again pretty soon. Torrential downpour. Might wanna get you and your wig inside, Stella. See ya tomorrow.”

As they moved away from her, Stella rolled her eyes at him, shifting on her very high heels and turning back to watch the cars moving past, one hip jutted out. “Didn’t think twinks were your type, Jackie!” She called after him, and Kauri twisted around to look back at her, confused.

Jack pretended he didn’t hear her. He kept his eyes peeled for more hazards and leaned close to Kauri, voice low and cautioning. “Don’t talk to these people - you’re an outsider. They’ll eat you… and not in the fun way like I would.”

Kauri nodded solemnly, tightening his grip on Jack’s hand a little more. “Like, like the guys in the alley,” Kauri said in a half-whisper, less a question than a statement of fact. “They thought I had money, and then Mr. Owen… wanted me to miss him. That’s, that’s why he set it off, I think…”

“Yeah.”

Kauri hesitated, and then whispered, “Jack? Can, can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah, sure. What’s up?”

“Um... What’s a twink?”

Jack burst out laughing and steered Kauri down a different main street. “A twink’s a skinny, young, hot guy. They usually bottom, but not necessarily. Stella’s wrong, though - my type is ‘has a dick,’” he grinned a bit.

Bottom. Has a dick, Kauri mouthed the words in echo but didn't say them out loud, his face a little red, still embarrassed. "I, I don't… I, um. D-Do I… am I… that?" He gave up on putting together a sentence that made any sense and followed Jack in embarrassed silence after that.

The convenience store was on the corner of this block, bars on the large windows but a view of the fluorescent lights and displays inside visible in between them, and Jack led Kauri in after taking a quick look around. “Hey, Bill,” he greeted the clerk, with easy familiarity and something like real affection.

“Hi, Jack,” the clerk, a man somewhere in his forties, responded without looking up from his book.

The shop had mostly canned goods, magazines, and junk food, but Jack took a basket and went right to the freezer section to pick up some meat first. Crappy meat, but better than nothing. He got a gallon of milk, some blocks of cheese, and a couple jars of pickles.

“Anything you want in here?”

Kauri kept himself close, nearly pressed against him, eyes on the floor. As far as he knew, he'd never been in a place like this before. Owen bought groceries or had them delivered, Kauri never went anywhere with him except a coffeeshop or to the Host's, or to the, the ski cabin, where he and-

Kauri cut the memory off before it could hurt, gnawing on his lower lip nervously, trying not to look like what he was - a runaway pet, something worth money. The clerk hadn't looked up but his bloodied face and ripped-up expensive clothes weren't exactly subtle.

"I, I, um… I, I don't-... whatever you want is fine, Jack," He said seriously.

There was a soft beep from inside his backpack and a muffled, slightly mechanical female voice said, Kauri pizza appreciate all kinds. Kauri sandwich appreciate but not mayonnaise. Kauri iced coffee appreciate milk.

Kauri's eyes widened back to the fear from when he'd first seen Jack and his already pale face went white.

Jack’s brow raised and he pulled Kauri behind one of the shelves, out of Bill’s view. “Please tell me you don’t have robot parts in you, too.”

Kauri’s eyes fixed on the floor, shoulders curving in a little. As his hair dried out of the rain it was beginning to frizz up, and as he shook his head he tried to smash them back down, less distinctive, less recognizable.

“I, I don’t… um.” He looked to one side and then the other, then slid the backpack off his shoulders, holding it with one arm curved around it while the other reached for the zipper. When he unzipped it, slowly, he pushed back the fabric so Jack could see inside.

Jack stared a second at Kauri, and then warily looked into the bag, half-expecting something to jump out. Part of a circle of black metal and plastic was in there, with two softly glowing red circles on the flattened top. Jack squinted.

Keira greet, the female voice said, clearly coming from the Roomba nestled into some fabric. Designation Keira. Kauri, Owner.

Kauri swallowed, shamefaced. “I, um, I stole something when I ran away from Mr. Owen.”

“... yeah. A floor cleaner. Real bright,” Jack said, bewildered, staring at the two faintly glowing red dots that seemed to stare right back. He’d realized the kid was naive, but he didn’t realize he was a dumbass. “That’ll help you a lot more than like… clothes… water… I don’t know, a knife. Whatever, man. It’s talking, though, and that’s weird. Pizza? I’ll get pizza.” Jack muttered to himself a bit, pulling a couple boxed pizzas out of the freezer. That was reasonable - he could do that. Great. Just great. Lost one psycho, gained another.

Kauri’s eyes narrowed, the first sign of any real backbone or spine he’d shown so far. “No, I took her because he was going to get rid of her,” he snapped, zipping the bag back up and throwing it angrily back over his shoulders. “And she has GPS, she could tell me directions, but I didn’t… I don’t have anywhere to go, so she doesn’t know how to direct me. I don't know anything, and she knows everything. I can't even read, I can't… I can't tell anyone I don't know how to read."

“You just told me,” Jack responded, more to be obtuse than to actually argue.

"You used to be a pet, too!" Kauri half-hissed, half-whispered. "You should be the only one I can tell!"

There was no more beeping from the backpack. Kauri's jaw was set and angry, but even so - he never left Jack's side, shadowed him like the pet he still was, always just behind and to the side.

Jack didn’t exactly mind that, although he was starting to question Kauri’s sanity - in fact, he turned around and took a long look into Kauri’s eyes, checking for dilated or pinprick pupils. Kauri stared right back, swallowing against the way they were inches apart.

Finally, Jack sighed, seemingly satisfied with what he saw. “Okay, so she’s a computer. She could tell me the total of this stuff. If she’s right, she’ll match Bill, and then maybe I’ll believe you.” Jack listed everything off with their prices before tax and waited.

There was a brief pause.

Fifty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents pre-tax, the woman's voice spoke from inside the backpack. She might have sounded slightly smug, but that could have just been the way the mechanical, robotic edge to the voice made it seem flat. Local sales tax is 6% on food and 13% on non-food items. Total cost sixty-one dollars and fifty-nine cents.

Kauri frowned, crossing his arms in front of himself. "There, now you admit when she's right that I'm not crazy."

“I didn’t say you’re crazy,” Jack said. He hadn’t, not to Kauri’s face. He’d just been muttering that he was psycho. Which was… not different. “Okay, I did say that you’re crazy. But I don’t think she’s right.”

He took a hoodie and a pair of sweats off a hanger, and put them up on the counter. He loaded the food up. “Hey Bill, can you subtotal before these?”

Bill looked up at Jack and his company, sighed tiredly, and set down his novel before he started punching in and bagging the order. Which subtotaled, of course, to sixty-one dollars and fifty-nine cents.

“...great, thanks. Yeah, add these to the order,” he pushed the clothes. Bill added them, looked over Kauri and paused.

“Got yourself a new stray? Lookin’ kinda fancy, there,” he asked, surprised. He folded the sweats and watched Jack, who kept a straight face and tried not to look nervous. “You boys should be careful. Cops’ll be making their rounds soon. Here,” he tossed the hoodie at Kauri.

“Yeah, thanks, Bill,” Jack took out a pair of fifties and passed them to Bill, who put them in his drop box right away and counted out some change. “Have a good night, man.”

“Get some rest, Jack.” Bill paused, and the automatic doors had slid open with a sssshhhk sound when he added, "And get something over his arm."

Kauri glanced down only to realize that crossing his arms had made his sleeve ride up again, his barcode and Whumpees-R-Us product number in plain sight. He yanked the sleeve back down and cradled the hooded sweatshirt in his arms, holding it so the cloth folded over his left arm, looked perfectly natural.

“Fuck. Thanks, Bill.” Jack led Kauri back outside, looking determined and heading straight for his apartment.

"Is he… is he going to tell?" Kauri whispered once they were outside. "H-how far is it to your place? Mr. Owen might hit the button again, I don't want to, to be obvious if he… if he asks me to come back again."

“Nah. Bill’s a good guy, pretty trustworthy. And he owes me some,” Jack shrugged. He snorted softly. “Couple buildings down this way, couple minutes’ walk. You mean when he electrocutes you for fun?”

“H-He doesn’t-” Kauri cut himself off, a look of uncertain worry on his face. “It’s not for fun. I wasn’t supposed to be able to leave him. He, he just… he just misses me, he doesn’t have any other way to say it.”

“Yeah. Sure he does.”

Kauri clutched the sweatshirt closer to his chest, pressing just a little against Jack, like he was reminding himself that Jack was right there, and this was real.

Jack looked to the side at him. Man, at least Cori had never been smart enough to make Reid think he wanted him or cared about keeping him - he just took Reid off the shelf to play with and put him back.

“I was supposed to be, um… I messed up but he didn’t get rid of me, he could have sent me for refurbishment but he didn’t, just r-repair, so… so he just wants me home. I just-... I just don’t want to go home, Jack. Home... he hurts me a lot, now.”

Refurbishment had Jack’s gut twisting. There were so many phantom pains when he thought about that place and Ruby. “So do what you want. Don’t go home,” he shrugged. “I mean, he can’t be exciting to go home to if he’s hurting you when you’re not around. Can’t imagine what he does when you are.”

Actually, he could. Very vividly.

Jack stopped by a building door and bent, took a pair of keys from out of his sock - the only keys he owned. He unlocked the door to the stairwell and led Kauri up. “Make sure that closes behind you. Don’t wanna get any bums hanging around.”

Kauri looked quickly back over his shoulder, as though there might be some of those bums already ready to leap through the second their backs were turned. He pulled the door shut firmly, listened for the loud click as it closed and locked.

Then he turned back, following Jack up quickly, hissing occasionally as it jostled what he was pretty sure was a bruised rib.

"Well, I wasn't supposed to leave. He was nice, b-before I, um, was… incorrect. Aberrant pet," he muttered to himself. "Incorrect mental process. He got mean b-because I, um, he thought I was… looking at another pet."

“Well, they usually start nice. Then there’s… something… and their real self comes out.” Jack looked back over his shoulder, brow raised. “Looking at another pet? What, like you liked another guy?”

"I don’t think we count as guys,” Kauri said, a little confused. “Besides, um, pets don't feel emotional connections. The only individual a pet can develop an emotional bond with is its owner or owners-... You probably learned that, too. S-sorry, it's automatic…"

“Oh...sure. Spent a day arguing with my handler on that one just cause I could,” Jack laughed a little and shrugged. “Emotional connections aren’t... well. Haven’t had many.”

After they were up the first flight, they walked down the hallway. Jack stopped at the third door on the right, tested the knob. All good. He unlocked it and stepped in. The moment he was in, he hung up his jacket in the small closet, beside a denim jacket and a brown leather instead of the black he’d worn tonight. Then he peeled off his crop top, back littered in scars.

Kauri swallowed, watching Jack, and when he pulled his shirt off Kauri’s eyebrows rose, just a little. It’s been days, some part of him piped up, insistent. Kauri shifted uneasily. Owen had stopped caring about whether or not Kauri felt good in bed since he’d come back home from repair, and things had been mostly painful - and now he’d been gone for five days and his body wasn’t used to that any longer…

“Deadbolt the door behind you, set your bag wherever. Your Roomba can do its thing if you want. Shoes off - the floor’s clean and I don’t wanna track dirt everywhere,” he added, going to one knee to untie his work boots. Under his left foot, in the sole of the boot, he pulled out several folded-up hundreds. He stuck those in his jean short pocket. “I’m gonna go stash this and get some clothes on.”

“Uh-huh,” Kauri said, distantly, still sort of thinking about Jack without his shirt on - the absence of a mark inside his left wrist, but also the rest of him, too - as he dropped the backpack to the floor, stepped out of the too-big slides, and let Keira out to sit on the ground. “Her, uh-” His voice cracked a little and he cleared his throat. “Her wheels are broken, she doesn’t… clean much now. That’s why he wanted to get rid of her. Um… can I… is there a place I can change, or, or out here, or…?”

Jack walked to his room - the kitchen and eating area, along with a comfortable loveseat and a tv, were all one space. The bathroom and bedroom were both small, separate rooms. “Yeah, bathroom, or out there. Wherever. I see bodies all the time, man, doesn’t bug me.”

Kauri nodded, and thought that if he weren't what he was, he would want to use the bathroom, for privacy.

But he was what he was, and so he peeled the sodden, bloody, ruined blue cashmere off of himself without hesitating further, dropping it with a wet thump into the trash can.

The little circles along his collarbone still glowed faintly, a soft pulsing light. All the new red spots that would blossom into bruises couldn't quite disguise the darker, older marks already there. All his suggestions that Owen didn't hurt him all that badly became an obvious lie when he could see the evidence left since he'd come back from repair.

Kauri had been controlled, but he had proven to Owen he could no longer be trusted, and life had been… worse, since he’d come home, and he could only lie about that as long as no one saw his skin.

He swallowed, peeling his pants off, too, shivering with damp skin in the chilly air as he dug through one of the grocery bags to pull the sweatpants out.

Just as he pulled out the simple black sweatpants, fire lit along his collarbone, racing out through his nerves.

Kauri crumpled naked back to the floor, muscles rigid. He curled into a ball, jamming his hand against the little circles, whining low in his throat at the pain.

Jack had pulled on a pair of thrifted slacks when he heard a soft noise. He paused, listening, and then decided he was imagining it and reached for a shirt.

Along Kauri’s collarbone, the line of metal suddenly turned a bright and brilliant glowing sky blue. “Ow, ow, hurts, h-hurts, ow ow ow-"

On the floor a few feet away the stationary Roomba began to call out in a loud mechanical voice HELP KAURI HELP KAURI HELP KAURI.

Jack was running back at the first cry of pain. The Roomba’s noise made things feel surreal - how could a robot asking for help not be? - but he made it quickly and dropped to his knees.

Jack hesitated, hand hovering over Kauri’s shoulder, worried the current would carry.

Kauri twisted around to look up at him, blue eyes wide and focused on something far beyond him, making a constant helpless low whine in his throat. He reached out to grab Jack's wrist, his fingers shaking, but he gripped on tight.

Jack startled at the quick grasp, but he let Kauri take him.

"P-push, on, on it, h-helps-" Kauri tried to bring Jack's hand over the line of metal. His voice shook with the electrical current, forced out between gritted teeth with a jaw that would barely move, tears standing in his eyes. "Push on th-them-... Ow, I'm, I'm sorry, Oh-Owen, I'm so sorry-"

The Roomba dropped the volume of its voice, but it did not stop repeating its plea.

“Fuck, Kauri, you don’t need to apologize to him,” Jack muttered as Kauri pushed his hand gradually more and more firmly onto the line of metal, brow furrowed with worry. “Fuck this guy.”

The metal was warm to the touch, warmer than Kauri's skin, but as he pushed on it Kauri's locked muscles started slowly to relax.

The pressure did something - Kauri didn't know what - did something to make it hurt less, and Kauri kept his grip on Jack's wrist, breathing hard, still making low hnnnh, hnnnh sounds, tears running from the corners of his eyes towards the ground.

Jack stared at him, teeth set, worry evident as he watched Kauri cry and listened to his pain.

"No, j-just… just a second, he u-usually d-d-doesn't-" There was a tense moment, Kauri's back arching. He gasped as the metal under Jack's hand went suddenly hot.

Finally, Kauri collapsed back onto the floor.

"F-fuck, h-hate when it does this ah, after," he stammered, limbs twitching and jerking with aftershocks. "S-sorry, sorry, d-didn't mean to…"

“When it does what after? When it heats up?” Jack winced but kept the pressure, glad that he’d stupidly snatched food out of a hot frying pan with his fingers often enough to numb the ends a bit. “What didn’t you mean to do, man?”

"A-all of it… t-to, to go, to… " Kauri's voice shook, riding out the way his muscles tried to lock up, until finally he could relax enough to control his own limbs again. "H-he, ah, I j-just, hnnh." He had to concentrate to let go of Jack's wrist, slowly unwinding his fingers, still twitching as he rolled onto his back, grateful for Jack's cool clean floor.

Jack moved slowly when Kauri let go of his wrist, still leaning over him. He gently wiped the tears away from Kauri’s temple with his fingers, then slowly sat back, cross-legged.

Kauri leaned into the touch automatically, without a second thought. His eyes closed, breathing hard, but at least Jack didn’t hurt. "Hnnnh, it's, um… h-hate my voice like this, like th-the Facility… th-think he's going to bed, turned it up for th-th-that… s-s-saying g-goodnight…"

Jack stared, baffled, and shook his head. “Saying what? I definitely don’t like this guy.”

“I d-don’t want to either,” Kaui said, almost dryly, and opened his eyes again to try on a shaky smile. “I’m s-sorry, this… probably isn’t how you pic-pictured a naked tw-twink on your kitchen floor.” His shaky smile widened, just a little. “H-hey, I made a j-j-joke.”

Jack grinned and shook his head, laughing. “Do you hear me com-... complaining?” he almost had to force the word out. Which was fine. He’d force whatever they stopped in him, like he’d forced reading, thinking, saying what he thought. “Oh no, how do I deal with the naked twink on my kitchen floor getting electroshocked? A helpless hot guy in my kitchen, how terrible for me. Seriously, though, we should find a way to get that thing out. Carefully. Fuck him and his goodnights.”

"D-d-doesn't come out. They put it in me at the, when I got repaired. Th-there's a video… ugh." Kauri pushed himself up a little, resting weight on his elbows. The skin around the metal circles was reddened and looked almost like a halo of sunburn, but the glow had gone back to the usual soft blue light.

"S-sorry. I won't… I'll get m-moving tomorrow. Thank you f-for, um, for helping me.”

“Sure, man. You’re welcome to stay, but if you wanna leave tomorrow that’s your decision,” Jack shrugged. He was a bit disappointed, but that was his own to deal with.

Kauri blinked, surprised at the offer to keep staying, and then his eyes dropped back to Jack’s body, before going back up to his eyes. “Hey, c-can I… you said you were a Romantic but y-y-you're all marked up. Did your owner do that?"

Jack laughed awkwardly and rubbed the nape of his neck. “Uh...some of it. They weren’t allowed to shock me when they trained me. Special order bullshit. So they used drugs and pain. And then some of these are from my customers, but nothing major. I was never actually trained for Romantic besides the positions. Already knew what to do for sex. But I’m stubborn like a goat, so... she had her work cut out for her with my Domestics.”

Jack look pretty pleased about that. He was stubborn. They’d changed him, but he’d fought every bit of it… except when he hadn’t. He didn’t think about that. That was Reid, and Reid didn’t belong here.

"I used to be stubborn, too," Kauri said a little wistfully, sitting up fully as the ache finally subsided the rest of the way. "I think so, anyway. I had to be, if I ran away, right? Training's supposed to get rid of it."

Kauri glanced around, searching the floor with his hands, before he found the black sweatpants behind him. Apparently he'd been laying on them the whole time. When he went to pick them up, his fingers twitched and refused to quite close. "Just like the Facility," he muttered. "H-hey, is it okay if, if I need a second? To get dressed? My, my hands are always bad after discipline."

“Yeah, sure,” Jack reached for the pants and set them on Kauri’s lap. If he let his hand linger just a little longer than necessary, Kauri either didn’t notice or didn’t seem to mind. “Let me know if you need a hand. I’ll get the food going. What are you thinking? Pizza?”

Jack had already turned away when Kauri, looking down at the black pants in his lap and with his shoulders still twitching with the occasional mild aftershock, said softly, “Mostly I’m thinking that I’m r-really fucking lucky I met you tonight.”

#whump #electroshock #tw: electroshock implants #tw: abusive relationship #tw: referenced abuse #tw: referenced violence #escaped whumpee #box boy #box boy universe #box boy multiverse #jack #spiffythespook #pet whump #dehumanization #future kauri #erase to control #whumpee #tw: references to prostitution #tw: referenced past noncon

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jade-ngoc-yeshim · 5 years

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1. The M.O.

Why did I start this blog? I have no plain and straightforward answer to offer; it’s a coalescence of several factors—some tangible; some I’ve yet to identify; and some rustling around in the pit of my stomach, for which I lack the words to will into coherence. But I will try my best to explain:

2019—my 25th year of existence—I will always reflect on and refer to as “The Crumbling.” It was the year when I lost myself to a number of competing forces: work, love, extraordinary circumstances, and the cyclical churn of life. Those who’ve known me for a long time would characterize me as incredibly stable; risk-averse; always planning for the long-term; cripplingly self-aware; and always doggedly marching uphill towards a set of well-defined, high flying goals. My tunnel vision was impressive. My modus operandi clearly articulated. My drive unflappable.

The inertia behind it all was guilt. I had guilt about a lot of things:

Firstly, I had access to the full gamut of opportunities that were ripped away from my parents by war and displacement. I had to make up for this as their only child. Fuck selfish millennial self-realization. I had to live for three.

Secondly, my birth-given liminality. That I, as a second-generation immigrant/migrant/refugee (whatever legal or sociocultural label you deign to ascribe to my personhood), stand at the boundary between homeland and foreign land (cum new “home”), Vietnam and America, past and present. It is difficult to occupy two spaces; oftentimes, I feel that I am in neither, and that the only comfortable place to inhabit is the hyphen that tenuously connects “Vietnamese” and “American.” To straddle two identities is to be constantly uncomfortable. It requires a lot of shifting, recalibration, and a lot of stumbling. I was never Vietnamese enough, and so others shamed my parents for not doing a good job in raising me. I was never American enough, and so I shamed myself into invisibility.

Third, being a Vietnamese woman. The consequences of veering off-course extend far beyond you. The stories uttered in hushed tones about one’s paternal second cousin twice removed from Cleveland or what have you: She had such promise. She had the potential to become an engineer or doctor—to elevate her family’s social status. But she just had to succumb to the vices of the typical Vietnamese woman: boys, hard substances, and the cold, hard draw of under-the-table cash from working in auntie’s nail salon. And so my existence as a young, OK-looking, Vietnamese-American woman in a foreign land with many foreign ideas inherently made me a flight risk. And so be it. And so it is.

Turns out, guilt is a great motivator. It led me to unbelievable achievements at a very tender age: becoming valedictorian of my high school class; being the first of my family’s generation to go to college; graduating summa cum laude from an Ivy League institution; becoming a Rhodes Scholarship finalist in one of the most competitive districts in the U.S., winning a full scholarship for a master’s program in the United Kingdom; graduating with high marks from the world’s best refugee and migration studies course at the University of Oxford; landing my first real job working for USAID; and having the privilege of serving as a Program Officer for the Syria humanitarian crisis during some of the most tumultuous times in the war’s history.

But what is the point of great material achievement when it comes at the expense of other, more important aspects of your life?

For most of my adult life thus far, I have foregone love, social engagements, precious time spent with family, and beloved hobbies in the ruthless pursuit of achievement. I let go of art, music, good men, and good times. I was constantly hunched over my laptop, producing—worrying my friends and family sick in my permanently crooked state. And I kept going, motivated by a dangerous cocktail of excitement over how much I was gaining and the eternal damnation of imposter syndrome. I thought that I can rest only when I become successful, with no clearly identifiable marker or metrics for success.

I get easily carried away, but I am not stupid. I knew the bubble had to burst at some point.

I just didn’t know how violently it could.

///

“The Crumbling” was a sudden conflagration with a long kindling period. The first match was struck at Oxford, when my lack of romantic savvy led to my falling in lust/infatuation with a narcissistic, well-networked man who offered me manufactured kindness during a very confusing time in my life. To put things colloquially, I was “lost in the sauce.” I was fixated on how much I didn’t belong at my graduate institution and felt so sorry for myself. I craved validation and understanding; it was the soporific I needed for my weeks’ long insomnia, the Xanax for my constant worries, and the energy boost I needed to wake me from my malaise. I was emotionally hemorrhaging. And smelling blood, he barreled towards me.

He raped me when I was drunk in my own bedroom. He weaponized the insecurities I shared with him against me. He further emptied me of whom I was, spun a narrative of how I was a pitiful, love-drunk woman who deserved what he done to her; and made my home away from home a fundamentally unsafe place. And the only coping mechanism I knew was to dive head-first into work—to fill my empty spaces through the only way I knew: producing.

It was the wrong answer. But I managed to see myself through to the end of my master’s with it, albeit with a few sacrifices: Never attending my own graduation out of fear of seeing my rapist again. A bitter distaste for life. An inherent fear of men and relationships (and of my own shadow) that went long unresolved. Strained communication with my parents. And a further shattered sense of self-worth.

///

Things were fine for a year or so when I was caught up in a flurry of new beginnings: moving to a new city, starting a dream job in a dream organization, and making my first furtive steps into adulthood. I was occupied with finding my identify as a young professional and invested my heart and soul into my new career. And on a fateful afternoon in September 2018, I was tapped for my first humanitarian deployment to Adana, Turkey—a three-month commitment that doubled just a month into my stay.

It was thrilling. It was exhilarating. It was empowering to be the face of U.S. humanitarian assistance in northern Syria at 24. But as exciting as it was, it was also overwhelmingly terrifying to sit at the helm of a humanitarian juggernaut as the trajectory of American foreign policy changed overnight. From December onward, Turkey was an amalgam of mild PTSD, living in hotels, unpacking and re-packing, armored vehicles, Jack Daniels, furtive puffs of Marlboro Milds, military men, street cats, insecurity, getting rowdy, hardened alternative trailer systems, over-caffeination, and exhaustion.

I traveled to beautiful places. I broke hearts, and I encountered love. I was where the action was. I was living out my wildest dreams. I had purpose. I felt alive, and maybe for the first time. I sincerely believed that I would always look back at Turkey as my golden era.

/// Wheels down ADA-FRA-IAD. Enter “The Crumbling” in full force. ///

What does it mean when the “golden era” of your life—the moment when you most felt alive—was wholly illusory?

When you look back several months later, scratch through the vermeil, and find nothing but the shaky foundations underpinning your drawn-out, whisky- and cardamom-scented daydream?

When the person you fell in love with—the first after being raped, the one who earnestly listened to you recounting your survivor story—ended up emotionally using and abusing you, as well?

When, despite putting in blood, sweat, and tears into your work (quantified at approximately 10-12 hours a day, inclusive of weekends), your supervisor tells you to reconsider whether humanitarian work is right for you?

When deployment is no longer an option for you because of that, and you come face-to-face with the crushing reality that you never built a life in your home base. (Rephrased: When there is no escape from the void.)

When the wounds finally start to seal up, and then your grandfather passes away. And suddenly you’re shoulder-to-shoulder at his altar with the extended family who narcissistically abused you during your youth? (Re: The past rears its ugly head again.)

The symptoms of all of this occurring within a 3-month timespan were:

Losing 20 pounds;

Vacillating between sleeping constantly and not at all;

Your loved ones remarking that the light in your eyes has completely vanished;

Hours and hours of self-help podcasts;

A lot of consolatory chocolate from coworkers who’ve noticed that something is terribly amiss with you;

Near-constant mental haze;

Ostinatos of teary-eyed apologies to your friends, whom you’re convinced you’ve burdened;

Manic consumerism;

Trying to harvest endorphins through prolonged cardio sessions;

Taking a lot of strange vitamins and supplements that didn’t do anything, other than make you dehydrated;

Frequent panic attacks; and

Desperate forays into various branches of spirituality (inclusive of a cheap [actually not cheap at all] psychic who tells you that you’re the victim of both black karma and an inter-generational love curse [!]…but at least she had an adorable cat.).

Tl;dr: It’s depression. Horrendous, soul-crushing depression, and constant anxiety over the other shoe dropping. It’s coming to terms with the daunting reality that the only way out is to roll your sleeves up and start laying the foundations of your identity brick-by-brick. It’s coming to grips with the fact that you have no sense of self outside of what you do. What is the point of accumulating achievements when you never pause to appreciate them?

What is the point of working tirelessly for others, when you make no time to sit with them and to enjoy all of the abundance together? What is the point of life when it is all prospective?

Do you truly have a sense of self when you have relied on others to give you meaning your entire life?

///

As the thick haze of “The Crumbling” dissipated, I arrived at a bit of clarity: That what had passed had not happened to me, but for me. That the shaky foundations on which I rested my already fragile sense of self needed to collapse—that I needed to collapse—in order to build something that was truly steady and purposeful.

All is not lost. On the contrary, the ashes borne from the waves of trauma that I endured over these past several months are but the rich inputs for a more fortified way of being.

I would be remiss to not document the process along the way. A process I will affectionately refer to as “The Awakening.”

#blog #diary #depression #awakening #tw: rape #tw: abuse #tw: mental health #tw: violence

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thesffcorner · 4 years

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Book Couples of 2019: Ranked

I stole this idea from Sam at ThoughtsOnTomes, and I’ve done it two years in a row. So why not keep the tradition going in the next decade too and rank all the couples from books I read in 2019.

Before we start, some ground rules:

SPOILERS AHEAD;

All of the couples are from books I read in 2019;

All the couples must be canon; they are only on the list if they are written as explicitly romantic;

Worst to Best, i.e. couples I liked the least to couples I liked the best.

Let’s go!

TERRIBLE TIER:

50. Erika and Michael from Corrupt by Penelope Douglass

Is anyone surprised that these two are the worst couple of the year? If you are, you must be new here.

This pairing has all the tropes I hate in literature: an abusive, possessive alpha male hero who treats the girl like shit, but it’s ok because he loves her. He’s also willing to destroy her life over his friends, who as far as he knows raped her, so that’s fun too. Oh, and also it takes for her to almost die for him to tell her he loves her. We stan an emotionally stunted idiot.

As for Erika, she’s entitled, dumb, naive and completely virginal, in spite of being in a committed long term relationship. She has no personality other than her unrequited 14 year old crush, but somehow she’s supposed to be smart and independent? Sure, Jan.

49. Joe and Beck from You, by Caroline Kepness:

I don’t think I need to explain to anyone why I hated these two. They are both pretentious, horrible people and I’d say they deserve each other, except no one deserves Joe, not even Beck.

48. Marcus, Maria and Saya from Deadly Class by Rick Remendeer:

2019 was a bad year for love triangles, which is a trope I’m not a huge fan of anyway, but man did this year make me hate it even more. As the first example we have Marcus, Maria and Saya, who are by far 3 of the most obnoxious characters I have ever had the displeasure of reading from.

First we have Maria, who is just ‘crazy’, because women be crazy y’all! She’s promiscuous, even though she has a boyfriend, who she then cheats on with Marcus, back-stabs her best friend over him, and then gets dropped like a potato when Marcus realizes he can sleep with Saya too.

There are some attempts in the latter volumes to give her some depth and explain why she was dating Dio to start with, but you know, I’d rather you had opened with that.

Marcus, outside of being the absolute worst person in existence, treats Maria poorly, talks shit about her behind her back, cheats on her, let’s her take the fall for stuff he and Saya did and in general doesn’t want to be with her, but stays because sex.

His relationship with Saya is even worse; they like the same shitty music, and are both horny. Also Saya is a horrible tsundere cliche, which is already annoying in anime and manga, even well written ones, let alone when an American writer tries to emulate it. Badly.

BAD TIER:

47. Mariko, Akira and Taro from Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean

The second love triangle on the list, and this one wins by being the dumbest, most underdeveloped one of the year.

Mariko was the character I liked the most, but her connection to both Akira and Taro was tenuous at best, and more than a little frustrating.

Akira gets put in the friend-zone, except not really because he actually is proactive and tries to show Mariko that he values her, but then the book forgets about him so we can develop Taro, who is somehow even worse. At least Akira had a connection to Mariko before he fell for her; Taro sees her and decides she’s the one because she talks back at him thinking he’s just an ordinary samurai, not the prince, a trope that needs to fuckin DIE. Not to mention his faster than Kylo Ren turn to the darkside.

46. Odessa, Evander and Mereday from Reign of the Fallen by Sarah Glenn Marsh:

The next triangle on this list, and this one hurts more because it actually had potential.

There is something really compelling about two women coming together to grieve the loss of a loved one, with the idea that Mereday has nursed a crush on Odessa since childhood, but because of social norms and her brother, she’s stayed away.

What we get instead is an uneven mess, where neither character feels like they are progressing at all, and a ton of contrivances as to why they won’t talk to each other, instead of building on the existing conflict of ‘Odessa’s boyfriend and Mereday’s brother is the same person, and he is dead’.

45. Poe, Auden and St Sebastian from A Lesson in Thorns, by Sierra Simone:

Speaking of potential, these 3.

This is one of those triangles where all 3 legs should be, and are written to be equal, but unfortunately, the author clearly liked the one I liked the least, the most.

I liked Auden and St Sebastian, wanted to find out what happened to make Auden treat St Sebastian the way he did, and why St Sebastian let him do it. I even liked the pull they felt for each other and the jealousy Poe brought up in them.

I also really liked Poe and St. Sebastian, their angst over being separated, their bonding over feeling like outsiders in Auden’s world, and the loss of their respective mothers.

The couple I liked least were Auden and Poe, which is the one Simone spent the most time on. I hated Auden’s entitlement, the blindness to his privilege, the unnecessary engagement to Delphine, and I likewise hated how horny Poe was 24/7 even when she’s supposed to be finding out what happened to her missing mother, which uh… is not good.

44. Arthur and Ben from What If It’s Us by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertali:

I wasn’t a fan of this relationship from the start, because I just couldn’t stand Arthur as a character. Even though he improved, the relationship didn’t.

The two didn’t have any chemistry, they weren’t compatible, and Ben had rather serious issues he should have been solving, instead of jumping straight into a new relationship. Arthur also fixated on stupid shit like a box of stuff, which is appropriately immature, but didn’t make me root for them to succeed as a couple.

Also I hated the ending.

43. Penelope and Sam from Emergency Contact, by Mary H K Choi

In theory, these two would be in the meh tier, but what pissed me off about this relationship is how underdeveloped it was. Sam was a character who needed serious counselling and therapy, not a girlfriend, and Penelope was just an immature teenager. I didn’t root for them to get together, I rooted for them to get help.

42. Malachiasz and Nadezda from Wicked Saints, by Emily Duncan:

These two absolutely have to go to the bad tier, even though they had potential and worked with tropes I like.

I love the idea of a villain-hero romance; it can be done right, and the push and pull between power and control, light and dark, etc can be invigorating. This, was not that.

Firstly we don’t know that Malachiasz is a villain for most of this; at most we think he’s some kind of assassin, but considering the whole mission the characters are on is to destroy Kalyzin and kill the King, that’s not exactly damning. Second, what should be these characters’ conflict, their religious views isn’t at all explored and Nadezda falls for Malachiasz way too quickly for someone who has been indoctrinated from birth to kill people who do blood magic.

Also there’s a set up for a love triangle in book 2, and when will my suffering end.

41. Celine, Bastien and Grimaldi from The Beautiful, by Renee Ahdieh:

Speaking of love triangles, we have possibly the worst one I read this year, in that it wasn’t even properly established!

I had the same issues with Bastien as I did with Auden; he had no personality, other than being rich and handsome. He also does the whole ‘this woman talks back to me, so she must be the one’, which is strike 1 against him.

Celine was fine as a character, but her connection and love for Bastien felt unwarranted, considering both his behavior and everything she knows about him, not to mention it somehow felt rushed in a 500 page book.

Grimaldi I just plain hated. Him stepping in to pretend that he was Celine’s lover when she’s lost her memories and clearly doesn’t love him, but ESPECIALLY him deciding out of the blue that he loves her after he detains and humiliates her for his own amusement made me rage quit this series.

40. Daisy, Camila and Billy from Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid:

Yeah, I know it’s weird to put the couple(s) from a favorite book of the year in the bad tier, but I really, really didn’t like these pairings.

Billy and Camila were infuriating. I get that people like that exist but Camila was far too forgiving considering everything Billy put her through. Billy was trash.

I also hated the way Billy treated Daisy, and I was furious that she had to live with knowing what was happening between them for decades while he got to go home to his wife and pretend nothing happened. Yeah, this book hit a personal spot, read the review if you want more coherent thoughts.

39. Noam and Dara from the Fever King, by Victoria Lee:

I am genuinely shocked they are this close to the meh tier, because boy was I not a fan of them.

I wrote a really detailed review of this book, and all my issues with Noam and Dara, from their age gap, to the weird sexual politics, to substance abuse, and especially to Dara reading Noam’s mind for months without telling him anything. Their relationship made me uncomfortable, and that was without adding the third leg of this Godforsaken triangle which is Lehrer, a man who is like 100 years old.

But hey, I still want to know what goes down in book 2, so they get to close out the bad tier.

MEH TIER:

38. Runa and Indigo from The Boneless Mercies, by April Genevive Tucholke:

Runa was a great character, but this romance is barely worth mentioning. It’s introduced at the very end, and it’s underdeveloped.

37. Jack and the Village Girl from Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire:

I tried to look up the girl’s name, I really did, but I couldn’t find it and I don’t remember it. I also don’t have the book so I can’t check.

I don’t know what I expected from a book about Jack and Jill, but Jill killing Jack’s girlfriend because she was jealous of Jack is… well not it.

36. Lowen and Jeremy from Verity, by Colleen Hover:

I struggled with whether to put these two in the bad or the meh tier. On the one hand, I cared not one bit about their relationship, even after we discover that it’s founded on lies and an attempted murder. On the other, there was nothing inherently wrong with their interactions and they did care for one another, even if was painfully boring.

In the end, I decided that boredom is a meh trait so, meh tier it is.

35. Annaleigh and Cassius from House of Salt and Sorrows, by Erin A Craig:

Instalove, the couple.

There was some potential, with the whole not knowing when it’s the real Cassius and when it’s Kosamaris or the Trickster pretending to be him, but it’s barely taken advantage of. In the end it’s just another ‘we’ve known each other for a week, but let’s die for each other’ plot.

34. Mei and Kai from The Bride Test, by Hellen Hoang:

I really struggled where to put these two, because as individual characters, they were fine, great even. As a couple? Yikes.

I loved Mei and wanted her to be happy, but the secret she kept from Kai was genuinely horrible, and I still can’t believe that the book resolved it by just not addressing it until the very end.

Kai was fine, not nearly as developed or likable as Mei, but the way he treated Mei in parts of this book were horrific, even if he struggles with expressing feelings and boundaries.

I ended up placing them in the meh tier, because at least they were never malicious to each other, which is more than can be said for the couples in the bad and terrible tier.

33. Rachel and Delphine from A Lesson in Thorns, by Sierra Simone:

These two get to be in the meh, not the bad purely because I actually understood their dynamic. I really liked the idea of Delphine discovering her sexuality, both in women and in BDSM, and overcoming trauma by taking charge of her own body and desires.

I also liked seeing Rachel realize that she had actual feelings for Delphine and having to deal with them. Too bad I’ll never get to find out how their relationship will pan out, cause fuck this series.

32. Stevie and David from Truly Devious, by Maureen Johnson:

These two were perfectly fine, even interesting at points, until the ending, which made me so angry that they get to squat in the meh tier.

Also Stevie going through David’s stuff? Not cool.

31. Yen and Vu Con from In the Vanisher’s Palace, by Aliette DeBodard:

The dynamic between these two was more than a little uneven, with the constant threat of murder and the knowledge that Yu would never be able to go home and see her mother, which is enough for me to resent any character no matter how cool of a dragon she is.

But… that human-dragon sex scene. Wildest thing I’ve read all year.

30. Henry and Diego from We Are the Ants, by Shaun David Hutchinson:

While I liked the book a lot, Henry and Diego were… not great. Diego was a character that at points came off more unreal than the aliens, from his wildly dramatic life story, to him not going to jail at the end, and his limitless patience when it came to Henry. Truly a manic pixie dream boy.

29. Olive and Ethan from the Un-honeymooners, by Christina Lauren:

This couple would have been in the great tier, had it not been for the last third of the book. Ethan not believing Olive, telling her that she’s jealous and dramatic for wanting to warn her sister that his brother is a cheater, and then making up for it with a stupid, grandiose gesture instead of, actually talking to her and learning his lesson? Nah, we don’t stan that kind of manipulative behavior in this house. The only reason they are in the meh tier is because they really were cute the rest of the book.

28. Isobel and Julio from An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, by Curtis Craddock:

Not much to say about them, mostly because they met in the last third of the book. I would take a bullet for Isobel, and judging by the blurb for book 2, Julio might have beat me to it, so he gets to be in the meh.

27. Emily and Haskel from Passing Strange, by Ellen Klages:

Like Mei and Kai, I liked these two as separate characters more than as a couple. It’s not that there weren't any chemistry between them, it’s that they weren’t developed enough for me to care. If this were a longer work instead of a novella, they’d probably be higher.

26. Jonas and Florian from The Monster of Elendhaven, by Jennifer Giesbrecht:

I liked the idea of this relationship more than the execution. Jonas being horny 24/7 for Florian’s dainty wrists was understandable, but Florian being sad that Jonas isn’t his dead twin sister… less so.

However this does get points for having the strangest sex scene in any book I’ve read this year; yeah even stranger than the one in Gideon the Ninth.

OK TIER:

25. Ruby and Dov from The Wise and the Wicked, by Rebecca Podos:

While I didn’t love the book, Ruby and Dov were fine. I appreciated the trans rep, I liked the way their relationship developed and the oddball humor the characters shared, and I thought they were cute together.

24. Lila and Cassel from the Curse Workers Series, by Holly Black:

Lila and Cassel grew on me substantially between White Cat and the rest of the series. I liked the angst in Red Glove because of Lila being worked and I liked the rod trip they get to go on at the end of Black Heart.

23. Aurora and Kal from Aurora Rising, by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman:

There is nothing wrong with Aurora or Kal, even their bonding/imprinting thing reminded me too much of Twilight/Avatar.

They do have cute scenes together, but I’m just not a fan of the alpha male, macho boy ‘protecting’ the girl and deciding for her what he will do with their relationship. There’s room for improvement, is what I’m trying to say.

22. All the couples from the Witchlands Series, by Susan Dennard:

I was originally going to split these up in different tiers, but seeing as it’s been exactly a year since I read these books, and I don’t remember much about these couples, they all get to go in the OK tier.

First we have Ryber and Kullen from Sightwitch. I liked Kullen’s humor, which contrasted well with Ryber’s seriousness and diligence, but there’s very little of them as an actual couple. I hope we get to see them again in Bloodwitch.

Aeduin and Iseult were also fine. I know they feature more prominently in Bloodwitch, but what little we get from them in Truthwitch and Windwitch was some solid set up for a good Ben/Rey, Zuko/Katara type relationship.

Safi and Merik are my favorite, but that’s only because I love Safi. Merik is the weaker part of this duo, though I do enjoy their banter, and the scene in Truthwitch where they dance and start levitating was amazing.

21. Sam Cade and Gina from Stillhouse Lake, by Rachel Caine:

I was really surprised by how much I still like these two as a couple. The only reason they aren’t higher, is because they don’t stay a couple by the end of the book.

I genuinely loved how tender and slow their relationship developed, and how much character development Cade got to get to it. Him bonding with Gina’s kids, was super sweet and the scene where he asks Gina if he can kiss her warmed my shriveled heart.

GOOD TIER:

20. Frey and King Roth from The Boneless Mercies, by April Genevive Tucholke:

I think the theme for the good category is my surprise at how much certain couple stuck with me. When I read the book, I wasn’t thrilled with Frey and Roth, because a different romance for Frey had been built up.

But now, a year later, I still remember their scenes, especially the one where Roth tells Frey he is writing an epic about her, and asks her to come back to him. Good sh*t.

19. Kate and Shepherd from This Is Our Story, by Ashley Elston:

I was surprised at how much I liked these two as a couple. They were supportive and cute, while also dealing with some serious issues and angst. The ending was a bit dramatic, but the scene where Kate likes a 4 year old picture of Shep on instagram by accident SPOKE TO MY SOUL.

18. Grier and Shafeen from STAGS by M A Bennett:

This is another pairing that surprised me with how much I liked them. The book claimed that Henry was charming, but Shafeen was the real charmer, and I could actually believe that he is a gentleman who went to private school.

Grier was a bit dim, and more than a little naive, but I liked how she got through the huntin’ shootin’ an’ fishin.

17. Levi and Enne from Ace of Shades, by Amanda Foody:

I loved these two and they had great chemistry and banter, but they aren’t yet an official couple so I can’t really justify putting them any higher than good.

The scene where Enne plays for Levi’s life? Amazing.

16. Harrow and Gideon from Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Mur:

I wanted them to be in the great tier, but they just weren’t.

I loved Gideon; she was funny, a true himbo. But Harrow? I hated her for about the first 300 pages of the book. And when I finally stopped hating her, they had that weird bath sex scene and then Gideon DIED.

So I can’t put them any higher knowing that I liked only 20% of their actual relationship.

15. Cat and Tyler from Aurora Rising, by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman:

Cat and Tyler? Now that’s some good sh*t.

I am a sucker for the captain and his/her pilot pairing, especially if one of them is a smooth talking pretty boy and the other a daredevil always ready to fight. These two were excellent, not just in their chemistry and banter, but also in the angst because what kept them apart actually made sense.

I love that Cat broke a chair off of Tyler’s head when they met, Anne of Green Gables style, but I also love the scene where they first got together at the bar. Chef’s kiss.

14. Sebastian and Emir from Running with Lions, by Julian Winters:

Seb and Emir were really close to making the great tier, but there were just too many contrived reasons to keep them apart.

I liked the slow build from enemies to friends to lovers, but I just wish we had gotten more time on the lovers section without unnecessary drama keeping them apart.

13. Poppy and Cerenic from Sleepless, by Sarah Vaughn:

I freaking love Poppy and Cerenic, and they would have been in the great tier, had it not been for the rushed ending.

They were still excellent together; supportive, trusting and caring, and that scene where Cerenic kisses Poppy so she can’t put him to sleep? God tier.

GREAT TIER:

12. Mia and Grace from On a Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden:

I loved how cute and realistic, Mia and Grace’s relationship was, which a wild thing to say for a series set in space. I loved their friendship, how it slowly became a romance, the heartbreaking way they split apart and then found each other again.

The only reason they aren’t higher on the list is because they don’t end the comic as a couple, which works perfect for the story, but less so for my, uh, list of couples.

11. Millie and Flora from Her Royal Highness by Rachel Hawkins:

I am a sucker for the stuck up snob falls for the earthy dumbass, and Flora and Millie were exactly that. They were a really cute couple; I liked the discussion of homophobia in the royal family, letting someone else define your life and the overall way the two of them got together. I also appreciated Millie being the one to fuck up and doing everything she could to fix her mistakes.

10. Daisy and Miles from Prince Charming by Rachel Hartman:

Daisy and Miles beat Millie and Flora just because reading their banter put tears in my eyes. I don’t think I’ve laughed out loud at any other book like I did this one.

There were so many great moments in this book, starting from Big Bird Hat to Sebastian getting punched by Alex, but the scene I love the most was the scene between Miles and Daisy in the cabin.

9. Severin and Laila from The Gilded Wolves, by Roshani Chokshi:

The amount of angst and sexual tension Laila and Severin have makes me wonder if this book perhaps should have been an adult.

I like both characters on their own, though I’m always a sucker for the trope of two competent and smart people making the other an absolute fool just by being in the same room as them.

I would have put them higher, but I just hate the way this book ended. Though since I’m mentioning scenes that were great… the dance. If you know you know.

8. Jack Zimmerman and Bitty from Check, Please! By Ngozi Ukazu:

Jack and Bitty are too cute for words. I love the way their relationship developed, I love their dynamic, how positive their relationship is while also dealing with real world issues, like families and gossip magazines.

Also this comic is amazing and free, go read it.

7. Hypnos, Zofia and Enrique from The Gilded Wolves, by Roshani Chokshi:

I didn’t know that my perfect pairing is where every character is Jonathan from the Mummy, but I guess that’s my jam.

Enrique and Zophia using their skills in math, languages and history to solve riddles together was great and hilarious, especially Enrique antagonizing Zofia just to see her reaction.

Hypnos is my favorite character and the banter between him and Enrique was excellent; I’m always a sucker for smooth-talking rich, misunderstood anti-heroes with tragic backstories (ahem, Lando, ahem). If this is to be a love triangle with one pairing at the end, I really don’t know who I’m rooting for.

6. Zara, Beatriz and Nadim from the Honors Series, by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguire:

Finally, some good fuckin food.

This love triangle fed me. It was the only one that was properly developed and established, I loved all 3 characters in it, and they all complimented each other amazingly.

Zara is a great lead, I really loved her journey; I would die for Nadim, though I’d probably have to fight Zara for that because her commitment to him was so wonderful. I also really love how slowly and carefully Beatriz was introduced as a love interest, and how well balanced the three of them are. Can’t wait to see what happens in Honor Lost.

5. Bri and Curtis from On the Come Up, by Angie Thomas:

Listen, their banter alone was enough to make me root for them. Also Curtis saved Bri from a freaking SWAT team so like… what more do I need to say.

They were just super cute and entertaining ok?

GOD TIER:

4. Nax and Ryan from The Disasters, by M K Englnd:

The only couple that came close to making me laugh as much as Miles and Daisy, except I related to Nax way more as the bisexual disaster he is.

I loved the way Nax’s always on the edge of a panic attack, and yet somehow still so charming personality was complemented by Ryan’s cool calm and collected demeanor, and their banter was hilarious.

I especially enjoyed Nax’ inner monologues, and the scene where they have to hide in a herd of goats had me in stitches.

3. Neil and Andrew from All for the Game Trilogy, by Nora Sakavic:

People should learn how to write an angsty slowburn from this series.

Andrew is an absolute piece of shit and Neal definitely deserved better, but I am not about to sit here and tell you that the scene where Andrew let Neal put his hand on his chest and Neal didn’t move it, didn’t send me into a weeklong crisis.

2. Rachel and Sana from Tell Me How You Really Feel, by Aminah Mae Safi:

Sana and Rachel were like two halves of my own personality and yet somehow infinitely cooler than I’ll ever be. Their romance was an excellent homage to every great teen rom-com, and I loved every page of it.

Sana was amazing; I loved her personality, the way she stood up for herself and dealt with problems. I also loved that for once the more feminine of the duo was the one who took charge of the relationship.

The only gripe I have with Rachel was that she finished the film before the screening, like hello, ex-film student here: I call bs.

1. Alex and Henry from Red White & Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston:

Was there any doubt here? Henry and Alex were hands down the best written couple of 2019. Not only were both individual characters fleshed out and so well developed, their relationship, going from enemies, to beruging friends, crushes, and finally lovers willing to upheave international politics was amazing to read about.

Alex Claremont Diaz is my favorite character of the year and maybe even top 5 of all time, and if you haven’t read this book, read it. It will make you a happier person.

And there you have it, 50 couples ranked. Happy reading in 2020!

#book couples 2019 #book couples #reading #moni talks

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callmeakumatized · 6 years

Text

Hey, Jealousy - Ch. 5 (complete!)

ch.1 ch.2 ch.3 ch.4 ch.5 Ao3 ff.net

For Rose! (FFIINNAALLLYYYYY FINNIIISSHHHEEDDD!!!!!

Nebs helped! (MANY, MANY THANKS) :D

"Come on, Adrien!" Marinette's angry voice brought him back to reality again, followed by a rough-but-not-too-rough push on the back of his shoulders. "I can't carry you, you need to move your legs!"

"Whad?" Why did his voice sound funny? "Where are we – "

"Ugh! If you aren't going to move your legs – you know what?"

Two small hands pushed down on his shoulders suddenly. Before Adrien even knew what was going on, he grunted in pain, his backside having come in contact with something rather hard.

"Ow…" he whined, the small…hallway? starting to spin too much for him to keep his eyes open anymore.

"Hey – hey!"

Adrien jerked when a sharp pain met his cheek.

"Don't you fall asleep, Adrien Agreste! You stay awake, do you hear me?"

"Marined?" Adrien asked dazedly. "Where are we?"

Marinette sighed. "Just-just stay awake, ok? I'll be right back. Here – "

A rustle of fabric, and then something soft was pushed into his face. A hand from somewhere reached one of his own, yanking it up to push against the cloth covering his nose.

"Keep your head and hand up there, alright?"

Adrien groaned in reply. He heard his companion scoff, and, had he looked up at her, he would have seen one magnificent eye-roll.

"You only have yourself to blame for this, you know," Marinette continued in a low voice. Adrien chanced a glance up to her, only to see her peeking through the windows of a great blue door at something.

Where were they?

Before Adrien could even lift his eyes to fully examine his surroundings, a wave of nausea suddenly stirred in the pit of his stomach. He closed his eyes and bent his head down to his knees, feeling more and more cross by the minute. The pain was flooding his face, pulsating through his forehead and cheekbones and threatening to beat a nasty rhythm straight into his eyeballs. In a moment of whiny self-pity, Adrien indulged in a little game of chance.

"I didn' b'eak my nose…" he muttered into his bundle, daring Marinette to hear him. No reply came, and Adrien, sick of the jumbled words he was vomiting, blew his nose into the fabric-whatever Marinette had given him. The pain made him cry out in a pitiful whine, but, hopefully, despite the retch-worthy pain he had just endured, his voice would at least sound more…intelligible.

"Excuse you?"

Adrien froze.

…he really had thought he had said it quietly enough.

There comes a time in every young man's life when he questions the purpose of his life and the role he has in the universe. 'Who am I, really?' he might ask. 'Have I made my mark on the world?' might be something else that would cross his mind.

'I'm dead before I even lived,' though unusual, wasn't unheard of…because Adrien was mumbling it to himself. Just now.

In fact, it was the only coherent thought running through his mind at the moment.

She's going to kill me, and I totally deserve it.

Adrien gave a start when he felt a gentle – though quite, quite firm – pull on his hair. His head was forced upward, and he hated how vulnerable he felt in this moment, mostly from not being able to close his mouth to purse his lips. Marinette, whose fingers were currently curled securely in his hair (man had he imagined this moment! Although, a little differently, he'd have to admit), was now crouched in front of him, eyes skimming over his face. The look she had was, at first, just short of frightening; curled lip, furrowed brows, flushed face…it was a look he knew well, just…behind the mask. Toward Chat. When he did something really, really stupid.

(For some reason, Adrien was a little relieved that she didn't wholly reserve her "I'm so incredibly done with you" face for just Chat.)

As Adrien sat statuesque in front of Ladyb-Marinette, he watched the girl's terrorizing visage morph into something a little softer, her eyes that held a fervent fire fading into a gentle frown. He flinched when she reached up to touch his nose, but didn't pull away. He trusted her too much to think she would hurt him. Well, hurt him again.

"Do you think it's broken?" Marinette asked, grimacing.

Adrien gave her a flat look. "It's squooshed. You squooshed it."

Marinette was red, and not just on her cheeks. Her neck, ears, and even a bit of her chest were stained in the color. A 'tsk' sound left her, and she moved to sit on the (…stairs. They were definitely on stairs) step next to Adrien, facing away from him.

"It's not like you didn't deserve it," she huffed out.

Adrien's frustration at the whole stupid situation started to rise. His father was going to hear about this, and not in the 'My Daddy's the Mayor' or 'I've got a rich Daddy in the Ministry of Magic' way, but in a 'You'll never be allowed out of the house ever, ever, ever, ever – do you HEAR ME, ADRIEN!? – EVER' way.

Why did it have to be the face!?

"My nose, Marinette! My. NOSE!"

"It's not like I meant to!" she whisper-shouted back at him, turning to face him. "And for goodness' sake, keep your voice down!"

"Didn't mean to - !? Marinette." Adrien pulled the fabric all the way down from his face and Marinette visibly flinched. "I kinda think this was a little straight-on for someone who – " he pulled his hands into the air between them, one hand clutching the bloodied mass still, and raised his fingers for air-quotes – "'didn't mean to'."

This time, Marinette was the one to give Adrien an unimpressed look. "I meant I didn't do it on purpose! It was just a…reaction! A reflex!"

Adrien snorted. "You're going to blame this on 'being Ladybug' now? Please. As if you didn't just gloat about 'self-control' just the other night, after I – " Adrien suddenly stopped. The memory suddenly flooded his brain, a grin growing on his face and his mood lightening significantly from the mental picture show playing in his brain:

Chat dropped down suddenly, pouncing on top of Ladybug before she could get away.

"Chat!" she squealed, laughter catching the edge of her exclamation in just the way Chat loved. "What're you – ? AARRGGGHHH STTTAAAHHHPP!"

But Chat Noir didn't stop. He continued to rub his forehead and cheek all over Ladybug, any inch he could reach, before she kicked him in the gut. He was okay with that, though; the deed had already been done…and she smelled wonderful.

"After I scent-marked you."

If Adrien had been looking – instead of dazedly daydreaming – maybe he would have thought about the crap coming out of his mouth before it spilled out. Marinette's sickly expression of absolute horror and distaste stayed a safe secret, however, Adrien blissfully ignorant while lost in the joy this particular recollection awarded him.

"Y-You…you're…?" Marinette took in a deep, rattling breath. "I…. T-T-That's what you were doing!?"

Without warning, a petite fist came down on Adrien's arm, making him yelp in surprise. He tried to wave Marinette and her fists of fury away – hadn't he been hurt enough already? – but as his arm came out to flail at the abuser, Adrien felt nothing but air touching his fingertips. That's when he realized the heavy stomping up the stairs must belong to Marinette.

"I can't believe this...!" she was saying to herself in a rather loud rumble of a voice. "How is this my life? Who does – who does he think he is!? What did I – UGH!"

A door slammed somewhere, and the entire stairway shook with the force of it.

Adrien's eyes started to feel heavy once more, relaxed as he now was after thinking about Ladybug. Leaning against the wall of the stairway, he smiled to himself, and thought about how a cat-nap right now sounded like the purr-fect –

"Oh man, Adrien!" Plagg's scritch-scratchy voice suddenly hissed merrily right into Adrien's ear. The boy gave a start, but Plagg paid him no heed. "What were you thinking? Usually I can tell when someone's about to make a bad decision, but for the first time in centuries, you actually took me by surprise! Haha!" Plagg zoomed in circles around the stairway as if unable to contain his amusement. The grin never left his face…and neither did the mischievous glint that Adrien found so often in his tiny eyes.

What the…?

Adrien sat up a little taller. If Plagg was this happy – especially with something Adrien had done, and apparently had done recently – something must be terribly wrong. 'Bad decision'? Instantly, Adrien replayed everything that had just happened. Somehow, he'd made Ladybug – no, wait, Marinette – angry at him…but that could be from anything! If she had figured out just one thing about Adrien, or what he knew – beyond what had happened in plain sight right in front of her – she would be ticked. But she hadn't, had she? Maybe she was just ornery about the "gloat" comment…but really, she totally deserved it! He'd wanted to get back at her ever since she'd said that at the top of the Trocodero, and now –

OH GREAT MAMA SASSAFRASSIN' CHEESE CORN.

Adrien buried his face in his cloth once more, a great groan rattling his hands through the fabric.

Plagg, who seemed to have been just waiting for this moment, exploded in pent-up glee.

"Realized – HAHAHA! I can't even – HAHAHA! I can't – I can't even say it!" Plagg's laughter rang loud in Adrien's head, the force matching the throbbing of the blood rushing into his ears perfectly, igniting an entirely new cacophonous mess of mental agony. "R-Realized what you said, did you!?" The black cat had now landed on the floor on his back, his little paws clutching his stomach and feet waving around in unadulterated mirth.

"Plagg…Chat Noir doesn't have a 'become one with the shadows' ability, does he?"

Plagg, helpful as ever, only laughed harder.

Adrien was growing irritated. "Plagg, would you shut up!? You're going to wake the neighbors! Or someone else is going to see you and –"

"Yeah, it's too late for that," another voice said.

Adrien whipped around so fast, his vision tunneled immediately. There was a shuffling of feet – very Marinette-like feet, and Adrien felt the slip of the hand on his sleeve. The collective force of this latest debacle caused Adrien's rumpus to slide off the stair…and his consciousness to slide from the cognizant world.

"Realized what you said, have you?" Marinette echoed Plagg's words from before. If words had a taste, these would have come with extra spice.

Adrien, effectively hiding his entire face behind the cloth she'd given him except for what he was sure were huge, shocked eyes, only nodded. Marinette sighed, reaching into the small basket she had brought with her to pull out some medical supplies. She reached up and tried to pull his hands down gently…but Adrien, who was still not sure if he was actually passed out in some alley somewhere, under an Akuma's influence, or – scariest of all – actually sitting on the stairs with Maribug who was not impressed by Adrichat, reflexively leaned away from her outstretched fingers. She gave him a look, then tried again…with the same result. After the third time, she smacked her own leg in frustration.

"Adrien Agreste!" she whisper-yelled through slightly-clenched teeth. "You have given me – and a lot of other people – so much crap tonight, and I am presently not in the mood to play these games with you, so you had better lower your hands right now so we can clean up your bloodied face!"

Ten minutes later, Adrien was leaning against the wall of the stairwell, pouting, Marinette leaning over him with one arm across his chest to hold him down, and the other arm gently working at cleaning his face. Both teens were panting heavily, beads of sweat from sheer exertion trickling down their faces.

"You owe me an entire roll of medical tape now," Marinette said quietly, in between winded breaths, not looking away from what she was doing. "You know that, right?"

Adrien only narrowed his eyes at her, but he didn't pull at the make-shift bindings tying his wrists to the banister. That tape crap was strong, and, while they both know he probably could break it if he tried hard enough, Adrien just didn't have the gusto in him anymore, not after the day he had, and definitely not after the impromptu wrestling match he'd just endured with Marinette when she manhandled him into this position.

Marinette only rolled her eyes again and sighed…though the small twitch at the corners of her lips told Adrien she wasn't really that mad. Angry or not, though, she still deserved to hear something he needed to say.

"I'm sorry."

Marinette stopped what she was doing and looked down at Adrien, surprise at his admission clear on her face.

"For what?" she responded, returning to what she was doing, though now small glances at him interspersed with minding the task that busied her nurturing hands.

Adrien let out a long breath. "Everything?"

A silent beat.

"Wanna be a little more specific?" Marinette finally responded, pursing her lips.

"Not…really."

She snorted. A few quiet moments passed, then Marinette sighed heavily. She dropped her hands down in front of her and turned her full attention on Adrien.

"So…um, h-how long have you known?" she asked quietly, biting her lip.

"About what?"

"About…well, about me being Ladybug."

Adrien hummed in understanding, shifting awkwardly to reposition his aching hide-quarters on his stair. The movement caught Marinette's attention. Suddenly, as if she hadn't even noticed her dastardly deed of tying him up in the first place, Marinette reached into her basket and pulled out some medical scissors. A few snips later and Adrien's hands broke free of their bindings. He sat up straighter, making himself more level with Marinette, who was perched on the stair above his own, her legs draped over his (to keep him from literally kicking and screaming) and feet on the next stair down. Adrien started working on pulling the wads of bandages-turned-tie-downs off his fingers. A ginger touch on his nose brought his eyes back to Marinette.

A very close Marinette.

A close-enough-Adrien-had-to-do-a-little-double-take Marinette.

"Today," Adrien breathed out. He found himself unable to tear his eyes away from her face…and he really didn't mind that at all.

"Hm?" Marinette responded quietly, licking her lips.

"I-I-I'd only known today. About, uh, you. Being Ladybug."

She looked crestfallen for a second, then confused, the emotions passing on her face so quickly and so up close, Adrien was sure he was getting dizzy from it.

"What gave me away?"

Adrien tried to smirk, but his lips were refusing to follow orders.

(They had something else on their mind…and it had nothing to do with talking, but everything to do with the girl sitting incredibly too close in front of him.)

"Um…" Adrien cleared his throat, hoping Marinette ignored that little voice crack. "You see, M'Lady, when a guy gets called a name by a girl he likes, he doesn't easily forget it…especially when she's…er…dressed up as him." He could see the confusion melt into embarrassed understanding in Marinette's eyes, and couldn't resist adding on, "I still think cat ears would've made your outfit purr-fect."

The effect was immediate. It was one of the main reasons Adrien – as Chat Noir – never cut out the puns, no matter how much Ladybug harassed him about them. But it was his calling-card, in a way; the association between puns to Chat Noir was seamless. So, at the sound of one of his signature lines in the tension-filled atmosphere, Marinette, to his immediate delight, snorted, lips twisting upward with the action. The light in her eyes, as she fixed them on his face, danced merrily in the dimming lights, the crinkles at the edges from her accompanying smile clear evidence of the honest merriment she must be feeling.

But…as quickly as it had come, the smile slid off her face.

"Adrien," she started quietly, "was it…was it true?"

"Was what true, Mar?"

She sighed heavily, eyes closing for a moment. When she opened them again, Adrien was alarmed by the moisture building there.

"What…what Luka said about, um, about you…" – her breath in and out was rattling – "…and me."

A beat passed. Marinette seemed to be holding her breath.

"Yes," Adrien answered quietly.

Marinette's hands clenched into fists on her lap.

"It was?" Her voice was so small, Adrien almost cried on the spot.

"Yeah, Mar…it was." Tentatively, Adrien lifted a now bandage-free hand to her face, hoping, despite this crap-filled day and his stupid actions, he could show her some sincerity, that something real was growing here. "And then? Then I had to spend an entire week worrying over why it was the way it was between us – Adrien and Marinette, that is – and then why it even mattered to me if Luka liked you or not." He took a deep breath. "And then I had to watch you today – which, admittedly, had some parts I definitely don't regret seeing…." He smiled when she shook her head at him, a laugh and a blush brightening her already glistening eyes. As her cheeks pulled up into a real smile once again, the force pushed against the fullness there and forced a tear to slide down her cheek. Adrien immediately thumbed it away, but just the feel of it, the reason that it was there in the first place, caused his heart to ache. He could feel the wetness pushing into his own eyes, the burning in his throat telling him it wouldn't be long before he wouldn't be able to hold in the emotion much longer.

"But…" he continued after they collected themselves for a moment, "I also had to watch you with…with Luka. And tell myself that I didn't deserve to even feel jealous." The reality of it was starting to hit him more and more. "And then – then you said…you said 'Beetlebug' and I – "

He couldn't stop it now. Adrien could only turn his betraying eyes away, pull his hand away, wish His Lady to look away, when the first sob broke through the surface. The pain throbbed and burned in his nose, matching the anguish grating on the walls of his heart. He didn't deserve her…never had, and, likely, never would.

But oh, did he want her.

In the depths of his despairing realizations and the heaviness these thoughts pressed on his heart, Adrien felt a pressure on his face. Blinking and sniffing and just all-around wrecked, Adrien couldn't bring himself to meet Marinette's gaze. Marinette, though, didn't press him. Instead, her thin fingers left his face and wrapped around his knees to scooched his legs over into a more comfortable position, one where she could sit comfortably next to him. As her warmth met his side, Adrien, who was still averting his eyes, jumped when her small hands clasped onto his own.

The feeling that had course through him, burning through his veins and pushing him to prove himself, to win, finally formed itself into words. Words that he had to speak out loud; else, as they died on his lips, his heart would die with them. Slowly, fearfully, Adrien turned his head to Marinette, meeting her red-rimmed eyes with his own.

"I thought I lost you both."

Though the words themselves burned his throat in painful emotion, Adrien didn't get another chance to cry. With the force that made Ladybug Ladybug, Marinette abandoned his hands on his lap, reached up, and pulled Adrien's lips to her own.

There was still a lot to say…but it seemed as if neither one cared for more words.

Though Adrien was, perhaps, less experienced than his partner in this particular pair-practice, he was eager to learn…and Marinette seemed to be his perfect teacher. The first touch was a brush of lips, the sensation like a concert master playing the perfect pitch to which the orchestra would tune; the sensation, all at once soft and strong and beautiful, broke as fast as it came, but the feeling continued resonating unrelentingly in the chambers of Adrien's heart, filling him with desire and want and need and…something else. There was a word for it – always had been – and, while Adrien had used it millions of times in his own mind when thinking about Ladybug, he realized – now – how stupidly naïve he had been in its definition.

Eagerness and passion pushed them into the next kiss…and the next. Adrien was drinking her in, reveling in the shockwaves her hands gave him. Without even feeling the need to ask, Adrien laced his fingers in her hair, behind her petite ears and their precious gems, pulling her in at a better angle (all while being extremely mindful of his nose). She sighed, and he breathed it – her – in; it was intoxicating, a drug he could devour endlessly. Lips moved a little more hungrily now – starving souls consuming their heart's desire. Her lips opened and closed in tantalizing circles against his own, and that feeling pushed through his chest harder now. His heart raced frantically. He had to tell her. He'd waited so long, and so had she. And he…he couldn't keep this from her – from them both – any longer.

A heady suctioning sound as they broke apart kept them connecting over and over again for a moment longer than Adrien intended…and he was almost sucked back in to try to define the exact taste and texture of her lips. But, Adrien was stubborn where he felt a need. Pursing his lips – and trying really hard to ignore the feel of her breath on his face – Adrien pulled away from Marinette long enough to mutter the words that had been begging for an out since the day Adrien had met his Ladybug.

His Marinette.

"I lub doo."

Adrien blinked...then groaned. So much for a momentous magical moment.

Marinette giggled, only adding to the embarrassment that was a broken nose confession. With a groan, Adrien pushed his reddening forehead into the crook of Marinette's neck to hide his shame.

"Oh, Minou…" Marinette sighed into his hair. "I lub doo too."

Fin!

[[A/N: THANK YOU TO EVERYONE FOR THE LIKES AND REBLOGS AND FOLLOWS AND LOVELY, LOVELY COMMENTS AND ASKS!! Life has been CRAZY lately, and your lovey love and awesome support and SWEET MERCY BEAUTIFUL ENCOURAGEMENT have meant the WORLD to me. So...THANKS! ( psssst...have an idea? want to see something written?? hit that ask button! 8) )]]

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sage-nebula · 6 years

Text

Voltron thoughts beneath the cut (for spoilers, and also negativity).

I don’t know if I can really say everything I need to say coherently. I’ve barely slept, I haven’t eaten practically anything in nearly twenty-four hours, and part of that is because every time I try, I can’t get myself to do it, even when it’s soup. Between the medication I’ve been on and the anxiety that flared up due to this show despite the medication I’ve been on, I’ve been really sick all day today. So I’m going to try to be coherent, but I don’t know how much I’ll end up succeeding. Anyway, here we go.

TL;DR: I watched season six of Voltron: Legendary Defender. And I’m not going to watch any of the seasons to follow. I’m getting off this shuttle here, though I’m probably still going to continue writing my AU fics since they’re AUs and have nothing to do with canon anyway, therefore.

Longer version:

There are a few different reasons for this, all of which stem from this most recent season and how it made me feel. It’s kind of funny, in a way; I thought the thing that would make me want to quit would be how Keith was treated, given that he’s my fave, but he was actually treated really well this season (mostly, anyway, but I’ll get to that in a second). He got to get back in Black, he got a wolf companion, and he whooped untold amounts of ass as the Black Paladin. We also got to learn some more about his past (although we still don’t know his dad’s name, smfh), and we had it confirmed that he and Shiro are found family and that Shiro had a hand in guiding and raising him (both because Keith told Krolia as much, and because in the flashbacks young!Keith has a higher pitched voice while Shiro is in an instructor uniform, i.e., they met when Keith was so young his voice hadn’t broken yet; I’m guessing 11 or 12). All of these things were things that I personally really liked, even though that last one is one that I feel I can’t really enjoy thanks to how this fandom is. (Like, every time one of those scenes came up---like when Krolia thanked Shiro for “raising Keith to be the man he is today,” or we saw young!Keith and Shiro---my thoughts were, “Aww ♥♥♥,” immediately followed by, “god, this will cause so much Discourse™.” Kind of ruins it . . . a lot.)

And that’s what brings me to this decision. At least, partly.

I was not excited for this season. At all. Any time I heard something about Voltron, it made my anxiety spike and filled me with dread. I knew that part of this was because I had already known that season five was our one shot at positive interactions between Keith and Lotor, and that was shot. My guess was that what was going to happen was that Lotor would discover the Shireplica plot, attack him, and then Keith would attack Lotor because Lotor attacked “Shiro.” And honestly, that would have been better than what we got. But my point is, leading up to this season I felt nothing but dread. While watching it, there were some things I enjoyed (see above), and other things I . . . absolutely did not. And afterward? I can’t think about it without feeling my anxiety flare up despite the Lexapro. I’m not even a little bit happy. I’m not looking forward to season seven, because I don’t know how season seven could possibly be good after the sheer assassination Lotor’s character suffered at the hands of the writing staff. And it’s funny, honestly, because I was expecting Lotor to part ways with Team Voltron, and hell, I wanted him to because they literally sent him to his execution last season, but I wasn’t expecting them to assassinate his character the way they did. I thought it would be Keith’s treatment that made me leave, not Lotor’s. But here we are.

Okay. Coherency.

My point is, I’ve come to realize that this show . . . does not make me happy. At all. And it’s not even just that it makes me want to complain (although the writing this season surrounding Lotor, his generals, and tbqh the way they had Keith and Krolia ~away for two years~ just so they could get out of actually showing us how they’ve bonded was completely terrible), but that it actively stresses me out and upsets me. Like, I’ve been incredibly open about how much I relate to Keith (which is why his found family bond with Shiro is so important to me; it’s a really personal thing that made their relationship my favorite in the show before The Discourse™ sucked the enjoyment out of it), but I relate a lot to Lotor, too. The narrative they were setting up with him, and the character journey that he was on---the way that he was specifically rejecting his upbringing, adamantly refusing to follow in his parents’ footsteps, toeing the line between different cultures and sides of his heritage, living as an abuse survivor whose reactions weren’t always ~*~pretty~*~ but were real . . . all of that really, really spoke to me. And it was a deeply fascinating and interesting narrative, too. It was one that I wanted to see play out. As much as I rejected the “he’s been alive 10,000 years lmao” nonsense they tossed in there (because he doesn’t act like it at all; they don’t know how to write characters that have lived that long), the idea that Lotor has rejected ten thousand years of conditioning in order to do his own thing is one that is incredibly compelling. It’s one thing to be Good (or at least Not Evil) if you were raised to be Good or Not Evil. It’s another thing to choose to be those things despite years upon years upon centuries of abuse and conditioning designed to make you a Horrible and Evil person. I’m not saying that I wanted Lotor to be a Pure Hero, but rather that I saw the narrative setting up an anti-villain and I was interested in following that story. I related a lot to that story, due to my own personal experiences. I am definitely far more of a Keith in terms of personality (and trauma disorders), but I related a lot to Lotor’s story as well and was very interested in seeing that narrative play out.

And then . . . they threw it away in favor of making him a batshit crazy definite villain who went laughing mad and decided he was going to slaughter his own people and start his own empire just like Zarkon.

I’m sorry, but nothing can redeem this. It’s character assassination, straight up. The thing with the alteans is bad enough; you could sort of maybe explain it as Lotor sacrificing a few to save billions, but that’s doesn’t jive with the Lotor that let planets rule themselves, and that worked alongside the miners to harvest things from their planet. It doesn’t jive the way that he did it, anyway. But even that, like---even that is not as much of a straight up assassination of his character as the villainous breakdown rant he goes on near the end wherein he declares he’s going to slaughter everyone, including the galra (who . . . follow him?), and start a new altean empire, like . . . honestly, just . . .

Coherency. Coherency.

I couldn’t enjoy the Sincline vs. Voltron fight (despite wanting to see Sincline form forever . . . and thinking that it looks 10,000 times better than Voltron) because of how Lotor’s character was mangled to make it happen. I just sat there staring blankly at the screen the entire time, feeling nothing but heavy disappointment and sadness. And that . . . is not how I should have felt during that sequence. I should have been excited. I should have been into it. And I mean, parts of it were nice; seeing Keith be the boss I always knew he could be as the Black Paladin was nice. It’s good that his character arc was finally re-railed. But the rest of it . . . what was done to Lotor . . .

My point is, this . . . isn’t enjoyable to me. Between how the fandom has been (i.e. the worst; if this show manages to run to completion without someone actually, literally trying to murder someone I’m going to be goddamn amazed), and the terrible writing, it’s just . . . underwhelming at best and severely upsetting at worst. And make no mistake, the writing is terrible. Lotor’s character assassination aside, as I said above, it’s very plain to me that the entire reason why Krolia and Keith were gone for two years was so that they wouldn’t actually have to show them building up a relationship. The generals were controlled by the plot wholesale. Ezor went from being the most devastated over Narti’s death (to the point where she stops seeing Lotor as her prince in the JP dub) to being glad to be back on Lotor’s side even though Narti is, you know, still dead. Zethrid has been reduced to “as long as I get to blow stuff up, I don’t care.” And Acxa went from wanting to protect Zethrid and Ezor, to . . . being loyal to Lotor? To wanting to ditch him again?? Who the fuck knows. It’s pretty clear that the girls are just plot devices at this point, and as someone who actually really cares about them, that’s upsetting to me. (Like, I’m just going to be honest here, most of the “OMG BADASS LADIES STEP ON MEEE” that I’ve seen in the fandom doesn’t seem to really care about the girls as people. I’m sure there are some people out there who do, but most people seem perfectly happy to have them being Haggar’s lapdogs because “omg badass ladieezzzz” rather than thinking about what’s good for them. But I really care about and like the generals as characters, so to see them reduced to plot devices who just follow whoever with no rhyme or reason is incredibly disappointing to me.)

But what I’m trying to say is, this isn’t enjoyable to me. I’m not having fun. And while at this point I’m not sure what narrative they’re actually trying to tell (the characters are literally just reacting to the plot now, rather than moving it forward; we have no idea what the hell their goal is and I’m sure we won’t find out until some villain does something new), I also know that it’s not one I’m particularly interested in seeing play out. I still love several of the characters (Keith primarily, but also Lotor (despite what they did to him), Kolivan, Acxa, Ezor, Zethrid, and Narti if she’s somehow miraculously still alive), but the overall plot of the show is not one I’m interested in anymore. I don’t think things are going to be handled with the nuance they deserve. I don’t think the writers have the ability to do that at this point. And knowing what this show could have been, versus what it is, makes it really difficult for me to want to keep watching.

So I’m not going to.

Because I don’t see a point in watching something that doesn’t make me happy. If I’m going to come out of every season feeling like this, I shouldn’t do it. To be fair, there are probably a lot of other factors that go into this, such as being on antidepressants / anti-anxiety meds for the first time ever (lot of good they’re doing!!), and other stressors, but . . . still, a show should make me happy. A show should alleviate the stress, not add to it. Even if the show isn’t ultimately what has reduced me to crying so much (and I’ve cried a lot), it’s still a contributing factor and it shouldn’t be that way.

So I’m stepping off. For me, VLD had a good run (mostly the back half of season two, and season three), but this is where I’m done. With the show, at least.

Because like I said, I still do really love the alternate realities I’ve created, and I’m probably going to keep writing those. They’re AUs, so they have nothing to do with canon as it is. My Keitor Zine fic is already done and has been submitted; and my Big Bang fic is an AU as well. So I’ll probably still write those, as I want to, because they’re not beholden to any of the nonsense that just went down in s6, or any of the nonsense that will follow. So if anyone is still interested in those, I’ll probably still write them.

But as for watching the actual show? No. I’m done. Seeing that done to Lotor, and the girls, and how bad the writing is overall . . . I’m sorry, but there are better shows out there. And I just can’t do this anymore.

So . . . that’s that. As coherent or incoherent as this was, that’s that. And I don’t even have a good way to end this so just . . . here’s this, ig.

(don’t reblog it, though. likes and replies are fine, but no reblogs, thanks.)

#/#//#///#////#/////#voltron spoilers #vld spoilers #vld6 spoilers #just in case anyone is using blacklist on mobile where the read more might not show up

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apsbicepstraining · 6 years

Text

A ‘radical alternative’: how one husband changed the perception of Los Angeles

In the 1960 s, British architectural reviewer Reyner Banham proclaimed his love for the city that his fellow academics disliked. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world perceived it but what would he think of LA today?

Now I know subjective sentiments can run, the correspondent Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I anticipate LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most unpleasant and most uncivilised major municipality in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer …

Three years later, Raphaels words appeared in reproduce again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies “the worlds largest” exuberantly pro-Los Angeles book further written. Ever since pamphlet, it has shown up on rosters of enormous books about modern cities even those is drawing up by people who examine Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Somehow, this notebook that described so much better of its initial publicity with startle value( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, gibed the New York Times refreshes headline) has maintained its relevant through the decades, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to orient themselves. But what can it educate us about the Los Angeles of today?

An architectural historian a decade into his vocation when he firstly visited, Banham knew full-well that his fellow academics detested Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his work on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.

The many who were ready to cast doubt on the importance of the enterprise, he reflected in its last chapter, included a discriminated Italian inventor and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this volume, disbelieved that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such a project and keep walking without a word further.

The project began when Banham introduced his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and was indicated that he cherished the city with a heat, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Schooling at the University of Southern California, who made him up in the Greene friends architecturally hero-worship Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged basi from which to explore. But what he went looking for, and the behavior he wrote about what he saw and experienced, redefined the behavior the intellectual nature and then the rest of the world perceived the city.

Reyner Banham with his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth in 1968. Photograph: Peter Johns for the Guardian

Not that he affirmed his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially located the city incomprehensible a reply shared by many commentators, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

Banham firstly attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its enormous seat with electronic designs, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how he came to grasps with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental chassis and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental life-styles to which it gave rise.

But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular target to do a specific circumstance, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your home, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he grumbled in the third talk. The distances and the trust on mechanical transportation leave no chamber for coincidence even for joyous accidents. You strategy the day in advance, curriculum your activities, and forgo those random encounters with sidekicks and strangers that are traditionally one of the honors of metropoli life.

Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like metropoli contained out a predict: The unique appreciate of Los Angeles what arouses, plots and sometimes fights me is the fact that it offers revolutionary alternatives to almost every city conception in unquestioned currency.

In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles differences from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the scholars of modernity, with obvious gratify. It seemed to legitimise a model “youve already”, in a 1959 section, proposed to supersede the old notion of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.

Civilised living in suburban LA. Image: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images

Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its shell separated open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic white-hot, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness agitated exclusively by occasional specialised sub-centres. A visitor to Los Angeles today might hear the city was reported in merely the same method: as a network of nodes, a constellation of city villages, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.

Banham made another digit in the eye of diehards who insisted that a city should have just one strong centre with his short section A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.

From its fetishised designs such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new role towers in their standard livery of dark glass and sword, Banham wrote that everything platforms as an unintegrated scrap in a downtown panorama that began to deteriorate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.

The journals contrarianism manifests the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it plays the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan style, innovative energy, international affect, distinctive way of life, and corporate identity[ supports that] all the most admired theoreticians of the present century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.

Filled with photographs and sketches, Banhams book on Los Angeles subdivides its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach towns of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborate and costly residences; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and boring sufficient to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the famed, then infamous, freeway method he dubbed Autopia: a single intelligible home, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos invest the two calmest and most fruitful hours of their daily lives.

The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated scrap in Banhams gazes. Picture: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy

Between sections on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often intentionally impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys components, reaped distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic goodnes here , no penalty for aesthetic violation; nothing but a vast planetary callousnes, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.

More than 40 year later, Banham ascertained a stylistic bounty of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul graves, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in member Modern Architecture.

He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … improved of timber and stuccoed over, all same at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, embellished up-front, emblazoned with an aspirational epithet such as the Capri or the Starlet.

In defining dingbats as the true symptom of Los Angeles metropolitan id, trying to cope with the unprecedented appearing of residential concentrations too high to be subsumed within the misconceptions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the center and prolonged tension, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.

Banham attracted out the implications of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable structures not by adoring them , nor denigrating them, but simply by investigating them because they are. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would preach the same approach in their own metropolitan classic, Memorizing from Las Vegas, produced the subsequent year: Withholding opinion may be used as a tool to construct later ruling most sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at the least toward the esthetics of American commercial-grade culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.

The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Photo: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, writer of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, became thus far as to name Banhams book hazardous: The hackers who do shopping center, Hawaiian restaurants and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the disagreement of roads, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and wield a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more humane civilization where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers abuse of the land and the induce corpuscles in kids of my own lungs, the author might be sat up against a wall and shot.

Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through one day in the town that builds rigmarole of record and terminate all the rules, and inspired within him a passion that goes beyond gumption or intellect. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a altogether self-absorbed and perfected gravestone) to Los Angeles characteristic imagination of innocence( prominently marked on all the maps in his volume ); the overgrown areas of the old Pacific Electric Railways rusting runways that once tied the whole gigantic city together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.

There, Banham requested the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking spectator of American urban cliche, what public buildings a guest should meet. Ruscha recommended gas stations.

Banham pre-empted dissents to Los Angeles urban sort by claiming the model problems very little, had now been written that Los Angeles has no urban kind at all in the commonly accepted feel. Yet whatever it does have, he reasoned, has rendered a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, prepared of emergent city phenomena.

Come the day when the pollution fate finally condescends, he chronicled over aerial shots of Wilshire Boulevards double sequence of towers and frame-filling vicinities of separated homes, … when the traffic grinds to a halt and the private vehicle is banned from the street, a lot of craftily placed citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and seem no pain.

Cyclists on Venice Beach … though much of LA is not bike-friendly. Photograph: Alamy

The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold messages for the man who announced Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving are particularly pleased when you have, like earlier generations of English academics who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, learned to drive in order to speak Los Angeles in the original.

But just as its own language heard on the street of Los Angeles have multiplied, its own language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How legible would Banham, who perished in 1988 , now find it?

The smog that expected bane of the citys postwar decades which he always minimise has all but faded. The duration of apparently limitless seat to pander an obsession with single-family dwells has given channel to one of construction cranes sprouting to satisfy the new is asking for high-density vertical living. They digest not only over a downtown grow miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres sown all over greater Los Angeles.

Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development astounds any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys brand-new runway transportation system, which started to develop almost 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success of funding, the planning and execution( at least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the country now ogles to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public cavity in general.

Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater handiworks of humankind but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than numerous current beholders of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway method of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better structure nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.

Banham seemed downtown Los Angeles merely deserved a short section devote to it. Picture: Alamy

Banham also foresaw the rise of the self-driving gondola, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical articulation navigation arrangement dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that countenances an eerie resemblance to those every American driver uses today) “re coming with” questions that Banham also prophesied all those years ago. The marginal gains in efficiency through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the mental destitutions caused by destroying the residual misconceptions of free decision and driving skill.

Under each outwardly celebratory sheet of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles simply constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the roadway, the working day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the detached live, it more must fall out of promote, or into impracticality, sooner or later.

Some of these components that reaped Banhams attention have, after their own the times of dishonor, rotated fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has find a target in the future of the city, growing the subject matter of critical analyse and architectural rival.

Banham also checked the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing builds, especially one striking and elegantly simple-minded stucco chest on La Cienega Boulevard. Its designer? A certain Frank Gehry, then nearly unknown but now one of the most powerful influencers of the improved context in not just Los Angeles( his current high-profile job concerns re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased river ), but other municipalities as well. The Toronto-born starchitect grew his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad spaces in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the urban nature.

These eras, the rest of the city world-wide also influences Los Angeles. No longer striving under the deceptions of total exceptionalism which prevails in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, instructs, parks and even bike-share structures, moved paces toward the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively schemed , non-experimental cities where, Banham deplored, warring pressure group cannot get out of one anothers hair why i am pressed together in a hallowed labyrinth of culture statues and real estate values.

In its impressive order to incorporate older metropolitan moralities and play by the rules of good urban issues, modern Los Angeles discounts the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Hindering Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the horrendous fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental city spirit.

The engineering-trained columnist viewed Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a severely necessary renovation of its interface in recent years , nothing has already been written a consumers manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.

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